Episode 6: The Law
Officer Rowan Shepherd had very nearly died. People had died around him, strangled to death or thrown into buildings by an insane woman with inexplicable powers. But he hadn't died; instead, he'd killed her, and learned some strange words he also didn't understand. He had spoken the words shortly after, during debriefing, and the results had been surprising...frightening, even. Since then he had been interviewed live on the news, showing off the strange power that killing that girl had given him, and he had been half-interrogated by his superiors and told or showed them everything he knew. But when he walked back to the precinct the next morning, there was something new he hadn't told anyone, and didn't intend to.
After going to bed
that night, Rowan had seemingly awoken in a lavish bedroom probably
three or four times the size of the entirety of his apartment. He
spoke the words as if by reflex, and immediately felt himself
shrinking down in the bed. He sat up, feeling his hair flow down
across his cheeks and fall to the bed before long, a big loose mass
of light blue silk. His nightgown shrank to fit the narrowing
shoulders and slimming frame as with the increasingly familiar gentle
tug downstairs, he was changed into a woman. Her chest puffed forward
not long after, a tail sprouting from her back and her ears
stretching up into tall, fuzzy triangles just as comfortable as
stretching her arms after exercise.
She looked around,
uncertain whether this was real. Dreams were normally not
so..coherent. Eventually she stood up, the normally long nightgown
trailing just to her thighs despite a considerable loss in body
height, and then the bedroom door opened, and in walked a far taller,
more beautiful woman sporting seemingly countless tails, in what
seemed like the pajama equivalent of royal robes.
"Well well,"
she crossed her arms, smiling—maybe, more like smirking. "You
got a lucky shot in, didn't you?"
She felt uneasy around this woman; not like she was hostile, but like she never wanted her to be. "Who..are you?"
"Oh I am a lot of things," she answered. "Some choose to call me a queen or a goddess, but such titles are really still far beneath me. Suffice to say that I am the origin of your new powers. Really, I'm glad to see you get them; the girl I gave them to first had no imagination." She moved strangely, instantly coming noticeably closer—not quite into Rowan's personal space yet, but threatening to be. "You must have noticed by now, you aren't capable of as much as she was. Those are the rules: The killer gets but a fraction of the original's power. But in cases like yours there's an exception. You can regain the full extent of what she was capable of in one of two ways."
She felt uneasy around this woman; not like she was hostile, but like she never wanted her to be. "Who..are you?"
"Oh I am a lot of things," she answered. "Some choose to call me a queen or a goddess, but such titles are really still far beneath me. Suffice to say that I am the origin of your new powers. Really, I'm glad to see you get them; the girl I gave them to first had no imagination." She moved strangely, instantly coming noticeably closer—not quite into Rowan's personal space yet, but threatening to be. "You must have noticed by now, you aren't capable of as much as she was. Those are the rules: The killer gets but a fraction of the original's power. But in cases like yours there's an exception. You can regain the full extent of what she was capable of in one of two ways."
"And..what are those?"
The woman nodded. "Practical, aren't we. I like that. Well, the first way isn't even worth mentioning," she said, counting off a finger, "it puts you at a great disadvantage in exchange." Drawing out a second finger, she said, "The second way lacks that disadvantage, but I can't promise it will be easy: You have to kill another of those I have blessed. It even comes with a bonus; you get the full extent of both your new power and theirs if you do this."
"You want me
to...kill someone," she repeated.
"Someone else," the woman retorted, suddenly appearing next to her and putting an arm over her shoulder. "You've already proven your willingness to kill those who harm the people. It's part of your duty, isn't it? Surely you can find another wild criminal among the multitude I have blessed to take power from. Anyway," She pushed off, and then leaned over so her mouth was close to one of Rowan's ears—and as much as the smaller girl wanted to move away, she seemed to be momentarily paralyzed, stuck in place. "What's one life next to all those you could save with the full extent of your powers? You must know people like yourself are already mostly water in the first place; with as much control as you should rightly have there are very few wounds you wouldn't be able to heal."
"Someone else," the woman retorted, suddenly appearing next to her and putting an arm over her shoulder. "You've already proven your willingness to kill those who harm the people. It's part of your duty, isn't it? Surely you can find another wild criminal among the multitude I have blessed to take power from. Anyway," She pushed off, and then leaned over so her mouth was close to one of Rowan's ears—and as much as the smaller girl wanted to move away, she seemed to be momentarily paralyzed, stuck in place. "What's one life next to all those you could save with the full extent of your powers? You must know people like yourself are already mostly water in the first place; with as much control as you should rightly have there are very few wounds you wouldn't be able to heal."
