Battle Vixens! - 5

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Episode 5: One Last Calm

After running a few blocks with the chair over her head, Ning stopped, setting it down, and pulled the gag out of Nadia's mouth. She didn't look injured, thankfully...the fox-girl, summoned a blade to carefully cut off the ropes next. "Yaay, you saved me!" said her granddaughter, standing up and jumping up and down a couple of times...before actually taking a decent look at her savior. "..You look funny."
Ning giggled slightly at that; part of her was startled her granddaughter didn't recognize her, despite how obvious it should be that she wasn't, but the rest just found the sudden, blunt realization/statement hilarious. "I know I do," she said. Her ears twitched as she heard a few gunshots, and she frowned for a second...hopefully Light was okay. She didn't seem like the kind of person who'd just stand arount in front of a barrel, though. "Are you alright? Did they hurt you?" she said, returning her attention to the person right in front of her.

"Nope," she shook her head. "Those mean guys kept making me eat applesauce, though."

The fox-girl headtilted slightly. "Do you...not like applesauce?" This was a new opinion.

"Not anymore, after havin' to eat it so much!" said the girl. "And they kept talkin' about how some mister Neilson was gonna pay them to get me back. But I dunno any mister Neilson."

...All this, because they got my name wrong, thought Ning, frowning a bit deeper. She looked around for the first time since stopping to free Nadia; somehow she'd lucked out and wound up in an alley with no witnesses around. "Okay, um..I'm gonna do something, but I don't want you to be startled or anything. This isn't really what I look like," she said.

"It's not?"
"No, this is...like a special disguise. I want to show you who I really am, okay?" The fox-girl took a couple of steps back...just in case.

"'Kay," she nodded.

After speaking her phrase, another bolt of lightning appeared from the clear sky, reverting her change: Taller, yet weaker; older in every way, but truly himself again. Gerald sighed slightly as the return to himself completed; there was something pleasant about feeling young and full of energy again, to be sure, but after feeling stuck that way the day before it was a relief to be able to go back to being himself.

"Paw-paw!!" And his little girl jumped him in a hug. He laughed along with her, twirling her around in a circle before setting her down again.
"I'm so glad you're alright," he said, giving his first genuine-feeling smile this week. He saw something out of the corner of his eye then, and turned slightly toward it: Light was walking up to them. She was using illusions to look like a human with normal brown hair, but otherwise exactly like herself...and thankfully, uninjured.

"Hey," she waved. "How's Nadia?"
"Seems like she'll be okay," he said, "I'll take her in for a checkup to be sure, but...ah," he paused, realizing his granddaughter was staring at the newcomer a bit. At the moment, of course, Light was a Stranger to her. "Right. Sweetie, this is Light. She helped me rescue you."

"Really?" said the little girl, apparently directed at Light.

"Yep! Nice to meet you," she said, offering the girl a hand to shake—which she did. And then, leaning in a little closer, she loudly whispered: "I didn't know Paw-paw was a superhero..."

"Eheh..well..I mean," the fox-girl stumbled over her words a bit.
"I wasn't until yesterday," said Gerald. "Nadia, you need to keep this a secret from everyone, okay? A lot of bad people got powers the same way I did, and they might think I'm one of them."

"Bad guys?" she said, looking back at him. "But you're not a bad guy!"

"Look, if everyone knows your granddad's a superhero then the real bad guys might come bug you at your house," said Light. "If we keep it a secret then you won't have to deal with that, yeah?"

"Oooooh. Okay," she nodded, apparently accepting this.

"Let's get you home, sweetie," said Gerald, offering a hand to lead her with. "I've got to talk to the policemen about all this." He nodded vaguely to Light, and she seemed to understand what he wanted, making the three of them invisible on the way home.

About halfway there, Nadia said, "Hey, Paw-paw..?"
"Yes?"

"When did you start bein' a girl?"

Light put a hand to her mouth, barely suppressing a full-on laugh. Gerald was a little less amused. "Uh..it's just, I-I don't know why exactly but that's just what I look like when I'm using my superpowers," he tried to explain. "So..I'm not a girl right now."

"Oh, okay."

