Battle Vixens! - 94

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Episode 94: The Monsters With(in) Us

When Rowan finally returned 'home' again to the VI headquarters, he didn't get too far inside before Warp appeared in front of him. "...Afternoon." She didn't appear inside his personal space for once, maybe having given up on getting a reaction out of him with that.
"Same to you. I want to ask 'where you been', but I assume you can't answer that."
"Not really, no."

"Hugo taught me—or 'reminded', more like, how to look things up on a computer."
"That's..good." Out of all of the ways for someone with amnesia to 'learn about themselves', or just to regain other various bits of lost information, that was a sensible strategy. It made him feel mildly foolish and slightly ashamed that something so obvious had at no point occurred to him.

"Did the same thing for Dawn and Cynth a little while ago. Soo..I suppose it's not really a secret to anyone how Cynth died."
"Not particularly." The trajectory of this conversation was increasingly obvious, but he played along anyway.

"I don't get the impression you told them that."
"..I didn't. Are they okay?"

"Better than I'd be if I had to mercy kill my Ess Oh—or be on the receing end o' that, I guess. Still—I thought I was screwed in the head."
"If you want to seek help, it's available," Rowan said. "The VI will cover the costs. I'm sorry if that wasn't made clear before."

"Hah, well. I kinda like the way my brain works now. You might need to explain 'help' to those two a bit more clearly, is all. Hugo thought she did a rubbish job at it."

"..Do you know where they are now?"
"About this time? I'd guess going to get supper," Warp shrugged. "I don't track people or anything."
"Unless you want to talk to them," Rowan observed dryly.
She grinned somewhat viciously. "Nah, this was all luck." And vanished again. Turning his head to the right, he could see her briefly appear at the nearest intersection before teleporting away again.

...If she never actually walked anywhere, her legs were going to atrophy. But maybe she only teleported like that to dramatically exit conversations. He just shrugged to himself and headed toward the cafeteria—it was about time for him to eat, too.

---

With everything packed away, the vixens who weren't Ning changed back to their human forms. Amory glanced between Emma and Ning for a moment. "Do we uh..need to explain that?" he asked the latter, gesturing at the former.
"Uhhm—"
"Nope! We sorta took care of that while 'being Quartz'," Ning said. "Wild, but—it goes a ways toward explaining the weird mood the Giver was in when she spoke to me last night."
"Wait, what?"
"I can explain on the way back," Blake offered. "Sorry, it just feels really—I guess, 'efficient'—to tell yourself something you want you to know?"

"That's fine, I mean I can see where it might be better anyway..."

A nearby door opened, and Ning's grandkid came out, yawning. The white-haired foxgirl quickly went over to her. "Mornin', sleepyhead. You rest well?" she said, kneeling to ruffle the small girl's hair a bit, then gently brush it into a more presentable state.
"Mm-hm. Who're theeeey?" she asked, pointing.
"Some nice kids who helped me pack things up. You've met Emma before, right?"
"Uhh.." Nadia's head tilted as she evidently tried to determine which of the three people that was. "Oh! Emma?" She came a little closer, Ning standing up again and turning to watch.

"Uh, y-yeah."

Nadia lifted her arms out and upward. "You grew up!"
"Heheh, yeah. I um..you could definitely say that."

" And no, uh, eye thingies!" she imitated putting on a pair of glasses.

"Glasses, nope. I thought it was maybe time to get contacts," she lied smoothly enough. Well, she was going to have to give the same excuse to adults soon enough, so if she couldn't even convince a fairly trusting child then they were, perhaps, in trouble.
"Neat! Your face is really pretty," Nadia said cheerfully.
"Thanks."

Walking from just outside the building to their cars (armor in tow), Emma sort of pulled hesitantly close to Amory and they seemed to eventually, silently negotiate an agreement to hug and have a brief goodbye kiss before parting. Blake had never really thought about it this way before, but they were actually a pretty cute couple—if still a little overly cautious around each other, but maybe it was just that way in public? Not like it was really much of his business anyway.