And then...the
woman was back to being across the room from her. "Think about
it. And anyway...perhaps I should give you the warning I gave
everyone else. Trouble is coming to your world, and it's coming
soon." With that ominous statement, she disappeared, and
right away, Rowan began to wake from the dream. She appeared back in
her apartment, in the nightgown and panties her clothes had shifted
into in the dream, but thankfully was able to change everything back
to normal by speaking the phrase again.
Part of him wanted
to think that it was only a dream, that maybe whatever had happened
to people caused them to dream that way, and speak the words to
change in their sleep. But it had felt completely real, and even now
the memory of it was perfectly vivid. What exactly had she meant by
'trouble'? He told himself that he couldn't report this to his
superiors even if he wanted to; they'd just laugh it off because to
them it really would appear to just be a dream.
Could he...should
he try and gain the full extent of his powers? There were a lot of
criminals and lunatics who had been given those powers, and with his
own new powers, there was already talk all over the station of him
being sent out to deal with them. All he had to do was...shoot, or
slice, to kill, and later claim he had no choice. But...that was
wrong. Even those who had gained these strange powers, and were
abusing them, were people—citizens, with rights like everyone else.
He couldn't kill someone just to serve his own desires, even if those
desires involved saving lives.
Maybe it wouldn't
even matter. Just like yesterday, perhaps his hand would be forced
regardless. And if it did happen, and had the effect the woman
suggested, then he could mention the dream; there would be solid
evidence then that he'd learned something true from it.
Classes were not
cancelled on account of worldwide fox-girl epidemic. Blake found it
deeply difficult to concentrate on the math lecture when he was
thinking about what had happened over the weekend. Was trouble
coming? Had he accidentally partially mind-controlled Ning, err,
Gerald? Had he left enough of a trace somehow, despite being
extremely careful, for the police to track him down? Or worse,
track the 'bank robber' down? ...That would be bad.
There were happier
thoughts to distract him, too. The idea of patrolling around town
this afternoon between science class and suppertime was deeply
appealing, even if he probably wasn't going to run into any
criminals, since this was the real world after all. He caught
himself daydreaming of dashing around town, maybe jumping from
rooftop to rooftop where it was reasonably safe to do so, like the
chase with Ning the other day but without any stakes...It was just
too much fun to pass up. None of his homework was due until later
this week anyway, so he could just do that tonight.
On the way to
lunch, he opened the map on his phone and tried to plan out a route
to run around and building-jump on. Preferably businesses that had
nice, flat, sturdy roofs on top of them rather than people's homes.
The sudden ability to be amazing at parkour changed the normally dull
commute to the dining hall into a survey of places to wall-kick or
-run, things to jump off of or onto, and so on. He was still doing it
during lunch, enough to make the people eating across from him turn
around a couple of times to try and figure out just what he
was staring at.
He told himself to
be patient, it was only an hour , but physics class just seemed to
drag on and on. He wondered: Didn't he violate physics now? Probably
in a lot of different ways, honestly. Or, well, what did they do when
something violated known physics? Write new physics? Nobody was even
asking their teacher about this, despite the fox-girls being all over
the news, and Blake sure didn't want to be the one to do that, what
with the whole secret-identity thing. Well, they had things to learn,
and a class to pass, and maybe most of the people here were just
holding on to normality as hard as they could. Sure, back at lunch
and walking around and on the way in and out of this class there were
people talking about it, with a wide diversity of opinions
represented...but it was all hypothetical talk of something distant,
almost fictional to them.
Maybe this was just
what the human mind did when confronted with such a deep-seated
defiance of what it thought to be reality. All of this hardly felt
real even to Blake, for as tight of a grip on the reality of the
danger as he consciously kept while being Light. Well, everything
would sink in sooner or later, and it did seem better than outright,
paralyzing shock.
Finally, it was
time to go play hero for a while. Blake had a better plan than just
using his apartment's bathroom this time, instead finding one of the
several single-occupant restrooms on campus, chosen carefully to be
one that didn't have a camera pointed at it, and stuffed the contents
of his pockets into his backpack before quietly speaking the phrase
to change form.
