Battle Vixens! - 128

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Episode 128: The Other Shoe

Amp bent over in front of the redheaded vixen, then gently pulled her into a hug. "Nngh..AAAH!" A burst of fire went out from her body for a second, singing the cot, before pulling back into her body.

"Shhh...it'll be okay..." Cynthia breathed heavily and loudly a couple of times, let out something like a sob, and then her breaths stabilized. Amp let go and got out of the way so she could sit up and look around.

"...Thanks, I guess. Have we, met before?"
"I was around when you were 'revived'. But we didn't really talk. I'm Amp," she said.
"The one who can wake people up, huh."

"That's me!" she said with a bright, sweet smile. "Oh, most people aren't s'posed to know about me, though."

Cynthia nodded. "I'll keep a lid on it, then..."

Looking around the room a little more, she spotted Rowan standing off to the side. "Guess you think I got reckless again? That ain't it, I promise. Maybe there was another option, but—I just thought if that thing was gonna get me or her, it'd better be me. My power was hardly workin' in all that rain as it was."

"I thought that might have been your reasoning," he said. "She was able to keep it from using your power very effectively."

"That's...good. Where is she, anyway?"
"Waiting outside. I thought...you might want some space, for a moment."
"I did. But...I'm ready now."

Cynthia stood up carefully, then went over to the door. She paused briefly to look Amp's way one more time. "Thanks—really. I wouldn't-a had the confidence to just jump in front of that thing...relearn what it's like to be in one—if I wasn't so sure someone would be there to wake me up after."
"Glad I could help," Amp said.

After she left, Rowan said, "I suppose you'll need to head back out right away."
"Yeah," she nodded. "I wanna make sure there's plenty of time before the monsters show up."
"Pass on a message to Light for me. If she needs my power...use it. As soon as I know it's possible, I'll be heading your way to assist."

"Got it."

"Cynth!" Both of them came together into a hug for a long moment. Dawn was sobbing, which made the other vixen tear up, too. After they both let go, however, she took a couple of steps back. "I guess..we need to talk, huh."
"Yeah, we need to talk," she said. "Ain't any good to swallow our feelings just to make each other feel better. They just..boil up to the surface at the worst times anyway."

"Uh-huh..."

Dawn sniffed. "All I ever wanna do is protect the people I care about...but every time I try to keep you safe, I do somethin' stupid, an' you get hurt bad instead."

"You're so much better than I am, though," Cynthia said. "I keep on dragging you down. There's all these other folks who care about you—who care about both of us—and you can't give up your life, and all of them, just for me. Not no more."

"I guess...we got so used to havin' nobody but each other to depend on, we hardly know how to be around everyone else."

Cynthia crossed her arms, taking a deep breath. The thought had come to her in the middle of the excruciating pain inside that monster's belly, but as horrible as it was, it still felt like it was true. At the very least, Dawn needed to hear her say it—she needed to let it out of her own mouth.

"Maybe we...shouldn't be 'together' anymore, you know? Maybe, just for a little while. Clingin' so tight to each other all the time's...just gonna lead to us tearin' each other apart."

Dawn sniffed again, some tears freezing themselves on the way down her cheeks. "I know.." she choked out. "You're right. Always are. Still...hurts."
"...Yeah. Hurts for me, too."

---

Emma's hiding in our apartment.

She's worried people could find her in hers.

Amory had been warned about the basic situation by a couple of texts from his roommate, but that didn't quite prepare him for the sight he saw when he unlocked the door and came inside. There was no light—besides the faint rays of badly-overcast sun from the windows—and Emma was crumpled into a little ball on the floor, facing the wall. For most people, fox-forms meant an upgrade in physical ability, raw power, and confidence, but Amory couldn't help the feeling that she was keeping that form right now just because it was smaller than her human one.

Her ears twitched slightly—having heard him coming in, of course—and she showed her first signs of life in the form of a loud sniff, pulling herself partway out of the fetal position to turn her head half-backwards. "...Hey. Um...B-blake's taking a nap," she said.

"Forget him, what about you?" he said quietly, coming closer. "What're you doing down there?"

"Just...you know...sulking." She sniffed again. "I screwed everything up again, just like I always do..."

"Come on, that's not true. This isn't even that bad—"
"Really!?" she snapped suddenly. And then, angrily: "How would you know?" Then, just as suddenly again, she turned back toward the wall. "Sorry..."

"I guess I don't know," Amory said, skipping over the apology. He felt like she didn't want him too close to her, so he sat down on the edge of the nearest chair instead. "But it's definitely not the end of the world, right? Plenty of other people, never even hid that they were vixens in the first place."

"I know that...I know that! It's just—me, for me, this sucks worse than anyone else, because—I'm me."

"What makes it so bad for you?" His tone wasn't accusatory—he genuinely wanted to understand.
"I hate attention. I hate the feeling that people, so many people I don't know, are looking at me, watching me. I could—I could put up with it when I was 'Gemma', because there was always someone else I could be, and hide behind that and not have to worry about people finding me. But now I screwed that all up! There's nothing to hide behind, and it's my own stupid fault!"

"You knew you'd have to tell people eventually," he tried.
"Eventually...eventually! I can deal with eventually, because it's basically like 'never'! The monsters will be gone eventually. Eventually, everyone else in my family will get old and die! I don't have to worry about that because the person who'll have to deal with it is another me, probably completely different, maybe who's even figured everything out! But this is right now, and I'm not any better than I was when all this started!"
"That's not true," Amory said in a sterner tone.

"It is!" Emma stood up suddenly and turned around. "Look what I'm doing right now!" when she tried to be louder, her voice came out painfully hoarse and cracked, but she seemed to completely ignore this and force it out anyway. "I'm throwing a tantrum over something every other person on this planet could just deal with! But I can't! I've ruined everything all over again, for no good reason!"

"'No good reason'?" Amory noticed at this point that Blake's door was open—and hadn't been before. He took a small step out into the living room. "You saved someone's life, Emma. There are no better reasons."

"I could've done it in a way that wasn't stupid!" she said, turning on him. "That didn't tell everyone 'hey, look at me, I'm Gemma'!"

"From what I saw, I don't know that there was a smarter way to do it. There wasn't any time to think about what to do."
"There had to be another way!"

"This one wasn't that bad," he insisted.

"Oh yeah!?" she advanced on him a few steps, waving her arms his way. "Well I don't see you going out in the halls and saying 'hey everyone, I'm Light! Lemme just transform in front of you so you'll all know it'!"

She stopped, took in a sharp beath, dropped her arms to the sides. "I'm sorry. That wasn't—that's not fair. I'm the one who screwed up."

"You didn't. In that same situation, Emma—I probably would've hesitated. I would've taken too long trying to think of alternatives, and gotten someone killed. That's screwing up. I'd regret it for the rest of my life."
"So you want me to not regret this?!" she said, angry again.
"No, I just..."
"You just what?"
"I can't accept that you did something wrong. There just, weren't any other options."

"Great." Emma put her arms out into the air turned around, pacing back towards the wall. "So I didn't do anything wrong, and my whole life is ruined anyway!"

Amory thought he should try to step in again at this point. "That's an exaggeration, isn't it? It can't be that bad."

She turned around, taking in a sharp breath to retort something angrily, then letting it out again. Some tears were streaming down her face, making him want to get up and go give her hug or something...but she didn't want that, and he couldn't force it on her. She finally squeaked out: "He knows..."
"Wait, who?"
"Your dad!" she said, pointing at him. "He knows, he told me that he figured out you got powers almost as soon as the second wave happened! He basically guessed what kind, too! And he made me promise not to tell you that, so that's another thing I can't do right—but he told me to see how I'd react! I didn't get it at the time, but he was testing me to see whether I'd protect you, even from him! But now he'll know I was just protecting myself!"

