Blood and bullets!

Amanda.

Guns, guns—guns and more guns… a few knives, a machete she'd picked up at, pfft... some point... as well as all her personal belongings.

A Sat-phone tinkered with by a brainiac to work without the stupid subscription it wanted, this weird force-field emitter that sometimes blocked projectiles, but most of the time simply seemed to do fuck all… Par for the course with brainiac tech, in all honesty…

A handful of grenades she'd scavenged while rooting through an already picked-through police precinct. Hidden in a locked desk drawer that nobody had bothered to look at.

These were all things that Amanda unstrapped from her person and carefully set aside.

And, of course, the pièce de résistance!

Her most sacred relic that truly had no equal.

An overly gaudy pride flag and my little pony-themed 'desert eagle' that she'd never yet found bullets for. At least, not since acquiring the thing off one of her alternate selves during a 'swap out.'

And, without getting political, it was a true masterpiece in sheer mall-ninja absurdity!

Customized to the nines with laser aim assistance, holographic sights, a tactical flashlight, and a magazine that 'giggled' with child-like yet somehow ominous delight when slapping it home or racking the slide...

Terrifying as it was, majestic.

Now, Amanda really wasn't sure who would have even dreamed up such an abominable combination of childhood whimsey and excessive firepower… let alone who would have desired to be seen wielding the terribly sickly sweet firearm. 

Yet, such concerns weren't precisely what she'd call bothersome within the realm of the world's new norm.

Next, she even took off her clothes.

Those combat boots she'd struggled with in her dream were now beaten and well-worn but not at all falling apart. Her torn leggings, which had been one of the reasons she'd even started this ritual in the first place, went next.

The tattered and abused vest that was filled with as many bite marks as it was dimples from small-calibre bullets, also made its way to the growing hoard…

That particular bit of Brainiac tech, despite how she'd felt about it in the past, had been well worth the investment, given how durable it had proven to be. Truly, a cornerstone of her attire!

And finally, her chipped, shot at, partially busted, and dirty mask. The very same that she'd placed on her face whilst still asleep.

It was weary, battered, and cracked in various places… and had also long since lost its initial reason for her donning it, as anonymity was a secondary concern these days… However, it was bulletproof, to an extent. Which, so far as things went, was a reason enough to keep it protecting her face.

Still, this, too, she placed on the growing pile of her effects until even her underwear was tossed haphazardly to the side. Amanda standing naked in all her theatrical romantic glory! The warmth of sunlight banishing the chill of her nightmare as it bled in through a nearby window.

Filthy, gross, absent soap for a damn near two weeks since she'd last found a good place with running water to hide at and spend the night... Amanda wasn't looking her best...

Her hair wild and disheveled, cut even shorter than it had been in her memory, now falling to her ears as scalp care was a practical non-starter while roaming the wasteland of towns and cities that used to be the East Coast of a once great nation…

Currently, she was sifting through the remnants of Providence.

Stuck in a highrise apartment some—two dozen or so floors up, having been sure that she'd find something of interest, but… As with many locations she chose to rummage in, others had already beaten her to the party...

Filthy scavengers, the lot of them!

And yet, Amanda wasn't without her own advantages…

Taking a deep breath, she froze time, and just like that, the world around her came to an abrupt and complete halt.

She stood there, silent in the overwhelming stillness that overcame reality, enjoying the short semblance of peace that the moment offered before setting about to work.

Though she could maintain this space for nearly an hour now, her power was not without its faults. Chief among them was that whatever Mandy was touching joined her in this realm of stifled and frozen time; thus, physics still forced her to conform moderately to its laws.

Likewise, if she did leave her power going for too long, she would feel utterly exhausted by the time she actually returned to the real world. While here, her body did not age, did not require sustenance to fuel itself or water to hydrate, her muscles not tearing or stretching…

However, all the weariness and energy she spent would come knocking and looking for its payment, waiting with a club to bust her ankles and deliver a demand for the loan repayment…

Yeah... she'd gotten herself into more than a single bad situation by relying on her abilities too much for too long.

