Battle Vixens! - 38

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Episode 38: Adjust Tracking

It was later, through the news, that Gerald Nelson found out that Light had been attacked. Not just one or two, but four puppets all committed to the effort; he was glad she didn't hesitate to use his power in dealing with the situation, but still couldn't help but feel some annoyance at not being there himself. He had to mind the shop, though; there was just nobody else to do it at the moment. He couldn't afford to close up; there was social security and some retirement money, but it just wouldn't be enough for both of them.

Although this was the reality of the situation, a part of him was starting to feel that maintaining the facade of this version of himself was more of a burden than anything else. Nadia was already used to Ning, understood she was the same person as always and seemed perfectly happy around her. Ning was stronger and quicker and had so much more energy...and above anything else, Ning was the one capable of protecting people. But if he dared to break the mask and go public with that persona...there were just too many people that would put in danger. It felt impossible.

He drove to the school to pick his granddaughter up, and then home, changing forms once inside and starting to get supper ready. It was somewhere in the middle of making the meal that Ning stopped in her tracks, a nagging thought hitting her from nowhere. She ran to her phone and rattled off a text, and then two or three more, with one hand while continuing to work with the other.

"You were able to trakc me and the peopel who took nadia"
"with like a light thing right"
"Could you do that on the puppets?"

---

Clark called "Light" through the VI app, and Blake picked up the phone. "Hey, wow, perfect timing," he said.

"What?"
"Uh, I was just about to—I'll explain in a minute. What were you calling about?"
"Oh. I uh...I had kind of a horrifying thought, and I thought I should share it right away."
"Well...what is it?"
"Okay, uh...Stay with me on this one. Rory thinks this is farfetched, but...Well, you have..a way of turning yourself into light to move at light speed."
"Right..."
"Your sword is also 'made of light' but it turns into solid matter, mostly resembling metal, and back into light again, whenever you want."
"Yeah."
"So: What if you, made your sword appear, turned it into light while turning into light yourself, and started moving in a certain direction, towing along the light that 'is your sword'. And then, turned that light back into a sword while you and it were still in motion?"

"Uh...I guess..the sword would, still be moving?" he said, unsure of the meaning.
"Correct, it would still be moving. At light speed. Or—well, physical, not-light things can't move at light speed, but, I suspect it would at least start pretty close to that speed."
"Soo, what makes this thought horrifying?"

"Aaah, let me, put it this way: I would avoid doing that, at least here on Earth, innn, any situation where you wouldn't willingly set off a nuclear bomb."

"..Oh. Okay, yeah."

"I mean, we're not really sure it'll work that way 'because magic', and Rory isn't sure you even can do it for the same reason, but, I thought it would be a really good idea to ask you politely not to try?"

Blake was silent for a moment, mostly unsure of how to react to the vague possibility of having a personal, probably self-destructive nuclear option available. Eventually Clark prompted, "So, what was your thing?"
"Oh! Uh. I was just reminded of something I figured out how to do way back, uh, literally the first day I had powers. And Amory told me that you can fly and bring along a passenger?"
"Well, with—you know, with some help."
"Right. Anyway, um, there's a possibility that I might be able to track where any given puppet came from, and if I can, then in turn I may be able to get all the way back to the one making them. But like, probably they've got a car and one of the puppets can teleport and it'd just be easier overall to avoid detection by doing it up in the air instead of at ground level, even with a car of our own."

"That's...pretty good news overall. So you want my help with this 'scouting mission', then?"

"If you're not too busy, at least."

"I'm pretty well caught up. Anyway, I think this takes priority if it works."
"That's great, because we're in the car and most of the way to your house by now," said Blake.
"...Ah. I'll make sure the blinds are shut, then."

Before long, all three of them were in the Quinns' living room, all changed into foxgirls; Rory stood off to one side with her arms crossed. Light and Clark both had a slight blush on, visibly nervous about this part even though everyone knew it was necessary. After a short pause, Clark said, "So uh, who're you gonna do first..?"
"Hmn. It'll be faster if I just go for both at once," said Amory cheerfully, putting her hands together with a peaceful smile. Then she took a step closer to them and reached her hands out to the tops of their heads, using one hand to rub each one's ears. They leaned in and moved closer, and then followed her over onto the couch and let themselves fall onto it, both pulling instinctively into a little group hug once they got there. Soon their tails were pratically knotted together, each of them had one hand on each of the others' ears, and there was a small chorus of churring. Amp reached in and got both of them glowing in their own particular ways, quickly growing them up to their fully-powered forms, and then gently untangled herself from them, hopping off and taking a couple of steps back to admire her work.