Amory needed a long moment to take this news in. He'd known...for that long? And hadn't said anything? It was hard to reconcile this information with everything he'd ever known about his father. But Emma didn't have a habit of randomly making up lies, and she was clearly in a 'too-much-honesty' kind of mood right now.

Finally he said, "No—he's smarter than that. There's no reason it couldn't be both."

"So I guess he's smarter than me. No surprise there."

A tense silence hung over the room for a moment.

Finally, Emma said: "...I should leave, huh? I'm in the way here. I should just, go back to my own room. It's so easy to just use my powers to hide that I'm going in there, and if I don't make any noise and leave the lights off then nobody'll even know I'm there. I should've just done that in the first place."

"You're not in the way," Blake said.
"Well I can't fight!" she snapped back. "Not today! Maybe not ever again! Look at me!" she gestured violently at herself. "I'm still the same coward who stalked you instead of asking you out!" she said, making the same kind of gesture at Amory. Then, waving toward Blake: "And I'm still the same stupid, selfish person who tried to kill you out of jealousy for someone I'd barely even talked to! I...I..." She sniffed, and stumbled backwards, clumsily landing back to sitting on the floor and pulling her arms back around her knees again, pushing her face into them to inadequately muffle a loud, frustrated, angry scream.

She drew her head back up again and sniffed loudly. "Sorry...I'm sorry," she said quietly. "It's just—

"Hi...my name's Emma Hayes," she said slowly, in what seemed like a failed imitation of a calm, friendly tone of voice. "We've, met before, but what you might not know about me is that—even though I'm a really dumb, scatterbrained girl most of the time, sometimes I can be really good at focusing on all of the worst things. And just sometimes, when something makes that extra bad—like when my life goes through a change too big for me to deal with—I have a massive, crippling anxiety attack and just, turn into a huge jerk and lash out at anyone who tries to help me out of it."
She leaned forward a little bit and hugged her knees again. "...It happened when I realized that going to college would mean leaving my family behind and living with a total stranger—I locked myself in my room for a week. April had to leave food in front of the door and then make sure I knew she wasn't anywhere nearby before I'd accept it. I almost missed graduation."

Then she sat up again, letting go of her knees to wave her arms around as she started talking faster and faster: "But then that stranger turned out to be really nice! Her name was Beryl, and she practically sensed it every time it was gonna happen again, and pulled me out of it! Like when that monster ate me and I thought I was better off never using my powers again and never learning anything else, just to keep that from happening again but worse! I was probably just too angry for it to happen when I found out who she really was! But now, because of that—she's gone, and she's never coming back! That person I knew might as well have died! And it's like I killed her," she said, drawing her hands in to point to herself, "because in the end she was just a lie that I figured out the truth about."

She panted after that long stream of words, needing to sniff a couple more times before finally catching her breath. Then she slowly pulled herself back up onto her feet, looking at Blake. "You should..use my power, however you need to, for today. Our emotions affect our powers, and with the way I feel right now, there's no way I can be anything but a, a liability. I'll...try to get over it. But I just—can't make any guarantees. I'm, really sorry about all of this."

Blake nodded slowly. "Take care of yourself. I just—want you to understand one thing. What you did, doesn't make you stupid. It makes you a hero."

Amory had taken the opportunity to stand up and move closer to Emma. After all of that, he couldn't...not try to give her a hug! So he physically made the offer, and she accepted after a second, sobbing again into his shoulder. She pulled out of with another hard sniff. "Sorry...I'll see you later." Then she started off toward the door, making herself disappear again.

After she left, Blake gave Amory a sympathetic expression, mixed with a tinge of stress and exhaustion. "I'm...gonna try to get some more sleep. Guess I should eat before everything starts up, too."
"Yeah. I'll let you know when it's time," Amory said. Then he remembered: "Oh, right—Rowan said you could use her power if you need it. And, if the attack on the city is light enough to make it possible, he'll be coming here himself to help."
"...Thanks."

---

Happy eclipse day!
First: I should admit I cribbed that "Hi, I'm [x], and these are my mental problems!" thing from the comic All Night Laundry. It's probably not as good here, either.
Second: I hope this is adequately conveyed already, but I want to be clear that the problem isn't meant to be exclusively that everyone knows who Gemma is now. That is somewhat bad for her, but the more important thing is that it's pushed her mentally off the edge and into an emotional downward spiral, during which a lot of other unprocessed trauama, doubts, fears, guilt, etc. bubbled back up to the surface.

Battle Vixens! - 127

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Episode 127: The Eye

"So, this is Amory—a friend of mine. I guess you could call him a 'civilian expert' or whatever."

"Uh, I dunno if I'd go that far," he said, shrugging.
"Well, nice to meet ya anyway," Braille said, shaking his hand.

"Light—do you know what happened with Gemma?"
"Magus called and said she thought she'd transformed in front of people," Light answered.
"Worse." Amory handed her his phone, which was open to a shaky phone-video-recording of Emma reciting her phrase, jumping over some people, and punching a monster in the face-slash-telling everyone to run away.

"Oh..yeah." She handed the phone back. "Not much we can do about that, huh. Magus said she ran off after the fight and, they couldn't find her."

"She probably just, needs some time to deal with this..." Despite trying to sound optimistic, Amory couldn't seem to keep the worry out of his voice.

"Anyway!" Rory interrupted the dour conversation. "Braille here was hoping to get Gemma's input on how her powers work and all, but with her being 'busy' for the moment, we were hoping you could help us figure it out anyway?"
"Me? Well, what do you know about it?"
Braille repeated her description of how she experienced her powers for Amory. Light added what she'd noticed during the fight: The monster missing attacks it seemed ready to hit, as well as her own movement occasionally feeling slightly off-target.

"Well, your sense of aim when moving light around isn't usually wrong, right? It's practically automatic."
"Yeah. It was a little disroienting."
"In that case—I don't think the way you help people dodge is as passive as you think," he said to Braille. "You probably couldn't as easily anticipate where she was gonna go, compared to watching people or monsters get ready to move."
"I guess not?"
"To sum it up, then: You're generally aware of where things are around you. And I would guess that, when in a fight, you always feel like you 'want' people to make their dodges and land their hits?"
"Well, yeah—why wouldn't I?"

"I think your power has to do with distances," he suggested. "You can sense distances fairly precisely, and you can also distort it to some extent. Basically warping space to make lengths shorter or longer, even if not by very much."

"That makes sense, I guess. What about the uh..wobbliness, though? Why would the distances I feel not match up with what I see?"
"Can you describe that 'wobbliness' in any more detail?" Light asked. "What's it...'look like'—for lack of a better way to put that?"
"Well, uh...hmm."

Braille took a moment to cross her arms and really, visibly think about it. "It's a little like...the ocean? Back when I first got my powers, and Lucy was showing me some pics and videos, I said, 'what's the ocean look like'? So she pulled up a video of like, the deep ocean, not anywhere near a beach, from above. It shimmered and wobbled up and down, you know? It's..kinda like that, but in all directions instead of just up and down."

Light tilted her head slightly. "...You can't be serious."
"Huh?"

"I think..you must sensing gravitational waves. They warp space—distances—that's how gravity actually works. But the strongest ones do it by amounts so tiny that we need equipment on the scale of several miles long just to register them. And your power is apparently that sensitive. No wonder you get disoriented when comparing it with what you can see using just baseline human vision."

"Oh. Hah, I guess I'm pretty cool, then?" she said, grinning.
"Yeah. I think some theoretical physicists might want your number. Or—experimental?"
"Both, really," Amory said. He paused as his phone buzzed, then glanced at it.

