Reply to Guest: Yeah, and Bubbles is fun to write too.


Chapter 29: Red (Part 3)

The City of Townsville. Outskirts. Cult of His Arm Compound.

13 FEB (Monday) 1989. 1625.

Blossom and Buttercup had reached the front door of the manor too late, as they had to knock out a few straggling cultists before they could get to the building. By the time they got there, they couldn't stop Bubbles, only see the needless destruction she had caused.

There was a woman in the stairs, literally, stuck in a hole there as if a giant had shoved her halfway through it. She was still groaning in pain by the time the two Girls saw her and passed out before they could question her. In the corridor next to it, there were six bodies, some barely moving, some not, and Blossom was surprised that the former was still breathing because of the number of bullet wounds in them.

The sound of gunshots exchanged between the manor and the law enforcement units outside had significantly lessened, reduced to one deliberate potshot every few seconds. It was becoming quiet. The battle was concluding.

The Girls couldn't hear Bubbles. She had been maddeningly loud before.

"Buttercup, search upstairs – I'll look for her here," Blossom said to her sister nervously.

"Sure thing, sis," Buttercup was exhausted, so she had to run up the wooden stairs like a normal kid, except faster and less awkward. The thing with her was… she knew exactly where Bubbles was through her enhanced hearing, and she certainly wasn't where she was going.

Blossom started searching by using her x-ray vision, looking through the walls of the manor as she ran from room to room, shouting Bubbles' name desperately. At one point, she had bumped into a wall she was looking through, forgetting in her anxiety that it was there. But there was no Bubbles, only whatever remained of the cultists she had gone through. Most were alive, some vaguely so. A few weren't so lucky. Blossom could only hope that the gunshot wounds they suffered weren't from Bubbles.

After a few rooms over and still no sign of Bubbles, Blossom found a few SWAT officers. Two of them were dead on the ground. One of them had bullet wounds all over him, but he was still alive if heaving his breath as if drowning. His helmet was off and his balaclava was rolled up even though it was a combat zone. He knew he was living his last hour.

Blossom came up to him and knelt down beside him, unsure of what to do. Their eyes made contact. It reminded Blossom of the first time she fought crime at the Townsville Central Bank, when she was, again, the last person a SWAT cop saw before he died. It'd made her tear up, just seeing a good man – a police officer – die just because he tried to make the world a better place. Standing up, she gave the dying cop a hug. He didn't even have the strength to lift his arms before he heaves his final few breaths, gasps and entered his death throes, before finally stopping – forever.


Meanwhile, as Blossom was comforting a dying policeman, Buttercup was racing upstairs, towards a sound she heard. And it wasn't on the second floor. The second floor was quiet – the cultists sniping from there were either dead or hiding like cowards. But Buttercup could hear an even bigger coward, hiding much further away.

The sound was a restrained weeping, but there was a second sound. A baby was crying – why it was there and why it was crying, Buttercup didn't care.

The little girl, with a grin plastered on her face, looked up. It was all coming from above the second floor. The attic. Her House had one too, though they had never gone up there except for during a tour around The House that Dad gave them on their second week's birthday.

Flying up fist-first, Buttercup smashed through the ceiling to enter that dark place up above. Landing next to the hole she made, she saw who had been making that noise. A woman next to a cradle, practically naked as she wore some kind of a see-through red silk dress, with only her bra and panties really covering anything at all. A baby was in the cradle. They were the family of The Cult of His Arm's leader, though Buttercup did not know, nor would she have cared who they were.


Bubbles wasn't anywhere to be found on the first floor, so after saying goodbye to the dying policeman who was now dead, Blossom had to wipe her tears away and go on, no matter how much she just felt like bawling away on the ground.

After checking the immediate vicinity around the manor, only to find more SWAT cops and USDO soldiers advancing on the house and cuffing any surviving cultists, then the garden, which was full of dead cultists with tight-fitting bags on their heads and no gunshot wounds or injuries, Blossom decided that she could be in the basement.

