The "Best" RPG Ever-45

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Everyone had gotten quiet by the time they reached the pasturelands. Rayna didn't particularly like it this quiet, and there was an important topic to address. "So uh, what exactly are we gonna do to kill the giant worm, once I find it?"
"I'm considering sticking my sword into it," Zack deadpanned from the front. This drew a couple of chuckles from his usual teammates.

"Well no, I mean—it's a tunneling monster. Do we follow it down into its tunnels where it definitely has an advantage, or try to lure it topside somehow?"

"We fought a giant bird before, and had a lot of trouble until Clera found a way to make it crash," said Lynn. "Giving the monster the homefield advantage sounds like a disaster waiting to happen."

"Well, it likes eating livestock, right? Can you just..give it some fake pigs and cows to try and eat?" said the catgirl.
"Um..I mostly do people-illusions when it comes to actual illusions. The first thing I figured out was copies of myself. Not sure if I can..." Rayna gestured nearby, trying to make an illusion of a cow, and just made a version of herself with cow-patterned hair and clothes. "Not too helpful."

"The other way to lure it up is for someone to go down where it is, pop it in the nose and run it to the surface when it's mad," said Mira. "Or...hmm." She looked at Rose for a second, which caused a couple of the others to look in the same direction.

"Huh?" The dragon-girl looked around in confusion. She'd been following the conversation but didn't know what she'd done to get everyone looking at her.
"Why don't we just blow up the tunnels?" the witch said, getting a bit of a smirk.

Katherine thought for a moment. "Ohh, I get it."

"Get..what?" Rose was clearly still confused.

"You can breathe minty breath down into where the worm is, then someone can light it on fire. That doesn't rely on the worm being able to get mad—just on it having basic 'run away from fire' survival instincts—and it won't risk anyone getting eaten down there with it."
"Oh. Umm, I dunno exactly how much breath I can breathe though? If the worm's really big, the tunnels are really big too, and there might be too many of them..."
"It's worth a try, at least," said Rayna. "With me tracking the worm's actual location we'll be hitting the tunnels closest to it. And if it doesn't work, plan B can be the 'lure it up' one."

"I s-should be able to help this work, too," added Nora.

Their first stop was where the worm's most recent victims had been. The wreckage of a chicken coop lay in several piles around a bunch of upturned ground, with another partially-covered hole nearby where the worm had gone back in. The first hole was hard to gauge the exact size of, but the second one was farther across than any of them were tall. "..Pretty big worm, then," said Zack, standing next to the hole. "So you can track it from here?"
Rayna came up next to him, looking first down to the hole, then up and around. "Yeah. Just follow my lead for a bit."

The path led to one of the back gates of town, and then a while beyond that. Some more conversation started, first with Lynn talking about what their group had been doing since coming out to the Frontier, and Rayna occasionally interjecting. The others, mainly Katherine and Mira, answered in kind with stories of their exploits so far.

..."So there was some kind of fear-ghost-thing and an angry animated armor in that castle we went by? All that happend for us was Rayna heard some kind of armor clinking far-off, which, I guess probably could've been either one...or a third weird thing in there. But we were mostly interested in getting out of there as fast as possible, and on to a real town."

..."Yep, that was my demon-summoning circle. I hope I didn't scare you too much with that."

"Aria was a lot scarier than anything else we ran into there, trust me. And I'm mostly sure her appearing was technically not even your fault."

..."You say you can read minds, huh?" said Rayna from the front. "Well, what color am I—"
"You're thinking red, but also that if I say red you'll deny it and say you were thinking blue."
"..Oh. Well..how about, what—"
"Three. Seven. Forty-two. Underwear."

"Hahah, made you say 'underwear'!"
"You're the one who was thinking about it. Anyway, when we're actually fighting just direct any thoughts at anyone else and I'll transmit them, so you can save your breath. Umm, I can't really do that for Rose though, so you'll still have to talk aloud to her."

"Aww," the dragon-girl whined slightly.

..."So you blew up their campfire?!" Nora shyly nodded. "That's hilarious. I wish I could've seen the looks on those idiots' faces..."