"Huh...oh." It didn't sound like especially good news.
"What is it?" Rory said.
"Well—the vixens in the city had kind of a hard time," he said, putting the phone away. "Cynthia got eaten, but they killed the monster that did it and she's not hurt, at least."
"Ooh. So I guess the VI will be needing to use their usual way of waking her up, then?" she said.
"I guess they will. Uh, for some good news, apparently the Giver told everyone that we're getting a break the rest of this afternoon. The third attack she predicated today won't happen for at least five more hours. Buuuut it is supposed to be 'even worse' than the first two."
"Plenty of time to wake her up, then. I would assume," Dr. Quinn said—the last part added after a brief pause.

"Look...how'd you get here, anyway?" Light asked Braille, not wanting this halfhearted attempt at hiding Amory's powers from her to go on any longer.
"Friend drove me."
"Maybe you should go back. There's no good reason for you to stay here five more hours. We don't actually have...a base, or anything, unless you count the Quinns' house, and if things are gonna be that bad, then your team might need you."
"Maybe? I could stand to check in, at least." She went for the nearest chair, then sat down, undid the blindfold, and pulled a phone from her pocket.

"Are you sure you want to send her away?" Amory asked quietly. "Knowing how much harder things are gonna be already without Ning, plus Gemma might not exactly be in the mood to fight."
"After five hours?" Rory said, earning her a slight glare from him.

"She's helped enough," Light said. "And she was hoping to talk to Gemma, and can't right now. I already explained how they could meet later though—using the dreams? So, I can't keep someone here if they're needed somewhere else."

Braille went straight to talking on the phone; the voice on the other side sounded like Lift's. She sounded less chipper than in her conversation with Light that morning, and even a little tired. After some back-and-forth, the sentence that Light particularly picked up on was: "You think they'll be mad if I have to recall you before the day's done?"

Light gestured slightly at the vixen on the phone at this point; Rory nodded, but Amory pointed emphatically at his not fox ears. Then he sighed. "No, I guess you can't, huh."

---

Amory drove Blake back to the apartment complex, then went to leave Rory by the campus before heading out to the city. Blake walked through the hallways to their apartment feeling kind of sore and listless. At least his human form wasn't so completely soaked—and didn't have nearly as much hair to soak. It'd be nice to just sit on the couch and do nothing, he thought, or maybe just go take a nap. He tried to turn the key in the lock, but then realized that it didn't seem to want to go that way, because the door was already unlocked.

He took a silent, slow, deep breath in and out, trying not to fixate on the worst-case scenario. Perhaps Amory had simply forgotten to lock it. Still, he tried to open the door as quietly as possible, and mentally prepared to speak the phrase to go back to being Light if there was someone in there.

Well...there was someone in there, but at least it was someone he knew. She was sitting on the floor of the living room right in front of the wall opposite the front door, and turned around when it opened. She'd been staring at that wall in the dark, apparently.

"Um...hi." It was Emma, currently in combined-fox-form.

"What are you doing here?" Blake asked, coming inside and gently pushing the door shut behind him.
"Um..I d-didn't wanna go to my own..people know I live there," she said, the second sentence sort of a squeak. Even with relatively little light coming in from the overcast sky outside, he could see she'd been crying. "Sorry. I-is Amory...?"
"He went to the city, to wake someone up." Blake locked the door, then came farther inside, noting a phone face-down on the floor near the wall on the door's side of the room. "How'd you, get in here, anyway?"

"W-well uh, you know how I can make my weapons into lots of different shapes? That, also includes lockpicks..."
"Aaaand, you know how to pick a lock?" He went over to the couch and sat down.

"Beryl taught me how to do it with some hairpins," she said, staring at the wall again. "After about the um, fifth time I forgot my keys. She was like, 'I won't always conveniently be here to let you in, you know'? And then, the sixth time, she was there, but pretended she wasn't to test me...she was always doing stuff like that."

"Pulling pranks?"
"Sorta. When I finally managed to do it, she picked me up in a big hug, said she was proud of me, and made me a big supper. She was...always doing things like that, too."

"I know you technically broke and entered, but you can take a chair if you want," Blake offered.
"Uh, n-no thanks...I'm...I like it here," she insisted.

"Alright then..."

"So, your phone's over there..." Blake said, pointing behind him—not that she was looking. She knew where it was.
"Uh, my family...was calling. I, turned it off, and threw it, at the wall...hope I didn't break it."

"What's your family like?"
"Um...big. My..when my dad proposed, he apparently said 'let's have seven kids!', and meant it."

"And she married him anyway?"

"Mmh. They both wanted a lot of kids. So...I'm number seven."

"What's it like having that many people in your house?"

"Well...I kinda like it, I guess. There's, enough of a crowd that I never really have to worry about standing out too much. The oldest, April, was starting college by the time I got out of elementary school. She's, kinda more like a cool aunt than a sister, really. She's always extra nice to me, I think 'cause she's worried some of the 'middle' siblings might be bullying me or leaving me out, I guess..."

"You know, —"
"I know!" she said a little loudly, cutting him off. "Sorry...I..." She sniffed. "...I know. I just, can't, right now."

"That's fine. We have some time, actually—five hours off."

"'Off'?"
"Before anything else shows up. That's what she told everyone, at least."

"Oh."

"I don't really...know what to think about her anymore," Emma said. "When I..realized...I thought back on all of the little tricks she'd played, and thought she'd just been making fun of me the whole time. It made me angry enough to scream, and pick her up, and wish I could cut her throat. But then she started crying and said she really thought of me as a friend, and, I remembered all the nice things she did, too. There was...never...any time she jerked me around for, just no reason. It was always to teach me something, or help me out. If she pushed me, it was always..to be a better person. It's, still easiest for me, to think of her like she's two different people. But even then, the things she says sometimes sound to me more like 'Beryl'...

"...I wonder what she'd do with me right now."

"Probably laugh at you for being so upset and tell you to 'just get over it'," Blake said, sighing. "It's not like she has any idea what it's really like."
"Maybe..." Emma sounded unconvinced.

"Well." He stood up carefully, "I'm going to go to my room and take a nap. Wake me up if I'm still asleep after...three hours, I guess. There's a clock above the TV."

"...Okay."

---

"...No answer. Drat." Simon plopped his phone onto the table.
Karis arrived with a tray of desserts, sitting down across from him. "Who're you trying to call, dear?" Most of the team had come to VI headquarters for some debriefing, and then the cafeteria.
"Well, it seems like Gemma had a teensy little, 'secret identity malfunction'? I thought she might could use some encouragment? Maybe a little sage advice about being properly famous."

"You try leaving a message? She might be getting quite a few calls right now."
"But she should still answer me first," he said. "After all, I'm the one who can tell her how to respond to everyone else!"

"And yet the world still refuses to revolve around you," she said wryly.

About half a table away, Tora came up to sit across from Dawn—who was presently busy staring down into some untouched food. "Hey—it's dinner, not a TV. Eat up!"

"I'm...not feelin' so hungry," she said.

"When's the last time you ate?"

"Breakfast, I guess."

"Then you, are, hungry," Tora declared. "Your metabolic processes demand fuel! Especially after a workout like we just went through."

"Cynth can't eat right now..."
"Is that what you're worried about? I heard the boss say she'd be up within a couple hours."

"She did say that. Wonder what she's gonna say to me, once she's up."

"'Great job, thanks for saving me'?"

"Nah...more like, 'you idiot, you total moron, why didn't you just move outta the way?'" Dawn sighed. "I dunno...I dunno why. I saw that thing comin' for Rowan, an' I just...lost it, again. Like with the, the bat thing. Every time I go tryin' to protect someone, I do somethin' stupid and..someone gets hurt instead."

"Well, it's not like you didn't protect her, right? Anyway, outta everyone present who could've gotten eaten—well, all that rain must've made it pretty hard for that thing to use fire powers, right?"
"You think it's good it got her!?" Dawn demanded, finally picking up her head to direct a brief flash of rage Tora's way.
"No, no—don't get me wrong," she said, spreading her arms out apologetically. "It's always better nobody gets eaten. But if she's smart, she might've realized, 'better me than her'. And so, knocked you outta the way."

