- Location
- Internet, The
Thanks for the chapter.
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A Shadow, an Eon, and a Worm (Worm/Pokemon)
- Thread starter ShadowPixelle
- Start date
- Crossover
- Location
- England, Smugsville.
I'm back from my holiday with no wifi, so hello again!
I may have been rereading T!V while writing this chapter, so it might've been an inspiration for it.
I may have been rereading T!V while writing this chapter, so it might've been an inspiration for it.
Chapter 21- Business, planning, and surprise
- Location
- England, Smugsville.
May 21st, 2011. Saturday.
"So how was yesterday, Taylor?" Danny asked, frying eggs.
Taylor, face down on the table and half asleep, shrugged. "Fun, I guess." She mumbled, with a yawn. "Might've been out for a bit too long, thinking about it, but the food was nice, Vicky and Amy seemed to be doing ok, and there wasn't really much going on. Signed a few autographs, which was weird."
"I'd've thought you'd be more used to it by now." He commented. She shrugged again, pushing herself up and leaning on her hands.
"I mean, I kind of am, but it's still weird. Inari tends to work at night, since I'm at school and all. Don't want too many days off, but also don't want to set a pattern of me being off when Swarm's out and about, in case people draw the wrong conclusions. But because of that the main people we see are criminals causing trouble, shopkeepers and random mugging victims. Don't tend to end up signing much then. Since Leviathan, though, we've been out in the daylight a lot more." She grinned wanly. "I guess having Glory Girl and Panacea eating with us didn't help on the attention side."
"Not to mention the sparkly Kyuubi, the kitsune on a sugar high, and the slightly menacing bug controller?" Danny said dryly. Taylor chuckled.
"I guess. Was still strange, though. Especially since they left us alone while eating, aside from taking pictures, but the second we were outside the place we got swarmed by people wanting us to sign stuff."
"I also saw that Parian got some rather interesting visitors." He led, poking at the eggs for a moment. Taylor nodded again.
"Yeah, I asked Vicky if she happened to know where Parian's store was, since all I could find online was 'downtown', then Inari decided to drop in after we ate." She smirked, remembering how surprised the doll Cape had been at seeing them show up at her doorstep. "I'd needed to talk to her anyway, and she seemed nice, though a bit overwhelmed."
"I think that having you three show up unannounced would be enough to overwhelm anyone." Taylor laughed.
"Probably, yeah. I feel kinda bad, but at the same time it was a really good opportunity for both of us, and she seemed really, really enthusiastic once we explained why we were there and I made my offer."
"Hello there Parian," Eon greeted, as the Cape appeared from the back of the shop. "A pleasure to meet you, I've heard quite a bit about what you do here. It's rather nice to meet a Cape that doesn't care for violence."
"Ah… nice to meet you too." She stumbled, clearly staring at them from behind the mask. Swarm smiled a little behind her own, outwardly examining a rather nice dress that was standing on a mannequin near the door. Shadow's attention, meanwhile, had been quickly captured by a particularly sparkly bag, which she was curiously circling and admiring. "Eon, right? Of Team Inari."
"That's me." He nodded. "Along with my second, Shadow, and Swarm."
"Hey there!" Shadow called, looking up to wave. Swarm turned around fully, giving up the pretence of examining the dress- though it was a nice dress, she'd probably never wear it, it wouldn't really work if she bought it as Swarm, and Taylor had nowhere near enough money to afford it- and nodded to her.
"So, what brings you here?" Parian asked, apparently trying to move back to more familiar ground. "I wouldn't think either of you need a costume, and Swarm apparently made her own according to rumours."
"Correct, but it is actually Swarm that wanted to speak to you." Eon replied, waving a tail at her. "Shadow and I are primarily just here as an escort, since we were all together already."
"I… see." Parian turned to look at her, so she made her way closer to the counter while Eon dropped back to start looking around as well- something he'd been denied the chance at doing at first, being the team leader. "So, what did you need, Swarm?"
"Actually, it's more of an offer for you, rather than a request from me." She grinned widely, directing the spiders in her bag to start bringing out the bit of spider silk she'd brought for the demonstration. "I was curious if you'd be interested in a little business idea I and my friends came up with…"
"Honestly, Dad, she looked like she was about to start dancing with joy." Taylor laughed, now holding a coffee and rather more awake. "She was actually bouncing on the spot, it was so funny."
"It does sound like it would've been amusing." He admitted, pushing the eggs out of the frying pan and onto some toast. The bacon joined them a minute later, then the two plates made their way over to the table. "Do you think you can manage it, though?"
"Probably, yeah." She nodded, taking hers from him. "I can set the spiders to keep weaving even while I'm away, and the Den has a lot of spiders there now. I set them to work and they just spin, every time I drop by the Den I feed them and take the bits down to store them, and there's still the ones upstairs too. Not as many there, and I might move them over to the Den eventually, but I figured it'd be a good idea to keep some separate in case something happens."
"A good call, I think." Danny agreed, wincing slightly at the memory of the boxes in his daughter's room. "And I gather you're doing this cheap?"
"A hell of a lot cheaper than it'd normally be for spider silk. I looked it up, and really don't see why it needs to be so expensive. Spiders don't need paying, after all."
"It's the economics of the thing." He shrugged. "But good on you, Taylor. A nice, legitimate way to make money."
"Hey, stealing from the gangs is legitimate!" She remarked, mocking offence. "Not exactly legal, I suppose, but it's not like they got most of it through legal means anyway."
"I suppose that's true." Danny chuckled, leaning over to ruffle her hair. "And the less money the gangs have to work with the better. Even if it is mainly the Merchants."
"Attacking the Empire would just give the Nazis a reason to label us as ABB sympathisers, especially given Shadow and Eon's appearances, and there's now our truce with Lung, too." Taylor brushed his hand away. "Not that I really mind that we're only targeting the Merchants. They're a major problem, and none of us like them. Lung we can put up with, he has some honour and he's so scared of the idea of a Kyuubi running around that I don't see him being a problem. The Empire's a bit harder, but they seem to be avoiding targeting us as well, which is nice, and hopefully it'll stay that way if we avoid to obviously going after them."
"Cape work. Almost as bad as politics, but with more threat of injury." He said dryly. Taylor laughed.
"That seems to be the basic situation, yeah. It sucks, but we're managing. Even if we don't make much of a difference on the whole, we're getting to be a bit of a pain for the Merchants, which is always good."
"As long as they don't get annoyed with it and decide to come after you to teach you a lesson."
"We're actually surprised it hasn't happened yet." Taylor admitted, poking at her half-eaten eggs. "Eon and Shadow have some ideas for plans, based on the stuff we've found online about the Merchants, but nothing's concrete. If they do decide to come after us, though, we'll be able to fight back, at least until the Protectorate or someone shows up to give us a hand." She smiled thinly. "Maybe even Lung, given how he's been about us."
"Ah yes, the rage dragon of Brockton Bay showing up to help Team Inari. That won't catch some attention at all." Taylor shrugged.
"If it does, so be it. Rather be mostly alright because Lung showed up and have to explain why Lung showed up than have something go wrong and people get hurt."
"Definitely."
"…And I think that's the last of that." Director Emily Piggot sighed, making a note in her pad. "Everything's recovering well in the city, actually faster than the Thinkers projected, which is nice. Work on the memorial's already begun, relief's going fine… is there anything else anyone wants to bring up?"
"I have something, Director." Hannah aired, looking up from her own notepad for a moment before flipping backwards a few pages. "I had a call from Lady Photon yesterday…"
"Ah. That." Emily sighed, as a number of other Capes in the room winced. Lady Photon calling wasn't normally a good thing, since she was the leader of an independent hero team. "Right. I would like to get everyone's opinions on it, at least, before I go taking this up to the Chief Director."
This made everyone sit up- even Ethan, who'd been sitting quietly in his chair the entire meeting. This normally wouldn't be a bad thing, except for the depressed aura he was radiating and the miserable looks he kept shooting the chair to his left, where Alice normally sat. Something that would need to go to the Chief Director was something everyone wanted to hear about.
"Thank you, Director." Hannah nodded. "I had a call from Lady Photon yesterday. She was actually calling on behalf of Team Inari, because Panacea had an idea last Sunday after the attack. From descriptions of her power given to her during their healing stint, along with some information picked up during their hospital visits, Panacea managed to conclude that Shadow's form of healing also has a mental component, one focused on healing mental disabilities of a certain severity. While she's uncertain exactly what it would work on, and Shadow admits to having never tested it before, Panacea thinks it's focused on rebalancing the chemical makeup of the brain, through unknown means."
Hannah had spent a lot of time the night before communicating with Lady Photon after the initial phone call, gathering as much information on the theory Panacea had come up with as possible. Panacea had also spoken to Shadow about what they were telling the PRT, given that it was her power, and in return Lady Photon had forwarded a paragraph, written by Shadow on Panacea's phone, that explained in detail how her power worked, followed by another one written by Panacea that shed some light on what she saw it doing.
"Interesting…" Robin hummed, leaning on the table slightly.
"Panacea believes that it's possible that it would remove Master effects."
The room went completely silent, all of them staring at her. Emily smirked slightly, knowing that her first reaction had been rather similar.
"Swarm's power is a Master effect." Rory pointed out, sounding stunned.
"Shadow calls it the badge rule." Hannah sighed. "Apparently it got its nickname from the badges they wear that denote them as being on the same team. As long as she mentally compartmentalises them as on her team, none of the negative effects of her abilities will touch them. In her message, she mentioned that she could attempt to use her sleeping ability on one of her team mates, and it would only work if she really wanted it to. If she'd been trying to use it on an enemy and her team mate was used as a shield, it wouldn't affect them. Shadow believes this is the same thing; her healing power only heals Swarm, because they're on the same side, but it doesn't affect her ability to control insects for the same reason."
"Wait, but if it only works on her team mates, but her team mate with a Master power isn't affected by the anti-Master thing, then how would it work otherwise?"
Hannah shrugged. "Shadow admits that she's unsure, hence the offer. Lady Photon, on behalf of Team Inari, is requesting a specific power testing, using a few different Masters and a volunteer or two, to see exactly how her power can be made to react to Master effects."
"Wait, hang on." Shawn, apparently coming back from wherever he'd been for a moment, interrupted. "If Shadow can decide who's on her team, that means she can restrict her healing when she does it, right?" He waited for Hannah to nod before he continued, "Would that mean she'd be able to stand right on a battlefield and heal everyone but the opponents?"
"Probably, yes." Hannah nodded again. "But there'd also always be the risk of her being knocked out or killed if that happened, to stop her from doing that. Additionally it's apparently quite the mental task to keep everything like that lined up, because if there's too many she might slip and accidentally heal an enemy. It's easier for her to define a room and heal everyone in that room, a task which she normally uses her illusions for."
"I see."
"Anyway," Emily butted in, before anyone else could; Colin, in particular, looked worryingly curious about the idea. "What do you all think? In order to get the Masters together we'd need to call in rather a few favours from other branches, so I think it's better off going straight to the Chief Director for this one instead."
"I agree." Robin stated firmly. "This could be an incredible chance to heal hundreds of people, hell it could probably deconstruct the containment zones built around Simurgh attacks. The bigger question would be why the hell wouldn't we want to?" There was seconding all around the table, even from Ethan, still sitting miserably in his own little world.
Colin frowned. "Is it likely to work, do you think? I am… unsettled by the idea that we are just supposed to expose some people to Masters and hope that Shadow's power works."
"That's why it would be our own Master class Capes, and all be done in a test environment here." Emily reiterated. "Shadow would only be here to use her healing power on those volunteers, and if everything works as Panacea hopes it will, then it will be organised with the Chief Director for Shadow, and possibly the rest of Team Inari depending on whether or not Eon is found to be able to do it or if they merely wish to show up as her bodyguards- because by that point it feels likely that Alexandria herself might choose to escort them around, and they could probably put any condition in the world on her healing and the public would pressure to work with them- for them to travel to the different containment zones around the world to remove the Master effects left there."
Assuming they can, of course. Emily mused silently, as Colin acquiesced. There's no guarantee that Shadow being able to heal human Master's effects means that she'll be able to remove the Simurgh's ones. But even being able to fix humans would be a good start, if nothing else. "Right." She said aloud. "I'll send a message to the Chief Director about this but, pending that acceptance, Hannah, get ready to send Lady Photon a message for Team Inari, with a date and time for their appointment with the PRT for… put it down as power testing, I suppose."
"Will do, Director." Hannah made a note in her pad- even though they all knew she didn't need to- and looked up.
Emily glanced around. "I don't suppose there's anything else?" She held up a hand when Colin opened his mouth. "Not to do with that, Colin. We'll speak of that another time." He made a little grumbling sound, nodding and sitting back again. She waited a few more seconds, then finished, "No? Then meeting over, everyone can go back to whatever they were doing before this started, I'm off to send that message up the chain."
Heaving herself out of the chair, she stomped towards the door, planning on heading straight back to her office to draft up a message to the Chief Director, asking for assistance from some of the other branches to test this theory out.
Rebecca nodded to her secretary as she headed back into her office, casually opened the door, and pretended that she wasn't cursing out David with every breath she took. The break for lunch hadn't managed to calm her down any, like she'd hoped; instead she'd ended up spending entire time stewing on the conversation trying to figure out what the hell had happened with the idiot.
Admittedly, that wasn't really hard to figure out; he was pissed because Shadow had somehow managed to do more damage to Leviathan than anything they'd tried ever on the damn thing, but that made David's irritation more confusing in some ways. The damn Endbringer had been driven off incredibly quickly, and with very little damage compared to what was normally expected of the Island-Sinker, yet for some reason this seemed to make him more annoyed. To the point where she'd just spent almost an hour arguing with him, with the help of Paul, trying to stop him from following through with the idea that they needed to force Shadow to talk to figure out how she was so powerful.
Absently she winced, rubbing at the bandage under her sleeve, where her arm still stung from taking a large impact from the lightning strike. Admittedly Rebecca would love to interview Shadow about her powers, if only to figure out how the hell they'd managed to injure her, but force was in no way the best method of doing it. The little kitsune creature had driven off an Endbringer with ease, her team leader was a Kyuubi and thus most likely stronger, given that he had control over her, and Rebecca really didn't want to see what they might do if they decided the Triumvirate were being hostile towards them.
No, what they needed was a nice, calm reason to bring them in and ask a few questions about how their powers worked, preferably without giving away the fact that they'd managed to injure Alexandria in the process.
Sitting forward in her chair with a groan, Rebecca tried to pretend that David wasn't being a strange idiot and that she could instead get on with some of the work that always came in the aftermath of an Endbringer fight.
Then she noticed the folded piece of paper on her desk.
She sighed, picking it up and opening it, hoping that it wouldn't be something to add to her problems-
Message incoming from Brockton Bay. Agree, and do whatever's necessary to make it happen. Everything else is up to you.
Staring blankly at Contessa's message slash demand, Rebecca gave up, resting her face against her palms and watched the darkness for a while. The nice, calm darkness that wasn't giving her cryptic hints, more work, or a stress headache.
When, about two minutes later, her computer pinged with a high priority message, she glared at the monitor for a moment before opening the message.
Then she leaned back again, grinning and giggling slightly madly. Sometimes things just drop into your lap, I suppose. She read the email again, reaching for a pen and pad to make notes on while she did.
"Three Masters, at minimum, we might want to try and find more than that just in case, and a couple of volunteers for the human Masters… Piggot can set up a lot of this, thank god, but I might as well smooth the process out a bit…" Rebecca muttered to herself, flicking to another window as she tried to remember how many Master class Parahumans the PRT had access to, and whether the Directors would be willing to give them up for a day or so for power testing purposes.
Possibly, if David had stopped being an idiot by then, she could bring him along and get him to use some of his Master powers as well, which would make it a little easier to set everything up.
At least she wasn't irritated anymore.
Sabah hummed gently to herself as she wandered around her workshop, the remains of her last project left on the table as she directed one of her larger gorillas to move the mannequin with the dress into the side room, where it would be out of the way until it was picked up. Cleanup would be done in a few minutes, once she'd had a moment to catch her breath and decide which project she would move onto next.
She had quite a few at the moment, which was nice. A couple of them were from out-of-town, which she would be sending out for delivery instead, the payment being made to the bank account she'd managed to get set up for her Cape business.
That had been an incredible pain in the ass to get sorted, mostly because it was being done under her Cape identity, and most banks didn't like that, but she'd managed it in the end only a few weeks ago, just a bit before Leviathan.
Thinking about the Endbringer attack just a week before made Sabah sigh, looking around. She'd gotten incredibly lucky that her shop had avoided damage almost entirely, the other buildings around the area blocking a lot of the wave and the sealing she had keeping most of the rest away. Her finished orders had been fine, all far back in the shop and on high shelves, her fabrics had been fine, and the examples of her work that were on display in the front had only been somewhat damp where the wave had leaked in.
The lack of damage altogether was practically a miracle, given that it was Leviathan. Sure, Behemoth was well known for wrecking cities, but Leviathan had sunk islands before. Getting out of the attack mostly just bruised and scratched- in terms of destroyed buildings and that- was incredible.
As Parian she hadn't been able to contribute much to the rebuilding effort that was going on, unlike some Capes, but she'd still been sure to show up around and do what she could. Her gorillas had been good at that, moving things about that were too heavy to be done alone normally, and once she'd had one holding up a significant amount of building to let the workers get out when a support of some kind had broken and caused the two floors above to almost collapse in- she'd also used her animals to complete the rest of the work under the direction of the foreman, making sure that it would be safe for the workers to go back in and finish it properly- but compared to some of the things going around on PHO at the moment it seemed like very little. Glory Girl, for example, had been very visible, jetting this way and that to help out anyone she saw that seemed to be having even a little trouble; from carrying cement across the road to helping move supplies to a shelter that was out of reach because the road was damaged and the van couldn't get around it, to giving an elderly lady some help getting home with her shopping when the building work had caused her trouble.
Or Team Inari, who'd been popping up a lot as well, just wandering the streets to keep the peace or using their telekinesis to lift things into place for the builders to use. Admittedly Swarm had seemed a little left out, but her powers weren't exactly very well suited to this sort of thing. She could probably make a killing clearing out infestations, but bugs weren't very good at building massive structures that humans could use.
Rather like fabric, she supposed.
Thinking about Team Inari made Sabah smile slightly, glancing over to the patch of spider silk she'd been given the day before when the three had suddenly dropped by. It was about a foot square, and she'd already poked at it a bit with her power, testing how it worked. It was definitely the sort of stuff she'd like to work with, especially with how cheap Swarm was willing to sell it, though she might want to try layering them to make it thicker when she worked with it. It would take a lot of silk, and probably fabric layers for some designs, but it would be very worth it.
Reaching out, Sabah lifted the square from its place on the shelf, carefully pulling and flexing it again, before replacing it and going over to the safe where she kept her 'floating' cash, for situations where she needed to give change- because some customers liked paying up front- or when she needed money and didn't have time to go to the bank.
Pulling a few hundred from the safe, she slipped it into one of the envelopes on the same shelf as the safe, then grabbed a pen from her table and noted on the front, 'First payment for spider silk, to Swarm.' That done, she replaced everything, closed the safe, and went back to thumbing through her different orders, wondering if any of them would be willing to pay a slight premium for their outfit to be made of spider silk instead, dyed whatever colour they wanted.
Rebecca leaned back slightly, unable to keep herself from staring at her monitor in mild shock, and reread the email again.
"Everyone." She murmured to herself. "Literally everyone has no issues at all."
She'd gone through the list of Master-class Capes that the PRT had access to, some Protectorate and some Wards, and made a list of her own out of the Directors that she felt were most likely to agree fairly easily to her request. The emails had all been sent out separately, asking so-and-so Director if this Cape or that one would be available on Tuesday of this week to help with a power testing that would be occurring in Brockton Bay that day. Not expecting responses for a little while, given the time zones, she'd moved on to some other work, mostly related to the Endbringer attack from the previous Sunday.
When the first email came back, Rebecca had mentally prepared herself for a long inquiry into why the Capes were needed, and who was being tested, and why she was asking instead of Director Piggot- only to open it and find that the Protectorate Cape she'd requested, an animal Master focused on snakes, would be available to help with that power testing, and they'd send him along on a transport aiming to arrive about an hour before.
She'd actually spent a few minutes staring at the email before sending a reply thanking them for their help, then dropped back in her chair and stared into the darkness of her hands again, trying to figure out why on earth she hadn't had to do anything more.
The next two emails, for a minion Master that controlled a pair of puppets, and a human Master with the ability to slightly influence people into moving certain ways, had been just as easy, but the next one- another human Master, this one with emotional effects that boosted the negative emotions of a target- came with the difficulties that she had been expecting.
Admittedly she hadn't been the Director to come across so strongly, but the requests for clarification had all been there. Who was being tested, why was she contacting him instead of Director Piggot, why did they need a human Master specifically… she'd sent back a response, half expecting to need to argue the point further in a little while, only for the next email to be one informing her that the Cape in question would be flying out on a transport to arrive a few hours ahead of time, barring any delays, and that they hoped that would help.
Rebecca wasn't sure if it was the fact that Panacea had been mentioned in the email, as the one who came up with the theory, or if word of Shadow's part in Leviathan had spread that far already despite the standard two week silence about the attack results, but whatever it was had clearly changed that Director's mind quite quickly.
One of the Wards she'd asked about had been refused, on the grounds of parents refusing to send their child to a place that, a) was known for being a hotbed of crime, and b) had just been attacked by an Endbringer- ignoring the fact that the city was recovering well and that the entire place had enforced its own Endbringer Truce throughout the rebuilding, though to be fair the reputation of the place was fairly well earned- but one of the other animal Masters had been allowed through, so Rebecca hadn't bothered to chase up someone else.
Two animal Masters, one minion controller, two human Masters, someone that animates shoelaces, and a projector… this is going ridiculously well. Rebecca mused to herself. Literally no-one at all has any trouble with moving these Masters to Brockton Bay for power testing. I mean, I suppose curiosity could be playing a part in it, but seriously, one person wanted more information and was fine with it as soon as they got it, and only person to refuse is because of their parents. She shook her head, leaning forward again and compiling the list of Cape names, regions and Directors to send back to Director Piggot, as well as what time to be expecting each of the Capes.
Once that was done and sent, Rebecca locked up her computer, stood and stretched, before heading out of the door in search of food and coffee.
At least this was easier than trying to deal with David again.
Emily glanced over at the sound of a high-priority email coming through, opening it with half a thought. She grinned victoriously a minute later, reaching across her desk for her phone.
"Miss Militia speaking."
"Send a message to Lady Photon for Team Inari, Shadow's power testing is down for three pm on Tuesday." Emily instructed, making a note on her calendar. "Also put out word that we're looking for a couple of troopers willing to be put under a Master effect temporarily for the sake of testing out a possible Master removing power. Perhaps four people, two for each of the human Master's that're being shipped out to us."
"Ah- yes, Director." Hannah replied, sounding vaguely startled. The line went dead just after, and Emily leaned back in her chair with a smile.
Now this was looking good.
Amy yawned, looking at her phone as it pinged with a message. She and Vicky were lounging about on the couch, the TV playing some random terrible movie they'd found as background noise, the flying Brute scrolling through PHO while Amy read. Folding down the corner of the page she was on slightly to make a temporary bookmark, she closed it with one hand and unlocked her phone with the other.
Seeing that it was a message from Aunt Sarah, she raised an eyebrow and scanned over it, then read back more deeply with her eyes wide.
"Vicky, I need to borrow your phone for a minute." She half-demanding, not moving her gaze from the screen.
"Why?" Her sister audibly raised an eyebrow down at her. "You've got your phone."
"Yeah, but I need to call Shadow and I need to keep this message on the screen at the same time, and it's easier to just nick your phone."
"Ok, but I better find out what this is about." The girl demanded, placing her phone in Amy's empty hand.
"You will in a minute, trust me." Amy promised, checking and dialling the number before waiting.
"He-llo, this is Shadow speaking." The peppy voice of the small fox announced.
Amy chuckled. "Hi Shadow, it's Amy."
"Oh, Amy! What's up, do you two need me to come round again?" She could vaguely hear the sound of shuffling in the background, like someone was running about collecting things.
"No, no, we're ok, Shadow." She assured. "I'm just calling because I got a text from Aunt Sarah a minute ago."
"Oh?"
"Yup. Make sure your afternoon's clear on Tuesday, because you've got an appointment with the PRT for power testing." Amy explained. "Three o'clock in the afternoon."
The other end of the line went quiet, while Vicky stared at her.
"Shadow?"
"Hello, Amy." Eon's deeper voice came over the speaker. "Sorry about Shadow, she's currently running around in very enthusiastic circles." Amy laughed loudly.
"Fair enough. Anyway, Shadow's got her appointment at three on Tuesday afternoon, I've been asked to come along because I'm a healer, and the entirety of Team Inari's also invited, either to let you play bodyguard because you're independents, or in the hopes that you can do it too, Eon."
"I can, but it's rather more limited than Shadow's is." He replied. "I've not been doing it for nearly as long as Shadow has, I only started practising a little before Leviathan attacked, she's been doing it for years. I get two, maybe three uses at a push, then there's no way I'm doing it or pretty much anything else again. Shadow gets a lot more out of it, plus the restoration works better on her because of that. Even still, I'll be there. Swarm probably will as well, I'll ask her in a little while."
"Excellent. I'll tell Aunt Sarah to tell the PRT that, then." Amy smiled.
"Thank you, Amy. We'll see you on Tuesday, then. If not sooner."
"We'll be in touch." She promised, hanging up. Turning back to Vicky, she handed the phone back to her, and continued, "So I've got an appointment to make on Tuesday, at three in the afternoon. Mind giving me a lift, Vicky?"
"Sure thing, Ames." Vicky nodded, after a moment. Both of them laughed a little, then went back to what they'd been doing, Amy sending her reply to Aunt Sarah before picking up her book again.
"So how was yesterday, Taylor?" Danny asked, frying eggs.
Taylor, face down on the table and half asleep, shrugged. "Fun, I guess." She mumbled, with a yawn. "Might've been out for a bit too long, thinking about it, but the food was nice, Vicky and Amy seemed to be doing ok, and there wasn't really much going on. Signed a few autographs, which was weird."
"I'd've thought you'd be more used to it by now." He commented. She shrugged again, pushing herself up and leaning on her hands.
"I mean, I kind of am, but it's still weird. Inari tends to work at night, since I'm at school and all. Don't want too many days off, but also don't want to set a pattern of me being off when Swarm's out and about, in case people draw the wrong conclusions. But because of that the main people we see are criminals causing trouble, shopkeepers and random mugging victims. Don't tend to end up signing much then. Since Leviathan, though, we've been out in the daylight a lot more." She grinned wanly. "I guess having Glory Girl and Panacea eating with us didn't help on the attention side."
"Not to mention the sparkly Kyuubi, the kitsune on a sugar high, and the slightly menacing bug controller?" Danny said dryly. Taylor chuckled.
"I guess. Was still strange, though. Especially since they left us alone while eating, aside from taking pictures, but the second we were outside the place we got swarmed by people wanting us to sign stuff."
"I also saw that Parian got some rather interesting visitors." He led, poking at the eggs for a moment. Taylor nodded again.
"Yeah, I asked Vicky if she happened to know where Parian's store was, since all I could find online was 'downtown', then Inari decided to drop in after we ate." She smirked, remembering how surprised the doll Cape had been at seeing them show up at her doorstep. "I'd needed to talk to her anyway, and she seemed nice, though a bit overwhelmed."
"I think that having you three show up unannounced would be enough to overwhelm anyone." Taylor laughed.
"Probably, yeah. I feel kinda bad, but at the same time it was a really good opportunity for both of us, and she seemed really, really enthusiastic once we explained why we were there and I made my offer."
"Hello there Parian," Eon greeted, as the Cape appeared from the back of the shop. "A pleasure to meet you, I've heard quite a bit about what you do here. It's rather nice to meet a Cape that doesn't care for violence."
"Ah… nice to meet you too." She stumbled, clearly staring at them from behind the mask. Swarm smiled a little behind her own, outwardly examining a rather nice dress that was standing on a mannequin near the door. Shadow's attention, meanwhile, had been quickly captured by a particularly sparkly bag, which she was curiously circling and admiring. "Eon, right? Of Team Inari."
"That's me." He nodded. "Along with my second, Shadow, and Swarm."
"Hey there!" Shadow called, looking up to wave. Swarm turned around fully, giving up the pretence of examining the dress- though it was a nice dress, she'd probably never wear it, it wouldn't really work if she bought it as Swarm, and Taylor had nowhere near enough money to afford it- and nodded to her.
"So, what brings you here?" Parian asked, apparently trying to move back to more familiar ground. "I wouldn't think either of you need a costume, and Swarm apparently made her own according to rumours."
"Correct, but it is actually Swarm that wanted to speak to you." Eon replied, waving a tail at her. "Shadow and I are primarily just here as an escort, since we were all together already."
"I… see." Parian turned to look at her, so she made her way closer to the counter while Eon dropped back to start looking around as well- something he'd been denied the chance at doing at first, being the team leader. "So, what did you need, Swarm?"
"Actually, it's more of an offer for you, rather than a request from me." She grinned widely, directing the spiders in her bag to start bringing out the bit of spider silk she'd brought for the demonstration. "I was curious if you'd be interested in a little business idea I and my friends came up with…"
"Honestly, Dad, she looked like she was about to start dancing with joy." Taylor laughed, now holding a coffee and rather more awake. "She was actually bouncing on the spot, it was so funny."
"It does sound like it would've been amusing." He admitted, pushing the eggs out of the frying pan and onto some toast. The bacon joined them a minute later, then the two plates made their way over to the table. "Do you think you can manage it, though?"
"Probably, yeah." She nodded, taking hers from him. "I can set the spiders to keep weaving even while I'm away, and the Den has a lot of spiders there now. I set them to work and they just spin, every time I drop by the Den I feed them and take the bits down to store them, and there's still the ones upstairs too. Not as many there, and I might move them over to the Den eventually, but I figured it'd be a good idea to keep some separate in case something happens."
"A good call, I think." Danny agreed, wincing slightly at the memory of the boxes in his daughter's room. "And I gather you're doing this cheap?"
"A hell of a lot cheaper than it'd normally be for spider silk. I looked it up, and really don't see why it needs to be so expensive. Spiders don't need paying, after all."
"It's the economics of the thing." He shrugged. "But good on you, Taylor. A nice, legitimate way to make money."
"Hey, stealing from the gangs is legitimate!" She remarked, mocking offence. "Not exactly legal, I suppose, but it's not like they got most of it through legal means anyway."
"I suppose that's true." Danny chuckled, leaning over to ruffle her hair. "And the less money the gangs have to work with the better. Even if it is mainly the Merchants."
"Attacking the Empire would just give the Nazis a reason to label us as ABB sympathisers, especially given Shadow and Eon's appearances, and there's now our truce with Lung, too." Taylor brushed his hand away. "Not that I really mind that we're only targeting the Merchants. They're a major problem, and none of us like them. Lung we can put up with, he has some honour and he's so scared of the idea of a Kyuubi running around that I don't see him being a problem. The Empire's a bit harder, but they seem to be avoiding targeting us as well, which is nice, and hopefully it'll stay that way if we avoid to obviously going after them."
"Cape work. Almost as bad as politics, but with more threat of injury." He said dryly. Taylor laughed.
"That seems to be the basic situation, yeah. It sucks, but we're managing. Even if we don't make much of a difference on the whole, we're getting to be a bit of a pain for the Merchants, which is always good."
"As long as they don't get annoyed with it and decide to come after you to teach you a lesson."
"We're actually surprised it hasn't happened yet." Taylor admitted, poking at her half-eaten eggs. "Eon and Shadow have some ideas for plans, based on the stuff we've found online about the Merchants, but nothing's concrete. If they do decide to come after us, though, we'll be able to fight back, at least until the Protectorate or someone shows up to give us a hand." She smiled thinly. "Maybe even Lung, given how he's been about us."
"Ah yes, the rage dragon of Brockton Bay showing up to help Team Inari. That won't catch some attention at all." Taylor shrugged.
"If it does, so be it. Rather be mostly alright because Lung showed up and have to explain why Lung showed up than have something go wrong and people get hurt."
"Definitely."
"…And I think that's the last of that." Director Emily Piggot sighed, making a note in her pad. "Everything's recovering well in the city, actually faster than the Thinkers projected, which is nice. Work on the memorial's already begun, relief's going fine… is there anything else anyone wants to bring up?"
"I have something, Director." Hannah aired, looking up from her own notepad for a moment before flipping backwards a few pages. "I had a call from Lady Photon yesterday…"
"Ah. That." Emily sighed, as a number of other Capes in the room winced. Lady Photon calling wasn't normally a good thing, since she was the leader of an independent hero team. "Right. I would like to get everyone's opinions on it, at least, before I go taking this up to the Chief Director."
This made everyone sit up- even Ethan, who'd been sitting quietly in his chair the entire meeting. This normally wouldn't be a bad thing, except for the depressed aura he was radiating and the miserable looks he kept shooting the chair to his left, where Alice normally sat. Something that would need to go to the Chief Director was something everyone wanted to hear about.
