Battle Vixens! - 35

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Episode 35: The Promoted Pawns

For a second time, Rowan awoke in the strange room and immediately began changing to the smaller, female form, signalling another talk with the one responsible for everyone's powers. She sat up and looked around, feeling vaguely impatient. That woman had a sense of whimsy and theatrics that Rowan simply did not share, especially when lives were at stake; if she wanted to talk then there wasn't really a good reason to not just already be in the room before waking her up here.

Seeing that that was not happening, she sighed to herself and swung around and dropped off onto her feet, instinctively stretching for a couple of seconds after landing. Her clothes were the same small, blue nightgown as before, which evidently had a hole for the tail to come through in the back. Then Rowan glanced around the empty room again. "You are already here, aren't you?" she said impatiently.

"I would say I've always been here, but my real meaning would be obscured by the language," her voice responded from a couple of inches behind Rowan, making her jump, whirl around, and then immediately take several steps back. "Hahah! Got you," she smirked down at her. "The serious types are always the funniest to startle. Aww, you're even pouting a little bit~."

"I am not." Rowan realized her expression probably did strongly resemble a pout, but the word didn't accurately describe her emotion at the moment. She crossed her arms and looked aside while the woman giggled at her again.

"I suppose you're disappointed, however. I didn't kill anyone."

"On the contrary, I'm proud of you and the Hero for putting together my other clues." She knew that Rowan knew her nickname for Light, obviously. "There is one person I thought you might be willing to kill, but you're just too fatherly for that," she added, reaching over and ruffling the top of her hair. She growled under her breath but let it happen, imagining dozens of ways the woman could do this anyway if she tried to step away or resist. "Anyway, since you have the full extent of those powers, I thought I'd tell you a little bit about the person I gave them to first."

"Go ahead, then."
"Hmmmn.." She gave a 'thinking' expression, and then suddenly collapsed backwards as if into a chair. In fact, there was a chair there which Rowan knew for a fact hadn't been before. "Take a seat?" she offered, waving toward somewhere behind Rowan. Rather than trust that a chair would just be there, she turned and looked and then carefully sat down, instinctively crossing her legs not long afterward.

"Just a couple of weeks before, he found out someone close wasn't quite as good of a person as he always thought they were, in the form of a police raid turning up all sorts of awful substances in their house. He refused to believe it, even though it was perfectly obvious, and turned his anger at your people. In his little head, the only explanation was some kind of corrupt set-up. Do you remember who she killed first?"
"Yes," Rowan nodded. The whole thing had started with her appearing before an officer and just picking him up with one of the water-tentacle-things before slamming him repeatedly into the ground, well past the point of killing him. That one...had been a closed-casket funeral.
"That was the one she fixated on. Dreamed of killing."

"...And you gave her the means to do it."

She closed her eyes in a perfectly serene smile. "Don't imagine that I have a sense of guilt."

"I was merely stating a fact."

"Heheh. I suppose you were."

"Anyway, that wasn't all there was to that person. People are almost never just one thing, at least not until the moment of their death. He wasn't right in the head, obviously, but a part of him knew that. Somewhere in there, that mind remembered what it was like to be sane and rational and wanted that back, worse than anything. But that rage wasn't to be denied either, and you know very well which side showed at the end."
"I suppose you'll inform me that that is the reason I talk like this," Rowan said.
"At first, to some extent. The new power wasn't very well meshed with your mind." She brought her hands up next to each other with the fingers spread, placing them tip-to-tip. "You even had a few outbursts, but eventually you latched on to that calm and rational part because it was useful." Her hands moved together so the fingers of each hand fit in the gaps between those of the other. "By the time you gained the full extent of that power, it had an expression that made sense to you. But the acceptance of one side drags the other along behind it." Her eyes seemed to glint for a moment, and her hands jerked close together. "You still have the capacity to go into a frenzy when you really want to, don't you?"

"I am well aware of that already," she said.

She dropped her hands back into her lap. "Of course you are. I just wouldn't want you to hesitate out of worry that anything you're feeling isn't 'you'. You may have taken this power from someone else, but by now it's well and truly yours."

"...Frankly, you don't stike me as one typically concerned for the well-being of others."

"Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not," the woman gave a smile that bared sharp teeth. "But you do have a new enemy, don't you? And it wouldn't be sporting if you got uneven footing against her just because you doubted your own thoughts. She certainly doesn't hesitate to go for the kill. But I don't suppose I had anything much to worry about in the first place, did I? You know what to do with a mad dog."

