Speed prompt, written in 27 minutes.

That giggle. It grates me like fingernails down a blackboard. I can never tell where it's coming from—just like the infernal creature attached to it. She's like a mosquito: you can hear it, you know it's there, but it just won't fly into your web and die like it should.

I edge along the rooftop, gun poised, my eyes searching for that tell-tale glow and listening for the whoosh of her blinking around like a child who's had too much red cordial.

Any moment now, any moment, my visor will be charged and she'll have nowhere to hide from my—

"Hullo, there!"

The sudden voice makes me jump and I pathetically I nearly fall of the ledge. I've swung my gun around and begun to fire at her before I've realised she's gone.

There's a tap on my shoulder. I swivel to fire at it, and she's in front of me again, an insufferably big grin plastered across that irritating face of hers. "Um, so," she begins, carefully pushing the long nose of my gun away when I try to aim it at her again, "you do realise we're working together now, right?"

I fire at her anyway. Why not? She's annoying. "I will never work with someone like you."

She laughs a few times, and in an instant, she seated on the ledge above me, legs crossed casually at the ankles. "Well, it looks like neither of us is going to get paid, then."

That's a risk I'm prepared to take. "How sad for you. But it's not as if you'll need the money after I've killed you. I will escort the payload myself without you bothering me."

"Yeah," she says at length, "about that." She gives a little wave to someone behind me before vanishing.

When I spin there's an arrow pointed at my face and someone shouting in Japanese but before he's finished his sentence, I hear the pulse of that annoying little brat's gun, and the man's dropped to the floor, lifeless.

She's standing behind him and blowing pretend smoke from her energy guns like she's just been in an Old Western shootout. She winks at me.

That grates me too. I could have finished him if she hadn't interfered! "I didn't ask for your help!"

"'I didn't ask for your help'," she imitates me, failing horribly at my accent. "You know, you've got a lot to learn about being on the same team as someone!"

"I'd rather be on anyone's team than yours," I spit at her.

"Yes, well, you know what they say," she tells me, and then blinks beside me to whisper in my ear, "you don't get to choose who's team you're on, and looks like you're on mine." She takes a step back and gives herself the once-over. "Not that I blame you, I'm sort of fit, really!" She winks again.

I fire at her to get rid of her once and for all, and this time, she completely disappears and all I can hear is that infernal giggle, forever mocking me.