Light's familiar
form came with unfamiliar clothes, including the same shoes as before
but short socks, blue-denim short shorts and a blank white t-shirt
instead of the dress top and jacket. Also, her backpack had shrunk in
size a bit and turned pink, which she frowned briefly at the
silliness of before shrugging and deciding it didn't matter that
much.
After all, the next
step in the plan was for 'Blake' to walk back out of the bathroom and
to a certain never-locked classroom with no more classes scheduled
for that day and stow the backpack in an inconspicuous corner there.
It wouldn't do the whole secret identity form any good if someone
stole the backpack from her and Blake's ID and phone and so on. This
plan was thrown off slightly by the pink backpack, but it
would still be better if it was somehow discovered there than if it
was taken off of her person. 'Blake' stood out in the hallway slowly
reading some of the posters on the wall, not even opening the door to
the room, while she took care of that, and then he casually strolled
outside and finally out of camera view.
Light breathed a
sigh of relief. Finally, free to do what she'd been thinking about
all day! She took off at an invisible run right away, toward the
denser part of the city. The first thing to do was find a place with
a small enough gap between two buildings and hopefully nobody
present—easy enough, there had been a few candidates on the map on
her phone before, and a little bit of tweaking of the trick she'd
used to look inside of Gerald's house allowed her an easy 3D-image
map of the surrounding area to compare the memory of that against.
Before long, she
was there. She paused in the middle for a moment, feeling as if she
ought to be out of breath or at least a tiny bit tired..but she
wasn't. Of course, the sun was still out, so she was getting tons of
energy from the sunlight or whatever. Well, the next thing was to try
some platformer-protagonist stuff for real!
The fox-girl
grinned wide, taking off at a run straight for the wall. A short hop
and quick rotation in the air had her running up it, and then with a
sudden sideways squat and hard push with her feet she was on the way
to the opposite wall. Doing a quick corkscrewing somersault in the
air to orient her face-up with the feet aimed at that wall came
nearly as a reflex, and in no time she was running up the other wall.
Then she did it again, and a third time, before seeing the end of the
line rushing toward her and taking one more jump off the wall, a
quick reorienting spin, she landed on top of the roof.
"Heheheheh..!"
While conscious of her need to be quiet and not literally shouting
from the rooftops, Light couldn't resist a small giggle. That was
just as amazing as she'd imagined! The wind rushing through her hair
(and her ears and tail too) felt great! If anything, that series of
ridiculous acrobatics had her feeling more energized rather
than at all winded. Well, it was just the beginning. Looking out from
way up here, there were plenty of buildings to jump across. She'd
thought she was going to be worried about heights, or need to
be worried about heights, but the former just didn't apply at all,
and the latter...well, being able to wall-run and just being agile in
general gave her a lot of options for recovering from a botched jump.
So she went
jumping. This was as much fun as it had seemed like it would be, and
only after doing it for a few minutes did she remember she was
supposed to be looking out for criminal activity. She stopped,
kneeling over and then laying down so just the top of her head was
poking past the building's edge, looking down. Well..there were
certainly people down there. It was a little hard to tell what was
going on from this height.
Light stood back up
and brushed herself off, feeling a little silly. Of course she
couldn't see things from this height. She'd just have to pull the
light up to herself to take a look. The image in front of her just
showed some normal people milling around..nothing particularly
suspicious there. Monitoring the news would've maybe been a better
way to hear about crimes happening, but, well, it wouldn't have been
nearly as fun. She'd figure something out...
The fox-girl
dismissed the image and moved on, jumping over a couple of other gaps
before stopping and looking down again for a second. Even from this
distance she could see a few police cars down there...of course! If
the police were doing something, she could quietly help them out,
right? That was a pretty obvious way to find out what needed to be
done...maybe getting one of those police radio listener things would
be good, too. For now, she made another image in front of herself of
the scene down there.
It looked like they
weren't up to anything particularly special; that just happened to be
a police office down there. But one of the cars was from out of town;
on the side it clearly said the name of another city. Two officers
stepped out of that car, one of which looked vaguely familiar...they
were talking with the others there. The less-familiar one had an
extra shoulder-gun-holster thing hung from one of his hands. Light
paced a bit, watching as the familiar one took off his badge and
handed it to the other one. What were they...? He said something
else, seemingly not to anyone in particular, and there was a
burst of water; it became abundantly clear why this one had been
familiar.