"Thank you, Director." Hannah nodded. "I had a call from Lady Photon yesterday. She was actually calling on behalf of Team Inari, because Panacea had an idea last Sunday after the attack. From descriptions of her power given to her during their healing stint, along with some information picked up during their hospital visits, Panacea managed to conclude that Shadow's form of healing also has a mental component, one focused on healing mental disabilities of a certain severity. While she's uncertain exactly what it would work on, and Shadow admits to having never tested it before, Panacea thinks it's focused on rebalancing the chemical makeup of the brain, through unknown means."
Hannah had spent a lot of time the night before communicating with Lady Photon after the initial phone call, gathering as much information on the theory Panacea had come up with as possible. Panacea had also spoken to Shadow about what they were telling the PRT, given that it was her power, and in return Lady Photon had forwarded a paragraph, written by Shadow on Panacea's phone, that explained in detail how her power worked, followed by another one written by Panacea that shed some light on what she saw it doing.
"Interesting…" Robin hummed, leaning on the table slightly.
"Panacea believes that it's possible that it would remove Master effects."
The room went completely silent, all of them staring at her. Emily smirked slightly, knowing that her first reaction had been rather similar.
"Swarm's power is a Master effect." Rory pointed out, sounding stunned.
"Shadow calls it the badge rule." Hannah sighed. "Apparently it got its nickname from the badges they wear that denote them as being on the same team. As long as she mentally compartmentalises them as on her team, none of the negative effects of her abilities will touch them. In her message, she mentioned that she could attempt to use her sleeping ability on one of her team mates, and it would only work if she really wanted it to. If she'd been trying to use it on an enemy and her team mate was used as a shield, it wouldn't affect them. Shadow believes this is the same thing; her healing power only heals Swarm, because they're on the same side, but it doesn't affect her ability to control insects for the same reason."
"Wait, but if it only works on her team mates, but her team mate with a Master power isn't affected by the anti-Master thing, then how would it work otherwise?"
Hannah shrugged. "Shadow admits that she's unsure, hence the offer. Lady Photon, on behalf of Team Inari, is requesting a specific power testing, using a few different Masters and a volunteer or two, to see exactly how her power can be made to react to Master effects."
"Wait, hang on." Shawn, apparently coming back from wherever he'd been for a moment, interrupted. "If Shadow can decide who's on her team, that means she can restrict her healing when she does it, right?" He waited for Hannah to nod before he continued, "Would that mean she'd be able to stand right on a battlefield and heal everyone but the opponents?"
"Probably, yes." Hannah nodded again. "But there'd also always be the risk of her being knocked out or killed if that happened, to stop her from doing that. Additionally it's apparently quite the mental task to keep everything like that lined up, because if there's too many she might slip and accidentally heal an enemy. It's easier for her to define a room and heal everyone in that room, a task which she normally uses her illusions for."
"I see."
"Anyway," Emily butted in, before anyone else could; Colin, in particular, looked worryingly curious about the idea. "What do you all think? In order to get the Masters together we'd need to call in rather a few favours from other branches, so I think it's better off going straight to the Chief Director for this one instead."
"I agree." Robin stated firmly. "This could be an incredible chance to heal hundreds of people, hell it could probably deconstruct the containment zones built around Simurgh attacks. The bigger question would be why the hell wouldn't we want to?" There was seconding all around the table, even from Ethan, still sitting miserably in his own little world.
Colin frowned. "Is it likely to work, do you think? I am… unsettled by the idea that we are just supposed to expose some people to Masters and hope that Shadow's power works."
"That's why it would be our own Master class Capes, and all be done in a test environment here." Emily reiterated. "Shadow would only be here to use her healing power on those volunteers, and if everything works as Panacea hopes it will, then it will be organised with the Chief Director for Shadow, and possibly the rest of Team Inari depending on whether or not Eon is found to be able to do it or if they merely wish to show up as her bodyguards- because by that point it feels likely that Alexandria herself might choose to escort them around, and they could probably put any condition in the world on her healing and the public would pressure to work with them- for them to travel to the different containment zones around the world to remove the Master effects left there."
Assuming they can, of course. Emily mused silently, as Colin acquiesced. There's no guarantee that Shadow being able to heal human Master's effects means that she'll be able to remove the Simurgh's ones. But even being able to fix humans would be a good start, if nothing else. "Right." She said aloud. "I'll send a message to the Chief Director about this but, pending that acceptance, Hannah, get ready to send Lady Photon a message for Team Inari, with a date and time for their appointment with the PRT for… put it down as power testing, I suppose."
"Will do, Director." Hannah made a note in her pad- even though they all knew she didn't need to- and looked up.
Emily glanced around. "I don't suppose there's anything else?" She held up a hand when Colin opened his mouth. "Not to do with that, Colin. We'll speak of that another time." He made a little grumbling sound, nodding and sitting back again. She waited a few more seconds, then finished, "No? Then meeting over, everyone can go back to whatever they were doing before this started, I'm off to send that message up the chain."
Heaving herself out of the chair, she stomped towards the door, planning on heading straight back to her office to draft up a message to the Chief Director, asking for assistance from some of the other branches to test this theory out.
Rebecca nodded to her secretary as she headed back into her office, casually opened the door, and pretended that she wasn't cursing out David with every breath she took. The break for lunch hadn't managed to calm her down any, like she'd hoped; instead she'd ended up spending entire time stewing on the conversation trying to figure out what the hell had happened with the idiot.
Admittedly, that wasn't really hard to figure out; he was pissed because Shadow had somehow managed to do more damage to Leviathan than anything they'd tried ever on the damn thing, but that made David's irritation more confusing in some ways. The damn Endbringer had been driven off incredibly quickly, and with very little damage compared to what was normally expected of the Island-Sinker, yet for some reason this seemed to make him more annoyed. To the point where she'd just spent almost an hour arguing with him, with the help of Paul, trying to stop him from following through with the idea that they needed to force Shadow to talk to figure out how she was so powerful.
Absently she winced, rubbing at the bandage under her sleeve, where her arm still stung from taking a large impact from the lightning strike. Admittedly Rebecca would love to interview Shadow about her powers, if only to figure out how the hell they'd managed to injure her, but force was in no way the best method of doing it. The little kitsune creature had driven off an Endbringer with ease, her team leader was a Kyuubi and thus most likely stronger, given that he had control over her, and Rebecca really didn't want to see what they might do if they decided the Triumvirate were being hostile towards them.
No, what they needed was a nice, calm reason to bring them in and ask a few questions about how their powers worked, preferably without giving away the fact that they'd managed to injure Alexandria in the process.
Sitting forward in her chair with a groan, Rebecca tried to pretend that David wasn't being a strange idiot and that she could instead get on with some of the work that always came in the aftermath of an Endbringer fight.
Then she noticed the folded piece of paper on her desk.
She sighed, picking it up and opening it, hoping that it wouldn't be something to add to her problems-
Message incoming from Brockton Bay. Agree, and do whatever's necessary to make it happen. Everything else is up to you.
Staring blankly at Contessa's message slash demand, Rebecca gave up, resting her face against her palms and watched the darkness for a while. The nice, calm darkness that wasn't giving her cryptic hints, more work, or a stress headache.
When, about two minutes later, her computer pinged with a high priority message, she glared at the monitor for a moment before opening the message.
Then she leaned back again, grinning and giggling slightly madly. Sometimes things just drop into your lap, I suppose. She read the email again, reaching for a pen and pad to make notes on while she did.
"Three Masters, at minimum, we might want to try and find more than that just in case, and a couple of volunteers for the human Masters… Piggot can set up a lot of this, thank god, but I might as well smooth the process out a bit…" Rebecca muttered to herself, flicking to another window as she tried to remember how many Master class Parahumans the PRT had access to, and whether the Directors would be willing to give them up for a day or so for power testing purposes.
Possibly, if David had stopped being an idiot by then, she could bring him along and get him to use some of his Master powers as well, which would make it a little easier to set everything up.
At least she wasn't irritated anymore.
Sabah hummed gently to herself as she wandered around her workshop, the remains of her last project left on the table as she directed one of her larger gorillas to move the mannequin with the dress into the side room, where it would be out of the way until it was picked up. Cleanup would be done in a few minutes, once she'd had a moment to catch her breath and decide which project she would move onto next.
She had quite a few at the moment, which was nice. A couple of them were from out-of-town, which she would be sending out for delivery instead, the payment being made to the bank account she'd managed to get set up for her Cape business.
That had been an incredible pain in the ass to get sorted, mostly because it was being done under her Cape identity, and most banks didn't like that, but she'd managed it in the end only a few weeks ago, just a bit before Leviathan.
Thinking about the Endbringer attack just a week before made Sabah sigh, looking around. She'd gotten incredibly lucky that her shop had avoided damage almost entirely, the other buildings around the area blocking a lot of the wave and the sealing she had keeping most of the rest away. Her finished orders had been fine, all far back in the shop and on high shelves, her fabrics had been fine, and the examples of her work that were on display in the front had only been somewhat damp where the wave had leaked in.
The lack of damage altogether was practically a miracle, given that it was Leviathan. Sure, Behemoth was well known for wrecking cities, but Leviathan had sunk islands before. Getting out of the attack mostly just bruised and scratched- in terms of destroyed buildings and that- was incredible.
As Parian she hadn't been able to contribute much to the rebuilding effort that was going on, unlike some Capes, but she'd still been sure to show up around and do what she could. Her gorillas had been good at that, moving things about that were too heavy to be done alone normally, and once she'd had one holding up a significant amount of building to let the workers get out when a support of some kind had broken and caused the two floors above to almost collapse in- she'd also used her animals to complete the rest of the work under the direction of the foreman, making sure that it would be safe for the workers to go back in and finish it properly- but compared to some of the things going around on PHO at the moment it seemed like very little. Glory Girl, for example, had been very visible, jetting this way and that to help out anyone she saw that seemed to be having even a little trouble; from carrying cement across the road to helping move supplies to a shelter that was out of reach because the road was damaged and the van couldn't get around it, to giving an elderly lady some help getting home with her shopping when the building work had caused her trouble.
Or Team Inari, who'd been popping up a lot as well, just wandering the streets to keep the peace or using their telekinesis to lift things into place for the builders to use. Admittedly Swarm had seemed a little left out, but her powers weren't exactly very well suited to this sort of thing. She could probably make a killing clearing out infestations, but bugs weren't very good at building massive structures that humans could use.
Rather like fabric, she supposed.
Thinking about Team Inari made Sabah smile slightly, glancing over to the patch of spider silk she'd been given the day before when the three had suddenly dropped by. It was about a foot square, and she'd already poked at it a bit with her power, testing how it worked. It was definitely the sort of stuff she'd like to work with, especially with how cheap Swarm was willing to sell it, though she might want to try layering them to make it thicker when she worked with it. It would take a lot of silk, and probably fabric layers for some designs, but it would be very worth it.
Reaching out, Sabah lifted the square from its place on the shelf, carefully pulling and flexing it again, before replacing it and going over to the safe where she kept her 'floating' cash, for situations where she needed to give change- because some customers liked paying up front- or when she needed money and didn't have time to go to the bank.
Pulling a few hundred from the safe, she slipped it into one of the envelopes on the same shelf as the safe, then grabbed a pen from her table and noted on the front, 'First payment for spider silk, to Swarm.' That done, she replaced everything, closed the safe, and went back to thumbing through her different orders, wondering if any of them would be willing to pay a slight premium for their outfit to be made of spider silk instead, dyed whatever colour they wanted.
Rebecca leaned back slightly, unable to keep herself from staring at her monitor in mild shock, and reread the email again.
"Everyone." She murmured to herself. "Literally everyone has no issues at all."
She'd gone through the list of Master-class Capes that the PRT had access to, some Protectorate and some Wards, and made a list of her own out of the Directors that she felt were most likely to agree fairly easily to her request. The emails had all been sent out separately, asking so-and-so Director if this Cape or that one would be available on Tuesday of this week to help with a power testing that would be occurring in Brockton Bay that day. Not expecting responses for a little while, given the time zones, she'd moved on to some other work, mostly related to the Endbringer attack from the previous Sunday.
When the first email came back, Rebecca had mentally prepared herself for a long inquiry into why the Capes were needed, and who was being tested, and why she was asking instead of Director Piggot- only to open it and find that the Protectorate Cape she'd requested, an animal Master focused on snakes, would be available to help with that power testing, and they'd send him along on a transport aiming to arrive about an hour before.
She'd actually spent a few minutes staring at the email before sending a reply thanking them for their help, then dropped back in her chair and stared into the darkness of her hands again, trying to figure out why on earth she hadn't had to do anything more.
The next two emails, for a minion Master that controlled a pair of puppets, and a human Master with the ability to slightly influence people into moving certain ways, had been just as easy, but the next one- another human Master, this one with emotional effects that boosted the negative emotions of a target- came with the difficulties that she had been expecting.
Admittedly she hadn't been the Director to come across so strongly, but the requests for clarification had all been there. Who was being tested, why was she contacting him instead of Director Piggot, why did they need a human Master specifically… she'd sent back a response, half expecting to need to argue the point further in a little while, only for the next email to be one informing her that the Cape in question would be flying out on a transport to arrive a few hours ahead of time, barring any delays, and that they hoped that would help.
Rebecca wasn't sure if it was the fact that Panacea had been mentioned in the email, as the one who came up with the theory, or if word of Shadow's part in Leviathan had spread that far already despite the standard two week silence about the attack results, but whatever it was had clearly changed that Director's mind quite quickly.
One of the Wards she'd asked about had been refused, on the grounds of parents refusing to send their child to a place that, a) was known for being a hotbed of crime, and b) had just been attacked by an Endbringer- ignoring the fact that the city was recovering well and that the entire place had enforced its own Endbringer Truce throughout the rebuilding, though to be fair the reputation of the place was fairly well earned- but one of the other animal Masters had been allowed through, so Rebecca hadn't bothered to chase up someone else.
Two animal Masters, one minion controller, two human Masters, someone that animates shoelaces, and a projector… this is going ridiculously well. Rebecca mused to herself. Literally no-one at all has any trouble with moving these Masters to Brockton Bay for power testing. I mean, I suppose curiosity could be playing a part in it, but seriously, one person wanted more information and was fine with it as soon as they got it, and only person to refuse is because of their parents. She shook her head, leaning forward again and compiling the list of Cape names, regions and Directors to send back to Director Piggot, as well as what time to be expecting each of the Capes.
Once that was done and sent, Rebecca locked up her computer, stood and stretched, before heading out of the door in search of food and coffee.
At least this was easier than trying to deal with David again.
Emily glanced over at the sound of a high-priority email coming through, opening it with half a thought. She grinned victoriously a minute later, reaching across her desk for her phone.
"Miss Militia speaking."
"Send a message to Lady Photon for Team Inari, Shadow's power testing is down for three pm on Tuesday." Emily instructed, making a note on her calendar. "Also put out word that we're looking for a couple of troopers willing to be put under a Master effect temporarily for the sake of testing out a possible Master removing power. Perhaps four people, two for each of the human Master's that're being shipped out to us."
"Ah- yes, Director." Hannah replied, sounding vaguely startled. The line went dead just after, and Emily leaned back in her chair with a smile.
Now this was looking good.
Amy yawned, looking at her phone as it pinged with a message. She and Vicky were lounging about on the couch, the TV playing some random terrible movie they'd found as background noise, the flying Brute scrolling through PHO while Amy read. Folding down the corner of the page she was on slightly to make a temporary bookmark, she closed it with one hand and unlocked her phone with the other.
Seeing that it was a message from Aunt Sarah, she raised an eyebrow and scanned over it, then read back more deeply with her eyes wide.
"Vicky, I need to borrow your phone for a minute." She half-demanding, not moving her gaze from the screen.
"Why?" Her sister audibly raised an eyebrow down at her. "You've got your phone."
"Yeah, but I need to call Shadow and I need to keep this message on the screen at the same time, and it's easier to just nick your phone."
"Ok, but I better find out what this is about." The girl demanded, placing her phone in Amy's empty hand.
"You will in a minute, trust me." Amy promised, checking and dialling the number before waiting.
"He-llo, this is Shadow speaking." The peppy voice of the small fox announced.
Amy chuckled. "Hi Shadow, it's Amy."
"Oh, Amy! What's up, do you two need me to come round again?" She could vaguely hear the sound of shuffling in the background, like someone was running about collecting things.
"No, no, we're ok, Shadow." She assured. "I'm just calling because I got a text from Aunt Sarah a minute ago."
"Oh?"
"Yup. Make sure your afternoon's clear on Tuesday, because you've got an appointment with the PRT for power testing." Amy explained. "Three o'clock in the afternoon."
The other end of the line went quiet, while Vicky stared at her.
"Shadow?"
"Hello, Amy." Eon's deeper voice came over the speaker. "Sorry about Shadow, she's currently running around in very enthusiastic circles." Amy laughed loudly.
"Fair enough. Anyway, Shadow's got her appointment at three on Tuesday afternoon, I've been asked to come along because I'm a healer, and the entirety of Team Inari's also invited, either to let you play bodyguard because you're independents, or in the hopes that you can do it too, Eon."
"I can, but it's rather more limited than Shadow's is." He replied. "I've not been doing it for nearly as long as Shadow has, I only started practising a little before Leviathan attacked, she's been doing it for years. I get two, maybe three uses at a push, then there's no way I'm doing it or pretty much anything else again. Shadow gets a lot more out of it, plus the restoration works better on her because of that. Even still, I'll be there. Swarm probably will as well, I'll ask her in a little while."
"Excellent. I'll tell Aunt Sarah to tell the PRT that, then." Amy smiled.
"Thank you, Amy. We'll see you on Tuesday, then. If not sooner."
"We'll be in touch." She promised, hanging up. Turning back to Vicky, she handed the phone back to her, and continued, "So I've got an appointment to make on Tuesday, at three in the afternoon. Mind giving me a lift, Vicky?"
"Sure thing, Ames." Vicky nodded, after a moment. Both of them laughed a little, then went back to what they'd been doing, Amy sending her reply to Aunt Sarah before picking up her book again.
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- Location
- Omniverse #1345
...The worst part is the smoothness is definitely a Simurgh plot, but a good one.
(The Endbringers are all Mastered by Eidolon into attacking. The Simurgh is unhappy about it, but can't just break it. She can, however, set up a plot that results in it being broken by chance because the connection just happens to get caught in a Heal Bell.)
(The Endbringers are all Mastered by Eidolon into attacking. The Simurgh is unhappy about it, but can't just break it. She can, however, set up a plot that results in it being broken by chance because the connection just happens to get caught in a Heal Bell.)
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- Location
- Internet, The
I'm a bit confused at why they expect the power to work against Skitter. Do they think it will heal the bugs? But even if so, wouldn't Skitter control them as soon as they weren't actively being healed any more.
Unless I misunderstand it, it works by removing external influence at one moment. I see it being completely ineffective against many master effects.
Unless I misunderstand it, it works by removing external influence at one moment. I see it being completely ineffective against many master effects.
"the sparkly"?
time it was
"bought it"?
to
This ability seems incredibly important in a waterlogged city. Poor sanitation and all that.
- Location
- US
It could conceivably work against swarm, if the power modified bugs as they entered the range and then sent orders to modified bugs. That's a bit of a stretch though. It could also work if there was some sort of lasting 'be well' effect instead of just an instantaneous heal. But that would only come up with continuous masters so nobody would know (except for the pokemon who've seen debuffs reapplied). Even if it were just the instantaneous effect, losing control of bugs even briefly could prove a real hassle - particularly venemous ones on people's skin. Granted, that would probably be more an issue for Swarm's opponents than Swarm herself, but still an issue.
ScottotheUnwise
Verified Crack (fic) Dealer
- Location
- Mulberry, Fl
Well, she does carry spiders and wasps in her hair. Could be needing a second application of heal bell if the first caused her to lose control and she reacted with a jolt.
Chapter 22- Gift, meeting, and acknowledgement
- Location
- England, Smugsville.
May 22nd, 2011. Sunday.
"Seeya later, Dad!" Taylor called, as she ran out of the back door, a backpack over one shoulder.
"Goodbye, Taylor!" Danny replied, before the door slammed closed. He chuckled slightly, lifting the coffee mug to his lips and taking a sip before heading for the front room, planning on spending his Sunday relaxing with a book until his daughter and her team came over for the afternoon.
He was rather glad that Eon was willing to keep him in the loop about their Cape activities, and even more pleased that he wanted to ask for his advice. While Danny might not be much use when it came to actual Cape stuff, he knew politics quite well, and was happy to use that experience to help make sure his daughter's team didn't get into trouble with the authorities over any incidents. Especially because, according to rumours, the PRT was often rather desperate to grab powerful Capes for their own team.
Although from the message Eon had sent Taylor last night, the PRT currently seemed more interested in forming some kind of alliance with Inari, rather than forcing them into a contract in the Wards to try and use their power and current popularity.
It said an awful lot about how the PRT worked that that was his opinion of them, he supposed. But it was known to happen in other places, and there were rumours that it'd happened before in the Bay, too, though he couldn't remember what the context of it was. It had only been a vague reference about six months ago at the office, and he hadn't been listening all that hard.
He was also very glad that Team Inari had been making connections to other Capes in the bay. Even if one of them was Lung… which might well have been a better thing, in some ways. He couldn't see any of the heroes helping them get their Threat Report out of the PRT's systems as a measure of friendship…
Snorting slightly at the mental image of someone like Glory Girl or Lady Photon walking up to Armsmaster and asking if they could see the Inari Threat Report, Danny placed his mug on the table and stood, heading for the bookshelf for something to read while he waited on his daughter and her team.
Swarm paused mid-step, cocking her head slightly to the side and turning unerringly to the left, staring at a wall.
"Something up, Swarm?" Shadow asked lowly, projecting her voice with her audio illusion to the girl.
"Kid, about seventeen, in ABB colours." She murmured back. "I can't see him too well, but it looks like he's got a backpack of some kind. No idea what's in it, I'm not going to risk trying to get any bugs in there."
"Interesting…" Eon mused. "I wonder what he's doing around here."
"We could go and ask?" Shadow suggested, with a smirk. "I mean, I don't see why not."
"Lead the way, Swarm." The Ninetales waved, stepping back from his slot as team leader. Swarm moved to the front as a scout, keeping a number of her bugs following the ABB member while she led them towards him through the alleyways.
She purposely led them so that they would come across him as they encountered a split, where they would normally turn left and out. The ABB member was coming from the right, and the trio paused for a moment to restructure themselves back to normal before leaving, almost walking right into him.
"Hello, there." Eon greeted, after giving him a moment to get over the shock of nearly running into the 'Cape' trio. "Apologies for startling you, this area is usually rather quiet."
"I was looking for you, Kyuubi Eon." The boy replied, looking nervous. "It's been noticed that this is the route your team comes into the city by, so I thought patrolling it would lead to finding you."
"Hm. If we're really getting that predictable, then maybe we need to start varying our routes some." He hummed. "It'd end up being a little too easy to trap if we keep using the same one, and I'd rather not be trapped by someone hostile." Looking up at the teen, Eon noticed him slowly moving towards his bag, and cocked his head a little. "What brought you looking for us?"
Picking up on the quiet almost-threat in his voice, the boy froze in the middle of sliding the backpack off, and looked around jerkily. "Lung-sama sent me, Kyuubi." He murmured. "One of the moles in the PRT managed to succeed in their mission, and he sent me to act as courier for it. I have the document in my bag, hid so it just looks like a lot of school work."
"Hand it over, then." The boy shot to grant his request, slinging the bag off his back and placing it on the floor to open it. He handed over a slim plastic folder, which Eon took in an Extrasensory and handed to Swarm, nodding. "Give Lung my greetings and gratitude."
"O- of course, Kyuubi." He bowed, swinging the bag back on and scurrying down the alley he'd come from.
They waited a few moments for him to leave earshot before speaking again.
"This is… interesting." Swarm said, having opened the folder to peek at the first page.
"We'll have a proper look at that later, we have a meeting to get to." Eon reminded her. "Put it into the Wonder Bag for now, it'll be out of the way and safe there, we'll do what we need to do today and have a look when we're back with your dad."
"Right, that makes sense."
"I wonder how much of it they got right." Shadow mused. "Probably not much of it, since they don't know anything about our origins or anything, so they don't really know how our powers work, but I'm curious to see what they were able to get kinda right under their understanding of things."
"Probably more than you expect, pix." He replied, as the bug controller closed the bag. "From what I understand the PRT are rather good at inferencing from known data- which isn't surprising, given their job."
"I suppose so." The Vulpix sighed, stretching slightly on the spot while Swarm stood up. "C'mon, we should get going, I guess. Wouldn't be nice to keep them waiting."
"Sure. We also need to figure out some different ways into the city, if we're starting to get predictable. I don't want anyone getting hurt because someone decided to lay traps along here for us."
The entire group of Capes looked up at the knock on the door.
"I'll get it!" Vicky called, from where she was already hovering near the entrance to the front room. She was out into the corridor and opening it almost immediately after, before anyone else could respond, making Mark and Amy sigh and shake their heads. "Hi, you three!"
"Hello, Vicky." Eon's low voice replied from the front of the house. "I hope you're doing well?"
"Pretty good, yeah." The door shut slightly heavily and the blonde floated in, leading the three members of Team Inari behind her.
Crystal, currently back from college due to her aunt's death during Leviathan, poked her head out of the kitchen. "Hello, Inari. Nice to meet you all, I'm Crystal, aka Laserdream. Want coffee?" The trio traded glances, Eon's gaze staying on Shadow for a few moments, then nodded.
"Coffee would be nice, thank you." Eon replied. The Cape vanished from the doorway, and two of Inari took their places; Swarm on a chair set up for her, and Eon to her right, slightly forward.
Shadow, on the other hand, completely ignored that, heading directly for Amy, who slipped down from her chair and smiled. "Hi, Amy. How're you doing?"
"I'm fine, Shadow." The healer showed no hesitation in running her hand over the crest on her head, Sarah noticed with interest, as she replied. "I guess you all are doing good as well?"
"Yeah, we're fine." She grinned back, pushing up slightly into Amy's hand. "I'm glad you're ok, though." She stayed there for a moment, then headed over to Eon's right side, sitting a little back from him. Sarah observed their dynamic with curiosity, then Crystal came in, balancing a large tray on her hands which she set down on the table.
Everyone busied themselves with arranging their drinks, Eon telekinetically moving things around to do so, while Shadow looked up at Swarm.
"Check that, Amy?" She requested, drawing everyone's attention. Most of the room immediately blinked and looked away from the eye-twisting static-like effect that had been placed over the lower part of Swarm's mask.
"That works fine, Shadow." Amy told her. Shadow nodded gratefully at her, while Swarm reached out and took a sip of her coffee.
"Oh, that's cool." Crystal commented, peering at it. "To stop people from being able to see your face, right?"
"That's right." Swarm confirmed, a little bit of buzz in her voice as she put the mug down. "It's not as effective as a mask is, because Shadow needs to concentrate on holding it up, but for eating or drinking in costume it works perfectly fine."
"It's a variation of the illusion I use to cloak." Shadow added. "I use a different one to Eon, because I have less power for that sort of stuff- well, most of it's the same, but the base is different. I just adjusted it so that it looks more like the static you get on a TV, then added a wrap around to it."
"It's a good use of the illusion set, and it's probably something we should experiment more with." Their leader finished. "There's probably quite a few uses for it outside of conventional security stuff, for instance."
"It does sound like something useful." Eric put in, from where he was half-lying on a couch. Crystal poked him in the side, making him shift so she could sit down, and Sarah leaned forward.
"Quite."
Inari all subtly shifted as well, apparently recognising the beginning of the meeting.
"Now, I know Shadow's been introduced to all of us before, but Swarm and yourself haven't. I'm Sarah Pelham, that's my husband Neil, that's Eric and Crystal, our children, that's Mark, and you've met Vicky and Amy."
"A pleasure to meet all of you." Eon half-bowed from his seat, while Swarm gave the impression of smiling gently as she waved slightly. "I'm a little surprised all of you decided to meet with us, though."
"It's mainly not wanting to leave the kids alone, plus Amy's going to be there with you anyway, so I thought it would be a good idea for all four of you to hear it together so nothing gets missed." Sarah admitted. "But anyone can come up with good ideas, and it's surprisingly common that the kids end up spotting something we missed, so including them can be helpful."
"Which certainly makes sense." Eon's tails curled around him in a wide arc, while he watched attentively over the table.
"So, your appointment's on Tuesday, at three in the afternoon. I'd recommend showing up a little earlier than that, maybe by five minutes, but you can always choose to stay in the area for much longer and only actually go in when your appointment is about to start." She began. "You and Amy can make the decision on whether or not you arrive together-"
"We probably should, just to give a little more credibility to the meeting." Amy cut in. "Shadow's already well known as a healer, and us saying it's power testing doesn't necessarily mean that it's Inari's power testing, just that it's a test that might need healers so they've called us in as backup. Eon and Swarm would obviously just be there as Shadow's escort to the building in that case, like Vicky tends to do with me."
"-And you can decide who it is who speaks to the receptionist about the appointment as well." Sarah sighed.
Eon, Shadow and Amy swapped looks.
"It might be best if you do it, because people in the city know you better than they know us, so they'd be less confused by you talking to them."
"But it's your appointment, officially, so it's probably under your name." She countered. "So Team Inari would need to ask, while I'd just have to put in that I'm with you for your power testing."
"I suppose I'm doing it, then." Eon rolled his eyes, lifting his coffee towards him. "If only because I'm Inari's team leader, so in many ways that's my job."
"Thanks, Eon!" Shadow replied cheerily. She took a sip of her own coffee, the mug doing nothing to help hide the smirk, and added, "That's nice of you to do. I was expecting that I'd have to do it, because it's my power testing."
Sarah watched with interest as Eon mimed hammering his head off a wall, created with his illusions, while Inari laughed. Amy and Vicky joined in, which was curious, but not too much so- they'd clearly made friends in the aftermath of Leviathan, which was nice. She could hear Eric and Crystal chuckling quietly from the couch beside her, as if they were uncertain as to whether it would offend them, and even Mark had a tiny smile on his face.
She cleared her throat, making the five rearrange themselves into something vaguely resembling seriousness, Shadow and Eon placing their coffee down as they did. "Right. Well then. Your appointment is technically with Miss Militia, but don't be surprised if Armsmaster shows up as well. He has a tendency to like showing up to power testing, probably out of curiosity. There's also probably going to be a few people monitoring over video call, just because that way they have people out of range if something happens. It's standard protocol with Masters of any sort, even when they're heroes and from the Protectorate, when working with unknowns."
"I'm not gonna start any trouble!" Shadow protested.
"I'm sure you wouldn't, but it's standard, since things can go wrong." Sarah shrugged, referring back to the information on her cell phone that Miss Militia had sent through for her to use to brief Inari.
Apparently someone in the PRT really wanted to keep Team Inari on their good side, for whatever reason.
"Yeah, it's not meant to be anything against you, Shadow, the PRT's just supposed to expect the worst." Amy put in, leaning over to run her hand over her head again. "Everyone's going to be fairly sure that you won't do anything, but they need to make sure to think of how they'd deal with it if you did, hence all the paranoia."
"Feels mean, though." Shadow pouted, looking down. "'Slike that stupid Bellossom back home, always complaining about fire just because she's a flower. Not like it can hurt anyone really, just sting a bit." The gathered New Wave members traded confused looks as Eon patted Shadow on the back sympathetically.
Swarm just sipped her coffee.
"Anyway, I'd recommend that you be polite to everyone there, because the PRT has the power to make your life very difficult if you're causing trouble for them, but mostly just be cooperative." Sarah suggested. "Answer what they ask about your powers honestly, because that'll help them narrow down what might and might not work, and follow what they direct you to do."
"Though if you really want to keep something secret, I wouldn't recommend telling them anything about it." Neil put in, making his wife give him an exasperated look. "The PRT's not the most secure system in the world, so anything that goes in there can probably be pulled out by someone else with enough effort."
"Good to know." Swarm said.
Sarah gave her a look as well, as best she could under the illusion. Despite the insect buzz in her voice, that had sounded suspiciously like a suppressed laugh.
"They'll probably poke and probe in the hopes of getting more information out of you while you're distracted dealing with the power testing, so don't be afraid to push back if you don't want to tell them something and they keep going." She finished. "But I would recommend cooperating with them, if only because they're often very good at extrapolating more about powers from what you give them."
"I see." Shadow nodded slowly, looking into the bottom of her coffee mug. She seemed very focused on it, and for a moment Sarah wondered what was so interesting about the remains of the drink before her tails curled up, shifting from the sides of her body back around. "Thank you for your help, Mrs Pelham. Amy, we'll meet you outside the PRT building on Tuesday, then. We've probably taken up enough of your time today." All three members of Team Inari drained their mugs and placed them back down, in a strangely synchronised move. "I'm sure you all have other business to handle today, and we've got some stuff to do as well, so we'll leave you be."
"Oh- of course." Sarah fumbled, staring. Luckily, Eric managed- somehow- to not be taken by surprise by the sudden exit, hopping up from the couch and offering his hand to Eon.
"Nice to meet you all, Inari." He grinned, as Eon placed his paw on his palm. "Glad you're working with my cousin. Hope it keeps up, you're all great."
"Thank you, Shielder." The silver Kyuubi smiled slightly in return, and all three Inari members gave slight bows to her, Shadow's a little deeper than the other two. "I also hope we get the opportunity to continue working with Amy, and hopefully also with your team here as well."
"It'd be fun for sure." Eric agreed, as Vicky floated out of her chair and headed pre-emptively for the front door. "Maybe we'll end up together on a patrol sometime, that'd be nice."