..."And the whole thing just fell apart after we took it out. The Captain let me keep it, even." Mira displayed her scythe briefly. "This'll be my first time really cutting up a monster with it, but it already feels pretty natural to hold. Just don't try to pick it up if I drop it, it's got kind of a dark magic thing going on..."

---

The others left, trusting Clera to settle their bill for lunch. Aria watched her hand over several coins extra and quietly tell the waiter to keep the change. Once he was off getting a receipt together, she said, "You tip pretty big, huh."

"Medical school is expensive," said the winged girl. "Unless one is from an already-wealthy family, one doesn't survive it without working in the service industry for a large period of time."

The shifter pointed at her, expressing 'oh, I get it' with the gesture. "You know what it's like, so you try to give back now that you've 'made it'. Pretty noble, I guess."

"What do you intend to do now?" She changed the subject rather than responding directly to the comment, but was blushing slightly again.

"Well, with your approval I'd like to go looking for magic item shops. Someone who might be able to identify my weird crystal thing and figure out how it works for me."
She raised an eyebrow. "My approval?"

Aria sighed. "My temporary disability means I have to have you with me. So I want to do that, but I don't want to drag you around all over the place against your will. If there's somewhere you'd rather go first then I'll come along."

"I don't particularly object, but...wandering around everywhere seems unwise. If you did become disoriented and fall, there would be only so much I could do. My suggestion would be more to keep standing and walking to a minimum, at least at first. And I am not certain you won't become excited and attempt to run in spite of your condition."

"Oh come on, I have more self-control than that." There was a second's pause and a knowing look from the doctor. "Well—when the sword's, not out at least," she amended, looking away.

"I just really don't want to sit around doing nothing for the next two days. It's against my nature. I'm liable to go crazy even without the blood hunger's help."

Clera nodded, seeming to understand this point. "Perhaps we can acquire a wheelchair. Or at least a cane or something else which you can lean on other than me."
"Now there's an idea!" Aria grinned. "I could buy me a stylish cane to lean on first and then we can go looking for magic pawn shops or whatever." She stood up, then immediately fell back into the chair. "Uck." Then she did it again, much more slowly, ending with leaning her hands on the back of the chair. Clera was giving her the kind of slightly disapproving glare a parent does when they just told a child the stove was hot and not to touch it, and the child just went ahead and burned their finger anyway. "Okay. Slowly. Promise."

---

"Hahhhhhhhhhhhh..." Even Rose was a little surprised by her capacity to just keep breathing green stuff into the tunnel in front of her. For some reason her "Rob" memories were under the impression that there might be some kind of limited tank to pull this magic breath from, but it seemed like she could just make any breath she wanted into that special minty nature-dragon breath, as many times in a row as she wanted. Well of course, fire dragons usually don't somehow "run out of fire to breathe", but there was just something about the ability to do this that had seemed like it would be limited. At least this knowledge was something good to keep in mind if one of her new friends got injured.

Katherine said, "How far are we now?"

Nora's eyes were closed. She could feel the wind down beneath the earth, flowing through a complicated network of tunnels, many partially collapsed. She had been pushing the air around, trying to distribute the dragon breath evenly so it would all ignite, and ease off the resulting air pressure by pulling non-dragon-breath air out through the available holes. She breathed in and out, reaching as far as her power would go. "I think, a-about my limit."

"Well, the stupid thing's got to be somewhere in all that," said Rayna. "I mean, it's not that far down even."

"Well then..Is everyone ready?" Katherine produced her trusty fire-knife again and floated it over to just above the opening. A few weapons were unsheathed or otherwise prepared. Nora opened her eyes again, focusing them on the elemental blade. There wasn't a verbal response, but it was clear from their minds (and Rose's posture) that everyone was as ready as they were going to be. "Okay, let's light it up."

BOOM. Everything shook slightly; the weaker parts of the surrounding ground emitted brief gouts of flame before collapsing from the explosion. There was silence for a few seconds, and then a tremor began. The shaking grew suddenly more intense and chaotic, knocking the less agile of the seven girls slightly off balance. Rayna actually fell onto her butt, and had to quickly hop back to her feet. Then the worm finally came up from the ground.

