Battle Vixens! - 12

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Episode 12: Not Light

"Amory...listen, I..um...uh..." No, no, more confident!

"I want to...I mean, uh, d-do you, um...that is.." Get to it already!
"Rgh. To thank you for, um, for your help with my chemistry homework, I-I, that is, d-do you want to, um..." Ugh, way too formal and stilted! Nobody talks like that!

Emma shook her head. She couldn't even talk confidently at a mirror, for crying out loud! The girl on the other side was blushing even, with a nervous look and a disappointed one all at the same time. She'd always been a bit of a trainwreck, a clumsy little stupid idiot, but this was getting ridiculous.

Maybe introducing herself first would be a good tactic. He probably had no idea she existed, or her name, or anything like that. Not that that was his fault—Amory just had this habit of noticing when other people were struggling with their homework, or some other thing, and he'd stop and try to help if he could. One time, she'd seen him try his best to help a graduate student in math with something he clearly didn't understand at all and they still thanked him for listening by the end of it, running off with some brilliant new idea.

It was getting silly. She'd started following him around like a lovesick dove or something. She was supposed to be more confident of a person than this by now! College was when people came out of their shells, right? When they turned into someone different, someone better? It didn't seem to be working on her. She was still the same shy, quiet girl she'd always been. There were just less people willing to take advantage of her than in high school, and more who were willing to reach out and help. That was a good thing, but it really wasn't enough for her. If only she could learn to be more confident...more anything. Get noticed, especially...especially by him.

Okay, well that was something that had changed. She'd never really been interested in someone...that way before. It made for an even bigger disaster than usual, though, because of course that meant she had absolutely no experience. She'd learned to walk without tripping over herself and to put on dresses and leggings and things without falling over or tying herself up in them because it was easy to practice and learn to be careful with her horribly uncoordinated self. And there wasn't any artificial help for asking someone for a date either, nothing comparable to the huge glasses on her face.

Wanting to be someone else was the kind of thing a person did in high school. Emma was so sure she was over that and starting to get comfortable with who she was. She accepted that she wasn't necessarily gorgeous, but could say with confidence that she was capable of looking very, very cute when she wanted to. She was used to dealing with or trying to fix what she didn't like, and improving what she did like even more. But that improvement felt so slow. She didn't really want to be someone else, no. She just wanted to be that better version of herself, faster. Or at least a version that could do more than silently follow the guy she liked before someone noticed and actually called her out as a stalker. That would be nice.

Okay. One more try. She took a deep breath. "Hi, um, m-my name's Emma...I.." Her voice grew steadily quieter, "I...you helped me with my, h-homework a f—, a few times. Um.." It was almost a whisper at this point.

The imaginary response from Amory was something like "what was that last part? Could you speak up?"
"I wanted to know if you!" she half-yelled, and then stopped herself, looking around awkwardly. Her roommate was out, as usual, but it wouldn't be very nice to wake the neighbors. "If you, um.." It was back to mumbling. Speak up, girl! "D-do you want to get some coffee? Or, um, t-tea? At the...somewhere..." Her voice trailed off and she was looking away instead of straight forward. This was...unacceptable. But it was a start. She'd said something vaguely resembling what she wanted to say, to a mirror. Give this routine a couple of weeks and she might actually be able to present herself to him and quietly mumble an apology for standing in his way before wandering off.

Emma sighed. It was getting late, she was tired, and even if it was Friday night she had a hard time waking up even the least bit late in the morning. When the sun was up, her body just wanted to be awake and refused any offers to go back to unconsciousness. So she slumped off to bed to go to sleep for the night, completely unaware how important her dream was going to be...

She lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out if it had all been real. Well, there was a way to test if something had really happened. It was just a few words long, after all. Surely she wouldn't have trouble saying it. And...to her surprise, she didn't.

Suddenly Emma felt a strange pulling sensation from the front of her body, growing stronger and stronger. Along with it was a much gentler stretching feeling from her ears and..something from her lower back, something that hadn't been there before. "Mnnh!" She pushed herself up, finding it deeply uncomfortable when whatever it was got pinned under her as it grew. Her clothes were rearranging themselves, too, and more, extra clothes were appearing, and she saw the color in her hair fading out, paling to a silvery-gray shade. Finally, the pulling finished with a sudden, distinct POP, like a balloon right in front of her suffering from a sudden case of a needle stuck in it.