"It would, yes." Shadow rushed over to Amy, giving her a slightly awkward hug, one her niece returned after a second of surprise, then the three headed towards the door.
"See you Tuesday, Amy!" The smaller kitsune called over her shoulder. There was the sound of quiet conversation at the front door of the Dallon house for a moment, and Inari left. Vicky came floating back in as they traded glances.
"I wonder where they were off to in a hurry?"Crystal mused, picking up and draining the rest of her mug. "Must've been important."
Nearly an hour later, the three of them had reached their main destination. Shadow was jittering around a little, an after effect of the mug of coffee and some sugar, but she was better off than she probably would've been- Eon had used the opportunity to define a small room and test out his own Heal Pulse on her. It hadn't been as effective at it might've been if Shadow had done it, and he'd been left fairly drained afterwards, but Shadow had reckoned it was passable and promised to keep up the practising.
Now, the team was looking at an obelisk near the edge of the city. It was purposely placed close to where Leviathan had first entered Brockton Bay, and hundreds of names were inscribed on it.
"According to rumours, most of the other ones are larger." Swarm said softly, the insect buzz in her voice muted. "This is probably one of the smallest in the world."
Eon felt sick. Shadow looked it.
Swarm walked around to Eon's side and opened the Wonder Bag, carefully lifting out the three bouquets of flowers. Swarm, vaguely familiar with some of the meanings behind a lot of flowers, had picked them out; marigolds, roses, and pink carnations, in various amounts. Keeping one for herself, she handed the other two to each of the Pokemon, then stepped forward to lay them down at the base of the monument, among the rest of the wreaths and bouquets from others.
Eon cleared his throat, shaking off the feeling of horror that came with knowing that this was considered a small monument, and spoke gently, "In honour of your sacrifice to help save this city, and in memory of those civilians that did not manage to escape." Swarm knelt next to him, head bowed, while Shadow muttered something unintelligible he couldn't identify.
"I am sorry for your loss." Swarm added. "You Capes died facing a foe believed to be unbeatable; that takes strength. To the civilians, we failed to get you to safety in time, or hold off Leviathan for long enough that you could make it. Leviathan was thought unbeatable, though. No fault of your own, nor of ours, led to this."
Shadow stepped away from her team mates for a moment, bowing lowly. "May your spirits go swiftly forth to the Cave of Memories, beyond the Turnback Cave, on the boundary of the Distortion and True worlds. May Giratina guide you, and the Dusknoir protect you, until the time you step from Memories." She straightened, focusing for a moment, and four Will-o-Wisps burst into life. They were caught in a Psychic grip and lifted to the top of the monument, burning gently with a soft blue glow.
Swarm looked down at Eon, tilting her head. He shrugged; he had no idea what that was about either. The bug Cape nodded absently, walking around the memorial and examining the names.
"Looking for anyone in particular?" Eon asked softly.
"Not really." She admitted. "Just curious, I guess. I doubt I really know anyone, aside from maybe a few of the locals like Shadow Stalker, but I thought it might be good to just take a look and-" She paused, stiffening. The bugs around her started moving frantically, the slight background hum of buzzing that hung around her form becoming much more pronounced.
"Are you ok, Swarm?" Shadow asked, trotting over. "See something?"
"Sophia." She rumbled in return, still staring at the monument.
Eon looked up. There, between a few Capes he didn't recognise, was the name Sophia Hess carved into the side of the large stone pillar.
For a moment, he couldn't figure out what it was about the name that was so important to her, before the long story of the bullying campaign at Winslow came back to him, and he grimaced.
"Ah." Shadow reached up, placing a paw awkwardly on her side.
"C'mon, Swarm, let's go home." The Vulpix said kindly. "We can talk more there, can't we?"
"Yeah." She nodded, exhaling heavily. The bugs around her went back to normal, though Eon could still tell that they were louder than normal from her emotions being pushed into them. "Yeah, Shadow. You're right. Let's get back." She promptly did an about-turn on her heel and strolled away, leaving the other two to hurry and catch up with her, heading for the Hebert household in the hopes that maybe Danny would be able to help out with this better than they could.
Danny glanced up as he heard the back door opening. Placing a marker in his book he put it to one side, standing and heading into the kitchen to meet his daughter and her team mates.
"Good afternoon, you three." He called out, as the smell of burgers reached him- clearly they'd decided to pick up take-out on the way back. "Did you meeting go ok?"
"Quite well, Danny, thank you." Eon replied, as he entered the room. "We got rather a bit of good advice out of it, as well as a bit more information about how the testing is being set up. Should be helpful."
"That's good." He smiled, looking down at the Ninetales for a moment before turning to Taylor, who had taken her mask off and was running her gloved hand through her hair.
Danny frowned. She seemed… a little off, somehow. More muted than she normally was when her team mates were around. "Are you ok, Taylor?"
"Not really." She admitted, sighing. Shadow and Eon placed the take-away bags on the table, heading over to her side as she collapsed into one of the chairs nearby. "Sophia's dead."
"Ah." Danny paused, sitting next to her. "What exactly is the problem, Taylor?"
"I don't know!" She sighed heavily, holding her head in her hands. "It's just… I don't know how to feel about this. I mean, on one hand, it's Sophia, for god's sake. She's spent most the last two years of school making my life complete hell, and now she's just… gone."
"Which, though I hesitate to suggest it, is somewhat of a good thing." Eon put in, from the chair he'd just jumped into.
"I mean, yes, because she's not a problem anymore, but also no, because she's dead." Taylor groaned. "I mean, I might've wished they'd get into trouble or get hurt or something, but I never really wanted them dead."
There was a slight weakness in her voice that made him think she was lying, though he left that for now.
"You don't need to feel obligated to mourn her just because she died during Leviathan, Taylor." Danny said, after a moment of serious thought. "Like you said, she decided for whatever reason to make your life terrible. There's no reason for you to really mourn the fact that she's not around anymore. Maybe feel bad for her family, but you've got nothing personally to be sorry about." He paused. "Probably not the advice I should be giving you, but I think it's right."
"So do I." Shadow admitted. "I mean, I never met Sophia personally, but I saw her a few times at that school. She was nothing but trouble for you, and while you shouldn't celebrate her being gone, you've got no obligation to mourn her if you don't want to."
"I suppose." Her voice still sounded hesitant, and Danny made a note to revisit that later on, when her team mates had left, and sat down next to them.
"So, anything else interesting pop up?" He asked instead, taking one of the bags and peering inside. This was apparently the trigger for the other three to remember the food and do the same, picking up the bags closest to them and beginning to work through them.
Over the course of the next ten minutes, they filled him in on the meeting with New Wave, the information they'd been given from it, and the situation surrounding that meeting.
"What was with what you said, Shadow?" Taylor asked, coming back from her quiet musings.
"It's a family thing." She explained. "Or maybe it's a Ninetales thing, or a Talekeeper thing? I'm honestly not sure. It was in some of the stories I've learned, and Gram said something similar when we went to visit my aunt after her hatching failed. And it's been said basically word for word before on memory days about different Pokemon that sacrificed something. Thought it was appropriate."
"It sure sounded cool." Taylor smiled. "Your family have some cool traditions and stuff."
"They're definitely interesting." Eon agreed. "I've heard a few of the stories Shadow learned when she was littler before, her Mom and Grandmother have tons more apparently, and it can paint a very strange picture of our world even to those of us who live in it."
"I wouldn't mind hearing some of these stories, to be honest." Danny said. "What about that threat report of yours?"
"Oh, right, we need to look at that." Shadow realised, putting down her half-eaten burger. She went down into the Wonder Bag, coming out a moment later with a thin plastic folder, like the sort you might see school assignments in. Opening it they found three pages, which she laid out on the table, Danny and Taylor moving to read them.
A few minutes later, the burgers lay forgotten.
"I believe I understand now what Lady Photon meant about the PRT being good at extrapolating information." Eon hummed.
"I feel like I should feel offended that they think I'm only good for a distraction." Taylor pouted. "Even if it is kinda true, there's still more than that that I'm good for."
"Yup." Shadow nodded, her head tilted slightly to the side. "Still, very interesting. I think I'll need to think harder about what I talk about during the power testing, aside from the healing stuff. If they've figured this much out from just what we've shown…"
"To be fair, you have shown rather a lot." Danny put in. "I've not seen you going out of your way to keep things secret, aside from the whole 'other world creatures' thing. Even then, you still make references as if you were spirits or something- though that does play off of local belief quite well. But point is, you're not really trying to keep things secret when you're fighting-"
"I never saw the point. In a Dungeon, you go hard so that your team mates don't get hurt and to keep yourself from needing to be defended." Eon shrugged, lifting up a chip. "Admittedly it's rare that any of those fights ever escalate into actual serious injury, but rule of thumb is that you want to put the enemy down before they manage to do the same, just in case. We've been careful here, because obviously our enemies don't get suddenly teleported out of the fight if they're too hurt, but we still try and end things quickly so no-one gets hurt."
"Which is good, many Capes don't bother to think about bystanders that might get hurt in their fights, or collateral damage. It's nice to see it. Even if you aren't Capes."
"Getting civilians hurt is pretty much the exact opposite of what a Rescue Team's supposed to do, after all." Shadow grinned, lifting her burger. "But yeah, Capes on this world don't seem to be very conscious of the impact of their battles."
"Which is a shame."
"Quite." Danny nodded at the three. "Anyway. We've got your threat report. What are you going to do with it?"
"Probably… very little." Eon acknowledged. "Making ourselves seem like less of an opponent to the PRT would be good, of course, but there's not really much we can do with the information without revealing that we have the information. Which of course would make them worry about how we got it."
"Fair enough. You could always make yourself seem like more trouble than you're worth, of course, but that can backfire."
"Which would be very bad, given that that might put Taylor in danger." Eon sighed. "I think just continuing as we are is probably the best option, but knowing how the PRT sees us is still a very good thing. We should try and keep them as our allies."
"I'd certainly agree to that." Taylor nodded. "They could cause a lot of trouble for us. Better to avoid that."
"How do you plan on dealing with Tuesday, then, Shadow?" He probed. It would be better to see if there was anything that might cause issues before she went in, of course.
"Honestly, it'll mostly be following whatever the PRT people say." She said. "They're the ones who've set all this up, so they probably know what's best to do. I'll just heal whoever they tell me to, maybe get Eon to define rooms for me if it makes it easier."
May 24th, 2011. Tuesday.
Shadow stared up at the large building before her. For the first time since all this had been suggested, she could feel a twinge of nerves.
"Hey, Shadow!" A familiar voice called from above, making her look up. She returned Amy's wave as she dropped down next to them, her sister placing her gently on the ground.
"Hey Vicky, Amy." She grinned weakly, leaning a little into Eon's side for comfort.
"Ready to go?" The healer asked.
Shadow inhaled deeply, closing her eyes for a moment, then nodded, stepping up to stand next to Amy.
"Yeah." She glanced at the other two members of Inari and at Vicky, all of whom were smiling at her. "Yeah, I'm ready."
"Then let's go." Amy lead the way in, with Shadow close on her heels, and Swarm and Eon just behind that. Vicky didn't follow them, and a quick look behind showed her lifting off again in the direction of the coffee shop.
"Hi." Shadow greeted, with a wide and friendly smile. The receptionist stared at her, making the smile become slightly more amused. "I'm Shadow, from Team Inari. I'm here for a power testing with Panacea, as well as my team. I believe Miss Militia asked for me?"
"Seeya later, Dad!" Taylor called, as she ran out of the back door, a backpack over one shoulder.
"Goodbye, Taylor!" Danny replied, before the door slammed closed. He chuckled slightly, lifting the coffee mug to his lips and taking a sip before heading for the front room, planning on spending his Sunday relaxing with a book until his daughter and her team came over for the afternoon.
He was rather glad that Eon was willing to keep him in the loop about their Cape activities, and even more pleased that he wanted to ask for his advice. While Danny might not be much use when it came to actual Cape stuff, he knew politics quite well, and was happy to use that experience to help make sure his daughter's team didn't get into trouble with the authorities over any incidents. Especially because, according to rumours, the PRT was often rather desperate to grab powerful Capes for their own team.
Although from the message Eon had sent Taylor last night, the PRT currently seemed more interested in forming some kind of alliance with Inari, rather than forcing them into a contract in the Wards to try and use their power and current popularity.
It said an awful lot about how the PRT worked that that was his opinion of them, he supposed. But it was known to happen in other places, and there were rumours that it'd happened before in the Bay, too, though he couldn't remember what the context of it was. It had only been a vague reference about six months ago at the office, and he hadn't been listening all that hard.
He was also very glad that Team Inari had been making connections to other Capes in the bay. Even if one of them was Lung… which might well have been a better thing, in some ways. He couldn't see any of the heroes helping them get their Threat Report out of the PRT's systems as a measure of friendship…
Snorting slightly at the mental image of someone like Glory Girl or Lady Photon walking up to Armsmaster and asking if they could see the Inari Threat Report, Danny placed his mug on the table and stood, heading for the bookshelf for something to read while he waited on his daughter and her team.
Swarm paused mid-step, cocking her head slightly to the side and turning unerringly to the left, staring at a wall.
"Something up, Swarm?" Shadow asked lowly, projecting her voice with her audio illusion to the girl.
"Kid, about seventeen, in ABB colours." She murmured back. "I can't see him too well, but it looks like he's got a backpack of some kind. No idea what's in it, I'm not going to risk trying to get any bugs in there."
"Interesting…" Eon mused. "I wonder what he's doing around here."
"We could go and ask?" Shadow suggested, with a smirk. "I mean, I don't see why not."
"Lead the way, Swarm." The Ninetales waved, stepping back from his slot as team leader. Swarm moved to the front as a scout, keeping a number of her bugs following the ABB member while she led them towards him through the alleyways.
She purposely led them so that they would come across him as they encountered a split, where they would normally turn left and out. The ABB member was coming from the right, and the trio paused for a moment to restructure themselves back to normal before leaving, almost walking right into him.
"Hello, there." Eon greeted, after giving him a moment to get over the shock of nearly running into the 'Cape' trio. "Apologies for startling you, this area is usually rather quiet."
"I was looking for you, Kyuubi Eon." The boy replied, looking nervous. "It's been noticed that this is the route your team comes into the city by, so I thought patrolling it would lead to finding you."
"Hm. If we're really getting that predictable, then maybe we need to start varying our routes some." He hummed. "It'd end up being a little too easy to trap if we keep using the same one, and I'd rather not be trapped by someone hostile." Looking up at the teen, Eon noticed him slowly moving towards his bag, and cocked his head a little. "What brought you looking for us?"
Picking up on the quiet almost-threat in his voice, the boy froze in the middle of sliding the backpack off, and looked around jerkily. "Lung-sama sent me, Kyuubi." He murmured. "One of the moles in the PRT managed to succeed in their mission, and he sent me to act as courier for it. I have the document in my bag, hid so it just looks like a lot of school work."
"Hand it over, then." The boy shot to grant his request, slinging the bag off his back and placing it on the floor to open it. He handed over a slim plastic folder, which Eon took in an Extrasensory and handed to Swarm, nodding. "Give Lung my greetings and gratitude."
"O- of course, Kyuubi." He bowed, swinging the bag back on and scurrying down the alley he'd come from.
They waited a few moments for him to leave earshot before speaking again.
"This is… interesting." Swarm said, having opened the folder to peek at the first page.
"We'll have a proper look at that later, we have a meeting to get to." Eon reminded her. "Put it into the Wonder Bag for now, it'll be out of the way and safe there, we'll do what we need to do today and have a look when we're back with your dad."
"Right, that makes sense."
"I wonder how much of it they got right." Shadow mused. "Probably not much of it, since they don't know anything about our origins or anything, so they don't really know how our powers work, but I'm curious to see what they were able to get kinda right under their understanding of things."
"Probably more than you expect, pix." He replied, as the bug controller closed the bag. "From what I understand the PRT are rather good at inferencing from known data- which isn't surprising, given their job."
"I suppose so." The Vulpix sighed, stretching slightly on the spot while Swarm stood up. "C'mon, we should get going, I guess. Wouldn't be nice to keep them waiting."
"Sure. We also need to figure out some different ways into the city, if we're starting to get predictable. I don't want anyone getting hurt because someone decided to lay traps along here for us."
The entire group of Capes looked up at the knock on the door.
"I'll get it!" Vicky called, from where she was already hovering near the entrance to the front room. She was out into the corridor and opening it almost immediately after, before anyone else could respond, making Mark and Amy sigh and shake their heads. "Hi, you three!"
"Hello, Vicky." Eon's low voice replied from the front of the house. "I hope you're doing well?"
"Pretty good, yeah." The door shut slightly heavily and the blonde floated in, leading the three members of Team Inari behind her.
Crystal, currently back from college due to her aunt's death during Leviathan, poked her head out of the kitchen. "Hello, Inari. Nice to meet you all, I'm Crystal, aka Laserdream. Want coffee?" The trio traded glances, Eon's gaze staying on Shadow for a few moments, then nodded.
"Coffee would be nice, thank you." Eon replied. The Cape vanished from the doorway, and two of Inari took their places; Swarm on a chair set up for her, and Eon to her right, slightly forward.
Shadow, on the other hand, completely ignored that, heading directly for Amy, who slipped down from her chair and smiled. "Hi, Amy. How're you doing?"
"I'm fine, Shadow." The healer showed no hesitation in running her hand over the crest on her head, Sarah noticed with interest, as she replied. "I guess you all are doing good as well?"
"Yeah, we're fine." She grinned back, pushing up slightly into Amy's hand. "I'm glad you're ok, though." She stayed there for a moment, then headed over to Eon's right side, sitting a little back from him. Sarah observed their dynamic with curiosity, then Crystal came in, balancing a large tray on her hands which she set down on the table.
Everyone busied themselves with arranging their drinks, Eon telekinetically moving things around to do so, while Shadow looked up at Swarm.
"Check that, Amy?" She requested, drawing everyone's attention. Most of the room immediately blinked and looked away from the eye-twisting static-like effect that had been placed over the lower part of Swarm's mask.
"That works fine, Shadow." Amy told her. Shadow nodded gratefully at her, while Swarm reached out and took a sip of her coffee.
"Oh, that's cool." Crystal commented, peering at it. "To stop people from being able to see your face, right?"
"That's right." Swarm confirmed, a little bit of buzz in her voice as she put the mug down. "It's not as effective as a mask is, because Shadow needs to concentrate on holding it up, but for eating or drinking in costume it works perfectly fine."
"It's a variation of the illusion I use to cloak." Shadow added. "I use a different one to Eon, because I have less power for that sort of stuff- well, most of it's the same, but the base is different. I just adjusted it so that it looks more like the static you get on a TV, then added a wrap around to it."
"It's a good use of the illusion set, and it's probably something we should experiment more with." Their leader finished. "There's probably quite a few uses for it outside of conventional security stuff, for instance."
"It does sound like something useful." Eric put in, from where he was half-lying on a couch. Crystal poked him in the side, making him shift so she could sit down, and Sarah leaned forward.
"Quite."
Inari all subtly shifted as well, apparently recognising the beginning of the meeting.
"Now, I know Shadow's been introduced to all of us before, but Swarm and yourself haven't. I'm Sarah Pelham, that's my husband Neil, that's Eric and Crystal, our children, that's Mark, and you've met Vicky and Amy."
"A pleasure to meet all of you." Eon half-bowed from his seat, while Swarm gave the impression of smiling gently as she waved slightly. "I'm a little surprised all of you decided to meet with us, though."
"It's mainly not wanting to leave the kids alone, plus Amy's going to be there with you anyway, so I thought it would be a good idea for all four of you to hear it together so nothing gets missed." Sarah admitted. "But anyone can come up with good ideas, and it's surprisingly common that the kids end up spotting something we missed, so including them can be helpful."
"Which certainly makes sense." Eon's tails curled around him in a wide arc, while he watched attentively over the table.
"So, your appointment's on Tuesday, at three in the afternoon. I'd recommend showing up a little earlier than that, maybe by five minutes, but you can always choose to stay in the area for much longer and only actually go in when your appointment is about to start." She began. "You and Amy can make the decision on whether or not you arrive together-"
"We probably should, just to give a little more credibility to the meeting." Amy cut in. "Shadow's already well known as a healer, and us saying it's power testing doesn't necessarily mean that it's Inari's power testing, just that it's a test that might need healers so they've called us in as backup. Eon and Swarm would obviously just be there as Shadow's escort to the building in that case, like Vicky tends to do with me."
"-And you can decide who it is who speaks to the receptionist about the appointment as well." Sarah sighed.
Eon, Shadow and Amy swapped looks.
"It might be best if you do it, because people in the city know you better than they know us, so they'd be less confused by you talking to them."
"But it's your appointment, officially, so it's probably under your name." She countered. "So Team Inari would need to ask, while I'd just have to put in that I'm with you for your power testing."
"I suppose I'm doing it, then." Eon rolled his eyes, lifting his coffee towards him. "If only because I'm Inari's team leader, so in many ways that's my job."
"Thanks, Eon!" Shadow replied cheerily. She took a sip of her own coffee, the mug doing nothing to help hide the smirk, and added, "That's nice of you to do. I was expecting that I'd have to do it, because it's my power testing."
Sarah watched with interest as Eon mimed hammering his head off a wall, created with his illusions, while Inari laughed. Amy and Vicky joined in, which was curious, but not too much so- they'd clearly made friends in the aftermath of Leviathan, which was nice. She could hear Eric and Crystal chuckling quietly from the couch beside her, as if they were uncertain as to whether it would offend them, and even Mark had a tiny smile on his face.
She cleared her throat, making the five rearrange themselves into something vaguely resembling seriousness, Shadow and Eon placing their coffee down as they did. "Right. Well then. Your appointment is technically with Miss Militia, but don't be surprised if Armsmaster shows up as well. He has a tendency to like showing up to power testing, probably out of curiosity. There's also probably going to be a few people monitoring over video call, just because that way they have people out of range if something happens. It's standard protocol with Masters of any sort, even when they're heroes and from the Protectorate, when working with unknowns."
"I'm not gonna start any trouble!" Shadow protested.
"I'm sure you wouldn't, but it's standard, since things can go wrong." Sarah shrugged, referring back to the information on her cell phone that Miss Militia had sent through for her to use to brief Inari.
Apparently someone in the PRT really wanted to keep Team Inari on their good side, for whatever reason.
"Yeah, it's not meant to be anything against you, Shadow, the PRT's just supposed to expect the worst." Amy put in, leaning over to run her hand over her head again. "Everyone's going to be fairly sure that you won't do anything, but they need to make sure to think of how they'd deal with it if you did, hence all the paranoia."
"Feels mean, though." Shadow pouted, looking down. "'Slike that stupid Bellossom back home, always complaining about fire just because she's a flower. Not like it can hurt anyone really, just sting a bit." The gathered New Wave members traded confused looks as Eon patted Shadow on the back sympathetically.
Swarm just sipped her coffee.
"Anyway, I'd recommend that you be polite to everyone there, because the PRT has the power to make your life very difficult if you're causing trouble for them, but mostly just be cooperative." Sarah suggested. "Answer what they ask about your powers honestly, because that'll help them narrow down what might and might not work, and follow what they direct you to do."
"Though if you really want to keep something secret, I wouldn't recommend telling them anything about it." Neil put in, making his wife give him an exasperated look. "The PRT's not the most secure system in the world, so anything that goes in there can probably be pulled out by someone else with enough effort."
"Good to know." Swarm said.
Sarah gave her a look as well, as best she could under the illusion. Despite the insect buzz in her voice, that had sounded suspiciously like a suppressed laugh.
"They'll probably poke and probe in the hopes of getting more information out of you while you're distracted dealing with the power testing, so don't be afraid to push back if you don't want to tell them something and they keep going." She finished. "But I would recommend cooperating with them, if only because they're often very good at extrapolating more about powers from what you give them."
"I see." Shadow nodded slowly, looking into the bottom of her coffee mug. She seemed very focused on it, and for a moment Sarah wondered what was so interesting about the remains of the drink before her tails curled up, shifting from the sides of her body back around. "Thank you for your help, Mrs Pelham. Amy, we'll meet you outside the PRT building on Tuesday, then. We've probably taken up enough of your time today." All three members of Team Inari drained their mugs and placed them back down, in a strangely synchronised move. "I'm sure you all have other business to handle today, and we've got some stuff to do as well, so we'll leave you be."
"Oh- of course." Sarah fumbled, staring. Luckily, Eric managed- somehow- to not be taken by surprise by the sudden exit, hopping up from the couch and offering his hand to Eon.
"Nice to meet you all, Inari." He grinned, as Eon placed his paw on his palm. "Glad you're working with my cousin. Hope it keeps up, you're all great."
"Thank you, Shielder." The silver Kyuubi smiled slightly in return, and all three Inari members gave slight bows to her, Shadow's a little deeper than the other two. "I also hope we get the opportunity to continue working with Amy, and hopefully also with your team here as well."
"It'd be fun for sure." Eric agreed, as Vicky floated out of her chair and headed pre-emptively for the front door. "Maybe we'll end up together on a patrol sometime, that'd be nice."
"It would, yes." Shadow rushed over to Amy, giving her a slightly awkward hug, one her niece returned after a second of surprise, then the three headed towards the door.
"See you Tuesday, Amy!" The smaller kitsune called over her shoulder. There was the sound of quiet conversation at the front door of the Dallon house for a moment, and Inari left. Vicky came floating back in as they traded glances.
"I wonder where they were off to in a hurry?"Crystal mused, picking up and draining the rest of her mug. "Must've been important."
Nearly an hour later, the three of them had reached their main destination. Shadow was jittering around a little, an after effect of the mug of coffee and some sugar, but she was better off than she probably would've been- Eon had used the opportunity to define a small room and test out his own Heal Pulse on her. It hadn't been as effective at it might've been if Shadow had done it, and he'd been left fairly drained afterwards, but Shadow had reckoned it was passable and promised to keep up the practising.
Now, the team was looking at an obelisk near the edge of the city. It was purposely placed close to where Leviathan had first entered Brockton Bay, and hundreds of names were inscribed on it.
"According to rumours, most of the other ones are larger." Swarm said softly, the insect buzz in her voice muted. "This is probably one of the smallest in the world."
Eon felt sick. Shadow looked it.
Swarm walked around to Eon's side and opened the Wonder Bag, carefully lifting out the three bouquets of flowers. Swarm, vaguely familiar with some of the meanings behind a lot of flowers, had picked them out; marigolds, roses, and pink carnations, in various amounts. Keeping one for herself, she handed the other two to each of the Pokemon, then stepped forward to lay them down at the base of the monument, among the rest of the wreaths and bouquets from others.
Eon cleared his throat, shaking off the feeling of horror that came with knowing that this was considered a small monument, and spoke gently, "In honour of your sacrifice to help save this city, and in memory of those civilians that did not manage to escape." Swarm knelt next to him, head bowed, while Shadow muttered something unintelligible he couldn't identify.
"I am sorry for your loss." Swarm added. "You Capes died facing a foe believed to be unbeatable; that takes strength. To the civilians, we failed to get you to safety in time, or hold off Leviathan for long enough that you could make it. Leviathan was thought unbeatable, though. No fault of your own, nor of ours, led to this."
Shadow stepped away from her team mates for a moment, bowing lowly. "May your spirits go swiftly forth to the Cave of Memories, beyond the Turnback Cave, on the boundary of the Distortion and True worlds. May Giratina guide you, and the Dusknoir protect you, until the time you step from Memories." She straightened, focusing for a moment, and four Will-o-Wisps burst into life. They were caught in a Psychic grip and lifted to the top of the monument, burning gently with a soft blue glow.
Swarm looked down at Eon, tilting her head. He shrugged; he had no idea what that was about either. The bug Cape nodded absently, walking around the memorial and examining the names.
"Looking for anyone in particular?" Eon asked softly.
"Not really." She admitted. "Just curious, I guess. I doubt I really know anyone, aside from maybe a few of the locals like Shadow Stalker, but I thought it might be good to just take a look and-" She paused, stiffening. The bugs around her started moving frantically, the slight background hum of buzzing that hung around her form becoming much more pronounced.
"Are you ok, Swarm?" Shadow asked, trotting over. "See something?"
"Sophia." She rumbled in return, still staring at the monument.
Eon looked up. There, between a few Capes he didn't recognise, was the name Sophia Hess carved into the side of the large stone pillar.
For a moment, he couldn't figure out what it was about the name that was so important to her, before the long story of the bullying campaign at Winslow came back to him, and he grimaced.
"Ah." Shadow reached up, placing a paw awkwardly on her side.
"C'mon, Swarm, let's go home." The Vulpix said kindly. "We can talk more there, can't we?"
"Yeah." She nodded, exhaling heavily. The bugs around her went back to normal, though Eon could still tell that they were louder than normal from her emotions being pushed into them. "Yeah, Shadow. You're right. Let's get back." She promptly did an about-turn on her heel and strolled away, leaving the other two to hurry and catch up with her, heading for the Hebert household in the hopes that maybe Danny would be able to help out with this better than they could.
Danny glanced up as he heard the back door opening. Placing a marker in his book he put it to one side, standing and heading into the kitchen to meet his daughter and her team mates.
"Good afternoon, you three." He called out, as the smell of burgers reached him- clearly they'd decided to pick up take-out on the way back. "Did you meeting go ok?"
"Quite well, Danny, thank you." Eon replied, as he entered the room. "We got rather a bit of good advice out of it, as well as a bit more information about how the testing is being set up. Should be helpful."
"That's good." He smiled, looking down at the Ninetales for a moment before turning to Taylor, who had taken her mask off and was running her gloved hand through her hair.
Danny frowned. She seemed… a little off, somehow. More muted than she normally was when her team mates were around. "Are you ok, Taylor?"
"Not really." She admitted, sighing. Shadow and Eon placed the take-away bags on the table, heading over to her side as she collapsed into one of the chairs nearby. "Sophia's dead."
"Ah." Danny paused, sitting next to her. "What exactly is the problem, Taylor?"
"I don't know!" She sighed heavily, holding her head in her hands. "It's just… I don't know how to feel about this. I mean, on one hand, it's Sophia, for god's sake. She's spent most the last two years of school making my life complete hell, and now she's just… gone."
"Which, though I hesitate to suggest it, is somewhat of a good thing." Eon put in, from the chair he'd just jumped into.
"I mean, yes, because she's not a problem anymore, but also no, because she's dead." Taylor groaned. "I mean, I might've wished they'd get into trouble or get hurt or something, but I never really wanted them dead."
There was a slight weakness in her voice that made him think she was lying, though he left that for now.
"You don't need to feel obligated to mourn her just because she died during Leviathan, Taylor." Danny said, after a moment of serious thought. "Like you said, she decided for whatever reason to make your life terrible. There's no reason for you to really mourn the fact that she's not around anymore. Maybe feel bad for her family, but you've got nothing personally to be sorry about." He paused. "Probably not the advice I should be giving you, but I think it's right."
"So do I." Shadow admitted. "I mean, I never met Sophia personally, but I saw her a few times at that school. She was nothing but trouble for you, and while you shouldn't celebrate her being gone, you've got no obligation to mourn her if you don't want to."
"I suppose." Her voice still sounded hesitant, and Danny made a note to revisit that later on, when her team mates had left, and sat down next to them.
"So, anything else interesting pop up?" He asked instead, taking one of the bags and peering inside. This was apparently the trigger for the other three to remember the food and do the same, picking up the bags closest to them and beginning to work through them.
Over the course of the next ten minutes, they filled him in on the meeting with New Wave, the information they'd been given from it, and the situation surrounding that meeting.
"What was with what you said, Shadow?" Taylor asked, coming back from her quiet musings.
"It's a family thing." She explained. "Or maybe it's a Ninetales thing, or a Talekeeper thing? I'm honestly not sure. It was in some of the stories I've learned, and Gram said something similar when we went to visit my aunt after her hatching failed. And it's been said basically word for word before on memory days about different Pokemon that sacrificed something. Thought it was appropriate."
"It sure sounded cool." Taylor smiled. "Your family have some cool traditions and stuff."
"They're definitely interesting." Eon agreed. "I've heard a few of the stories Shadow learned when she was littler before, her Mom and Grandmother have tons more apparently, and it can paint a very strange picture of our world even to those of us who live in it."
"I wouldn't mind hearing some of these stories, to be honest." Danny said. "What about that threat report of yours?"
"Oh, right, we need to look at that." Shadow realised, putting down her half-eaten burger. She went down into the Wonder Bag, coming out a moment later with a thin plastic folder, like the sort you might see school assignments in. Opening it they found three pages, which she laid out on the table, Danny and Taylor moving to read them.
A few minutes later, the burgers lay forgotten.
"I believe I understand now what Lady Photon meant about the PRT being good at extrapolating information." Eon hummed.
"I feel like I should feel offended that they think I'm only good for a distraction." Taylor pouted. "Even if it is kinda true, there's still more than that that I'm good for."