It was as terrifyingly huge as advertised. They got to see its full length as it leapt out of the smoking ground into the air, sailed through the air a bit, and then came crashing back down toward the earth mouth-first. It had rows and rows of teeth arranged in a full circle in its mouth; its gross segmented skin looked sort of sunburned from the explosion.

You're gonna put your sword in that? Rayna thought toward Zack.

I can try. One of the better balanced, he ran up to the worm as it started its descent into the ground and slashed sideways at it, spilling some green blood out. That was promising enough to try a few more similar cuts while the rest of it went under.

More ground rumbling. The fox-girl watched her indication of the underground monster's location carefully, and gave the knight a warning as soon and as quickly as she could. It's coming up under you!

Zack made a quick backflip, just barely avoiding the thing's mouth coming up out of the ground and snapping shut. Mira ran up and gave it a slash with her scythe, making a clear gash through the raw skin and spilling more green blood. You know, I'm not so sure cutting this thing is an efficient way to kill it, she understated. The worm backtracked the way it had come, shaking the ground some more. She mounted her broom and moved into the air rather than dealing with the ensuing earthquake.

It's—Rayna changed her mind; Rose needed to hear this. "It's circling around, I think it's gonna start going along the ground!" Indeed, as predicted, the giant beast rose suddenly halfway out of the ground this time, is back body writhing back and forth and sending its wide-open mouth rushing forward. It aimed itself toward the witch first, who threw a pumpkin bomb toward the head before jumping aside. The internal explosion did little to slow its momentum as it turned right, toward Zack. He jumped up and landed sword-first on top of its head, but it started to rotate itself violently back and forth to shake him off. He barely managed to get the sword back out of it before being thrown away, and the dragon-girl ran after his flying body, barely managing to catch him in her arms and skid across the ground on her knees with their combined momentum.

The worm was busy trying to turn itself back around for another pass; its wildly flailing back end required everyone to clear away. Rayna made some illusory noises like people shouting for it to hopefully come after, and Lynn, having already run and jumped some distance away to get out of the earthquake for steadier aim, began firing several electrically-enchanted arrows at its side. Nora noticed the electricity and amplified it when the next couple of shots landed. After a brief mental communication, Katherine's lightning-enchanted knife was stabbed in about a third of the way into the worm (any farther back was moving back and forth too quickly to aim at), giving the elf a more consistent source to shock it with. It was raining pumpkin bombs and demon fire, but very little of that was hitting its mark.

"Thanks..." Rose was still holding onto Zack, even after standing herself up and running several more steps to get clear of the flailing worm tail.

"Hh..you're welcome!"

"But you can, uh, put me down now."

"Oh, right!" She finally set him down, blushing slightly at the moment of airheadedness, and then turned around to see what was going on.

The worm had taken the bait and ran over some non-existent people, but when it continued to feel shock after shock from the knife stuck in it, it turned its motion downward again, knocking the dagger against a rock on the way down and sending it flying off into the air. Katherine caught it. What's it doing now?

"Probably coming up for another bite!" Rayna yelled; everyone was getting a little far apart at this point and an eaten dragon-girl was not a desirable outcome.

"Can you make poison or anything?" said the wolf-girl, still next to Rose.

"Um..I can make a plant that's already poisonous bigger. Oh wait—duh—plants!" She looked around briefly, and then waved her hands upward, converting a bunch of the upended grass and weeds in the worm-tilled ground into long, thick cords of vine. It was drawn toward her hands, and she held as much of it that way as she could, wrapping the rest of it loosely around her wrists and ankles. Soon she had a big pile of magically-grown vine in front of her, all the individual strands held by or attached to her one way or another.

I think Rose is trying something. Zack sent a mental image of what he was seeing while he drew his sword again. Where's it coming up now?

Uh, um— It was starting to move too fast for her to keep up with. How could something that huge go so fast? Lynn! Lookout!

Almost too late, but not quite, the archer leapt into the air and did a quick somersault away, landing in an awkward tumble. The worm went half its length up into the air, involuntarily swallowing a few more of Mira's explosives along the way, and then directed its fall vaguely in Zack's direction.

"Rose." Zack pointed toward Lynn just before she jumped out of the way of the rising worm.

