Battle Vixens! - 20

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

---

Episode 20: A Fractured Gem

Blake woke to the loud, blaring alarm sound that tends to precede weather alerts. It was coming from a neighbor's radio, and was quickly and apologetically muted by its owner about halfway through. Curious, he turned over and tried turning his own radio on, the volume already pretty low.

It was no weather alert. A slightly muffled voice spoke: "This is the Initiative. We remind those who know to remember the pact. If you have no pact with us, know this: Break our peace and we will destroy you. That is all." Then the same noises again, ending the emergency broadcast.

"Mrrngh.." He drew a hand back under the covers, and started to turn onto his back, but found it strangely uncomfortable; there was something in the way. After a second or two Blake realized that the wrong voice had just grunted out, and there were fuzzy ears and a tail under the covers, among other things. Right—of course the dream had compelled everyone to change. Well, it was still too early to wake up on what was supposedly a free day, so she turned onto her front instead and pulled the covers up a little more, finding it too much trouble to say the phrase and make a big flash of light.

A little while of keeping her eyes closed but not actually sleeping later, Light inwardly sighed to herself and pushed herself up, letting the covers slide off as she turned and maneuvered around to sit on the side of the bed before finally standing up, her tail gently pulling itself free behind her. Well, she could feel that the sun was at least starting to come up; it wasn't all that early. On the other hand, her ears didn't pick up Amory playing the news, which they certainly would if he was up.

She walked into the bathroom and turned on the light, having a look in the mirror. She really was pretty cute, all told, even in a baggy t-shirt with messy bed-hair. It was such a strange experience for someone used to being male to look in the mirror and see someone like that standing there. She took a moment to play around with her hair, run a hand down her side, poke at her chest a bit out of curiosity. It was...less exciting than it seemed like it should be, maybe, something to do with the general sense of girliness she felt whenever in this form. Well, then...!

After that she flipped her shirt up and over her head, off, and tossed it in the nearby laundry basket. How was that? Well, she was blushing a little bit at seeing her bare upper body, but more at a feeling of being exposed than anything to do with what she was seeing. A certain part of her said, Okay, a pretty girl in the mirror. So what? It's just me. And if it was just her, then the mental image of this in her memory was perfectly fine to recall later, while male. That might at least cause some kind of reaction.

Light's eyes narrowed, one of her ears drooping slightly. What, was she insulted that...she wasn't attracted to herself? It was as if she was thinking of Blake just slightly as a different person and hoping he would find her attractive. It was truly absurd, with the least bit of thought, but at least it seemed relatively harmless. As long as she was messing around with her form this way, how about going through a whole morning routine with it? Well—maybe not washing hair, since the near-hip-length and all the extra on her ears and tail would demand probably the entire rest of the bottle of shampoo, but everything else, sure. She could see whether or not her usual singing abilities carried over to this higher voice, maybe.

The only real hiccup was putting on clothes after toweling off. After all, everything was Blake's clothes and therefore Blake-size. On a kind of instinctive hunch, Light tried holding an outfit in her hands and saying just part of her phrase, something like 'the first part'. The clothes glowed white and shifted: Underwear split into a bra and panties, jeans shrank into shorts, the t-shirt just plain shrank. And unsurprisingly it fit her just fine. What was a little bit surprising, maybe, was that she apparently just knew how to put the bra on; that was...supposed to be something someone had to learn in this kind of situation, right? It was more of the territory of feeling 'girly', apparently. This was an entirely new and weird dimension to the mental effects of these powers to probably sort out...but, later maybe. In the meantime it might be good to report to the Quinns that she'd just discovered a way to immediately make clothes that fit this form, that was maybe kind of interesting.

Rest sounded like a good idea. Hopefully nobody would "break the peace" and Rowan wouldn't need to call her or anyone else in to go fight some murderous jerk attacking a bunch of fox girls. Hopefully today wouldn't be the day someone attacked the ones in their town, particularly the ones who had publicly announced their real identities on the news. It seemed a little like that kind of thing was what the woman wanted, but maybe the warning over the radio would be enough to stymie those kinds of attacks, at least in this country, for now.

