this is how it starts (ready set go)
dream yourself along another day
One thing they hadn't counted on (maybe a little stupidly) was something unexpected happening. Of course, it was only a matter of time, if one paused to consider what had been going on since before the beginning of the school year. Meadowsweet, the three creepy-weird fairies, someone (anyone) trying to take over the world (universe?) and not giving a damn about the Dragon Fire or even about wiping out their enemies, really. Weird, but true; both Meadowsweet and the fairies, as far as the girls could tell, only killed one another out of necessity. Each got in the other's way, so they needed to be eliminated, and that was that.
It really was only a matter of time until the Winx girls themselves were attacked.
And even then, it wasn't the Winx girls being attacked so much as Alfea school itself. The only reason defenses even fell to them was that the school's normal frontline (Laura, Sabrina, Cadenza) against these sadistic tricksters (a pair of spunky fairies this time) were nowhere to be found.
Bloom was immediately at attention; the girls all transformed in unison ("Oh my god," one of the fairies squealed, "they're like a chorus line!") at her word and hovered in midair around the intruders.
"What's Meadowsweet doing here now?" Stella called out to the group at large (but really to Bloom). The two fairies, both grounded but trading teasing grins, snickered at her loudness; one of them, a smallish blonde wearing so many shades of sparkle and pink that she put both Musa and Flora to shame, couldn't hold in a loud laugh and covered her mouth hastily. She whispered something to her much more scantily (and darkly) dressed companion and both laughed loudly, the former clutching at her sides. Aisha scowled and even Flora was starting to look cross.
"What's so funny?" Musa challenged, flying closer to float right above them. The girls looked up at her with matching clear green eyes, hands on their hips.
"Sorry," the blonde said, shaking out her long hair, "we were expecting someone a little more challenging."
"Someone who didn't pull that old 'shout out your plans as you make them up' trick," the other said, tossing her equally long black hair. "Y'know. Someone from this century."
"You know, Keely," the blonde said conversationally, keeping her eyes on Musa as she spoke to her companion, "Sabrina never blurts out her plans during battle."
"That's right, Candasy*," the brunette returned, keeping her eyes on Musa as well. "She never really says much of anything, as I recall."
"What is this, a talk show?" Bloom spit out furiously, taking her friends by surprise. "Are you going to challenge us or not?"
Keely giggled, apparently for sport more than anything else. "You…don't really get how this works, do you?" she taunted. Bloom's expression twisted into an ugly sneer and she shot down to push her face into Keely's personal space.
"Why don't you teach me?" she snapped. Keely raised her eyebrows and Candasy made a "hm" noise.
"Well, Firecracker," Keely said, casually shoving Bloom out of her way and stepping aside, "I'm sure you understand it's easier for us to just show you."
"So show me then!"
Bloom gasped sharply as she found herself with her face shoved into the ground, one of her arms being shoved painfully beyond its stretching point. Able to crane her neck just enough to look out the corner of her eye at her assailant, she bared her teeth at an apparently bored Candasy, trying not to growl.
"Bloom!" Flora cried uselessly, raising her hands to her mouth. Candasy rolled her eyes and Keely waved her hand in a "get on with it" gesture; her partner twisted Bloom's arm around, forcing her to flail on the ground and turn herself almost 180 degrees before she was given relief in the form of a forceful pin.
Swearing under her breath, Stella swooped down to help Bloom stand; the shaken fairy wrenched her arm out of Stella's grip, spinning on her heel to face their attackers with tears in her eyes.
"What, we're not good enough?" she shouted, stamping her foot. Keely and Candasy only looked at each other and nodded.
"Pretty much," they said in frightening unison. Flora shuddered.
Trying to come up with something that would work (at least a little), the Winx girls circled up around their opponents, each trying to glare the girls down and getting no rise out of them whatsoever. Tecna's entire arm was glowing neon green and Aisha's hands, balled into fists, sparked with cold, fluid energy; Musa rubbed her hands together quickly and Flora ground the four-inch heels of her boots into the dirt. Keely and Candasy stood back to back, gazes darting around the circle as they pressed their palms together.
