Battle Vixens! - 19

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Episode 19: The Planning Stage

"She thinks what?!"
"Yeah, that's what I thought," said Amory.

"How can—we're not even—I mean, I'm a guy for one thing!"
"You don't exactly look like one right now," Rory pointed out. "Pardon me, I'm gonna go talk to the news." She headed outside.

"Ugh, I wish I'd known that five minutes ago!"

Light sighed, looking at the door for a moment. "I could track her, find where she went—I've done it before—but she really doesn't want to see me again. I got that much. Anyway, if I did that I might accidentally unmask her, and that would probably make her even angrier with me."
"Also, you need to check on Ning," said Clark.

"Why, what happened?"

"Another monster attack," said Amory. "We got two today. Someone else calling themselves Dawn helped her kill it, but she looked pretty wiped out a minute ago."

"Well, now I just feel terrible." She paced around. "We had two attacks and I didn't fight in either of them, one of our potential allies specifically hates me and there's no way to tell her she why shouldn't, and—I don't know, anything else?"

"You didn't meet the other newcomer," Clark suggested as if trying to be helpful. "Actually, the report said she's from the next city over, so there's no telling why she was even there."

"Alright. I guess I'm going to see if she told Ning anything else before any new disasters pop up."
"Seems like a good idea. Do you know where Mr. Nelson's shop is?" said Clark. "It looked like she was pretty close to there, so holing up inside for a bit would make the most sense."
"You know, I might have an idea," said Light, thinking of the odd stopover Ning had made just after robbing the bank; not that store exactly but it would probably be close. "Tell me anyway."

After giving the directions: "Right, I need to go back to that room for more 'testing'."

"You gonna shoot for another fifty? You already look worn out," said Amory, concerned.

"No, I'm pretty much done. But we need a pretense of finishing up. I suspect we'll join you after that if there's anything worthwhile to discuss." Clark changed back, and walked out of the room into the hall, headed back.

"What do you think, should I guard him until Rory's done outside?"
"I really think he'll be fine, but as soon as you don't something horrible will happen. Don't tempt Murphy."

"Yeah, okay. Let's go after him."

---

Once Light was gone—really gone, she appreciated that she didn't just go invisible and stop to watch or something, not knowing Gemma could see right through it—Plus spoke Gemma's phrase and Minus disappeared, leaving behind just Emma. She felt..badly winded, but with some stretching and poking it became immediately clear that Minus's injuries hadn't "merged" into her whatsoever. She could've saved all that pain by just turning into one person for a couple of minutes.

Then again, Amory would've seen the real her. That was...unacceptable right now. She took a slow, tired walk the rest of the way to the garage to drive home in silence and probably sleep another twelve hours, until her body was so sick and tired of sleeping that it just wouldn't anymore. What was happening? Why was she starting to say things she didn't mean to say aloud? It was usually so easy to control the two bodies separately, together, simultaneously—why couldn't she control her expressions, or her words, just then?

About halfway to the apartment, at a stop sign, she forced herself to make the connection. It wasn't that she wasn't in control of both bodies, it was that she wasn't sure what she wanted to do or say, and somehow that came out differently for each body. Always opposites—Plus was acting the way Emma would normally act in that situation, keeping as much inside as physically possible, so Minus, of course, blurted everything out like an idiot. It almost felt good, in a way. At least, it did when she didn't think too hard about the consequences.

She had half-warned, half-threatened Light. What was she going to think about Gemma after that? Would she tell Amory about it? Emma wasn't sure where or when Light had suddenly appeared in the hospital; she had been focused on Amory while warning him about the attack and then run off with Rory afterward. Her concentration had been pretty far split toward keeping Plus alive and the hospital not-crashed-into with just the bare minimum for the other body at the time. Think, think...Amory had left the apartment with his roommate. There was only one car they had used, apparently both going to the same place. Obvious conclusion anyone halfway intelligent would have made five minutes ago: Light was his roommate. So they were..already living together. Maybe 'enjoying' the fact that he could turn into a girl.