She closed her eyes instinctively at the pop, partially an anticipatory wince as she'd felt sure the pulling sensation was leading to something painful. There was a weight on top of her/someone under her. What? Another girl's chest was up against hers, and a face on her face, cheek to cheek. She could feel really long hair down her back even though her hair wasn't even shoulder-length. A tail..that's what it was, was still partially pinned under her/lying across her legs. There was soft fur lying on all four of them. What? There were arms on her arms.

"Mngh.." Her voice sounded paritally wrong, like she was hearing it twice and one of them was in front of her, like in a recording. She tried to push herself up and opened her eyes, and saw...two girls? A girl in front of her? It was hard to process what was going on at first, but it started clicking right away somehow. A pair of black-gloved hands grabbed a pair of white-gloved hands, and all four were hers. She knelt on top of herself and pulled away, and sat up, looking at the bright red eyes with slitted pupils/light blue eyes which seemed to have plusses in them.

She was her and herself. She had been lying on top of herself, and now was still partially there. There were two of her. Both mouths opened wide, letting out a chorus of "WHAAAAAAAAT?!" in two slightly different voices.

The dark-haired Emma hopped up and stood on the floor, and stepped back, allowing the white-haired original she'd popped out of to swing her legs onto the side of the bed and stand up. She had no idea how to put this concept into words. There was all of the sensory information from two bodies—all the sight from two sets of eyes, sound from two different locations, bodily feeling, air across four tall, fuzzy ears and two tails swishing themselves around instinctively. But it wasn't overwhelming; it made sense somehow, and her mind seemed to already be easily sorting out which feelings were from which body, and an easy understanding just seemed to come to her of how to control the bodies separately, making each one work with just as much coordination as if it were the only one.

Emma One scratched her head and Emma Two tilted hers, their ears twitching around a bit. "This is—" "—power?" she said, One starting and Two finishing automatically. "But, I don't feel very—" "—strong or anything." Two to One. Somehow talking this way felt more natural than just having one body do all the talking, or having both do it the way they had at first, when surprised. Thinking aloud was a lot less coherent: "Is this—" "—It's not just me, I—" "—all those other people, so—" "—Maybe, check the news?" Two went to the apartment living room to check the news, running a hand through her long, long hair. She'd always thought about having long hair like this, but it was a lot of trouble to maintain. It was the kind of thing she'd surely mess up. Was...Two's bust bigger than hers? One's looked about the same, and it looked bigger than that, so, maybe a little bit?

The TV was on. One went to her mirror to get another look, even though she had just seen herself through her own other pair of eyes. Change the channel to the news, and—absolutely, definitely, lots of people had woken up with powers. But it seemed like everyone else got some kind of insane superpowers: There was fire, shadow stuff, someone had torn off a bank vault door. And what was her power? Just that there were two of her. Two Emmas for her one mind to mismanage just as badly as when there was just one.

One hmphed to herself. Even superpowerful cosmic entity fox women thought she was too pathetic to handle real power, she guessed. It felt a little like she'd been cheated or pranked. But whatever. Two put her hands on her hips, a determined look on both faces. She turned off the news; she would make the best of this one way or another. First it would be good to test, maybe even practice, her coordination with two bodies at once. Could she type coherently on a computer while reading a book? Could she read two books? Play a co-op video game with herself? Those were the kinds of things to test for. It was going to be a busy Saturday.

Occasional looks at the news gave her more information about how the other girls worked. Apparently they could summon some kind of weapon by just wanting to: Swords, hammers, knives, a bow even? Try as she might, Emma had no idea how to make a weapon appear. Thinking of a weapon of some kind appearing in her hand didn't work. Enthusiastically saying "Weapon appear!" or "I have the power!" didn't do anything but make her look silly in front of herself.

Those people out there were all fighting and killing each other, too. It was horrible! Good thing she'd already decided to be a recluse all day today, even before this insanity started. It convinced her: She would definitely not go outside this way, where she was...split into two? Or...well, she didn't feel split actually; if anything having two of herself felt more complete. It felt like going back to just one would be a big letdown, like losing half of herself. But she would have to do it; her life was clearly in danger if she was like this anywhere else.

