Battle Vixens! - 112

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Episode 112: Cats in Bags

Zeno stayed with their 'test subject' on the way back to the VI headquarters, thinking to keep an eye on her until she could leave. Since the vixen who could wake people out of comas was coming, some sort of agreement had been made that that person would ride back with Dr. Quinn—so Magus would have to wait until her business here was concluded. It probably wouldn't take all that long, and just lying back on a couch taking a real nap seemed to be doing the 'artificial' vixen some good anyway.

It didn't escape her notice that something was still bugging Rowan. He watched Simon and his wife leave for home (the former promising to come back and "do his job" within an hour or two) in a way that made it clear it had something to do with them. And, while he was in between that and receiving coma victims for "treatment" and should be resting, he headed for his office instead. After seeing that Clark was going to be keeping an eye on Magus anyway, Zeno went to check on him.

He was making a call in the soundproofed room across from his office when she arrived, and then she watched him cross back to his office with the kind of focus that prevented him from noticing anything other than his next destination. So...it was probably time for an intervention, or at least an attempt at one.

Zeno stepped halfway in and knocked on the door; he'd already gotten behind his desk and started to use his computer for something, and looked up only in response to the noise. "Yes?"
"Not that I'm one to talk, but you're not exactly following your own directive to spend the rest of the day resting," she said. "You need some more coffee?"
"...No, I've had enough," he said, shaking his head.
"You wanna let me in on what's bugging you, then?"

He stared mostly in her direction for a moment, deciding whether or not he could trust her with it. Then he sighed, gesturing to close the door, so she did, leaning back against it with her arms crossed. "I don't think Simon noticed, but the monster that hurt his wife—wasn't acting normally."

"In what way, exactly? It knocked down the wall of the high school, right?"
"Yes, but—there was almost no one in that part of the building by the time it did. Karis only got caught because she had gone back to check for any stragglers, just in case. And she was already buried in the rubble—as good as dead if we hadn't arrived. But it wasn't headed inside through the hole it had made to find more people to kill. It was digging at the rubble like it knew she was alive in there. Like it was looking for her in particular."

"Huh."

Zeno thought about it for a moment. "All of the info we got from the Giver says that the monsters are extremely simple-minded. They basically act on instinct, and have no concept of strategy..nor even the capacity to learn from their mistakes. All of the data and experience we know of supports this. They attack in clear, distinguishable patterns, and often knowing the pattern of a particular 'variant' is a huge step towards fighting it effectively."

"They want to cause as much destruction and death as they can," Rowan continued for her, "inasmuch as the idea of 'wanting' applies to them in the first place. They prioritize those who can fight back. Karis was in no position to fight back. I just wanted to know whether this has happened before."
"Well, of course it has," Zeno said. "Remember the second wave? Literally everyone, including our own Petra for example. And me? Those who got powers then, were targetted beforehand. Clearly the monsters 'know' if someone has a lot of potential, or at least they can 'sense it' or something. And, at least ex post facto, I think it's obvious that Karis had a decent amount of potential."

Rowan nodded, slowly. He was agreeing with what she'd just said without agreeing with her point. "Every person I've heard of that they have targetted recently has been close to someone already empowered. Family, close friends, romantic partners. No one else I've heard of, since the 'second wave' got their powers, has been specifically targetted. Does being close to someone the Giver handed power to automatically translate into having potential? Or vise versa?"
"..Not that I know of. Well—magic isn't entirely logical in the first place, but I agree that such a correlation wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. I certainly don't see how the other way around possibly could." He nodded again—agreeing with her completely this time, because that was his own point he was hearing back.

Zeno raised a hand up to her face, placing an index finger on her cheek. "You knoooow. Maybe instead of us wringing our hands over this, you should just ask the expert?"

"What expert?"
"Theee expert?" She made a forward gesture with both hands. "You know. Just take a nap."
"Oh."
"It can't hurt to ask, right? Worst case, she doesn't show up and you still get some shut-eye."

"I suppose so..."

At this point, their coversation was interrupted by a message on Rowan's phone. After a brief glance at its screen he nodded, standing up. "But it'll have to wait until we're through waking people up."