Emma went to her own car, and Amory drove Blake back to the apartment complex. On the way, Blake filled him in on the important details of Ning's dream the night before, along with some of the impression he'd gotten from the 'transferred memory' of how strange the many-tailed woman had been acting.

"...Seems to me like, whatever she's feeling, she still expects to be back to 'normal' before too long," Blake said. "Or at least wants to be, to some extent..."
"I still think it's insane that someone like her could feel something resembling doubt or uncertainty," Amory said. "Everything we've seen before—and when I met her that one time—the only impression I got was of total confidence, like everything was planned out three-hundred-million-plus moves in advance. I guess all of that could still be an act, but I can't imagine a purpose for pretending to feel that way."

Blake sighed. "I don't really care, honestly. At this point...she can act or feel however she wants, as long as we still beat those things and survive. After that, I'm guessing none of us ever have to see her again."
"Guessing, or hoping?"
"Little of both."

They got into the parking garage, and both exited the car.

"..You're uh, nervous about tonight, huh?"
Blake looked over at him briefly. "It's that obvious?"
"Your tone of voice when the idea came up was pretty blatant," Amory said. "Not otherwise, though, I guess."
He shook his head. "It's just—the same problem as being famous, but worse. I feel like I need to make a good impression on these people to keep the...alliance, or whatever, from falling apart, because obviously that would get a lot more people killed. But I don't know, any of them!" He put up his arms helplessly for a second, then dropped them again.

"I just...I can't watch other people fighting those things, or fighting each other, knowing what it's like. I haven't been able to bring myself to even look at that wiki for basic information, and now I don't feel like there's enough time. I don't know who's specifically interested in me or not, and there must be..thousands of people who could potentially be there."

"It's gonna be mostly the leaders of the various 'sister organizations' to the VI," Amory said. "Apart from just a few of them being secretive about who that is, or having non-vixen leaders so they'll have to appoint representatives, it'll mostly be the people who've been on the news the most. I can fill you in on some of them, at least, but—the whole point is that Rowan warned them you might not know who they are."
"I'd still feel like a jerk going 'hi, nice to meet you, now who are you?' to every single one of them, though."

"Well then, I'll tell you what I can once we get inside."

<hr />

Dawn hadn't really recovered from their shouting match at the computer.

Well...it had been Cynthia who'd done all of the shouting, more or less—like always, some part of her insisted. The taller vixen sat across from her near the end of a table in the cafeteria, staring down at her food with her ears folded and only occasoinally nibbling at it. Since it had happened, the redheaded vixen hadn't wanted to press the issue, understanding that Dawn felt bad enough already and knowing she'd screw up however she went about saying it...but it was coming dangerously close to a breaking point where she just couldn't take this anymore.

She inhaled slowly, thinking about how much she'd seen rash decisions hurt or almost hurt people ever since she'd 'come back to life'. And..exhaled. Just don't talk like a total jerk...

"Dawn, hey..."

"Mmh?" She tilted her head slightly upward, and Cynthia tried reaching a hand across the table to gently place across her wrist.
"I just..I hate seein' you like that. Please, tell me what's wrong?"
"Uh...I don't..remember."

Cynthia couldn't help it. Three to five seconds into the conversation, and already she gave the other girl an expression of annoyed confusion, dropping her hand away slightly. "Then why're you—"
"I don't know. I-I feel like I'm close, but it's not there," she said. "It's—I know I did somethin' awful, horrible...and I feel—I remember feeling awful about it, but also like it was, right." She shook, some small icicles falling from her eyes while the air around her became noticeably cooler. "An' I, I-I still don't know what it was. I'm scared."
"Dawn...I'm sorry."
She sniffed. "I-it's not, you. So don't—I just, I ain't sure I wanna remember, either. I feel like you'll hate me if you remember."
"Hey!" Cynthia leaned forward, standing part way up, catching the other girl's chin with her outstretched hand and pushing it up to face her. "Look at me. Nothing you've done, and nothin' you'll ever do, is gonna make me hate you. So—just forget that, okay?"