"...She is smart. Smarter'n me by a long shot," Dawn said.

"Smart enough to eat when she's hungry?"

"Guess so."
"C'mooon..." Tora gestured at Dawn's tray. She sighed, and picked up a fork to at least pretend to try to eat.

"Hey, whad'you do in America, when someone's clearly too mad to serve?"

Sam lifted her head to give Warp a long, blank-faced look, then deliberately ate a forkful of food before responding. "Honorable discharge."

"You think the VI can get something like that, maybe?"

"Well." She took a sip of drink before actually answering. "They're not a military organization. Volunteers can always un-volunteer."

"And if they're too stubborn to do that?"
"I s'pose someone would have to convince them. It'd be a little hard to force one of us 'empowered' to stand down for good."

"Guess it would, ey?"

"...There, message recorded." Simon put his phone down again. "Now let me at that cake!"
"Sure, sure," Karis chuckled, pushing the tray across to him. "You're too much, you know that?"
"Mmngh." He grunted through a bite, then swallowed and said: "I'll make every endeavor, in the future, to be precisely enough, then!" He brandished his fork in the air dramatically as he said this, then stabbed it back into the cake.

"Pfft." Karis dug into her own food again.

Rowan came carrying a tray of food, seeming to want to sit with them, so she gave an inviting gesture toward the spot next to her.

"Excuse me. Are you two only having dessert?"
"Why not? Everything else here is—"

"We ate lunch already," Karis said, cutting her husband off.
"Yes, that! So, did you get a reply?"
"...She'll be here as soon as possible," he said, nodding.

"I assume you know what happened to Gemma?"
"Absolutely," Simon said. "One who is the news must always be aware of the news."
"I..spoke to someone about her probable mental state. She may be unable to fight for the rest of the day."

"No way. Gemma's a tough girl," he said. "She'll be over it in a couple of hours!"

"Still. They don't have Ning; there hasn't been much sunlight for Light to work with, and the last attack may even come past sunset. Besides the fact that it's supposed to be even worse than the other two."

"I heard Braille showed up to help out, though."
"Their town needs her back. One of their members is down for today, too."

"I believe I might know what you're getting at, boss. You want to go help them," he said, sweeping his hand dramatically toward Rowan.
He sighed. "I would like to. They need..someone. But I don't know for sure whether I can take the risk."

"People always say 'it's great to be needed'," Karis observed, "but there is such a thing as being too needed, huh?"

Rowan nodded. "So when we learn...what we're all up against. I may leave you in charge here," he said. "Don't screw it up."

"What, me?" Simon asked, gesturing to himself. "It's against my personality type to underachieve!"

"Glad I can count on you, then."

---

I knew these "weather-themed" episode titles would include "the eye" at some point, but I didn't predict until I was writing this the fact that the word "eye" can be thought of as referring to a few different things actually happening here, too. Anyway, anonymous (post here) got Braille's power in one.

Battle Vixens! - 126

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Episode 126: Recurrent Nightmare

"CYNTHIAAAAAAA!"

If anyone thought that a lot of the water had been frozen before, they'd be really impressed now. A giant mass of ice rose up around the turtle, forming something like an enormous beartrap that closed itself tight around the thing's shell. It responded to Dawn's hoarse, strained, enraged scream with a noise of its own, an unnatural mixture of deep rumbling and high screeching that seemed like it shouldn't be physically capable of coming from a single mouth all at once—a sound that registered somehow as victorious, and filled every vixen who could hear it with a certain mixture of dread, disgust, and rage.

The ice around its body started to melt, then erupted off of it as steam—not black-mist-steam, but actual steam—as it began to coat itself in a wreath of flames. At this point. Rowan arrived next to Dawn, and grabbed her by the shoulders, forcing her to face her.

"Dawn. Calm. Down."
"What!?"

"I need you to remain calm," she repeated. "Focus on keeping the air around it cold. The rain will do the rest of the work for us. Do you understand!?" A wave of water gathered around both of them, picking them up and carrying them away from the beast as it came out of its reverie to decide who to eat next.
"I.." She sniffed. "Yes." And nodded.

Rowan let go of her, turning around and raising all of the just-melted water into an eruption of small limbs, their number a rival for the monster's own. As the air around the beast cooled, the fire around its body flickered out in the rain, and Rowan's limbs moved in, each one grabbing one of the beast's. It thrashed and writhed, trying to free itself.

Dawn still didn't seem to be in the best place, mentally speaking. Understandably, really. "How could I let this happen...happen again...?!"

Petra came up next to her. "Whaddayou mean 'again'? This is nothing like before," she said. She readied a fist with her left hand, and a stone fist rose up in front of the turtle's face.
"But I...it's.."

The stone-fist socked the beast's face with a left hook, in tandem with her own. "One—you're not alone this time!" It collapsed and reformed into a right hand, moving along with her as she used that arm to do a quick uppercut. "Two—she's not hurt! She'll survive this." She drew back both her hands and opened them, and the fist reformed into two smaller ones, opening themselves up too. Then both hands went together, clapping the monster's head in between them. "Three—we know how to wake her up!"

Just about done with being slapped around, the turtle drew its head back and snapped it forward, breathing out a jet of flame with enough force to break apart the stone hands. Petra responded by bringing some arches of rock up around the bases of its many legs just as they were starting to get free of Rowan's watery limbs.

Everyone could feel a certain, familiar sense of relief by now. "Hey, are we too late?" Nico's voice called from the very edge of the ruined area. She'd already planted some energy-replenishing trees, and was hard at work on some more.
"No, nah—you're just in time for the fuuun paaarrrt," Karis replied sarcastically. "Go crazy, seriously."
Sam strode up from the same direction, holding a freshly-woven net of thorned wire in her hand. "Don't mind if I do." She wrapped some of the wire from the net around the hilt of her weapon and threw it, landing a hit near the base of one set of limbs that had replaced one of the turtle's original legs; their constant, violent writhing then thoroughly tangled them up in the net.

Warp appeared next to Rowan, who had dropped all of the water-limbs by now and was bent partway forward, panting heavily. "I suppose you want to tell me this was preventable. If I'd only been here?" Rowan just shook her head. "No? Alright then." She hadn't just been making conversation, as the rest of the city's vixens had now appeared on either side of the turtle. Zeno shot its head with some arrows; Hugo yelled out a pressure wave to slam through it. Tora watched its limbs, head, and tail violently writhe around for a moment before shrugging and just throwing her weapons at the head. Fay risked running up to the limbs bound up in metal wire, tapping her staff against their base to place an explosion large enough to sever several of them from the main body. Just like the mouthtopus' limbs, they disappeared as soon as they were detached.

By now Sam had assembled another net, and tossed it with her knife to catch another of its multi-legs in it. But at this point, the turtle broke free from the earth holding it—Petra too exhausted to keep that up for the moment—and started struggling and thrashing around. Half-mobility turned out to still be quite a lot of mobility for it, forcing the nearby vixens to quickly scatter or allow themselves to be teleported out of harm's way—but it also didn't seem to understand how to control its movement with half its legs bound, so it was less of a deliberate charge and more of a dangerously fast-paced, erratic flailing.

Remedy alone could risk getting close enough to slash her sword at its head a few times, prompting it to stop struggling briefly and snap its head back before suddenly breathing out another jet of flame. This time the Stand didn't get unsummoned quite quickly enough, resulting in her taking some probably-lethal burns. Karis took a deep breath, mustering the effort to "reform" Remedy from scratch, and then had her go 'possess' Rowan once again.

The brief distraction keeping the thing from flailing had been just long enough for Rowan to reform a bunch of small tentacles and grab its legs again—just the ones not bound up in nets. Petra drew a bunch of the scattered rocks, dirt and concrete together into a big spike in the air and drove it down through the monster's neck, merging it with the ground it landed in to try and keep it pinned in place. And Sam threw another net around a third "leg"—having had plenty of time to assemble it during all that. By now, however, the beast was starting to get free of the first one she'd caught it up in.