"Mhm!" The dragon-girl nodded, and made a hard throwing motion. Vines went flying unnaturally up and over toward where the worm was, and began to wrap themselves around it as it fell. She tugged left as hard as she could, and it was sent toward the middle area, the big rut in the ground it had made by running itself back and forth—most importantly, away from herself and Zack. "Th—think, Nor, ra can, help?" she asked with some strain, pulling up and rightward against the strength of the worm's entire body, keeping it above the ground and as in place as much as possible. Her vines continued to wrap around its body, but already many of them were snapping...she had to focus her mind and power on regrowing those before too much was lost.

Zack nodded, then ran toward the imprisoned worm, thinking Rose's request toward the elf. Lynn was already taking advantage of its trapped state, firing a bunch of electrical, rock, and fire arrows at its middle-back. Mira and Katherine followed this up with a bombing run, the witch diving close and tossing several bombs for the psion to direct on into the thing's mouth cavity and then let explode. Nora solidified a bunch of the earth and turned it into more cords to bind the thrashing monster, closing her eyes to try and concentrate against all the noise and confusion. Finally, Zack began to come close enough to think about how he was going to attack it. A plan started to form, and at the same time it was communicated to the others he would need help from to get it to work.

Zack stopped a few yards away from the worm. Mira flew up next to him and hovered long enough for him to jump onto the back of the broom before flying as high up as they dared. Then Zack jumped off, switching to Light form and getting a death grip on his longsword with both hands, pointing the sword so its blade was facing the worm below. Katherine helped him keep it steady, at the same time telekinetically pushing the sword down with enough force to put it well past terminal velocity.

With all the momentum behind it and forces on it, Zack's sword cleaved straight through the worm's thick, tough skin, and kept going, cutting a deep hole all the way into its insides, down across its side, and toward the ground. Much of the momentum from the fall went into that cut, but he was still falling dangerously fast, and Nora let go of the dirt-cords to immediately make as strong an upward gust of wind under him as she could. He landed extremely roughly, dropping the sword clattering off to one side and rolling across the ground for what felt like a full minute, ending up lying on his back.

The worm's body flailed and thrashed, snapping the rest of the vines. Rose doubled over, panting in exhaustion, while the vines she'd been maintaining with her magic instantly withered and died, making recapturing it impossible. But this movement was short-lived, merely the death throes of the beast; in a moment more there was silence.

Mira flew over toward Rose and touched down, putting her broom away. Lynn was running up to meet them, too. "Phew...you, gonna be okay there?" She was feeling a little spent herself from all those bombs.

"Yhh..yeah...heh...heeheehee!" The dragon-girl stood herself up again, grinning at Mira. "Haven't had a workout like that in uuuhm, forever I think? It did die though, right?"

An image of Rayna appeared next to them. "Yes. Confirmed deceased. That was amazing, Rose!"

"You need a hand?" Katherine's head came into view over Zack; his landing process had formed a small, slightly deeper rut in all the loose ground in the bigger rut the worm had already torn open.
"Just...lemme rest here for a minute. I'll...get myself up." This didn't hurt, actually, but he was physically stunned and had the distinct impression it was going to hurt pretty soon.

"We p-probably should've put more th..thought into how to a-a-actually kill a giant worm," Nora pointed out from above the bigger rut.

Zack rolled his head over slightly in her direction. "You think?" He sat up slowly. "How hurt am I from that?"

"I think he needs a car wash more than a doctor," Katherine snarked. There was slimy green worm blood all over him, mostly the armor but some was definitely in the hair and fur.
"Um..." She hopped down next to him and bent over, examining the elements of his body carefully. "Um, l-lots of bruising...you'll be v-very sore even if I do my best to heal you. I d-didn't know you were going to s-sk-skydive on top of everything else!"

"You would've told me not to," he stated.

"W-well, Yes!"

Rayna came up next to the pit. "Are you guys doing alright?"

"Yep. Is that thing gonna regenerate or anything annoying like that?" asked Katherine.
The fox-girl looked. "I don't think so. Everything I can see says it's dead from front to back, top to bottom. One of you must've hit a vital organ at some point, or...something. Maybe where the important nerves were got hit...anyway, I think the Captain would've warned us if regenerating was gonna be a problem."