There were other issues, of course, those that she'd name to be of a more psychological spectrum… But, she figured that she'd managed a sort of handle on her questionable sanity, which is why she chose not to linger on such boorish concerns. All things considered, daily nightmares were, in truth, a fairly small toll to endure at the hands of what her 'power' did to her skull-stomped psyche.

Clapping her hands as her thoughts quickly drifted, as they were prone to do, Amanda eyed the myriad of familiar and not dead-looking versions of herself that were all lazily milling about around her.

Some whilst lounging on the couch eating a bag of old chips, others seeming to be in the midst of a fight, guns, knives, or improvised weapons all held in their hands as they battled—something within their own individual and hypothetical realities!

There were dozens within the small apartment to choose from, each a representative example of what she could have been had a tangent decision taken her on a separate path than her own.

Possibilities, branching unknowns, entirely different futures that each could, with but a flippant deviation of fate, have come to pass should she have, say, decided that yesterday she'd looted the pharmacy down the block rather than the storage facility she'd stupidly chosen to search, to no avail.

There were infinite opportunities that could have transpired from a lone footstep in a different direction. And, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant, those alternate forms of herself appeared before her, shadowy apparitions of denizens within worlds that had never come to pass, all waiting for her perusal.

Or, at least, that was how she thought her powers worked. That was the thing about deviant mutations; there really wasn't much of a repository of knowledge to help one figure things out as they muddled through life…

Thankfully, it didn't take long to find a shade that looked to have what she wanted. The shrouded reflection of herself seemed to stand near the door, Glock in hand, a knife in the other, her pack and belongings all strapped to her back and waist, which told Mandy that the girl wasn't preparing for a fight. Merely being cautious.

Wherever she could, Amanda always removed her belongings and stashed them nearby if she was going to get herself into a scuffle, largely because when she did start fighting, she had no desire to cripple herself just because she was scared of losing her belongings.

With a breath of preparation, Mandy moved into the proximity of a shadow's form, feeling the telltale sensation of tugging at her flesh, as though a magnet was ripping her apart! Brief agony nearly causing her to draw blood at the lip as existence shattered with the sensation of a cracking marble!

It's hazy remnants exploding into darkness, then consuming the shade before her, replicating its form, joining with its reality, merging with her alternate existence in a momentary flood of gut-wrenching butterflies before—

Amanda sheathed the knife in her belt. Twisting the pistol in her hand and popping the magazine.

Four bullets.

Hm… Mandy had gotten lucky! Apparently, this version of herself hadn't seen fit to kneecap that asshole pyrokinetic who'd tried stealing her water whilst she'd been filling another bottle. Hmmm, she wondered what she'd done in her stead…

Maybe a knife to the tendons on the back of his knee? He had tried frying her alive, after all, and there was a fine line between a lesson that her mercy wasn't without limits and actually trying to fucking kill her.

All the same, she quickly holstered the weapon and started checking out all her others, discovering that, on average, whoever this girl was, she seemed to still possess a semblance of her old determination to pretend to be a good person.

Oh well, not her issue now!

Fast as she could, Mandy tossed all her various things on the aforementioned pile and began again, shifting and changing through multiple iterations of herself before she had a veritable mountain of near-duplicate supplies with the sole exception of one object.

Not for the first time since she'd come into possession of it, Amanda glanced at the somewhat unsettling pony gun that was leaning up against the wall…

The sole item that she never seemed to find among all her various theoretical selves, other than that single time. The only thing in her world that didn't fit into place… She shivered at the thought… not because there was anything objectively terrifying about the gun, comparatively speaking, with what was still scrabbling at the door.

However, in a world where things had lost a certain degree of meaning to her, it stood as the lone entity that she'd never seen replicated through her various exchanges… But, ultimately, she pulled her attention away from the unnerving creation and instead focused on the door.

At this point, there was enough firepower to bring down a military blockade, but she didn't much care to go about filling her ammo reserves quite yet. After all, what would even be the point?

Instead, she yanked one of her sidearms from its holster, flipped the safety, then unloaded all its bullets through the metal barrier at a rough head height! Then she tossed the gun aside, pulling out the next and doing the same until it clicked dry and she began all over again!

Amanda was pounding lead into mutated flesh at an ever rapidly growing pace! Firing with pure impunity before dropping back into her silent world and merging with yet another variation of herself! Riddling the door with tiny pocked cavities in near non-stop gunfire until a discernable hole in its center appeared!

