(Episode XII) (Act 2)

“Where the hell are we, by the way?” Maddie looked and walked about in the spacious room they were all in. “The bitch apparently can hear 90 miles around her, we don’t need to be in an echo-y room to begin with.”

Jackie winced, as she kept her head turned, at an angle, so she can hear the girls herself. Whatever nature of the blow was, it seemed like the hearing on her left side is muffled, damaged. There was still ringing, a drone that persisted and practically drilled into her mind.

“Yeah, that’s unfortunate…” Jackie sighed. “Not only enhanced siVis hearing, but with a monster modifier? It would be a steal if it wasn’t so… Unfortunate. Vocab is limited when you suffer from head injury—”

“Y’know, for a girl that’s been so vocal in your dreading of all things Shift; you’re so eerily calm about this whole thing!” Tracy nearly hissed out, looking over her shoulder multiple times.

“Well I mean… I already got hurt by this situation—already in pain… I just need to not make it worse,” Jackie shrugged, and then winced again.

“You guys wouldn’t understand~” Aiko chirped. “When you’re in a terrible situation and you already get hurt—you only have to worry about getting out! That’s like, most of the fear knocked out right there!”

“There you go, Jackie, you got the Aiko Seal of Approval. Don’t you feel like a sane person?” River drily stated.

Jackie rolled her eyes, and stayed silent for a bit because she could’ve sworn she had a bout of dizziness after that. “I’m more focused about your guys than me anyways…”

Maddie approached the double doors at the end of the room, and opened them.

“…Oooooh,” she said. “Okay, yeah, that explains it…”

She opened the door fully, and what they’ve found was the gymnasium. It was green-ish blue in hue, the bleachers were empty, the scoreboard folded into the ceiling as the basketball hoops hung in unnatural ways—possibly due to damage over the years.

“So what the fuck was that room, then--?” Maddie asked.

“Probably for dance…?” River guessed.

“Ah, right, this is a snobby school—” Maddie accepted.

“Should w-we be talking?” Tracy stressed. “Considering the beast in the room—or coming to it soon?”

“She might get to a point where she can smell the sweat coming off us or whatever,” Maddie bounced back. “At this point, we’re just waiting for her to come so we can stall again—”

“Preeetty much…” Jackie sighed again. “And who knows what tricks or siVis knowledge she has over us. Just hiding won’t cut it—we have to bide.”

“Then let’s get biding--!” Aiko retorted.

“Okay, she kinda spilled most of what she could do herself…” River relayed. “Injury speeds up the process, her strength and hearing are further enhanced, can shred through stone… Really, the only silver lining is the fact she’s losing her intelligence at stage 2—”

“Stage 2?” Maddie asked.

“‘Zwei’ is two in German,” River answered.

“…See Brooke,” Maddie began. “You say you’re stupid, but you’re literally the only one who caught that.”

“Madison, I learned that from watching a show that has a main character fight viruses through anime videogames, I am not a scholar—” River shot back.

“Stay on task, here!” Tracy shouted. “What do we do with this information?!”

“See, I realized something too…” Jackie brought up. “From all of those… siVis safety seminars, they solemn bring it up, but every single victim has the weakness of ‘sequence cancelling’…”

“Yeah, but it’s the last resort,” River said. “You’re going to die or you do this—”

“So perfect for where we are now,” Jackie retorted.

“Us getting face to face and trying to achieve that would work, but… We’re us. We’re already fragile. I can feel most of the wounds from the Davenoid reopen as I close them again. Nevermind the thing with Nathan. We just can’t fight her…”

“That’s why everyone here needs to vow that if she get anywhere near us, we have to do that to save ourselves,” Jackie noted. “We can only run for so far, hide for so long—we have to be brave but not be heroes. So when N’atural closes in and any of us are too far away to help in time? Break whatever stance, whatever further transformation, whatever she does—interrupt it by striking her and using siVis to see where to strike. Then you run—”

“Gaaaawh--!” Tracy made with her mouth. “S-sure! Got it! But you really have to think about like, what if we fail or--?”

“There’s not much time to fail right now,” Jackie grimly said.

Tracy silently screamed as she holds her face.

“So that’s all we got--?” Maddie asked.

“No, because we’re still gonna do our exit strat—which is just bringing the house down. We bury her in rubble that we know she can claw out, but there’s enough for us to run down to Extant or meet the Enforcers on their way here. And we do that in a mix of plans—we weaken any support beam we find or try to bait her to crush into them if that doesn’t work. We use her destructive power against her, as we work ourselves up and I use everything in my being to send her back down a floor or through a hole. The sheer damage the building takes will do the work for us and we use Aiko’s ability to make another Rosebud to jump and slide down to safety as everything falls down. After we did the ground? We book it down to Steppe Ave.”