"How's Rose?" said Zack.

She looked up at the other group. "Oh, she's exhausted but giggling about it. I think she'll be just fine. But hey that was crazy, I have no idea how you got yourself to just jump off her broom in midair like that!"

"I just didn't think about it too hard."
"Th-that is a problem!" interjected Nora.

---

Took me a while to come up with how the actual fight against the worm should go. There are surprisingly few references to be found on how exactly, like biologically speaking, a giant monster worm is supposed to be killed.

(Also, I just realized I've been neglecting the navigation links lately and fixed it. As of right now, the next and latest links should all exist and point to the right place again.)

Senses of the Wolf

Let the year of the dog (slash wolf) continue! This sort of wound up being a "re-imagining" of the very rough outline of my very first caption ever, with a different image and a lot of differences to the story, really. It has been forever (longer even than the 8-year gap the blog will show you, since I actually had captions up on photobucket for at least a year or two before moving things to blogspot; man, do you even remember when photobucket was a non-terrible place to put images?), and I'd like to think my writing has improved since then. Also the image I used for this one is actually a picture of a wolf girl.

Battle Vixens! - 7

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Episode 7: Trouble

Trouble. That was the first word that came to Light's mind to describe it. It was a weird term to use, but the appearance of that word connected back to the night before her powers had first appeared. It felt certain that this was it, the promised trouble itself. Light's fur stood on end just seeing the thing form, and her fight-or-flight instincts kicked up even harder than they already had been by the last few minutes. The police girl must have had the same kind of reaction, as she began firing on it as soon as it landed.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG click click click click click click. The normal people around were screaming and mostly running away; one or two were standing there in shock. The creature, or whatever it was, drew itself up and then started charging, apparently unaffected by twelve direct hits to the center of its body.

Light ran forward, and around the thing. Its right foreleg was already up and ready to slash; the police girl was standing there with the gun still in her hand, either continuing to try to fire it or just too shocked to move. The sword appeared in Light's hand again and she leapt with it, clashing length-wise against its claws, catching a swipe that would've torn the other girl in half. The force of it sent her flying backwards through the air, just barely long enough to regain control of her positioning and land in a kneeling position halfway into the alley she'd just run out of. Its hook-claws grabbed her sword, wrenching it out of her grasp, but she just unsummoned it as soon as she realized it wasn't in her hands anymore.

The other girl had finally shaken it off, just in time to jump out of the way of the next swipe. Now Light had a clear view of the thing's front; it did have wounds from the bullets all across its underside, leaking a little bit of the vague black mist it seemed to be made of, but they looked remarkably shallow. Its face was completely flat, with glowing red eyes because of course they were, and also a mouth that seemed to be composed entirely of gigantic teeth, with no lips or anything to hide them. Well, at least it had eyes, which meant it relied on sight to at least some extent. Light gave it a blinding bright flash to look at instead of the two of them, and then set to work on placing numerous illusory fox-girls around for it to attack whenever it did start seeing again.

The other girl, sword in her hands, circled over to the thing's side while it roared, swiping at the air in response to the flash. Light stood up slowly, finally a little out of breath from all this running and jumping around, not to mention the amount of light manipulation at work just now. But she walked forward anyway, reforming the weapon in her hand and watching for an opening.

With some visibly hard concentration, a few floating water spikes formed from the air again, and she charged up, slashing with her blade and causing the spikes to stab it as they followed her motions, then dissipate and splash across its side. The blade and spikes both made visibly deep cuts and holes in it, the sword going all the way through the body rather than getting stuck partway through. Of course, with pain to guide it the creature didn't need its eyes, and swung hard at the fox-girl with an unnatural speed. She dodged the swipe by a couple of centimeters maybe, and that only because she was already on her way back away from it; her flowing cape-thing wasn't so lucky and got torn half to shreds.

Light spent a little more concentration to make her temporary ally invisible, allowing its next hyperspeed slash to just go through the air. It had its uninjured side toward her now, and her breath was back; that was enough. The white-haired girl ran at it, leapt into the air, and fell blade-first at its shoulder, digging the weapon into its body down to the hilt and immediately wall-hopping away toward its back to avoid retaliation. Only after she'd landed did she start to process the sound the thing made.