That just made aiming that much easier...

And, as though it were no different than an average Tuesday afternoon, Amanda shredded the mass of ghouls trying to break through to her in a hailstorm of unending death! Pretending, just for the kicks, like she could 'understand' the unintelligible moans of the dying dead, their whispers speaking to her between the bark of barrel and the snap of bullets.

The pantasmal 'creatures' that ever lingered at the edge of her sight, all dancing amidst the mayhem, giggling in her own voice, using the dust of gunpowder to manifest like small dustdevils.

Shots shredded flesh and bone alike! Flying through heads and shoulders and necks, Amanda focuses less on aiming for vitals and more on good old-fashioned fire superiority!

Craniums popped in explosions of erupting gore! Jaws were torn from slobbering maws! Fingers and hands reaching through the widening hole were turned into jelly and paste, their bones fragmenting like anti-personnel mines and splintering into the massed horde of bodies pushing down the hallway!

All the while, gunpowder and smoke filled Amanda's lungs like a warm fire at Christmas!

At some point, she'd even started laughing! Moving faster and faster, unloading with less and less care for where she aimed! Each hand found a gun as she seemed to bounce around the room like a speedster, popping in and out of existence again and again with maddened cackles of joy!

This was it!

This right here!

The fun in her life!

Sure, it was a little messy, and sure, it was loud as hell, but Mandy felt alive as she butchered an entire hallway of mutants, mowing them down time and time again as they climbed over the pile of bodies!

Her hands rising higher and higher as the lumbering creatures stumbled and rolled over their broken and shredded neighbours and siblings, the crazed grin on her face only subsiding as she abruptly realized nothing in the hallway yet moved…

Hmph... she could have jumped through the damned hole in the door that was glowing red at the fringes with the punishment it had withstood…

The bodies that filled the hallway were so thick that she couldn't even see beyond the pile of corpses that almost touched the ceiling! The wall of them so girthy that one would have to squeeze through the sides just to make a likely ill-fated attempt to squeeze by…

All the while, her heavy boots kicked and scattered the dozens and dozens of expended firearms and casings she'd discarded around her, the soot from their cartridges already creating a fine layer of dark dust on the hardwood that she idly ground in with one of her soles.

Then, she promptly tossed the two guns she was still holding and dug into one of her nearby packs to see what 'alternate' Amanda had found for snacks. Managing to rustle up a package of expired jerky, a refilled bottle of water, and some mixed nuts that had cranberries in them!

What a treat!

She sighed while plummeting onto the nearby couch, just chewing her way through the smattering of rather repetitive convenience-store fare that had been her life for the last few years as she'd travelled...

Thankfully, cities weren't the easiest place for the majority of people to actually efficiently strip of anything halfway decent. Ghouls, and occasionally worse, presented a sort of natural barrier for those not smart enough, experienced enough, powerful enough or brave enough to confront them.

And she could see why! As for most individuals who didn't possess the equivalency of a Superman mutation, which she wasn't even sure had come about to encompass all the Man of Steel's powers, the hordes of transformed and ever-multiplying ghouls that roamed large population centers could and would be the death of you.

Take her for example. If Mandy's powers made even a reasonable lick of sense or were fair to fight against, then she'd be stuck in the apartment she'd hidden in while a veritable tide of mutants either starved her out or got in and ate her alive.

Honestly, cities weren't for the faint of heart these days!

Still, it didn't take long for her to get bored of the same old same 'artificial goodness' of lab-made flavouring, so Amanda let what she'd been eating sit where she'd left it on the coffee table.

Her stomach was reasonably filled anyway, and her mind easily moved on to alternate matters. Not for the first time, she spent the following near hour rooting through the various packs of her other selves. Setting aside what she didn't want or didn't care to lug around with her.

Filling ammo clips for guns and the spares she kept as backup and altogether sifting through what was on offer until her pack, that was of course, the original, hardly had much in it that had arrived when she'd settled in for the night...

Amanda simply smiled at her newly re-stocked supplies, more happy she wouldn't have to bother with doing this again for months if she was careful...