"Yup." Shadow nodded, her head tilted slightly to the side. "Still, very interesting. I think I'll need to think harder about what I talk about during the power testing, aside from the healing stuff. If they've figured this much out from just what we've shown…"
"To be fair, you have shown rather a lot." Danny put in. "I've not seen you going out of your way to keep things secret, aside from the whole 'other world creatures' thing. Even then, you still make references as if you were spirits or something- though that does play off of local belief quite well. But point is, you're not really trying to keep things secret when you're fighting-"
"I never saw the point. In a Dungeon, you go hard so that your team mates don't get hurt and to keep yourself from needing to be defended." Eon shrugged, lifting up a chip. "Admittedly it's rare that any of those fights ever escalate into actual serious injury, but rule of thumb is that you want to put the enemy down before they manage to do the same, just in case. We've been careful here, because obviously our enemies don't get suddenly teleported out of the fight if they're too hurt, but we still try and end things quickly so no-one gets hurt."
"Which is good, many Capes don't bother to think about bystanders that might get hurt in their fights, or collateral damage. It's nice to see it. Even if you aren't Capes."
"Getting civilians hurt is pretty much the exact opposite of what a Rescue Team's supposed to do, after all." Shadow grinned, lifting her burger. "But yeah, Capes on this world don't seem to be very conscious of the impact of their battles."
"Which is a shame."
"Quite." Danny nodded at the three. "Anyway. We've got your threat report. What are you going to do with it?"
"Probably… very little." Eon acknowledged. "Making ourselves seem like less of an opponent to the PRT would be good, of course, but there's not really much we can do with the information without revealing that we have the information. Which of course would make them worry about how we got it."
"Fair enough. You could always make yourself seem like more trouble than you're worth, of course, but that can backfire."
"Which would be very bad, given that that might put Taylor in danger." Eon sighed. "I think just continuing as we are is probably the best option, but knowing how the PRT sees us is still a very good thing. We should try and keep them as our allies."
"I'd certainly agree to that." Taylor nodded. "They could cause a lot of trouble for us. Better to avoid that."
"How do you plan on dealing with Tuesday, then, Shadow?" He probed. It would be better to see if there was anything that might cause issues before she went in, of course.
"Honestly, it'll mostly be following whatever the PRT people say." She said. "They're the ones who've set all this up, so they probably know what's best to do. I'll just heal whoever they tell me to, maybe get Eon to define rooms for me if it makes it easier."
May 24th, 2011. Tuesday.
Shadow stared up at the large building before her. For the first time since all this had been suggested, she could feel a twinge of nerves.
"Hey, Shadow!" A familiar voice called from above, making her look up. She returned Amy's wave as she dropped down next to them, her sister placing her gently on the ground.
"Hey Vicky, Amy." She grinned weakly, leaning a little into Eon's side for comfort.
"Ready to go?" The healer asked.
Shadow inhaled deeply, closing her eyes for a moment, then nodded, stepping up to stand next to Amy.
"Yeah." She glanced at the other two members of Inari and at Vicky, all of whom were smiling at her. "Yeah, I'm ready."
"Then let's go." Amy lead the way in, with Shadow close on her heels, and Swarm and Eon just behind that. Vicky didn't follow them, and a quick look behind showed her lifting off again in the direction of the coffee shop.
"Hi." Shadow greeted, with a wide and friendly smile. The receptionist stared at her, making the smile become slightly more amused. "I'm Shadow, from Team Inari. I'm here for a power testing with Panacea, as well as my team. I believe Miss Militia asked for me?"
- Location
- England, Smugsville.
Little post-chapter comment;
According to the flower language dictionary I looked up online, the flowers mean grieving, eternal remembrance (specifically tea roses), and 'I will never forget you'. I figured they were appropriate, though if anyone knows I'm wrong and wants to correct me, please do.
Now, to mimic FF.net Shadow, we're now out of the breather period and into the 'stuff happens' period. Hope you enjoyed the breather, you're not getting another one for a while.
Another thing is that I'm heading back into school, and this year's probably gonna be busy. I've already lost my buffer, and while I've been working on a new one, I'd like to apologise if I miss any updates in the coming weeks to months, possibly even year. Hopefully after this year things will cool a bit, though.
According to the flower language dictionary I looked up online, the flowers mean grieving, eternal remembrance (specifically tea roses), and 'I will never forget you'. I figured they were appropriate, though if anyone knows I'm wrong and wants to correct me, please do.
Now, to mimic FF.net Shadow, we're now out of the breather period and into the 'stuff happens' period. Hope you enjoyed the breather, you're not getting another one for a while.
Another thing is that I'm heading back into school, and this year's probably gonna be busy. I've already lost my buffer, and while I've been working on a new one, I'd like to apologise if I miss any updates in the coming weeks to months, possibly even year. Hopefully after this year things will cool a bit, though.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
The notes may not be specifically for Alexadria's later use; they could be for other members of either the Protectorate/Cauldron to read later on.
- Location
- Internet, The
Not much to say since not much happened. A breather episode, as you mentioned.
Even if it wasn't completely correct, would Taylor know that?
Birthdays
- Location
- England, Smugsville.
The day her clutch was born, there was a rather large celebration.
Kuibeina supposed she shouldn't have been surprised, really. She had a large family, and while it was rare that she saw many of the oldest, a new clutch hatching was one of those things that always drew a bit of a crowd.
"Aaww, aren't you cute?" Her brother cooed, fussing over the oldest of the group. She seemed pleased with it, making the happy little chirp noises that only the very young could really manage.
"Naymos, please leave Elixa alone." She sighed, laughing even so. "You're going spoil her at this rate."
"What's a little spoiling of my niece?" The Mightyena grinned back, nuzzling the baby Absol's side.
Rolling her eyes, Kuibeina let them wander around the rest of the room, where her other hatchlings were being doted on by some others in her family. There was Deltien, with her sister Lita and her mate Kel, her mate was with his two brothers and a sister letting them fuss over Kaltria, Luriean was napping in his basket with his sister-
There was a quiet knock on the door, and the Serperior beside it opened it, still engaged in her conversation with her Mightyena mate- her grandparents through her father's side, wonderful Pokemon both- to let a Ninetales and Mightyena in, the latter more stooped with age than the former, but both bright-eyed as they looked at the controlled chaos in the room before them.
"Mama, Pa!" She called in greeting, not wanting to leave her two sleeping Vulpix alone. Her parents came straight over, her mother leading, and nuzzled her cheek in greeting.
"Hello, little 'Beina." Her Pa greeted, the hyena Pokemon butting her side. "Quite the party, I see."
"Apologies that we're late, daughter." Mama added. "There was some issue with the teleport Pokemon before we left."
"I'm just glad you're both here, Mama, Pa." Kuibeina smiled, her tails waving back and forth gently- carefully, so as not to wake the sleeping kits with the movements. "I know you said you would come, but when you didn't arrive, I was worried."
"We wouldn't miss this for the world or stars, 'Beina." Pa assured her easily. "Now, I see two little hatchlings here," he nodded at the sleeping pair, "But where are the others?"
"Lukos has Kaltira, meeting her aunt and uncles, while Naymos has a hold on Elixa at the moment, they're over by Lita and Kel, Deltien is there too," she frowned slightly as the two Absol cuddled into each others sides, the three adults apparently overwhelming them.
Pa followed her gaze, a similar frown. "I think I'll go over there and rescue the two of them and bring them back here." The Mightyena set off, the body language of a Pokemon on a mission, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
"Thanks, Pa." Turning back to her Mama, who had been scanning the room curiously, she continued, "This is a lot... more, than I thought it would be."
"It's a new clutch, love." Mama returned. "You've been to other reunions before, why would this one be any different?"
"I don't know." She admitted, with a laugh. "But it was surprising to see so many Pokemon here." The room was mostly full, though she knew that some family would be leaving to make room for others to show up soon. Those with hatchlings of their own would be showing up much later, in order to let the newest family members meet and spend time with their various cousins and such.
"It won't be for long." Mama assured. "Soon it'll be back to just you two and your kits."
"I'm welcoming it, honestly. These five are tiring work."
"You all were as bad." The elder Ninetales looked down at the basket by their side, and the two Vulpix sleeping within, lying with their heads on each others tails. "Two in a clutch of five..."
"They're the calmest out of all of them." Kuibeina told her. "They tend to just sleep. Elixa, Deltien and Kaltria wake up all hours of the day and night for stuff."
"They'll grow up out of that soon enough." She chuckled. "Then you'll have five kits leading their own little adventures." She smiled again. "Which one's which?"
"Luriean's the one on the left." The proud mother explained. "Shadow's on the right."
"Her fur's slightly darker than her little brother's..." Mama mused. "I take it that's part of the reason for her name?"
"Yes." She nodded.
"I see..." Leaning down to gently nuzzle the sleeping kits, she smiled. "I think little Shadow here is likely to be very interesting when she grows up." She said. "I'm rather looking forward to it, I think."
Kuibeina raised an eyebrow at her Mama, who didn't respond, and it was promptly swept towards the back of her mind by her Pa, with the two elder Absol carefully carried by the scruff of their necks.
For the kits first birthday, it was primarily the seven of them. The five kits were still spending a lot of time sleeping, but they also had some very long days where all they did was run about their play room.
Kuibeina was lucky that Lukos was normally available to keep an eye on them when that started going on. His danger sense could easily be tuned to making sure that the kits didn't hurt themselves playing or get too exhausted running about. It was much harder to do herself, especially since she couldn't exactly just separate them all with Extrasensory- though her Miracle Eye had gotten a lot better since the kits had hatched.
Today was just a day where they were playing games, though. The family had sent over a large number of assorted gifts, and the end result meant that there were numerous chasey or chewy things scattered around the playroom, as well as the remains of the wrapping paper for whenever the kits got bored and decided that shredding things was more fun.
There'd also been a number of books for young Pokemon delivered, though at the minute the five were having too much fun running about to think about reading, no matter what the subject was.
Lukos was watching over them now, as they chased things around the room, while Kuibeina was having a quiet cup of tea before she went in to drag them out for cake.
The sugar rush she knew she'd have to put up with later was worth it to see her kits so happy, in her mind.
A knock at the door made her raise an eyebrow and place her teacup on one side, standing from her chair and trotting over to it.
"Mama! Pa!" She exclaimed, seeing the two familiar faces. "What are you doing here?"
"You didn't think we'd miss our grandkit's first birthday, did you?" Mama grinned, slipping in. "The teleport was a bit difficult to set up, admittedly, but we managed."
"Where're Lukos and the kits?" Pa asked, looking around. The front room hadn't changed much in the month since they'd last been, Kuibeina knew, but it was more the Mightyena making sure that they were all taking care of themselves ok, rather than looking for differences.
"They're all in the playroom, Lukos is keeping an eye on them while they chase things around." She explained, closing the door and leading the way back to the table. "I was just having a cup of tea before getting the cake out." He nodded, while the elder Ninetales made herself at home in the little kitchen, coming back a few minutes later with two more cups of tea.
"Ah, good." Mama smiled. "Well, no reason to make them wait for cake, I suppose. I'll give them all my gift later."
"Are you sure you'll manage to get them to sit still that long?" Kuibeina checked, knowing what her mother meant by gift.
She chuckled. "Of course. No matter how energetic, kits always calm down for one of our family's stories."
"Not that you wouldn't know that." Pa laughed as well. "You probably use it to get them to settle to sleep. I know we did with you." Kuibeina blushed, nodding. It was the best way to get them to fall asleep; send them off with one of the stories she knew as part of a Talekeeper family.
The three drank their tea quietly, discussing little things like the weather over the top of it, before the mother went to fetch her mate and five kits for the cake.
The five of them entered the room with despondent faces, not knowing why they were being pulled away from their game and not liking it at all. It was Kaltria that noticed them first, being at the front of the group squeezing through the door- they still hadn't quite figured out the concept of 'single file lines'.
"Gram! Gramp!" They cheered, suddenly brightening. There were a few trips as they all suddenly picked up the pace and sprinted for their grandparents, who chuckled and scooped them up into hugs.
"Hello, little kits." Pa smiled widely. "How's your birthday?"
The usual tumble of voices as five one-year-olds all tried to get their side of the story across at the same time followed, with only little snippets of it being actually able to be heard, but both of the elder Pokemon smiled and nodded as if they understood completely.
"Well, I'm glad to hear you're all having a good time." Mama told them, as Deltien finally ran out of steam to talk about his day. "Now, how about we all sit down and let your Mama here tell you why she interrupted playtime?"
They tilted heads slightly in sync, making Kuibeina grin at the cuteness of it.
"Not Gram?" Luriean asked slowly. Mama chuckled.
"Well, I might be part of the reason your Mama called you out, but I wasn't the main one." She admitted. "Now, you five come and sit here at the table, yes?" The five padded over, apparently still working over the situation in their heads as best as they could, and let themselves be arranged on the seats set aside for them at the table.
All eyes widened when she levitated a set of five cakes over to them, each with a little candle on the top. They were only small- the kits were still young, after all, and honestly Kuibeina didn't want to know how much trouble they would be on a serious sugar rush- but to the little ones that didn't matter.
"Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…" She led, placing them down. "Happy birthday dear kits, happy birthday to you."
Lukos smiled down at them as they gaped at the cakes, fire reflecting from their eyes. "Would you like to blow the candles out?" They looked up at him, then nodded, all inhaling.
It took a little bit of effort, and the tiniest bit of help from Mama when none of them were looking via an Extrasensory, but all of the candles were blown out. Carefully, Kuibeina plucked them from the top, leaving the little cakes alone.
"Can have?" Elixa asked. She chuckled, nodding.
"Yes, Elixa, you can have the cakes."
Unsurprisingly, there was very little talking for a while after that, as they dug into the cakes. Mama had gotten up to make another round of tea a little way in, handing them around, before sitting to wait.
"Now," she said, once they were finished. They all looked up at her, curious. "Who wants to hear a story?"
"Me!" They all cheered, making her laugh.
"Well, let's get you out of those seats and down to the mats, and Gram can tell you a story, ok?" Kuibeina offered, walking around the table. With the cooperation of the kits- as in, them actually sitting still and waiting for once, rather than wriggling to get down to the floor faster- she soon had them all down on the ground and trailing towards the mats in the corner of the main room, where Kuibeina would often tell them stories if she wasn't trying to get them to go to bed.
Once they were all comfortable, and Mama had lifted her tea, she sat herself down between her mate and Pa to let her Mama talk.
"Long ago, back when all the world was covered in forests, there was a group of travelling Pokemon…" She began, in a soothing voice.
Kuibeina leaned against her mate, letting the familiar tale roll over her, as her kits listened, entranced.
By the time the kits had reached their second birthday, the family of seven were no longer living in the large city of Obiva, instead having moved to a much smaller town called Fori. While it placed them all further away from their family, and Lukos had had to arrange a transfer to a different branch of the Pokemon Expedition and Archaeology Team, but they'd both felt that it was a better place to raise their kits than the bustle of the big city. Plus, with Teleports, it wasn't exactly much of a hassle for their family to come and visit, or for them to go there instead.
The house was also rather larger, with extra bedrooms for when the five grew up and decided that they wanted their own; for now they all wanted to stay in the same room, where they could snuggle up together, but soon enough that would start becoming difficult as they got larger. The downstairs space was much bigger, allowing for more of a kitchen, a playroom was set to one side with plans to renovate into a library or Talekeeper room once the kits were older, and this house had a back garden, with enough space to be used for teaching the kits their Moves and also growing berries, which Kuibeina planned to sell at the town market.
The kits had already made a lot of friends among the younger Pokemon around Fori, in fact, which was part of the reason she was glad for the massive back garden. At the moment, it had a table set up, full of food, and a big birthday banner for all of them hanging off the poles set up- unfortunately there weren't any trees big enough to use yet, and probably wouldn't be for a while.
Either way, soon the five of them would be coming down, not having any sort of surprise party this year because they wanted to invite all their friends, and then the garden would be full of happy children running around and playing games.
Kuibeina was slightly disappointed that her Mama couldn't be here for this one, but she and Pa had visited only a week ago to drop off the kit's presents and wish them a happy birthday, so the kit's wouldn't mind.
Mama had said that the main reason was because she knew they'd want their new friends over to play, so they didn't want to get in the way, which was nice.
Still, as the five kits stumbled out into the garden with wide smiles and party hats, and the guests from Fori started arriving with greetings and gifts, Kuibeina decided that she didn't mind too much that her family weren't able to visit.
There were plenty of Pokemon here, after all, and whatever made her kits happy was perfect.
The five didn't get a chance to really celebrate their third birthday, due to the fact that two days before it they'd ended up attending their first family hatching gathering. The timing had felt a bit sour to Kuibeina, even though logically she knew it wasn't really reasonable for her to try and blame her sister-in-law for the fact that her little tribe had hatched so closely to her own, but watching the kits run around and coo over the new Poochyena and Rattata hatchlings that were being shown around took a lot of the edge off.
"Aren't they cute like that?" Lukos whispered in her ear. She took her eyes off Shadow for a moment to look up at him, then nodded as she found her kit again in the crowd.
"They are, yes. How're your brother and sister?"
"They're ok, just tired."
"I'm not surprised." She muttered. "Five was bad enough, I can't imagine having to deal with thirteen."
"They'll manage, in the end. Besides, our five grew up rather faster than these will, so we had a lot more time with them causing trouble." Lukos chortled, then paused. "Speaking of which, where's Deltien?"
"He's with your mother and a couple of the pups." She told him immediately. "I saw them a minute ago, he seemed to be doing alright, if being a bit of an annoyance like normal."
"He's still cute enough to get away with it, I suppose." He sighed. "I'll leave him for a while, then go drag him away if he causes trouble."
"I think that's just the basic plan of action for all of our kits, really." Kuibeina grinned, spotting Elixa and Kaltria bobbing through the crowd, chattering to their great-grandmother while the Serperior in question slithered through the mess that was a family hatch gathering. Shadow had joined Luriean- how did she manage to get to the other side of the room in the space of a few seconds?- in talking to some of the cousins more their age, catching up on how everything was going in that funny way only young children could manage.
Instead, their birthday that year was a quiet affair with gifts arriving in the mail, a bit of running about playing games, some reading in the corner, cake, and a sugar rush that still hadn't worn off by the time they were supposed to go to bed.
I suppose letting them stay up for a little while longer won't hurt in the end. Kuibeina decided, watching them bounce about the playroom after a dozen different coloured balls. At least it'll calm them down somewhat.
At their fourth birthday, Kuibeina was wondering if this was revenge for the relative peace of the day a year before.
"And what have we learned from all this?" She asked sternly, looking down her nose at the five. She remembered it being an effective way of Furretting the truth out of young Pokemon from when she was younger, and it seemed to still work just as well, since they were squirming under the gaze.
"To only set off food fights when the adults won't see?"
All except Deltien, who'd inherited her mate's stubbornness and then some, plus some sarcasm from somewhere.
Kaltria swiped at her slightly-elder brother, ignoring his return growl as she said meekly, "Don't start food fights at a party?"
"Don't cause chaos?"
Kuibeina barked out a laugh at Elixa's suggestion, all veneers of seriousness forgotten. "Honestly, asking you lot not to cause chaos is like asking the Sun not to shine. Still, not quite, you three."
"Ask permission before starting a food fight?"
"Tell you beforehand what we want, so you can make stuff sepif- sessip- just for it?"
She grinned down at the two Vulpix, who were smirking slightly in return. "Pretty much, you two. Yes, Lur, I'd like to know if you wanted to start a food fight, and the other parents probably would as well, and yes, Shadow, knowing beforehand that you wanted to do it would mean I could make stuff specifically for the fight, leaving the rest of the food alone and giving you stuff that's easy to clean up."
"Speaking of which," Lukos put in, looking over the five of them, "Cleaning up is something you all should be thinking about as well."
The kits were splattered with various sauces and juices; while it was most visible on the snowy white coats of the three Absol, there were still stains on both Vulpix as well. Elixa in particular seemed to be attempting to become a collage painting with the number of different berry juices on her coat, leaving her more of a red-yellow-purple-green mix than white. Deltien had managed to get most of the orange drink juice along his back, Luriean was so yellow and glittery he could be mistaken for a shiny Pokemon, the horn on Kaltria's head had an apple stuck on it in addition to her coat having a rather large splodge of Tamato Berry juice running down her side, and Shadow seemed to be attempting to become a salad.
Actually, on second glance, Kuibeina was pretty sure that whoever was responsible for her elder Vulpix's state had just upturned the salad bowl on her, given the lettuce and Tamato stuck in her head crest, the fur on her tail had Pinap Berries in it, and there were dozens of little bits of berry scattered around the ground that had probably fallen off while she was running around using the mustard bottle as a beam weapon.
"Ok, Pa!" They all chorused, running over to the hose by the side of the house. She exchanged an exasperated look with her mate.
"Well, at least it's not boring." He commented. She thwapped him with the end of her tail.
"Oh, be quiet and help me clean this up." She commanded in return, starting to use Extrasensory to remove bits of sandwiches from the ground and put them in the bin.
She could still hear him snickering as they made their way around the garden.
Luckily for Kuibeina's slowly declining sanity, the kits decided they didn't want a big birthday party for their fifth birthday, so instead the family had sat around playing board games and eating silly party food after opening their gifts.
Between the group of them packing up the board game- it was still unfinished, so Kuibeina was sure to preserve it for if they wanted to continue it the next day- and the kits going upstairs to get ready for a story and bed, the Ninetales ended up facing a slightly nervous-looking Shadow.
"Is something wrong, kit?"
"Not… really, Mama?" She said, biting her lip. Kuibeina sat, sweeping her tails around her, and placing the littler kit between her paws.
"Say, then." She encouraged. "I can't help otherwise."
"Canyouteachmethestories?"
She blinked. "Pardon?"
"Stories." Shadow tried again. "Can you teach me?"
"You… want to pick up Talekeeping?" She checked, a little surprised when the female nodded. Five was… young, to be learning most of the stories, but there were definitely a few that she could teach her- well, a lot more than a few, admittedly, but when the archive of stories her family knew or stored was somewhere in the thousands that wasn't a big shock- at her age. "Are you sure?"
"Mhm." She nodded a second time. "Your stories're cool. I wanna be able to tell cool stories too."
"Alright." Kuibeina hummed. "You go to bed now, and I'll come up to tell you all a story in the big room in a minute, then sometime over the next few days I can start teaching you some of the easier ones."
"Thanks, Mama!" Shadow cheered, stretching up to bump her nose against hers. She leaned down a little to make it easier, and the Vulpix quickly jumped up and went running for the stairs.
Kuibeina watched her go, still a little shocked, then sighed and shook her head. Standing and shaking out her tails, she followed after her second eldest daughter, mentally planning out the letter she was going to write to Mama for advice.
Perhaps she'd be able to drop by for a visit to help her teach. She had the experience in it, after all.
They ended up at a water park for their sixth birthday.
Kuibeina had no idea how she'd managed to get talked into this, and honestly she wasn't completely certain Shadow or Luriean knew either, but apparently the three Absol kits had decided on it at some point and browbeaten their siblings into agreeing with them. They seemed to be having fun, though, even with the Fire type's being constantly splashed with water.
And also the Water types of the group having taken it upon themselves to use Water Gun or Bubble on any Pokemon that strayed too close.
The adults were spending their time around the outside of the pool area, watching over their smaller kits and socialising. Lukos was wandering around with a slight rainbow sheen over his horn, keeping an eye on the children that way- any of them being hurt would be a disaster, after all.
"This isn't quite what I would've expected from a birthday party for your kits." Alika, an Electivire who was looking wearily at the water park, noted, inching a little further away from the edge.
"It's not what I was expecting either, believe me." She laughed. "But you know what those five get like when they want something."
"At least it's not going to be as messy as the one a couple years back." Mitul grimaced, both faces looking upset. "I looked like I was strawberry flavoured for a few days after that."
"There, there." Jillim sympathised, patting the Vanilluxe on the side. "At least you didn't have to clean it up."
"Neither did you!" Kuibeina reminded the Reuniclus. "You lot just left us to deal with it."
"I never said I helped." He grinned. "Just that Mitul didn't have to." The three of them chuckled together for a few moments, watching as a pair of Elekid and one of the Vanillite worked together to aim one of the larger water guns positioned around the large park- put in for those Pokemon who couldn't go into the pools because it was unsafe, but still wanted to join in with their siblings or friends that were able to swim around- at the group of birthday kits and fired a massive blob of water at them.
They shrieked in surprise, along with the Totodile and Meowth that were with them, and the parents laughed aloud when another canon went off behind them, aimed by one of Jillim's Solosis with Confusion and fired by a Ralts that had gotten bored with swimming, and took advantage of the surprise created by the scream to hit another group.
A large water fight promptly started up, with the Pokemon on the canons being hit a few times as well. The adults quickly backed away from the edge, retreating instead to the safety of the food area behind the glass wall, thus shielding them from the water spray outside.
When the kits were seven, they ended up visiting Mama and Pa at their home at the bottom of the Winterhaunt Mountain. The mountain was on one side of a rather large forest, with the city of Obiva on the other side, but the forest was big enough that the small village had its own branch of the Teleport Guild.
"Gram!" The five called, storming into the building to hug the taller Ninetales.
"Hello, little ones." Mama greeted, sweeping all of them into a hug- with a little difficulty, given how much taller they were all getting and the length of the Absol's horns- before passing them over to Pa. "How are all of the birthday kits doing?"
They broke into chatter, talking about the gifts that had been opened that morning before the teleport- some from family, sent through the post, while others had been dropped off during the previous days by friends in Fori. Pa chuckled, leading them into the living room to sit down, while Kuibeina and Lukos smiled at Mama.
"I swear, it's like they haven't seen you in forever." Lukos grinned widely, giving her a hug. "Though it is nice to see you again."
"Good to see you too, child." Mama nuzzled him, opening the hug to her daughter as well. "And I can't really blame them. To a hatchling, a month is an eternity, especially when it comes to family. I know I hated it when I didn't see my Gram for more than a few days."
"I suppose when you're young it's hard to comprehend it being difficult to travel to visit." Kuibeina admitted. "They're getting older, of course, so they'll come to learn pretty soon that it's both difficult and expensive sometimes to travel to see Pokemon."
"They do get money fairly well already, actually." Lukos added. "So it shouldn't be difficult for them to understand. They're rather fond of going shopping in the village with me or Kui."
"Mostly Shadow and Elixa, honestly. They like being seen as grown up." The Ninetales sighed. "Only seven and they want to be seen as grown up… strange."
"That's how things work, I'm afraid." Mama told her, patting her shoulder. "They'll probably grow out of it, amusingly enough."
"I suppose so."
"Now, how about we go and rescue your Pa from the horde and tell our little kits some stories, hm?" She suggested. Kuibeina laughed.
"That'll be one way to keep them happy." She agreed, as she and Lukos went over to the cushions in the corner of the room.
"Kits!" Mama called. "Come here, will you?"
"Sure thing!" They replied, all crowding around her. "What is it, Gram?" Elixa asked.
"Why, I have some stories to tell you, of course." She smiled as they all perked up, running to sit beside Kuibeina and Lukos on the cushions. "Good to see that you're all enthusiastic about it." She added, sitting down beside Pa on another pair. "Now, let's see... long ago, in an ancient forest, there was a shrine..."
Kuibiena let her Mama's voice roll over her again, watching with amusement as her kits eyes sparkled as they listened to the first of many stories.
It was only when the group hit eight that they started getting more interested in their birthday presents. For the first few years, it was mostly games and toys, and the occasional book, and while it was similar things now, Kuibeina couldn't help but think that there was something strangely more to them in some way.
Maybe it was the fact that the kits were starting to get different interests, more obviously than before, and so presents were chosen with that in mind. Maybe it was because they'd been chosen by their friends themselves, instead of just being picked by their parents but with their friends names on them.
Or perhaps it was because this was the first time where the five of them had personally picked out presents for each other, using their pocket money to buy what they could- and begging her for a little bit extra if they needed it.
Lukos had been the one to organise the presents the night before, making sure that the ones the kits had gotten each other were right at the back, for last. Given that she knew what each of them had brought each other, the mother approved of that decision.
"Ooh..." Kaltria's awed gasp brought her out of her thoughts for a moment, and she smiled at seeing Elixa's gift sitting in front of her, still surrounded by wrapping paper.
The thing in question was a pretty little ornament meant to be hung on horns, which would drape down the side of Kaltria's face when attached to the lower part of her horn. It'd been fairly cheap- Kuibeina had banned them from actually buying anything too expensive for each other, plus it was being bought on a kit's pocket money- but-
"It's beautiful." She added, unknowingly completing her mother's thought. "Thanks, Elixa! Now I feel bad about what I got..."
"I'm sure yours is great too, sis." The eldest Absol reassured her.
"Mama, can you put it on for me?" She begged. Smiling a little more, she lifted it up with Extrasensory, carefully undoing the clasp and hooking it around her horn. "Thanks!"
"It's really pretty, Kal." Luriean commented.
"Suits you." Shadow agreed. Deltien just nodded.
"Thanks." She said again, grinning just as widely and with a little blush on her dark cheeks. "Del, you go next!"
Kuibeina settled back beside her mate as the five continued, working their way pretty much randomly through the presents given by their siblings. For the most part, the girls had little sparkly bits, though Deltien had one too; a sort of necklace, or a very glittery scarf, that Shadow seemed to have gotten as a joke. The younger Absol had been happy with it, though, which was nice.
And it was a very nice scarf.
Books had also been traded around, and little games- nothing quite as big as the console Lukos and she had bought them, made by a group of Porygon and other Pokemon as a mimic of the game consoles humans had, but smaller things that would also work well as family games.
Kaltria's gift to Elixa had been jewellery as well, a wrist band that clipped around her paw, and the eldest sibling had given the youngest a hug of thanks for it, declaring that it was easily prettier than what she'd bought. Shadow had brought Deltien an amusing winter hat, knowing he hated the cold, that had a hole in it for his horn, then Luriean had found that the Vulpix had gotten him an absolute ton of sweets and Gummis, teasing him about his sweet tooth when he opened it- which led to him teasing right back about her inability to eat more than a few without going on a sugar rush.
By whatever system they had been working by, Shadow ended up the last one to open a gift; this one from Luriean, her slightly-younger sibling. The elder Vulpix poked at it for a moment, curious.
"Did you get me a book, Lur?" She asked. He blushed, and pointed at it.
"Have a look, if you want to know so bad."
"Planning on it!" She chirped, using one claw to carefully slice through the tape.
A purple book fell out, followed by another lilac one and then three pens, blue, grey and black, for those Pokemon with paws. Glancing at her brother with a raised eyebrow, she flipped through the lilac one, the eyebrow going further when she realised that it was blank.
"I know that when you do Talekeeping stuff with Mama and Gram, you just use bits of paper, and it's kinda a mess." He explained. "So I figured it might make it easier to keep them all in order if you had a book. Then I saw the darker one, so I bought that as well."
Shadow looked blankly at it for a moment, then around at the other things, then at him.
Then she jumped him, ending up tangled in a hug.
"Thank you, Lur!" She cheered.
On their ninth birthday, after everything had been opened and packed away, Shadow decided to make an announcement.
"I," she declared, using the pile of books and games that she'd accumulated as a stand, "Am going to be a Rescue Pokemon."
Silence greeted that remark from all quarters, since she hadn't even mentioned that to Kuibeina yet, and a glance told her that Lukos hadn't know either- not that he wouldn't've told her straight away if she had.
"But..." Luriean asked, "Aren't you gonna be a Talekeeper?"
"Yeah!" She replied easily, "But I can be a Rescue Pokemon too!"
"That sounds like it'd be hard, though." Elixa put in, head tilted to the side. The new bangle on her horn caught the light as she did, similar to the one she'd bought Kaltria a year before.
"I mean, yeah, kinda, because I'd be learning new stories and also training a lot, but being a Rescue Pokemon would give me chances to travel around the world, and meet new Pokemon, and I could get stories from them!" Her eyes were sparkling slightly at the idea. "I could get stories from places that we'd never managed to go before, because I'm there on a mission, or because the client knew them and was willing to share, or because a Pokemon from far away joined the team!"
Kuibeina met Lukos' eyes, and the two of them padded back a bit while the kits talked.
"Would she be in danger?"
"Of course she would." He snorted. "As a Rescue Pokemon she'd be fighting all manner of things, and doing all manner of crazy missions. She'd probably get into more trouble than I do at my job." Her heart dropped a little. "But she'd also be doing all of this in those Mystery Dungeons, rather than in old ruins or whatever. Those places have strange powers, I've heard, that keep Pokémon in them from getting too badly hurt." He shrugged. "So, really, it's more about if we think we can prepare her."
"She'd have support, right?" She checked.
"There's always the different branches of Adventure Guilds, Wigglytuff Guild is the most common around here I think, and she'd have a team." He assured her. "Even if she started out as the only one on her team, she'd probably be given someone to work with during the basics or something. Or she might have to join a team for at least a little while at the start, then be allowed to make her own team once she has more experience."
"Plus she'd never shut up about it if we didn't let her, or she'd just leave when she was old enough to do it." Kuibeina sighed slightly, then nodded. "If you're ok with it?"
"Only if you are." They traded another look, then the Ninetales stepped forward.
"Alright, Shadow." She said loudly, cutting off the conversation. "We're ok with you becoming a Rescue Pokemon, but there's going to be a few conditions first. Namely, I'm going to start teaching you some Moves and how to use them properly, and you're going to need to prove to us that you can use them. You're also going to learn a lot more about your illusions, how to use them, and how to detect if someone else is using them on you. You'll only be allowed to go and join a Rescue Team- or make you own," she added, seeing the female inhale, "When your Pa and I decide that you're good enough with your Moves and illusions to stay safe. Understand?"
