Battle Vixens! - 92

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Episode 92: Lightning Crashes

Amory followed Blake through the back entrance to Ning's shop. "Are you sure this place is private enough?"

"Oughta be fine," Ning said, stepping back to let them inside. "Once it came to closin' time, some of my old regulars started shooin' folks off so I could get the rest of the stock packed away. Still gotta take care of that before I leave, but—we sold an awful lot, and there's still plenty of time."
Blake nodded, then looked around the half-empty stockroom. "Nadia?"
"Napping. Tuckered out from all the attention." She crossed her arms. "Some folks wanted to meet her, but I was pretty clear about no pictures. They were good about that, but—she's still not used to so many new people at once. This won't be loud anyway, right?"

Her guests exchanged a brief glance. "..Shouldn't be. Unless 'we' yell for some reason," Blake said.

"Well, you and I'd both know better, so..isn't that how it works?"
"Yeah." He breathed in and out once, then said what he had to to change into Light.

"Is it bad I'm lookin' forward to this?" Ning said. "Not that I ever had a clue this sorta thing was possible, but—Light-Ning! For real," she said, gesturing excitedly forward.
"Better than being nervous, I guess," Light said. She caught herself picking at one of her own ears, and slowly dropped the hand to her side again. Amory was also in vixen form by this point.

"So, what do we do exactly?"
"Well uh...more or less, I just say your phrase while we..hug." Light looked slightly away, blushing.
"Aww, are you bothered about that? C'mon, I'm old enough to be your grandma! You wouldn't mind hugging a granny, right?"
"The thing is, though, you don't look like it..."

"Baah. C'mere you." Ning stepped in, halfway picking Light up in a hug. "You need a hug anyway, don't you? You've been stressed for days!"

"Hmnh." It really wasn't as bad with the other party treating it like no big deal. Light just gently returned the hug. "So, you wanna do it?"
"Yeah, go ahead!"

After Light gave the order, both of their bodies converted mostly to the respective forms of energy—light and electricity—and flowed together into a space exactly between their prior positions, reforming into a single, two-tailed vixen's body. She was around half a foot taller than Ning, slightly curvier too, with bright white hair down to her lower waist and the same white-with-black pattern to her ears as Light. Her eyes were a yellowish-green—halfway between Light's and Ning's, of course—and her clothes came out as a pair of short jean-shorts and a tight, white-and-black t-shirt whose hem only made it about halfway down her waist, partially showing off a slim midriff sporting a six-pack.

The merged girl giggled at once, looking down across herself for a moment. "Not bad at all~. I'm feeling surprisingly okay with getting used to this," she said.

"Uh, which 'I' and which 'this'?" Amp asked.
"Light, and—being 'two people', I guess." She brushed a hand over one of her own ears. "I mean, I guess I was right about being stressed. Even though I, uh—'Ning' has had a fairly long day, I hardly even understand what I was worried about. It'll turn out okay!"

"Well, that's good to hear, at least. So...'Lightning'?"

She nodded. "Like there was any other choice, heheh! Lessee here.." Raising a hand palm-up, Lightning made a spark of electricity dance around in a circle, then a more complicated, spiraling pattern. "This is nice, I actually feel totally in control like this. I mean—the 'tuning' helped a ton, but this is on a totally different level. Well—you know how good 'Light' is at manipulating physical light, yeah?" Amp nodded. "It feels just as easy as that, now. I could make ten thousand volts navigate a rat maze if I wanted!" By this point she had lowered her hand, split the spark into five or six arcs of electricity all dancing around her in spiral patterns." Ooh hey, if I ever wanted another career, I'd be a pretty good electrician," she brought up out of nowhere. "Control or not, being immune to shocks and able to 'feel' electricity like this would be ridiculously useful."

"Uh..sure. Anything else come to mind?" Amp said, trying to keep her more or less on task.