During all this, Nico worked with Warp, teleporting just close enough for her fruit-throwing trees to be effectual and steadily planting a ring of them around the monster. She now finally retreated back to her support trees a relatively safe distance away. The magic fruits could now join the assemblage of everyone else's projectile attacks—including Warp's own blade thrown via teleportation at each of the monster's eyes in turn—resulting in an increasingly steady stream of mist coming up off of the turtle's head.

Fay went to the most-recently-restrained bunch of limbs, braving sticking around long enough to place three or four point-explosions and cutting off the majority of those tentacles in the process. When the remaining ones went to grab her, Warp teleported her away. Now the turtle wasn't just bound, but half-blind and more or less crippled; it broke itself free of the earth spike and water-limbs again, but could only drag itself forward with its one remaining useful set of limbs. It repeated its unsettling roar/screech from before, but sounded a lot less victorious and a lot more angry and desperate. Every time it approached a vixen, she vanished from its sight, and the barrage of attacks to its head just didn't stop.

The monster tried one more desperate move, drawing its head, tail, and as many of the mouthtopus-limbs as it could untangle all back into its shell. Then fire erupted out not just from where the head had been, but from all six holes. The limbs that it hadn't been able to retract were immediately incinerated and destroyed by the flame jets, which started out all at the same intensity, but then some became weaker than the others, the force starting to spin its shell around and propel it forward.

"Rocket turtle!" Karis spread out her arms, gesturing at the sight. "Grreat!"

"Y'know, we could just let it crash," Petra observed—there was nobody in the beast's present path.

"Property damage," Rowan said flatly.
"Yeah yeah..." With some visible effort, she lifted the ground it was approaching into a wall for it to bump into instead, then made another wall for it to hit in the direction this bounced it toward. She took deep breaths in and out as she kept doing this, keeping its forward momentum from ever quite getting too fast. With a quick signal, Karis got Warp to teleport her next to her husband, then placed a hand on Petra's shoulder to have Remedy 'possess' her, sharing the burden.

Sam had already been partway through weaving yet another net; with the change of situation, she continued trying to make it bigger. "Send it to the pit!" she suggested.

"Yeah, boss can drown it down there!" Zeno agreed. "Right?"

"...With some help." Rowan glanced Dawn's way, and she nodded in recognition.

"This...isn't...pinball, you know!" Petra said between heavy breaths, but tried all the same. Karis sat down, then lay on her back, letting Remedy donate as much energy as she could to the effort. After some more bouncing back and forth, the turtle finally tumbled straight down into the pit another giant monster had left behind.

Then they sprang the trap. Rowan had steadily been gathering all of the rainwater falling, plus that already pooled up in the surrounding area, into an increasingly tall wall of water surrounding the pit from every side except the one the turtle had been on. As the monster landed inside, the water—and most of the surrounding rain—all went crashing down inside. The jets of flame from the holes in the turtle's shell were put out, six jets of steam breaking their way up through the deep pool of water for a moment. Then there was a rumbling, and the monster—its head and remaining appendages back out of its shell again—jumped out of the pit roaring, landing on the ground in front of it...right where Sam had placed her trap.

The mass of thorned metal curled itself up around the entire body of the beast, tangling all of its limbs up at once and partially binding even its tail and head. The turtle roar-screeched angrily again as another onslaught of attacks descended upon it, and it finally began to turn indistinct. When it started to try to retract its head through some of the wire holding it, Petra threw a spike of stone down through its neck to keep it pinned in place for a few more hits. It struggled and thrashed, but couldn't get itself free, instead just managing to cut its own body through the woven wires and send even more black mist streaming off of it.

It convulsed violently one more time before, at long last, dissipating. Sam reacted quickly, dismissing all of the metal before the monster was even fully gone to ensure no harm would come to the person inside of it. Rowan pulled in water to below the beast's fading body, forming it into something of a cushion for the redheaded vixen's unconscious form to fall down onto. She yelled and convulsed briefly as she was guided gently down onto the ground, the water moving aside and the pouring rain that should've been falling on her being redirected away so it would have no chance of drowning her.

"Wuuaaagh." Petra toppled backwards onto the ground, not hurting herself but winding up lying on her back next to Karis. She turned her head slowly to look. "Oh, hi dear."

"Hi."

"Would you mind carrying her, Sam?" Rowan asked—still holding her hands up to repel the rain. "Most of us with the capacity to carry a person are truly spent after that ordeal."
"No problem."

Dawn had fallen to her knees and was audibly sobbing. Warp appeared in front of her. "Well, what now? Looks like you saved her this time."
She sniffed hard and slowly looked up, finally realizing the other vixen was offering a hand to help her up. "N-nah...she saved me, again. It's always...like this." She took the hand and stood up shakily, clearly needing the support to stay on her feet. "Every...every time. What's wrong with me?"

"Maybe you should ask her. Knows you better than I do, right?"

---

"Light!"
"What's wrong?" A call from Magus right now didn't necessarily mean something was wrong, but opening with her name in an excitedly-worried tone made it feel a lot more like it was.
"Have you heard from Gemma?"
"No, why?"
"She was totally freaking out the whole time we were fighting the monsters, and then just bolted as soon as it was over. I think she might've accidently outed herself!"
"'Outed'?" Light asked, not immediately making sense of this word.
"You know, like—unmasked? Transformed in public? Secret identity no more?"
"...Oh."

"And Doc Quinn and I haven't seen her around since she ran off, and neither has anyone else."
"Well...I don't think you need to worry too much. She's probably just gone somewhere to hide," Light said. "I'll keep an eye out for her, though."
"Yeah, okay. That works."

"Thanks for letting me know."

"Hahah, no problem," Magus said—the laugh a slightly nervous one—and then hung up.

"So...guess Gemma can't see me today, in that case," Braille said. Fox ears, of course, made every phone conversation effectively on speakerphone.

"Maybe not," Light said, leading the way back toward Ning's store. "But there are other options. I know someone else who's not bad at figuring out powers just based on the evidence, and...I'm not too bad at it myself."

"And I'm a scientist!" Rory chipped in eagerly. "Plenty of brainpower between the three of us."

Light nodded. "Besides...there's, another way we could introduce you to her, now that I've met you."
"Oh, yeah?"

"Are you...aware of the 'dream space'? The same as the place we 'went to' when we first got our phrases."
"Definitely," Braille nodded. "Lucy has semi-regular convos with the Giver there, apparently. Oh, yeah—in the last one she said something like 'when building someone a new body, why would you ever preserve all of its old injuries and flaws?' We think it might mean my human form isn't blind anymore—if I can ever manage to get back to it. How'd you do it, Dr. Quinn?"
"Oh..me? Uh.." Rory blushed slightly. "I remembered my wedding vows, with my husband. I don't know if you have that option exactly, but we've guessed it's something to do with..remembering things that were very emotional for you before, or something."

"Hmm, yeah. I can work with that."

"Anyway," Light said, "there's a way for..vixens to meet each other there, as long as they've met before. Including if you've met someone who's met the person you're trying to meet, or so on. We could ask Gemma to talk to you 'there', tonight or sometime."
"That'd be fine," she nodded.

As the store came into view, Light used some brief trickery to get a read on Amory's location inside, then placed some text in her sight asking her to turn back to human form and noting: We have a visitor.

---

Once I had 125 written, I found these next few astoundingly easy to get through. We're approaching ever closer to another of those scenes that I've had more or less written in my head for a very long time now, and I'm pretty excited for that!