Candasy winked. "Easy breezy!"
Without warning, Bloom threw a white-hot ball of fire energy right at the blonde's face. Reacting quickly, Tecna, who stood opposite Bloom and therefore opposite Keely, put her arms out in front of her and sent her crackling electric energy right at the taller fairy's heart.
What happened next was almost (almost) too fast for any of them to catch.
As easily as if they had been expecting it (they probably had), Keely and Candasy had transformed into fairy forms (Believix, shockingly) and flown what must have been at least five yards up, using the pressure of their hands to force one another off to the left and right, respectively. Twisting around midair with their hands outstretched (Keely with her palms up, Candasy with her palms down), the fairies summoned a thick barrier around the Winx girls, arcing over them in a dome that would probably have been a great defense in any other battle. As it were, it only prevented them from moving more than two feet in any direction out.
Aisha thumped her fists pointlessly against the barrier and Flora raised her hand to her cheek, eyebrows furrowed as she bit her lip. Stella threw a ball of solar energy at the wall and it bounced back at her; she ducked and it hit Musa, throwing her back into the wall where she landed with a sick thud. Candasy laughed, spinning like a ballerina in a harness.
"What do you want from us?" Bloom screamed, digging her nails into her palms. "What's wrong with you?"
"Ah," Keely said, flying towards the ground and transforming back out of her fairy form as her feet touched down, "there's your problem, right there. Nothing is wrong with us. We're not sick in the head, we're not out to destroy the world. We're not psychopaths."
"We want to make the world better for everyone and everything," Candasy added, touching down on the opposite side of the dome. "The world, the solar system, the galaxy, and you can imagine farther out. Well, maybe."
"You want to save the universe by taking it over?" Stella asked, clearly abhorrent. "You're totally psychopaths!"
Keely paced around the circle, shaking her finger in the air. "No, not quite," she said as Candasy began to pace around as well. "We don't want to 'save' anyone; we're realists, not optimists. We don't think we can 'save' anyone or any world. We just want to unify them."
"From a political perspective," Candasy continued, "if the planets were all unified under a single governing body, the members all from the same like-minded group with its own strict hierarchy, there would be no need for any interplanetary conflict. Any threat could be immediately isolated and quashed, before it became a problem."
"You're crazy," Tecna said scathingly. "Each planet, at least, would require an individual leader; each leader would have different ideals, different methods of ruling. Your system would never work."
"Ah," Keely said—they seemed to enjoy switching off, and neither had disagreed with the other yet. "That's the beauty of the hierarchical system within the larger governing body. If a single ruler were to fall out of line, he would be dealt with quickly and efficiently, replaced without a thought."
"You'd completely remove any input from the common people!" Bloom shouted, as if she took personal offense to their plan. Candasy chuckled and shook her head.
"Individual leaders would be free to receive input from the masses at any time," she said (as if it were that obvious), "and do with it as they wished. Small personalization is perfectly acceptable as long as those particular, planet-specific customizations don't cause systems to stray from the group's larger ideals."
"No," Stella said fiercely. "Each planet is individual, each planet is unique. You can't possibly hope to have them all ruled by one person!"
"Meadowsweet isn't one person," Keely said sweetly. "You think one person could possibly be behind our organization? No, our governing body is just that—a board, made up of several individuals united in their goals and the methods by which to attain them. Meadowsweet is merely an idea in the process of execution."
"Still!"
"Hence the allowances for particular changes, individual touches in the leadership of each planet," Candasy repeated. "A planet encompassed in sunlight and accustomed to strict hierarchical rule, for instance, would be governed far differently than a planet swathed in ice and subject to mob rule."
Musa shook her head. "You can't hope to have those two different kinds of places ruled by a single ideal."