Emma felt as if she was going to burst into flame for a moment; it passed. She tried to remind herself that she didn't have any right to be angry in this situation; it was her own stupid fault. Right? She had just been too slow, like usual. But at the same time, this made a second time her actions alone had saved him; even Light admitted to that. Light was really...she was...

The walk from the garage into her apartment, which was thankfully absent of her roommate for the moment, was silent. The crossed, scrambled, confused wires in her head that had made her speak in a confusing, contradictory manner were hard at work fighting to get a thought the entire way through to having words for it. The fundamental contradiction hit her once she was standing just inside, turning around after locking the door.

She wanted to kill Light, but she did not want Light to die.

The former had been building ever since the realization that it was a name; the latter had been established in the very brief moment of conversation with her. Emma had never wanted to kill someone before, in her entire life. She had never felt something like this, and it terrified her. The worst part was that who she wanted to kill was an impossibly good person, a better person than she had any hope of being. The act she was contemplating, if successful, would make the entire world a worse place.

Somehow, Dawn had seen this in her...eyes, or her tone of voice, or—something, within a minute of meeting her. That stranger's advice had been to go ahead and do it, but limit how stupid she was going to be. You can't take killing a person back. You can apologize for all kinds of horrible things and a good enough person might even be able to forgive you, but a corpse is incapable of forgiveness.

Another worst part—there seemed to be a lot of those—was that she now knew exactly where Light lived. If the part of her that really wanted Amory's roommate dead won the war in her head eventually, it would be so easy to just wait until a time they were both asleep and do it. She couldn't let that happen. Somehow, this needed to be dealt with as soon as possible.

Emma took a moment to clear her head, taking a few more steps into the apartment. A plan started to form while her mind reached back to something she hadn't been paying that much attention to at the time. Clark, Rory's husband, had healed her. Even now, without having watched it all that intently, she could clearly remember how it worked. Possibly because it had been used on her, so she understood it from the inside instead of just having to watch it happen and work out what was happening.

She split herself again, Minus wincing from the pain of the bruises still there. The way the healing worked was a little strange; it wasn't some kind of physical manipulation at all. It was more like, it pulled something out of the person that was already there, amplified it a little bit, and put it to work. Plus could do this, but felt exhausted in a strange, non-physical kind of way. Using Rory's trick to put what little there still was in the other body to work, she tried to "heal" that. Minus instinctively picked up Plus's wrists and concentrated; a white aura flared around her for a second, and she felt vaguely better.

Then it was Plus's turn. She held her hands up to the highest-ranking bruise in terms of how much it hurt, and gently pulled, pushed, coaxed. After a bit she got a weak bluish glow around it and it hurt less. This process was repeated a few more times, and on removing Minus's shirt it was clear that there was just minor bruising left.

Both of her were exhausted after that; it was time to possibly eat something and then have a small coma. But there was one other thing she hadn't tried before now. Instead of the original body saying her phrase, Minus said it. And...to her surprise, Emma found herself still in Minus's position, watching Plus disappear. Her body morphed down to Emma's usual appearance, complete with glasses, and her shirt was still off; the bruises were still there even! She stared at this in disbelief for a moment before beginning to understand.

There was no original. Gemma was Gemma. Plus and Minus were Gemma's two bodies, equally valid. When they needed to go back to being Emma, she took the place of the one who spoke. Saying her phrase again, it appeared that Plus's body popped out instead, confirming the idea. It made a strange kind of sense; she wasn't one body and then another extra one, she was two bodies.

On top of making sense, it had a nice advantage: If she wanted, she could spread her two selves out pretty far, then make both appear in one place by just re-merging and separating real quick. It would be convenient if she ever needed to watch for disaster in two different places at once and be at full strength to deal with it in whichever place it actually appeared, or something like that. In theory she could hide one of herselves somewhere convenient and just teleport the other one in. A body still needed to travel to wherever she wanted to be, but only one, and it could be at as convenient a time as she wanted.