“I like all of that. I really, really do. But we ain’t gonna bring the building down—” River said.

“Y-yeah--?” Jackie questioned.

“It would’ve worked because well, yeah. Superhero stuff and powers brings buildings down because fuck physics. But buildings, especially now, have reinforcements aside from support beams—like load-bearing walls and…” River sighed for a bit. “Steel materials. Not to mention the possible hazardous materials that could be in her and we end up inhaling. And at best, she’d be buried in a pile or something.”

Jackie sighed for a bit. “Right, that’s fair…”

“But we can still trap her in a wreck, still,” River admitted. “Just don’t expect the building coming down and more… The ceilings and stuff caved in. And the pipes pour water all over her. We can definitely work with that.”

“Thanks River,” Jackie smiled.

“You’re the one making plans nursing a ruptured eardrum or something. You’re like, the definition of badass right now.”

“You’re not gonna convince her to date you like that, Brooke,” Maddie snarked.

“1), Jackie would break me—without the abilities and 2), me ‘making a move’ involves me explaining what a current meme is with a lot less letters or words and just stuttering,” River replied.

“Speaking of…”

She saw River tense.

“Oh, no sorry River, I—I meant about my ability…” Jackie clarified, seeing the poor girl untease and exhale in relief.

Jackie looked at her hand and made a fist.

siVis Ability!

She watched her fist, muscle—veins—and skin, start to engorge blue with literal power.

“Theoretically…I should be able to hold it…”

She closed her eyes, trying to figure out how to realize that.

She went to her Mindspace, and watched her arm take on the power as it coursed down her it. It soon overtook the shoulder and spread rapidly across her chest, which made her double over.

She opened her eyes and let go, ending the process as the power faded away.

“I can do it, but it’s going to take a lot…”

“Not only that, we have to load you on after,” Maddie crossed her arms.

“Thaaaat too…” Jackie kept feeling up and down that arm, tingling. “Y’know what? We have to compare notes. What do you all feel when you use your abilities? What have you noticed so far overall?”

“Oh oh oh!” Aiko went first by making sure she got first. “Uh… So when I take over something, all of the inner workings become like… My organs? Weirdly enough? Like the engine isn’t my brain, but it’s now something I need to keep alive and worry about. That and the more I exist within the object, the more I break it.”

Maddie shrugged. “Iunno how my shit works… I just touch something and they become string and I can break that string. But if they like, hit me—Because of the Davenoid fuck, he hit me while I was ripping him up and like, he made my hands open up like string. So maybe while I’m doing it, the same can happen to me? Which is shitty, but—”

“I think my steam requires my breath to do. Otherwise, I go smokey without a problem, I’m basically invisible, and I leave a trial that quickly spreads out into a cloud. It was a shame when we got in that fight, they figured something out, but N’atural’s gone primitive enough that she hasn’t found out whatever they did and you guys got used to it during the Davenoid fight. I just need to breathe more, or what happened with the Davenoid where I just… Couldn’t catch my breath for a moment.”

Tracy rubbed her hands together. “When I… Make things pull up, I think… There’s a physical toll, in a sense. I have to mime pulling up that floor, or flipping those lockers… But when the Davenoid attacked, there was a point where he couldn’t…”

She made a face.

“I want you all to close your eyes,” she commanded. And they all did.

siVis Ability!

Tracy tried to access her ability, making an effort to push up the floor or do something.

“Oh my god… Open them?” And they did what she said.

Tracy once again made an effort to lift up the floor, and a square of the floor lifted upwards.

“It’s based on sight—Okay,” she put it back down, and looked to Aiko. “Look away—at the wall or something.”

Aiko did what she was told, just staring at the floor with a nonplussed look on her face.

Tracy tried lifting the floor… And nothing happened.

Tracy then raised her arms, looking at Aiko’s wall… And pulled back, causing the wall to jut out.

“It works on someone’s line of sight,” Maddie realized. “How fucking anal, no wonder you have this power—”

“That’s good to know…” Jackie mused. “But it’s like I said. No matter how weird or random these abilities are… They’re our tools now. This is going to be a challenge that’s going to bring us closer in understanding them better. And what better exercise than trapping a living example of how these powers can go.”

Jackie cracked her knuckles. “So let’s go, girls.”