Descending down into the dark underground, Blossom had to think twice about it – Bubbles would never have entertained the idea of going to such a place – but she remembered what Bubbles had become with her new BerXerker ability.

There was almost no light at all. Blossom could only make out vague, colorless shapes and she had to descend down the steps on foot due to her exhaustion. Unable to find a switch, she had to light up her eyes instead, shining the way ahead.

Blossom thought she could hear sniffling and weeping. She found that her heart was beating and screaming more than it did when she was just facing cultists.

At the foot of the stairs, she was afraid to turn the corner, despite all her enhanced abilities and infrared beam and track record. But after swallowing a slimy glob of saliva, she finally did…


Buttercup was flashing her usual predatory shark smile when she found the woman and baby in the attic. She scanned the nearly-naked woman from head to toe. She was voluptuously beautiful, with perfectly shaped limbs, toned in color and muscles to appear not too harried by the pressures of staying in shape but not too weak. But Buttercup wasn't staring at her hungrily for her beauty. Her flesh was her toy, like the Play-Doh Daddy got for her. But those colorful slabs of dough could only last for so long before she got bored of them. The human body, on the other hand, was so much more fascinating.

The woman started forward, pointing a pistol that she had hastily taken from a dressing table next to the cradle. The baby cried as usual, and Buttercup thought derisively that it reminded her of Bubbles.

Buttercup was unfazed by the woman's reaction, even as she cocked her pistol with trembling hands and threatened with a shaken voice that she would shoot.

Buttercup kicked off into a hovering position, a slight aura of green light was emitted around her, visible in the dim attic. It was just to show her her power, or at least what was at the tip of the iceberg.

It was enough to break the woman, who burst into unsightly tears as the pistol fell from her trembling hands. In truth, Buttercup's eyes, which glowed menacingly green in the dark, was already enough to scare her senseless – her breaking was just a delayed response, slowed by maternal instinct and futile hope.

"P-please… don't hurt the baby!" the woman cried and begged. "Its all I have left – take me instead… Please, just leave my precious alone…" Buttercup thought that it was a treat, having another person volunteering to be mutilated and killed by her.


"Bubbles?" Blossom called out in the dark basement. She had rounded the corner after plucking up whatever remained of her courage.

She was just right there, and she wasn't even trying to hide at all. She was kneeling in a pool of blood, surrounded by the corpses of eight cultists.

"Bubbles? It's me, Blossom – don't punch me again, okay?" she said to Bubbles. She wasn't sure if she heard it as there was no reaction from her.

Bubbles was facing away from her, so Blossom only knew that she was crying from the sound of her sniffling, sobbing, and trembling. Her face was in her hands, as if ashamed, or afraid – even though the only frightening thing in the basement was herself.

Blossom inched closer to her. The closer she got, the more afraid she was of coming closer to what was supposed to be her sweet, harmless sister.

"Bubbles?" Blossom said her name one last time, and it was as if she'd finally heard, as she had removed her face from her hand and turned her head, not all the way to the back to face her, but enough such that Blossom could see her left eye. It was still hellish red, screaming lethal danger.


Buttercup had taken the cult leader's bride at her word. When she ordered the woman to turn around, which she reluctantly did so, Buttercup gave her a kick in the small of her back so hard that it'd broken her spine and caused her to fall to the wooden ground. Next, Buttercup landed over the woman's leg and stomped it in the back of the knee, crushing her knee cap against the hardwood flooring. There was a crunching sound as she shattered it. She followed this up with a kick to the woman's ribs when she flipped around. There were more cracking sounds. Buttercup knew that she had broken a few ribs. The woman screamed.

"No- please!" the woman begged, and her contradictory request confused Buttercup. Didn't she just ask that she kill her rather than the baby? Buttercup knew what it meant, and it'd given her an idea. Walking over the woman to the cradle, Buttercup floated up to take a peek at the baby - it was still crying non-stop. Buttercup found it annoying and wished that it would shut up. At the same time, the woman had somehow crawled up to the cradle, in a feeble attempt to get the baby before Buttercup did, but her broken back and left leg had made it impossible for her to stand up and rescue it. "No! Not the baby! Please! Don't hurt her!"