The tall vixen took in a somewhat ragged breath, and the air around her warmed again. She was still crying, but more slowly—and her tears weren't frozen anymore. "O-okay. I'll..try, anyway."
Cynthia sighed, and let go so she could sit down again. "Good enough. You should really eat, though."
"Mmh."

Whatever it was, it had to be the same thing she remembered being angry about—but what stuck in her head the most was Dawn saying it also felt like it was right. The anger she could partially recall felt...complicated, in a similar way. Not mixed with justification, but a sense of...relief? Like something was gone that she'd never wanted to see destroyed, but had always wanted to be free of nonetheless. She was...equally unsure that she really wanted to remember it; it was obviously going to be painful for both of them if they did.

---

Amory had his laptop out on the coffee table where they could both see it from the couch, and leaned up to it to navigate the wiki as he went through what seemed to be the major players, going roughly in the order he thought of them.

"..And, this is Las Espadas," he said, sitting up straight once again. "She's..sort of the whole 'organization' in Mexico. I mean, there's some other vixens acting independently around the country, and it's not clear how much contact she actually has with them, but as far as being...known, by their government, she's it." The wiki's picture of her was sharper than most, obviously taken professionally. It showed a short vixen with blue eyes and black hair and fur, wearing what looked to be full combat gear, giving a small grin with her arms folded toward the camera. There were several long, fairly thick lines of bright blue light floating in the air around her pointed in various directions; the ones that weren't pointed mostly toward or away from the camera could be seen to have a sort of t-shape with a much shorter line close to one end, crossing through the longer line perpendicularly.

"You don't make that sound like a good thing," Blake said.
"Yeeeeaaah. She uh, you know—in the first few days before the monsters started showing up, when a lot of vixens were just going around doing...whatever they wanted? She was one of the worst. By which I mean—she pretty much went on a killing spree of drug cartels, crime lords, elected officials she deemed 'corrupt'—which, I don't know that she was necessarily wrong about that—but uhhh, also anyone else who got in her way, including police, normal citizens, and several other vixens."
"So, she just went straight to using her power to kill anyone she decided was 'evil'."
"You could say that, but uh." Amory hesitated, flinching slightly.

"For her actual targets, it wasn't just...killing. There's some stuff the news wasn't even willing to describe, much less show photos for. Her power lets her summon those 'light blade' things and throw them around through the air," he said, pointing to the lines of light in her picture, "and I think she can do the same thing with her original sword and the weapons she 'got' from the other vixens she's killed. They say she pretty much..dismembered or completely shredded her victims, wrote messages on the walls or floor with their blood...that kind of thing. At first she declared herself 'Las Espadas de la Justicia'—the swords of justice, basically—but people pretty quickly replaced that last word with 'Muerte'—death. Lately everyone settles for just the first two words."

Blake shook his head. Naturally, he wasn't happy to see someone getting away with something like that. "So if she..did all that, then why..?"

"Well—once the monsters started showing up, she basically agreed to a truce with the Mexican government and, kinda the world at large: She fights off the monsters, and won't kill anyone except in self defense. That isn't—all of the terms of the agreement, though: She strongarmed them into basically giving her an official governmental position to try and root out 'corruption' in a...not so murder-y way. But it's still...touchy.

"Either way, though, she's—not like Tobias," he continued. "She's actually been taking down the monsters more effectively than most of the world."
"'Cause she has way more power than most of us do alone," Blake said.

"Yeah. But at least she's like..using it for something other than killing people now? Like, fairly early on this one monster managed to eat three vixens in Cuba, and she rode a jet out there after dealing with some of her own local monsters and took it down by herself. I woke those three up the other day, so..she not only got them out of there, but didn't try to take their powers at all."