The tests all went incredibly well, far better than she could've hoped for. Her mind easily processed two streams of input at the same time from two different books, and two outputs (typing while writing down, two completely different sentences) proved just as easy to manage. She was the best co-op partner she'd ever had, because she was herself and so didn't have to discuss or explain anything, and both of her were just as good of players as one of her alone had ever been—which, admittedly, wasn't amazing, but seeing no loss of ability from working two fronts simultaneously was impressive. Emma gave herself a small fistbump at the end of that test, and giggled a little at the silliness of it.

There was some even better news, too. It occurred to Emma several hours after she'd fed both of herself breakfast (and worried about doubling her food bill, before realizing she could've just gone to being one person before eating and then back again, that would've probably worked) that she had never gotten out her glasses. Her eyes (all four of them) just plain worked, like eyes were supposed to work. And both of her bodies seemed really well coordinated and even a little athletic, able to do things like handstands and cartwheels competently! This was a humongous jump up for the gym class disaster Emma, who'd had two or three hospital stays from trying even the slightest bit too hard. She even dared to try a few riskier tricks, spotting herself with the other body to try and keep from breaking anything, and even those things like flips and midair twirls seemed to work great, not even ending in the expected dizziness.

When she became doubly hungry for lunch, Emma decided to go back to one body to take care of that. Eating two donuts simultaneously was fine, but she wasn't so sure about eating two different lunches, or eating different bites of the same lunch simultaneously in two different mouths. Maybe something to try in limited doses later, but for now just filling her belly would be good enough, and having just one to fill would be helpful. On speaking her phrase again, the extra body disappeared, and the original one—the one with the plusses in the eyes—shifted back, her ears and tail feeling as if they were being squished briefly before disappearing and her clothes changing back to the nightshirt she'd been wearing in bed before all of this happened.

She was, of course, back to the same clumsy girl as before. She had to go get her glasses to see more than two feet; then she tripped over own feet and nearly shattered the whole plate of food on the apartment floor, but caught herself on the counter just in time. It was hard to go back to being uncoordinated after being two people at once who were both just perfect at all kinds of moving around. The end of lunch couldn't come soon enough, and it was back to being Em One and Em Two again.

Well...One and Two seemed really unimaginative. Looking in her own eyes again, Emma thought maybe that 'original' body with the silver hair could be called "Plus" in view of the weird shape her pupils took. It was kind of strange they looked like that; it didn't seem particularly helpful for seeing, but from the view inside she knew it wasn't hurting it. And if one of her was "Plus", then the other had to be "Minus". She was in a lot of ways the opposite of Plus: She was an inch or two taller, dark-haired instead of light, long-haired instead of short, bigger bust, deeper voiced...therefore, "Minus". And if she tilted both of her heads enough, then she could get the slightly slitted pupils of Minus's eyes to look like minus signs. That was good enough. Together they were...Gemma! Like..Gemini, but Emma. She giggled to herself with Plus; not like anyone would ever hear those names. But it was good to have some consistent way to refer to which self she was thinking about or having do stuff.

Done testing, Gemma went on to actually using her double self to get twice as much studying and homework done. She took a break to play games for a while, helping herself out a little more. She re-fused again to eat supper and spent the rest of the night until bedtime with more of the same. Then, since there was only one bed and she didn't particularly feel like sleeping on top of herself or having a mysterious other girl appear in case her roommate suddenly showed up, Gemma switched back to being just Emma to go to sleep. Only as she was about halfway there did her tired mind finally bring back up a small point of order: Amory. She was supposed to talk to him Monday, and hadn't done any practicing at all! It was going to have to happen tomorrow, she thought. She could practice in front of herself; that would help, maybe. So just go to sleep for now, or you'll be totally useless tomorrow, she thought. After all, we can't afford to waste another two days of opportunity on being tired, right? Emma smiled to herself, feeling at least a little clever about that.

Monday was the big day. Much to her embarrassment, Emma had actually gone to the trouble of figuring out which classes Amory had. They were in none of the same classes, of course, because the universe just couldn't make it easy on her. That was fine, she'd gotten all the way to pretending Minus was Amory and saying a few complete, unmumbled sentences yesterday! Surely, even without being two people...surely she could manage this. His last class was at the same time as hers, and in a nearby building. All she would have to do is wait far enough away to watch the main exits to that building and see which one he left from. Easy.