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"Okay honey, now that we're alone again..." Clark's wife made a vague waving motion at him while he bolted the door to their house.
"That meant something very different until yesterday," he observed. "You're just plain insatiable. Why don't you examine yourself again instead?"
"I told you: In my case it's at least reasonable—the extra musculature accounts for the added strength. But you...for one thing, where do you even fit all that you?"

"Are you saying I'm overweight?" he said, cocking his head to the side a bit. She just folded her arms and gave a mock-shaming glare.
"Honestly. You ought to be more concerned about breaking your own laws."
"Hey, I didn't make 'em. I didn't even discover them," he said with a shrug. "Anyway, fine..."

It was a secret to neither of them, but to everyone else, that two nights ago they had mysteriously shared the same dream. Standing right next to each other, they each heard incomprehensible words, and awoke the next morning to discover the shared dream in the process of talking about the strangeness of it to each other. And then they had tried out those words, and...well, Clark spoke his now.

The first effect was a faint, bluish glow surrounding him. On recorded video, it just looked like that glow appeared, brightened to obscure him, and then faded again to reveal the other form all in the span of an instant. But to the two of them the change seemed to take much longer, and was far more visible. The glow felt vaguely warm, and in a way that was hard to describe he felt as if that warmth was connected to a warmth in his wife, in the people and animals just outside on the streets, and on outward to the whole rest of the world. Every person or creature's warmth was a little different somehow, like it had a unique flavor to it...but now she would tell him he was mixing senses. It was, again, hard to describe.

But after a second his personal warmth seemed to touch his skin directly, and then it began reshaping him. His height slid downward, his hair pulling itself out longer and longer and brightening to a lighter shade of brown. His clothes loosened from the shrinking, then reshaped and tightened themselves, the pants shortening and spreading into a skirt, the shirt growing long, wide sleeves, a sash, a tie, and a vest and bra beneath. His underwear, of course, tightened into a soft pair of panties which immediately tugged flat as Clark's sex changed.

Her ears gently tugged upward, pushing out into a tall, fluffy pair of fur-triangles the same color as her hair. From her back sprung a tail, growing long and thick with more of that same color for except at the white tip. She finally stopped shrinking a full two feet below her original height (they'd measured it), and her chest gently pushed out into the waiting A-cup bra, filling it perfectly. Unseen to her, her eyes had turned bright red mid-blink, and some red markings appeared on her cheeks. A needle a little longer than a fountain pen stuck itself into her left ear, not a painful sensation but a small shock the first time around to be sure; its back end had a golden bulb with a tassel coming down from it.

And Clark smiled in spite of herself; the feeling of being small, light, soft and fluffy was slightly addictive, and somehow being cut off from the sense of everyone's "warmth" around her was slightly uncomfortable, a discomfort she only ever seemed to notice after changing back to this form. "I still think this is more normal than yours," she said, "I mean, you get those horn-things..hm?" Her ears twitched slightly.

"What?"
"Oh, we left the news on," said Clark, walking over to the living room. Her gait was dainty and gentle, almost like floating, but somehow got her around very quickly, despite her considerably diminished height making her stride length relatively tiny. They were reporting about some old guy who said two of those fox girls who'd shown up in the last couple of days had saved his granddaughter. "How about that?" she said, hearing her wife finally make it behind her. "You think we should be playing hero?"
"Nope. Revealing ourselves now will just get us killed by some of the others, or maybe arrested just on principle. If whoever that is wants to play superhero that's fine, but especially with the news reporting on them they're just gonna invite trouble."
Clark was aware of her wife coming up to her tail, and moved it over where she could hug and run her hands across it briefly, knowing full well that was what she wanted to do. "You still think the trouble is real?" She couldn't really blame her; she'd hugged her own tail several times since getting it. It was like a huge, warm teddy bear.

"No doubt. It's only been a couple of days. Maybe that woman wanted us to have time to understand our powers...or she just wanted to give us some time to murder each other. Either way, that's the cue we're waiting for."