Blake sighed. "This is..probably why I didn't want to hear too much about what was going on in the rest of the world. I mean, I guessed I'd hear about some people like that. And it's likely I'll have to meet her, too."
"Well, nobody said you have to lie about what you think," Amory said. "The VI's basically said they're giving her the same 'deal' as everyone else: Don't kill people and cause chaos now, and we'll—at least temporarily—ignore what you did in those first few days. That seems fair, I mean, there's plenty of people in America who got powers, or more power, by killing vixens early on, and many of the vixens actively working with the VI now committed much worse crimes than Ning ever did. It's just that Las Espadas is one of the ones who did..more than most."

"Fair enough. I just—don't get the sense she'll regret what she did at all," he said.

---

Cynthia couldn't possibly understand this feeling. But—did that matter? She didn't need to understand it to care. Dawn was reasonably sure she didn't understand some of what the redheaded vixen was feeling, either. She hadn't understood why her first thought right after Rowan had said her piece (after fighting that dragon) had been to challenge her to a fight. Maybe it was something she said—and did—without thinking about it at all. That was kind of a non-explanation, though; the impulse to do it without thinking still had to come from somewhere.

Both of them turned toward the sound of footsteps nearby. The cafeteria was fairly noisy overall, but they'd purposely picked a nearly empty corner far from the serving lines, which most people wouldn't bother going the distance to reach as long as there was closer seating available. It was—Rowan, carrying a tray of food himself. He didn't slow his walk when they noticed him, nor speed it up, instead maintaining the same brisk pace as always. Eventually he came to the seat next to the empty one to Cynthia's left.

"May I join you two?"
"Sure, go ahead," she responded for both of them—not that Dawn particularly minded. Her voice sounded slightly sarcastic, but it almost seemed not to be that way on purpose.

"How are you feeling? I'm sorry I haven't been around much today."

"You're busy doing important stuff, right?" Cynthia said; it was like she was trying but failing to wring the sarcasm out of her own tone of voice. "It's not like we're all that important."
"You're both extremely important to me," Rowan said firmly. "That's why I'm apologizing."
"...Fair enough, I guess.

"So. What've you been doin' all day, then?"

"Preparation. Diplomacy. Training. Phone calls. Meetings," Rowan sighed. "Exhausting work, but someone has to do it. I don't really know how I got picked for this job, apart from just falling into it."

"You must be pretty good if it's that important and they haven't fired you yet."

"Hmmh."

"..I heard you both found out how Cynthia died."
"Yeah, we did."
"Mmhm. Hugo was just tryin' to show us how to use a computer, and got to see us screamin' at each other," Dawn said.

"..It was mostly me. But, yeah."

"We both..remembered, after we saw. The promise."
"You knew about it the whole time, right?" Cynthia said.

Rowan nodded slowly. "I think I'm getting too used to hiding information from people for 'their own good'. I thought it would be painful to hear, and confusing—maybe even enough to damage the trust between you two, if you didn't remember any of the context."

Cynthia crossed her arms, already finished eating by now. "Well, you're right about that, I guess..."

"If there's anything else you want to know about your past, I'll tell you. You're not...you seem to have enough of 'yourselves' back to make that decision without my help."
"That's cool and all, but..we pretty much just got through agreein' there's somethin' we don't wanna remember just yet," she said. Dawn didn't remember any such agreement in particular, but...was grateful for this anyway.

He nodded again. "Just let me know if either of you changes your mind."

"...I'm sure you noticed, but Hugo isn't very good at helping people through emotional trauma. Neither am I," Rowan said. "There are people whose..job it is, generally, to help with things like that. Someone you can talk to in complete secret—who will never, ever tell anybody else what was said in that conversation. And, who would also try to help you sort things out for yourself, as best as possible."

"That don't sound too bad," Dawn spoke up. "You know one of those?"
"The VI can find someone for you, if you want," Rowan said. "I came here to explain that, and make the offer. Normally they work one on one, but if it would make you feel better, I suspect someone could be persuaded to speak with both of you together for some sessions."