Even with the
remote image from her powers, Light was able to see the change in
full, unlike over the TV. The officer started shrinking rapidly right
away, his hair turning light blue and flowing out across his back and
the sides of his face. His body steadily flowed inward and downward,
narrowing and slimming all over. His uniform melted into a white
vest, a short black skirt, a cape and some blue sleeves. Soon a
fairly short girl stood there instead. Her tail spilled out from her
back, her ears burst up into the hat, which immediately responded by
turning to water and moving to the left ear, attaching itself as some
kind of decorative attachment to it. Finally, the last of the water
from the explosion speaking her words had created formed into a
sheathed katana, which dropped from above her to be caught in her
slim, small hands.
It was the girl
from the news yesterday. She released the sword, and it turned to
mist (water vapor, maybe); then the officer who'd been in the car
with her offered her the badge and holster. The former seemed a
little awkward to pin to the vest, but the latter had clearly been
sized specifically for her current, smaller form, and fit perfectly
fine.
Why in the world
had they shipped this guy...girl out to Light's town, from her own
city? Surely there were plenty of things to be doing with those new
powers back there. She was scratching her head about this when one of
the other officers had a sudden, surprised expression and pointed.
With the different perspective of her image it took Light a second to
realize he was pointing up at the roof of a nearby
building—specifically, the one she was on right now. The
blue-haired girl reacted by saying something quickly and then taking
off at a run, prompting Light to drop the image and do the same.
Stupid, stupid!
She'd let herself get distracted, pulled too much focus from being
invisible. Of course she was back to being invisible now, and
just in case sent an image going off in some other random direction,
but she shouldn't have been so careless in the first place! After
running for a short while, Light dropped down, hanging off of the
edge of the building to get a brief aerial view and see if she still
needed to be running. That police girl was...still coming right
toward her! What was going on here?
Since she was
already partway down, Light let go of the edge and bounced off of the
walls a little bit to make a relatively gentle landing, then started
running through some of the streets and alleys, still invisible. If
she'd even seen her drop off the building, she at least wouldn't have
an easy time following this trail, right? And after that,
she took to the walls again, climbing back up to the top of the
building, and kneeling over to be a bit less visible...even though
she was invisible right now.
A quick look
around...nobody else up here right now. So she'd been followed down.
Her ears twitched, picking up a pair of shoes coming up the walls
again. Well, running didn't seem to have done much good at all. Light
sighed standing up and taking a few steps backwards, away from where
she was pretty sure her pursuer was going to land. That prediction
was correct; the other girl did a rolling flip from the building
across from this one onto that spot, and immediately popped up, water
condensing and gathering into that sheathed blade again, pointed
toward Light with its hilt in her right hand.
She seemed a little
bit out of breath. "You can't...hide from me," she said
calmly, between huffed breaths. "I can see...the water in you."
"Well, thanks
for telling me that." Light dropped her invisibility, at least
for the police-...girl? in front of her. It was pointless anyway,
right? "Is there some good reason you're following me around?"
"You are
wanted for questioning." Her breath was mostly back already; she
didn't have as much stamina as Light but still seemed able to recover
pretty quickly. "Is there some good reason you were running from
a police officer?"
"I was just
running in general, until I noticed you were behind me. What do you
wanna ask?"
The other girl
glared. "That is not how this works. Change back to your normal
appearance and come with me to the station."
"Um.." Light pointedly looked around at where they were just now. "It'd be a little hard to do things in that order. Anyway, who says this isn't my normal appearance?"
"Um.." Light pointedly looked around at where they were just now. "It'd be a little hard to do things in that order. Anyway, who says this isn't my normal appearance?"
"You know
something about the robbery two days ago. Someone with abilities
matching yours was involved in a later, related incident." Her
voice remained calm and still, almost untingend by emotion.
"The only
thing I've done recently was help catch a couple of
kidnappers. You want to arrest me for that?"
"If you won't
come with me, I can arrest you for obstructing justice. I won't ask
you again."
"Well, fine."
Light crossed her arms. They wouldn't be able to keep her very long;
she could probably escape if it came to that anyway; and she could
continue to claim not to know anything about the robbery. "But
I'll stay like this. There's no law against that."
