Battle Vixens! - 126

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Episode 126: Recurrent Nightmare

"CYNTHIAAAAAAA!"

If anyone thought that a lot of the water had been frozen before, they'd be really impressed now. A giant mass of ice rose up around the turtle, forming something like an enormous beartrap that closed itself tight around the thing's shell. It responded to Dawn's hoarse, strained, enraged scream with a noise of its own, an unnatural mixture of deep rumbling and high screeching that seemed like it shouldn't be physically capable of coming from a single mouth all at once—a sound that registered somehow as victorious, and filled every vixen who could hear it with a certain mixture of dread, disgust, and rage.

The ice around its body started to melt, then erupted off of it as steam—not black-mist-steam, but actual steam—as it began to coat itself in a wreath of flames. At this point. Rowan arrived next to Dawn, and grabbed her by the shoulders, forcing her to face her.

"Dawn. Calm. Down."
"What!?"

"I need you to remain calm," she repeated. "Focus on keeping the air around it cold. The rain will do the rest of the work for us. Do you understand!?" A wave of water gathered around both of them, picking them up and carrying them away from the beast as it came out of its reverie to decide who to eat next.
"I.." She sniffed. "Yes." And nodded.

Rowan let go of her, turning around and raising all of the just-melted water into an eruption of small limbs, their number a rival for the monster's own. As the air around the beast cooled, the fire around its body flickered out in the rain, and Rowan's limbs moved in, each one grabbing one of the beast's. It thrashed and writhed, trying to free itself.

Dawn still didn't seem to be in the best place, mentally speaking. Understandably, really. "How could I let this happen...happen again...?!"

Petra came up next to her. "Whaddayou mean 'again'? This is nothing like before," she said. She readied a fist with her left hand, and a stone fist rose up in front of the turtle's face.
"But I...it's.."

The stone-fist socked the beast's face with a left hook, in tandem with her own. "One—you're not alone this time!" It collapsed and reformed into a right hand, moving along with her as she used that arm to do a quick uppercut. "Two—she's not hurt! She'll survive this." She drew back both her hands and opened them, and the fist reformed into two smaller ones, opening themselves up too. Then both hands went together, clapping the monster's head in between them. "Three—we know how to wake her up!"

Just about done with being slapped around, the turtle drew its head back and snapped it forward, breathing out a jet of flame with enough force to break apart the stone hands. Petra responded by bringing some arches of rock up around the bases of its many legs just as they were starting to get free of Rowan's watery limbs.

Everyone could feel a certain, familiar sense of relief by now. "Hey, are we too late?" Nico's voice called from the very edge of the ruined area. She'd already planted some energy-replenishing trees, and was hard at work on some more.
"No, nah—you're just in time for the fuuun paaarrrt," Karis replied sarcastically. "Go crazy, seriously."
Sam strode up from the same direction, holding a freshly-woven net of thorned wire in her hand. "Don't mind if I do." She wrapped some of the wire from the net around the hilt of her weapon and threw it, landing a hit near the base of one set of limbs that had replaced one of the turtle's original legs; their constant, violent writhing then thoroughly tangled them up in the net.

Warp appeared next to Rowan, who had dropped all of the water-limbs by now and was bent partway forward, panting heavily. "I suppose you want to tell me this was preventable. If I'd only been here?" Rowan just shook her head. "No? Alright then." She hadn't just been making conversation, as the rest of the city's vixens had now appeared on either side of the turtle. Zeno shot its head with some arrows; Hugo yelled out a pressure wave to slam through it. Tora watched its limbs, head, and tail violently writhe around for a moment before shrugging and just throwing her weapons at the head. Fay risked running up to the limbs bound up in metal wire, tapping her staff against their base to place an explosion large enough to sever several of them from the main body. Just like the mouthtopus' limbs, they disappeared as soon as they were detached.

By now Sam had assembled another net, and tossed it with her knife to catch another of its multi-legs in it. But at this point, the turtle broke free from the earth holding it—Petra too exhausted to keep that up for the moment—and started struggling and thrashing around. Half-mobility turned out to still be quite a lot of mobility for it, forcing the nearby vixens to quickly scatter or allow themselves to be teleported out of harm's way—but it also didn't seem to understand how to control its movement with half its legs bound, so it was less of a deliberate charge and more of a dangerously fast-paced, erratic flailing.

