The Case of the Sunken Store 02

"Lisa? Lisa? Lisa, please wake up."

There was a hand shaking her shoulder. She tried to force her eyes open, the pain in her back and the tingling in her extremities made it feel like forcing fire through her nerves.

But Taylor was shaking her. She had to open her eyes. She had to respond. She had to tell her she was okay.

With a titanic effort, one eyelid lifted, a lance of pain shooting through her from the light stabbing into her eye. The blue and white dress above her was…wrong. Her eyeball rolled higher and she grunted.

"You're not Taylor."

"Lisa, wait, don't! You can't fall unconscious again! Lisa -"

\/\/

"Hey, there you are." Lisa didn't have to be a Thinker 7 to hear the raw relief in Taylor's voice wafting down from somewhere above her.

She groaned as the throbbing in her head dulled to a quiet roar instead of a jet engine and cracked open an eyelid. "What the hell happened?"

"We killed Coil. Nobody's ever died while linked into the Hive though, and the backlash was…not pleasant."

Lisa remembered her girlfriend suggesting they should pull Coil into the hivemind. It had seemed like such a bad idea, but she'd been so convincing. How better to defeat a power than to share in the experience of it? And really, who would ever have thought they would attack by making him harmonize with them?

"You were out for a long time. I called Armsmaster and Lady Photon, told them to bring Panacea. You really scared me, Lise…"

"…Sorry…"

"Don't apologize. Just…get better."

"I was getting too much information at once. His power and mine were not meant to work together like that. Though…Tay, if the big boys on the block are coming, you need to let me lie down for a bit and go to the door over there. I'm not…entirely sure what's in there. My brain still hurts too much. But…I think…I think Coil…"

Her eyes narrowed and her head snapped up to focus on the door. "A prisoner? Another hostage?"

"…Worse. And if I'm right…I don't think she has a home to go back to."

Taylor carefully pulled back, laying Lisa's head down on the floor, Taylor's jacket acting as a pillow. "Yes. She does." Leaning down, Taylor kissed Lisa's temples. She could feel all of the tension bleed out of her. Everything was going to be alright. "Stay here. Rest. I'll go help the girl. And then, after Panacea has looked over you both, we'll bring her home with us. Okay?"

"I love you, and your hero ways, Tay," Lisa murmured. "Never change, babe."

"Never."

\/\/

"Lisa, please, the bathysphere is stopping and I'm not certain what we will find down here. You need to wake up!"

Lisa jerked upright, her memories shattering like glass and her breath ragged. She stared, wide-eyed, at Elizabeth. The other woman was close enough Lisa could've counted her eyelashes. She'd nearly brained her with a headbutt as the dream dissolved. Gasping, Elizabeth fell backwards, landing on her ass, and Lisa managed to catch her breath.

"Jesus Christ, I hate Cohen!" she shouted. "I should have just fucking kicked the bastard when I had the chance."

"Good. You're awake," Elizabeth murmured, her hand over her heart. "Are you always that animated when you wake?"

"After being electrocuted? Let's go with: yes." Lisa grabbed the bar of the bathysphere and pulled herself to her feet. "Fuck. He really did send us down to the Department Store. Well this is just perfect."

"Can't we just take this back up?"

"Only goes one way. You'd have to jury rig the controls and I never learned how to do that with tech this old. I can hack things with digital codes and passwords - things from the 21st century. Not this shit. This is schizo tech from another world combined with cathode ray tubes and stuff my great-grandmother would have considered cutting edge. I'd be more likely to send us to the bottom of the ocean. No, we'd have better luck finding a damned Big Daddy, cutting him out of the suit and trying to walk back up."

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Actually, that's not a truly horrible idea. Let's call that Option B and see if we can't find ourselves an Option A."

A shudder ran through the bathysphere and a ding sounded. Lisa looked out the porthole as the pressure inside equalized. A moment later and the hatch popped. Shaking herself, Lisa pulled out her revolver and stepped past Elizabeth.

"Okay, Liz, we both know you're not from around here. Are you a parahuman? A cape?"

"No. I am…I was…something entirely different."

"Fantastic," Lisa grunted. "Any special powers?"

"Not anymore. I may be able to tell you if there are…inconsistencies in the fabric of this reality, but we would need to be very close to a Tear. And I would not be able to manipulate them, even if I could still sense them."

"Okay then." Lisa nodded and waved for Elizabeth to follow her. "You know, the fact you can speak in capital letters is a bit weird." Lisa sighed and continued under her breath, "I've been around capes too much if I can hear that."