After a quick breakfast, Light lay across the couch playing a handheld for an hour or two. Periodically her ears would twitch around, hearing the noise of someone else nearby getting out of bed; eventually one of those people was Amory in the bedroom right in front of her. Part of her thought maybe she should change back before he came in here, but another part was thinking the exact opposite. In the middle: Did it really matter that much? It shouldn't; this appearance was the same person as the other one in the end, after all. That convinced her to just continue what she was doing and not bother.

He came out and (somewhat predictably) stared for a second or two. "Um...morning. You're, uh, up early." Then he slid sideways in the general direction of the kitchen, his eyes not leaving her for a good several more seconds.

"Yeah, there was a new emergency announcement thing on the radio. She appeared in everyone's dreams last night and announced we wouldn't have any monster attacks today. So someone called the Initiative—I think probably who Rowan's working for—made an emergency broadcast asking everyone to play nice."

"Well, that's cool of them I guess," he said, finally turning around to go look for breakfast. "Uhh, I'm sorry for staring, I'm just still not used to living with a cute girl. Or—someone who can be one at will."

"Heheh," she giggled lightly.

Along with breakfast-making noises: "So do you believe her? It sounds like you believe her, like at least Rowan and whoever took the announcement seriously."
"I mean, technically she hasn't lied to us, or to me at least, once yet. She was able to predict those things would attack in the first place, soo...Also, she specifically said the enemy had 'overexerted' themselves, which matches pretty well with everyone getting about a double dose of attacks yesterday."

"You had a look at the news?"
"No, I didn't really wanna think about it for a while. I guess I probably should." She started to lean up to get the remote from the table on the side her feet were on, but paused, thinking. Remotes worked by infrared light, right? Maybe she could just imitate that. Light tried pointing a finger at the TV to make some light that would turn it on with no apparent success. It did feel like she got some non-visible light to appear and hit the TV, but it was maybe not the correct signal or whatever. It would probably require her to learn precisely how the remote worked to imitate it, which on the balance was far more effort than just picking the stupid thing up. So she rolled forward onto her front to face the other way and push the power button.

Neither of them had really watched anything but the news lately, so that was what channel it was on. The report was, conveneintly, about the alert that had gone out that morning. Amory came in and Light finally picked herself up to a sitting position to give him the other half of the couch.

The Vixen Initiative, they reported, was an American organization formed in the wake of the recent crisis. They had no direct, governmental power yet—lawmakers being glacially slow as always—but reported having numerous of the "empowered" in their employ and several times as many in alliance agreements with them. Their goals were simple: Organize fights against the mist creatures that had appeared recently to reduce casualties and risk to ordinary people; keep the peace among the "empowered". Hence the emergency alert this morning, a somewhat more abrupt public introduction than they had expected to make, in light of an announcement made by "the Giver" in dreams the night before. That led to questions to which Amory and Light already knew the answer, with reporters naturally skeptical of someone contacting a large number of people through their dreams simultaneously. But, the person representing the Vixen Initiative said, was that really any less believable than all of the things they already had direct, filmed evidence for? After a brief silence he said, I thought not. Of course the message for any "empowered" watching was the same as it had been in the alert: Remember the pact, and keep the peace, or the Iniative and everyone with them would destroy the offending party. They were also now starting to publish recommended actions for various kinds of businesses and government agencies in case of an attack, in an effort to restore some level of normalcy and safety to the situation.

"They really like the word 'destroy', huh," said Light.

"Yeah..I guess they're really worried about the people who did all that killing the first couple of days. Fear of death from an overwhelming assault is the only motivator they can even be slightly sure of in these circumstances, seems like."

"Hmn?" Light turned around, having heard something odd.

"What?"

"...Paper." She hopped over the back of the couch and quickly up to a piece of paper she had just heard being slid under the door. While picking it up, she also redirected some of the light from outside to try and see who had left it. They were gone already, but rolling her vision back through time slightly..."Gemma. Oh boy." Light carefully unfolded it, uncertain whether there was some unknown 'make a bomb out of paper' ability the megaman girl had managed to learn lately.

