Chapter 3

Dark Mirror was in his lair, sorting through several pages from the lab theft. He finally got frustrated and threw it all to the floor. "I thought you said I'd know when I found it. Currently, I'm not finding anything!"

"Just quiet and keep looking before I'm forced to make you!" Tress snapped.

He instantly backed off. He didn't like the way her powers of obedience made him feel. When his mind would be torn from him and all he could hear was her commands and all he could feel was the need to do her will—it was awful. He never wished to endure it again. Of course, he also didn't want to become a henchman when he was fully capable of beating her down before she could grab his will.

Either way, it wasn't a hypothesis worth testing.

Finally, he just stood up and walked over to her. "Well, when are we going to get the Loonies?"

"Soon, I trust. We mustn't allow Bliss to regain her memory first…" She then looked at the looking glass. "…or anything else!" She threw everything at the wall and growled, storming over to the mirror and seeing Bliss on the other end, holding the tiara she had found and cautiously examining it. Tress looked at her own tiara to find it to be the exact opposite of the one Bliss held. And yet it bore the same power: it gave her all of her power over plants. "That little brat never stops! When will she learn to stay out of my conflict with her?!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Sibyl! In my homeland, she watches over the castle and such affairs and insists on meddling between me and Bliss. She is the reason we are both here with no way home! And now she's teleporting artifacts from the castle to Bliss!"

Dark Mirror looked at the image in confusion. "What good is a crown gonna do her?"

"All you need to know is that it'll make her more powerful. That is something I cannot condone. We have to get this plan going. NOW!"

Meanwhile…

"Any names?"

"No."

"Faces?"

"No."

"Vague images?"

"Not at the moment."

Tech sighed. "Man, usually amnesiacs have at least some links to their memories intact. With you, it's like someone laid out a brick wall between you and your memories while you were in your coma."

Bliss just lay on her stomach, flipping through books on the floor of his lab. "At this point, I could understand it if they had." She then picked the crown back up and looked it over again. It had to be a link to her old life, it just had to be. Besides, they didn't have anything else to go on at this point.

Tech then got a beep on the communicator. He hit a button to answer. "Tech here."

"We're coming back in," Ace's voice came through.

"Got it. I'm reopening the bay doors now." He hit another button before turning the COMM back off. He then looked at Bliss to see that she had abandoned the books she was so engrossed in and was now stroking the lines and contours of the mysterious tiara. He sighed and knelt down beside her, putting his hand on her back in comfort. "We'll figure this out. Even if it takes a million years, I promise."

She smiled. She didn't notice her wagging tail suddenly wrapping itself around Tech's. "Promise? The one thing I remember fondly is that people aren't very good at keeping their promises."

He smirked. "I guess you just met all the wrong people." He then saw through the security footage the team's jet pulling into the landing bay. He stood up and started to walk off to meet them. He suddenly stopped and yelped when he felt a yanking.

Bliss reciprocated that.

They then took notice of their interlocked tails.

Bliss forced out a nervous giggle. "Some pinky swear, huh?"

The two grabbed their tails and pulled them apart.

Tech gave her an awkward smirk and started off. He met up with the others in the living room. "How'd it go on your end?"

"Trail's run cold," Ace groaned, "No sign of what they're after, who they are, or where they're going next. Not even a pattern to their hits, at least not one that we can discern. What about you?"

Tech sighed. "No memories whatsoever. No chords struck in anyway. Her photo doesn't match anyone in our database, let alone one that fits her name. That crown of hers is most definitely a link to her past somehow but it doesn't seem to be even akin to anything I've ever seen or heard of. I even ran it through the scanner and the readout made no sense, like whatever material it's made out of isn't even on the periodic table." He then looked back at the hallway. No sign of her yet, she must still be in the lab. "We pulled the security footage for her room. She showed me when she went into the bathroom and her nightstand was empty, then she came back and the crown was there. We watched the footage and it literally did just appear out of nowhere!"

None of the Loonatics could process that.

"Well, maybe she knows other mutants and one of them teleported it to her," Lexi suggested.

"Lex…" Tech sighed. "Look, about 1/3 of the population sustained any reaction to the meteor, specifically superhuman abilities. There were thousands of different powers reported. Teleportation, geo-leaping, matter reconstitution—those are all just as rare as our powers, I'll admit, but that makes them about 1% of the mutant population. Then that person would have to be powerful and smart enough to send that crown, whatever it is, through the tower's shields, to her room, and onto her nightstand. Even without factoring in however long a distance the teleport was, that makes the odds for your theory a billion to one!" He sighed. "Besides, based on the reoccurrences of her memory lapses, I'd place the most likely date for the problem's beginning on the day of the meteor strike, so any connections after that would be completely unknown to her. For all we know, the meteor is what caused her coma and her amnesia." He scoffed. "For all we know, she's related to or is a villain."

Lexi had started to respond when he'd sighed, but bit it back. Now she pointed to the reason why.

Tech quickly turned around.

Bliss was standing at the mouth of the hall, her hands folded in front of her with the crown in one and a book in the other. "You don't have to stop just 'cause I'm here."

"Uh, I didn't mean…"

"It's OK. I know about as much as you do at this point. And I wanna know just as much as you do. Maybe more."