Elizabeth chuckled. "I would tend to agree. My adoptive father used them quite often. It is a habit of his I, regrettably, picked up…before I killed him."

"Sounds like you had a fun family reunion."

"Something like that."

Lisa fell silent, dropping into an internal war with herself. Her eyes constantly scanned the dark corners of the store around them, seeking any hint of movement. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Nothing to distract her from the voice of her wife coming from another world, another life, scolding her to open up to others more.

"You know, my parents tried to use me as a Magic 8-ball when I was a teenager. I was a glorified money printer for them…for about a month before I wised up and ran away."

"Hm," Elizabeth murmured. "I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it, I got even with them. Bankrupted those assholes and stole all their money."

The department store continued to be cold and dark and quiet as we paced along. There were still no signs of Splicers, but at least they were swiftly approaching the divisions between the main sections of the store.

"If we're to be sharing origin stories, I suppose it is only fair that I more fully share mine as well. I was a caged bird for nearly 20 years, slowly being groomed into a weapon of ultimate war, all while my unique abilities were siphoned off, until I was turned into the equivalent of a walking nuclear bomb should they ever be released in full."

Lisa stopped her scan of the rooms and turned to look at Elizabeth, her eyes wide. The woman wasn't showing any of the usual signs of lying, no head tilt, no wandering eyes, no smirk…just a set, determined gaze and gritted teeth. "Holy shit."

"This was, of course, after I was sold by my drunken father, and essentially kidnapped by my adoptive father when my drunken father changed his mind, either just too late or just in time - depending on your point of view."

Lisa blinked. "I hope you killed the asshole."

"I did agree that it was a fun family reunion," she said, smiling.

"Heh, yeah, you did." Lisa twisted back towards the path forward and continued walking. "You're a lot stronger than you look, Elizabeth."

"I'm also frighteningly focused. To my detriment it turns out," she sighed.

"You and me both, sister. Hey look at it this way, if I manage to get home, I'm pretty sure that my wife is going to want to adopt you as her sister - she does that a lot - so, yeah. Try not to die down here."

"I distinctly remember there being more Splicers…"

Lisa frowned, almost missing a step as she overheard Elizabeth's murmured final words. Yet more confirmation that there was something inherently strange about this woman. She knew too much, yet she didn't know enough. She had seen things she couldn't have known, yet she'd also missed large sections of life in Rapture.

Just who, or more accurately what, was Elizabeth?

Lisa had started to direct them towards the Bedroom section of the store when Elizabeth grabbed her hand. Frowning, Lisa glanced back.

"We should go towards the Toys area first."

"I guarantee you, Fontaine is going to be in the fancy bedroom area. It has opulent furnishings and he's a creature of habit. I have enough small favors I can call on that I can, maybe, work that so that, instead of killing us on sight, he might actually point us in the right direction. We can get in, talk, get a bead on Sally, get out. Hopefully with our heads still attached. He doesn't like me, but he'll know I want to get up to the rest of Rapture just as much as he does. I'm more useful alive than dead."

"Lisa, I have good reason to believe we might be able to pick up the trail in Toys. We may not need to go to Fontaine at all."

Lisa's eyes narrowed to slits. "If I find out you let me get electrocuted for fucking nothing - that you already knew we had to come down here - I will be very annoyed."

"I didn't remember much of this facility until we arrived. I don't want to go to the Toys section. In fact, I want to stay as far away from that section of the store as physically possible. That's how I know we need to go there."

"I see," Lisa murmured. "Well, I guess we're going to find some toys to play with."

The walk to the Toys section was quite short, barely five minutes. As soon as they arrived, Lisa immediately realized why there were so few Splicers in this area of the building.

"Big Daddy corpse…that's pleasant. Looks fairly fresh too. Can't be more than a day old, tops, otherwise this place would be swarming with Splicers. They're scared to get too close too fast, you see. Well, at least we know that if we really need to go with Plan B, we can come back here. Hey, Liz, do you…"

Lisa trailed off as she caught sight of her companion's pale, sweating face. Elizabeth was staring at the Big Daddy, her fists clenched and her jaw locked shut. No…that wasn't right. Elizabeth wasn't looking at the diver, she was looking at the pile of rubble next to the thing.

"Dammit. It's never simple," Lisa muttered. She strode forward, skirting past the Big Daddy. She frowned as she saw the mangled remains of a man stuck on the end of its drill. "DeWitt. Huh. Mutual kill…didn't think the drunk had it in him."

Dropping down to one knee, Lisa left the dead man and dead bodyguard to their eternal battle, instead pawing at rubble off to their side. She didn't have much to move before she found what she was searching for.