Emma was completely flustered before she even saw him, but took up her position anyway. She watched, and watched, and watched...and saw something very unusual. Someone opened one of the side exits, stepped out, and...poof! Gone. He was just...gone? No, no, that couldn't be right. Eager for a distraction, she ran up to where he'd disappeared and looked around. In a moment...there! She saw it! There was a distortion in the air, like in movies or video games when someone is "invisible" and they want the audience to know. She had to look really carefully to see it, but she could. The distortion was...running away! Against her better judgement, Emma almost instinctively spoke her words, and Minus popped out right away. She gave chase, trying to hide herself as best she could.

Watching it longer and longer, she got better and better at making sense of it. It was all a trick of the light; the light was bending around the person's body somehow. It seemed like they were responsible for it. Eventually, Plus could only still see the slightest shimmer, but with some effort Minus was able to sort of...filter her eyes and see who it really was. A fox-girl, with some kind of light powers she guessed; white hair and ears. Gemma realized they were getting out of the woods and toward the major city now, and decided to try and imitate the girl's trick, not to hide her whole self, but just those ears and tails, and...maybe make the pupils look normal, the eye colors less weird.

It wasn't clear at all to her why she thought she'd be able to do that, but it was like...it was like being backstage during a magician's trick. The audience was fooled because they couldn't see all the machinery working couldn't see the card in the man's sleeve. But after watching it for so long, Gemma was sure she understood it just well enough to tug on a few strings and...there! Plus looked like a normal girl. So did Minus, with Plus's help. Minus didn't seem to be able to do the same thing, not correctly at least. Trying to do the same thing with Minus seemed to cause her shadow to move around in an unnatural way, and the shadows of other things to be pulled toward or away from her. She would have to figure it out later; that stranger was getting away!

Gemma followed all the way to an alley, trying to keep her movements as casual as possible. Minus stayed closer, as the one who could see through it; Plus stayed just in range for the no-ears, no-tail, normal-eyes illusion and tried really hard to act casual. It got easier the more she did it, as did Minus's seeing of the other girl and the kind of shadow-pulling, though she tried to be careful not to do enough for the people around to notice. In the alley, the stranger suddenly decided to go jumping up the building! That was...well, Gemma hadn't expected that. Watching from just outside the alley, mouth agape, Minus's surprise almost made Plus drop the illusion. Almost. Well, she wasn't going to follow some crazy girl up the walls of a building, or...two buildings, or whatever. It seemed like that was it for her. Gemma decided to get out of there, and head back home before someone noticed...something off, or something.

Walking home, several things occurred to the girl in two bodies. One: She had had no trouble following someone through the woods, all the way to town; she had run fast and not tripped, and didn't feel tired afterward. These bodies were more than just a little more coordinated; they were agile, fast, with impossible levels of stamina. She could be a track runner if, well..if she could do this stuff as her regular self. Two, more importantly: She had...learned something from watching the girl. She had learned something about how the girl manipulated light, which Plus could just sort of imitate, and Minus's attempts to imitate, well..it was increasingly clear that that her was able to manipulate shadows this way. With some experimenting, it seemed like Plus just couldn't figure out Minus's trick of shadow-moving, even while watching it, and Minus just couldn't get a hold of how Plus was messing with light. It was like...somehow the imitation wasn't real enough to fully understand what was going on from watching it.

But it made perfect sense now; Gemma didn't seem to have any particular power because she could learn the powers of others! Maybe not as...good as their powers, but if she could see someone else's power in actions, she could actually use something a little bit like it. She could sort of figure out which strings to pull. And now that she understood how to move light/shadow, it stuck in her mind, recalled easily, not like something she was going to forget.

Three: She had run off after the invisible girl instead of talking to Amory, or even watching him go. Plus growled at Minus in frustration on realizing this, and Minus pulled down on her own ears briefly in response. Seeing her own expressions like this was kind of comical, but she tried to stay focused on how bad this was. What was she doing? She'd practiced for hours yesterday and now, nothing! Well...maybe she'd talk to him tomorrow. Yeah, their classes lined up in the later afternoon, so...that would work, right?

Back inside her apartment, Gemma decided to try one more experiment. She sort of, fiddled with the light and shadows a little bit differently, trying to make something special appear. The room dimmed slightly as light was pulled toward Plus's outstretched hand; the shadows from the furniture darted over toward Minus's. Then a knife appeared in each; a sparkly shimmer of light making Plus's while, of course, the other girl's was made out of shadows rushing into place and solidifying. The lighting in the room returned to normal, but the knives stayed.