Her tail released again, Clark turned toward her wife, and frowned slightly, a small hand automatically reaching up to draw the needle out of her ear, and in the same motion turn it so the bulb side was facing forward. "Hey, you got a papercut at lunch."
"Seriously?" She rolled her eyes. "Oh, fine. I guess we need to observe this effect, too." She held out her hand and Clark used the needle like a wand, gently waving it over the minor injury. They both watched a faint blue glow travel from the needle to the hand, and then the wound seal itself back up. "Thanks, I guess." Clark withdrew her hand, and then pointed toward a neighboring room. "Now, come on—treadmill."
"Aww, I hate the treadmill.." Clark followed obediently anyway. After all, it was in the name of science.

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Normally, Amory only watched the news in the morning, with and slightly after breakfast, to help him wake up. This weekend seemed like a good time to keep it on, even when he went back to his room to do homework. There was something genuinely supernatural going on, that science had no good explanation for yet, and a lot of people were getting hurt. Even if it was relatively quiet in this town and back in his own hometown, something big was clearly going on and it didn't seem likely to end with just the strange fox-girls appearing. It'd be foolish to think it wouldn't affect this or that place just because it mostly hadn't so far.

In a way, having the TV on to hear was a reassurance. The fact that the news was still broadcasting, and the anchors were still covering relatively normal stories in between updates about the bizarre worldwide phenomenon, at least made a complete, apocalyptic disaster seem less imminent. Commercials still ran because the businesses that paid for them hadn't closed up shop in light of the appearance of super-powered fox-girls. So on, so forth. He could focus on what he needed to think about easier, and it's not like his roommate was around to be bothered by the noise.

Recently there was another story involving some of those girls acting locally, apparently two of them working together to rescue some girl and call the police on the kidnappers—or rather, make a big beacon in the sky to let police know where the kidnappers were. The fact was that Blake was acting a little strange the last couple of days. He usually spent his weekend doing about the same thing as Amory, sitting around in his room doing homework. To be fair, they didn't know each other that well; the college had just stuck them in the same apartment for sophomore year, and it was only a few weeks into the semester yet. But he knew Blake to love superhero stories—comics, movies, even cartoons and TV shows. And...he now, separately, knew a couple of events involving the fox-girls that seemed to correlate.

Two of them had fought yesterday, but not killed each other; a corpse would've appeared for sure, as it usually was. They just seemed to disappear. And today, two of them had been involved in rescuing someone—very hero-like in nature. Besides, a supposed third one had been yesterday's bank robber and shoved the money in the man's hand as if to help him pay the ransom. A more likely narrative was that the two fighting were the same as the rescuers, one of them was the bank robber, and at least some of the people involved didn't want to implicate the robber. The fight must have resolved peacefully with an agreement to save the girl directly instead of paying her ransom, in which case whoever had challenged her wouldn't have wanted her to get arrested.

It all meant that there were two fox-girls in town, just two. And one of them...might be Blake. The times lined up, at least, with him being out at the same time as the fight and the rescue happened. But lots of people were out, too. Maybe Amory was on completely the wrong track, but what kind of errand did his roommate need to run that had him leave without his phone or wallet and later come back with nothing to show for it? If he was just taking a normal walk one of those days, what was he doing on the other one? It wasn't definite, but it seemed...suspicious.

The next question was: What could he do about it? If Blake was interested in being the secret identity side of a superhero, then Amory risked being able to expose him just by knowing this much. It was a risk he'd be better off knowing about. But it's not normal to have a conversation with someone that starts with "Hey, are you a superhero?" Or worse still, "Are you among those people running around outside using new magical powers to kill each other, and normal people, and the cops?" That was what asking someone if they were among the fox-girls might reasonably amount to. Questioned directly, without any evidence, he'd just say no—whether it was true or not.

If Amory wanted to even ask, he needed proof, or at least solid enough evidence to call him out on being one of them—even a heroic one. And looking for that proof would either convince him that Blake really was one, or that he wasn't. Proving he was wrong would be great, by far the least awkward option, and proving he was right would at least be better than allowing his suspicions to be an uncertain risk. The first step, of course, was to act like nothing was wrong when Blake came back today. Easy enough.

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A weird transitional section I've actually had written out for a while, but had trouble deciding I was finished writing it. Next entry will hopefully be more exciting.