It wasn't what she expected. It wasn't a small body the size of a little girl.

In some ways, it was worse.

"Elizabeth. Care to explain how you're lying here, dead, and yet you're standing right behind me?" Lisa asked, her voice as steady as a laser.

Even amongst capes and golden alien wannabe gods. This was…not normal.

"I believe…I believe that my superposition state has collapsed. I was everywhere. I was nowhere. Now I'm…"

"Just a single woman, in a single body, in a single space, in a single universe."

Lisa stood, backing away from the buried corpse of the woman she was traveling with. Twisting on her heel, she snarled, her revolver half cocked, and half raised. "Tell me the truth, Elizabeth. Were you one of them?"

Had she been so blind? Had she been walking around - talking about her past, coming to like - another of Scion's ilk?!

Elizabeth met Lisa's gaze with a frown, her fingers finally unclenching and her breathing evening out. She blinked and cocked her head to the side. "Was I…what? Are you implying I was one of those abominable, parasite things that infected half the multiverse?" Lisa's gun wavered. "I told you what I was! I was a child soldier, an accident of the universe, literally caught between two worlds."

"Wait…" Lisa struggled to catch up. This wasn't right. This didn't track. This…the Worms lied.

"My kidnapper leashed and siphoned my link to my home, draining power that should have dissipated naturally. It expanded and compounded and made me into the walker of the docks. You think I'm the…the parasite?!" Elizabeth shouted. She strode forward and slapped her. Lisa reeled back, the sting on her cheek burning and the gun dropping to her side as her free hand came up to rest on the red imprint on her skin.

"You saw me! Before I was - Diminished! I pulled you out of the water between worlds! I saved you, you ungrateful, infuriating woman!"

"I - I - didn't ask -"

"The least you could do is thank me for saving your ungrateful ass!"

Images of Lighthouses, and docks, flashed behind her eyes. She felt the weight of water - that wasn't water - in her lungs, and pain, so much pain.

Lisa gasped, falling backwards and staring up at Elizabeth, as the other woman glared down at her, hands on her hips, scowl on her face. "You! You're my nightmare! You're the thing I can't remember! You're why my power broke! It looked at you and that void of - "

"Sea of Infinite Possibility."

"And it - I don't know - overloaded! You're why I…" Lisa trailed off, stopping herself before she could throw around the blame she so dearly wanted to. In another age, another time, she would have.

And it would have been wrong.

"Scion's attack kicked me into that void didn't it?"

"I wouldn't really know. I only saw the effect, not the cause."

"…I can't really remember it," Lisa mumbled.

Elizabeth sighed, her arms dropping to her sides. "Most people can't. The human mind isn't really built to comprehend it. Nothing natural is. I only have the barest recollections of the whole myself and I ruled over that domain with my alternate selves for an eternity, for the merest blink of an eye. It doesn't make much sense from a linear, strictly cause-effect perspective, it can't, being outside of time like it is."

"Well…thanks for saving my life," Lisa grunted.

"You're welcome." She reached down and Lisa accepted the assist, letting Elizabeth pull her to her feet.

The silence stretched for an uncomfortable moment before Lisa spoke again. "Soo…DeWitt was your asshole kidnapper?"

"One alternate version of him that was not killed with the rest, yes. This one was particularly bad. Instead of locking up his version of me, he murdered her when he tried to kidnap her. And he couldn't even accept that fact, so he hid here and forgot about his past."

"Are we even actually looking for Sally or did you just want to come here for closure?" Lisa asked with a heavy sigh.

Elizabeth grimaced. "I used Sally to assist in my revenge. I was planning to take her from this place afterwards, but…"

"But you died and to make things right, you had to break the universe. And you doomed yourself, shot my potential easy way home, and likely shot the kid in the foot at the same time. Oh this is just…glorious." Lisa looked to the heavens and groaned. "I swear to god, Taylor, you are going to laugh your ass off when I get home and tell you this story. You and Dinah both."

"I would like to meet your family. They sound like rather pleasant people. Certainly better than mine."

Lisa laughed, her entire body shaking with the force of it. Wiping tears from her eyes she strode forward and clapped Elizabeth on the shoulder. "Liz, my girls will be the most pleasant folk you'll ever meet; even while they are shanking you. Don't mess with my girls, that's important survival advice. Now, let's go finally find your kid, and figure out how to raise this store from the depths. Then we can jailbreak you again, and…just maybe, get home."

"It sounds like a plan." Elizabeth smiled back and reached out to squeeze Lisa's hand.

Maybe there really was a light at the end of this tunnel after all.