Blizzard

Chapter 4

Sunlight.

Chirping.

A soft wind.

Anna's eyes opened gently to the scenery outside the open window.

Then she looked at the time.

"OH SHIT!" Frantically she threw herself out of bed, washed up, grabbed her stuff and was out her apartment in no time. She was late. Disastrously late. The professors' weren't going to like it.


Crouched on the rooftop, Elsa watched her roommate frantically leave the building. There was something unmistakably distinct about her that made Elsa like her so much. She smiled as she watched Anna frantically dash into the campus.

Then she descended back into the apartment.

Her cover of leaving a note on the coffee table that she had left early was now redundant; evidently Anna had rushed out far too fast to notice it. But that was unimportant; her work needed to be finished, then she could get some rest. She deployed her laptop, a high-tech, heavily modified computer, already running her standard hacking programs, scanning through the city databases and monitoring systems.

What would a gang of gunmen want if they blow up a bank without stealing anything?

Her laptop's screens split into three more ultra-thin screens, bringing up more windows on traffic movements, CCTV footages, heat signatures; anything that could help her track the gunmen down to where they deployed from. Now that she knew there was definitely something very, very fishy, then she knew how to look, and who to look for. She drew the glaive from her suit's back and checked it for damage. None at present.

She keyed in a few commands into the computer, ordering it to locate the various cameras the vicinity of the bank vault and scan the footage. She needed to know where the gunmen came from.

In the meantime Elsa hit a few commands into her gauntlet, broadcasting a remote signal to her weapon stashes located around the city. For the past 10 years of her life, since she had decided to become a vigilante, she had planned her stash locations. When she was 15 years old she minimized the staff in her ancestral home so she could implement her plans in relative privacy. Her father's weapons company turned into a resource for her to develop weapons and attain revenue. Remotely she used it to plant stashes of weapons across the country should the need ever arise. And thanks to her financial and legal advisors, Kai and Gerda, her actions were never discovered. When she was 18, and after completing her combat courses she had been training with for almost all her life, she started her campaign as Blizzard (or at least, that was what she was called).

Now, her planning was about to be put to the test. If something was really going on, then she was really going to need all the equipment and resources she could get her hands on.

She programmed the drone to perform a remote drop onto the dump behind her apartment; she would retrieve that once her computer once done scanning the footage. Right now, she undressed from her suit and hung it in her wardrobe, making sure to hide it behind her other clothes. There was no reason the dry-clean it. She didn't sweat.

But the reason why was another secret she didn't want to bring up.

A beep. Her program had finished its scan. Elsa looked back at the screens, watching as the computer plotted out the traces of cameras that tracked the gunmen, from the time the disembarked to assault the vault to the time they were still driving in their van towards the building. She scanned through the program's report.

There we go. She stared at the reticule that had popped up on the rendering of the city map. Found you.

Now she knew where to look. But in the meantime, there were other priorities to take care of.

Like a certain redhead she shared a room with.


Anna struggled to stay awake. It was fantastic how she couldn't have fallen asleep yesterday, and apparently the cure for her "insomnia" was her professor's droning and monotonous voice. She had half a mind to record it and play it at night, just so she could go to sleep. It didn't help that she still had fencing classes afterwards, and she couldn't just sit on the sidelines. She was one of the team's best fencers; sitting out simply wasn't an option. She rubbed her eyes, letting her mind daydream away from the lecture she was still in.

Somehow she wandered back to her roommate.

It was probably a ridiculous amount of good luck she was experiencing. Soon after she moved in she gets saved by a masked vigilante from thugs attempting to capture her, and then she gets a fantastically gorgeous roommate that she met online. Elsa was something quite out of this world. Anna loved her facial features, her platinum blonder hair, her curvy figure; hell, she had to play with herself three times before she could go to sleep—

She cringed. She most certainly didn't have to remind herself of that. That was embarrassing, of all the things she had probably done in her life. All things considered, getting turned on by your new roommate was beyond a new level of weird. Or at the very least, Anna was finding excuses to cover up her shame.

Her phone beeped. She sighed, half annoyed that something had decided to interrupt her daydream. Almost indignantly she picked up the phone and read the message.

-Where are you? Still in class?-

Anna's face practically lit up. It was Elsa.

-Yeah. Really boring. And I've still got fencing after this…-

-Wait, you're an artist AND a fencer? Damn girl, that's one hell of a resume you have there!- Anna couldn't help but let a smile creep across her face. To her relief, she was sitting at the back of the theatre, so her professor wasn't about to call on her anytime soon.

Another message. -Meet me after all your classes at the garden before your fencing training. Got a small treat for you.- Treat?! Anna started panicking, she hadn't got anything for Elsa herself. No no no no no, I need to get her something. I don't want her to think I'm insincere—!

The shrill alarm signaling the end of class cut through her thoughts, causing her to jump in surprise. Anna packed up her stuff as soon as she could, already brainstorming on what to get for Elsa. Dammit. I barely know her, how am I supposed to know what to get her?


Chocolate.

The wrappers were everywhere: on her table, in the trash, in her clothes pockets; Elsa could easily tell what her favourite food was. She didn't know why she felt the sudden urge to get Anna a gift, she just knew she wanted to make her happy. The store nearby would contain the necessary products. But she still had some unfinished business to take care off.