"You're funny, missus," Buttercup simply said as she picked up the baby, surprisingly gentle and instinctively savvy in holding the baby, which wriggled in her tiny arms. Even more surprisingly, the baby had stopped crying. Touching down, Buttercup stood a distance from the woman, who had pulled herself up to a rough sitting position using the cradle. "You said you'd let me kill you, and now you didn't want it. Should I kill your baby then?"

"Please don't!" the woman screamed. Buttercup enjoyed seeing her like this. Her desperation and agony were amusing. The little girl had never liked being forced into the same position by Blossom, and it felt cathartic to do the same to someone else. It felt good, knowing that someone else would look worse than her when threatened. "Not my baby! Please, you can take me! Just not her! Don't kill her!"

Buttercup gritted her teeth in a sadistic smile the moment the word 'kill' was mentioned. Shifting the baby to one hand, Buttercup pulled her pistol out of her holster and pointed it dead center at the baby's forehead, the muzzle pressing against the baby's skin gently. Her finger was on the trigger. A slight pressure in the wrong direction would have dire consequences.

"NOOOO!"


When Bubbles heard Blossom, she stood up and turned fully around. Her eyes were still red, and she had been bleeding from them as if the blood in her eyes were too much. But mixed in with the blood were tears.

"Hello, sister!" Bubbles greeted Blossom with so much venom that it sounded exactly like pure hatred for her.

"Bubbles?" Blossom said, her voice a near whisper. "What's happening to you?"

"Blossom…" Bubbles' expression had swung around all of a sudden, from one of pure rage and hatred to one of intense sadness and shock and fear. And pain. The red in her eyes began fading until it was blue once again in a sea of blood. Blossom took it as a sure sign that Bubbles was 'better' again. She noticed, too, that she had been injured, having suffered multiple cuts from Duranium blades.

"Bubbles - I've been so worried about you!" Blossom said as she came up to her for a hug. Bubbles accepted it, needing it badly.

"I'm so sorry I've hurt you! I didn't mean it!" Bubbles cried. "I… couldn't control myself!"

"It's okay," Blossom comforted her. "I guess I… deserve it, in a way."

"But you don't…" Bubbles said. "I wouldn't have hurt you if I-" Bubbles couldn't continue. There were no words for the rampage she had committed, and any mention of her drug would destroy her. Probably set Blossom off, and then it'd be back to square one, with her becoming hated and useless once more.

"Bubbles," Blossom suddenly said firmly as she withdrew herself from the hug. "You can't go around hurting and killing people like this - no matter how bad they are. They weren't like the Purple Man… besides, Dad said we can't. I need you to control yourself better."

"You're not going to tell Dad, are you?" Bubbles asked, a small part of her enraged and insane self still within her, afraid that Blossom was going to tattle on her. She thought that if Dad knew, he'd find out about her secret, somehow.

"Promise me you'll control yourself," Blossom demanded, her face and voice gone cold.

"I'll try…" Bubbles promised, though deep down, she knew that it was an empty one. As much as she wanted to do good by her leader sister and listen to her Daddy - the fairy godmother's magic was wondrous. She'd felt so much more pleasure this time, and the thrill of fighting without fear was equal to none. The very act of killing and hurting others had enhanced it, and the biggest secret of all this time was that she'd felt ecstatic when she'd punched Blossom in the mouth. True to what Blossom had said, it felt like justice - and revenge, she wouldn't admit. Not that she would admit either that it was justice, too. It was only by her love that she'd held back on hurting her more. "I'm sorry…"

What was worst, however, was the fact that when all her bad emotions had returned - the fear, depression, and anxiety - they felt even worse next to the intense ecstasy while she was under the influence of the magic. Moreover… did the magic last longer this time? It would partly explain why it'd felt so much more pleasurable.