It was a different kind of bomb, maybe:

"Light-

I know who you are and where you live. I need your help." ("This will get ugly" was scribbled off in the margins) "Meet me on the quad ASAP. Come alone please please. I don't know what will happen otherwise.

-G"

"Well, that looks like a trap." Amory had taken the slower route to read it over her shoulder.

"Do I really have much of a choice, though? I need to meet her to explain she's misunderstood everything anyway. And she says she needs help..." Light's ears drooped a bit, thinking of the expressions the poor girl had shown near the end of their last meeting.

"You better not get yourself killed. But if you do go, then do you have enough faith in that woman to leave me alone here?"

Light thought about certain events in her 'personal' dreams: The ear touching and tail grabbing in particular. "...No." She sighed. "Any objection to paying the Quinns an visit?"

"Dr. Quinn will definitely force me to actually work," he half-complained. "It's better than risking being attacked, though. How do you want to do this?"

A minute or so later, Rory picked up the other end of the line. "Yo, what's up?"

Amory explained the situation in brief.
"Uh-huh. I guess I can babysit for a little while. My husband's still in bed after tiring himself out all of yesterday. I'm gonna make you do your homework, though."
"Yeah, I knew that already. I've got my backpack."
"You've always been one of the smart ones. And tell Light she should really come for some lessons too, especially once Clark wakes up! When you have control over electromagnetic radiation the first thing you should do is pick a physicist's brain for ideas of what it can do."

"Oh, yeah..duh." Light, walking next to him with an image of Blake overlaid for the cameras, could of course hear the entire conversation with her fox-ears. "I guess I really have a reason to survive whatever's gonna happen now."

"She says sure, if she lives."

"Well you'd better live then! You kn—you do know this is gonna turn into a fight no matter what you do or say, right? Couldn't be more obivous?"
"I mean, maybe she could resolve it peacefully," said Amory.

"You saw the way she reacted yesterday. That girl's not stable right now. You just don't kill her either, hear Light?"

"Wasn't planning to," she said, annoyed at the accusation.

"She says—"
"—she wasn't planning to, yeah. I wasn't planning to have guests over today, either. You'd better have some interesting questions or something, seriously. Don't make me give you something harder to do just so I'm less bored. Actually, are you sure you don't want me to come in as backup once Clark's awake." Light shook her head.

"I..think not coming alone could really make things even worse," said Amory. "Anyway, we're getting in the car now, and I'm not gonna talk and drive."
"Ooh, responsible. See you in a few, then."

---

After getting off at Rory's house, Light went invisible and took the short walk from there to campus. Then she made her way over to the courtyard. Gemma's two bodies were standing there, side by side, looking tense with their fox parts twitching impatiently.

"...I can see you—" "—especially this body," she said, starting with the white-haired one and ending with the other, which was looking right at her.

Light dropped the invisibility. "Why do people keep announcing they can see through the illusions? Wouldn't it be better to let me think I'm fooling you?"
Plus looked nervous, flustered by the question. "Well, I, I'm just—" "—a little insulted you decided to try and hide from me," said Minus, who looked confidently angry.

Light looked back and forth between the two of them. "...Are you sure you're both the same person?"
"Yes!" they both said at the same time.

"So, um—" "—I called you out here for a fight," Plus to Minus again. A short blade appeared in each of her four hands.
"I'm getting some really bad deja vu here. Aren't you still like...half injured from yesterday?"
"I fixed it," Plus said. "...mostly," the other body added more quietly.

"Look, before you attack me can I mention that I am not interested in Amory, like, at all? I mean—you must have noticed since you know where I live and all, I'm a guy."

"That's, even worse," said Plus by herself, looking kind of hurt. "You'd know what he wants even better," said Minus, pointing one of her weapons at Light. "Can you honestly say he's never touched you?—" "—You've never thought about it?"