He sighed and walked over to her. "Look, I didn't wanna have to pull this but…" He sighed again and put a hand on her shoulder. "Bliss, amnesia is a tricky condition. It's very dangerous for the mind and, since everyone is different, there's no way to determine how severe it could be from one person to the next. If we do figure this out, triggering you too fast could cause mental damage but too slow could make it even more difficult for you to ever recover."

"I'm touchy at the moment, I get it."

"You're taking it pretty well."

"Guess I'm not as fragile as I ought to be." She sighed and handed over the book. "I think putting all of the books together struck something. At least five of those others seemed to stand out, but this one seemed especially familiar."

Tech took it and looked at the cover. "…Bliss, this is a collection of fairy tales."

"I know, but…something hit me when I was reading it, like…some distant connection."

"Maybe a childhood memory?" Lexi suggested, walking over to Bliss but talking to Tech, "Maybe her mom or her dad read her those stories?"

Tech shrugged, considering. "Well, it's not much, but it's a start. Let's look at those others you were talking about. Maybe putting them together will give us something to go on."

Bliss nodded and walked off to the lab, fingering the crown again as she did so.

Rev went over to Tech. "Tech…" he said, slowing down both to show his emotional state and for the sake of his best friend, "…what if she really does turn out to be…" He didn't have to finish that question.

Tech sighed, his ears drooping a little bit more with every second. "I don't know."

Back in the lab, Bliss sat beside the other books that had rung bells. They were as diverse as ants, from Modern Music Theory to Biology: The World We Live In to, of all things, A History of the Occult; Myths and Mysticism. She groaned, hoping Tech would be able to make more sense of it than she was. 'Cause she saw no pattern. None. She sighed, picking up one of the random books that didn't seem familiar: a 25th century novel of the colonies on the other planets, The Moons of the Seventh Nebula. According to the description, it was nowadays a classic usually on the high school recommended reading list, right up there with Wizard of Oz and Moby-Dick. She blinked at the part about Wizard of Oz. She went back over to Tech's bookcase (wondering inwardly about why someone like Tech even had half these books) and perused the next shelf.

Wonders of the Ocean

Pluto Isn't a Planet?!

Wizard of Oz (complete series, for that matter)

Bliss took the book from the shelf and began to flip through the introductory pages. When she finally came to the first chapter, she grabbed a stray bookmark and placed it there before closing the book. She'd read it later. This was one she wanted to really read. Maybe she should start a booklist. It's not like she had much else to do or anywhere to go.

She sighed, getting back into her Indian-style sitting position on the floor. She then resumed looking over the crown. She fingered the front again. Finally, she just threw caution to the wind and gently placed it on her head.

It glowed.

Of course, she didn't entirely see that since it was, well, on her head, but she thought she noticed something wrong. Suspicions confirmed when she heard a rustling coming from an experiment table in the corner. She looked over there but nothing had changed since the last time she saw it. But when she turned back around, she heard it again. She got up and slowly approached the table. No difference. Until she got close enough. She finally got to the table and placed her hand there.

A plant resting in a pot wrapped itself around her arm.

She gasped, pulling back a little.

The plant still seemed to be holding on, as though begging her not to leave.

She pulled away, rushing back over to the book pile.

Please don't go.

She froze completely, blinking in shock. She could've sworn she heard someone talking, a voice she didn't recognize, but…it was almost as if the voice went right through her ears and into her head. Not entirely telepathic, but not entirely audible either. She finally made herself look back at the plant. She looked around for some other source of sound but nothing registered. So she looked at the plant again, calling herself crazy for even asking this: "Did you just talk?"

Yes. Please, no one's ever been able to reach me before.

She just went into shock, stepping back. What was going on? "Uh…"

It's OK. You don't have to be afraid. Trust me, I'm not gonna hurt you and you're not going crazy.

She groaned, burying her head in her hands. I don't believe this. I'm talking to a plant!

What was that? I couldn't—

Before the vegetation could finish its response, the door opened. Tech was coming back into the lab. "OK, I…are you OK?"

Bliss shook it off. "Yeah, I…I'm fine."

He nodded and went over to the line of books she had lain out on the floor, the others strewn about. "So this is your hit list?"

She could only nod in response, still taken aback by her unusual encounter with the leaf-life. Wait, what did I just call it?

Speak up, I can barely understand you! the plant kept up.

Bliss gave it a look over her shoulder.

What? Tech can't hear me.

"Bliss, are you sure you're OK?"

Bliss forced herself back into reality. "I'm fine. Just…a bit shaken up, I guess."

"Can't say I blame you." He then took notice of the book she was holding. "That strike any chords, too?"

She looked at the copy of Wizard of Oz she was holding. "To be honest, I'm not sure."

"Guess you're just a library-lover." He smirked. "If you thought mine was interesting, you should see the 38th floor. Practically the whole floor is a library. Got everything from Redwall and the Inheritance Cycle to Mark Twain to…well, the Bible."

She smirked. "Maybe I should check that out sometime." She then looked at the book in her hand again. "Oh, but this is—"

"If you wanna read it, that's alright with me."

She smiled in answer. "Thanks." Then she sat back down beside him. "So, uh, about my…'hit list'…"

"Right. Well, uh…music is understandable. But I don't know where it fits into the life of someone who connects just as readily with something like occult myths or biology…" He continued on.

But all Bliss could pay attention to was the plant in the corner.