Lightning put a finger to her cheek, thinking—pulling the sparks back into herself at the same time. "Weell, I only half-know what I'm talking about, but it's all electromagnetic uh..'ssstuff', right? Like, electrons and photons basically act kinda similar in a lot of situations, and stimulate each other out of atoms. It's only a small fraction of Prism's 'trick', but I'm sure I could make as much light from electricity as I liked, or vise-versa." She darkened the room, forming a sphere of light next to her with a diameter around half her own height, and then snapped with her right hand, turning it into an equal-sized ball of electricity—then, repeating the gesture, back again. "This feels way more 'efficient' than that actually, if that makes any sense. More closely related, possibly, besides just being my 'native' elements and not an 'imitation'. Ohh yeah, I'm super fast and strong too," she said, flexing an arm, "not that there's a greeaat non-destructive way to demonstrate that, and dual wielding is always pretty sweet!" With this last declaration, she formed Light's and Ning's swords in her left and right hands respectively, holding them out to either side for a second before pulling them in, holding both vertically in front of her to look at.

"Hmn. You know, I was able to change my two swords into a sword and sheath before. Maybe it's 'flexible enough' like this?" Lightning clapped her hands together with the swords still in them, succeeding in a brief eruption of sparks and light (a flash which Amp's power alone let her not be blinded by) with the end result of a gigantic sword being held in both her hands. "Hmn, pretty good. Not sure I can do as many different 'weapon shapes' as Emma, but some more options to pick from is still pretty nice." She let go, unsummoning the blade.

"..You know what else, I think this makes me just strong enough to manage Light's 'light-speed' thing semi-frequently. Not—constantly, but often enough to supplement everything else in a fight for sure. Soo—pet me a bit, then?"

"Uh..sure." It was strange for someone she perceived as Light to be quite this blunt with the request (at least, in a non-urgent situation), but Amp was happy to come closer to the tall woman and reach up, gently rubbing her ears a bit. Predictably this grew her taller still, enough that she had to pick Amp up off her feet for her arms to still reach. After it was done, Lightning set her down again, still grinning brightly.

"Whoo! Thanks," she said. "I dunno that there's much 'extra' over what we've already covered but stronger...oh, but I bet I could leave some electricity along the trail I 'lightspeed' through. I mean—really, if I can be light or electricity through the air and I can convert one to the other, why not?"

"Heheh, true enough," Amp said.

"So—the one other thing is testing this with Emma to see if it goes up another tier. And, actually I can't think of any reason I wouldn't be able to 'make' me and her fuse independently...that is, uh—"
"Light making two of the others fuse?" Amp surmised aloud.
"Yeah, that!"

---

"There is one other issue which we need to bring up," Dr. Bridges said. "As we mentioned before, 'Hephaestus' is able to identify valid keys." He couldn't resist using the 'codename' at least the once now that it was announced, after all. "This was first displayed by examining the masks the Giver did not take."
Dr. Brand nodded; if she was annoyed about the name, it was difficult to tell through her usual demeanor. "Every single one was viable. We made several dozen of them, because our methods for testing viability—without actually having someone attempt to use them as keys—incorrectly told us each was a failure, and we retained them in hopes of studying them to learn what went wrong."

"So...you mean to tell me," Chandra said, "that the research department has dozens of masks capable of doing what that one did to you, to anyone."
"Well—not precisely anyone," Ezekiel said. "Our current understanding is that a certain amount of 'natural aptitude' and 'compatibility' would be needed in order for even the most viable of keys to activate. But—morally, 'anyone' is close enough. We're keeping them in a more secure location than my partner's office now, of course."

Dr. Brand said, "The point is: The problem of what to do with the fruits of our research has come up much sooner than expected. In my personal opinion, these particular fruits are deeply flawed—but that does not change the fact that they have tactical potential."

"Nor that there is an obvious risk in keeping them around, yet sitting on them," Dr. Bridges continued. "The question comes down to: Destruction, deployment, or...storage." He hesitated slightly out of disappointment that no word starting with 'de-' would communicate this last concept. "And while it is emphatically not our decision to make, we naturally have opinions on the matter."

"We agree that storing them is an unnecessary and wasteful risk," Dr. Brand said, "and that such an act, if found out by our allies or the public, would sow distrust. I believe they should be destroyed as soon as possible, in the process salvaging any material that can further our work and produce keys without irritating side-effects all the sooner."
"I, on the other hand, think it would be wasteful to destroy them," Ezekiel said. "I would gladly see them in the hands—or on the faces, really—of persons the VI or its allies consider trustworthy enough to wield the power they would help awaken. It's not as if the public would be shocked by the appearance of a few dozen more vixens at this point."