It was at once a hiss, a loud, low guttural rattling and a high, wailing screech—a little like hearing two or three different animals in distress all at the same time. But there was something distinctly unnatural and wrong about the sound that she wasn't sure she could place her finger on. Even though it meant that monster was feeling pain, and so must be taking damage, it was an unsettling sound, maybe enough to terrify anyone hadn't already seen what it looked like. Hearing it stunned her for a second, and she was grateful to have illusions to keep it from actually taking advantage of that.

Light called back her sword, leaving its deep hole in the thing's shoulder to spout more black mist. The other girl had run up next to her, mostly because that was the opposite direction from the area the monster was attacking right now. Since it was facing away from them, she took a moment to narrow down the illusions to just one particularly good at dodging and then concentrate some of the sunlight above them into a heat laser—like the ones she'd aimed at Ning the other day, but with an intensity that would do much more than a mild sunburn. The hulking thing made its awful noise again, when it caught that full against its back, and whirled around before jumping up toward where the laser was coming from, swiping up toward the source with its good arm.

She couldn't keep this intensity up for more than a couple of seconds, and returned focus back to invisibility and an illusion or two. The other girl had found a sewer drain to pull water from, and got three or four times the little blades she'd been able to make from vapor to just start swirling around her in a tornado of pain. But she didn't seem to know how, or maybe be able at all, to just send them at the monster, instead choosing (or maybe being forced) to charge right at it. Well, she was invisible, but that many rapidly-moving parts was just plain impossible to hide properly with Light's powers, so she went for another flash in its eyes timed just as it landed from attacking the air and the water-wielder came close.

Her play was to jump right at its chest and stab it with her sword, letting all the water blades follow suit and bury themselves all over the thing's wide body. The sword's aim was where Light guessed a heart surely would be, if something like this had organs like that. But of course this didn't kill it right away, and she hadn't caught on to how wise the backup plan of "jump away immediately" was quite yet, so the thing was able to grab her off of itself, holding her in one of its giant hands.

She was obviously not going to struggle free of that, and it might have started crushing her already. Light ran. Its mouth opened, wider than it had for making noises earlier. It opened and opened, looking like a snake unhinging its jaw. Halfway there, the thought occurred to her that that thing was going to eat that girl. It was a good thing she was already on the way to do something about it.

Another flying leap from the ground took Light up onto the wrist of the arm holding the other girl. Her momentum wouldn't let her land there, so she kept going with another jump forward off of it, toward the gaping mouth. But since her arms were free and not wrapped in giant monster-claw-hands, she was able to lead with her blade, sticking it right into its disgustingly way too open maw, angled up slightly. Then Light's feet were on its upper teeth and she bounced back again, landing on the wrist for real this time. The sword's tip was sticking out of the upper-back of its head very briefly; then it disappeared, just in time to be lodged firmly into the wrist just behind its hand. Then it finally let go of its captive and staggered backwards, spewing mist from the several holes all throughout its body.

The other girl landed roughly, gasping for air. Light tumbled for a bit and popped back to her feet, feeling rather winded herself. She brought her sword back again, holding it out in front of her, standing defensively between the big beast and the police girl, only for it to collapse onto its back, destroying more of the road in the process. Then it faded, just as it had appeared, turning to black mist and then seeming to blow away down the streets in a strong wind nothing else felt.

"Hh..hhhf...that was, way too close." Light released her sword after a second and turned around. "Are you...okay? Anything broken?"

She was already kneeling, and slowly stood back up. Instead of answering the question, she stated, "You could have...run away at any time." Her voice had returned to the steady, genuine calm it had had at first.

"What, and leave you to die? That..thing to run around and hurt people!?" She wasn't even sure exactly why she thought it would do that if left alone, but it felt so...obvious somehow. "What kind of person lets that happen?"

"I...thank you. But, it wasn't a good idea." She pulled out her pistol again, pointing it at Light. They were just far enough apart to make trying to smack it away or grab it a very bad idea. "I have to...uphold the law. You know something..so I have to take you in for questioning." Something about the way she said 'have to' here seemed to suggest she didn't want to at this point.