Battle Vixens! - 125

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Episode 125: Oops

"Should I be happy we're here again?" Karis put out a hand to her side, bringing Remedy into view to walk next to her. "Or should this bring back the trauma of a thousand grabby-hands, plus almost having lava dripped on me?" She followed Petra past some buildings, to the scenic view of the massive hole in the ground their fight with the Hecatoncheires had left behind, now partially filled with rainwater—and getting a little deeper all the time, as a light drizzle continued to fall from above.

"It's not all bad. Look-look, the restaurant's still here!" her husband said, gesturing backwards. "We had a great time there, right? Maybe they'll spare us some cheese fries once this is over."

"I just wonder what exponential function their insurance rates are now following..."

Rowan arrived from another street, Dawn and Phoenix trailing behind her. Karis immediately didn't like the careful distance those two were keeping from each other, the way they refused to quite look at each other. "Okay, everyone," she said. "We have a turtle and two of those squidlike aberrations."

"Ooh, now that's an SAT word!" Petra japed. If she even sensed the tension in the first place, this was probably just her way of trying to defuse it.

Rowan gently cleared her throat before continuing, and Simon seemed to take the hint. "Focus on survival and damage control," she continued. "Cutting off the limbs of the..ugh, mouthtopi," (Karis didn't blame her for disliking such an awfully-constructed name) "should reduce the threat they pose over time. The larger threat is the turtle—that'll be your job, Petra. Since the ground here is already as dilapidated as one could imagine from yesterday, there is little need for restraint here. Just—don't break anything that isn't already broken, if you can help it."

"Alright alriiight," Petra beamed.

"Let's try to draw the three of them apart while we're at it. Dawn and Cynthia, you take one—I'll try to keep the other one busy with Karis. This isn't hard-and-fast; if someone else needs support, give it. I'll probably be splitting my efforts to help with the turtle regardless."

The fact that they didn't seem to object to being paired up—instead each giving a serious, solemn nod—actually worried Karis a little more for them. It meant whatever was going on between them wasn't petty, and wasn't just young-teenager emotional. It was serious. But she wasn't one to question the more experienced 'commander'; Rowan seemed to have an almost-parental level of concern for those two, so it was believable that she knew what was best.

"Hey hey—" Petra pointed ahead, at a dome of shadow starting to gather. It was flanked by wispier swirls of black mist on either side. "Looks like the strategy meeting's over just in time, boss!"

"...Indeed." Rowan gestured to the left, then crossed toward the right. Karis had Remedy follow, staying back with Petra for now; Cynthia marched herself confidently forward, and Dawn seemed to drag along behind her reluctantly.

---

The first time the monsters appeared, there was no warning. There was no buildup. It had seemed to be a relatively normal day, apart from everyone still reeling from the shock of superpowered fox-girls suddenly existing. They had shown up like a magic trick: Not there one second, there and ready to kill and destroy the next. It turned out afterward that suddenly showing up like that wasn't the only way they could appear. Sometimes they'd manifest as a slowly-swirling mass of black mist in the sky, building up more and more until something even the vixens could barely survive fighting showed up. Sometimes it was at least thirty seconds, or a few minutes, even for relatively "low-level" monsters. It was all kind of random, to some extent, just how suddenly they'd appear.

Added to that, there was now that "early warning system" of sorts. Even if you didn't have the app, someone around you probably did. There would be an alert, and everyone would flee. The first couple of times that happened, it had been panicked fleeing. However, between the warning usually being at least a few minutes out and the monsters often having a buildup before they appeared, it hadn't taken long for the fleeing to turn more orderly and careful. Nobody wanted to be there when a monster was (probably not even those who had to fight them, really), but nobody wanted to get trampled, either. But there was always the possibility of the worst-case scenario. The early warnings weren't always so early.

Thad had successfully put the events of the previous night out of his mind—for now, at least—and so was enduring a normal day of class..or at least, a day in the "new normal", which usually felt a lot like the old one. The rain over the college had lightened up for a few minutes, so he and some of the guys from the team were on their way across the quad just after lunch, all of them probably just about to scatter off toward their various classes. A loud noise from a large number of phones got everyone's attention—this was part of the "new normal", too, of course. But the thing that happened next was a lot less familiar to most of them.

Everyone had just processed what kind of alert was going out, understood that it related to the place they were in, and started to move toward the buildings—more or less, each person toward the closest available entrance. Then, just like a magic trick, something was there that hadn't been before. Two somethings, big black shadows in the shape of wild animals, were just suddenly—present right in the middle of the grass. It felt like a miracle that they hadn't literally appeared inside of someone, given the crowd present.

Now, Thad himself wasn't in immediate danger. He was some several yards back away from the big, wolf-looking things with black, wispy snakes for tails, and there were several people between him and them. He was nonetheless struck by the immediate impression that something that shape wasn't supposed to be that size. He'd seen a decent amount of news footage of fights; there were the vixens fighting the monsters, at least, to give a sense of scale and help measure how big the monsters tended to be, but it still just looked wrong to him, in person—how big they were. It looked like either one of them could crush his car just by landing on it from a jump. And these were supposed to be some of the weaker ones, right?

Everyone was briefly, completely and totally silent. A couple of guys he didn't really know were standing right there in front of the monsters. They froze in place, staring up at them, and for a few miraculous seconds the monsters seemed to be looking around like they were disoriented...or maybe it was that they had their pick of defenseless prey, and were deciding which of the college students scattered around nearby would be the easiest to kill. When one of them tensed to move—the guys in front of them, in easy pouncing distance, still standing there in a paralyzed panic—the silence broke, and a few things happened in rapid succession.

Thad heard a voice he recognized from behind him—the first voice to be heard, before everyone else started screaming and running—saying something he didn't quite understand. It was kind of gibberish, but felt like it had a profound meaning all at the same time. He couldn't quite imagine how he'd pronounce it himself, even though it rattled out of her mouth as easily as her own name might. Then a sort of grayish blur went past him, above him in an up-and-down leap, and managed to land in between the monsters and their imminent prey. After that, the one body, sporting two tails, sort of..stepped apart, becoming two bodies going in two directions at the same time: One forward, one back.

The one with the white tail went forward, drawing a fist back and punching at the snout of that monster that had been getting ready to pounce, meeting it in midair and somehow imparting enough force to throw it skidding backwards along the ground. The other one turned around and, in a different, but still reasonably familiar voice to Thad, screamed out "RUN, STUPID!" in a panicked voice at the top of her lungs. The one with the white hair was already busy running away from the other monster—which seemed to have decided that she was the best target possible—and the one that had just yelled now turned around to help.

By this point, the screaming and running had started—including the guys who'd just been a few inches away from death. Once the silent spell was broken and the threats were in motion, they probably hadn't needed to be told what to do at all. Thad turned and sprinted for the nearest building himself, feeling a sharp adrenaline rush from how incredibly close that had been. He got inside and stopped, bending over with his hands on his knees and panting, and then he started to realize what had just happened.

That first voice he'd recognized was that of Emma—little Emma, who'd had a serious growth spurt recently and started wearing contacts. The person who'd leapt forward, punched a monster away and told everyone to do what they should've been doing in the first place—anyone in this town would know that that was Gemma. Gemma, Emma. It almost seemed obvious now that he knew it. But more importantly—if he knew it, then so did everyone else.

As in, EVERYone else.

Thad wasn't about to spill her secrets any more than he would his own roommate's, but if he'd recognized her as only a slight acquaintance, then there were others around who knew her too. With where they'd been, and how many people they were, she'd be lucky if someone hadn't recorded the whole moment on their phone. It could be on the internet before the fight was over, and in the news by mid-afternoon.

From what he knew of Emma, she was a pretty shy girl, and definitely not someone who wanted everyone's attention. She had a big family who'd all be concerned about her—especially with her being her—being in such dangerous situations all the time. This definitely couldn't have been the time, or the way, she'd have wanted everyone to know. But she'd saved someone's life by doing that. Another half of a second and that guy would've been monster food—laying aside that they didn't really seem to eat their victims unless they were vixens. If she'd hesitated to do it, people would've died.

