Battle Vixens! - 118

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Episode 118: Calm Before

Warp noticed Dawn sitting alone in the cafeteria, a tray of empty dishes that used to contain breakfast on the table in front of her. She teleported to just outside of the tall vixen's view and walked up on the opposite side of the table. "Oi, guard pup. Where'd your master go?"

She sat up slightly, looking confused. "Huh?"

"Cynthia?"
"Oh...she's uh, went to therapy...after breakfast. Said she had some stuff to unpack...alone." Dawn's ears drooped, and she slumped down again, especially on this last word.

Warp sat down, leaning in slightly to force their eyes to meet. "Really? I thought if anyone was cracked in the head, it'd be you. Especially after yesterday."

Dawn looked away. "...Sorry."

"Hey, 'sorry' won't keep me alive." Warp hit the table with a fist, just hard enough to make the silverware on Dawn's tray jingle. "I'm used to working with—more often for—unstable people, but that's not really what I expect out of this job."

Dawn jumped at the noise, then folded her ears back, looking briefly alive again—getting a flash of anger. "I ain't usually like that! It was—just—too much. All at once, and she—..." A few tears appeared in her face, and she slumped and looked away again.

Warp sighed; this wasn't going much of anywhere. "Look, I really don't care about the finer points. I'm plenty happy to stay out of everyone else's business except when it nearly gets me killed again. So I'll just tell you this, as free advice: No matter how much you care about her, look after yourself first. You can't protect anyone in the state you were in yesterday."

Since Dawn didn't respond verbally to this, she shook her head and stood up, not giving the courtesy of walking out of sight before teleporting herself away. She'd have to think of some other way to deal with this. One way or another, she was not going to have a repeat of yesterday's near-death experience. After all, the whole point of this endeavor was to get herself a little farther away from death.

---

After breakfast, Blake drove into town, parked, and found somewhere to shift forms and be Light. She thought through Ning's location at the new location of her store, and Rory's at her house, and so settled on a park roughly halfway between the two—posting herself so that she could respond to an attack an either direction. More specifically, she found a bench to sit and wait on. She was invisible, but this bench was rather out of the way, and the park had barely any people in it right now to begin with...so the risk of someone else wanting the bench and nearly sitting on her was very low.

Being able to sit down and lean back while she waited was a bonus. It wasn't raining yet, but the sky was overcast, and she could easily feel the difference between the bright daytime sun she was used to having charge her up during battle and how the cloud-dimmed light right now felt. She was going to have to hold back on fighting, focus on illusions—which mostly felt low-cost and effortless—but, as she'd assured her roommate that morning, it shouldn't be too difficult to do that.

What she wasn't expecting was a call about midway into the stakeout. She got out her phone in a brief panic that someone might hear it ringing from an apparently unoccupied bench and come looking to see if someone was missing a phone. Initially she was planning to just reject the call and put the thing on silent, but then saw who was actually calling: Lift, of the "No Evil" team, through the VI app. What did that mean? Did that team need help or something? That thought alone meant she couldn't just ignore it, so she quickly answered instead.

"Yoo, Light, how ya doin'?"
"Uh..okay. Is something wrong?"
"Huh? No, nah, not unless being temporarily bored counts. I just thought I'd check on our neighboring team's leader, is all, since it sounds like today's gonna be pretty rough."
"I'm not—"
"I know, I know, you don't give commands or whatever. But you're still, like, the 'leader' morally speaking. As in, it's you who inspires everyone around you to fight—that much is obvious."
"I guess.." She sighed, not really wanting to argue about this point.

"Hey, hey—are you holding up okay, though? You sound kinda tired, and I guess the weather can't be good for your powers, right?"
"I'm..I'll be all right," Light said, trying not to let the worry that a nearly-complete stranger already seemed to know her powerset's most fundamental weakness. "I know my limits."