Light put her hands up. The light was different..it was almost certainly sunset. There wasn't that much less light right now, but her usual powered-by-the-sun-ness didn't seem enough to cure the exhaustion from all the recent running and fighting. When the sun did go down she'd probably be in even worse shape. "Well, I never attacked you. Just for the record. And I'm not doing it now, either. Look, I'm not even gonna run away. I just don't want to change back."

"You should..reconsider—"

The girl dropped her gun, convulsing to the ground. Light's mind had to trace back a couple of steps to realize she'd seen some electricity arcing at her from behind, and then noticed Ning standing just a couple of feet back from the police-girl. A quick glance down made it clear she was still breathing, just stunned; it probably had been about the level of a taser, or slightly more to get past heightened fox-girl defenses to basically everything. The small girl made a 'come on' gesture, and Light took off running behind her, both of them fleeing the scene.

They didn't stop until they got back to Gerald's house, and then inside. Light was panting heavily again; the sun was mostly gone now and her tiredness had only compounded from that panicked run. But the lights were on in here, which was enough to help a bit. "I'm sorry I didn't get there sooner," said Ning. "I saw it on the news, and the helicopter footage of you fighting that huge monster, and started running right away. But..at least I helped you get away, right?"

Light sat at the front of the nearest chair. "Yeah, that was..thank you, but you...really shouldn't have done that."

"What do you mean?"
"I mean—she's a policeman. Woman. You assaulted a police-person. And she just wanted to question me."
Ning crossed her arms. "Questioning someone doesn't involve pointing a loaded gun at them."

"Things were a little tense. She saw a lot of people get killed by a fox-girl the day before. But—I mean—it was also a bad move tactically."

The smaller girl didn't appear to understand, mostly just still seeming mad about the whole gun thing, or possibly disappointed that Light wasn't happier to have been rescued. "Look, I really appreciate that you came to help me and that you did help me get away. I do. It's just—we don't want them to find out you robbed the bank, and we don't want them to find out that we or I am working with the person who robbed the bank. The evidence points to someone with electricity powers, and you just showed them I know someone with electricity powers. And on top of that she has water powers and can use them to detect me past illusions; I don't know if she might even be able to track us here with those."

"Well—well what else were you gonna do?! Go down to the station where they'd make you tell them everything? Try to run away and get shot?"

Light realized something. "Actually...wait. It wasn't loaded."

---

"You should reconsider running away."

Rowan stood up again. She'd been about to let that girl get away. Her magazine had been spent within a few seconds of seeing the monster, and she hadn't exactly thought to bring extras before deciding to chase down a shadow on the rooftop. It was wrong, what she'd thought about doing. A person doesn't become immune to the law just because they saved a police officer. Or because the officer tried to kill them.

Her body ached, but breathing, standing, moving her arms..all seemed to work fine. Sensing the flow of water in her blood, it seemed like there was some moderate to pretty bad bruising, but thankfully nothing broken and nothing internally bleeding. That was worse. That she'd actually done. What had she turned into for those two or three minutes!? Shooting someone who was basically a civilian, someone probably innocent and apparently only interested in helping out? Her mind spun back to the day before...the crazed look in that girl's eyes. Was that a crazy person gaining undeserved power, or the power making her crazy?

No, no, that couldn't be it. She was herself—was Rowan, still. It had been...what she knew they were capable of, had seen happen to her friends and coworkers. None of them had deserved it; there were families missing fathers and mothers, husbands and wives. That was all; something about the way this white-haired girl was acting had brought her to that moment, and she'd just...snapped. It took a giant black mist monster appearing out of nowhere to un-snap. Coming back to work the day after that happened had been a mistake. He'd thought he'd be able to handle it, as he had a few times before in the past when officers he'd known had gotten killed, but this time...it had just been too much.

The word was out that it was safe to come here again. There were police, emergency responders, news crews flooding in. Rowan stood still. Trying to kill that girl was wrong, and she was lucky that it turned out to be a decent person who wouldn't just let a cop get killed to make her escape, no matter how little the cop acted like they cared about the law. Somewhere in there, in the middle of the fight with the giant creature, she'd realized all that. And then pulled an empty handgun to encourage her to get away, planning to pretend she hadn't realized it was empty until it was too late. It hadn't happened that way; someone else had hit her with a taser or something. She hadn't heard them coming, and didn't hear anything but two pairs of feet running away while briefly lying on the ground. But it had still been her plan: Try to apologize for doing the wrong thing once by doing it again, in the opposite direction. Two wrongs didn't make a right, as far as the law was concerned.