---

Dawn had...killed her father.

Cynthia spent a few seconds confused. In the abstract, killing someone's father sounded like a bad thing—downright villainous, even. But the news didn't hit her as hard as it should have. There was something...there had been something at the edges of her thoughts and emotions for a while now, too faint to make any concrete thoughts out of, and yet sharp enough to be a constant influence on her emotions. She never felt quite right trusting anyone, especially if that person was older, or an authority figure. Even now, after fighting alongside the others and seeing what sort of people they were, the suspicion that someone was going to stab her in the back hovered permanently in the back of her mind. Dawn was the only exception to this feeling.

But she had...killed Cynthia's father.

After a second or two, there were some tears coming down her cheeks. It progressed into quietly sobbing after a moment, mourning for someone she didn't quite fully remember. It was a complicated feeling, like a stabbing pain in her heart mixed with an overwhelming sense of relief. It was also..very familiar. Right, of course—she'd known this before. Back when she fully remembered him.

She reached a sleeve up to wipe her face. Dawn looked sad and worried, but not particularly sorry. At least, not for the act itself. Sorry she'd had to admit to it—probably a second time—for sure. "I said you'd hate me for it."

Cynthia sniffed hard, some immediate anger helping her pull out of the sobbing just enough to shakily speak. "You—s-stupid idiot! I don't hate you! I'm just...sad."

"I dunno how much you remember...he was a monster," Dawn said.

"He had a monster in him...but he was still my dad," she answered back, quietly. She still didn't quite have a full grasp of any specific memories, but the picture felt much closer to being clear.

Cynthia pushed up from her seat and sort of stumbled forward, hugging the other vixen forcefully. "I know...you only did it 'cause you wanted to protect me. It still..hurt. It still hurts." Dawn returned the hug gently and uncertainly, like she was afraid it would turn into some kind of judo throw. Cynthia waited until her sobbing quieted down before letting go, standing up straight briefly before putting a hand on the table next to her to steady herself.

"...I ain't mad anymore," she said. "I just...need a little time alone. 'Kay?"

Dawn nodded, slowly. It felt like...maybe she understood better than she used to what it was like to lose someone. Cynthia put a hand on her shoulder for a long moment, then turned and walked away, in the direction of their room. There was a gift from that morning that she wanted to retrieve, and then...hopefully find some corner of a room in the complex where nobody would notice her.

---

Rowan showed up to welcome the two vixens in the van once it got to the VI headquarters. After this, Amory was brought through some suspiciously empty hallways to a small sort of infirmary room where around ten comatose vixens were waiting. Presumably there had been some excuse made to clear people out of this particular route so that nobody who didn't "need to know" would see her. Void followed too, since she was supposedly being awakened at the same time. This way the others would presume that she'd simply been brought here like them, and woken up before them.

She stood in a corner and watched Amp work, the group of strangers in the room quickly striking up conversations—at least, those who spoke the same language. Even though some of the girls Amp woke up didn't seem to understand the words she was saying, it at least seemed like they understood well enough what was going on: She had awakened them after they'd been eaten, and now everyone was waiting here for a few minutes. Once the work was done, Rowan gestured for Amory to go to a back room and then brought in some VI office workers, including interpreters for those who didn't speak English. In the span of a few minutes or so, it sounded like everyone cleared out except for Rowan and Void...so she poked her head out the door, and confirming this was the case, came the rest of the way out.

"Everyone's left already?"
"Not quite," Rowan said. "Most are still arranging transportation. Void's team lead is on her way here to pick her up." His phone buzzed and he paused to briefly glance at it. "...She's arrived; I'll bring her here. Lift is sworn in on your existence already," he noted, then briskly left.

"...Efficient," Void commented after a moment of silence. "Done this before?"
"Well uh..I've woken people up before," Amp said. "But this is only the second time we've done a bunch of people. I guess Rowan must have made a plan for when my help was needed again, after that. Or...if not him, then someone in the VI, at least."

"Not tired?"
"Hmn?" Amp tilted her head slightly. "Oh, me? No, my power gets refreshed when I wake someone up. And...it doesn't really seem to tire me out to use it in the first place. I guess it's an advantage of having a non-combat power," she shrugged.