This felt...right, somehow. She understood how to hold them; Plus instinctively held it out, forward, to stab straight, while Minus went for kind of a back-handed hold instead. The two bodies' names seemed a lot more appropriate with the increasing amount of opposite-ness when it came to their powers, she thought. Some experimental swings with each felt just right, and she went slowly through what the motion of throwing the knives would be, too: Straight, dart-like for Plus, but aimed to go spinning around the air for Minus. She didn't want to actually throw them in her apartment; something would definitely get broken and her roommate wouldn't like that. But it was clear enough she knew how.

After dismissing them back into sparkles of light and bits of shadow, Gemma tried re-summoning the weapons. They appeared easily this time, with no effort at all. It was just...grab for them, and they were there. Let go, and they were gone. Just like the girls on the news seemed able to do. Well...she still didn't want to go outside like this, at least not without hiding her features; she didn't want to fight. Putting herself in danger seemed foolish, when there was so much she could do with these two bodies. But maybe...if she hapened to see someone using their powers, Gemma could hide herself somewhere nearby and try to figure out how they worked. Just in case.

The monsters on the news looked terrifying. She definitely didn't want to be near anything like that. And so, when there was a panic from not one, but two of them, showing up on the quad, Emma simply ran away with everyone else. She was no hero, after all. Just a clumsy girl who'd gotten the slightest bit lucky. Of course, it was now their fault she'd missed talking to him again. Well, at least there was a better excuse to tell herself than "I got distracted" this time...

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"Wait, then who—how did you—!?"

BOOM! A noise like thunder cut him off, shocking them both; the girl in front of him jumped a few feet up into the air in surprise, landing awkwardly on her butt and knees. Then Amory realized who it probably was that had just shown up to the party. Ning's body appeared right after the lightning bolt in a brief purple blur, her longer sword landing directly in the thing's back before another bolt was called from the sky, using the weapon as a lightning rod.

The beast hissed/roared angrily, turning on her, and pounced. With a very familiar sparkle of light, a knife appeared in the hand of the girl who was Not Light, and she stood up and threw it, landing a hit in one of the thing's legs. A second stranger appeared chasing behind the thing's tail as it ran after Ning, who was just barely ahead of its unnatural, skittering speed after dodging that pounce. The stranger closer to Amory turned completely around toward him, seemingly content to let the others do the work for now. "A-are you okay?" she said with a nervous, concerned look on her face. There were plusses in her eyes instead of pupils.

"I think I'll live. Did you—"
The mist monster roared again, making a very sharp turn to the side to almost bite the dark-haired stranger when she slashed its side. "Yipe!" said the girl nearby, jumping as if it was her being nearly bitten. Ning took the opporutnity to turn around and spread her hands, giving a classic force-lightning-like attack at the monster's whole body. It steamed black mist out like a boiling pot and roar/hissed even louder than before. "I-I'd better go help, me," said not-Light, abruptly turning around and running toward the monster.

Amory panted, sitting himself up further. What was going on here? Who was that, and how did she have Light's powers? There was only one way to get someone else's powers, wasn't there? He saw the other person, who since she wasn't Ning had to be the "me" the plus-eyed girl had referred to, make an upward motion, and suddenly the beast's shadow moved in front of it and rose up into a kind of wall shape, which it crashed itself into in a charge at Ning. She got out of the way as the shadow exploded away, the force clearly far too much for it. Wait—shadow powers? That girl in Japan...

He stood fully up, trying to brush the gravel off and assess the damage. There was some real pain here and there, but nothing seemed broken or even twisted from the fall. The noise of the battle continued: More lightning, the sound of blades cutting and stabbing into flesh, or whatever the dark mist stuff was. He looked up. Plus girl had two knives now, one in each hand, and she ducked away from swipe after swipe from the giant wolf's claws. It seemed like she was being forced toward him until she made a flash appear to one side to blind it, forcing it to stop briefly. Then she jabbed both knives into its body and some, not much but some, electricity arced from her fingers into the blades, like a weak imitation of what Ning had done a moment ago.