"The core of a system of beliefs can transcend such trivial details," Keely said dismissively. "Both could be ruled with the same end result in mind; one may require a stricter method of governing, maybe more of a tangible-rewards-based system, but both would reach the same spot when all was said and done."
"Isn't it funny," Candasy said then, a smile quirking her lips up at the corners, "how you all have stopped your fruitless attempts to escape your prison in order to hear out our plans? Either you've realized how stupid it is to try to break the barrier—which I doubt—or you find some legitimacy in our claims, which I'm sure you would never admit to."
"You're crazy!" Tecna said again, a little more forcefully. This time Keely was the one to smile wryly, knocking her knuckles against the barrier.
"Maybe," she admitted as Candasy nodded speculatively. "In any case, we're not going to kill you. There's no reason. We are going to leave you here awhile, though; your little defense squad can bust you out, whenever they get back."
"You know where they are?" Flora said, sliding forward.
"Of course," Candasy said. "Why wouldn't we? They're out in the woods somewhere, probably killing Nolwenn and Briallen as we speak."
Killing. Bloom's palms began to bleed where her nails cut into them.
"You can speak so casually about your own teammates being…being murdered?" she hissed. Keely shook her head.
"If they were being murdered, it would have to be premeditated," she said. "I'm sure that, well-prepared as they are, none of our favorite little fairies could've predicted this battle today." She glanced at Candasy almost proudly. "We're much bigger game than those two, anyway; if they'd known we were going to be here, they surely would've stuck around, let Nolwenn and Briallen have their way with that little town."
"And they never would've gone after those two so fast if they'd stopped to think a moment," Candasy added with a snicker. "Like we would've sent them out on their own, the weaklings."
"Yeah, that's what we thought, too."
Keely bit her lip and closed her eyes tightly for a moment. "Shit."
Fast as a shot, Laura was bashing Candasy's head with her forearm and sending her flying; Cadenza held Keely's head up with a hand fisted in her hair and bashed her knee into the other girl's solar plexus. As both stood, momentarily doubled over, Sabrina drew her fingers back and strung the two up in midair, leaving them hanging there as Cadenza used her whip-shot attack to break Keely's and Candasy's barrier dome.
"Thank you," Bloom said with something nearing forced sincerity. Cadenza shot her a dirty look and Laura rolled her eyes.
"We didn't do it as a favor," Cadenza said bitterly. "We've repaid you for luring them out; now we're even." She glared at Keely's and Candasy's limp forms. "And we didn't killed your lackeys. Too low on the food chain, wouldn't you say? Not our problem."
Sabrina sashayed tauntingly over to Keely and Candasy and flicked her wrist, jerking them around a little. "Sorry," she said, seemingly both to the suspended fairies and to the increasingly offended (angry) Winx girls. "It's been a long night."
"Like that's an excuse," Aisha bit out. Cadenza flicker her fingers in the other girl's direction (without even looking her way) and Aisha stumbled backwards, feeling as though someone had just poked her forehead with something very sharp. "Hey!"
Laura stretched languidly, her arms reaching way up over her head. "It is if you've been as busy as we have." Something (maybe her shoulder) cracked and she shook herself.
As they had seen her do the last time Meadowsweet had attacked Alfea, the Winx watched Cadenza raise her glowing white hand towards the captive fairies; the entire yard was engulfed in the white light for no more than a split second before it faded back to normal and—just as last time—Keely and Candasy were left screaming, wailing, sweating, swearing. Candasy's sparkling pink two-piece was ripped at the shoulder, leaving it to droop over her chest where she pulled at it desperately (grasping for purchase); Keely's already scant dress was nearly in shreds, leaving her huddled this-close-to-naked, crouching on the ground and digging her fingers into the dirt (nails filthy and broken).
"Teach you to mess with us," Cadenza muttered. Sabrina and Laura closed in on their prey, glowing faintly, as Cadenza turned away in disgust and walked over to the Winx girls.
"So," she said, all casual business attire. "What do you want to know?"
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*Pronounced: can-DAY-see