Both of them paused, hearing footsteps and conversation in the hallway. "..up to your discretion," Rowan's voice finished a sentence. "If you don't want to use it at all, that's also fine. But in that case, it'd be best if you send it back—we only have so many, and I'm told they aren't exactly easy to make."
"Cool, cool.." Lift's voice (which Amory recognized from the phone conversation with Light). "Well, I haven't got an answer for who to give it to right on the spot, but I'll put some serious thought into it."
"Good."

He opened the door at this point, and the blond vixen ran straight to Void, half-tackling her with an excited hug. "Void! My gosh, we really thought we'd lost you this time!"

The formerly-deaf vixen returned the hug gently, patting her on the back a couple of times. "Good to see you too, Lucy. Have some news..."
"Oh, yeah?" Releasing the hug, Lift took a couple of steps back, seeming to very deliberately create a specific amount of space between them. The reason for this became obvious when Void lifted her hands and started rapid-fire signing at her team lead, who nodded—appearing to understand it perfectly—and then signed back just as quickly. Despite her crash course earlier, Amp couldn't follow this silent conversation at all.

After watching this for a few seconds, Amp turned back to Rowan. "So uh..guess my work's done here?"
"Right," he nodded. "It would be best for you to use human form in the more public areas."

"'Kay."

Seemingly done talking to Void for the moment, Lift came over to the two of them. "Hey, thanks for waking her up," she said to Amp. "No need to worry, I'm sworn to secrecy about you and all."
"No problem~," she replied cheerfully.
"Hah, seems to me like you're more of a 'Waker' than a 'Dreamer' though, eh?" She then immediately changed both her subject and who she was addressing: "Yo, Rowan—Void tells me you've got a vixen here with a disability? By the name of Sam? Think you could introduce me real quick?"
"I'll have to see where she is..but that shouldn't be an issue," he said.

---

Once all of the VI's visitors had been seen off, Rowan headed to his room for a much-needed nap. There was still a lot more business to conduct today, but it wouldn't do any good to run himself into the ground. Besides which, there was one bit of business that he could only conduct while he slept...

Standing over the bed, he spoke the phrase to change back into a blue-haired fox-girl. It always seemed like the magic that changed them had some sense of context; in this case, the clothing she wound up in was a simple nightgown, appropriate for sleep. It was a little odd, but it did save the trouble of changing clothes—or changing back after she woke up. For now, she lay down, willing herself to go to 'her' room in the strange dreamspace.

Rowan wasn't the kind of person who normally had a lot of difficulty getting to sleep, and it was doubly so after a hard half-day or so's work. She sat up in the strangely large, archaic, ornately decorated bedroom in no time at all, and turned to hop down off of the bed, instinctively stretching for a moment before remembering her surroundings again.

There wasn't any knock at the door, nor any large, many-tailed fox-woman already waiting for her in the room. The Giver probably knew that she had a question to ask, so..did this mean that she didn't want to answer? Or that she'd prefer to answer over twitter, maybe? It was just as likely that she was simply waiting a while before showing up to mess with Rowan.

She went up to the door, thinking: When Amory wanted to connect two people's dream spaces, all she had to do was knock on the door. What would happen if somone else knocked, from the inside? If nothing else had gotten that woman's attention, then maybe this wouldn't either...but it couldn't hurt to try. She raised her hand and tried a formal, loud few knocks, and then waited, crossing her arms, for a moment.

Even though it was the result she wanted, and perhaps even expected, Rowan was still slightly startled when the door opened. She recovered quickly enough to take a couple of steps back as the tall woman who owned the dream space stood on the other side, placing her far enough away to look up at her face. "Hello there~." She had the usual kind of smug grin on. "You wanted to ask me something?"

"Correct." Logically, there should be something—somewhere on the other side of the door for the Giver to be standing in. But Rowan couldn't make out anything other than the fox-woman herself. She'd gotten a little more used to the lack of logic in this dream space since her first couple of encounters with it, however, and so continued without much pause: "I assume you also already know what it is."