While Rowan was trying to mentally process that and come up with an answer, she abruptly leaned forward and grabbed her ears, running her hands all over them. Rowan involuntarily leaned forward into it for a few seconds, and then back again, violently enough to knock the chair over behind her and land on her back.

"AaAhahaha! That reaction was priceless!" Rowan pushed herself to her feet and backed away several steps, growling audibly this time, and the woman stood up as gracefully and calmly as ever.

"I suppose now isn't a good time to ask if you can get them to change my nickname? 'The Giver' makes me sound like one of your machines, you know, like an automated teller? It doesn't convey much beyond a singular function. But I do a lot more than give out powers."

Rowan made an effort to calm down. "You already know that I did not come up with or publicize that name."
"Oh, of course. But what would you call me, I wonder?"

"Chaos, maybe." Her ears were still folded back, and she still had a tinge of embarrassment in her cheeks from knocking the chair over..and what had preceded it.

"Aah, that's a good one," she pointed at Rowan. "I do love my upheavals. At least try and mention it to the other blessed ones you know? Maybe it'll catch on." With a wink, the woman disappeared, and she began to wake from the dream.

Sitting up in her bed at the VI headquarters, Rowan tried to imagine what, from the Giver's perspective, the purpose of that entire conversation could be. Obviously there was some extent to which she just liked to tease people and found Rowan's reactions entertaining. It was clear enough she was also eager for some bloodshed wherever it could be had, and took the opportunity to further encourage the eventual killing of the puppeteer, although she probably knew from the start that things were likely to head down that road. But there was something else...

She had described the taken power like a separate personality, or some kind of "personality attachment" even, which tried to merge with her own usual one. According to—"Chaos"—her powers "truly belonged" to her not because she had full control of them now, but because they had successfully "latched on" to her own mentality.

And the person she thought Rowan would be willing to kill was obviously Dawn, given her history. (The night before, she had asked the others to start calling her by that name, feeling it fit the look she was stuck with better than the real one.) Dawn was also the only person nearby with a taken power, and her behavior lately had seemed slightly...inconsistent with what Rowan was able to get of Donald Keller. It seemed like a positive change, beginning to move past the death of a loved one, but...

Just in case, maybe it was time to try and find out what Cynthia had wanted.

---

Truth be told, Simon wasn't terrible at math. He could work out in his head how much the paint and other materials that went into a work had cost and multiply that by a decently large number to come up with an appropriate price. He could do finances; he did the family taxes every other year and came out just as well with the IRS as his wife did. Calculations were fine, but statistics? Not his strong suit.

The Initiative was trying very hard to come up with some sort of predictive algorithm to figure out where and when a monster was likely to show up next. It was going to be a new feature for the app, so as an artistic consultant for how said app should visually look, of course he was hastily ushered into a meeting about this completely technical matter. He sat in the back of the room, drummed the eraser of a pencil against the desk and scribbled feverishly on a notepad, trying not to go mad from all the talk of confidence intervals and percentage thresholds and so on and so forth. The sad thing was that his wife probably would've loved to rub shoulders with a few of these people, and would maybe even have a relevant opinion about all of this, but she had gremlins to teach right now and wouldn't have taken a day off even if they had known about this ahead enough of time to tell her about it.

They didn't attack at night. They always attacked outside. They seemed to prefer the afternoon in the mid-week, and the morning on the weekend. Those were the salient facts, all that Simon felt it was reasonable to have any confidence in, and those last two didn't guarantee anything. The first two didn't really guarantee anything either; it seemed just as possible to him that the monsters had some intelligence behind them aiming to lull everyone into a sense of security before taking out a bunch of major installations with a night raid that placed monsters directly inside of them. Maybe once it understood what nukes were it would go after some of those!

These were such dark thoughts, not really for him. It had soured Simon's mood a little bit to hear of Nico going into a coma before he even got any photos to make a commemorative painting of her with. Okay, that was a little insensitive. He was upset she was down for the count! He liked her. Her family must be in a terrible spot right now, or rather they would be without the Initiative's help in certain matters. But that part of him which wanted to make that visual record for progeny experienced a deep pang of frustration at losing a subject before even getting a chance to ask. If he was the one who encountered the puppeteer (as everyone seemed to already be calling her) in person first, they were going to have words, and those words were probably going to be punctuated by some rocks to the face.