"Yes, Mama!" Shadow nodded frantically, looking like a bobble-head statue. "I'll do just fine, you'll see!"
She had.
No matter how much Kuibeina might've hated it, and wanted to hold her back again and again just so that she didn't need to see one of her kits leave the den- and so young too! She was still barely a hatching as a Vulpix- she had to admit that Shadow had taken everything they'd thrown at her and come back asking for more. She'd learned Ember with ease, and started messing around in her own time to figure out how to start upgrading it to Flame Burst, Inferno, and then Flamethrower. She'd been doing things with her illusions quite well, though she still struggled with making her Pokemon illusions lifelike enough. There was a Lucario in her family tree, she knew, so she'd spoken around Fori and found that Jillim knew Heal Pulse, though it wasn't the most stable, but he'd been willing to teach Shadow how to do it, even if it only did a tiny bit.
Even her cousin and uncle had gotten in on the mix- though Shadow had gotten into the habit of calling them 'uncle' and 'gramp' respectively- and taught Shadow Magnet Rise on one of their visits, just to add an extra skill in.
She had a fairly varied Moveset now, with some physical and some ranged Moves, an ability to heal that would grow in time, and a number of different ways to negate weaknesses or lower the damage by boosting her own stats.
It was pretty much accepted by now, both in the family and in Fori, that Shadow was going to be leaving soon. Probably before the end of the year.
This fact seemed to make this birthday a particularly hard one for the others to take; Luriean especially.
The presents weren't much, again just books and bits of jewellery. In fact, pretty much every present gotten by the others was quite small, due to the single gift given to Shadow as a group.
"We all worked together to get this one." Kaltria explained nervously. "Which is why there isn't really much from us. We're sorry about that... do you like it?"
Her elder sister gaped at the present, the paper now scattered across the place, then grinned at her sister. "Of course I do."
The gift in question was a scarf, dark purple, and a white bag with lilac stripes.
"We thought the scarf would be good for you to put your badge on, when you get it." Deltien explained. "Then Elixa suggested that we also get a bag, so you can put stuff that you need or want to keep on you in there."
"There's a little side pouch for Pokè too." Said Absol added. "Though you might not be able to get too much stuff in there... it should be good for berries and that, though, or other items that're important."
"We figured it'd be useful for when you leave to go to Alma." Luriean finished. "We all pooled our money together to get it for you..."
The explanation was cut of by Shadow pulling all of them into a group hug, crying.
"I'm gonna miss you guys..." She sniffled.
"We'll write, and we can always come and visit by Teleport." Elixa reminded her. "We're not gonna fall outta touch." Even the eldest Absol had tears in her eyes, though.
Kuibeina glanced at Lukos, and both parents joined the hug as well, the presents left forgotten on the floor.
When the kits hit eleven, they decided to play a prank on Shadow.
The group had exchanged letters with Eon a few dozen times since Shadow had teamed up with him in Team Inari, and Kuibeina had arranged with him for Shadow to be dragged put to training most of the day, allowing for the family to Teleport in and set up in the den for a party.
"You would be Kuibeina, yes?" A Machoke asked, standing just outside of the Teleport place.
"Yes, that's me."
"I am Zemo, on Team Inari. Eon sent me to guide you to their den." He explained.
"Oh, thank you." The Ninetales smiled gratefully. "Kits, stay together, ok? Make sure you have everything."
"We've got it, Mama!" Elixa promised, as the rest of them worked together to grab the bags of decorations they were going to set up in the den. Lukos made up the back of the group, and nodded to her that they were fine.
Zemo waited patiently for the family to get into order, then started off, letting them follow him through the streets of the rather large town over to where Shadow had described as the Rescue Team fields.
"Here." He told them, opening the door of a woven hut, large enough for the entire family plus a bit, and stepped aside. "Milliant is looking out for Eon and Shadow. She will tell you when they return."
"Thank you for your help, Zemo." Kuibeina smiled, as the four kits ran in and dropped their bags, starting to search through them for banners and pins. "And please thank Milliant for me as well, will you? You're both being very helpful."
"Family is very important to Shadow." He shrugged. "I am happy to help arrange things for her to spend her birthday with them."
"Thank you anyway." She reiterated. "Not every Pokemon would be willing to help out."
"Inari would." He said. "Inari helps out it's own." The Machoke wandered away, and a Mismagius poked their head through the wall.
"All clear for now, they shouldn't be back until well later this afternoon, so you should have a few hours to set things up." She told them. "I'll just keep an eye on things out here and pop in when they're coming back."
"Thank you, I assume Milliant?" She nodded. "Thank you."
"No problem, ma'am." An arm came through the wall as well, giving a salute, then the Ghost type retreated completely.
"Right then, kits!" Kuibeina called, over the bustle. "Let's get things set up for Shadow, shall we?"
"Yes Mama!" They called back.
When Shadow and Eon returned to their den a little after three, the entire room was covered in glitter and streamers, there were presents piled in five groups, and the six of them were sitting in the centre of the dark room waiting for them to arrive.
"...but that went really well, I think another few times and I might have Heal Pulse down." Shadow's voice said from just outside the door.
"Dian seemed to think you're doing really well with it, yeah." Eon agreed. "Hopefully you'll be able to figure it out enough for missions soon."
"Then I'm going to start on Heal Bell, I think." She added. "If I can find someone who knows it."
"Maybe Dian does. Or someone on our team."
"Right! I'll ask around." The door slowly creaked open. "We need to put some better windows in here. Or get better blinds or something, it's stupidly dark-"
"Surprise!" The family chorused, making her yelp.
"Guys!"
Eon doubled over laughing, and she spun to glare at him.
"You knew about this?"
"Eon helped set it up." Lukos told her. "And had a couple of your team mates help us out too." She grinned, tackling him in a hug.
"Thanks, Eon."
"You're welcome." He smiled in return, patting her back. "Now, why don't you go catch up with your siblings and open your presents."
"Will do!" She laughed, storming her siblings and getting a group hug going.
Eon headed into one of the side rooms, coming out a little while later with a tray of tea things. The three settled down on the side, watching the eleven-year-olds enthusiastically open gifts.
When they were twelve, Eon and Shadow decided to reverse the prank. Organising it through letters had taken a while, but they'd set everything up for the four siblings to be out of the house with Lukos while the Rescue Pokemon Teleported in and made their way to the house.
"Hello again, Eon." Kuibeina welcomed, pulling them into the house. "We've got most of everything set up, we're just waiting on you two."
"Hi, Mama." Shadow smiled, hugging her and trotting by. "Where're the presents?"
"Over by the table." She called back, as she and Eon swapped amused glances. "Your team doing ok?"
"It's going well, ma'am." The shiny nodded. "Shadow spent a lot of money recently buying the recipe for Max Elixers, which was worth it, but it means the entire team's been pulling longer shifts to make up the money. We had to be pretty careful with the scheduling to make sure we got here."
"The Teleport cost isn't going to cause trouble, is it?" She checked, concerned. He shook his head.
"No, ma'am. We're managing fine, and we have savings for things like this. Sometimes we use the Teleport service to get closer to Dungeons for missions, we just tapped into that. Might have to take some more difficult jobs for more money when we get home, but the other squads in the team can manage fine."
"Alright." She said softly. "But don't be afraid to ask for help if you need it, ok?"
"We will, ma'am."
"Eon!" Shadow called, trotting over. "Can I have the presents?"
"Here." He handed over the Wonder Bag that was on his back, letting her take it with Extrasensory.
"Thanks."
"What did you get them?" Kuibeina asked, as her daughter wandered off again.
"It's mostly Shadow's gift, but you'll see in a bit." He smirked. "When are the others getting back?"
She glanced at the clock. "About an hour from now."
"Excellent." He went off to see what Shadow was doing, and she rolled her eyes, going towards the kitchen to put the tea on.
"Surprise!"
"Shadow!" Luriean shouted, recovering first and piling into a hug.
"Hey, slightly-littler-brother." She grinned, patting his head. "I am home for the birthday!"
"Brilliant!" Kaltria laughed. "I was wondering why we weren't sending you your presents by mail. I thought we were going to Teleport again."
"Nope." Eon put in, from where he was standing by the side of the present piles. "We decided we'd come to visit."
"Hi, Eon." Deltien waved. "Now, presents?"
"You all need to open mine last, and at the same time." Shadow warned, and she handed the first one on Deltien's pile over. "But yeah, presents."
Thus followed the standard mania that was opening presents on their birthday. Kuibeina, Lukos and Eon sat on the side, drinking tea and quietly chatting about things, until the group got through the pile.
Shadow had gotten a cool hat from the four, which apparently boosted healing abilities- tested by Jillim to make sure it worked- and was looking eagerly at her siblings as they all slit open her gift to them.
"Oh!" Elixa gasped quietly.
"I thought it would be nice if we matched, so I got all of you ones as well." She said quietly. "They were custom done at one of the stores in Alma."
Each one of her siblings had in front of them a pair of a scarf and a bag, in matching colours. Elixa's scarf was a beautiful yellow, while the bag was white with gold stripes, Deltien's was an emerald colour while the bag was forest green, Luriean had a royal blue scarf with a sky blue striped bag, and Kaltria's was a bright, firey red scarf with a bag that had a much darker, more burnished red for the stripes. They were all clearly based on the lilac striped bag and purple scarf that she'd been given when she was ten, just before she left.
"Thank you, Shadow." Kaltria sniffed, pulling them into another group hug.
For their thirteenth birthday, one of them was missing.
The group was a lot quieter for that, and one pile of presents sat unopened on the side.
Kuibeina supposed she shouldn't have been surprised, really. She had a large family, and while it was rare that she saw many of the oldest, a new clutch hatching was one of those things that always drew a bit of a crowd.
"Aaww, aren't you cute?" Her brother cooed, fussing over the oldest of the group. She seemed pleased with it, making the happy little chirp noises that only the very young could really manage.
"Naymos, please leave Elixa alone." She sighed, laughing even so. "You're going spoil her at this rate."
"What's a little spoiling of my niece?" The Mightyena grinned back, nuzzling the baby Absol's side.
Rolling her eyes, Kuibeina let them wander around the rest of the room, where her other hatchlings were being doted on by some others in her family. There was Deltien, with her sister Lita and her mate Kel, her mate was with his two brothers and a sister letting them fuss over Kaltria, Luriean was napping in his basket with his sister-
There was a quiet knock on the door, and the Serperior beside it opened it, still engaged in her conversation with her Mightyena mate- her grandparents through her father's side, wonderful Pokemon both- to let a Ninetales and Mightyena in, the latter more stooped with age than the former, but both bright-eyed as they looked at the controlled chaos in the room before them.
"Mama, Pa!" She called in greeting, not wanting to leave her two sleeping Vulpix alone. Her parents came straight over, her mother leading, and nuzzled her cheek in greeting.
"Hello, little 'Beina." Her Pa greeted, the hyena Pokemon butting her side. "Quite the party, I see."
"Apologies that we're late, daughter." Mama added. "There was some issue with the teleport Pokemon before we left."
"I'm just glad you're both here, Mama, Pa." Kuibeina smiled, her tails waving back and forth gently- carefully, so as not to wake the sleeping kits with the movements. "I know you said you would come, but when you didn't arrive, I was worried."
"We wouldn't miss this for the world or stars, 'Beina." Pa assured her easily. "Now, I see two little hatchlings here," he nodded at the sleeping pair, "But where are the others?"
"Lukos has Kaltira, meeting her aunt and uncles, while Naymos has a hold on Elixa at the moment, they're over by Lita and Kel, Deltien is there too," she frowned slightly as the two Absol cuddled into each others sides, the three adults apparently overwhelming them.
Pa followed her gaze, a similar frown. "I think I'll go over there and rescue the two of them and bring them back here." The Mightyena set off, the body language of a Pokemon on a mission, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
"Thanks, Pa." Turning back to her Mama, who had been scanning the room curiously, she continued, "This is a lot... more, than I thought it would be."
"It's a new clutch, love." Mama returned. "You've been to other reunions before, why would this one be any different?"
"I don't know." She admitted, with a laugh. "But it was surprising to see so many Pokemon here." The room was mostly full, though she knew that some family would be leaving to make room for others to show up soon. Those with hatchlings of their own would be showing up much later, in order to let the newest family members meet and spend time with their various cousins and such.
"It won't be for long." Mama assured. "Soon it'll be back to just you two and your kits."
"I'm welcoming it, honestly. These five are tiring work."
"You all were as bad." The elder Ninetales looked down at the basket by their side, and the two Vulpix sleeping within, lying with their heads on each others tails. "Two in a clutch of five..."
"They're the calmest out of all of them." Kuibeina told her. "They tend to just sleep. Elixa, Deltien and Kaltria wake up all hours of the day and night for stuff."
"They'll grow up out of that soon enough." She chuckled. "Then you'll have five kits leading their own little adventures." She smiled again. "Which one's which?"
"Luriean's the one on the left." The proud mother explained. "Shadow's on the right."
"Her fur's slightly darker than her little brother's..." Mama mused. "I take it that's part of the reason for her name?"
"Yes." She nodded.
"I see..." Leaning down to gently nuzzle the sleeping kits, she smiled. "I think little Shadow here is likely to be very interesting when she grows up." She said. "I'm rather looking forward to it, I think."
Kuibeina raised an eyebrow at her Mama, who didn't respond, and it was promptly swept towards the back of her mind by her Pa, with the two elder Absol carefully carried by the scruff of their necks.
For the kits first birthday, it was primarily the seven of them. The five kits were still spending a lot of time sleeping, but they also had some very long days where all they did was run about their play room.
Kuibeina was lucky that Lukos was normally available to keep an eye on them when that started going on. His danger sense could easily be tuned to making sure that the kits didn't hurt themselves playing or get too exhausted running about. It was much harder to do herself, especially since she couldn't exactly just separate them all with Extrasensory- though her Miracle Eye had gotten a lot better since the kits had hatched.
Today was just a day where they were playing games, though. The family had sent over a large number of assorted gifts, and the end result meant that there were numerous chasey or chewy things scattered around the playroom, as well as the remains of the wrapping paper for whenever the kits got bored and decided that shredding things was more fun.
There'd also been a number of books for young Pokemon delivered, though at the minute the five were having too much fun running about to think about reading, no matter what the subject was.
Lukos was watching over them now, as they chased things around the room, while Kuibeina was having a quiet cup of tea before she went in to drag them out for cake.
The sugar rush she knew she'd have to put up with later was worth it to see her kits so happy, in her mind.
A knock at the door made her raise an eyebrow and place her teacup on one side, standing from her chair and trotting over to it.
"Mama! Pa!" She exclaimed, seeing the two familiar faces. "What are you doing here?"
"You didn't think we'd miss our grandkit's first birthday, did you?" Mama grinned, slipping in. "The teleport was a bit difficult to set up, admittedly, but we managed."
"Where're Lukos and the kits?" Pa asked, looking around. The front room hadn't changed much in the month since they'd last been, Kuibeina knew, but it was more the Mightyena making sure that they were all taking care of themselves ok, rather than looking for differences.
"They're all in the playroom, Lukos is keeping an eye on them while they chase things around." She explained, closing the door and leading the way back to the table. "I was just having a cup of tea before getting the cake out." He nodded, while the elder Ninetales made herself at home in the little kitchen, coming back a few minutes later with two more cups of tea.
"Ah, good." Mama smiled. "Well, no reason to make them wait for cake, I suppose. I'll give them all my gift later."
"Are you sure you'll manage to get them to sit still that long?" Kuibeina checked, knowing what her mother meant by gift.
She chuckled. "Of course. No matter how energetic, kits always calm down for one of our family's stories."
"Not that you wouldn't know that." Pa laughed as well. "You probably use it to get them to settle to sleep. I know we did with you." Kuibeina blushed, nodding. It was the best way to get them to fall asleep; send them off with one of the stories she knew as part of a Talekeeper family.
The three drank their tea quietly, discussing little things like the weather over the top of it, before the mother went to fetch her mate and five kits for the cake.
The five of them entered the room with despondent faces, not knowing why they were being pulled away from their game and not liking it at all. It was Kaltria that noticed them first, being at the front of the group squeezing through the door- they still hadn't quite figured out the concept of 'single file lines'.
"Gram! Gramp!" They cheered, suddenly brightening. There were a few trips as they all suddenly picked up the pace and sprinted for their grandparents, who chuckled and scooped them up into hugs.
"Hello, little kits." Pa smiled widely. "How's your birthday?"
The usual tumble of voices as five one-year-olds all tried to get their side of the story across at the same time followed, with only little snippets of it being actually able to be heard, but both of the elder Pokemon smiled and nodded as if they understood completely.
"Well, I'm glad to hear you're all having a good time." Mama told them, as Deltien finally ran out of steam to talk about his day. "Now, how about we all sit down and let your Mama here tell you why she interrupted playtime?"
They tilted heads slightly in sync, making Kuibeina grin at the cuteness of it.
"Not Gram?" Luriean asked slowly. Mama chuckled.
"Well, I might be part of the reason your Mama called you out, but I wasn't the main one." She admitted. "Now, you five come and sit here at the table, yes?" The five padded over, apparently still working over the situation in their heads as best as they could, and let themselves be arranged on the seats set aside for them at the table.
All eyes widened when she levitated a set of five cakes over to them, each with a little candle on the top. They were only small- the kits were still young, after all, and honestly Kuibeina didn't want to know how much trouble they would be on a serious sugar rush- but to the little ones that didn't matter.
"Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…" She led, placing them down. "Happy birthday dear kits, happy birthday to you."
Lukos smiled down at them as they gaped at the cakes, fire reflecting from their eyes. "Would you like to blow the candles out?" They looked up at him, then nodded, all inhaling.
It took a little bit of effort, and the tiniest bit of help from Mama when none of them were looking via an Extrasensory, but all of the candles were blown out. Carefully, Kuibeina plucked them from the top, leaving the little cakes alone.
"Can have?" Elixa asked. She chuckled, nodding.
"Yes, Elixa, you can have the cakes."
Unsurprisingly, there was very little talking for a while after that, as they dug into the cakes. Mama had gotten up to make another round of tea a little way in, handing them around, before sitting to wait.
"Now," she said, once they were finished. They all looked up at her, curious. "Who wants to hear a story?"
"Me!" They all cheered, making her laugh.
"Well, let's get you out of those seats and down to the mats, and Gram can tell you a story, ok?" Kuibeina offered, walking around the table. With the cooperation of the kits- as in, them actually sitting still and waiting for once, rather than wriggling to get down to the floor faster- she soon had them all down on the ground and trailing towards the mats in the corner of the main room, where Kuibeina would often tell them stories if she wasn't trying to get them to go to bed.
Once they were all comfortable, and Mama had lifted her tea, she sat herself down between her mate and Pa to let her Mama talk.
"Long ago, back when all the world was covered in forests, there was a group of travelling Pokemon…" She began, in a soothing voice.
Kuibeina leaned against her mate, letting the familiar tale roll over her, as her kits listened, entranced.
By the time the kits had reached their second birthday, the family of seven were no longer living in the large city of Obiva, instead having moved to a much smaller town called Fori. While it placed them all further away from their family, and Lukos had had to arrange a transfer to a different branch of the Pokemon Expedition and Archaeology Team, but they'd both felt that it was a better place to raise their kits than the bustle of the big city. Plus, with Teleports, it wasn't exactly much of a hassle for their family to come and visit, or for them to go there instead.
The house was also rather larger, with extra bedrooms for when the five grew up and decided that they wanted their own; for now they all wanted to stay in the same room, where they could snuggle up together, but soon enough that would start becoming difficult as they got larger. The downstairs space was much bigger, allowing for more of a kitchen, a playroom was set to one side with plans to renovate into a library or Talekeeper room once the kits were older, and this house had a back garden, with enough space to be used for teaching the kits their Moves and also growing berries, which Kuibeina planned to sell at the town market.
The kits had already made a lot of friends among the younger Pokemon around Fori, in fact, which was part of the reason she was glad for the massive back garden. At the moment, it had a table set up, full of food, and a big birthday banner for all of them hanging off the poles set up- unfortunately there weren't any trees big enough to use yet, and probably wouldn't be for a while.
Either way, soon the five of them would be coming down, not having any sort of surprise party this year because they wanted to invite all their friends, and then the garden would be full of happy children running around and playing games.
Kuibeina was slightly disappointed that her Mama couldn't be here for this one, but she and Pa had visited only a week ago to drop off the kit's presents and wish them a happy birthday, so the kit's wouldn't mind.
Mama had said that the main reason was because she knew they'd want their new friends over to play, so they didn't want to get in the way, which was nice.
Still, as the five kits stumbled out into the garden with wide smiles and party hats, and the guests from Fori started arriving with greetings and gifts, Kuibeina decided that she didn't mind too much that her family weren't able to visit.
There were plenty of Pokemon here, after all, and whatever made her kits happy was perfect.
The five didn't get a chance to really celebrate their third birthday, due to the fact that two days before it they'd ended up attending their first family hatching gathering. The timing had felt a bit sour to Kuibeina, even though logically she knew it wasn't really reasonable for her to try and blame her sister-in-law for the fact that her little tribe had hatched so closely to her own, but watching the kits run around and coo over the new Poochyena and Rattata hatchlings that were being shown around took a lot of the edge off.
"Aren't they cute like that?" Lukos whispered in her ear. She took her eyes off Shadow for a moment to look up at him, then nodded as she found her kit again in the crowd.
"They are, yes. How're your brother and sister?"
"They're ok, just tired."
"I'm not surprised." She muttered. "Five was bad enough, I can't imagine having to deal with thirteen."
"They'll manage, in the end. Besides, our five grew up rather faster than these will, so we had a lot more time with them causing trouble." Lukos chortled, then paused. "Speaking of which, where's Deltien?"
"He's with your mother and a couple of the pups." She told him immediately. "I saw them a minute ago, he seemed to be doing alright, if being a bit of an annoyance like normal."
"He's still cute enough to get away with it, I suppose." He sighed. "I'll leave him for a while, then go drag him away if he causes trouble."
"I think that's just the basic plan of action for all of our kits, really." Kuibeina grinned, spotting Elixa and Kaltria bobbing through the crowd, chattering to their great-grandmother while the Serperior in question slithered through the mess that was a family hatch gathering. Shadow had joined Luriean- how did she manage to get to the other side of the room in the space of a few seconds?- in talking to some of the cousins more their age, catching up on how everything was going in that funny way only young children could manage.
Instead, their birthday that year was a quiet affair with gifts arriving in the mail, a bit of running about playing games, some reading in the corner, cake, and a sugar rush that still hadn't worn off by the time they were supposed to go to bed.
I suppose letting them stay up for a little while longer won't hurt in the end. Kuibeina decided, watching them bounce about the playroom after a dozen different coloured balls. At least it'll calm them down somewhat.
At their fourth birthday, Kuibeina was wondering if this was revenge for the relative peace of the day a year before.
"And what have we learned from all this?" She asked sternly, looking down her nose at the five. She remembered it being an effective way of Furretting the truth out of young Pokemon from when she was younger, and it seemed to still work just as well, since they were squirming under the gaze.
"To only set off food fights when the adults won't see?"
All except Deltien, who'd inherited her mate's stubbornness and then some, plus some sarcasm from somewhere.
Kaltria swiped at her slightly-elder brother, ignoring his return growl as she said meekly, "Don't start food fights at a party?"
"Don't cause chaos?"
Kuibeina barked out a laugh at Elixa's suggestion, all veneers of seriousness forgotten. "Honestly, asking you lot not to cause chaos is like asking the Sun not to shine. Still, not quite, you three."
"Ask permission before starting a food fight?"
"Tell you beforehand what we want, so you can make stuff sepif- sessip- just for it?"
She grinned down at the two Vulpix, who were smirking slightly in return. "Pretty much, you two. Yes, Lur, I'd like to know if you wanted to start a food fight, and the other parents probably would as well, and yes, Shadow, knowing beforehand that you wanted to do it would mean I could make stuff specifically for the fight, leaving the rest of the food alone and giving you stuff that's easy to clean up."
"Speaking of which," Lukos put in, looking over the five of them, "Cleaning up is something you all should be thinking about as well."
The kits were splattered with various sauces and juices; while it was most visible on the snowy white coats of the three Absol, there were still stains on both Vulpix as well. Elixa in particular seemed to be attempting to become a collage painting with the number of different berry juices on her coat, leaving her more of a red-yellow-purple-green mix than white. Deltien had managed to get most of the orange drink juice along his back, Luriean was so yellow and glittery he could be mistaken for a shiny Pokemon, the horn on Kaltria's head had an apple stuck on it in addition to her coat having a rather large splodge of Tamato Berry juice running down her side, and Shadow seemed to be attempting to become a salad.
Actually, on second glance, Kuibeina was pretty sure that whoever was responsible for her elder Vulpix's state had just upturned the salad bowl on her, given the lettuce and Tamato stuck in her head crest, the fur on her tail had Pinap Berries in it, and there were dozens of little bits of berry scattered around the ground that had probably fallen off while she was running around using the mustard bottle as a beam weapon.
"Ok, Pa!" They all chorused, running over to the hose by the side of the house. She exchanged an exasperated look with her mate.
"Well, at least it's not boring." He commented. She thwapped him with the end of her tail.
"Oh, be quiet and help me clean this up." She commanded in return, starting to use Extrasensory to remove bits of sandwiches from the ground and put them in the bin.
She could still hear him snickering as they made their way around the garden.
Luckily for Kuibeina's slowly declining sanity, the kits decided they didn't want a big birthday party for their fifth birthday, so instead the family had sat around playing board games and eating silly party food after opening their gifts.
Between the group of them packing up the board game- it was still unfinished, so Kuibeina was sure to preserve it for if they wanted to continue it the next day- and the kits going upstairs to get ready for a story and bed, the Ninetales ended up facing a slightly nervous-looking Shadow.
"Is something wrong, kit?"
"Not… really, Mama?" She said, biting her lip. Kuibeina sat, sweeping her tails around her, and placing the littler kit between her paws.
"Say, then." She encouraged. "I can't help otherwise."
"Canyouteachmethestories?"
She blinked. "Pardon?"
"Stories." Shadow tried again. "Can you teach me?"
"You… want to pick up Talekeeping?" She checked, a little surprised when the female nodded. Five was… young, to be learning most of the stories, but there were definitely a few that she could teach her- well, a lot more than a few, admittedly, but when the archive of stories her family knew or stored was somewhere in the thousands that wasn't a big shock- at her age. "Are you sure?"
"Mhm." She nodded a second time. "Your stories're cool. I wanna be able to tell cool stories too."
"Alright." Kuibeina hummed. "You go to bed now, and I'll come up to tell you all a story in the big room in a minute, then sometime over the next few days I can start teaching you some of the easier ones."
"Thanks, Mama!" Shadow cheered, stretching up to bump her nose against hers. She leaned down a little to make it easier, and the Vulpix quickly jumped up and went running for the stairs.
Kuibeina watched her go, still a little shocked, then sighed and shook her head. Standing and shaking out her tails, she followed after her second eldest daughter, mentally planning out the letter she was going to write to Mama for advice.
Perhaps she'd be able to drop by for a visit to help her teach. She had the experience in it, after all.
They ended up at a water park for their sixth birthday.
Kuibeina had no idea how she'd managed to get talked into this, and honestly she wasn't completely certain Shadow or Luriean knew either, but apparently the three Absol kits had decided on it at some point and browbeaten their siblings into agreeing with them. They seemed to be having fun, though, even with the Fire type's being constantly splashed with water.
And also the Water types of the group having taken it upon themselves to use Water Gun or Bubble on any Pokemon that strayed too close.
The adults were spending their time around the outside of the pool area, watching over their smaller kits and socialising. Lukos was wandering around with a slight rainbow sheen over his horn, keeping an eye on the children that way- any of them being hurt would be a disaster, after all.
"This isn't quite what I would've expected from a birthday party for your kits." Alika, an Electivire who was looking wearily at the water park, noted, inching a little further away from the edge.
"It's not what I was expecting either, believe me." She laughed. "But you know what those five get like when they want something."
"At least it's not going to be as messy as the one a couple years back." Mitul grimaced, both faces looking upset. "I looked like I was strawberry flavoured for a few days after that."
"There, there." Jillim sympathised, patting the Vanilluxe on the side. "At least you didn't have to clean it up."
"Neither did you!" Kuibeina reminded the Reuniclus. "You lot just left us to deal with it."
"I never said I helped." He grinned. "Just that Mitul didn't have to." The three of them chuckled together for a few moments, watching as a pair of Elekid and one of the Vanillite worked together to aim one of the larger water guns positioned around the large park- put in for those Pokemon who couldn't go into the pools because it was unsafe, but still wanted to join in with their siblings or friends that were able to swim around- at the group of birthday kits and fired a massive blob of water at them.
They shrieked in surprise, along with the Totodile and Meowth that were with them, and the parents laughed aloud when another canon went off behind them, aimed by one of Jillim's Solosis with Confusion and fired by a Ralts that had gotten bored with swimming, and took advantage of the surprise created by the scream to hit another group.
A large water fight promptly started up, with the Pokemon on the canons being hit a few times as well. The adults quickly backed away from the edge, retreating instead to the safety of the food area behind the glass wall, thus shielding them from the water spray outside.
When the kits were seven, they ended up visiting Mama and Pa at their home at the bottom of the Winterhaunt Mountain. The mountain was on one side of a rather large forest, with the city of Obiva on the other side, but the forest was big enough that the small village had its own branch of the Teleport Guild.
"Gram!" The five called, storming into the building to hug the taller Ninetales.
"Hello, little ones." Mama greeted, sweeping all of them into a hug- with a little difficulty, given how much taller they were all getting and the length of the Absol's horns- before passing them over to Pa. "How are all of the birthday kits doing?"
They broke into chatter, talking about the gifts that had been opened that morning before the teleport- some from family, sent through the post, while others had been dropped off during the previous days by friends in Fori. Pa chuckled, leading them into the living room to sit down, while Kuibeina and Lukos smiled at Mama.
"I swear, it's like they haven't seen you in forever." Lukos grinned widely, giving her a hug. "Though it is nice to see you again."
"Good to see you too, child." Mama nuzzled him, opening the hug to her daughter as well. "And I can't really blame them. To a hatchling, a month is an eternity, especially when it comes to family. I know I hated it when I didn't see my Gram for more than a few days."
"I suppose when you're young it's hard to comprehend it being difficult to travel to visit." Kuibeina admitted. "They're getting older, of course, so they'll come to learn pretty soon that it's both difficult and expensive sometimes to travel to see Pokemon."
"They do get money fairly well already, actually." Lukos added. "So it shouldn't be difficult for them to understand. They're rather fond of going shopping in the village with me or Kui."
"Mostly Shadow and Elixa, honestly. They like being seen as grown up." The Ninetales sighed. "Only seven and they want to be seen as grown up… strange."
"That's how things work, I'm afraid." Mama told her, patting her shoulder. "They'll probably grow out of it, amusingly enough."
"I suppose so."
"Now, how about we go and rescue your Pa from the horde and tell our little kits some stories, hm?" She suggested. Kuibeina laughed.
"That'll be one way to keep them happy." She agreed, as she and Lukos went over to the cushions in the corner of the room.
"Kits!" Mama called. "Come here, will you?"
"Sure thing!" They replied, all crowding around her. "What is it, Gram?" Elixa asked.
"Why, I have some stories to tell you, of course." She smiled as they all perked up, running to sit beside Kuibeina and Lukos on the cushions. "Good to see that you're all enthusiastic about it." She added, sitting down beside Pa on another pair. "Now, let's see... long ago, in an ancient forest, there was a shrine..."
Kuibiena let her Mama's voice roll over her again, watching with amusement as her kits eyes sparkled as they listened to the first of many stories.
It was only when the group hit eight that they started getting more interested in their birthday presents. For the first few years, it was mostly games and toys, and the occasional book, and while it was similar things now, Kuibeina couldn't help but think that there was something strangely more to them in some way.
Maybe it was the fact that the kits were starting to get different interests, more obviously than before, and so presents were chosen with that in mind. Maybe it was because they'd been chosen by their friends themselves, instead of just being picked by their parents but with their friends names on them.
Or perhaps it was because this was the first time where the five of them had personally picked out presents for each other, using their pocket money to buy what they could- and begging her for a little bit extra if they needed it.
Lukos had been the one to organise the presents the night before, making sure that the ones the kits had gotten each other were right at the back, for last. Given that she knew what each of them had brought each other, the mother approved of that decision.
"Ooh..." Kaltria's awed gasp brought her out of her thoughts for a moment, and she smiled at seeing Elixa's gift sitting in front of her, still surrounded by wrapping paper.
The thing in question was a pretty little ornament meant to be hung on horns, which would drape down the side of Kaltria's face when attached to the lower part of her horn. It'd been fairly cheap- Kuibeina had banned them from actually buying anything too expensive for each other, plus it was being bought on a kit's pocket money- but-
"It's beautiful." She added, unknowingly completing her mother's thought. "Thanks, Elixa! Now I feel bad about what I got..."
"I'm sure yours is great too, sis." The eldest Absol reassured her.
"Mama, can you put it on for me?" She begged. Smiling a little more, she lifted it up with Extrasensory, carefully undoing the clasp and hooking it around her horn. "Thanks!"
"It's really pretty, Kal." Luriean commented.
"Suits you." Shadow agreed. Deltien just nodded.
"Thanks." She said again, grinning just as widely and with a little blush on her dark cheeks. "Del, you go next!"