Dawn looked at Cynthia; she was fine maybe talking to someone like that by herself, but...unsure how the other girl would feel about them possibly keeping secrets from her...nor how Cynth would feel about spilling her own guts to a complete stranger with nobody else around.
"Heck, we're both pretty screwed up, amnesia or not," Cynthia said, shrugging, after a moment. "Worth a shot, right?"
"Y-yeah.." Dawn nodded.

---

The list continued on from there. While Las Espadas was one of the outliers in terms of the sheer amount of blood on her hands, the number who'd actually killed people (vixens or not) was more than Blake had expected. There were several, like the vixens from Japan, who hadn't killed anyone other than in self-defense and seemingly tried to do only good with their powers, but it was at best an even split with people who chose to start killing people as soon as they got powers—or as soon as they realized that murdering another vixen would make them stronger. And..these were the ones Amory thought were of note as possibly representatives or leaders who could show up at the 'summit' that night.

"I guess that's..basically everyone I can think of," Amory concluded. "I mean—I could go down each country's list on the wiki, but since you're not really expected to know any of them in the first place, this is maybe enough to just give you a feel for things, at least?"
"Yeah..." he mumbled distantly.

"Is it just me or...?"
"Hmn?"
"Well, it seems like a disproportionate number of people who got powers already had a list in their heads of 'people I will kill if I can get away with it'. And so many of them more or less did."

Amory shrugged. "I guess so. It probably has something to do with her seeking people with 'violent desires'. I mean, there's not many 'want to's' more violent than murder, right? But, hey—if someone commits a murder and then chooses to spend maybe the rest of their life risking themselves to save other people..maybe it doesn't make up for it, but at least they're trying to do good now?"

"I agree intellectually—I mean, I've always felt like anyone who's actually sorry about what they've done should get a second chance, an opportunity to change and do good, instead of only ever being punished for their past actions. But..." Blake shook his head. "It still makes me feel a little sick. Maybe there are—or, should be—limits to that idea."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then: "...There's one...well, I'm not gonna go so far as to call it a 'good thing', but there's something."

Amory watched his roommate's expression carefully. "Which is?" It was unusually cold, with a faint hint of anger—none of which really screamed 'I thought of a positive side to this' to Amory.

"I was starting to wonder, I guess, after seeing the way she was last night, talking to Ning. If...she really did felt guilty about everything she's done, if she's capable of actually changing. But—no."

"Out of everyone on Earth she could've given powers to, trillions of people, she picked—some of us who wanted to do good or at least not evil, in maybe a violent way or something, sure. But she didn't do a thing to filter out anyone who just wanted to kill people, or wanted something badly enough to kill whoever was in their way to getting it, or...mentally ill people who endangered themselves and others with that power."

His voice was calm and even, but seething with a buried rage—maybe even hatred. All of this was foreign and borderline terrifying coming from Blake. "Before the monsters even showed up, she'd basically already done part of their work for them: Killing people, destroying things, throwing the whole world into chaos. And it's not any of that she was ever sorry for. She was sorry she had to see Emma upset—just her, because it meant she couldn't have any more fun 'pretending' to be her friend. She's still the same Hedonistic, selfish jerk she introduced herself to me as, and at least as evil as the thing she's helping us fight anyway."

Amory nodded slowly; he couldn't disagree with this, as much as some part of him wanted to. "She's just the monster on our side," he said slowly. "I don't..even think her mind works the way ours does, to have anything like the same kind of morality or conscience. If I had to guess, maybe it didn't even occur to her that there was any meaningful difference between people who'd go on killing sprees and people who wouldn't, not really. I assume she just plugged the numbers in and figured the damage they'd do wouldn't be bad enough to worry about in the long-term. Not that—I mean, even if that's true, it doesn't change the fact that a lot of people died for basically no reason."

"No, they did die for a reason," Blake said quietly, sitting up and pushing against the armrest on his side. "They died so she'd have something to watch until the rest of the monsters showed up." He stood up and left for his bedroom after that, leaving a sense of contempt and disgust hanging in the air.