After a brief moment of petting each other, the two boosted girls jerked back and quickly stood well apart just in front of the couch. With a little bit of concentration, she'd figured out how to make Light's clothes a bit less revealing: A full-size tank top and very slightly longer shorts than before. She still tugged at them a little uncomfortably (well, the top was kinda low cut still), and eyed Clark's relatively conservative "shrine maiden" outfit with what looked like jealousy for a second or two.

"I don't think I'll get used to what that feels like," said Clark. "It was a little weird though...for a second there I felt like there was something I should..say?"
Light looked back up at her and blinked a couple of times in surprise. "Yeah...me too."

"Oh woow, your voice is so deep now!" Rory interjected, moving in behind Clark and pulling her arms around her waist. "Anyway, we'll think about what amazing new thing that could mean later."

"R-right.." Clark put her hands on her wife's arms for a moment before both of them let go. "Anyway...we should get on with this."

"You two be careful flying around, yeah? If you feel like it's gonna wear off soon, touch down right away."

"I know that."

"It prolly won't wear off for several hours unless they actually get in a fight," said Amp. "Which would be a really bad idea right now."

---

Rowan asked to be informed whenever Dawn finally got up from the "nap" she'd started immediately upon walking into the building. The report he got was that she charged straight from her bedroom to the exercise area, and when he caught up he found her hitting one of the punching bags repeatedly with her bare fists.

He came up next to her, listening to her grunt from the effort and waiting patiently for the inevitable pause to catch her breath. "You'll break your hands doing that without some protection," he said finally.

"I just...need...ta hit somethin'." She turned half toward him. "We're all outta puppets, right?"

"For today...at least, as far as we know." Rowan moved a hand forward tentatively; she didn't back away or brush him off, so he placed it on her shoulder. It was a little cold still, but not enough to keep him from doing it. "Petra told me what she said..at least, enough to get the gist of it."

Dawn nodded slowly, then gently pulled away, before giving the bag a solid kick. "She's right, ain't she? That's what makes me so mad." Two more punches, and another kick. "I'm so stupid."

"Do you think what she wants to do is right?"
"No." She paused, rolling her shoulders back and panting slightly. "So what I did, what Cynth told me ta do..musta been wrong. But if I didn't do it, then..." Turning back toward him, with a pained expression: "I made a promise. It was stupid, to agree ta somethin' like that, but I did. An' as far as I could tell she was dyin', with no hope. I couldn't..."

Her head turned down, and she made the noise of a poorly-suppressed sob. The air around her went ice cold for a second or two, and then back to normal again. After a moment of indecision, Rowan stepped forward and put his arms around her, placing her head in his shoulder to let her cry there for a moment. She returned the gesture, and he kept her there even though her body was so cold it hurt. "Dawn...you've never really had time to sort all this out. Whether it was right or not, it hurt you, and beating yourself up over it won't help it heal."

She let go after a moment, and took a small step back, her ears drooping as she saw his body give a small involuntary shiver. "Sorry."
"It's alright, it was my idea," he said with a slight, wry smile.

"I can't just...quit, or take a break, or nothin'. Not now."

Rowan nodded, agreeing. "You're needed now more than ever. But you'll do more harm than help if you let our enemy use your emotions to control you."

"Whaddayou think I should do, then? I can't help how I feel. Just seein' one a those...and thinkin' that's someone's family, or friend, or...an' she jus', killed 'em and took over..." Her eyes went sharp, cold, and angry. "I want to tear her heart out through her throat."

"I know that feeling, too," said Rowan. "Nobody ever has to ask why the police get so worked up when you kill one of our own. My advice is to keep talking about it—to me, to anyone else you trust. And remember that you're not the only one who wants to take her out, so working with the rest of us has a better chance of success than doing it on your own."
"Yeah..." Dawn nodded.

---

Rory watched her husband and Light fly out the backdoor and up into the sky, and then closed the door behind them and turned around, heading back to the living room. "Well, I guess we just wait for the results," she said, taking a seat on one of the chairs. Amory was still in fox-form, lying across the couch.

"Clark probably could've taken you along if you wanted..."
"Nah. If they managed to get detected and roped into a fight with Light's powers plus flight, I kinda think they deserve to take some hits," she said. "Anyway, even without you being targeted by monsters I don't think it's a bad idea to have someone guarding you most of the time."

"Hmm." Her ears drooped a little bit; something about saying that had made her remember something concerning, apparently.

After waiting what felt like an appropriate amount of time for her to mull that over, Rory said, "Listen...can I ask you something?"

"Yeah?"
"How do you...do it? Like, is it all magic power, or is there some kind of technique?"