The whoosh of her UAV reached her ears soon enough, followed by a secondary whoosh, and a crack as her pod hit the pavement at the dump behind her apartment building. There's the package. Getting the item out would be easy; Elsa turned to contemplate the problem of how to hide the pod. Eventually she just decided that she would have to leave it, for it was unlikely that Anna would connect a random pod with her presence in her room.

Her next problem was what to wear.

Elsa had never been very good with clothes; she'd never needed particularly fancy clothes, and spending ten years on the street and ten years up in a mansion had done nothing to improve her sense of fashion. She sighed. The only things she learned were what clothes were needed to cause a distraction, what clothes were needed to conceal weapons, and what outfit to wear for combat. As she descended the steps of the apartment block she pondered over the issue, her mind mentally scrolling through the outfits still stuck in her wardrobe, untouched for ages. She never really needed them; most of her time was spent alone, researching or practicing or training. She never went out to meet friends, let alone boys, or girls for that matter.

She was a hyper-lethal vector. With all the skills necessary to outsmart and outplay even the deadliest of criminals.

So why she nervous about meeting her roommate?

The pod hissed after she input her palm recognition, revealing the equipment load within. Hefting the package by the straps, she lifted it back up to the apartment, stowing it inside her room behind a guitar.

Oh yes. That thing. She took a forlorn look at the instrument, again untouched since she had committed to her vigilante double life.

She was nothing like Anna. Not as open, not as cheery, hell, not as normal as her. Elsa ended up in front of her open wardrobe, pondering why all her clothes seemed so alien to her, and the only things she had left that were familiar to her were her suit and the snowflake glaive. Everything else didn't register in her brain, all shut out because they didn't help her carry out her job.

For the first time forever, she was insecure.

Unsure.

Who am I?


She had dressed in full fencing gear when she rushed up to the rooftop garden, her heart pounding from both the exertion and trepidation.

And there she was.

Crouching in a semi-ninja pose upon a parapet, dressed in khakis and a white t-shirt, her silhouette illuminated by the afternoon sun. A smile crept across her face. "So what is it?"

Anna caught the bag that Elsa tossed her, barely able to mask her excitement as she opened the paper bag. "OHMYGOSHHH!" she practically screamed. "Chocolate!"

Elsa smiled as she watched her roommate practically go crazy just looking at the stuff – she hadn't even tasted it. Earlier she had decided to give up on getting chocolate from the nearby store; she had a stash of those with her weapon caches, so she made another drone drop outside their apartment building with the chocolate, deliberately checking to make sure it was of premier quality. Just watching Anna spazz over her gift gave her a warm fuzzy feeling that she couldn't quite understand yet.

"Where'd you get this?"

"Online. I ordered a sample."

"The delivery was that fast?"

"I have fast couriers."

"I er, kinda have something for you too."

That was a surprise. She certainly wasn't expecting that. Goddammit, Elsa, you can predict where people intend to snipe your brains out and you didn't anticipate anything like this?

Anna drew a box – leather box – from her bag still slung upon her shoulder, producing a gleaming watch from within. "Anna," Elsa gasped, "I can't accept that. I'm serious. That is far too expensiv—"

"It's fine. My dad can afford a lot of things."

"Your… dad?"

"Yeah. He runs the Weaselton Company. See that big building down over there?" Anna pointed down the road towards the large facility cum office, with the large WEASELTON signage hanging on its side. "That's his office. He gets things pretty fast too."

"But this—"

"Just take it," Anna placed the box in Elsa's hands, giving her a reassuring smile, but also exploiting the opportunity to wrap her hands around Elsa's. God, that feels so good. "It's the least I could do."

"Least?" Elsa's eyes widened in half-skepticism and half-disbelief. "This costs at least three thousand bucks!" The silver watch gleamed brilliantly amidst the sun's rays, but it wasn't the heat that Elsa felt. It was warmth.

"Just keep it, alright? I gotta run!" She watched as the fencer evaded Elsa's grasp and dashed down the steps. Elsa watched her disappear into the stairwell, and a smile crept upon a face.

She took up her job as a vigilante to make people feel better by saving them, relieving them from fear. She thought that was the only way she could help.

But now, Elsa realized that helping people wasn't just about saving the helpless, or beating up the gangs in the town. It was also about making people happy.

Today, she made one person happy.

And she didn't plan to stop there.


"You are kidding me."

"Unfortunately sir, they were all apprehended."

"I provided you with AUTOMATIC RIFLES, a ROCKET PROPELLED GRENADE, tactical information on the APD's officer deployments, response times, and SWAT forces. And you're telling me, that a SINGLE VIGILANTE was somehow still able to take a gang of 8 ARMED MEN down?!"

"Ye…Yes sir."

"Fools! Useless idiots! I'm not even going to bother intervening during the trial. It's a complete waste of my time. I didn't even ask you guys to do anything constructive, just to make her USE HER BLOODY CRYOKINESIS!"

"She seems to be rather reluctant to do so, sir."

"I am aware of that, you dense little shit."

"…so what do we do now, sir?"

"We only know her as Subject 17. The rest of the information was lost. Till we can find that information, we keep this up. If we can, expose her identity. That will make things a lot easier."

"Do we have another target?"

"I believe we do. Gather as many available forces as you can. Then take the university. Don't kill any hostages, just flush her out. You have two options. You can either kill her, or if you can't, expose her powers and/or identity. Either way, I'm going to enjoy this very, very much.

"We'll find you soon enough, Blizzard.

"And the snow won't protect you no more."