Frank nodded. "Hmm." He paused, leaned back and slowly forward again, and then pressed the button on his desk for the intercom with his secretary. "Opal, could you bring in the slides from this morning?"
"No problem, sir." She came in, quickly and efficiently setting up a projector screen and a laptop at one edge of his desk before handing him a slide-changer button and going to stand on the other side of the screen with her hands behind her.

"Indulge me for a minute, please," he said, flipping through the first several slides. "This is a presentation I gave this morning to our..well, 'investors', for lack of a better word. The government, of course, and some individuals and groups who believe in the Initiative's goals and have been helping to fund it. I won't bore you with the expense reports...here we are." He stopped at a slide showing a chart with an obvious upward trend. "First of all, this is the total estimated cost each day from the destruction caused by the attacks over the past couple of weeks. Oh, and, for all of these, we skipped the days when there were no attacks. This leaves off the hazard pay for doing repair work in an area known to be frequently attacked, since that's only in certain places and in the past few days or so." He clicked to another graph with a clear upward trend. "This is the number of people injured or worse each day.." Next was a bar graph with relatively small numbers, but still those numbers went up over time. "..The number of casualties among empowered—including being killed, being eaten and put into a coma, and the surprisingly few who suffered non-fatal injuries severe enough to take them out of active combat more or less indefinitely."

"...The average length of a battle..the total estimated volume of black mist making up the monsters for each day, using some rough computer-assisted estimation from available news footage..." Rowan's eyes drifted once or twice to the secretary, who just smiled and gave an innocent wave at him the second time.

"..Aaand, this one requires a bit more explanation. Not too far into the development of the VI app, we built in a 'post-battle survey' that vixens could elect to take. This is the average rating, from one to ten, on questions like 'how difficult was this fight?', 'how much stress did you feel during it?', 'how tired are you right now'?...more or less," he said, pointing out each color in turn with the clicker's built-in laser pointer. "We got complaints after the first few days that the scale didn't go up to a hundred. And, of course, this is just from the relatively small number who were able to, and chose to, participate in those surveys—but you can see the same thing by just watching the news. It's increasingly common to see near-death experiences, people still completely out of breath throughout interview segments, but relieved just to have a chair to sit in..or empowered collapsing straight to sleep from exhaustion and needing to be carried off somewhere private by their comrades or helpful bystanders. If anything, Rowan's work has been commendable in making our city an exception when it comes to that; Light's group as well, though that may be due to their 'secret weapon' making them temporarily stronger when it's needed.

"..The people I gave this data to this morning wanted to know why our funding emphasized research and development so heavily. What the Giver gave us was obviously not intended to last the whole war—if you want to call it that," he said. Rowan's eyes drifted Opal's way again at this point, and she winked. It was hard to say whether this was innocent or not, really. "Long-term, our goal is to have a world where anyone can defend themselves from those things. But even in the short-term, the Empowered need all of the support they can get, as soon as we can give it." Frank leaned over the laptop, switching over from the presentation to something else. "Now, here's something I couldn't show them..."

Some shaky video from the day before, in Light's town, came to the screen, pausing on a frame focusing on Magus. "The research department's preliminary test subject. For the moment, everyone knows her as another 'ordinary' vixen. Here she is fighting alongside Light.." He skipped through some more video to an image of her putting up a shield to block a barrage of lightning. "..and helping take down that monster that ate Ning. Her powers seem weaker than most, but they're uniquely versatile in a way no one else can come close to...with, maybe one exception," he added, obviously thinking of Gemma.

"Now, as I understand it, it's not guaranteed that every person who gets a key will be a 'Magus'—or a 'Hephaestus', for that matter. Still, there's no telling what other useful abilities people could have. The Giver chose to hand people 'violent' powers which could be used to directly fight those things, which suggests there may be those who could awaken other abilities that would provide some of the increasingly needed support. Imagine if every city had at least one person who could heal wounds with a touch, even a fraction as well as Dr. Quinn," he said.

"That's not to mention our allies," Frank continued. "They've been breathing down our neck to hear what kind of progress the research is making, right?"
Rowan nodded. "There is some unspoken but obvious suspicion that—being largely an American organization—the VI won't really release all of the information, much less the tools we develop, for the use of those in other countries."