Right: Also, if one body was injured she could enjoy being not injured by merging into the one that wasn't. This was an advantage she was pretty sure other people with powers didn't have a match for. On that note, she was exhausted and would be starving, so it was time to go back to normal and shove something down her throat before collapsing into bed. And then the half-formed plan in her head could finish forming when she wasn't taking twenty minutes to realize the obvious. She was going to be very stupid tomorrow, but if things went well, not too stupid. It just had to work...

---

---

"I'm really sorry I wasn't there to help."
"It's..alright." Ning was sitting in a folding chair in the back room of her store, with her two guests standing up. "I learned something: I actually do 'recharge' from absorbing lightning."

"How'd you get a chance to test that? An electro-squid?" said Light.

"No, I...I was tired, and my first instinct was to do this," she summoned her sword and pointed it vaguely upward, "and strike it from the sky. Felt better right away, buut, it was kinda temporary."

"You could probably pull from the power lines or electric sockets too, right?" said Amory.

"Maybe? Probably, but..I think I would burn the building down if I tried."

She dropped her arm, letting go of the sword so it disappeared again. "Even though it's not leaking out of me anymore, I still feel like I have no real control over my power. I'm terrified I'm gonna hit someone nearby every time I really let it loose. To be honest, it was...kind of a huge risk I took when I stunned the policewoman, I wasn't sure I could keep it weak enough to not just..."

"Well, I guess we're lucky about that, then," said Light, crossing her arms for a second. Ning looked briefly like an ashamed child, which reminded Light she was an adult so her own expression softened again.

"I don't get why your powers would be that hard to control. It's not like that for anyone else we've met. I mean, for me it's just.." she waved a hand and easily made some light dance around in a complicated fashion for a couple of seconds. "...easy."

"Maybe it's just the nature of electricity, or especially lightning I guess?" said Amory. "It's not really feasible to try and control where lightning's gonna strike, the best we can do is make some things more likely to be struck and stay away from them."

"Yeah, but on the other hand we have tamed lightning," said Light. "I mean..." She waved at the lightbulb in the room, some of the electric sockets. "I wonder if hauling around some copper wire would help..."
"The really bad thing about this is I can't even practice, at least not anywhere there's the smallest chance of someone coming by or something getting set on fire...which is mostly everywhere. It's just too big of a risk."
"Well, I'm glad you're okay at least. Wish Dawn had stuck around long enough to thank her, too."

"Oh!" Ning's ears perked and quivered slightly as she abruptly sat up, apparently remembering something. "She had a message for you. Or—really, mostly just a phone number."

"Huh. Whose?"

---

Rowan Shepherd was sitting in his apartment again after a long day. The bruises were almost entirely gone, and he'd slowly learned to encourage them to heal faster, what his limits were. There was some rapid-fire tactical coordination he'd had to help with that afternoon, when nearly twice as many mist monsters as usual showed up in the city. The story seemed to be the same everywhere, like the enemy—whoever they were—were ramping up their assault. All of their known fighters were alive but exhausted after this one; it would prove a pyrrhic victory if they were going to have to face as much or more tomorrow. At least he would be able to be one of the ones fighting now.

The news reports suggested Don (or maybe it was Dawn in that form) had succeeded in making contact; there was a lot of evidence that the purple-haired young woman had frequent contact with the one called Light. So he was sitting next to his phone today, as long as it took, until the call came.

It didn't take too long after the report that Don was on his way back. He picked up a call from a number he didn't know. "Rowan Shepherd, hello."

"Hi, this is Light. I'm calling from Rory Quinn's phone at their house, for the record."
"I'm glad to hear you got the message," he said.
"Yeah..about that, how do I know you're you? The way of getting your number to me was kind of indirect."

