Part Four – Out Of Sight, Out Of...


This time, they were the images. Blossom saw herself, along with her sisters, fighting to contain an orange liquid as it spilled into the streets.

Suddenly, she saw herself clamped down on a table, beside which someone was injecting her with something.

"Antidote X," said a voice, echoing through their minds.

On the table, Blossom's body became Buttercup's body.

Buttercup's body became Blossom's body.

The two flickered back and forth.

Blossom and Buttercup then saw each other hovering above the scene below them as if they were ghosts. Blossom clearly saw that Buttercup's mind was unable to cope with what she was seeing.

"What's going on?" she cried.

The lights flickered on, and they were suddenly in their kitchen. There was no operating table; instead there was their breakfast table. The figure from before became the Professor, unresponsive, hunched over the table, and in the background, Buttercup was breaking, pounding, destroying anything she could get her hands on, Bubbles crying behind her. Suddenly Buttercup stopped, and looked around.

"WHERE AM I?" she screamed. "WHY DO I KEEP SEEING THIS?"

Buttercup looked up slowly. When she blinked her eyes, one of them became the same eye Blossom saw in herself each time she looked in the mirror. It didn't look any different from her own, but seeing her eye against Buttercup's was... unsettling.

Each time the images changed, it was something different. Bubbles' sad memories were swirling around them, creating a vortex that lifted them off the ground, as well as several objects from the street around them. Trash cans, scraps of paper, pebbles... everything that wasn't attached to something else was sucked into the myriad.

They were fighting monster after monster. She was flying alone, Monster Island looming in the distance ahead of her. A giant, severed crab claw floated towards Townsville bay and washed ashore. She was crying. She looked afraid for her life. She witnessed her own funeral from afar.

It was enough to drive them mad.


And suddenly, all the voices and images stopped.

At first she thought this was another flashback, but after a moment, Buttercup began to feel stiff and shifted her posture, and realized instantly that she was back in her own room.

She became aware of her surroundings. Nothing was as it had been. Her bed looked almost new, the house no longer smelled of stale, musty air, and she could hear the cars passing by her house outside. It felt foreign... but at the same time, peaceful, for the first time in... a long time.

After a moment, the Professor passed by her room. He stopped and leaned back in. "Buttercup? If you don't hurry and eat your breakfast, you'll be late for school."

She could do nothing but stare at him. He stared back at her, and it seemed like everything was okay again... he didn't look at her with fear; he didn't look at her with anger; there was nothing but joy and pride written across his face.

Buttercup blinked; didn't even recognize her own voice when she spoke. "I'll be right down."

The Professor smiled and continued down the hall.

She stared at her hands and felt her face and body in turn. There were no cuts from the fight; no war-worn callouses; no blemishes; no scars.

No scars.

She was... home. As if everything had been a waking nightmare, and she had just woken up.

She smiled, and tears trickled down her cheeks.

And then quickly, she wiped them away. Never show weakness.

Buttercup hovered down to breakfast and stared at the plate of bacon and eggs, freshly crisped and scrambled, respectively. She grabbed the fork and stuffed some of the eggs into her mouth, realizing for the first time how hungry she was.

And it was good.

She couldn't remember her food being this good. It felt like forever that she had a good meal, cooked by the Professor.

She noticed that the other girls were staring at her. She had her hands clasped over her cheeks and realized that she had been making odd, joyful noises while eating.

"Are you okay, Buttercup?" Bubbles asked, worried.

"It's not that good," Blossom chuckled as she took another bite.

"Sorry," Buttercup said, swallowing her food quickly. "It's just...uh, the... Professor's cooking is really good today."

"Well, thank you, Buttercup," the Professor said, beaming. "Though I can't say that I've improved much since yesterday. Maybe it's the eggs I used this morning."

Yesterday... Buttercup sighed inwardly. She really thought that sounded strange, but couldn't put her finger on how.

She no longer cared, however. If this was a dream, she didn't want to wake up, and she didn't want anyone to think that she had just been through the longest nightmare ever.

No matter how real it had seemed.


Everything was darkness, and Blossom realized that she had her eyes closed. When she opened them, she was sitting on her bed, in her room.

Her room? How? Wasn't she just...?

She pinched herself and felt real pain. If it wasn't a dream, then...

Buttercup and Bubbles were on either side of her, just waking up themselves. Looking around, she realized how familiar the room looked, and yet the feeling of nostalgia was unnatural.

"Aahh..." Blossom stretched, and realized that she didn't feel anything other than the initial pains of coming out of a deep, relaxed sleep.

It didn't make any sense. She should have been powerless and on the verge of exhaustion, but she felt... alive. Like the Powerpuff she used to be.

"Mornin', Blossom," she heard on her left, and glanced over at Bubbles. She looked... normal. As normal as a Powerpuff Girl could. No metallic arms. No gloom. She had bed-head, but...

Everything was fine.

It didn't make any sense.

"Good morning, girls!" A cheerful Professor called from the doorway.

She glanced over, and was overcome with joy at seeing him.

For the first time in a long time.

"PROFESSOR!" She shrieked and dove at him, embracing him strongly, and sobbing.

"Whoa!" He cried out as they fell to the floor.

"Professor! Professor, I... and we... and Buttercup, and Bubbles... and Mojo... And we were—"

"All right, all right, Blossom, calm down!" The Professor said, sitting up with her still in his arms. "It looks like you've just had a bad dream. Go and get a glass of water and come down to breakfast. We're having my world-famous flapjacks today."