Light put up her hands. "Well, yeah, I mean..." There was that one time, as far as touching went, but it was just...she was really tired and it felt good. It wasn't some intimate part of her body, and it wasn't romantic at all! "That's a little extreme, isn't it? Thinking's too much?" Minus responded by throwing a knife at her, which she jumped to one side of. "Whoa! Hey, look—you said, you needed my help with something right? Is us trying to kill each other really the only option here?"

At this point, Minus made to lunge straight at her, and Plus, bizarrely enough, got in the way, letting go of her own weapons to grab onto the other body's wrists and hold her in place. "I hate you. I want to kill you," Minus said, glaring. Plus, half-turning around, had a pleading expression instead. "I-I don't want you to die! You deserve to live way more than I do, so—fight back, please! Stop me!"

Light summoned her sword anyway, just in time for Plus to get pushed off to one side and the other body to start a series of wild slashes, each of which was easy enough to block. Then the body that had just been defending her threw a spike of ice, which she backflipped away from, turning to face them both. "Really getting mixed messages here."

Gemma made a blinding flash, which caught her off guard; she put up her sword reflexively and blocked a follow-up attack, and her vision came back quickly enough to continue, slowly pulling back from the flurry of blades, keeping them from flanking her as best she could. "Shouldn't you be—" "—immune to that?"

"I know, right?" This wasn't helping the sense of deja vu. But while they were coordinated, they weren't quite as fast, and every once in a while Light could swear that one of them feinted deliberately to give her a signal to block the other one's attacks. Light was able to draw some of her focus to quickly set up a filter on her eyes and block any more bright flashes, and then make a couple of aggressive shots at one or the other girl's weapon to try and knock it out of her hand—another possibility denied her the first time around.

Plus was hitting with much more force, and Minus's grip looked kind of awkward, so it wasn't much of a surprise when Light eventually managed to knock her weapons away while Plus was busy ducking a feint. The disarmed body hopped back and immediately drew her hands upward, doing some kind of magic attack. Light jumped back just in time to not get impaled by a spear made from her own shadow, and then had to block a particularly hard two-handed strike from the other body.

Shadow: Opposite of light. Also apparently very good at being sharp. Light drew in sunlight from the surrounding area, making light sources everywhere to mute out the shadows; the glare would hopefully make it a little harder for Gemma to see, too. Plus fired some electricity from one of her knives and threw the other; Light ducked just aside of the physical attack while swinging her sword, the blade catching the electricity and dispersing it away somehow. That was...new.

There were tears coming from Plus's eyes again. "What are you doing!?—" "—Stop just running away and attack!" Minus, of course, punctuated this with a strike of her own, throwing some compressed ground at Light's head.

"Okay..." Ducking under that and forward, Light flipped her blade around and aimed a strike right at Plus's head. The move seemed too fast for her to react to, and made a really uncomfortable CLACK; she winced and flinched to the side slightly but immediately responded by trying to stab Light in the side with an ice spike. Reflexes alone allowed her jump away from it, having expected at least some stunning from the attack. And then Minus was throwing her own weapons at Light again, which she deflected with a couple of sword swipes.

The collected, glaring light was easy enough to turn into more attacks; while she was starting to dodge another several swipes from both bodies, Light tried some lasers. Minus moved in the way of each, putting her hand up to block it and apparently not being hurt much at all by it. With Plus still charging her, Light couldn't take advantage of the distraction all that well, but did eventually manage to catch both of Plus's blades on her own while Minus was busy blocking. Minus growled with effort while Plus drove Light's weapon down with an unexpected burst of strength, but Light just unsummoned the weapon to let her stumble forward and then kicked her hard in the stomach, making her fall back with a pained whimper.

"RrRRraAAAh!" Minus roared, holding her arms out before suddenly drawing them in. Shadows pulled themselves in from outside the glare, racing toward Light's feet. One after another she jumped over and aside of shadow-spikes, just missing her feet every time. Okay, apparently maintaining all this light wasn't actually very useful; Light dropped it to save on the concentration.