"NO! Please don't!" the cult leader's bride had been begging for what felt like forever. Buttercup had been threatening to kill her baby time and again. The best part? It never got old.

"But you said 'no' when I was kicking you," Buttercup repeated herself, acting shallow and coy just to get at the woman, giving her reasons to believe that her baby was in peril, though to be fair, Buttercup had been seriously considering killing the baby anyway. She had never done it before, and it felt like something she should try. 'We should try everything at least once in our life' – wasn't that what Mommy and Daddy would say?

"I'm sorry – please!" the lady pleaded and cried. "Take me instead! Not her, please! She's innocent!"

"I don't know," Buttercup continued to taunt the woman. "I think I'm bored of you." She lifted her pistol from the baby's forehead only to press it against the baby's stomach. "I wonder if your baby would sound like one of Bubbles' toys if I press her belly button with a bullet?"

Instead of the usual reaction however, the woman had started clawing at her chest, at the ribs she broke as she was gasping for air, before convulsing.

"Buttercup, just what are you doing!?" Blossom's voice had suddenly boomed out of nowhere. It'd shocked Buttercup that she had nearly pulled the trigger. Turning around to the sound of her glorious leader sister's voice, hoping that it was just her imagination, Buttercup was very quickly disappointed.

Both her sisters were floating over the hole she made.

"What are you doing with that baby?" Blossom questioned again, with her hands on her hip and a very cross look on her face.

'Oh no,' Buttercup thought as she felt nervousness rise up in her like never before. She shifted her gaze to the near-naked woman before turning back to Blossom, betraying another of her crimes to her sisters. Bubbles, who herself was dripping with blood, flew up next to the woman to check on her.

"I- But I was just- It's not what it looks like!" Buttercup stammered, already imagining the consequences with Dad. No, she could already see it. "I was just playing with the baby, really!"

"By pointing a gun at it!?" Blossom bellowed - or what amounted to a bellow from a little girl. "Don't you know how dangerous those things are to normal people!?"

She felt like slapping herself, not for endangering a baby for amusement (not to mention seriously considering killing it) nor for injuring and planning the death of an unarmed civilian, but for growing overconfident and not listening to her surroundings for Blossom when she should have known better.

"I… forgot," Buttercup tried to salvage the situation by lying. All it got her was an angrier Blossom who shook her head in disbelief. "Honest!"

"Blossom!" Bubbles shouted from the side. She'd been checking the woman on the floor for a pulse on her neck and wrist, just like how Mommy and Blake had taught her. "The lady's dead and she's hurt really badly."

Blossom glared at Buttercup, feeling anger boiling inside her. With Bubbles' BerXerker ability going out of control, the last thing she needed was Buttercup suddenly acting up and killing when she had been fine for more than a month! At least, that was from Blossom's perspective. She was still none the wiser when it came to her sister's other homicidal activities.

"Did you do this, Buttercup!?" Blossom interrogated her wayward sister, pointing at the recent corpse on the floor.

'Oh no, oh no, oh no!' Alarm bells were ringing in Buttercup's head. Double trouble! And things were going so well too - she'd been able to kill quite a few people before Blossom had caught on.

"I didn't- It- She was already there when I got here!" Buttercup lied even further. "I didn't kill her!"

Blossom closed her eyes, trying to control the anger inside her. She knew that Buttercup was lying. She'd heard Buttercup threatening the lady on the way up to the attic.

"YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO KILL ANYONE, STUPID!" Blossom yelled at Buttercup, throwing out her hands as she did.

"But- But-" Buttercup was grasping at straws, looking for a way out. Any way out. The way Blossom blew up had shaken her - previously, it'd been funny when it happened to Bubbles, but now she knew how it was like to be on the receiving end of it. "Why does Bubbles get to kill and I don't!? It's not fair!"