"Good, good. Just—you know—we owe y'all one, or maybe like six, so gimme a call if you need a hand. We'll do what we can, send someone over maybe."
Light semi-unconsciously shook her head. "I..couldn't ask you to do that, when it's as dangerous where you are as it is here."

"Hahah, we'll see. Anyway, best of luck out there today! Fight well and all that. Whoop, I got another call comin'!" With that, Lift abruptly hung up again.

Light stared at her phone for a moment after that, the free hand scratching one of her ears. What had that been about, really?

---

"'Limited combat usefulness', wasn't it?" Rowan had been asked to help the research team's efforts by going to one of the VI's unoccupied courtyards, in vixen form, to spar with Hephaestus. She was actually there ahead of Rowan, and had an impatient, annoyed expression on. "Have you changed your mind about that?"

"I have not." She sighed, drawing out a pair of blades into her hands. "I abhor violence in the first place. This was entirely Ezekiel's idea, and he would not shut up about it. He claims that we need 'a better grasp of the scope of my powers, especially against a magic-wielding opponent'. I would prefer to have this over with as quickly as possible."

Rowan nodded. "Moving on to the next thing on my schedule is a priority for me, also. How should I fight, then?"
The small, mostly-white-haired vixen visibly paused to consider, then said, "If you form limbs with water to restrain me, the fight will be over without having gained any useful data. I would not survive an encounter with your 'dragon form', either. So—use your magic for projectiles only, and your weapon freely. As you would have fought before you gained the 'full use' of your powers."

"I'll still be cautious not to hurt you," Rowan said, moving to a ready stance.

"I appreciate that, but note that I lack the experience to guarantee that I can do the same."

"Understood."

Both of them stood quietly apart from each other, each waiting for her opponent to make the first move. Heph's stance was loose, almost relaxed, and to an unaware observer it might not appear that they were fighting at all. Rowan eventually decided to try to create an opening, making a small blade of water form to her opponent's left without moving her hands. Her expectation was that Heph would either see or hear it just in time to block, and leave an opening; instead, she seemed to react before the blade had even fully formed, swinging her blades in quick succession in that direction to 'cut open' the space there and make a portal whose other end was a few inches behind Rowan. While the blade's momentum carried it through the portal, she was easily able to let go of it so that it splashed down as harmless water before reaching her.

Anyway, by then she had already moved forward in an attempt to capitalize on the expected opening. Her blade swept forward and met one of Heph's, so she let go of it, reforming it in the other hand and swinging from a different direction, meeting the other blade. By then, her opponent was parrying the first blow, recovering quickly into a chop. She turned aside of that swing, letting go of her weapon again in the process, and formed several more water blades surrounding Hephaestus.

Again, Rowan expected one thing and got another: Instead of attempting to press forward and capitalize on the advantage of blocking her blows, the small vixen hopped back out of the path of the new set of blades, using her weapons instead to cut open a portal and immediately leap through it. Again, it was like she knew where they'd be before they had even formed.

It was mostly Rowan's instincts that saved her, prompting her to dive to one side as Hephaestus came upon her from above and behind swords-first. She was left rolling briefly before hopping back to her feet, raising her blade to try to block a follow-up swing from one of Heph's blades, then quickly swapping her weapon to the other hand to block the other blade.

From here, they went through a rapid dance of strikes and blocks, with Rowan mostly on the receiving end. Hephasestus was fast, agile, and her use of her swords was ideal: Precise, calculated strikes with no overcommitments, no wasted energy, and very little in the way of openings between them. Even though she was constantly trading her weapon back and forth between her hands, and Heph—while she probably could do something like that—wasn't, not being able to have two weapons physically present at once still made it harder to keep up. But the thing that seemed to tip her over into being at a real disadvantage was that Heph always seemed to see her tricks coming—she seemed to know when Rowan was swapping hands, and no amount of changing up her timing appeared to be enough to fool her.