He stood up, breath fully caught, and saw Magus running the other way, pushing through the door and out of the building. There wasn't anything Thad could really do about this, but maybe Magus could at least make sure she didn't get hurt. He silently wished her luck, and headed for somewhere he could get a vantage point to watch the fight from. After all, personally knowing someone involved had him a lot more invested in seeing how things turned out.

---

No sooner did the turtle appear than it was buried in spiky rocks, dirt, and shattered concrete, the very ground its legs stood on twisting up around them to shackle them in place. It didn't take being bound very well, of course, but flailing its flail-like tail and snapping its giant head around did little to free it faster. Petra was kneeling forward with both of her hands palm-down on the ground, focusing hard on keeping it pinned.

Karis had Remedy run recklessly ahead, slashing her sword around; this succeeded in cutting off the ends of some of their opponent's limbs, but got her grabbed pretty quickly, the tentacles knotting themselves all around her body and starting to pull her toward the monster's mouth. Then Rowan sprang her trap: She'd been gathering a bunch of the water from the pit up around herself, and now turned it into a collection of large watery blades, sending them through where the mass of limbs had gathered to all go toward Remedy and cutting enough of them off for the Stand to slip herself free and land a bit roughly on the ground.

Cynthia seemed to compete with Remedy in the 'charging ahead' contest, lifting her right hand to form a giant fireball over it and tossing it ahead of her as the mouthtopus started swinging its limbs her way. She landed a direct hit on the beast's center mass, the fireball exploding into a flame all across its body that sent black mist streaming up off of it. At the same time, she leapt and backflipped past Dawn to behind her, evading the tentacles' reach by a couple of seconds or so, and landed into a one-knee kneel, panting softly. When the moster charged forward in a rage, it met a spiked wall of ice, bouncing off of it first, then skittering forward again and wrapping its limbs around the wall to try and yank it out of the way. By now, Cynthia had gotten back to her feet, and both of them circled in opposite directions, moving to either side of the monster's forward charge. When it got past the ice wall, no one was there.

The turtle broke its legs free of the shackles and shook the rocks off of itself, sending them flying all over. Petra stood up quickly and hopped backwards a couple of times, lifting her arms to the sky to catch all that flying earth and keep it floating in midair instead of allowing it to scatter and possibly hit her allies. Then she dropped most of it safely, merging the rest into some large spikes she drove down into the turtle's limbs as it started to advance toward her.

Karis and Rowan's opponent gathered its remaining limbs together, tilted back, and went for a head-on charge. Remedy vanished, and Karis ran herself over toward the right to bait it away from her husband. Rowan recovered some of the water from the giant blades into a bumpy, spiky solid mass on the ground in front of the monster, tripping it into an awkward tumble and then grabbing it with that same water, now in thorned-tentacle form.

Disappointed to find no one past the wall, the mouthtopus started to turn Petra's way. "Nope!" A scattering of a few small fireballs peppered its main body, making it tilt over and start charging straight Cynthia's way. She took off at a run to one side, narrowly evading some of the tentacles whipping out on either side of it by diving and rolling along the ground. When it started to get up again, Dawn was throwing a bunch of rough, quickly-thrown-together spikes of ice into it, getting its attention once again and convincing it to charge her this time. Cynthia stood up and panted heavily; even making that little fire was getting harder for her as the rain came down heavier. Dawn dodged aside of the charging monster, raising up a giant icy blade made out of the rain and wielding it two-handed in an expertly-placed chop, cutting off maybe half of the beast's limbs all at once.

An enormous fist of stone, maybe four times the size Petra usually managed, raised itself up from the ruined ground, delivering an uppercut to the turtle's head with enough force to flip the entire beast up, pivoting on its tail to land back down onto its back. The fist fell apart as soon as it had landed this hit, Petra audibly exhaling from all of the recent effort, but then grinning as she watched as the monster did the same thing its tiny, normal-animal counterpart would do in the same situation: Futilely wiggle its limbs around in the air. However, there was the extra flavor of its head violently biting and its tail whipping around agressively.

Remedy reappeared next to the monster to slash off a few more of its limbs while they whipped around at the water-tentacle holding it. Rowan joined this dance of blades for a moment, somehow landing more hits one-handed (while her other hand stayed raised in the air to keep the water-limb holding tight) than Remedy did with both. This didn't last long before the beast wriggled itself free and charged again—thankfully, at Remedy, who was promptly disappeared out of its way.

The monster that had missed Remedy kept recklessly charging forward, seeming to lack the mental capacity to register that it should've caught its target by now if she were still in its path. The monster that had gone past Dawn seemed able to run just as fast as ever without the limbs she'd taken from it, but it did try to stop in reaction to blow. However, it had a lot of momentum to try to get rid of, so it skidded and slithered across the wet, uneven ground for a bit.

Just long enough for its wide-open mouth to collide with the upended turtle. At the same time as the other one charged headfirst into the very same's shell.

Petra's grin evaporated, and as she caught her breath, she said something everyone else was probably thinking. "Aah...shoot."

---

"Thundering flood, bind and restrain. Wrapping Waves!"

It just seemed like the best spell for the situation. Both of Gemma were being chased by the snakewolves, and there was some light rain falling, plus the earlier rain still soaked into the ground, that Magus figured she could use as sort of 'material components' to make it a little less costly. It worked pretty well, too: In an imitation of Rowan's magic, some tentacles of water raised themselves up from the damp ground to wrap around the beasts' bodies and hold them back, buying the two-bodied vixen some breathing room.

Walking slowly forward, still holding her sword up to maintain the effect, Magus called: "Gemma! You okay?" As soon as they weren't being chased, both bodies had turned around and just started unleashing on their former pursuers.

"I'm, not hurt," Plus said uncertainly, over Minus repeatedly saying...something. It was too fast and quiet to properly make out at first. By about the sixth or seventh repetition, Magus was pretty sure it was...'Everyone saw me'?

"Okay, well uh, don't think I can hold this much longer, so—"

"I'll get it," Plus cut her off, some uncharacteristic aggression to her tone. Both bodies lifted their hands, and the monsters' shadows rose up through their bodies as big spikes, pinning them in place even longer. "Just, kill them!" she said, sounding genuinely angry. Minus was...still saying the same thing as before; her tone of voice read as nervous, or maybe even scared.

"Um, okay?" Magus just went with channeling some bolts of lightning down from the gathering clouds above. It was very strange, and a little off-putting, to see the two bodies of what was supposed to be the same person expressing such completely different moods.

The beasts struggled free of the shadow-spikes, but by now both of Gemma had stepped far enough away that they had some catching up to do. Plus jumped aside, leaving beind a faint, blurry illusion for her persuer to try to bite through; Minus dove into a shadow to let the other one pass. Then, finally, Dr. Quinn showed up.

She had her string wound up into a club, and raised up a puppet from the ground to hand that weapon to. It ran up and slammed the club into the side of the snakewolf that had stopped in its tracks to bite an illusion, making it break apart and wrap its strings up around the beast's body. While black mist erupted off of its body, it turned and swiped a claw at the puppet, landing a hit clean enough to destroy it, but the strings continued twisting around its body until it was bound in place.

The other snakewolf had started to turn Magus's way. She tensed to run, but Clark had already brought up another puppet and put it between the running monster and her, getting its attention on chasing that instead. So she took the opportunity to focus on channeling some more lightning.

With the monster bound up again. Plus started grabbing daggers out of the air—from light, shadow, air, water vapor, some of the dirt lifted out of the ground, and who-knew-what-else—and throwing them at it one after another. "RrrrraaaAAAAAGH!" Minus had popped back out and started making some small fireballs to throw after the one still chasing a puppet; it sounded like her chant had changed to just the word 'stupid' over and over again at some point.