"People like
you have shown the ability and willingness to easily kill
people." Her voice showed its first spark of emotion, and it
wasn't a good one. "That would be like walking into the precinct
with a deadly weapon in your hands."
"Like me?! You're also—and you're the one pointing a weapon at me."
"Like me?! You're also—and you're the one pointing a weapon at me."
"I have good
reason to fear for my life." The sheath turned to water
and fell off the blade, and she drew it back, moving to a ready
stance. "I won't hesitate to use this if you continue to
resist."
Light made an
exasperated expression with her hands. "I'm not resisting!"
The girl responded
to that by running up and slashing. Light saw the attack coming more
than early enough to dodge, jumping away to one side. "Whoa,
hey! There's no need to escalate this into violence!"
She stood up, the
blade right in front of her in both hands. Water appeared rushing up
from around her feet, swirling around her. "You already did! You
and other people like you. You think just because you have some kind
of powers you can do whatever you want?! That you're above the law?!"
While she spoke the water gathered up into several discrete pieces,
blade-like shapes all around her.
"...No?"
She wasn't exactly
listening. She charged, slicing at Light; the water-blades followed
this up, forcing her to dance around and back and sideways and under
to not get cut into pieces. One slash came after another, some of the
blades surrounding them to keep her from getting too far away. Light
was able to keep dodging, but just barely. The girl was in a rage,
yelling about lives destroyed, families going without fathers and
mothers, but it was just in the periphery of her mind, nearly all of
its focus taken up by the task of not getting cut in half or stabbed.
Eventually she was maneuvered into a corner, a position she couldn't
dodge out of, and with that sharp blade coming down at her her
reflexes had her hands come up, a shimmer of light forming into a
sword in them just in time to block the strike.
The police girl
seemed to look at the blade clashing against hers for a second or two
as if it meant something, and then suddenly jumped back, the
water-blades turning back into normal, gravity-obeying water and
splashing onto the concrete around Light. In the same motion she
transferred the hilt to one hand and the other snapped to the holster
on her side. Light jumped aside before realizing why: Finding the
roar of gunfire even louder with these ears and seeing the pistol
aimed right at where she would've been if she hadn't.
"Can we please
calm down and talk for just a second?"
"You had
a chance to come quietly." The gun was fired again, and barely
missed. Without being able to use illusions to misdirect those shots,
one of them was going to hit soon. "Then you drew a weapon on an
officer." Her voice was completely calm again all of a sudden,
but it wasn't the serene calm it had been at first; it seemed almost
cold and calculating.
"A wea—what?!"
Light noticed she was incidentally still holding her sword, and
disappeared it. "It's gone, stop shooting at me!"
"No."
The next jump took
her off the roof of the building. It would be much better if
she didn't have a clear shot at Light, right? If there was somebody
else she had to worry about hitting, especially? Surely she wasn't
berserk or crazy or angry enough to start firing on civilians, right?
Light made a quick few hops across the walls to land in an alley and
started running as soon as her feet hit the ground. Another shot rang
behind her, along with a sound she thought was maybe the bullet going
into the asphalt.
Light kept running,
out into one of the main streets. She made a decision to be visible
at this point; if that other girl was going to shoot her she would
have to do it in front of a whole lot of witnesses. There were
people on this sidewalk, who took notice as she ran past and around
them, over the road briefly and onto the other sidewalk. They had
probably also heard the gunshots; what were the chances anyone around
here hadn't? Light stopped in front of a store window, turning
around to look. The other girl was on the other side of the street
with her weapon still drawn. There was a car coming, and she'd
stopped to wait for it. But...
There was something
wrong with the light. She could feel it somehow, being bent
unnaturally somewhere just over the middle of the road. The car drove
past, and Light saw the other girl looking up at the same spot. It
was like a ripple in a pond, only it was in the air, and not a heat
wave. It spread and grew, turning from waves to something black
and..fuzzy, indistinct. Everything else seemed to be crawling by;
this was the same kind of slowed-down perception as seeing a person
change to their other form.
The shadow grew
into a huge shape, like a giant bear. It solidified and grew more
distinct, gaining something between feathers and scales all across a
huge body with four thick legs, each ending in long, hook-shaped
bladelike claws. Before long, the pitch-black creature fell to the
ground, landing square on its hind feet and shattering the road. Even
fully formed, it seemed to have a smoky, mist-like quality to it. It
was facing away from Light, straight toward the other girl.