"Uhh.." Amory was smart enough to know what she was talking about, but was put off by the blunt approach to the question.

"I just thought I might ask you for some tips, if you've got 'em. I mean...Clark does have a reaction to my petting, but it's not the instant switch-flip you can accomplish." She gave a brazen grin. "I admit, I do have plenty of ways to get him to look at me 'that way', but one more wouldn't hurt."

"Um.." The blonde fox-girl blushed, but her expression indicated she was forming an actual response in her head, so Rory tried to be patient. "It's..this is gonna sound really stupid, but I don't just pet the person's body. Whenever I, do that, I can feel their emotions, especially toward me. I think my power wouldn't work on someone who hated me—like, I wouldn't even be able to touch them. Clark was...hesitant that first time, but trusted me enough to keep still until it started."

"I see. It occurs to me now that you mention it..the fox parts 'feel' pretty intimate, somehow," Rory said. "Not the sort of thing I'd want just anyone to touch. Which is weird, they're biologically pretty close to normal animal parts aside from being stapled to an otherwise human body, and real foxes don't exactly have a special reaction relating to either of those places."

"It's all magic nonsense. The powers are tied to the fox parts, and the powers are also tied to the person's...self, or whatever. So I guess my power uses them as some kind of conduit," she said. "Physically I don't think I'm doing anything different from the obvious...move the same direction as the fur, go for the tail with my tail at the same time—okay, I feel weird saying that's obvious, but.."
"No no, it is," said Rory. "One more appendage to touch with works great when there's one more place to touch. Anyway, I wonder whether Clark could leverage that 'spirit power' to some effect like yours...maybe not the powering up part, since that's literally what your power is, but the other part..."

Amory closed her eyes, reopened them to a kind of confused squint with her ears lowered slightly. After a pause she said, "My first instinct is to say 'yeah, that should work', but I have no logical reasoning behind it."

"Well, you shouldn't be suspicious of your first instinct, right? 'Least until someone proves it wrong."

"It's just...I think my powers mess with my mind more than I'd like," she said. "I imagine everyone I know with powers in their fox form first, like that's how I've always known them. And I keep having these leaps of logic when it comes to understanding other people's powers, and a lot of them seem to be right."

"That sounds awkward and useful respectively," said Rory. "So what's the big deal?"

Amory sighed. "I like to think I'm in control of my own mind. I need to have a clear head and give what I think are sane observations and advice. But when she gave me these powers, it's like she opened it up and put a bunch of new information in. How do I know it's all true? What if it's mostly true, with some convenient thing that's false that'll cause a disaster when I decide to just trust it? Or—if not false, since she 'never lies'—true but misleading?"

"Hmn. Well, the stuff in your head is only one source of information, after all. Why don't you treat it as hypotheses to be tested, in that case, and only go out of your way to test them when it's safe to do so? And, if you really don't want to trust something your head just popped out then you can just, refuse to act on it. Right?"

"Maybe that would work...although I don't know how to act like I don't have information that I have," said Amory. "If I just act like the opposite is true then it's simple reverse psychology and she doesn't even have to 'lie' at all to make me make mistakes."

"Well in that case, just let other people act on their own without telling them what you think is true," said Rory. "I mean, the context where this is gonna matter will probably be some high-stakes battles anyway, so if you don't trust your instincts on something, why not rely on those of others?"

"Mmnh. I'll have to be careful either way...but I feel a little better having some kind of plan," Amory said. Smiling back up toward Rory's face, she added, "Thank you." Her tail was kind of swishing back and forth like a dog's tail wagging, too...it was just irresistibly adorable.

"Heh, and Clark thinks I'm impulsive," she said. After looking around the room briefly, Rory spoke the phrase to change forms and stood up, moving toward Amory a bit. "Maybe a quick demonstration would help me see if there's any more subtle techiniques you've got that I'm missing," she said.

"Heheh..." Amory sat up, blushing slightly but seeming open to the idea. "It'll be easier for you to pay attention to that if you're not busy jumping on top of me again."

"Maybe so." She sat on the now-open cushion, close to the small fox-girl. If nothing else, this would make tonight fun once the two kids left the house.

---

Clark's ability to pick people up was easy enough to extend to giving them control over their flight, as long as they stayed close enough to her. Once they were above the house, Light twirled and orbited around in the air some, laughing a little bit. "It's really something, right?" said Clark, smiling back.

"Yeah..." She brought herself back to an upright position, facing Clark. "I've always wondered what it's like to just float around through the air like Superman. There was a time I thought I wanted to be an astronaut, just to get to float around in zero gravity."

"Something change your mind?"