The one thing that tended to save Rowan in situations like this was her ability to think while her body did the fighting. Hephaestus's main stated power, besides the portals, was the ability to 'see' magic. That had to be what she was doing—she could see Rowan's powers having an effect on the water vapor in the air before she'd really achieved anything with them, and she could see the sword about to be summoned before it was fully there. The only way to get around an advantage like this...was to turn it against her.

Rowan began forming some low-effort, harmless bubbles of water behind her opponent, to no effect. She repeated this a few degrees up at a time until they were just enough in Hephaestus's peripheral vision for her to react—expecting a blade, she hopped back, and when Rowan made more bubbles appear in front of her in an arc, she drew her blades and slashed the air to make a portal once again, jumping through it.

It was impossible to know exactly which direction the other end of that portal was going, except that it couldn't be anywhere Rowan could see right now—so right in front of her was the safest. She sprinted forward several steps, waving her hand behind her to form about ten spinning water-blades in some random locations and orientations back there. When Heph dove down out of her portal, she had to drop her weapons and twist around in the air to avoid being cut by some of them, and one still managed to scratch her arm. She rolled forward along the ground, and recovered only to a kneeling position, Rowan having already turned around with her weapon drawn, the tip of the blade down in her direction.

"Enough, I yield."

Rowan nodded, letting go of and dismissing her blade, then offering the same hand down toward Dr. Brand to help her up. "As much as it may pain you to hear this, Ezekiel was correct. Your power does give you a significant advantage, at least in a fight against a vixen."

"I suppose so." She took the assistance, then quickly dusted herself off.

"You also have a great deal of agility and manevuerability, and strong instincts for using your weapons, but—tactically speaking—allowing yourself to rely too much on 'seeing attacks coming' that way is dangerous."

Heph nodded. "I would not be able to use that 'sight' against typical monsters anyway. Only those who have swallowed an empowered would have anything for me to 'see'."

"However, being able to open portals is useful in a variety of ways. If we find ourselves in a situation where you have no choice but to participate in combat—please keep their use of getting yourself and others out of danger at the forefront of your mind."

"Of course.

"At any rate...I must get back to my real job now."
"And I to mine. I hope this has been helpful."
"Right. Should at least get Ezekiel off my back." She turned and left.

As much as she complained, Rowan thought, Dr. Brand wouldn't have agreed to do this just because Dr. Bridges was annoying him. He presented a sour disposition most of the time, but it was clear that they trusted each other quite a bit for having only met a couple of weeks ago.

On his way back through the building, Warp came walking up to him. "What's wrong?" he asked, figuring it had to be something serious for her to not attempt to startle him by teleporting to two feet from his face again—or maybe she'd given up on it, since it hadn't worked the last several times she'd tried.

"Listen. I don't want to work with Cynthia or Dawn today. Anyone else but them."
"Sure," he said first, and then after an appropriately long pause: "Can I ask why?"

She crossed her arms. "I think they're both pretty close to falling apart—Dawn much more so, but she'll drag that other girl down with her. I can't trust folks in that kind of mental condition to not stab me in the back—much less to watch it. Even if it's not as bad as all that, I've got no interest in especially risking my life for other people's drama."

Rowan nodded. "Maybe I'll put you with Hugo or Nico, then—they're both pretty stable. But you do understand that if we have to fight something big, they'll be there with everyone else."

"'Course. I don't want to be unreasonable," she said.
"Anyway, thanks for letting me know...I'll keep an eye on the two of them myself."
Warp nodded. "Best of luck with that, then."

---

Emma noticed Marcus in the hallway between a couple of her morning classes, and waved him over. He ran up after a moment. "Yo!"

"Hey. Um, are you..okay? You know—" her voice went under her breath "—after yesterday and stuff?"
"Uh, yeah, I'm great. I ate a lot and slept pretty much forever, so..I feel pretty good."
"Did your—you have a roommate?"
"Uh-huh?"
"Did he uh..get suspicious of you sleeping a lot?"
"Uhhh, nnooo, not at all," he said. Even Emma could tell he wasn't being entirely honest, but it seemed like if it was a real problem he'd say so. And—she wasn't up to confronting someone about something like that anyway.
"Okay, good. Uhmm..stay on your toes, I guess?" She was kind of the 'more senior superhero' or whatever, and so felt an urge to say something vaguely like that, even as awkwardly as it came out.
"Yeah, always! See ya!" He waved, running off.