He nodded. "Sending out a few of our preliminary results, while noting their flaws, would give them some assurance of our stated intentions. Besides, of course, helping them."

"In short, you think we should hand those things out like candy," Chandra said; by her tone, she seemed to be in Dr. Brand's camp.

"Well, not exactly," Frank said, and gestured to Dr. Bridges. "The research department has already developed tools to assess the alignment of a person's goals to those of the Initiative, as well as their viability for a key to awaken meaningful power. With some slight tuning, those same tools could be used to choose who gets a mask, and offered to interested ally organizations for the same purpose." Ezekiel nodded slowly, not so much agreeing with him as visibly thinking about how to accomplish said tuning.

"Another point in favor of this decision is the Giver's theft of a few of those masks. To me it reads like a message: 'Use the rest of these yourselves, or I will'." Opal nodded just slightly. It resembled the way one would politely and absent-mindedly nod while listening to someone else speak, but of course it happened to be timed exactly after he said this. Since he was still addressing the other three in the room, Frank wasn't even looking in her direction at the time.

---

Gemma's phone rang, and she picked it up. "Uh...Light?" She hesitated, glanced at Magus, and then apparently decided to use this name.
"N—yes. Uh, Partially, yeah," The voice on the other end didn't really sound like Light, or even 'boosted' Light, from Magus's prior experience. It sounded..lighter but also more mature, which didn't seem like a possible combination. Definitely less serious. "I'm also Ning! We did the thing," she continued after a second or two to seemingly get her response straight.
"Oh. Uh, good, I guess?" Gemma did not seem to know the purpose of the..fusion?..calling her.
"Yeah, so, since I'm already, I mean we're already—whatever. You wanna see if the other thing works?"
"The other..oh! Um, sure I guess?" She glanced uncertainly at the Quinns, and Clark helpfully gestured at some of the unclaimed armor. "Uhh, I'm at the Quinns' place, and they have our armor..stuff. You want me to bring yours?"
"Sure! Amp's too, if you don't mind. That's—three, for the record."
"Um, I know, but thanks."

"Great! We're at my—uh, at Ning's shop. See you soon!"
"S-sure." The other end hung up excitedly.

"Uh, Light and..well, we wanted to see if like a three-way fusion was possible," Gemma half-stumbled her explanation.
"I, uh, presume she's calling herself 'Lightning'?" Magus asked.

"If anything is good and pure in this world, she is," Rory replied.
"Eheh, she didn't actually say." Gemma spoke the phrase to change back to her vixen form, standing up and splitting into two bodies presumably in order to more easily carry her burden.
"Um, do you need any help carrying those out?" Magus said, getting up herself.
"Well, uh—" "—I'd appreciate it, at least."

"So this is uh...dumb, and totally self-serving," the vixen in the hat said as they were on their way to Gemma's car. "But I gotta ask anyway."
"Hmmn?" Just Minus looked her way, Plus being ahead of them.
"That uh, spell thing, the Giver used on you. There's no way you like, 'learned' it or could teach someone else how to do that, right?"
"Uh, no. Sorry.—" "—I guess I can see where a lot of people might want something like that.—" "—And I mean, even if I could, she might get kinda angry about trying to 'share' the 'prize'?—" "—I dunno."
"No, no, that's—I get it," Magus said.
"Uhhm. I really am sorry,—" "—I mean, I know what it's like to kinda hate how you look."
"It's no big deal. I probably shouldn'a asked." Still—magic that could change people's appearances had been visibly staring everyone in the face the whole time. It had a limited and specific effect when it came to 'regular' vixens, but..if Magus could come up with a spell that arbitrarily altered clothes, then...

Well, what did it matter, anyway? It wasn't like she could temporarily split into two to have the 'vixen side' cast a spell at the 'human Marcus'. Or, like—if she figured out a spell to transform someone, it wasn't like anyone else would be able to learn it. Even Gemma, whose whole thing was learning, evidently couldn't 'imitate' her spells. Maybe it was something best put away and not worried about. But, even as Magus made her way back through the Quinns' house and said her goodbyes, heading out the back fence toward her car again—the idea lingered. Her spells could violate nature in all sorts of other extreme ways, so...why wouldn't there be a transformation one? But—it wasn't like she'd have anyone to test it on, either, even if she did come up with something like that.