"Well...I went to one of those camps, you know? They put me on the G-force thing—the one that spins you around like crazy? I...didn't like that so much. Especially my stomach. I was really young then, but pretty soon I decided I wanted a job with a lower risk of physical injury."
"I made a similar decision pretty early in life, myself...and yet now we're doing this," said Clark, gesturing vaguely at Light's current appearance.

"Heheh, yeah. Best-laid plans and all that.

"Anyway..we've got work to do." Light turned her body around in what she was pretty sure was the direction of campus. "We should try the quad first. There were two there, so if one trail goes cold I'll try the other. If that's still no good, we could try the one that came after you."

"Right." Clark started off, the taller girl following. "..We're already invisible, right?"
"Psh, yeah. Before you even opened the back door."

"Just checking before I go over the road. I've never really navigated as the bird flies before, but I know exactly how to drive there."

When they got there, Light lowered herself to the ground, and began filtering her vision, pulling things back to that afternoon and then looking for light absorbed by the crossbow-wiedling wind puppet. The shadow one, she reasoned, might have been hiding in the shadows, which would be more difficult to track. "Hey...uh, your eyes are kinda glowing," said Clark.

"They do that, yeah. I guess some kind of power decoration. It'd broadcast what I was doing if I wasn't also making it all invisible."

"Is it harder to make dynamic lighting like that invisible?" she wondered.
"Not really? I can't really feel any difference even when I'm not boosted. And right now, I feel like I could hide a whole skyscraper without breaking a sweat." She started down the trail of the wind puppet. She had run straight toward the monster as soon as it appeared, but hadn't been standing around waiting on it; that was good news, at least, since if she had been it would suggest the puppeteer had some way of knowing where the mist monsters would be. During the time slightly before that, she had been hiding in a certain alleyway, pacing around behind a dumpster to stay out of sight of anyone who happened to pass by.

Rolling things back a couple of hours, to just the start of lunchtime, Light finally saw her arrive, and followed a jump down from the roof of a building, then some running/walking/jumping across rooftops—all sensible things to do if one didn't want to be spotted too quickly. Unfortunately for the puppeteer, this made it far easier to track the puppet than it had been to track Ning or the kidnappers; there was only the one humanoid shape clearly outlined going all across the rooftops.

Then the trail led off of campus and along the road out to the highway, a patch with forest to the side of it, which the puppet had made her way through up until finding buildings tall enough to hide on top of. Eventually the puppet's trail led up close to the side of the road, and then abruptly disappeared, indicating that this her point of origin.

Light blinked a couple of times, switching the filter around to try and see everything that was there at the moment she disappeared. There were the others—shadow-girl, plant-girl, the one Rory had stolen the spear from. And there was a car, pulled over by the side of the road, that they appeared next to, one by one. The car had tinted windows, which failed to reflect enough light out to make out anything clear of what was inside. There was a vague shadow of someone with tall, triangular ears from the driver's seat, however, which was enough to suggest that the puppteer herself was there.

She touched down, walking around where the car had been to its back. And...there was a liscense plate, of course—a number. "What do your special eyes see?" Clark quipped after watching Light stare around for a minute or two.

"She summoned them all right here, from a car," said Light. "Uh, did you bring your phone? We should get this to Rowan as soon as possible."

"Yep!" Clark pulled it out, and carefully typed the number in, then preceded it with a brief explanation of where it came from. "So now what?"

"We should try and follow the car back to wherever it came from," said Light, turning her eyes toward the road. "Or at least, I'd like to, but..." Her ears drooped slightly.

"Hmn?"

"...There's just too many cars on the road. This one's pretty generic, I couldn't track this particular car just from knowing what the model looks like, or what color it is." She floated up slightly, turning her head back and forth. "I'm losing track of it just looking around here. Wish this part of my power was just a little better..."

"Well, it's already pretty amazing," said Clark. "Along with everything else you can do, I'm honestly impressed you get to do still one more thing with so much utility. Anyway, I'm sure that plate number will come in handy the next time she tries to drive out and summon more puppets."

Light nodded ."There's no way she'll expect us to know it. We might be able to catch her by surprise this way..."

"I sure hope so." Clark's phone made the tune of a reply text, and opened it right away. "Stolen, some time late last week, from a gas station. The security camera went black just before...I guess now we know why. And he says thanks, but be very cautious if you get an opportunity to track her any farther."

"Yeah...I know better than to take that monster on alone, even if she's tired out," said Light. "Anyway...I guess we can fly back home for now." She was clearly still a little disappointed that they hadn't wrapped up the whole thing right then and there, but Clark was honestly relieved. There was a level of tension involved in hoping to stumble upon a supervillain's lair that she wasn't actually prepared for that particular night.