Speaking of, the purple-haired girl had both her weapons in hand, and began to slice at the things side repeatedly, drawing its roar and its ire. It bit at her wildly and she barely got away from the attack, the shadow of a nearby building moving between the beast and her with the intervention of the dark-haired friend or whatever of the plus girl. Well—she was still alive, so...something else had to be going on here, right? Or there was more than one person with electricity powers...Rather, there had been.

A chunk of concrete was pulled up near the monster and thrown right at its head. Then four knives thrown at it, Ning's sword jabbed into its head through the chin and her own shorter blade stuck right into his muzzle. There was another light show, the two other girls running away as Ning loudly yelled, putting her hands out and emitting several strikes of lightning in a row, the kind of display any rainstorm would be proud of. That did it; the monster hissed one more time as its body visibly grew less distinct; it roared and swiped weakly with a paw as it faded away, hitting nothing. The six weapons stuck into it fell to the ground, clattering briefly before disappearing: One knife into light, one seemingly joining a nearby shadow, one into some bits of broken concrete...and the last one, just like Ning's blades, in a small shower of electric sparks.

Ning stood still, panting heavily. The plus-eyed girl was off in the distance a bit, her friend near Amory. He pointed at her. "You."
"Me?"

"Where did you get those powers!? Who did you kill?"
"K-kill?!" Both her and the plus-eyed one said at once, at the same time.

He snapped at the other one: "Did you attack Light in her sleep!?"

"Light?" Ning, obviously, reacted to this, immediately running after the other one with her weapons reappearing. The target seemed stunned, and wound up with one of Ning's blades dangerously close to her chest. Looking toward Amory, she said, "What did they do to Light?...Wait, who are you?"

"I'll explain later."

"I d-don't—" "—know anyone by that name!" the two girls protested, the one near Amory starting and the other finishing. "I haven't—" "—attacked anyone! I swear!" With a weapon that close, the plus-eyed one had her arms up and both of them looked equally terrified.

"Okay, okay back up a second," Amory shook his head, realizing he'd jumped to a probably totally incorrect conclusion. He waved a downward motion toward Ning, hoping she'd understand to withdraw her weapon. "You just showed off light powers. And shadow powers, and...How did you do all that?"

"Um, I'm—" "—n-n-not really sure how to—" "—um, to explain it, I just...I saw a girl bending the light the other day and—" "—I just sort of t-t-t-tried to do what she was doing." Ning, thankfully, let go of her sword at this point, apparently starting to understand that there wasn't any good reason to attack just now. "A-and then, the same thing with you and the lightning," said the one near her. "But when I—" she started, and the one near Amory finished "—do that with this body, i-i-it, um, comes out differently. So, shadow, and um, er-earth I g-guess?"

Amory took a deep breath, let out out through his lips in an 'f' sound. He was starting to really feel the bruises and scrapes from falling over on the concrete. "Okay, calm down. I'm sorry I started accusing you like that."
"Uh-uh—" "—um..." Both of them started blushing furiously.

"You saved my life, right? What's your name?" he said.

"I, I, I, I, I," they both stuttered with different timing, like a strange kind of off-tempo echo. Everyone heard the sound of a siren in the distance; of course someone had called 911 on seeing the giant wolf appear. "Um—" "—I gotta go!" Both of them bolted off in different directions.

"Wait!" Ning looked at Amory. "...Well, should I chase them?"
"I guess not..." He took a couple of steps her way, and then stopped. "Ow."

"Oh, sorry!" She ran up toward him. "Are you all right? What happened? Who are you?" she said, increasingly excited with each query.

"Mostly. That thing appeared and came right after me. I'm Amory. Um," he started to make a B sound, caught himself. "Light's, roommate. She's told you about me, right? You're Ning?"
"Um—yes. How much do you know?"

"Not a lot," he half-lied. He was pretty sure he knew exactly who she was—not by name, but at least by seeing the face interviewed on the news. But he couldn't have her thinking Light had told him that much, because she hadn't. "I guess you need to run if there's police? I'll tell them you and whoever that was saved me," he said.

"Okay," she nodded. It looked like she was about to take off, but paused. "I'm...glad we got to you in time."
"Yeah. Me too." He looked down at himself again. "Feel...pretty lucky, even though I think I might need some stitches. But, to be there that quick I kinda wonder if she was following me..." Ning just nodded, and then ran off just before the emergency responders started showing up.