"Would you recognize my other voice? Listen." He spoke his phrase, and shifted like flowing waters, back to a blue-haired girl. Curiously, her clothes reshaped into some light blue pajamas with a pattern of pink fish all across them. After taking a moment to be mildly confused and prod at the attire, she said, "Here, this is still me. Is this approaching sufficient proof?"

"Um.." There was another voice just out of hearing range of the other phone. "Yeah, just to be sure, say something you said the other day. Like: 'You know something about the robbery two days ago'."

"You know something about the robbery two days ago. Someone with abilities matching yours was involved in a later, related incident," she said, continuing with the next sentence as further evidence. They were probably the only two people who heard that the first time around.

"Okay, that's—yeah, I believe you. So, your friend said something about coordination?"

"Correct. Well, to begin with I wanted to apologize for your treatment when we first met. I wasn't thinking clearly, and I know that is no excuse."

"We, uh...have some reason to think the powers make people slightly crazy, in a way. It's—you know, just don't shoot at me again and I think we'll be good."

"I should also thank you for saving my life. Are you aware of what happens to people who are eaten by them?"

"Yeah...saw some of that on the news."
"I am immensely grateful for your sparing me that fate, at great risk to yourself." Rowan leaned back, crossing her legs instinctively. "I've been brought on to a team focused on dealing with the present crisis. We've been taking people put into comas that way to a secure facility, but none have awakened as of yet."

There was a slightly longer pause. "Listen...she...you know who I mean?"
"It would really help if she'd bothered to introduce herself. At the moment we're using the nickname 'Giver'."
"Yeah—I dunno if you know this yet, but she makes some kind of personal visits to people's dreams sometimes. At least, she has to mine."
"The night after my powers were gained, I was visited too. You're the first person to corroborate," Rowan said, feeling slightly excited about the news; it didn't really show in her voice.
"Okay, good. Last night I got a chance to ask her what we can do to help the people in comas. She gave kind of a roundabout promise that help would show up eventually. I'll try and remember exactly how it went..."

"Hold on a moment." She leaned forward, picking up a pad and a pen from the table in front of the couch. "Go ahead."

"...I see. Do you know what she meant about the powers being tied to..?"
"We have...a theory. It's not a very comfortable one, if it's right. Uh, this is what I meant about the powers possibly making us crazy," said Light. And then explained the theory and some of the evidence she had, though there was probably more.

"This may tie into some of what I've felt while in this state," Rowan suggested.

"Yeah, you do talk kinda..I'm not sure how to describe it. Like, way too calm, except for when you were angry you just suddenly were really angry. You didn't sound like that when you first picked up, either."

"I have indeed noticed it. I seem able to stop and speak normally with enough effort, but it's a difficult habit to break for some reason. However, it's been more beneficial than harmful, so my superiors have encouraged me to not fight it too hard. I suspect that possessing powers tied to someone else's identity and desires is what causes it, based on your theory. We'll get to work on seeking more evidence for or against it, and I will get back to you on it later, if it's all right to leave messages at this number?"

More talking away from the phone. "Um, yeah, I think so."

"Thank you. There are some further matters, regarding coordination. I think I should tell you that your local law enforcement is well aware of the events of last Saturday, or at least a reasonable approximation of them. In view of the circumstances, and with some encouragment from the group I'm working for, they won't be pressing any kind of charges. Not ever. I would appreciate it if you would pass that on to whom it is most relevant."

"Oh. I, I see. Yeah, okay."
"You didn't think they were just incompetent, did you?"
"Nooo, honestly we mostly stopped thinking about it entirely once we started having to deal with the monsters and the possibility of more people with powers showing up to try and kill us..."

"That is understandable."

"So, thank you. Also thanks for sending Dawn, she kinda saved Ning's life probably."