She remembered his flapjacks. They were very good. He had an interesting formula or recipe to making them. She remembered how he had taught her and how she had gone over the memory many times during the experiments to stay sane and keep hold of reality.

But this was reality, wasn't it? She had feeling, and right now, the duality was trying to reconcile itself with what she was seeing, hearing, touching, smelling...

Everything that she was feeling right now was so peaceful.

And it didn't make any sense.

She put her hand up to her eye. She could feel the bone surrounding it, but the moment she touched the lens, she recoiled. Not because it hurt...it didn't; that was the problem.

Her eye was not her own.

She made something up to mask her odd behavior. "Ow!" She hissed, and clenched her eye shut.

"Blossom?" Bubbles looked at her concerned. "Did you just poke your eye?"

"Yeah," she said carefully, "I must not be fully awake. I'm going to the bathroom." Without waiting for her sisters, she flew over to the bathroom and looked strongly into the mirror. She saw her reflection, and nothing more. She was wearing her usual pink nightgown, and both her eyes looked normal. She reached up and pressed against her right eye again.

It just didn't feel right. It felt... wrong.

She looked at her hair for the first time. It was a mess. She forgot about her eye for a moment and started fixing her hair.

She made it perfect. Like this morning. Her sisters joined her making their way down to breakfast, backpacks waiting for them by the door.

"Heeeeere's breakfast!" The Professor cried out as he threw his arms out to greet his girls. He was wearing his "Hail To The Chef" apron, one that Blossom had vividly remembered, and one that she really liked, if only because she liked puns.

But even though everything up until this moment was perfect...

It still didn't make any sense.

Why was she "remembering" things when she should be "experiencing" them?

She looked at the breakfast table.

"Wow, Professor! These look great!" she said, her voice raising an octave in surprise. The table had a giant platter in the center with an extra-large stack of extra-large flapjacks piled high. Butter melted off the sides and ran down, making the bottom flapjacks soggy, but she knew that would just add to the flavor, because for these flapjacks, you used unsalted, sweetened butter.

She cut a piece off with her fork and put it in her mouth.

It was good. It was so unbelievably good that she found herself rubbing her cheeks. She ate as though she hadn't had anything so good to eat in years and ate her entire stack in a matter of minutes.

After such an amazing breakfast, Blossom and her sisters swung their backpacks over their shoulders and headed out for the bus to school. They had gotten into this habit after the bus had nearly gone off the road once. How long ago had that been? She didn't remember.

On the bus, she couldn't help thinking about this odd whirring sound she'd been hearing since she woke up. It seemed almost too familiar. She glanced around the bus and thought she heard the noise again.

She had the distinct feeling she was missing something important. She ran over the thoughts in her head again. She had woken up, tackled the Professor, gotten a drink of water, and went down to breakfast...oh, and she poked herself in the eye, too.

Wait. Her eye?

She reached up and poked her left eye through the eyelid. It felt... normal. Like a normal eye would. She did the same with her right eye... and that was when she noticed the difference.

Her right eye felt hard, like it was plastic, or some kind of hard rubber. But she was on the bus. She couldn't make a scene.

Why had she forgotten? That's something that you don't notice every day. Her eye had taken a backseat to breakfast. What was happening?

"Blossom, I made a drawing of Suzie!"

Blossom looked over at Bubbles, and saw she was smiling brightly and had a picture—albeit a badly drawn one—of their classmate Suzie. Brown hair, brown eyes, orange sweatshirt and blue pants...and she was giving Blossom an apple from her lunch. Blossom was giving her a peach. It was a trade of their favorite fruits.

Nostalgia overwhelmed her and she once again forgot about her problems.

"I remember that, Bubbles. That was the day I met Suzie, wasn't it?"

"Uh-huh!" Bubbles smiled. "She told you she got an apple in her lunch and you told her you got a peach in yours, and she said, 'Hey, I really like peaches! You want to trade me for my apple?' and you said—"

"I remember, Bubbles," Blossom said patiently, a weak grin on her face. "It looks great."

As she stepped off the bus, she still didn't realize what the matter with her memory was.

Because it didn't want her to know.


She could see them in their dreams. The ones she made. They were happy, and it made her feel happy, too, if only slightly; the other emotions still reigned over her mind. She was on the verge of tears, torn between all of her feelings at once. She didn't know what she needed to do.

The weight on her spine came back. She breathed faintly, a small gasp as it pushed the words into her head. She was lost, and the voice had come again.

Make them happy, Bubbles. Give them their perfect lives. Make them love the world that isn't real.

"The world that isn't real?"

Yes, it intoned slowly and meaningfully. Make them realize the world we live in is full of hate. Make them realize that yours is full of love. They will love you for it in the end, and you will be truly happy. You will all be together forever.

"Happy." The word brought a tear to her eye. "Together."

She concentrated. She had a new mission to accomplish.

Show them, Bubbles.

She concentrated again.

Make them love you, Bubbles. Love them so that they love you..

She concentrated harder. By now the aura of psychic energy manifesting around her had coalesced into a visible blue glow, and was getting brighter every second.

Love them, it boomed powerfully at her, pressing its influence harder.

Yes. I will. I do.

And she peered deeper into their dreams.