"Bubbles couldn't control herself but you can!" Blossom fired back. In the meantime, the turn the argument had taken, which had evolved to involve her, was upsetting to Bubbles. She hated what she had become - a killer. And she could remember every single bit of it too. "Hand that baby over, Buttercup!"

Buttercup did not listen immediately. Instead, she'd backed away from Blossom instead, holding the baby closely, her gun coming back up to the baby's head. At this point, Bubbles was biting her fingernails. It looked as though Buttercup was holding the baby hostage.

"I'm not doing it! You're going to tell Dad about me, aren't you!?" Buttercup shouted, her pistol hand shaking, just a twitch away from firing.

"I'll tell Dad about you if you don't give me the baby!" Blossom warned her misbehaving sister, turning cold. With her arm twisted, Buttercup walked over to Blossom and handed the baby over. Blossom carried it with both arms, tightly - afraid to drop it. She had seen pictures of babies and real ones out on the streets, but she had never held them before. It was then that she noticed that there were bruises on the baby's arms. Buttercup had held it too tightly. Regular adults and children were fragile enough - what more for babies? The sight of those injuries, though minor, had made Blossom mad again.

"Blossom- Sister- My sweet sister- Please don't tell Dad about me," Buttercup continued to plead, putting on a fake smile in an attempt to appeal to Blossom. "Have I ever told you I love you?"

"I'm still doing it," Blossom said her coldly, trying her best to keep her anger inside, no matter how difficult it was. Alice had warned her about it - how anger could do a lot of damage, especially with her enhanced abilities. She jumped down the hole in the attic after that and landed softly with a barely audible thump. Bubbles followed.

"But- you said! You promised not to tell!" Buttercup cried, following Blossom, pleading like a hungry or wounded puppy.

"Just like how you promised not to kill!?" Blossom exploded as she turned and yelled. The baby had started crying because of it.

"She- It wasn't as if- the woman- she tried to shoot me first! She shot me!" Buttercup tried again to lie her way out of the problem. Bubbles crossed her arms as she glared at Buttercup; even she had detected the half-baked lie immediately.

"You're a big, fat, stinking liar, Butter-mouth!" Blossom scolded, before resuming her walk down the manor hurriedly. It was far too obvious a lie that it was impossible to miss - she hadn't heard any gunshots from the attic while she was on the way there. The woman was on the floor long before she had caught Buttercup red-handed. It was obvious from her injuries.

"Blossom, please! I- I lost control too! I couldn't- sometimes I just get so mad-" Buttercup continued to plead with her leader sister as they descended the stairs down to the first floor. "I mean I wasn't mad- I was just- I was just playing- I mean-"

Blossom continued to ignore Buttercup even as she continued to plead and find excuses and appeal to her merciful side and their sisterhood and becoming more aggressive and desperate at every turn. She didn't stop even as they were met by Mister Mullens, who was nursing the graze wound on his arm. Stanley Talker, whom Blossom and Bubbles were glad was fine all along, was right beside him.

"That a baby in your arm?" Mullens asked rhetorically.

"We found it in the attic, Mister Mullens," Bubbles said. She was leaning on Blossom's shoulder, looking at the cute little thing. Talker got up on his hind legs by using Bubbles as support. Buttercup had kept quiet here for fear of revealing her secret to her police friends.

"Hrrr… a cute lil' pup ris rhat rit ris," the talking dog cooed with what amounted to a kind of doggy purr if there was such a thing. He soon got off Bubbles after taking a whiff of the surroundings. "Rrr… you srell funny, Rur-rles. Rhat did you get mixed rup rin?"

"Nothing, it's just blood," Bubbles claimed. It took her long to figure out what the talking dog meant. The moment she remembered that dogs had a good sense of smell, she realized that he might discover her dirty little secret with the fairy godmother's magic.