Remedy alone could risk getting close enough to slash her sword at its head a few times, prompting it to stop struggling briefly and snap its head back before suddenly breathing out another jet of flame. This time the Stand didn't get unsummoned quite quickly enough, resulting in her taking some probably-lethal burns. Karis took a deep breath, mustering the effort to "reform" Remedy from scratch, and then had her go 'possess' Rowan once again.

The brief distraction keeping the thing from flailing had been just long enough for Rowan to reform a bunch of small tentacles and grab its legs again—just the ones not bound up in nets. Petra drew a bunch of the scattered rocks, dirt and concrete together into a big spike in the air and drove it down through the monster's neck, merging it with the ground it landed in to try and keep it pinned in place. And Sam threw another net around a third "leg"—having had plenty of time to assemble it during all that. By now, however, the beast was starting to get free of the first one she'd caught it up in.

During all this, Nico worked with Warp, teleporting just close enough for her fruit-throwing trees to be effectual and steadily planting a ring of them around the monster. She now finally retreated back to her support trees a relatively safe distance away. The magic fruits could now join the assemblage of everyone else's projectile attacks—including Warp's own blade thrown via teleportation at each of the monster's eyes in turn—resulting in an increasingly steady stream of mist coming up off of the turtle's head.

Fay went to the most-recently-restrained bunch of limbs, braving sticking around long enough to place three or four point-explosions and cutting off the majority of those tentacles in the process. When the remaining ones went to grab her, Warp teleported her away. Now the turtle wasn't just bound, but half-blind and more or less crippled; it broke itself free of the earth spike and water-limbs again, but could only drag itself forward with its one remaining useful set of limbs. It repeated its unsettling roar/screech from before, but sounded a lot less victorious and a lot more angry and desperate. Every time it approached a vixen, she vanished from its sight, and the barrage of attacks to its head just didn't stop.

The monster tried one more desperate move, drawing its head, tail, and as many of the mouthtopus-limbs as it could untangle all back into its shell. Then fire erupted out not just from where the head had been, but from all six holes. The limbs that it hadn't been able to retract were immediately incinerated and destroyed by the flame jets, which started out all at the same intensity, but then some became weaker than the others, the force starting to spin its shell around and propel it forward.

"Rocket turtle!" Karis spread out her arms, gesturing at the sight. "Grreat!"

"Y'know, we could just let it crash," Petra observed—there was nobody in the beast's present path.

"Property damage," Rowan said flatly.
"Yeah yeah..." With some visible effort, she lifted the ground it was approaching into a wall for it to bump into instead, then made another wall for it to hit in the direction this bounced it toward. She took deep breaths in and out as she kept doing this, keeping its forward momentum from ever quite getting too fast. With a quick signal, Karis got Warp to teleport her next to her husband, then placed a hand on Petra's shoulder to have Remedy 'possess' her, sharing the burden.

Sam had already been partway through weaving yet another net; with the change of situation, she continued trying to make it bigger. "Send it to the pit!" she suggested.

"Yeah, boss can drown it down there!" Zeno agreed. "Right?"

"...With some help." Rowan glanced Dawn's way, and she nodded in recognition.

"This...isn't...pinball, you know!" Petra said between heavy breaths, but tried all the same. Karis sat down, then lay on her back, letting Remedy donate as much energy as she could to the effort. After some more bouncing back and forth, the turtle finally tumbled straight down into the pit another giant monster had left behind.

Then they sprang the trap. Rowan had steadily been gathering all of the rainwater falling, plus that already pooled up in the surrounding area, into an increasingly tall wall of water surrounding the pit from every side except the one the turtle had been on. As the monster landed inside, the water—and most of the surrounding rain—all went crashing down inside. The jets of flame from the holes in the turtle's shell were put out, six jets of steam breaking their way up through the deep pool of water for a moment. Then there was a rumbling, and the monster—its head and remaining appendages back out of its shell again—jumped out of the pit roaring, landing on the ground in front of it...right where Sam had placed her trap.