Kuibeina settled back beside her mate as the five continued, working their way pretty much randomly through the presents given by their siblings. For the most part, the girls had little sparkly bits, though Deltien had one too; a sort of necklace, or a very glittery scarf, that Shadow seemed to have gotten as a joke. The younger Absol had been happy with it, though, which was nice.
And it was a very nice scarf.
Books had also been traded around, and little games- nothing quite as big as the console Lukos and she had bought them, made by a group of Porygon and other Pokemon as a mimic of the game consoles humans had, but smaller things that would also work well as family games.
Kaltria's gift to Elixa had been jewellery as well, a wrist band that clipped around her paw, and the eldest sibling had given the youngest a hug of thanks for it, declaring that it was easily prettier than what she'd bought. Shadow had brought Deltien an amusing winter hat, knowing he hated the cold, that had a hole in it for his horn, then Luriean had found that the Vulpix had gotten him an absolute ton of sweets and Gummis, teasing him about his sweet tooth when he opened it- which led to him teasing right back about her inability to eat more than a few without going on a sugar rush.
By whatever system they had been working by, Shadow ended up the last one to open a gift; this one from Luriean, her slightly-younger sibling. The elder Vulpix poked at it for a moment, curious.
"Did you get me a book, Lur?" She asked. He blushed, and pointed at it.
"Have a look, if you want to know so bad."
"Planning on it!" She chirped, using one claw to carefully slice through the tape.
A purple book fell out, followed by another lilac one and then three pens, blue, grey and black, for those Pokemon with paws. Glancing at her brother with a raised eyebrow, she flipped through the lilac one, the eyebrow going further when she realised that it was blank.
"I know that when you do Talekeeping stuff with Mama and Gram, you just use bits of paper, and it's kinda a mess." He explained. "So I figured it might make it easier to keep them all in order if you had a book. Then I saw the darker one, so I bought that as well."
Shadow looked blankly at it for a moment, then around at the other things, then at him.
Then she jumped him, ending up tangled in a hug.
"Thank you, Lur!" She cheered.
On their ninth birthday, after everything had been opened and packed away, Shadow decided to make an announcement.
"I," she declared, using the pile of books and games that she'd accumulated as a stand, "Am going to be a Rescue Pokemon."
Silence greeted that remark from all quarters, since she hadn't even mentioned that to Kuibeina yet, and a glance told her that Lukos hadn't know either- not that he wouldn't've told her straight away if she had.
"But..." Luriean asked, "Aren't you gonna be a Talekeeper?"
"Yeah!" She replied easily, "But I can be a Rescue Pokemon too!"
"That sounds like it'd be hard, though." Elixa put in, head tilted to the side. The new bangle on her horn caught the light as she did, similar to the one she'd bought Kaltria a year before.
"I mean, yeah, kinda, because I'd be learning new stories and also training a lot, but being a Rescue Pokemon would give me chances to travel around the world, and meet new Pokemon, and I could get stories from them!" Her eyes were sparkling slightly at the idea. "I could get stories from places that we'd never managed to go before, because I'm there on a mission, or because the client knew them and was willing to share, or because a Pokemon from far away joined the team!"
Kuibeina met Lukos' eyes, and the two of them padded back a bit while the kits talked.
"Would she be in danger?"
"Of course she would." He snorted. "As a Rescue Pokemon she'd be fighting all manner of things, and doing all manner of crazy missions. She'd probably get into more trouble than I do at my job." Her heart dropped a little. "But she'd also be doing all of this in those Mystery Dungeons, rather than in old ruins or whatever. Those places have strange powers, I've heard, that keep Pokémon in them from getting too badly hurt." He shrugged. "So, really, it's more about if we think we can prepare her."
"She'd have support, right?" She checked.
"There's always the different branches of Adventure Guilds, Wigglytuff Guild is the most common around here I think, and she'd have a team." He assured her. "Even if she started out as the only one on her team, she'd probably be given someone to work with during the basics or something. Or she might have to join a team for at least a little while at the start, then be allowed to make her own team once she has more experience."
"Plus she'd never shut up about it if we didn't let her, or she'd just leave when she was old enough to do it." Kuibeina sighed slightly, then nodded. "If you're ok with it?"
"Only if you are." They traded another look, then the Ninetales stepped forward.
"Alright, Shadow." She said loudly, cutting off the conversation. "We're ok with you becoming a Rescue Pokemon, but there's going to be a few conditions first. Namely, I'm going to start teaching you some Moves and how to use them properly, and you're going to need to prove to us that you can use them. You're also going to learn a lot more about your illusions, how to use them, and how to detect if someone else is using them on you. You'll only be allowed to go and join a Rescue Team- or make you own," she added, seeing the female inhale, "When your Pa and I decide that you're good enough with your Moves and illusions to stay safe. Understand?"
"Yes, Mama!" Shadow nodded frantically, looking like a bobble-head statue. "I'll do just fine, you'll see!"
She had.
No matter how much Kuibeina might've hated it, and wanted to hold her back again and again just so that she didn't need to see one of her kits leave the den- and so young too! She was still barely a hatching as a Vulpix- she had to admit that Shadow had taken everything they'd thrown at her and come back asking for more. She'd learned Ember with ease, and started messing around in her own time to figure out how to start upgrading it to Flame Burst, Inferno, and then Flamethrower. She'd been doing things with her illusions quite well, though she still struggled with making her Pokemon illusions lifelike enough. There was a Lucario in her family tree, she knew, so she'd spoken around Fori and found that Jillim knew Heal Pulse, though it wasn't the most stable, but he'd been willing to teach Shadow how to do it, even if it only did a tiny bit.
Even her cousin and uncle had gotten in on the mix- though Shadow had gotten into the habit of calling them 'uncle' and 'gramp' respectively- and taught Shadow Magnet Rise on one of their visits, just to add an extra skill in.
She had a fairly varied Moveset now, with some physical and some ranged Moves, an ability to heal that would grow in time, and a number of different ways to negate weaknesses or lower the damage by boosting her own stats.
It was pretty much accepted by now, both in the family and in Fori, that Shadow was going to be leaving soon. Probably before the end of the year.
This fact seemed to make this birthday a particularly hard one for the others to take; Luriean especially.
The presents weren't much, again just books and bits of jewellery. In fact, pretty much every present gotten by the others was quite small, due to the single gift given to Shadow as a group.
"We all worked together to get this one." Kaltria explained nervously. "Which is why there isn't really much from us. We're sorry about that... do you like it?"
Her elder sister gaped at the present, the paper now scattered across the place, then grinned at her sister. "Of course I do."
The gift in question was a scarf, dark purple, and a white bag with lilac stripes.
"We thought the scarf would be good for you to put your badge on, when you get it." Deltien explained. "Then Elixa suggested that we also get a bag, so you can put stuff that you need or want to keep on you in there."
"There's a little side pouch for Pokè too." Said Absol added. "Though you might not be able to get too much stuff in there... it should be good for berries and that, though, or other items that're important."
"We figured it'd be useful for when you leave to go to Alma." Luriean finished. "We all pooled our money together to get it for you..."
The explanation was cut of by Shadow pulling all of them into a group hug, crying.
"I'm gonna miss you guys..." She sniffled.
"We'll write, and we can always come and visit by Teleport." Elixa reminded her. "We're not gonna fall outta touch." Even the eldest Absol had tears in her eyes, though.
Kuibeina glanced at Lukos, and both parents joined the hug as well, the presents left forgotten on the floor.
When the kits hit eleven, they decided to play a prank on Shadow.
The group had exchanged letters with Eon a few dozen times since Shadow had teamed up with him in Team Inari, and Kuibeina had arranged with him for Shadow to be dragged put to training most of the day, allowing for the family to Teleport in and set up in the den for a party.
"You would be Kuibeina, yes?" A Machoke asked, standing just outside of the Teleport place.
"Yes, that's me."
"I am Zemo, on Team Inari. Eon sent me to guide you to their den." He explained.
"Oh, thank you." The Ninetales smiled gratefully. "Kits, stay together, ok? Make sure you have everything."
"We've got it, Mama!" Elixa promised, as the rest of them worked together to grab the bags of decorations they were going to set up in the den. Lukos made up the back of the group, and nodded to her that they were fine.
Zemo waited patiently for the family to get into order, then started off, letting them follow him through the streets of the rather large town over to where Shadow had described as the Rescue Team fields.
"Here." He told them, opening the door of a woven hut, large enough for the entire family plus a bit, and stepped aside. "Milliant is looking out for Eon and Shadow. She will tell you when they return."
"Thank you for your help, Zemo." Kuibeina smiled, as the four kits ran in and dropped their bags, starting to search through them for banners and pins. "And please thank Milliant for me as well, will you? You're both being very helpful."
"Family is very important to Shadow." He shrugged. "I am happy to help arrange things for her to spend her birthday with them."
"Thank you anyway." She reiterated. "Not every Pokemon would be willing to help out."
"Inari would." He said. "Inari helps out it's own." The Machoke wandered away, and a Mismagius poked their head through the wall.
"All clear for now, they shouldn't be back until well later this afternoon, so you should have a few hours to set things up." She told them. "I'll just keep an eye on things out here and pop in when they're coming back."
"Thank you, I assume Milliant?" She nodded. "Thank you."
"No problem, ma'am." An arm came through the wall as well, giving a salute, then the Ghost type retreated completely.
"Right then, kits!" Kuibeina called, over the bustle. "Let's get things set up for Shadow, shall we?"
"Yes Mama!" They called back.
When Shadow and Eon returned to their den a little after three, the entire room was covered in glitter and streamers, there were presents piled in five groups, and the six of them were sitting in the centre of the dark room waiting for them to arrive.
"...but that went really well, I think another few times and I might have Heal Pulse down." Shadow's voice said from just outside the door.
"Dian seemed to think you're doing really well with it, yeah." Eon agreed. "Hopefully you'll be able to figure it out enough for missions soon."
"Then I'm going to start on Heal Bell, I think." She added. "If I can find someone who knows it."
"Maybe Dian does. Or someone on our team."
"Right! I'll ask around." The door slowly creaked open. "We need to put some better windows in here. Or get better blinds or something, it's stupidly dark-"
"Surprise!" The family chorused, making her yelp.
"Guys!"
Eon doubled over laughing, and she spun to glare at him.
"You knew about this?"
"Eon helped set it up." Lukos told her. "And had a couple of your team mates help us out too." She grinned, tackling him in a hug.
"Thanks, Eon."
"You're welcome." He smiled in return, patting her back. "Now, why don't you go catch up with your siblings and open your presents."
"Will do!" She laughed, storming her siblings and getting a group hug going.
Eon headed into one of the side rooms, coming out a little while later with a tray of tea things. The three settled down on the side, watching the eleven-year-olds enthusiastically open gifts.
When they were twelve, Eon and Shadow decided to reverse the prank. Organising it through letters had taken a while, but they'd set everything up for the four siblings to be out of the house with Lukos while the Rescue Pokemon Teleported in and made their way to the house.
"Hello again, Eon." Kuibeina welcomed, pulling them into the house. "We've got most of everything set up, we're just waiting on you two."
"Hi, Mama." Shadow smiled, hugging her and trotting by. "Where're the presents?"
"Over by the table." She called back, as she and Eon swapped amused glances. "Your team doing ok?"
"It's going well, ma'am." The shiny nodded. "Shadow spent a lot of money recently buying the recipe for Max Elixers, which was worth it, but it means the entire team's been pulling longer shifts to make up the money. We had to be pretty careful with the scheduling to make sure we got here."
"The Teleport cost isn't going to cause trouble, is it?" She checked, concerned. He shook his head.
"No, ma'am. We're managing fine, and we have savings for things like this. Sometimes we use the Teleport service to get closer to Dungeons for missions, we just tapped into that. Might have to take some more difficult jobs for more money when we get home, but the other squads in the team can manage fine."
"Alright." She said softly. "But don't be afraid to ask for help if you need it, ok?"
"We will, ma'am."
"Eon!" Shadow called, trotting over. "Can I have the presents?"
"Here." He handed over the Wonder Bag that was on his back, letting her take it with Extrasensory.
"Thanks."
"What did you get them?" Kuibeina asked, as her daughter wandered off again.
"It's mostly Shadow's gift, but you'll see in a bit." He smirked. "When are the others getting back?"
She glanced at the clock. "About an hour from now."
"Excellent." He went off to see what Shadow was doing, and she rolled her eyes, going towards the kitchen to put the tea on.
"Surprise!"
"Shadow!" Luriean shouted, recovering first and piling into a hug.
"Hey, slightly-littler-brother." She grinned, patting his head. "I am home for the birthday!"
"Brilliant!" Kaltria laughed. "I was wondering why we weren't sending you your presents by mail. I thought we were going to Teleport again."
"Nope." Eon put in, from where he was standing by the side of the present piles. "We decided we'd come to visit."
"Hi, Eon." Deltien waved. "Now, presents?"
"You all need to open mine last, and at the same time." Shadow warned, and she handed the first one on Deltien's pile over. "But yeah, presents."
Thus followed the standard mania that was opening presents on their birthday. Kuibeina, Lukos and Eon sat on the side, drinking tea and quietly chatting about things, until the group got through the pile.
Shadow had gotten a cool hat from the four, which apparently boosted healing abilities- tested by Jillim to make sure it worked- and was looking eagerly at her siblings as they all slit open her gift to them.
"Oh!" Elixa gasped quietly.
"I thought it would be nice if we matched, so I got all of you ones as well." She said quietly. "They were custom done at one of the stores in Alma."
Each one of her siblings had in front of them a pair of a scarf and a bag, in matching colours. Elixa's scarf was a beautiful yellow, while the bag was white with gold stripes, Deltien's was an emerald colour while the bag was forest green, Luriean had a royal blue scarf with a sky blue striped bag, and Kaltria's was a bright, firey red scarf with a bag that had a much darker, more burnished red for the stripes. They were all clearly based on the lilac striped bag and purple scarf that she'd been given when she was ten, just before she left.
"Thank you, Shadow." Kaltria sniffed, pulling them into another group hug.
For their thirteenth birthday, one of them was missing.
The group was a lot quieter for that, and one pile of presents sat unopened on the side.
- Location
- England, Smugsville.
As you can see, this one is a collection of scenes, crossing thirteen years, mostly about the same day. Happy SEW birthday, everyone.
I came up with this on Sunday, and only had time to finish it this morning. Still, here, a gift for you all. Thanks for one year of A Shadow, an Eon, and a Worm. Without you all, this wouldn't have been much more than a collection of snippets gathering dust. I'll do my best to get another chapter out soon, but school's started up again and everything's come to a bit of a bustle. I hope you all enjoyed this glance into Shadow's life before SEW started, and I hope there's much more to come.
Thank you, so much.
I came up with this on Sunday, and only had time to finish it this morning. Still, here, a gift for you all. Thanks for one year of A Shadow, an Eon, and a Worm. Without you all, this wouldn't have been much more than a collection of snippets gathering dust. I'll do my best to get another chapter out soon, but school's started up again and everything's come to a bit of a bustle. I hope you all enjoyed this glance into Shadow's life before SEW started, and I hope there's much more to come.
Thank you, so much.
Zeuseus
KNEEL BEFORE YOUR GOD!!
Well, that was a slightly depressing ending to an otherwise adorably fluffy set of scenes.
But it's okay, cos Pokemon are bullshit tier powerful and noone is gonna stop shadow from coming home to her family with lots of awesome stories XD
- Location
- Here
- Location
- England, Smugsville.
Hopefully the journey through to the end is still fun, though.She'll be home soon enough. Though she and Eon could probably use a bit of help, but given Moves can actually hurt Endbringers...
grins yeah... let's go with bullshit tier.
Nope! I'm running with the idea that there's both Pokemon world berries and also human world ones. Rawst berries would've been around, but in this case they also have strawberries too.
Chapter 23- Power testing, chattering, and planning.
- Location
- England, Smugsville.
The receptionist, to her credit, recovered quite quickly, smiling politely in return and nodded. "Certainly, Shadow. Let me just call her for you." She turned away from them and picked up the phone, obviously dialling the Cape. "Panacea and Team Inari here for you, Miss Militia." She waited a moment, during which Shadow could hear vague mumbling on the line, and nodded again. "Of course." She put the phone down and turned back to them, gesturing over to the side as she did so. "Miss Militia will be down in a minute to escort you to the testing room. If the four of you would just wait over there…?"
"Of course." Amy replied smoothly, with a smile. She led the way over there, Shadow staying by her side and both other members of Inari following a little bit behind, taking seats- with the two healers in the middle of them. She looked amused. "Any reason you're doing that?" She asked lowly.
There was a somewhat large gap between them and the nearest other people, the building surprisingly empty for being the main hub of most the heroes in the city, that also did tours, but Shadow understood that unlike the Rescue Guild people didn't come personally with their problems, but called them in. Even still, she appreciated Amy's attempts at being discrete.
Eon, sitting on Amy's right and between the rest of the chairs, smiled a little at her, touching her arm to draw her attention. "We're in an unknown area escorting two healers to an important duty." He explained, just as quietly. "As such, we're your guards against any possible form of danger, no matter how unlikely it is that you'd be harassed or attacked. It's standard protocol for an escort mission, though given that this would likely be classed as a high ranked mission I'd honestly rather we had more members. Shadow can protect herself, of course, and I've no doubt you can too, but I'd still rather neither of you had to while we were on duty."
"Do you really expect trouble?"
"Honestly, no. I doubt any criminal would be insane enough to attack the building containing the city's heroes, and don't doubt that if someone was the heroes here would be responding promptly. It's a matter of personal business, is all. You're our friend, and Shadow's our team mate."
"Besides, not like either of us can do much to help with the healing bit." Swarm added, shrugging. "Eon can do it, sure, but not as well as Shadow can."
"Shadow's been learning since we started, which was two and a half years ago." He said. "Maybe a little longer, actually?"
"I started learning Heal Pulse just before we started, but only by a few days. One of our mentors taught me so I could make sure neither of us got hurt while training without them. Heal Bell, the other bit, took a little longer, because I had to find someone to tutor me and it's also harder to see if it's having the right effect." Shadow reminisced. "I taught Eon a little, and he picked up some from my tutors, and I offered to teach anyone who joined us. We ended up with enough healers- and enough people in the team- that we can routinely do three groups of four teams doing missions, if we want to, with backup healers and teams in case of trouble. Not all of them take that, of course, some missions can be easy, but we always have a healer on the team, just in case. Eon rarely used his healing abilities. He's always the leader, so it's his job to handle giving orders on a mission, not keep an eye on everyone and make sure they're healthy. That's the healer's job, after all."
Amy looked curiously, as though she was about to ask another question, when all three Inari members straightened, their enhanced- or extra- senses telling them that the Cape they were waiting for was approaching. They all shifted into various 'ready' positions, Eon and Swarm a defensive one while Shadow was more polite and formal. Amy got the idea quickly, clamping down on her curiosity until later and straightening as well.
A few seconds later, the military-themed Cape entered through a security door, turning to search the waiting area and finding that she didn't need to. She headed straight over to them, Amy and Shadow standing to greet her. Swarm and Eon also stood, standing a little bit behind both of them and waiting.
"Hello, Panacea, Inari." Miss Militia greeted them both, her eyes clearly smiling. She shook Amy's outstretched hand, then leant down somewhat to take Shadow's paw as well.
"Hello again, Miss Militia." Shadow replied, feeling a little more comfortable. She'd worked with Miss Militia before, in combat and in interviews, she could handle this with that and her friends being there. "Thank you for this."
"The two of you are likely to provide rather a great service today. Three, if Eon can manage it too. That's plenty of reasoning to assist." She let go of Shadow's paw, letting her drop down to all fours and follow along as she headed back for the door. Swarm and Eon followed them, a step behind, though they all had to pass in front of Miss Militia in order to get in. They let her take the lead, though, and both ignored the slightly strange look she gave them. "I hope you've been keeping this quiet?"
"New Wave knows." Shadow said easily. "But that's because they've been helping with it all. It's only fair."
"True." Militia nodded. "Out of curiosity, why are Eon and Swarm here? Not that you're not welcome, in fact another healer- Eon can heal, I believe?- and an extra Master to work with is very useful, but…"
"No, I understand. Eon can heal, yes, but he can't do it quite the same. I can do both parts of it at the same time- it was an accident, I was battling a copy of something that if it were real could've easily killed Eon and I, and I panicked- but I've never been able to teach how to do it. I don't really know how I do it, to be honest, but I can do them either separately like Eon or together. I'm not sure which would cause the Master effect break thing, though I have a guess, and Eon might be needed to do it if I get too tired." She explained, shifting the bag of restorative items on her back with Extrasensory. She was still making more Max Elixirs to replace the ones from Leviathan, but a pair of Leppa Berries and some focus would do the same job, so that was what she had with her. "Swarm can volunteer for the Master thing as well, if she wants to of course, but she's mostly here from curiosity and to support me, I think."
"Pretty much." The bug Cape acknowledged. "I'll help out too, though. Having an example of Shadow's exclusion rule might be useful. If only to see if we can toggle it."
"That might be interesting to see as well." Miss Militia nodded. "Figuring out how your exclusion works would be good, I think. I'll pitch it to the Director in a moment."
"Who's actually involved in this testing?" Amy asked, curious. "Aside from the Masters, obviously."
Their guide laughed a little. "Aside from the Masters, Armsmaster and the Director will be with me on the other side of a barrier, which is where anyone not currently involved in the testing will be, due to Shadow's requirement for a defined room. Dragon is going to be monitoring remotely as well. Standard protocol for anything to do with Masters or Strangers."
"Makes sense." Shadow nodded. "And you do know that I can define a room with illusions, right?"
"Yes, but we thought it would be a better idea to have one clearly defined, rather than you either needing to make a room and also try clearing the effects, which might mess with the results, or having Eon do it for you." She explained. "Mostly because we weren't certain Eon would be here with you."
"Shadow is my second." Eon said simply. "Of course I'd be around for something important with her." Shadow shot a quick thankful look over her shoulder at him as they took another corner, then stopped beside Amy as Miss Militia opened another door.
Stepping through, the Vulpix looked around with interest at the room they were led into. It was mostly bare, just a number of chairs lined up under a table, which was against a wall of glass. Seven of the seats had Capes sitting in them, two of which had animals and one just a tall box, four more seats had men and women in PRT uniforms, and standing a little ways away was the semi-familiar armoured figure of Armsmaster and an unfamiliar woman that she assumed was the Director. On the wall behind them all was a screen with another familiar person on it, though this one was just the image of a helmet.
"Ah, Miss Militia." The Director half-announced. "Good, you're here."
She nodded. "Director, this is Inari. Inari, Director Piggot of the ENE PRT."
"A pleasure to meet you, Ma'am." Shadow bowed lowly, knowing Swarm and Eon would follow the movement with slightly less depth. "I must thank you for arranging all of this. I understand the power to clear Master effects is something that would be very important here on Earth Bet, but I would have in no way had the ability to arrange something like this myself."
"Ah, that's quite alright, Shadow." She replied. Looking up, Shadow noticed that she seemed quite confused, which confused her in turn- she was just offering proper thanks. "Although in fairness, the Chief Director was the one to arrange for the Parahumans to come here for your testing." She shook her head, slightly sharply. "Still, if we continue trying to place the credit in the right place I believe we'd be here all day without getting anywhere, so let's begin."
"First, introductions." Miss Militia cut in. "Of course, you know Armsmaster, and I believe you met Dragon during Leviathan," both Pokemon nodded, getting one in return from the Capes, "The seven Capes you won't have met are all visiting us from different bases around the country; Viper is an animal Master from Phoenix, Arizona, Protectorate," a man in a brown costume, patterned on snakeskin, nodded to them, one hand on a long brown snake around his neck, "Ursinae, a Ward who specialises in bears, from Utah West Valley City," a girl around twelve waved from her seat on top of a rather large grizzly bear, her costume apparently designed like she was wearing a bearskin rug- which seemed slightly strange to Shadow, given that she controlled them, but whatever, it wasn't her job to make the costumes, "Geppetto, Protectorate, from Evansville Indiana, controls puppets."
"Which explains the two large human-shaped boxes in the corner." Amy put in, making the Cape wearing a flat mask and something that looked like a suit, nod.
"Quite right." A wave over to it caused the frontmost box to creek, and they all looked over to see a white mask with a smiling face lean out, one hand coming up to jerkily wave at them. "Not my best puppets, don't want to risk any of them in testing stuff."
"Fair."
Miss Militia cleared her throat, making Shadow look back at her. "Bad Faith, also Protectorate, from Salem in Oregon, a human Master who pushes specifically negative emotions in whoever she targets, and Microshift, another human Master who can slightly influence how people move around him, coming from Jackson Mississippi." A tall woman with white-blonde hair and a green domino mask nodded coolly at them, while the boy- about fifteen, maybe- grinned. "Tripwire is a Ward, from Greenwich in Connecticut, who I believe you'll be starting with unless something's changed," Another boy, this one a little younger than the other and in a costume that reminded Shadow of shoelaces but was probably made of steel wire or something, waved at them, while the Director shook her head in response to Miss Militia's querying look, "And finally Ursa Aurora, from New York City, who makes forcefields that look like bears." Shadow could feel Swarm's surprise behind her as the woman in a glossy black mask added her own wave to the greeting, and resolved to ask later as she grinned.
"Nice to meet you all!" She waved a paw back, tails wagging gently. "Thanks to all of you for helping with this, it's great."
"Not a problem." Bad Faith shrugged, her voice sounding slightly French- from what Shadow'd heard on videos and stuff, anyway. "Zome- pardon, some one being able to break Master's effects is a big thing, in the end."
"There's also the four Parahuman Response Team members here, which are going to be helping out in the human Master testing. Jackson, Walter, Kelme, and Mann."
Shadow smiled at them as well. "Thanks too. I know being put under a Master isn't exactly most people's idea of a good thing."
Mann snorted. "Not particularly, but it's for a good cause." She agreed. "You just do what you're supposed to be here doing, and we'll all be fine."
"I'll do my best."
Director Piggot cleared her throat, seeming a little annoyed for some reason. "Right, well, if that's all?" The group of Capes nodded, which made her relax a little, looking down at Shadow. "Then you and Tripwire can go into the other room, and we'll begin."
"Alright." Shadow let out a little sigh as she followed Miss Militia over to the other door in the room, Tripwire coming up beside her. She slipped her bag off her back and left it by the door, then headed into the centre. The room was plain and boring, with nothing in it other than the wall of glass on one side, where the rest of the people in the testing were watching.
Well, there was also the scents of a bunch of people behind another wall, but since she hadn't been introduced to them Shadow assumed she probably wasn't meant to know about them and so she ignored them.
"So, Tripwire?" She asked, just for something to do while they waited for a signal to start.
"Yep." He nodded. A long coil, which she had taken to be a belt or something, unwound itself from around his waist and waved the end at her. "Power seems to use an aglet as a requirement for what I can control, hence the little thing on the end."
"Aglet?" She cocked her head, then finished a second before he replied, "Oh, the things on shoelaces. Guess that explains why your stuff looks like them so much."
"I started out planning on being an independent. Actually did for a little while, then ended up going to the Wards when stuff got a little too hard to handle." The boy shrugged. "I asked branding if I could keep the call back to shoelaces though, because that was the main thing I used."
"Which is fair, I guess." Shadow smiled. "I know a few of my old friends had cantrips they used that they kept mementoes for. Some of them had really weird stories to them, too…"
"Shadow, Tripwire, we're ready to begin." Armsmaster's voice came over an intercom. Looking back at the glass wall, she noticed that everyone had taken a seat, Armsmaster likely in a special one for his power armour. A few flashing lights indicated that cameras were probably there, and that they'd just come online, probably under Dragon's control or something, but there were probably more around the room that she hadn't seen. "If Tripwire could hold some cables at various distances around the room?"
"No problem, sir." Tripwire said respectfully, more long cables rising up from his costume. There was a second layer of armour underneath, Shadow noticed as they wound around the room like snakes- particularly adventurous Arbok or Seviper, maybe, that were willing to be floated around. Some of them reached almost to the ceiling, though the Ward was careful to avoid placing them in a way that would have them land on either of them if they fell.
"Hey, do we want Amy in here as well?" Shadow asked suddenly. "To see if she can spot my power doing anything to Tripwire?"
There was a long silence on the other side of the window, followed by the brunette healer slipping through the door. She wove through the collection of cables, ending up at his side and offering her hand out.
"I'll take that as a yes." He muttered dryly, rolling up the glove he was wearing and letting her rest her hand on his wrist.
"Go ahead, Shadow." Dragon prompted, sounding suspiciously like she was trying to avoid laughing.
The Vulpix nodded again, closed her eyes, and barked.
The sound echoed around the room for a moment, almost immediately being covered up by the sound of metal cables dropping to the floor. Shadow yelped, instinctively covering her ears because of the noise, while both Amy and Tripwire flinched slightly.
"That was weird." The Ward announced, after everything had landed and the ringing died down. Shadow cautiously removed her paws from her head, standing up straight again with a slight blush. "I could feel the connection I had with them just vanish."
"Vanish?"
"Yeah, like I cut my power out completely from the cables." He nodded. "I've done that before, just let everything go, but that was like someone else cut the link."
"I think that's basically what happened." Amy admitted. "I could see the activity in your Corona cut off for a moment."
"It came back about a second after, I didn't reactivate it because I was kinda surprised." He crouched down slightly, offering his free hand to Shadow. "Wasn't really sure if you could do it, so sorry for not believing it."
"No problem." She grinned, taking it. "Your kind aren't really used to people being able to cut out powers, from what I know. There's power nullifiers, but not someone who can randomly disconnect your abilities for a moment. Sometimes that's all you need, of course."
Amy gave her a curious look as Tripwire pulled his sleeve down again, collecting the cables from around the room and bringing them back. "Yeah, I learned that one myself. All you need is a moment of surprise to turn something in your favour." The door opened again once all the cables were in place on Tripwire's costume, and Viper came in, snakes slithering behind.
He held out his hand to Amy without saying anything, and the brown snakes that had followed him settled themselves around the room. Shadow sniffed curiously at the nearest one, noting the different scents on them.
"None of them are poisonous." He told her, sounding irritated. "I made sure I was only bringing constrictors for this, since I was told I might lose control of them."
"Alright." She accepted, looking up at them. She paused for a moment, breathing carefully, then snapped out another bark.
The wave of energy burst out, and a few seconds later there was a loud hissing on her right.
Slowly, Shadow turned, eyeing up the much larger boa glaring at her from a good few feet up. For a moment, she recoiled, old instincts from facing much bigger Pokemon rising up, and it lunged, heading towards her throat.
Another instinct, this one honed by two years of Dungeon exploring, sent her away, dodging left and swiping out as she did- knowing that they weren't poisonous and had no ranged Moves meant that it was a safe bet- and she knocked its head away. Some louder hissing followed, sounding angry, before it suddenly stopped.
Shadow shook her head, pushing away the warm Fire burning in her chest and swallowing, then looking up at Viper- she'd ended up next to him and Amy from her jump. "Thanks."
"Are you alright?" He asked, as the four snakes made their way over to them, the one she'd hit having a slight mark along its face. "Sorry about that."
"No problem." Shadow shrugged. "Bit of a scare, but we probably should've expected that to happen." She looked up at the injured snake. "Is it ok?"
"He's fine." Viper told her, glancing at the window. "Anything else you want to do?" The Vulpix's sensitive ears told her that there was a quiet, hurried conversation going on behind the glass, and she looked over as well before looking at the snakes.
"Maybe we could try leaving them here, then you going out of the room." She suggested. "To see if I need to hit the Master or the minions?"
The other side of the window went quiet again, then the side door opened.
"I think that's probably a yes." Amy snorted, heading towards the door. The four snakes wrapped around Viper made their way down to the floor, the Protectorate member following after her and leaving Shadow in the room with the four large constrictors.
She gulped. This may have been a mistake… They started to fan out around the room, Viper apparently trying to keep them out of easy lunging distance- whatever that was for a snake that size- so she tried to calm herself and waited.
She had to stop herself from using Calm Mind to help out, because she didn't want to bias the results at all, so she just sat there breathing carefully until Armsmaster's voice came over the speakers again, giving her the go ahead.
Shadow barked, and once again had to dodge around irate constrictors. This time all four of them at once for a few seconds, before Viper got his control over them back.
"Well," she panted, once she had her breath back. "It looks like I can break control just by hitting the minions, at least?"
She swore she heard Eon snorting with laughter as Amy opened the door, slipping back in and letting the snakes wander out.
"Do you want to try it with just the Master, too?" She asked. "Or are we not bothering with that."
There was a pointed silence.
"We can try that with Geppetto's puppets." Director Piggot told her. "For now, continue on with Ursinae." Another, much larger door opened in the wall- that one much more hidden than the one they'd come through- and the Ward came in riding a large grizzly bear.
"Heya!" She waved, sliding down its side as the door shut again. "Anything you want me to do?"
"Please keep the bear on the other side of the room." Shadow requested, looking up at it. "Mostly since the snakes seemed kinda annoyed that we broke the Master connection, and I don't really want to know if it's going to have the same effect."
"That's probably a good idea." Amy agreed, eyeing it warily.
"He's nice." Ursinae complained, but did as she asked and put him on one side. The bear curled up into a ball and watched them with his head on his paws, and both Shadow and Amy took a step back. "Anyway, ready?"