"Gemma! Don't overdo it," Clark said. From all of the damage so far, the snakewolf in her strings was already starting to look indistinct as it shook off the last of them and turned Plus's way.

"I know, I know," she said, spreading her hands to place a fairly large light-shield, then jumping away when the monster slammed itself into it, shattering it but recoiling back in the process. Minus's concerning mantra got slightly louder, adding in the word 'idiot' occasionally.

By now Magus was ready to send down another bolt, so she focused it on the nearly-dead monster, succeeding in finishing it off. The other one bit down on the puppet it had been chasing, breaking it in half before it was unsummoned, and both of Gemma turned their attention to destroying that one, too. Clark retrieved her needle and started weaving some new string with it with one hand while the other one raised up another puppet and sent it toward the remaining monster.

The snakewolf had turned around and started toward Minus, only for Plus to lift some of the ground in front of it just as it picked up speed and trip it into a forward tumble. Then both of her twisted a bunch of shadows into spike-covered, vine-like appendages wrapped up around the monster's crumpled body before it could stand back up again. Minus held the shadows tight around its struggling body while Plus threw a bunch of seeds into its main mass, using each of them as the center of a small but poten point-explosion.

Magus thought she'd almost feel bad for it at this point if not for..everything about these monsters. So instead of that, she focused on throwing some cheap, quick-cast attack spells at the now-stationary monster. Clark had a puppet waiting to get its attention in case it broke free, but by now she'd finished putting together another club and sent a second puppet along to slam that into its body. Between the three vixens' prior onslaught and the monsters' apparent extra-strong weakness to the magic of Dr. Quinn's weapon, the hit from the club was enough to finish that one off completely, too.

"..Ffffh." Magus let go of, then unsummoned her sword. Chain-casting a bunch of spells in a row was still a little tiring, after all. Clark dismissed all of her puppets and went up to where Gemma was. Minus was still mumbling something in a high, panicked voice, and Plus didn't look happy, either.

"What happened?" she asked, her tone concerned and serious. "Are you alright?"
"Alright?! I j—" Minus seemed to start saying something before Plus clapped a hand over her mouth, then stepped into her to recombine. "...Sorry. I, I'm okay. I just..needtogo!" she said, and then suddenly took off at a run, taking the extra effort to make herself invisible about five or six steps in. This didn't work as well at hiding her path as it should have, since both of the remaining vixens could see and hear a door being thrown open and left to close itself in her wake.

After watching that, Clark gave Magus a questioning look. "I got here after she did. But I think..."

---

The tentacled beasts' remaining limbs convulsed chaotically around as the turtle's shell seemed to begin to eat them, starting with their main bodies. Petra took a deep breath, then lifted her hands, raising up an arch of stone above the middle of its shell. "Okay okay—new rule! Never ever ever ever, run them into each other!" While the shell swallowed up the rest of the other two monsters' bodies, it withdrew its legs into its shell, only to then have dozens of large, thick tentacles much longer than those legs had been erupt out from each of the four holes. Its tail grew twice as long, and the shell and head simply reshaped themselves so that the entire monster was now right-side-up again. Now Petra brought the arch down around its body to try to restrain it, but it used its multitude of limbs to propel itself upward, shattering all of the condensed rock as it jumped into the air and tried to come down at Petra mouth-first. She raised and rode a wave of concrete away from it, and then the pit full of rainwater suddenly emptied, its contents turning into a dragon's head and rushing over to meet the beast where it landed. Its 'neck' wrapped around the turtle's head, and its teeth bit down hard around its snout.

Karis moved closer to Rowan, placing a hand on her shoulder and having Remedy 'possess' the blue-haired vixen. "I guess combining our problems isn't as convenient as it sounds, huh?" Rowan just grunted with effort as a bunch of the rain around them decided to start falling inward toward the monster instead of downward, combining into some independent limbs that each tried to grab at its writhing tentacles and keep it in place. There was a momentary struggle before the turtle shook free, the entire dragon plus all the limbs dematerializing back into ordinary water and splashing off of it as it spun itself around to go after Petra a second time.

By now, Dawn and Cynthia had come next to her, the former building as large of a wall of spiked ice as she could well ahead of them. Petra tilted and threw the ground around under it as it ran, making the process as difficult as possible, so it didn't quite manage to pick up enough momentum to charge all the way through the wall of ice, instead crashing against it. Then the three of them scattered, forcing it to pick a target. When it went for Cynthia, a stone fist punched it in the side of the head; it turned and snapped to retailate, but no one was in that direction. It whirled around and charged Petra's way, and Rowan came over, now in her dragon's mouth, grabbing up all of the water she could to hold its front limbs as the dragon's teeth bit into the base of the turtle's neck.

They wrestled for a long moment, giving Petra enough time to catch her breath again and start twisting some ground up around the thing's back limbs. Still, the turtle eventually shook free, and Rowan had to ride a wave of water away to keep it from snapping her up in its mouth.

Remedy jumped forward out of Rowan, threw her sword at its muzzle, and bolted. It chased her down in no time flat, but it got a big bite of nothing for its efforts. Cynthia seemed to take this as a cue to throw her own sword at its face, exploding its material into some flame crawling along its head briefly before the pouring rain put it out. So now it came after her. Petra tilted the ground to ninety degrees to flip the turtle sideways, but it just used its tentacles to turn this into a hundred-eighty-degree roll, spun around and ran after Karis—because she happened to be the closest thing in its view at the moment.

Karis knew better than to get anywhere near that thing, so she brought Remedy up in front of herself and ran backwards, having her Stand run briefly toward the beast and then off to one side. Knowing that these things never learned anything ever gave her some peace of mind about this maneuver, and it did, in fact, predictably chase down the one 'person' who it couldn't actually eat yet again. When it caught up, its jaws closed on the empty air Remedy was no longer occupying.

The turtle turned around rapidly, picking another target. It chose Rowan, who'd been kneeling in place with a hand on the hilt of her sword stabbed into the ground as a crutch, a tall pool of water unnaturally keeping itself in place around her. She had the water pick her up, leaning back into it and riding it in a wave backwards toward the pit it had come from. Her retreat was less immediate than it should have been, the wave moving too slowly to guarantee she'd outrun the turtle—especially if she had to continue past the pit and climb up its back end. But then the water she'd left behind suddenly froze, turning into ice and then shaping into spikes that pierced up into the tentacles on the turtle's left side, followed by a large, unshapen mass of ice landing a direct hit on the side of its head.

That got its attention, and it turned toward the owner of all of that ice. Dawn panted heavily but leaned down, putting both of her hands onto the ground and freezing all of the water that fell onto it into row after row of spikes for the turtle to bash itself into. Still it picked up speed as it went, even as the spikes twisted inward, grabbing or stabbing into the monster's many limbs. She took a hard breath inward and screamed it out in an enraged voice, like she was daring the thing to get any closer.

Since everyone else seemed to be out of breath at the moment, Karis called out: "Dawn! Move! Cut and run, girl!" But it seemed like she either couldn't hear over all the yelling, or more possibly, was too spent to move aside quickly enough—or too stubborn to be willing to try at this point. The gigantic, tentacle-limbed turtle advanced on her despite some water-limbs and spikes of earth trying to arrest its movment, despite a thrown sword from Remedy trying again to get its attention. When it came close to its target, it drew its head back for just an instant, its jaws wide, before snapping it forward and closing them around a vixen.

But it didn't catch Dawn. She'd been shoved, hard, imparting enough force that she tumbled along the ground several feet to a spot well out of the way.

---

Sometimes it feels like Emma's entire character arc can be summed up in a single trope: "Break the Cutie".
Anyway, I've had both "sides" of this episode more or less planned out for a while, only closer to writing it realizing they could fit in the same episode. Magus's side was really easy to write, but I was fuzzier on the details on the city side, so that took me a lot longer to come up with.