Minus could see her 'especially'. So maybe Plus wasn't so good at it...Light tried tossing her blade at Minus, trusting quite accurately that she would dodge around it. At the same time, she made herself invisible and an illusory Light charged at Plus, who was just now standing fully up. Plus tried firing some more electricity at the fake one, allowing the real one to get around and smack her in the head again. "AAAAAAAH!" She fell over again, holding the hit spot; both of her bodies screamed in pain. Before Light could get over some hesitation from seeing her in that much pain, Minus recovered enough to start trying to pull the ground out from under her, forcing her to jump away. So that physical immunity required her to be 'prepared' for an attack...

Plus was up, and electricity crackled wildily around her hands as her weapons re-formed; both bodies came at Light for another assault. This was starting to wear her thin, and even if she was tired from yesterday, Gemma apparently had two bodies' worth of stamina to work with. Plus electrifying the blades was a new trick, and it would probably conduct through her sword from a direct contact; the 'waving it away' earlier didn't seem likely to work in this situation...

Light held out her left hand and spoke a phrase—not her own, Ning's. Electricity arced out from her wrists into a second blade, Ning's longer sword, and it met Gemma's strike, drawing even the farther-off electricity into itself. Light blocked Minus with the other sword, her usual one, and began the dance anew.

There was another whirlwind of blades; Gemma hadn't been this fast or focused before. She was angry—both of her—and it was all Light could do, even with the extra blade, to keep from getting cut or stabbed. Oh, also she was talking through the attack.

"It's not fair—" "—it's not right! I'm the one who saved him—" "—twice! You, you don't deserve to—" "—be the one who gets to be with him!" If not for the fox-ears, it seemed like it would've been drowned out by the noise of blades clashing against each other.

Light only spoke Ning's phrase again, sending a quick explosion of electricity out from the sword and forcing them both back for a breather. It lasted barely an instant, as Plus immediately charged again and Minus hung back, drawing shadow up into her hands, forming flat crescent-shaped blades with it and throwing them at her like boomerangs. These had to be met with Light's own sword, drawing some of the light forming it outward to shine directly through and destroy each one in turn.

Now they were talking over each other instead of going back and forth: "I'm a stupid, horrible, useless person, I shouldn't be doing this," said Plus while Minus yelled "I'm better than you! I'll kill you if I have to to prove it!"

Gemma was really losing it. Light decided to do the opposite, steadily tuning the self-argument out to focus on what needed to be done. Duck, destroy a shadow-blade, smack Plus's knife, aim the flat of this blade at her wrist—she dodged, force her to block this and then try that again. Even though Light's reach was better and she was faster, Plus just no-selled most of her strikes using the same kind of physical immunity as before, besides Minus continuing to find new directions to make bladed and spiked shadows come at her from.

Wait...Minus was getting pretty far away; she wouldn't be able to block like before! Just take the next few dodges backwards, get the right amount of distance. Light clashed her weapons against Gemma's, pushing against them to distract her. Minus would be focused on taking advantage of this pause in motion to attack, which was a perfect opportunity to make a searing-hot laser at each of Plus's hands.

She doubly screamed in pain again, the dark-haired body dropping her hands and losing whatever she'd been about to throw, and this time Light didn't hesitate. With her opponent's weapons dropped and her focus gone, Light spoke Ning's phrase one more time, commanding just enough electricity to get past that resistance and stun and pointing it right at Minus. The bolt struck and that body convulsed to the ground; the other one took a hit in the uninjured side of its head, knocking her over too.

Light dropped Ning's sword, allowing it to disappear, and jumped at Gemma's prone body, kneeling on top of her chest and placing the flat of the blade against her throat. It wasn't entirely clear what the rules were for "beating" someone with two bodies, so she kept herself tense until something like a white cloud floated out of Plus's head and toward her own; a dark cloud also came from Minus, much faster so that it arrived at the same time. A new phrase appeared in Light's head; like it or not, another person's power had become "hers".

Light took a deep breath and rolled herself back, releasing the sword out of existence and sitting on her knees just past Plus's feet. She was panting heavily from the nonstop running around and fighting of the fight, and tried to start getting her breathing back to normal.