---

Simon held his hands in front of his face, making a rectangle with his thumbs and index fingers to look through. "Annd...there, that's perfect! Have her stand still, just like that." Remedy was in his 'frame', and an easel with a canvas on it was between them.

Karis was still in fox-form, sitting down off to one side. "Oh, so you don't want her to kick a leg up in the air, or do a handstand?"

"Only if you want a painting of that."

She pretended to seriously consider it, and then said "Nah." So Simon got to work starting his painting.

"So—what was this big meeting about? Secret stuff, ooorrrr...?"

Simon signed annoyedly. "No, it was mostly soon-to-be-publicly-available information that also could've fit in an email."

Karis gave him a savage grin for that. "Yess, feel my pain!"

He just shook his head, but then he noticed—Remedy seemed to be smiling a bit, too. "Hey, did you tell her to smile?" he asked, pointing. Karis turned to look.

"No, I didn't. Huh." Remedy's expression turned more neutral, but her head tilted ever so slightly to one side.

"Well—I'll have to ask you to keep her from moving her head around like that once I get to the details," he said.

"Anyway, they've classified the monsters into four levels—starting at zero, no doubt because a programmer was involved—to give anyone checking the wiki a quick impression of how big, bad, and dangerous the monster of the day is. You ask me, they should've gone with at least twenty levels. And, there was something about them being on a logarithmic scale," he added with a slight dismissive wave of his free hand.

"Ooh, a log scale! Tell me more."

"Pfft, just that that's how they separate the four so-called 'classes'," he said. "I don't feel like I have to get it to understand that a higher class is a bigger problem."

"But still! This is an amazing opportunity for me to get my kids actually excited about statistics for once. And logarithms! 'Look, we use these to help superheroes fight!' Isn't that great?"

"Well, if it makes you happy," Simon shrugged.

After a moment of silence, his wife said, "Hey. Soo...are you uh, over what happened yesterday? With me, getting hurt and all?"
"You survived, and got healed. So there's nothing to worry about," he said.

"Uh-huuh. So you're not just putting on a brave front for me? Or—for yourself, more like?"
"Now why would I go and do that?" he asked cheerfully.

"Well, I don't think I'm over it," she admitted. "At the time, it—happened so fast, I don't think my brain had any time to process it. And then I was distracted enough by other things, for long enough, that I could put it on hold. But, now that I have time, it feels like it's playing catch-up. I really almost died," she said, quietly.

At this, Simon paused his work, turning his body to face her. His wife's expression really was a bit distressed, with her ears folded down on top of that. "Now, come on, it really isn't like you—isn't like either of us—to dwell on these things. We almost died back when Rowan and Dawn saved us from those pig-things too, didn't we?"

"Yeah, I guess so. It's something else when you get actually mortally wounded, though. I think I know exactly what people crushed under a collapsed building feel before they die, and by definition, most everyone alive doesn't."

"Well—I'm happy to help you unpack that if you want, even though I'm not very good at it," he said. "But the VI has therapists on call too, for obvious enough reasons."
"Hey—admitting you're no good at something?" she said, perking up. "Now that's unlike you, heheh!"

"Well, I certainly can't be perfect at everything," Simon said, "that'd be boring. No contrast to display my genius against."

"Theeere it is. Well, maybe I'll take one of those offers up sometime, if I feel like I need it. I probably—just need to sort through it myself, for now, though. But—you know, I'm here for you too, for the same thing, if you need it."

"...Sure. Thanks."

The painter went back to his work. He hoped to finish before the first wave of monsters showed up today, after all.