He couldn't stand being here anymore, and got up and left, leaving behind a glass of water as if he was just going to get something or use the restroom and certainly intended to return. One of the actual experts was having a slightly loud argument with another just now, drawing the rapt attention of everyone else, so he was pretty sure they didn't even hear him leave. He burst out into the hallway and went ten or twelve steps before very nearly running into Dawn. Not to give himself too much credit; she was the one to avert disaster, possessing the reflexes to duck out of the way before he saw what was going on and came to a stop.

"GaAah! Terribly sorry about that," he apologized right away, offering a hand since she was a little hunched over from the maneuver.

"'S all right." She looked at his hand for a couple of seconds before slowly taking it to pick herself up. Simon remembered in those seconds that her hands were usually colder than ice and braced himself, but either because she was wearing gloves or because he was mentally prepared for it, it didn't end up being too horrible. "You, runnin' away from somethin'?"
"Boredom more than anything," he said. "I shouldn't agree to attend meetings with titles I don't even understand."

"..I, really am sorry to hear about the, you know," he said. This wasn't a topic he was very good at; Karis was the one with all the tact.
"It's my own stupid fault anyway. I'm tryin' ta move past it an' get the body I got left healthy." Really looking at her for a moment, Simon realized that Dawn's eyes actually, really had a pale blue fiery glow to them, and tried to think about how he could accurately show that in a drawing. "..What? Somethin' on my face?"
"Oh, sorry," he shook his head. "Look, are you busy right now?"

"Naw."
"How would you—no, no." He paused, attempting to come up with the magic phrasing that would work. Dawn was naturally just confused by the self-interruption.

"Ah!" He held up an index finger for a second. "I never really properly thanked you for saving my life and Karis's. I've had several opportunities to talk with Rowan, of course, but you had just as much of a part."

"Well, it wasn't...nothin'." She looked away, blushing slightly.
"So the most valuable thing I can do is make a work of art for you. I know we're not supposed to take too much free stuff for being heroes and all, but this is just between fellow vixens so they shouldn't bat an eye. Is there anything you'd really like?"

"Um..I don't really..I mean..." She fumbled for a moment; he smiled patiently and gave her the time to speak. He did subtly move them both to one side, seeing they were at an intersection that others might like to walk through. "There, uh, there used ta be this art gallery near our neighborhood, would let us in for free. Cynth would take me out there, try ta get me to appreciate art an' all, but, I don't really, get it."

"That's alright," he said, "as long as I've been at this game, I still can't claim to really 'get it' all myself. The most important thing to me is beauty. Just, if there's something you think you would like to hang up in your room and be able to look at whenever you want."
"Uh, there were some nice, landscapes I guess?" Dawn seemed unsure. "Livin' where we were, you know, it's the closest we got to seein' much real nature."
"That I can do," he said. "There are some gardens in the town, or some spots out in the country, I might could show you photos of to pick from—or when there's no immediate danger to fight maybe to go and look at yourself sometime?"

"That's, cool I guess," she said. "Um, it's a lot a' work to draw one a' those, though, in't it?" There it was. Offering something for free, even if it was supposedly in gratitude, usually made the other person feel like they needed to return the favor somehow.
"The big issue with a piece like you see out in the museum is size," said Simon, making a sweeping gesture to indicate a huge canvas. "I can make something that looks good without it needing an entire wall clear to see the whole thing. And more importantly, it doesn't take me a year to paint that way. At its most complicated the kind of thing I have in mind would only take me about a week to finish—not a week of nonstop work, mind you, just in terms of fitting it in with everything else I'm always busy with."

"Just, uh..it's not too big of a deal," she said. "If somethin' more important comes up, I don't really care if you put it off."

Simon realized that at this point she still didn't care much for having a painting done, but had been trying not to offend him by saying so this whole time. It reeked of total apathy toward the topic, which he really wasn't offended by at all—after all, everyone had their own preferences for things—but it also meant that she probably wouldn't have rejected the request he'd started to make in the first place. While he was sure she'd like it when it was done, this further meant he hadn't even needed to go the route of offering to do extra work at all. Oh well, he was grateful to her, really, and he was a man of his word. "Listen, there is one project I really want to get done, or at least started on," he said. "I've been hoping to make paintings of us—you know, people who got powers. So after we save the world, people in the distant future can still know what we really looked like. Clearly none of us really has time to sit down for a portrait, but a few photos to work off of is good enough for me."