The mass of thorned metal curled itself up around the entire body of the beast, tangling all of its limbs up at once and partially binding even its tail and head. The turtle roar-screeched angrily again as another onslaught of attacks descended upon it, and it finally began to turn indistinct. When it started to try to retract its head through some of the wire holding it, Petra threw a spike of stone down through its neck to keep it pinned in place for a few more hits. It struggled and thrashed, but couldn't get itself free, instead just managing to cut its own body through the woven wires and send even more black mist streaming off of it.

It convulsed violently one more time before, at long last, dissipating. Sam reacted quickly, dismissing all of the metal before the monster was even fully gone to ensure no harm would come to the person inside of it. Rowan pulled in water to below the beast's fading body, forming it into something of a cushion for the redheaded vixen's unconscious form to fall down onto. She yelled and convulsed briefly as she was guided gently down onto the ground, the water moving aside and the pouring rain that should've been falling on her being redirected away so it would have no chance of drowning her.

"Wuuaaagh." Petra toppled backwards onto the ground, not hurting herself but winding up lying on her back next to Karis. She turned her head slowly to look. "Oh, hi dear."

"Hi."

"Would you mind carrying her, Sam?" Rowan asked—still holding her hands up to repel the rain. "Most of us with the capacity to carry a person are truly spent after that ordeal."
"No problem."

Dawn had fallen to her knees and was audibly sobbing. Warp appeared in front of her. "Well, what now? Looks like you saved her this time."
She sniffed hard and slowly looked up, finally realizing the other vixen was offering a hand to help her up. "N-nah...she saved me, again. It's always...like this." She took the hand and stood up shakily, clearly needing the support to stay on her feet. "Every...every time. What's wrong with me?"

"Maybe you should ask her. Knows you better than I do, right?"

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"Light!"
"What's wrong?" A call from Magus right now didn't necessarily mean something was wrong, but opening with her name in an excitedly-worried tone made it feel a lot more like it was.
"Have you heard from Gemma?"
"No, why?"
"She was totally freaking out the whole time we were fighting the monsters, and then just bolted as soon as it was over. I think she might've accidently outed herself!"
"'Outed'?" Light asked, not immediately making sense of this word.
"You know, like—unmasked? Transformed in public? Secret identity no more?"
"...Oh."

"And Doc Quinn and I haven't seen her around since she ran off, and neither has anyone else."
"Well...I don't think you need to worry too much. She's probably just gone somewhere to hide," Light said. "I'll keep an eye out for her, though."
"Yeah, okay. That works."

"Thanks for letting me know."

"Hahah, no problem," Magus said—the laugh a slightly nervous one—and then hung up.

"So...guess Gemma can't see me today, in that case," Braille said. Fox ears, of course, made every phone conversation effectively on speakerphone.

"Maybe not," Light said, leading the way back toward Ning's store. "But there are other options. I know someone else who's not bad at figuring out powers just based on the evidence, and...I'm not too bad at it myself."

"And I'm a scientist!" Rory chipped in eagerly. "Plenty of brainpower between the three of us."

Light nodded. "Besides...there's, another way we could introduce you to her, now that I've met you."
"Oh, yeah?"

"Are you...aware of the 'dream space'? The same as the place we 'went to' when we first got our phrases."
"Definitely," Braille nodded. "Lucy has semi-regular convos with the Giver there, apparently. Oh, yeah—in the last one she said something like 'when building someone a new body, why would you ever preserve all of its old injuries and flaws?' We think it might mean my human form isn't blind anymore—if I can ever manage to get back to it. How'd you do it, Dr. Quinn?"
"Oh..me? Uh.." Rory blushed slightly. "I remembered my wedding vows, with my husband. I don't know if you have that option exactly, but we've guessed it's something to do with..remembering things that were very emotional for you before, or something."

"Hmm, yeah. I can work with that."

"Anyway," Light said, "there's a way for..vixens to meet each other there, as long as they've met before. Including if you've met someone who's met the person you're trying to meet, or so on. We could ask Gemma to talk to you 'there', tonight or sometime."
"That'd be fine," she nodded.

As the store came into view, Light used some brief trickery to get a read on Amory's location inside, then placed some text in her sight asking her to turn back to human form and noting: We have a visitor.

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Once I had 125 written, I found these next few astoundingly easy to get through. We're approaching ever closer to another of those scenes that I've had more or less written in my head for a very long time now, and I'm pretty excited for that!