"Light, the group I'm working with feels it's best not to behave as too much of an authority in this situation, for a number of reasons both practical and moral. We have been steadily reaching out to groups or known leaders of groups that have formed across the US, merely asking for a kind of pact of alliance. We don't come into each other's towns to attack and kill for more powers; we stop chaotic behavior like killing and looting in exchange for some measure of forgiveness of such behavior in the past. And if someone does attack, irrespective of these pacts, then anyone and everyone available will come to help fight back and make that person pay. The evidence I have in front of me strongly suggests that you aren't one to cause chaos or start unnecessary fights in the first place."

"Yeah, but, I dunno if I speak for everyone. There's at least one of us around here I don't really even have a way to contact right now."

"That's alright. If you can convince at least the people you do have contact with to agree to this, it would be good enough. Either way, if you need help for any attack or intrusion, you can call this number. I will do my best to send help, or to come myself. Consider it personal gratitude, or an extension of the apology if you want."

"..Thanks, I'll keep it in mind." Of course, Light was thinking about the travel time making the offered help moot in such an emergency. But there had been a few successful support efforts so far, so it wasn't completely outlandish.

There was some more talking on the other end, for almost a full minute. "Well, the Quinns and Ning like the agreement just fine. I think you can consider us in on it. Also, we—well, at first just me, found something else out about the rules for our powers," said Light. "On Saturday night was the first time she visited me—the uh, Giver—to explain: Fighting someone, winning where you could kill them, and then not killing them, teaches the winner the loser's phrase." A brief interruption from someone else present. "Key phrase, whatever, you know what I mean. It gives the winner control over the loser's power, supposedly complete control. Rory and Clark found out that the same thing happens nonviolently if one person teaches the other their phrase. But with the whole 'total control' thing it's not really the kind of thing to do on purpose, you know, it's a lot of trouble."

"It puts the loser at a great disadvantage," Rowan intoned, mostly to herself. "...Light, I may have to pay you a visit soon."
"Sure...but, why, all of a sudden?"

"When she visited me, she told me there were two ways to gain full use of my powers. The first 'wasn't worth mentioning', the second was to kill someone and take their power. I...have denied it to myself, but a part of me was drawn by that temptation, how much more use I could be if I had their full extent. Even...that there might be someone I could 'get away with' killing to accomplish this. You helped me understand why that line of thinking was unacceptable."

"Uhm, I see what you're getting at but it's really the kind of thing to do with someone you really trust, like a lot. We've, barely met, right?"

"I can't think of any superior choice at the moment, and the sooner the better. You did save my life, besides which I am to understand you're already in possession of someone else's power, and handling it just fine?"
"Uh...y-yeah, I, guess?" Light had suddenly gotten very nervous. "I'm just, I'm worried about what happens if I go grabbing up a lot of power. She said—she said that collecting more gives a person more control, possibly even as far as mind control, and I, I don't know if that's something that has to be intentional to work or if it might happen unconsciously."
"I'm willing to take the risk. Light, with full powers I would be able to fight far more effectively against our enemies." The calm bled quickly out of her voice, the real desperation behind it showing through. "I may even be able to heal otherwise deadly wounds; it's that important. Please."
"Uugh...I don't really have much of a choice when you put it that way."

"Thank you. I'll call you back when I have an idea of a good time to show up."

---

"My...blessed ones. My...children."

She stood atop the stage, in full opulent royal garb, once again. The crowd seemed so very thin compared to that night nearly a week ago. "Look at you. Some have fallen, some have been taken out of the game...but many of you conquer, fight, and survive. That is who I speak to tonight, and I am proud of your efforts so far."

"I have some good news for you." She smirked. "Our enemy has overexerted itself today. Tomorrow, it will not be able to attack. So you have a free day: To rest, to plot, to...expand your territory. In time you won't need my help to see when a day like this has arrived, but I wanted to congratulate and reward everyone just this once. Have fun~."

As suddenly as it had begun, the shared dream was over.