"You jus' wanna take my picture?" she said, looking perplexed more at the idea of someone wanting to do that than anything else. "I don' care, I'm not busy now anyway."

"Oh, wonderful! I've got some of my stuff set up in a room over that way," Simon pointed. "It'll only take a minute or two, and I've been told it's entirely painless," he joked. "Really though, thank you for indulging me in this." He started off, and Dawn followed slowly.
"Sure, whatever."

---

Blake came back out in human form and announced that his homework was finished. In response to a questioning look from Amory, still a fox-girl, he said, "Boobs got in the way of typing" and left it at that. She giggled teasingly and then offered to treat him to a congratulatory supper slash last hurrah before school came back into session. The rest of the night was uneventful other than going to bed much earlier than he had the past several days and his body refusing to sleep for a couple of hours as a result. His head spent those hours spinning its wheels, trying to come up with some foolproof strategy against the puppeteer or figure out exactly what her next move was going to be, but ultimately coming up empty. To be honest, Amory was better at spotting the flaws in others' tactics than he was at coming up with his own. Light—er, Blake was the one who seemed good at making plans and getting them to work, at least with a little bit of help here and there.

The next morning, he came out of his apartment and waited at the door only a few minutes bofore Emma came running up, looking positively panicked. "Hi there," he said.
"Am I late?! I slept ten minutes later than usual, and I—"

"You're not late," he interrupted. "Calm down a little? I just got out here a minute or two ago, and my class isn't for thirty minutes. Unless yours is earlier..."
"No..." she looked embarrassed. "It's not for an hour. B-but, I didn't wanna make you late!"

"Well, let's get to the car then." He started off, taking it at a slow walk, and she followed, alternating between slower-than-usual walking and brief, nervous dashes to catch up.

The car was a better place for private conversation. "So, how are you feeling?" he said once they were inside.
"Um, b-better. Beryl showed up again, a-and she didn't actually break into my phone even! Sh-she made some supper and then I went to bed..."
"What's got you so nervous, anyway?"
"Um..uhhh..." She looked around, blushing a little bit. "I-it's just that I'm in a car, alone, with you," she half-whispered. "Th-that's all."
"I'm just drivin' you to campus, though," he shrugged. "And we're not really totally alone, I mean, the other drivers can see through our windows."

"Oh! Uh..I, guess you're right," she said, looking around at the world outside as if for the first time. "I, might've been misinformed a little about what getting in a car with someone you're dating means..."

"In my book, it just means we both want to go to the same place."

"Yeah, that's..that's a lot more sensible."

Now, how best to bring up the topic...? Well, Emma had described her as a little nosy, so... "Hey, did Beryl grill you about yesterday?"

"Hmn? Um, a little bit. I-I told her I went home for a while, since school was out? But she could tell I was tired, so she didn't try to make me talk too much. Kinda lucky, in that way. She really, uh..I mean, I'm a really bad liar in the first place and sometimes she'll just keep asking more and more specific questions until I can't answer anything anymore. I-I like her, but ever since...this stuff, happened, I'm kinda glad she hasn't been there too often. She must be getting ready to graduate at this point.."

"So, she's a senior?"

"Mm-hm," Emma nodded. "I've been dreading next year, what kind of person I might get as a roommate after she moves out."

"Probably someone you have seniority over at that point. How'd you like to have someone to boss around instead?"
"Errr....I can't really even imagine that." To be honest, neither could Amory, but it had been intended as a joke anyway.

"I really uh..." Emma squirmed a bit in her seat. "I guess I have her to thank that I actually asked you out eventually, sorta. Or, in any normal situation I would..."
"How do you mean?"
"Sh-she um..when I was first, thinking about it, she kept asking me what was on my mind u-u-until I finally admitted I had um, a crush on you, and then started giving me all kinds of a-advice on how to be bolder, and teasing me every time I almost came up to you but ran away. Sh-she suggested I try talking to a mirror first, and a bunch of other things...without even knowing who you were, she kept pushing me to a-at least talk to you."

"Oh." He tried to interpret this through the filter of "Beryl=Giver" and came up mostly empty. "Well, ah, I guess if we ever meet I should thank her."