"Well, sure, but just spitting information at someone isn't nearly as fun as having an actual conversation," she replied. "Won't you invite me in?"
"..Please come in." Rowan made a point to move aside. "I was under the impression this place was entirely 'yours' to begin with."

"For now, but it won't be that way forever," she said, gliding inside and seeming to close the door behind her with a flick of one of her tails. "Even so—landlords don't usually barge into their tenants' bedrooms uninvited, now do they?"

"I'd offer you a chair, but..oh." Rowan had gone to gesture at the complete lack of chairs in the room, but found that two of them had suddenly materialized while she wasn't looking that way.

"How kind of you~," the Giver said teasingly, then seemed to disappear from standing next to Rowan and appear already seated in the larger, more comfortable-looking of the two. The blue-haired vixen just shrugged and went to sit in the other one.

After this, she went straight into her question, starting to get impatient with all of the theatrics. "It appears that the monsters are targetting those closest to people you granted powers to, to the exclusion of others who are equally incapable of fighting back effectively. This does not match any previously known pattern of their behavior, unless such persons all possess high levels of potential. As our primary source of information on the way that this threat to our world operates, I assume that you have some explanation?"

She briefly pretended to need to think about it, putting a finger under her lips. "Hmmn...why, of course I do.

"The enemy instinctively seeks out those with power, because they are the greatest threat to its aim—and because consuming them gives it access to that power, at least temporarily. It also has a sense of potential—it can 'smell' those who could soon become a threat to it, and just as instinctively seeks to eliminate them, when it finds itself in absence of any immediate threat. That is how and why it targets those with potential."

"That does not answer my question."
The Giver chuckled condescendingly. "Patience, dear, I'm getting there! You see, when someone has a large amount of magical power, and especially when they display or use it on a frequent basis, it leaves a 'trace' of itself on everyone physically near that person. It is quite faint, but in some worlds can still be used to track powerful magic users: Find where they have been and who they have been with. The enemy can 'smell' this as well, once the trace has built up on an individual for long enough.

"Now, don't misunderstand me. It isn't the least bit intelligent; it lacks the capacity to have a concept of 'friends' or 'family' or 'love'. Rather, the enemy tends to target those who it senses such a trace upon because it is too stupid to tell the difference between a trace of another, stronger power belonging to someone else, and the potential of the person the trace was left upon to possess something similar."

"In other words...it targets those closest to people who have powers, because they've left a 'trace' on the people who they are physically nearby for long periods of time."
"That's right!" She was smiling like someone who had just helped another person realize something extremely obvious. Rowan was not smiling.

"...Why did you not warn us? We could have taken measures to prevent the loved ones of those empowered from being attacked!"

"Oh, don't be ridiculous.

"What would you have done if I had? Tell every single person I gifted power to to avoid close contact with those they cared about the most? To avoid frequent contact with anyone whatsoever? How would they do that? How would you make them do that? You require food and drink largely produced by others to survive; you lose your minds from long-term isolation; your entire society is structured around living in close proximity to others.

"And even if you could find a way to make it all work in practice, do you honestly think that people who chose to quarantine themselves off from their own support systems would be better warriors for it, or that you could keep those unwilling to do so from reaching their loved ones by force? Your world would not survive such massive wastes of energy by the only ones capable of defending it, and if those in charge were halfway intelligent, then they would very swiftly realize this.

"In short, there was no use in tormenting you all with such a decision when the end result is so obvious. At least, not when it would be so tedious to watch you slowly and agonizingly make."

"..And yet you chose to tell me now."
"Well, you were curious, weren't you?" she shrugged. "Anyway, you more than most humans know what to do with dangerous secrets, now don't you?" With this, she winked, then vanished, leaving Rowan alone again in 'her room'.

It seemed much more clear to Rowan now why the Giver had gone out of her way to make her ask, instead of just telling her. She had her own sideways kind of ethics, all centered on her every action being 'fair'—was Ezekiel's opinion, at least. In this case it meant that, to her, it was Rowan's own fault for asking, and her hands were completely clean in answering that question. So what did she expect Rowan to do with this 'dangerous secret', exactly?

This didn't prove a difficult question to answer, upon giving just a little bit of thought: Bury it.