Finally, people had arrived and started to ask her questions. One of the officers from this precinct asking if she was hurt, and how badly. Newspeople asking all kinds of things while being shooed away—what was that she'd just fought, where had the other person gone, so on so forth. Some of the other police were even asking things like that, and more. She opted only to answer the first oquestion, explaining she was injured and wasn't sure what would happen if she changed back in this state, best to have it looked at right away like this. They helped her over to some non-shattered road and into an ambulance parked at the edge of it. Nobody was going to ask her anything much until they were sure she wasn't going to die, which would give her more time to think. That was what she needed the most right now.

---

Amory saw Blake leaving the bathroom from a distance, on his way out of class with a crowd of other students. An impulse told him to follow, and he did—slowly, from a distance. It didn't seem like he noticed. He went on to stare at some posters for a while and then leave. That was...weird behavior if he ever saw it. The posters were—well, first of all they'd been there forever, so there was no way he hadn't seen them before, and secondly they were not that interesting. Just a picture of Isaac Newton with googly eyes pasted on, or a large-printed version of the cover of an obscure scientific book most of the professors, much less the students had never heard of.

When he left, Amory finally followed to where he'd just been. Was there a secret message on the posters or something? Well, no—a quick glance told him that they were the same old posters as before. But there must have been something there, some reason for him to...there. A door just across from the wall those posters were on was cracked open, just slightly. The classroom past it was empty, but the door wasn't on the system that usually auto-locked the classroom doors outside of classtime, and nobody had bothered to lock it manually.

A careful search eventually led Amory to a girly pink backpack. The conclusion that someone had just left their backpack behind here was rebutted by the fact that it was in a far corner of the room, rather than next to or on top of one of the desks. Someone had to have put it here deliberately. Blake hadn't even come in here, but he'd been conspicuously and suspiciously nearby for a notable period of time. So maybe this was it. What 'it' was, he still wasn't sure.

What now? Amory's sense of decency forbade him to actually open a girl's backpack and dig around inside, especially if he was wrong about it. The classroom was always unlocked anyway, so if someone had left it behind, they would be able to come looking for it here instead of having to wait for the building's main offices to open to check the lost and found, so he couldn't justify even picking it up.

Eventually he came up with something. Of course, as roommates, they had each other's numbers, to let each other know if something was going on or ask to be let inside in case a key was left behind. So Amory got out his phone and sent an innocent text asking what his roommate was doing for supper. It was the opener for a conversation inviting him to join Amory and some friends or something, if it was responded to. Instead, a very audible came from inside of the backpack.

That was it. Blake's phone was in here for some reason. Amory's suspicions seemed much closer to being proven true. But maybe it was a coincidence? Well, the buzzing had come from right near the top. He knelt over, slightly unzipped the pocket the phone seemed to be in, and found what he knew to be his roommate's model of phone. It didn't exactly say "This is Blake's" on front, but one more test would clinch it. He waited a minute or two, then sent another text saying "actually nevermind". The phone buzzed, and showed that a text from Amory had just arrived, the second of two unread ones.

Amory zipped the backpack up again, and stood up. Blake's phone was in a pink backpack in a room he'd stood next to for a while. It wasn't direct evidence of him being one of the fox-girls and going around playing superhero while trying to maintain a secret identity, but it was a very hard to explain set of events. It was enough to justify asking him directly. But that was best done back in their apartment, where it would definitely be a private conversation. And he didn't want to give his roommate a panic attack by taking the backpack or anything in it; the worst thing would be if Blake suddenly decided to run off into hiding or something like that because he thought he was compromised. So he started on his way home for the day, and began to try and plan what he would say to even start the bizarre conversation they were going to have to have.

The Free Puppy

A long time ago, I had a similar idea to this using an image with a catgirl in it, but never managed to actually write that one...

Brightest Sunshine