Gemma's bodies both mumbled incoherently, both sat up in exactly the same way. When her eyes opened she immediately closed them again, tightly as if whatever she saw was giving her a headache (or two). Both of them said, "I, I can't.." Evidently the ability to control and comprehend sensory input from two bodies at once was considered part of her power. That would make it a little hard to hold a conversation. Light decided it was worth the risk to give her back at least a reasonable level of coordination, and ordered that much of power back with the new phrase.

Plus slowly opened her eyes again, looking afraid the results would be the same as before. Then she realized Light was sitting right in front of her and gave a sad, wide-eyed look, her ears drooping nearly across her cheeks. "I'm..sorry. I'm so sorry," she half-whispered. "I should just...I should've just gone in a pit and died...but, I'm too much of a coward to..."

"Stop that," Light snapped.

"Hmmh?"

"Stop talking about dying! Stop thinking about hurting yourself! It's not even that bad, sheesh! You're like the third person to try to kill me this week, you know, and the last two turned out just fine."

"B-but I—" "—I've been selfish, and awful," the other body finished. "I made you deal with my problems instead of figuring it out myself,—" "—in a way that could've killed you. And I'd be the one doing it!—" "—This whole time I've only thought about what I wanted, or thought I should have, and didn't care about anyone else..."

"Well, not totally. I mean, you really did protect Amory when he got attacked. And warned us about the second one, which would've hurt a lot more people..."

"That was just because I didn't want him to die, before I—" "—even got a chance to talk to him. It was still all about me." Both of them looked away.

"Okay, let's...take a step back here. Why did you want to talk to Amory in the first place? You like him, right?"
"Um, y-yes."
"Why?"

"Because!" she stated as if that was the entire thing. The farther-off body managed to fill in some details: "He's cute, and smart, and, he's really nice. He's always helping everyone else. I-I just, I guess I wanted to be the one to help him..."

"So helping him would also help other people. It wasn't just about having him all to yourself, by the sounds of it."

"N-no—" "—it wasn't supposed to be. I just.."

"You got confused," said Light, carefully leaning forward to put a hand on her shoulder. "I'm increasingly convinced these powers make people a little crazy. You asked me to help you because somewhere in there, you figured out you were going way off-course, and wanted someone to snap you out of it, right?"
She turned to look at Light, apparently surprised at the physical contact. "Y...yeah. I-I guess so.—" "—The idea of me, wanting to kill someone, it's insane. I'm not..that isn't supposed to be me."

"..I'm still really sorry. You're being way too nice for this...for how I acted..."
"Yeah, I think that's my insanity showing," Light tried for a winning grin. "But I still want to forgive you and help you out so this kind of thing won't happen again." With that, she let go of the shoulder and hopped onto her feet. "For that, I think the first thing is for you to actually get to talk to Amory for real."
"Um, b-but, I...—" "—after this, I don't really deserve to even.."

"Look, stop worrying about what you 'deserve' and let's focus on what's good for you. You've built this up into some big dramatic event, right? Probably about half the time you imagine it'll be the biggest disaster possible, and then you're traumatized at a totally hypothetical event! It needs to happen so you can see it's no big deal, one way or the other." She offered the nearest Gemma a hand. "If nothing else, the fact you've saved or help save his life a couple of times gives you something to talk about. C'mon." She took it after a second, and let Light get her back on her feet. The other one pushed herself up.

She brushed off her clothes nervously. "B-but I...with what I just did, how...?" she half-muttered.

"You know, I'm pretty sure he'll understand at least as much as I do. If not, okay then. At least you'll know. And maybe it even is your fault in that case, but there's more fish in the sea, right?"

"..Y, yeah..."

Minus walked slowly closer; Plus looked around, her ears twitching slightly. "Why am I not hearing any news cars, or...anything?"
"Well, campus is closed and even folks who would be here anyway have a pretty good reason not to be, so nobody close enough to hear all that noise I guess. It might also have something to do with the illusion of absolutely nothing happening that I put above us right when I got here."
"Y-you've been—" "—this whole time?!"