"R-really?" Emma blushed again. "Errm...s-she, the day I um. When you were at the hospital and we fought those gryphon things, she said something like 'take what you want, and don't let anyone stop you.' It...I thought it was kind of a super weird thing to say, because...but, part of me was thinking along those exact lines, when I..attacked Light." She barely squeaked out the last few words. Okay, that seemed to fit her personality quite a bit, as Amory understood it.

"I see what you mean. So in a way, she is responsible even in the weirder reality, right?" he said.
"Y-yeah. Although, I don't know if I should thank someone for helping drive me crazy enough to a-a-attack someone. That just...it really isn't me," she said quietly. "I think about what I was doing and I really, just feel like I went totally insane for two or three days."

"I don't think you'd be the first person briefly driven mad by power," he said. "It doesn't even have to be crazy magic power to do that. At least you turned out okay, right?"

"Y-yeah. I dunno if Light—if he understands how grateful I am she stopped me. Um." She paused, probably confused by her own use of pronouns. Then: "She said something, just after that, like...trying to resolve things peacefully and forgive someone who tried to kill her, is her own way of being a little crazy."

"Right..."
"Um. Before that, at the hospital...she said...she knows what it feels like when the monsters show up, and to think about if the risk is really worth it. It's..I um. I decided to fight, and I told you why, but..." Something was clearly bothering her.

"What's wrong?"
"I don't know..i-it just feels like Light knows something I don't. When she talked about our powers making us insane, it wasn't just like, having power itself, but these powers. Does that make any sense?"

"Yeah." Amory thought through what he was going to say over a long, quiet pause. Emma was smart enough to pick up on that, she might very well figure it out on her own. So it was a good idea to just tell her the truth now. "We have..kind of a theory, but it's horrible in some ways to know about it."
"'We'? So, I guess um.."
"Right. It's based on some of what the Giver said, and partially on Light's experiences, and the way everyone seems to behave once they have powers. We call it 'the price'."

"That, uh..that sounds ominous."

"It's just this: We're pretty confident that the Giver hates those monsters. Like on a personal level. For some reason she can't or won't fight them herself, but she does really want them dead. From the very beginning, she talked about giving everyone power in terms of fighting them, right?"
"Y-yeah," she said, trying to think back to that dream from over a week ago.

"Our understanding is that her 'gift' doesn't come for free. It comes with the promise that you can take what you want, but it also sort of twists your idea of what you want around just slightly, enough to align it with what she wants—to get those monsters killed."
"Hmn..." She was thinking about it.

"So, like, what Light wants is to be a hero. The monsters attack people, so she wants to fight them. On top of that there's like this, instinctive response you have to seeing them, a fight or flight reflex that jumps up right away. Right?"
"Y-yeah. Like seeing a huge cockroach two feet from your foot," she said.

"I'm sorry...I know it's a little bit terrifying to know about, but I thought you'd rather I tell you than dance around it forever."
"It's fine, you're right," she said. "Thank you for trusting me." It occurred to him that they should be saying the same things after he told her about his own powers, but he couldn't make himself bring it up right now...he just couldn't.

After thinking for a moment she said, "But..."
"Hm?"
"..What about the puppets?"

"What do you mean?"
"The person controlling them, I mean. She—they've done nothing but attack people fighting the monsters, which helps them. So, why...?"
"Well, we've always been pretty sure the price doesn't totally override a person's own wants. It's more...subtle than that? It is kind of a relief, really, if a person can still be free enough to choose to help the monsters...as terrible of a thing as that is for someone to actually decide do."

"I guess so."

School after that was pretty normal. Amory had less trouble than he thought he would getting back into the mentality of classes, learning science that several people now defied on a regular basis. To be fair, all of the old science worked in all of the places it used to, there were just "new places" with all of this magic flying around. Surely somebody out there must be looking for a way to do magic without being a fox-girl gifted powers by a trickster goddess. Maybe it was only a couple of decades out from your average American college offering a major in golem summoning or fireball throwing...well, it wasn't like he'd lost his ability to daydream off and on. They'd agreed to meet for lunch before leaving the car, and they did, although the atmosphere was a little tense since the day's monster attack hadn't come yet, and the puppeteer hadn't made any visible moves yet either. If ever Amory were inclined to use the cliche of things being too quiet and mean it, this was it.