"Sure." Shadow glanced over at the window while Amy offered her hand to the Ward.
"You can begin." At Armsmaster's confirmation, Shadow breathed deeply and snapped out another bark.
The angry growling of the bear made her swallow, staring back at it, but it just grumbled and settled back down as Ursinae took control again.
"Same result." Amy mentioned, letting go of the girl. "Literally acted the same as Viper's did."
"Thank you, Panacea." Dragon said, as the larger door opened again for the bear to walk through. Ursinae waved, patted Shadow awkwardly on the head, then bolted after her bear, with the scent of embarrassment floating back.
Shadow made another mental note to start paying more attention to the emotions in scents again. It wasn't something she did often, not really being bothered with them back in Mystery Dungeons unless she was using it to figure out where other Pokemon were coming from, but with Tinkertech here having a special smell depending on the maker- and possibly also Mastered animals having a similar scent to the person controlling them, given how Swarm seemed to work; Viper and Ursinae could maybe be waved off as spending a lot of time around their animals- it was probably a good idea to keep a proper check on things.
A clattering of wood made her look over at the door again, Geppetto walking through the door with a pair of puppets awkwardly following behind him, using the walls as support.
"Shouldn't be too much trouble with this one." He greeted, waving to them. The puppets followed his movements, the happy and sad masks turning to look at them with empty eyes. "I'm gonna keep them over here near the door. Make it easier for me to get the things out of the room after they collapse or whatever's going to happen when you hit us with your little pulse thing."
Shadow nodded. "That's fine, they just need to be in the room." The sad puppet closed the door for them, then stood next to the happy one a little ways away from the wall. "Ready?"
Geppetto rolled his sleeve up slightly for Amy to place her hand on his arm, then nodded at the Vulpix. "Go ahead." Her bark caused both of the puppets to fall to the ground in another clatter of wood, and the sound of a bit of metal snapping.
She winced. "Sorry."
"Eh, it's alright." Geppetto shrugged. "Like I said, they're old ones, not my best. I was kinda expecting one of 'em to get broken." Clearly exerting his power again, the two of them stood slowly, the happy mask one balancing on a broken leg. "Not that bad, actually." He mused, testing making it stumble around a few steps. "Might actually be worth it to repair and upgrade these two a bit later. Been putting off doing that for a while, they were old and not worth it, but I do kinda like these two. Pair of my earliest."
"Sorry for breaking Smiley over there then, but I guess if it means you've got a reason to upgrade the two of them to use more then I suppose it's not too bad?" She said hopefully.
He snorted. "Smiley. I like that. Better than One and Two after all." Sad walked around to put an arm on Smiley, helping take the weight of the puppet off the broken leg, then the two of them hobbled their way out of the door into the other room. "Now, since I've been volunteered as the guy you test the other bit of the Master clearing on, if you're good to go again then go ahead."
"I think I'm good for this one, though I'll need to grab something out of my bag before the next one." She decided, after a moment's pause. "Ready?"
"Sure, just make sure no-one tries to catch my puppets when they fall over." He directed that towards the group of people behind the window. "They're pretty heavy." Shadow Heal Pulsed again, and there was the quiet sound of something falling.
"I think it worked." Amy told her. "I saw the activity in the Gemma flicker for a moment."
"It worked." Dragon confirmed for them. "And if Shadow does need to take a break, then now's a good time, since we're moving on to the two human Masters and Geppetto needs a moment to come collect his puppets."
"I'll only need a couple minutes, don't worry." Shadow assured her. "It won't take too long."
"Take whatever time you need, Shadow." Miss Militia told her, as Geppetto headed out of the room. "We have most of the afternoon still, after all."
Shadow nodded, heading over to her bag in the corner by the door and rummaging through it, checking the time on her phone while she pulled out a Leppa Berry and taking a bite out of it. Somehow it'd been twenty minutes since the start of the testing- it felt like a lot less than that, and it probably was; some of that was probably taken up by them waiting, walking in, and the introductions. Either way, Shadow mused, swallowing the Berry and feeling her ability to use Heal Bell rise back to normal again, it's time well spent in the end. Humming to herself for a second, she closed her bag again and finished the rest of the Berry in her mouth, the remains of it having gone in a little plastic bottle in the bag, then nodded to the window.
"I'm ready to go again."
"Already?" Director Piggot sounded surprised, so she nodded again.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Only need a minute or so to recover with help." She shrugged, heading back to the centre of the room. "Recovering on my own takes a little longer and isn't anywhere near as effective, I can only get about a use or two out of whatever I'm trying to recover." Microshift entered the room as she finished, followed by two PRT troops, Jackson and Kelme.
"Seems like a strange way of recovering, but powers are weird." The teen mused, holding out a hand. "Nice to meet you, anyway. Do you need anything specific from me?"
"Telling me when you start using your power would be good, maybe, but not really." She shrugged, taking it. "Just tell me when to start, basically." He nodded, holding out a hand to let Amy hold his arm.
"Fine, fair enough. Don't do this on two people very often, should work on that." Going silent and clearly focusing behind his mask, the two PRT troopers stiffened very slightly before starting to move.
Automatically Shadow barked, the wave of pink flickering out, and the troopers twitched, shaking their heads.
Microshift had a rather more violent reaction, shuddering severely and dropping straight to the ground, Amy letting go in shock as he fell. She quickly scrambled to grab onto him again, checking to see that nothing was wrong, and Shadow froze.
"He's ok." Amy announced, after a moment. "Look like the backlash from breaking his control had an effect something like a concussion, but that'll go away pretty quickly on its own, or I know your power affects things like that."
"Is that safe?" Shadow asked nervously.
"He's not using his power at all, so yeah. I'm sure it'll be fine." Even so, Shadow sent a glance up towards the window, seeking out Eon's face. Her vision wavered for a moment, a sure sign of an illusion, and the facsimile of a normal Ninetales jumped down from the window as if it were a portal, landing next to her and nodding.
Rolling her eyes slightly at his dramatics, as well as making sure that none of the others could see, she trotted over and placed a paw on the Ward's side, barking out a much smaller Heal Pulse focused mostly on him. A little wave went out, disrupting Eon's illusion as it did, hitting the rest of the room again, and Amy nodded.
"There we go, pretty much fine now." She took her hand away. "He'll wake up in a sec."
On cue, the boy stirred, and Shadow took a few steps back as he lifted a hand to his head, her ears and tails going down.
"Ow." He muttered hoarsely. "Anyone get the number of the truck that hit me?"
"That was Shadow's healing ability, actually." Amy informed him, offering a hand to help him up. "Looks like cutting a direct connection to a Master like that is pretty unpleasant for the Master."
Shadow looked up at the window. "Bad Faith, do you still want to take part? I don't really want you to get hurt unless you're willing to help."
The blonde woman seemed to consider it for a moment. "Non- no, I will be fine. This is important, after all, and if ze- the-" she broke off for a moment and muttered something low that Shadow didn't catch, then continued on slightly more slowly, "Damage is minor and you can fix it regardless, then I do not mind." Shadow nodded slowly.
"If you're certain." She watched as Amy led Microshift out of the room, issuing commands to him- probably related to medical stuff, from how it sounded- while Kelme and Johnson followed. Bad Faith strolled uncaringly out of the room a few seconds later in her skintight bodysuit, with Mann and Walter trailing behind.
Making good on her mental promise, Shadow sniffed the air. The two troopers entering seemed a little worried, as did Bad Faith, but for the most part the Parahuman seemed reasonably confident about the situation.
A few seconds after the door had closed, Amy taking a hold on Bad Faith's wrist, the worry of the two troopers abruptly began increasing quickly, making the two of them scan around the room with jerky movements.
"Go."
The bark once again caused all three of them to shudder, Bad Faith nearly falling to the floor before she stabilised herself, using Amy's shoulder as an impromptu crutch.
"My apologies." She mumbled, closing her eyes. Shadow quickly trotted over and gave her another Heal Pulse, helping to solve the issue and gaining a grateful look in return. "Thank you, Mademoiselle. I had underestimated how bad the effects of that backlash might be."
"You're alright though, right?" Shadow checked, holding her paw a little way away in case she needed to Heal Pulse again.
"Oui, I am fine." She nodded, reaching down to take the still-outstretched paw. "You are doing good work here, Mademoiselle Shadow. I believe this will be something I am quite interested in following."
Shadow smiled back. "I hope it does end up that way." Amy walked with Bad Faith towards the door again, giving her the same instructions that she'd given Microshift, and Shadow scratched behind her ear as she waited for her healer friend to return with the last person to test on.
"Hi there." Ursa Aurora smiled kindly from behind her mask. "Nice to meet you, Shadow."
"Nice to meet you too, ma'am." Shadow grinned widely. "Thanks for helping out with this. Are you sure you want to do this? With the backlash on the others…"
"It didn't hurt anyone but the human Masters, so I'm pretty sure that the chances are I'll be fine." The Cape shrugged. "Besides, it's better to know in the end whether or not your power works on the complete set, and I'm not above getting hurt to prove something like this."
Shadow snorted. "If you're sure." Both looked up at the window as Amy came and placed her hand on the Cape's proffered arm.
"You can proceed whenever, you two." Dragon stated.
"Thanks." Ursa Aurora nodded, then visibly focused for a moment, three purple bears coming into existence, forming a three point defensive position around the Cape.
They were slightly cloudy, with little white spots in them like stars, and Shadow spent a moment admiring them before snapping out a bark.
The first bear, the one closest to her, popped instantly. The one on the left, slightly further away, went indistinct and misty- incorporeal, almost, like Milliant when she decided to start passing through walls in Dungeons to act as scout- while the third one did nothing at all, just sitting there unresponsively.
"Huh." Shadow murmured, looking at them. Curiously, she went over and poked the incorporeal one, watching it ripple around her paw. "That's... new. Wonder if it's a Ghost?"
"It feels rather strange." Ursa Aurora commented, a furtive look on what she could see of her face and confusion in her scent. "I can half-feel one of them, like my power isn't quite sure it's really there."
"Your power kinda flickered when Shadow's power hit you, and now it seems to be doing... something...?" Amy frowned heavily, then lifted her other hand to her forehead. "I have no idea what's happening there, because it's making my head hurt."
"Should I try again?"
"Go ahead." Ursa Aurora shrugged. "I'm curious as to what'd happen."
Amy just shot a look at the window.
"You might as well." Dragon agreed. Shadow took this as a go-ahead, shouting out another bark.
The incorporeal bear promptly popped, while the remaining one went see-through. Amy, being the closest of them, poked it, and watched as her hand sank somewhat into it before rebounding off.
"That's different to what happened to me." Shadow pointed out, trotting over and pressing her paw in. The bear's form melded around her paw, not letting her push as much as the other did, but not forcing her away. "I wonder how come you got forced out? And why this one still seems more solid than the other one did."
"It being more solid could potentially be a side effect of it being further away from you." Miss Militia suggested over the intercom. "For the reflection thing, however... I have no idea."
"It would be interesting to push the limits of, however." Armsmaster put in, in the tones of someone thinking hard.
She heard Eon next, which surprised her. She hadn't realised he had access to the intercoms. Maybe Miss Militia was letting him use hers? "While that would certainly be fascinating to test, from the point of view of seeing what sort of things cause other reactions, that should really be pushed to one side for now, given that this is Master testing." He let that sit for a moment, then continued, "Of course, given that, the question really ought to be about why Shadow got this result at all."
"Is it possible that you're not really a Master?" Shadow asked the Cape, who was looking down at her bear with a curious and confused expression. "I know there's other classifications that can make stuff appear, like how Amy's cousins are a Shaker for their shields, so could it be something like that?"
"As far as I know, your ability doesn't affect shields." Amy agreed, nodding slowly. "Though we haven't really tested that properly." Shadow almost blinked in confusion, but suppressed that urge for a moment, instead thinking hard about when she'd healed a person through one of Eric or Crystal Pelham's shields. "Maybe with Shakers, it just ignores it, and with Masters it destroys projections, so when it hit something between the two it got confused and tried to do both, which is why one popped, one didn't do anything, and the other went halfway?"
They all contemplated that for a moment.
"That makes way too much sense." Ursa Aurora admitted, sighing. "Well, looks like I'm going through power testing again when I get home, just to see if there's anything else we managed to miss. Fun." Curiously, she reached out and touched the remaining star-bear, watching as her hand sunk into it for a moment before being repelled. "Also should see if I can do this on command. And if they can pass through stuff."
"Good luck figuring that out." Shadow said. "And I'm sorry if this causes you more work." The Cape snorted.
"Don't worry about it, Shadow. It's interesting, and having something new to figure out with my powers should be an interesting time waster for when I'm not patrolling." Releasing herself from Amy's grasp, she knelt down to shake Shadow's paw, smiling. "Thanks for the new pastime, I guess, and good luck."
"Thanks, and you too." Shadow returned the smile, balancing on three paws for a moment to shake her hand, tails wagging. "Hopefully it goes well for you."
The three of them made their way back to the door, Shadow lifting her bag with Extrasensory as she passed, and both healers promptly found themselves flanked by Eon and Swarm.
"Would you like to test the immunity Swarm has, or are we going to leave that?" Eon asked, from his position to the right and slightly behind Shadow. Miss Militia, Armsmaster and Director Piggot traded looks, then the Director sighed.
"I suppose we ought to, if Shadow and Swarm are ok with that." She turned to the two, who swapped their own looks and nodded together.
"Might as well. Next room, then?" Swarm nodded again, reaching out and pushing the door open, letting the healers walk through first, Amy glancing back down at Shadow and rolling her eyes. A number of spiders made their way out of her hair and costume as they went further in, Swarm's scent covering them and smelling slightly nervous.
"Ready?"
"Ready."
Amy placed her hand on Swarm's arm, in the small gap between her sleeve and glove. "Ready."
"We're ready too." Dragon confirmed. Focusing for moment, Shadow snapped out a healing pulse, hoping she wouldn't have to deal with irritated spiders and other bugs swarming them.
Nothing happened.
Blinking, Shadow nosed the nearest bug. She'd... somewhat expected nothing to happen, but at the same time it was surprising to see.
"No change at all." Amy reported. "Absolutely nothing. No change to the Corona's, no sudden case of shock or whatever, nothing at all."
"Good to know you're safe, then." Shadow sighed, as they made their way out of the room again. Not that we didn't know that anyway, but having confirmation is good.
"Always good to confirm." Swarm agreed, so quickly that it made Shadow do a double take, did I say that out loud? She could smell the smirk on Swarm's face, and sighed softly. If I did, then not much we can do about it, I suppose. Just have to hope for the best. Though I should probably pay more attention to things.
"I suppose that's everything, then." Eon said decisively, taking his place with the rest of the team.
"Yes, I think we're done here." Director Piggot agreed. "We know that Shadow can break Master effects now, admittedly with some backlash to human Masters."
"We'll likely want to talk to you again fairly soon." Miss Militia added. "If we passed on a message through Lady Photon, would that be workable?" Shadow, Eon and Amy swapped glances, then nodded.
"That would be fine." Eon replied. "Thank you all for your time." Easily the three Inari members gave a bow, Eon a little deeper than Swarm and Shadow a little deeper than Eon.
Again the entire room seemed confused- except for Amy, who'd probably been filled in by Vicky- and Miss Militia spoke. "Thank you for your time as well. Not all Independents would be willing to come in for power testing like this. Let me show you all the way out."
Swarm followed her out, and Shadow let Amy go in front of her before trailing along with Eon behind. As the door closed, she could vaguely hear Director Piggot start talking; thanking the Masters and the PRT volunteers for their help, and mentioning something about a Chief Director.
"Shadow," Miss Militia said, drawing her attention back up, "It's likely after this that the Chief Director is going to try and get you to some of the Simurgh quarantine zones, to see if you can break the Master effects there too. I don't know how much you know about those, but..."
"I know enough to know that it would be an incredible thing to do, Miss Militia." Shadow replied softly. "All of those people are trapped there, just out of fear for what might happen. If I'm able to free them- even if I can only free one zone of them for now- then it's absolutely worth it." She could tell that Miss Militia was giving her a funny look, even just mentally, and didn't care. She was a Rescue Pokemon, after all, so she'd do her best to help people in need, even if they weren't the people she normally worked for... or with.
"Yes, well." Miss Militia coughed. "The Chief Director will be informed of the results of today, and we'll pass a message on to Lady Photon if she arranges you transportation to a containment zone."
Eon and Shadow swapped a look- I don't like the sound of that 'if'...- but nodded. "Thank you, Miss Militia." As they were starting to reach the door, they went quiet for a moment.
"I'd like to ask that all of you keep what happened here today quiet." She requested lowly. "Since we have no idea what'll happen next with this, and we don't want the chance of someone trying to attack you if they hear that you're planning to try breaking the Simurgh's control."
Amy stiffened, breathing, "The Fallen..." Shadow resolved to check with Swarm who that was, but she got the point; bad guys, don't want them near us.
"Exactly." Miss Militia nodded, seeming nervous. "So we really don't want this leaking out, at least not yet. We'll have pretty much no chance of containing it once the first few trips have happened, but we can keep it quiet for now at least."
"Which is a good idea." Swarm muttered. "We'll keep it quiet, ma'am."
"Good." Opening the door, she said, slightly louder, "Thank you for your help today, Panacea, Shadow."
"No problem, Miss Militia." Amy replied. Shadow just nodded in agreement, not certain what was going on but pretty sure it was some kind of politics thing. "If you need us for anything again, just call."
"We'll be certain to." The Cape smiled. "Stay safe."
"And you, ma'am." Shadow smiled in return, then followed Eon away as the door closed, the Ninetales taking point this time. Amy walked at Shadow's side, ignoring the people pointing at them from the rest of the lobby, and sighed once they were outside.
"God, there was so much politics there I don't even know..." she grumbled. "I take it you understood most of that?"
"Yeah." Eon nodded. "Swarm can probably fill us in on the rest." Their insect controller nodded silently.
"Great." Amy pulled out her phone, glancing at it. "Well, it's just after twenty to, that didn't take all that long at all, anything you fancy doing to waste some time or are you going straight out?"
"I have money if you and Vicky want food, or at least a drink of something." Eon offered.
"There's a nice enough coffee shop just down the road." Amy told them. "I'll call Vicky to tell her, then text Mark."
"Sounds like a plan to me." Shadow grinned, finally relaxing. There'd been a lot of pressure there not to mess it up, for both her team and the people on Earth Bet, and she was glad that she hadn't. "Eon, can we have cake as well?"
He chuckled, patting her gently in the head. "Yes, Shadow, we can have cake. Just don't eat too much, alright? Your mother would give me hell if she learned that we were using this mission as an excuse to eat lots of sugary things."
"What, is your mom a dentist or something Shadow?" Swarm chuckled.
"Nah, but Mama knows I tend to get... a bit uncontrollable when I have a lot of sugar." Shadow admitted. "So Eon's supposed to make sure I don't have too much so I don't start being silly."
"As you can tell, I've been failing miserably at that. Mostly because Shadow's silly anyway." Eon snarked, tapping her side. "But I can at least keep her from being too hyped up on sugar while we're here."
Shadow smirked. "You can try, sure. Will you succeed is another matter."
Amy chuckled. "You two sound like you have a great time dealing with that."
"Oh, it's a great time." Eon sighed. "Especially since I can't just heal her and stop her being so bouncy. Not good enough to do that yet."
"I'm sure we'll manage." Amy said dryly. "Anyway, Vicky's on the way, she's just finishing up in a shop, and Mark says that it's fine, so as soon as she gets here we can all head to that coffee place."
"Vicky knows where the shop is, right?" Shadow checked, to a nod. "We could start heading there now then, and Vicky could meet us there."
"Good idea." Amy murmured, typing rapidly. Her phone flickered in response a few moments later, and she nodded again. "She'll see us there when she's done."
"Excellent." Shadow grinned. "Lead the way, Amy!"
The brunette healer chuckled as well, then started down the road, ignoring the photo's occasionally being taken and the fact that Eon and Swarm were once again protectively flanking the two of them.
Just in case, of course.
"So," Emily Piggot sighed, looking around the meeting room. "Now that's done, what do we think?"
Hannah frowned, rubbing her eyes tiredly. It had been several hours since the power testing, and the visiting Parahumans had all been shipped off to their respective home bases. The last one, Ursa Aurora, had left nearly half an hour before, having stuck around to make sure everyone else left safely and possibly just to delay her inevitable meeting with the power testers once she got back to New York.
Hannah couldn't blame her, those people were mad when they got insulted, and being told by some random team that they'd gotten something wrong was a brilliant way to get them riled up.
"I think Shadow has the possibility to be the scariest and most useful member of that entire team." She finally sighed, after rolling the question around her mind for a minute. "Scariest, in that if she can mess with Masters, what else could she manage to do? Most useful in that she can apparently teach how to do that... which kind of links to the scary, I suppose."
"Given that Swarm hasn't suddenly shown any sign of telekinesis, pyrokinesis, or magical bullshit healing, I'm going to hope that those two are limited to teaching each other." Emily muttered, scribbling something in the margin of whatever she was looking at. "Anything related to what just happened?"
"The ability to break human Master effects is impressive, and very efficient." Colin said easily, paying more attention to the tablet in front of him than the conversation. "It would be very useful if we were able to leverage it into being used on people suspected to be Mastered."
Hannah sent him a slightly irritated glance, rolling her eyes. "Of course, there's no guarantee that it'll work on any of the Simurgh's victims, even if it does work on normal Masters."
"But at the minute, it's the best chance we've got." Emily grumbled, dipping her voice further and adding under her breath, "Unless some Tinker manages to figure out a device to find Master effects of something."
Automatically, Hannah glanced at Colin, making sure he hadn't heard. The man was bad enough with his normal Tinker projects, they didn't need him getting more ideas that'd take up more of his time and their budget. From Emily's normal mutterings, it was bad enough.
Luckily, the man was still absorbed in the tablet, so she relaxed a little and smiled at Emily. "At least it's an option, though."
"Yeah, an option." She snorted. "An option that relies entirely on the goodwill of a random team of Independents. In Brockton Bay." Making another mark on the page before her, she sighed heavily. "Fuck it. I'll wait for the power testers to get their report done, add my own stuff to it, then send that to the Chief Director. She wanted it fast, after all."
The Director seemed incredibly tired and honestly fed up with the entire situation.
"I can write up my impressions on it all too, if you want." Hannah offered.
"Thank you, Hannah. That would be helpful. Colin, could you do so as well?"
The man looked up, seeming a little irritated, so Hannah added, "It would be more efficient for the Chief Director to have all of the impressions of the situation in one place, rather than having to chase them all up."
Colin closed his mouth, looking thoughtful, and Emily shot Hannah a thankful look as the woman smirked slightly. After working with Colin for so long, she knew how the man worked. Just mention that something would make something else more efficient, and he'd usually bend- or at least think about it seriously.
"Very well." He nodded. "I will endeavour to have my impressions on the power testing to you within an hour."
"Thank you, Colin. You both may go." Emily gave Hannah another grateful look as the Tinker left the room, securing his helmet as he did, and she nodded back as she pulled up her mask and left after him.
That entire power testing had been very interesting, and she thought she'd need to think very carefully about what her impressions of it were.
"Of course." Amy replied smoothly, with a smile. She led the way over there, Shadow staying by her side and both other members of Inari following a little bit behind, taking seats- with the two healers in the middle of them. She looked amused. "Any reason you're doing that?" She asked lowly.
There was a somewhat large gap between them and the nearest other people, the building surprisingly empty for being the main hub of most the heroes in the city, that also did tours, but Shadow understood that unlike the Rescue Guild people didn't come personally with their problems, but called them in. Even still, she appreciated Amy's attempts at being discrete.
Eon, sitting on Amy's right and between the rest of the chairs, smiled a little at her, touching her arm to draw her attention. "We're in an unknown area escorting two healers to an important duty." He explained, just as quietly. "As such, we're your guards against any possible form of danger, no matter how unlikely it is that you'd be harassed or attacked. It's standard protocol for an escort mission, though given that this would likely be classed as a high ranked mission I'd honestly rather we had more members. Shadow can protect herself, of course, and I've no doubt you can too, but I'd still rather neither of you had to while we were on duty."
"Do you really expect trouble?"
"Honestly, no. I doubt any criminal would be insane enough to attack the building containing the city's heroes, and don't doubt that if someone was the heroes here would be responding promptly. It's a matter of personal business, is all. You're our friend, and Shadow's our team mate."
"Besides, not like either of us can do much to help with the healing bit." Swarm added, shrugging. "Eon can do it, sure, but not as well as Shadow can."
"Shadow's been learning since we started, which was two and a half years ago." He said. "Maybe a little longer, actually?"
"I started learning Heal Pulse just before we started, but only by a few days. One of our mentors taught me so I could make sure neither of us got hurt while training without them. Heal Bell, the other bit, took a little longer, because I had to find someone to tutor me and it's also harder to see if it's having the right effect." Shadow reminisced. "I taught Eon a little, and he picked up some from my tutors, and I offered to teach anyone who joined us. We ended up with enough healers- and enough people in the team- that we can routinely do three groups of four teams doing missions, if we want to, with backup healers and teams in case of trouble. Not all of them take that, of course, some missions can be easy, but we always have a healer on the team, just in case. Eon rarely used his healing abilities. He's always the leader, so it's his job to handle giving orders on a mission, not keep an eye on everyone and make sure they're healthy. That's the healer's job, after all."
Amy looked curiously, as though she was about to ask another question, when all three Inari members straightened, their enhanced- or extra- senses telling them that the Cape they were waiting for was approaching. They all shifted into various 'ready' positions, Eon and Swarm a defensive one while Shadow was more polite and formal. Amy got the idea quickly, clamping down on her curiosity until later and straightening as well.
A few seconds later, the military-themed Cape entered through a security door, turning to search the waiting area and finding that she didn't need to. She headed straight over to them, Amy and Shadow standing to greet her. Swarm and Eon also stood, standing a little bit behind both of them and waiting.
"Hello, Panacea, Inari." Miss Militia greeted them both, her eyes clearly smiling. She shook Amy's outstretched hand, then leant down somewhat to take Shadow's paw as well.
"Hello again, Miss Militia." Shadow replied, feeling a little more comfortable. She'd worked with Miss Militia before, in combat and in interviews, she could handle this with that and her friends being there. "Thank you for this."
"The two of you are likely to provide rather a great service today. Three, if Eon can manage it too. That's plenty of reasoning to assist." She let go of Shadow's paw, letting her drop down to all fours and follow along as she headed back for the door. Swarm and Eon followed them, a step behind, though they all had to pass in front of Miss Militia in order to get in. They let her take the lead, though, and both ignored the slightly strange look she gave them. "I hope you've been keeping this quiet?"
"New Wave knows." Shadow said easily. "But that's because they've been helping with it all. It's only fair."
"True." Militia nodded. "Out of curiosity, why are Eon and Swarm here? Not that you're not welcome, in fact another healer- Eon can heal, I believe?- and an extra Master to work with is very useful, but…"
"No, I understand. Eon can heal, yes, but he can't do it quite the same. I can do both parts of it at the same time- it was an accident, I was battling a copy of something that if it were real could've easily killed Eon and I, and I panicked- but I've never been able to teach how to do it. I don't really know how I do it, to be honest, but I can do them either separately like Eon or together. I'm not sure which would cause the Master effect break thing, though I have a guess, and Eon might be needed to do it if I get too tired." She explained, shifting the bag of restorative items on her back with Extrasensory. She was still making more Max Elixirs to replace the ones from Leviathan, but a pair of Leppa Berries and some focus would do the same job, so that was what she had with her. "Swarm can volunteer for the Master thing as well, if she wants to of course, but she's mostly here from curiosity and to support me, I think."
"Pretty much." The bug Cape acknowledged. "I'll help out too, though. Having an example of Shadow's exclusion rule might be useful. If only to see if we can toggle it."
"That might be interesting to see as well." Miss Militia nodded. "Figuring out how your exclusion works would be good, I think. I'll pitch it to the Director in a moment."
"Who's actually involved in this testing?" Amy asked, curious. "Aside from the Masters, obviously."
Their guide laughed a little. "Aside from the Masters, Armsmaster and the Director will be with me on the other side of a barrier, which is where anyone not currently involved in the testing will be, due to Shadow's requirement for a defined room. Dragon is going to be monitoring remotely as well. Standard protocol for anything to do with Masters or Strangers."
"Makes sense." Shadow nodded. "And you do know that I can define a room with illusions, right?"
"Yes, but we thought it would be a better idea to have one clearly defined, rather than you either needing to make a room and also try clearing the effects, which might mess with the results, or having Eon do it for you." She explained. "Mostly because we weren't certain Eon would be here with you."
"Shadow is my second." Eon said simply. "Of course I'd be around for something important with her." Shadow shot a quick thankful look over her shoulder at him as they took another corner, then stopped beside Amy as Miss Militia opened another door.
Stepping through, the Vulpix looked around with interest at the room they were led into. It was mostly bare, just a number of chairs lined up under a table, which was against a wall of glass. Seven of the seats had Capes sitting in them, two of which had animals and one just a tall box, four more seats had men and women in PRT uniforms, and standing a little ways away was the semi-familiar armoured figure of Armsmaster and an unfamiliar woman that she assumed was the Director. On the wall behind them all was a screen with another familiar person on it, though this one was just the image of a helmet.
"Ah, Miss Militia." The Director half-announced. "Good, you're here."
She nodded. "Director, this is Inari. Inari, Director Piggot of the ENE PRT."
"A pleasure to meet you, Ma'am." Shadow bowed lowly, knowing Swarm and Eon would follow the movement with slightly less depth. "I must thank you for arranging all of this. I understand the power to clear Master effects is something that would be very important here on Earth Bet, but I would have in no way had the ability to arrange something like this myself."
"Ah, that's quite alright, Shadow." She replied. Looking up, Shadow noticed that she seemed quite confused, which confused her in turn- she was just offering proper thanks. "Although in fairness, the Chief Director was the one to arrange for the Parahumans to come here for your testing." She shook her head, slightly sharply. "Still, if we continue trying to place the credit in the right place I believe we'd be here all day without getting anywhere, so let's begin."
"First, introductions." Miss Militia cut in. "Of course, you know Armsmaster, and I believe you met Dragon during Leviathan," both Pokemon nodded, getting one in return from the Capes, "The seven Capes you won't have met are all visiting us from different bases around the country; Viper is an animal Master from Phoenix, Arizona, Protectorate," a man in a brown costume, patterned on snakeskin, nodded to them, one hand on a long brown snake around his neck, "Ursinae, a Ward who specialises in bears, from Utah West Valley City," a girl around twelve waved from her seat on top of a rather large grizzly bear, her costume apparently designed like she was wearing a bearskin rug- which seemed slightly strange to Shadow, given that she controlled them, but whatever, it wasn't her job to make the costumes, "Geppetto, Protectorate, from Evansville Indiana, controls puppets."
"Which explains the two large human-shaped boxes in the corner." Amy put in, making the Cape wearing a flat mask and something that looked like a suit, nod.
"Quite right." A wave over to it caused the frontmost box to creek, and they all looked over to see a white mask with a smiling face lean out, one hand coming up to jerkily wave at them. "Not my best puppets, don't want to risk any of them in testing stuff."
"Fair."
Miss Militia cleared her throat, making Shadow look back at her. "Bad Faith, also Protectorate, from Salem in Oregon, a human Master who pushes specifically negative emotions in whoever she targets, and Microshift, another human Master who can slightly influence how people move around him, coming from Jackson Mississippi." A tall woman with white-blonde hair and a green domino mask nodded coolly at them, while the boy- about fifteen, maybe- grinned. "Tripwire is a Ward, from Greenwich in Connecticut, who I believe you'll be starting with unless something's changed," Another boy, this one a little younger than the other and in a costume that reminded Shadow of shoelaces but was probably made of steel wire or something, waved at them, while the Director shook her head in response to Miss Militia's querying look, "And finally Ursa Aurora, from New York City, who makes forcefields that look like bears." Shadow could feel Swarm's surprise behind her as the woman in a glossy black mask added her own wave to the greeting, and resolved to ask later as she grinned.
"Nice to meet you all!" She waved a paw back, tails wagging gently. "Thanks to all of you for helping with this, it's great."
"Not a problem." Bad Faith shrugged, her voice sounding slightly French- from what Shadow'd heard on videos and stuff, anyway. "Zome- pardon, some one being able to break Master's effects is a big thing, in the end."
"There's also the four Parahuman Response Team members here, which are going to be helping out in the human Master testing. Jackson, Walter, Kelme, and Mann."
Shadow smiled at them as well. "Thanks too. I know being put under a Master isn't exactly most people's idea of a good thing."
Mann snorted. "Not particularly, but it's for a good cause." She agreed. "You just do what you're supposed to be here doing, and we'll all be fine."
"I'll do my best."
Director Piggot cleared her throat, seeming a little annoyed for some reason. "Right, well, if that's all?" The group of Capes nodded, which made her relax a little, looking down at Shadow. "Then you and Tripwire can go into the other room, and we'll begin."
"Alright." Shadow let out a little sigh as she followed Miss Militia over to the other door in the room, Tripwire coming up beside her. She slipped her bag off her back and left it by the door, then headed into the centre. The room was plain and boring, with nothing in it other than the wall of glass on one side, where the rest of the people in the testing were watching.
Well, there was also the scents of a bunch of people behind another wall, but since she hadn't been introduced to them Shadow assumed she probably wasn't meant to know about them and so she ignored them.
"So, Tripwire?" She asked, just for something to do while they waited for a signal to start.
"Yep." He nodded. A long coil, which she had taken to be a belt or something, unwound itself from around his waist and waved the end at her. "Power seems to use an aglet as a requirement for what I can control, hence the little thing on the end."
"Aglet?" She cocked her head, then finished a second before he replied, "Oh, the things on shoelaces. Guess that explains why your stuff looks like them so much."
"I started out planning on being an independent. Actually did for a little while, then ended up going to the Wards when stuff got a little too hard to handle." The boy shrugged. "I asked branding if I could keep the call back to shoelaces though, because that was the main thing I used."
"Which is fair, I guess." Shadow smiled. "I know a few of my old friends had cantrips they used that they kept mementoes for. Some of them had really weird stories to them, too…"
"Shadow, Tripwire, we're ready to begin." Armsmaster's voice came over an intercom. Looking back at the glass wall, she noticed that everyone had taken a seat, Armsmaster likely in a special one for his power armour. A few flashing lights indicated that cameras were probably there, and that they'd just come online, probably under Dragon's control or something, but there were probably more around the room that she hadn't seen. "If Tripwire could hold some cables at various distances around the room?"
"No problem, sir." Tripwire said respectfully, more long cables rising up from his costume. There was a second layer of armour underneath, Shadow noticed as they wound around the room like snakes- particularly adventurous Arbok or Seviper, maybe, that were willing to be floated around. Some of them reached almost to the ceiling, though the Ward was careful to avoid placing them in a way that would have them land on either of them if they fell.
"Hey, do we want Amy in here as well?" Shadow asked suddenly. "To see if she can spot my power doing anything to Tripwire?"
There was a long silence on the other side of the window, followed by the brunette healer slipping through the door. She wove through the collection of cables, ending up at his side and offering her hand out.
"I'll take that as a yes." He muttered dryly, rolling up the glove he was wearing and letting her rest her hand on his wrist.
"Go ahead, Shadow." Dragon prompted, sounding suspiciously like she was trying to avoid laughing.
The Vulpix nodded again, closed her eyes, and barked.
The sound echoed around the room for a moment, almost immediately being covered up by the sound of metal cables dropping to the floor. Shadow yelped, instinctively covering her ears because of the noise, while both Amy and Tripwire flinched slightly.
"That was weird." The Ward announced, after everything had landed and the ringing died down. Shadow cautiously removed her paws from her head, standing up straight again with a slight blush. "I could feel the connection I had with them just vanish."
"Vanish?"
"Yeah, like I cut my power out completely from the cables." He nodded. "I've done that before, just let everything go, but that was like someone else cut the link."
"I think that's basically what happened." Amy admitted. "I could see the activity in your Corona cut off for a moment."
"It came back about a second after, I didn't reactivate it because I was kinda surprised." He crouched down slightly, offering his free hand to Shadow. "Wasn't really sure if you could do it, so sorry for not believing it."
"No problem." She grinned, taking it. "Your kind aren't really used to people being able to cut out powers, from what I know. There's power nullifiers, but not someone who can randomly disconnect your abilities for a moment. Sometimes that's all you need, of course."
Amy gave her a curious look as Tripwire pulled his sleeve down again, collecting the cables from around the room and bringing them back. "Yeah, I learned that one myself. All you need is a moment of surprise to turn something in your favour." The door opened again once all the cables were in place on Tripwire's costume, and Viper came in, snakes slithering behind.
He held out his hand to Amy without saying anything, and the brown snakes that had followed him settled themselves around the room. Shadow sniffed curiously at the nearest one, noting the different scents on them.
"None of them are poisonous." He told her, sounding irritated. "I made sure I was only bringing constrictors for this, since I was told I might lose control of them."
"Alright." She accepted, looking up at them. She paused for a moment, breathing carefully, then snapped out another bark.
The wave of energy burst out, and a few seconds later there was a loud hissing on her right.
Slowly, Shadow turned, eyeing up the much larger boa glaring at her from a good few feet up. For a moment, she recoiled, old instincts from facing much bigger Pokemon rising up, and it lunged, heading towards her throat.
Another instinct, this one honed by two years of Dungeon exploring, sent her away, dodging left and swiping out as she did- knowing that they weren't poisonous and had no ranged Moves meant that it was a safe bet- and she knocked its head away. Some louder hissing followed, sounding angry, before it suddenly stopped.
Shadow shook her head, pushing away the warm Fire burning in her chest and swallowing, then looking up at Viper- she'd ended up next to him and Amy from her jump. "Thanks."
"Are you alright?" He asked, as the four snakes made their way over to them, the one she'd hit having a slight mark along its face. "Sorry about that."
"No problem." Shadow shrugged. "Bit of a scare, but we probably should've expected that to happen." She looked up at the injured snake. "Is it ok?"
"He's fine." Viper told her, glancing at the window. "Anything else you want to do?" The Vulpix's sensitive ears told her that there was a quiet, hurried conversation going on behind the glass, and she looked over as well before looking at the snakes.
"Maybe we could try leaving them here, then you going out of the room." She suggested. "To see if I need to hit the Master or the minions?"
The other side of the window went quiet again, then the side door opened.
"I think that's probably a yes." Amy snorted, heading towards the door. The four snakes wrapped around Viper made their way down to the floor, the Protectorate member following after her and leaving Shadow in the room with the four large constrictors.
She gulped. This may have been a mistake… They started to fan out around the room, Viper apparently trying to keep them out of easy lunging distance- whatever that was for a snake that size- so she tried to calm herself and waited.
She had to stop herself from using Calm Mind to help out, because she didn't want to bias the results at all, so she just sat there breathing carefully until Armsmaster's voice came over the speakers again, giving her the go ahead.
Shadow barked, and once again had to dodge around irate constrictors. This time all four of them at once for a few seconds, before Viper got his control over them back.
"Well," she panted, once she had her breath back. "It looks like I can break control just by hitting the minions, at least?"
She swore she heard Eon snorting with laughter as Amy opened the door, slipping back in and letting the snakes wander out.
"Do you want to try it with just the Master, too?" She asked. "Or are we not bothering with that."
There was a pointed silence.
"We can try that with Geppetto's puppets." Director Piggot told her. "For now, continue on with Ursinae." Another, much larger door opened in the wall- that one much more hidden than the one they'd come through- and the Ward came in riding a large grizzly bear.
"Heya!" She waved, sliding down its side as the door shut again. "Anything you want me to do?"
"Please keep the bear on the other side of the room." Shadow requested, looking up at it. "Mostly since the snakes seemed kinda annoyed that we broke the Master connection, and I don't really want to know if it's going to have the same effect."
"That's probably a good idea." Amy agreed, eyeing it warily.
"He's nice." Ursinae complained, but did as she asked and put him on one side. The bear curled up into a ball and watched them with his head on his paws, and both Shadow and Amy took a step back. "Anyway, ready?"
"Sure." Shadow glanced over at the window while Amy offered her hand to the Ward.
"You can begin." At Armsmaster's confirmation, Shadow breathed deeply and snapped out another bark.
The angry growling of the bear made her swallow, staring back at it, but it just grumbled and settled back down as Ursinae took control again.
"Same result." Amy mentioned, letting go of the girl. "Literally acted the same as Viper's did."
"Thank you, Panacea." Dragon said, as the larger door opened again for the bear to walk through. Ursinae waved, patted Shadow awkwardly on the head, then bolted after her bear, with the scent of embarrassment floating back.
Shadow made another mental note to start paying more attention to the emotions in scents again. It wasn't something she did often, not really being bothered with them back in Mystery Dungeons unless she was using it to figure out where other Pokemon were coming from, but with Tinkertech here having a special smell depending on the maker- and possibly also Mastered animals having a similar scent to the person controlling them, given how Swarm seemed to work; Viper and Ursinae could maybe be waved off as spending a lot of time around their animals- it was probably a good idea to keep a proper check on things.
A clattering of wood made her look over at the door again, Geppetto walking through the door with a pair of puppets awkwardly following behind him, using the walls as support.
"Shouldn't be too much trouble with this one." He greeted, waving to them. The puppets followed his movements, the happy and sad masks turning to look at them with empty eyes. "I'm gonna keep them over here near the door. Make it easier for me to get the things out of the room after they collapse or whatever's going to happen when you hit us with your little pulse thing."
Shadow nodded. "That's fine, they just need to be in the room." The sad puppet closed the door for them, then stood next to the happy one a little ways away from the wall. "Ready?"
Geppetto rolled his sleeve up slightly for Amy to place her hand on his arm, then nodded at the Vulpix. "Go ahead." Her bark caused both of the puppets to fall to the ground in another clatter of wood, and the sound of a bit of metal snapping.
She winced. "Sorry."
"Eh, it's alright." Geppetto shrugged. "Like I said, they're old ones, not my best. I was kinda expecting one of 'em to get broken." Clearly exerting his power again, the two of them stood slowly, the happy mask one balancing on a broken leg. "Not that bad, actually." He mused, testing making it stumble around a few steps. "Might actually be worth it to repair and upgrade these two a bit later. Been putting off doing that for a while, they were old and not worth it, but I do kinda like these two. Pair of my earliest."
"Sorry for breaking Smiley over there then, but I guess if it means you've got a reason to upgrade the two of them to use more then I suppose it's not too bad?" She said hopefully.
He snorted. "Smiley. I like that. Better than One and Two after all." Sad walked around to put an arm on Smiley, helping take the weight of the puppet off the broken leg, then the two of them hobbled their way out of the door into the other room. "Now, since I've been volunteered as the guy you test the other bit of the Master clearing on, if you're good to go again then go ahead."
"I think I'm good for this one, though I'll need to grab something out of my bag before the next one." She decided, after a moment's pause. "Ready?"
"Sure, just make sure no-one tries to catch my puppets when they fall over." He directed that towards the group of people behind the window. "They're pretty heavy." Shadow Heal Pulsed again, and there was the quiet sound of something falling.
"I think it worked." Amy told her. "I saw the activity in the Gemma flicker for a moment."
"It worked." Dragon confirmed for them. "And if Shadow does need to take a break, then now's a good time, since we're moving on to the two human Masters and Geppetto needs a moment to come collect his puppets."
"I'll only need a couple minutes, don't worry." Shadow assured her. "It won't take too long."
"Take whatever time you need, Shadow." Miss Militia told her, as Geppetto headed out of the room. "We have most of the afternoon still, after all."
Shadow nodded, heading over to her bag in the corner by the door and rummaging through it, checking the time on her phone while she pulled out a Leppa Berry and taking a bite out of it. Somehow it'd been twenty minutes since the start of the testing- it felt like a lot less than that, and it probably was; some of that was probably taken up by them waiting, walking in, and the introductions. Either way, Shadow mused, swallowing the Berry and feeling her ability to use Heal Bell rise back to normal again, it's time well spent in the end. Humming to herself for a second, she closed her bag again and finished the rest of the Berry in her mouth, the remains of it having gone in a little plastic bottle in the bag, then nodded to the window.
"I'm ready to go again."
"Already?" Director Piggot sounded surprised, so she nodded again.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Only need a minute or so to recover with help." She shrugged, heading back to the centre of the room. "Recovering on my own takes a little longer and isn't anywhere near as effective, I can only get about a use or two out of whatever I'm trying to recover." Microshift entered the room as she finished, followed by two PRT troops, Jackson and Kelme.
"Seems like a strange way of recovering, but powers are weird." The teen mused, holding out a hand. "Nice to meet you, anyway. Do you need anything specific from me?"
"Telling me when you start using your power would be good, maybe, but not really." She shrugged, taking it. "Just tell me when to start, basically." He nodded, holding out a hand to let Amy hold his arm.
"Fine, fair enough. Don't do this on two people very often, should work on that." Going silent and clearly focusing behind his mask, the two PRT troopers stiffened very slightly before starting to move.
Automatically Shadow barked, the wave of pink flickering out, and the troopers twitched, shaking their heads.
Microshift had a rather more violent reaction, shuddering severely and dropping straight to the ground, Amy letting go in shock as he fell. She quickly scrambled to grab onto him again, checking to see that nothing was wrong, and Shadow froze.
"He's ok." Amy announced, after a moment. "Look like the backlash from breaking his control had an effect something like a concussion, but that'll go away pretty quickly on its own, or I know your power affects things like that."
"Is that safe?" Shadow asked nervously.
"He's not using his power at all, so yeah. I'm sure it'll be fine." Even so, Shadow sent a glance up towards the window, seeking out Eon's face. Her vision wavered for a moment, a sure sign of an illusion, and the facsimile of a normal Ninetales jumped down from the window as if it were a portal, landing next to her and nodding.
Rolling her eyes slightly at his dramatics, as well as making sure that none of the others could see, she trotted over and placed a paw on the Ward's side, barking out a much smaller Heal Pulse focused mostly on him. A little wave went out, disrupting Eon's illusion as it did, hitting the rest of the room again, and Amy nodded.
"There we go, pretty much fine now." She took her hand away. "He'll wake up in a sec."
On cue, the boy stirred, and Shadow took a few steps back as he lifted a hand to his head, her ears and tails going down.
"Ow." He muttered hoarsely. "Anyone get the number of the truck that hit me?"
"That was Shadow's healing ability, actually." Amy informed him, offering a hand to help him up. "Looks like cutting a direct connection to a Master like that is pretty unpleasant for the Master."
Shadow looked up at the window. "Bad Faith, do you still want to take part? I don't really want you to get hurt unless you're willing to help."
The blonde woman seemed to consider it for a moment. "Non- no, I will be fine. This is important, after all, and if ze- the-" she broke off for a moment and muttered something low that Shadow didn't catch, then continued on slightly more slowly, "Damage is minor and you can fix it regardless, then I do not mind." Shadow nodded slowly.
"If you're certain." She watched as Amy led Microshift out of the room, issuing commands to him- probably related to medical stuff, from how it sounded- while Kelme and Johnson followed. Bad Faith strolled uncaringly out of the room a few seconds later in her skintight bodysuit, with Mann and Walter trailing behind.
Making good on her mental promise, Shadow sniffed the air. The two troopers entering seemed a little worried, as did Bad Faith, but for the most part the Parahuman seemed reasonably confident about the situation.
A few seconds after the door had closed, Amy taking a hold on Bad Faith's wrist, the worry of the two troopers abruptly began increasing quickly, making the two of them scan around the room with jerky movements.
"Go."
The bark once again caused all three of them to shudder, Bad Faith nearly falling to the floor before she stabilised herself, using Amy's shoulder as an impromptu crutch.
"My apologies." She mumbled, closing her eyes. Shadow quickly trotted over and gave her another Heal Pulse, helping to solve the issue and gaining a grateful look in return. "Thank you, Mademoiselle. I had underestimated how bad the effects of that backlash might be."
"You're alright though, right?" Shadow checked, holding her paw a little way away in case she needed to Heal Pulse again.
"Oui, I am fine." She nodded, reaching down to take the still-outstretched paw. "You are doing good work here, Mademoiselle Shadow. I believe this will be something I am quite interested in following."
Shadow smiled back. "I hope it does end up that way." Amy walked with Bad Faith towards the door again, giving her the same instructions that she'd given Microshift, and Shadow scratched behind her ear as she waited for her healer friend to return with the last person to test on.
"Hi there." Ursa Aurora smiled kindly from behind her mask. "Nice to meet you, Shadow."
"Nice to meet you too, ma'am." Shadow grinned widely. "Thanks for helping out with this. Are you sure you want to do this? With the backlash on the others…"
"It didn't hurt anyone but the human Masters, so I'm pretty sure that the chances are I'll be fine." The Cape shrugged. "Besides, it's better to know in the end whether or not your power works on the complete set, and I'm not above getting hurt to prove something like this."
Shadow snorted. "If you're sure." Both looked up at the window as Amy came and placed her hand on the Cape's proffered arm.
"You can proceed whenever, you two." Dragon stated.
"Thanks." Ursa Aurora nodded, then visibly focused for a moment, three purple bears coming into existence, forming a three point defensive position around the Cape.
They were slightly cloudy, with little white spots in them like stars, and Shadow spent a moment admiring them before snapping out a bark.
The first bear, the one closest to her, popped instantly. The one on the left, slightly further away, went indistinct and misty- incorporeal, almost, like Milliant when she decided to start passing through walls in Dungeons to act as scout- while the third one did nothing at all, just sitting there unresponsively.
"Huh." Shadow murmured, looking at them. Curiously, she went over and poked the incorporeal one, watching it ripple around her paw. "That's... new. Wonder if it's a Ghost?"
"It feels rather strange." Ursa Aurora commented, a furtive look on what she could see of her face and confusion in her scent. "I can half-feel one of them, like my power isn't quite sure it's really there."
"Your power kinda flickered when Shadow's power hit you, and now it seems to be doing... something...?" Amy frowned heavily, then lifted her other hand to her forehead. "I have no idea what's happening there, because it's making my head hurt."
"Should I try again?"
"Go ahead." Ursa Aurora shrugged. "I'm curious as to what'd happen."
Amy just shot a look at the window.
"You might as well." Dragon agreed. Shadow took this as a go-ahead, shouting out another bark.
The incorporeal bear promptly popped, while the remaining one went see-through. Amy, being the closest of them, poked it, and watched as her hand sank somewhat into it before rebounding off.
"That's different to what happened to me." Shadow pointed out, trotting over and pressing her paw in. The bear's form melded around her paw, not letting her push as much as the other did, but not forcing her away. "I wonder how come you got forced out? And why this one still seems more solid than the other one did."
"It being more solid could potentially be a side effect of it being further away from you." Miss Militia suggested over the intercom. "For the reflection thing, however... I have no idea."
"It would be interesting to push the limits of, however." Armsmaster put in, in the tones of someone thinking hard.
She heard Eon next, which surprised her. She hadn't realised he had access to the intercoms. Maybe Miss Militia was letting him use hers? "While that would certainly be fascinating to test, from the point of view of seeing what sort of things cause other reactions, that should really be pushed to one side for now, given that this is Master testing." He let that sit for a moment, then continued, "Of course, given that, the question really ought to be about why Shadow got this result at all."
"Is it possible that you're not really a Master?" Shadow asked the Cape, who was looking down at her bear with a curious and confused expression. "I know there's other classifications that can make stuff appear, like how Amy's cousins are a Shaker for their shields, so could it be something like that?"
"As far as I know, your ability doesn't affect shields." Amy agreed, nodding slowly. "Though we haven't really tested that properly." Shadow almost blinked in confusion, but suppressed that urge for a moment, instead thinking hard about when she'd healed a person through one of Eric or Crystal Pelham's shields. "Maybe with Shakers, it just ignores it, and with Masters it destroys projections, so when it hit something between the two it got confused and tried to do both, which is why one popped, one didn't do anything, and the other went halfway?"
They all contemplated that for a moment.
"That makes way too much sense." Ursa Aurora admitted, sighing. "Well, looks like I'm going through power testing again when I get home, just to see if there's anything else we managed to miss. Fun." Curiously, she reached out and touched the remaining star-bear, watching as her hand sunk into it for a moment before being repelled. "Also should see if I can do this on command. And if they can pass through stuff."
"Good luck figuring that out." Shadow said. "And I'm sorry if this causes you more work." The Cape snorted.
"Don't worry about it, Shadow. It's interesting, and having something new to figure out with my powers should be an interesting time waster for when I'm not patrolling." Releasing herself from Amy's grasp, she knelt down to shake Shadow's paw, smiling. "Thanks for the new pastime, I guess, and good luck."
"Thanks, and you too." Shadow returned the smile, balancing on three paws for a moment to shake her hand, tails wagging. "Hopefully it goes well for you."
The three of them made their way back to the door, Shadow lifting her bag with Extrasensory as she passed, and both healers promptly found themselves flanked by Eon and Swarm.
"Would you like to test the immunity Swarm has, or are we going to leave that?" Eon asked, from his position to the right and slightly behind Shadow. Miss Militia, Armsmaster and Director Piggot traded looks, then the Director sighed.
"I suppose we ought to, if Shadow and Swarm are ok with that." She turned to the two, who swapped their own looks and nodded together.
"Might as well. Next room, then?" Swarm nodded again, reaching out and pushing the door open, letting the healers walk through first, Amy glancing back down at Shadow and rolling her eyes. A number of spiders made their way out of her hair and costume as they went further in, Swarm's scent covering them and smelling slightly nervous.
"Ready?"
"Ready."
Amy placed her hand on Swarm's arm, in the small gap between her sleeve and glove. "Ready."
"We're ready too." Dragon confirmed. Focusing for moment, Shadow snapped out a healing pulse, hoping she wouldn't have to deal with irritated spiders and other bugs swarming them.
Nothing happened.
Blinking, Shadow nosed the nearest bug. She'd... somewhat expected nothing to happen, but at the same time it was surprising to see.
"No change at all." Amy reported. "Absolutely nothing. No change to the Corona's, no sudden case of shock or whatever, nothing at all."
"Good to know you're safe, then." Shadow sighed, as they made their way out of the room again. Not that we didn't know that anyway, but having confirmation is good.
"Always good to confirm." Swarm agreed, so quickly that it made Shadow do a double take, did I say that out loud? She could smell the smirk on Swarm's face, and sighed softly. If I did, then not much we can do about it, I suppose. Just have to hope for the best. Though I should probably pay more attention to things.
"I suppose that's everything, then." Eon said decisively, taking his place with the rest of the team.
"Yes, I think we're done here." Director Piggot agreed. "We know that Shadow can break Master effects now, admittedly with some backlash to human Masters."
"We'll likely want to talk to you again fairly soon." Miss Militia added. "If we passed on a message through Lady Photon, would that be workable?" Shadow, Eon and Amy swapped glances, then nodded.
"That would be fine." Eon replied. "Thank you all for your time." Easily the three Inari members gave a bow, Eon a little deeper than Swarm and Shadow a little deeper than Eon.
Again the entire room seemed confused- except for Amy, who'd probably been filled in by Vicky- and Miss Militia spoke. "Thank you for your time as well. Not all Independents would be willing to come in for power testing like this. Let me show you all the way out."
Swarm followed her out, and Shadow let Amy go in front of her before trailing along with Eon behind. As the door closed, she could vaguely hear Director Piggot start talking; thanking the Masters and the PRT volunteers for their help, and mentioning something about a Chief Director.
"Shadow," Miss Militia said, drawing her attention back up, "It's likely after this that the Chief Director is going to try and get you to some of the Simurgh quarantine zones, to see if you can break the Master effects there too. I don't know how much you know about those, but..."
"I know enough to know that it would be an incredible thing to do, Miss Militia." Shadow replied softly. "All of those people are trapped there, just out of fear for what might happen. If I'm able to free them- even if I can only free one zone of them for now- then it's absolutely worth it." She could tell that Miss Militia was giving her a funny look, even just mentally, and didn't care. She was a Rescue Pokemon, after all, so she'd do her best to help people in need, even if they weren't the people she normally worked for... or with.
"Yes, well." Miss Militia coughed. "The Chief Director will be informed of the results of today, and we'll pass a message on to Lady Photon if she arranges you transportation to a containment zone."
Eon and Shadow swapped a look- I don't like the sound of that 'if'...- but nodded. "Thank you, Miss Militia." As they were starting to reach the door, they went quiet for a moment.
"I'd like to ask that all of you keep what happened here today quiet." She requested lowly. "Since we have no idea what'll happen next with this, and we don't want the chance of someone trying to attack you if they hear that you're planning to try breaking the Simurgh's control."
Amy stiffened, breathing, "The Fallen..." Shadow resolved to check with Swarm who that was, but she got the point; bad guys, don't want them near us.
"Exactly." Miss Militia nodded, seeming nervous. "So we really don't want this leaking out, at least not yet. We'll have pretty much no chance of containing it once the first few trips have happened, but we can keep it quiet for now at least."
"Which is a good idea." Swarm muttered. "We'll keep it quiet, ma'am."
"Good." Opening the door, she said, slightly louder, "Thank you for your help today, Panacea, Shadow."
"No problem, Miss Militia." Amy replied. Shadow just nodded in agreement, not certain what was going on but pretty sure it was some kind of politics thing. "If you need us for anything again, just call."
"We'll be certain to." The Cape smiled. "Stay safe."
"And you, ma'am." Shadow smiled in return, then followed Eon away as the door closed, the Ninetales taking point this time. Amy walked at Shadow's side, ignoring the people pointing at them from the rest of the lobby, and sighed once they were outside.
"God, there was so much politics there I don't even know..." she grumbled. "I take it you understood most of that?"
"Yeah." Eon nodded. "Swarm can probably fill us in on the rest." Their insect controller nodded silently.
"Great." Amy pulled out her phone, glancing at it. "Well, it's just after twenty to, that didn't take all that long at all, anything you fancy doing to waste some time or are you going straight out?"
"I have money if you and Vicky want food, or at least a drink of something." Eon offered.
"There's a nice enough coffee shop just down the road." Amy told them. "I'll call Vicky to tell her, then text Mark."
"Sounds like a plan to me." Shadow grinned, finally relaxing. There'd been a lot of pressure there not to mess it up, for both her team and the people on Earth Bet, and she was glad that she hadn't. "Eon, can we have cake as well?"
He chuckled, patting her gently in the head. "Yes, Shadow, we can have cake. Just don't eat too much, alright? Your mother would give me hell if she learned that we were using this mission as an excuse to eat lots of sugary things."
"What, is your mom a dentist or something Shadow?" Swarm chuckled.
"Nah, but Mama knows I tend to get... a bit uncontrollable when I have a lot of sugar." Shadow admitted. "So Eon's supposed to make sure I don't have too much so I don't start being silly."
"As you can tell, I've been failing miserably at that. Mostly because Shadow's silly anyway." Eon snarked, tapping her side. "But I can at least keep her from being too hyped up on sugar while we're here."
Shadow smirked. "You can try, sure. Will you succeed is another matter."
Amy chuckled. "You two sound like you have a great time dealing with that."
"Oh, it's a great time." Eon sighed. "Especially since I can't just heal her and stop her being so bouncy. Not good enough to do that yet."
"I'm sure we'll manage." Amy said dryly. "Anyway, Vicky's on the way, she's just finishing up in a shop, and Mark says that it's fine, so as soon as she gets here we can all head to that coffee place."
"Vicky knows where the shop is, right?" Shadow checked, to a nod. "We could start heading there now then, and Vicky could meet us there."
"Good idea." Amy murmured, typing rapidly. Her phone flickered in response a few moments later, and she nodded again. "She'll see us there when she's done."
"Excellent." Shadow grinned. "Lead the way, Amy!"
The brunette healer chuckled as well, then started down the road, ignoring the photo's occasionally being taken and the fact that Eon and Swarm were once again protectively flanking the two of them.
Just in case, of course.
"So," Emily Piggot sighed, looking around the meeting room. "Now that's done, what do we think?"
Hannah frowned, rubbing her eyes tiredly. It had been several hours since the power testing, and the visiting Parahumans had all been shipped off to their respective home bases. The last one, Ursa Aurora, had left nearly half an hour before, having stuck around to make sure everyone else left safely and possibly just to delay her inevitable meeting with the power testers once she got back to New York.
Hannah couldn't blame her, those people were mad when they got insulted, and being told by some random team that they'd gotten something wrong was a brilliant way to get them riled up.
"I think Shadow has the possibility to be the scariest and most useful member of that entire team." She finally sighed, after rolling the question around her mind for a minute. "Scariest, in that if she can mess with Masters, what else could she manage to do? Most useful in that she can apparently teach how to do that... which kind of links to the scary, I suppose."
"Given that Swarm hasn't suddenly shown any sign of telekinesis, pyrokinesis, or magical bullshit healing, I'm going to hope that those two are limited to teaching each other." Emily muttered, scribbling something in the margin of whatever she was looking at. "Anything related to what just happened?"
"The ability to break human Master effects is impressive, and very efficient." Colin said easily, paying more attention to the tablet in front of him than the conversation. "It would be very useful if we were able to leverage it into being used on people suspected to be Mastered."
Hannah sent him a slightly irritated glance, rolling her eyes. "Of course, there's no guarantee that it'll work on any of the Simurgh's victims, even if it does work on normal Masters."
"But at the minute, it's the best chance we've got." Emily grumbled, dipping her voice further and adding under her breath, "Unless some Tinker manages to figure out a device to find Master effects of something."
Automatically, Hannah glanced at Colin, making sure he hadn't heard. The man was bad enough with his normal Tinker projects, they didn't need him getting more ideas that'd take up more of his time and their budget. From Emily's normal mutterings, it was bad enough.
Luckily, the man was still absorbed in the tablet, so she relaxed a little and smiled at Emily. "At least it's an option, though."
"Yeah, an option." She snorted. "An option that relies entirely on the goodwill of a random team of Independents. In Brockton Bay." Making another mark on the page before her, she sighed heavily. "Fuck it. I'll wait for the power testers to get their report done, add my own stuff to it, then send that to the Chief Director. She wanted it fast, after all."
The Director seemed incredibly tired and honestly fed up with the entire situation.
"I can write up my impressions on it all too, if you want." Hannah offered.
"Thank you, Hannah. That would be helpful. Colin, could you do so as well?"
The man looked up, seeming a little irritated, so Hannah added, "It would be more efficient for the Chief Director to have all of the impressions of the situation in one place, rather than having to chase them all up."
Colin closed his mouth, looking thoughtful, and Emily shot Hannah a thankful look as the woman smirked slightly. After working with Colin for so long, she knew how the man worked. Just mention that something would make something else more efficient, and he'd usually bend- or at least think about it seriously.
"Very well." He nodded. "I will endeavour to have my impressions on the power testing to you within an hour."
"Thank you, Colin. You both may go." Emily gave Hannah another grateful look as the Tinker left the room, securing his helmet as he did, and she nodded back as she pulled up her mask and left after him.
That entire power testing had been very interesting, and she thought she'd need to think very carefully about what her impressions of it were.
Last edited:
- Location
- England, Smugsville.
Oh. My. God.
Right. You got the chapter before you got the long apology. So.
First off, I'm so bloody sorry. None of this was intended at all, everything got a bit out of hand, and I'm so sorry for that. I started that break off because I ran out of buffer, and there I was thinking 'Well I'm starting up my Alevels anyway, so that's fine, I can settle in and write more and be right back!'
(For those who don't know, Alevels are the 16-18 schooling grade.)
Obviously, that didn't happen. And then I was writing a story for one of my classes, and that took over just about everything, and then Covid happened, and that ended with me in a bit of a slump, and then last September I moved away to uni... it's all just been such a mess and I'm so so sorry it's been so long. I really didn't intend it.
On the plus side, I've got about ten chapters in buffer, I've been doing ok keeping up with the writing thing- seriously, this last week is the most motivated I've been in ages, it's great- and while I do have all my coursework to do, well. I'm doing a degree in Creative Writing now, so in theory I have plenty of time to figure things out. Though I don't exactly plan on handing in any of my fanfiction for grading, I'll say.
I've been agonising all damn day about posting this, it really shouldn't've been this stressful, but I'm so sorry it's been so long and I truly hope you can forgive me for that. All being well, I'll be back to weekly uploads for at least a little while now. I've got the buffer for a few months, and hopefully I'll be able to keep that buffer up and not end up falling into any sort of despair again.
On the other plus, though, I was going through my notes as I was writing up more chapters and man, the next few arcs are gonna be great fun to write. Just... be aware that some of these chapters were written like, a year ago.
So yeah. Thanks for waiting around for me, I'll do my absolute best not to let this happen again. ILY guys, see you next week!
Right. You got the chapter before you got the long apology. So.
First off, I'm so bloody sorry. None of this was intended at all, everything got a bit out of hand, and I'm so sorry for that. I started that break off because I ran out of buffer, and there I was thinking 'Well I'm starting up my Alevels anyway, so that's fine, I can settle in and write more and be right back!'
(For those who don't know, Alevels are the 16-18 schooling grade.)
Obviously, that didn't happen. And then I was writing a story for one of my classes, and that took over just about everything, and then Covid happened, and that ended with me in a bit of a slump, and then last September I moved away to uni... it's all just been such a mess and I'm so so sorry it's been so long. I really didn't intend it.
On the plus side, I've got about ten chapters in buffer, I've been doing ok keeping up with the writing thing- seriously, this last week is the most motivated I've been in ages, it's great- and while I do have all my coursework to do, well. I'm doing a degree in Creative Writing now, so in theory I have plenty of time to figure things out. Though I don't exactly plan on handing in any of my fanfiction for grading, I'll say.
I've been agonising all damn day about posting this, it really shouldn't've been this stressful, but I'm so sorry it's been so long and I truly hope you can forgive me for that. All being well, I'll be back to weekly uploads for at least a little while now. I've got the buffer for a few months, and hopefully I'll be able to keep that buffer up and not end up falling into any sort of despair again.
On the other plus, though, I was going through my notes as I was writing up more chapters and man, the next few arcs are gonna be great fun to write. Just... be aware that some of these chapters were written like, a year ago.
So yeah. Thanks for waiting around for me, I'll do my absolute best not to let this happen again. ILY guys, see you next week!
Miho Chan
One with too many ideas
- Location
- Hummelstown
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Never apologize for not delivering content, unless you promised it. Only apologize if you decide to abandon a story. We're simply here to support you, and seeing you back and safe is more than enough for me personally. It's always a wonderful feeling seeing a story I thought was either hiatus'd or abandoned come back with a long chapter like this!