"Hrrr… That rakes sense," the talking dog spat out some saliva and said before padding away. "There's something rin re cultists' rlood that stinks…"

Bubbles' hand had gone up to her chest. She could feel her heart thumping as if she had sprinted across the entire breadth of Townsville. It was a close one. Too close. She took peeks at her sisters, afraid that they might put two and two together with what Stanley Talker had said, but they appeared more disgusted or confused than anything even remotely resembling suspicion.

"Could you take care of the baby, Mister Mullens?" Blossom continued on with the baby. "Its mother is dead and I don't think I can do it…" she glared at Buttercup while saying this.

"I'll take it," Mullens said. Bending low, he put out his arms and Blossom handed over the baby to him. He straightened out again, looking at the young little thing with a kind of warmth rarely ever seen in the hard-boiled detective's eyes. The blanket cocooning the baby was loose under Buttercup and Blossom's watch, so the detective wrapped it around tighter.

"It's sad…" Bubbles cried - the baby had distracted her from her own troubles. "Now she has no more mommy and daddy…" Bubbles would know, because she had cornered and killed the father, who was the leader of The Cult of His Arm, in the basement.

"Might be cold for me to say this, but… This might be for the best," the detective said. It wasn't just cold. It was rock-bottom absolute zero. "Those cultists wouldn't have made good parents to begin with."

"What's going to happen to her?" Blossom asked.

"She'll probably be put up for adoption. I hope the next pair of parents are better than the last," the detective said. "Good work, Girls. I'm glad the three of you aren't worse off today. Although… Bubbles, I think you need to tone it down a little. My fellow boys in blue reported too many dead. We need as many of them alive as we can. We need as many signed confessions and accounts as we can get. The more damning, the better."

"I'm sorry…" Bubbles simply said, holding her arm. Her wounds were starting to hurt again as the effects of His Secret 2.0 was starting to wear off.

"Still, that's some crazy stuff you just pulled. I'm glad you finally found your courage," the detective added. It'd hit Bubbles like a dump truck without him knowing it. She knew she didn't deserve the praise.

"I'm glad too…" Bubbles mumbled shyly, keeping her eyes away as she was afraid it'd tell him or anyone things she didn't want to let slip. Blossom put an encouraging arm around her shoulder, smiling, though even she knew that what had happened in the cult compound wasn't something to be entirely proud of. She thought that it was better than the alternative - to have Bubbles chicken out and cause everything to fall apart. In fact, the operation was nearly a failure had it not been for Bubbles' new power.

"Thanks to the three of you, we've hit the jackpot here. Their compound's full of this stuff," the detective added, before pulling out a syringe out of his pocket. It'd attracted Bubbles' attention immediately. It was a syringe of His Secret. "You know what this means? Fewer people are going to get jacked up with it. The three of you have done this town a favor. A big one."

But Bubbles was less than proud of it. She knew exactly where Mullens had gotten it from. It was from the basement, which was full of the drug. While she was dodging and taking bullets and Duranium blades in the basement, she'd taken the opportunity to 'borrow' a few syringes herself, secretly stuffing her pockets with them.

Buttercup was staring at the syringe in Mullens' hand too, secretly just as guilty of pilfering the crime scene of the drugs. There had been a few syringes in the attic that she took while she was in the middle of torturing the woman. She had collected about two dozen of those throughout her stint as an Angel of Justice - she had always treated them like trophies, just like how a raven would collect shiny things to build its nest with. While she knew nothing of what the drug could do, the syringe itself was shiny as it was made of metal, and it looked good.

"I'm just glad to help, Mister Mullens," Blossom said, ever the girl scout. The detective smiled at her sincerity and goodness.

"I'm sure you do. Now go home, get yourselves stitched up and crack open a soda or something, okay? I can see it now - soon, we'll see the Amoeba Boys in them zebra shirts pretty soon, and the three of you'll be free," the detective said.

At least, that was what Detective Mullens hoped. It was the least he could do for Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup. Once the Amoeba Boys were sent into the slammer, the Lombardi and their criminal enterprise would quickly fall apart without their protection and guidance. They would split into numerous factions, all keeping each other busy by squabbling over the remains of the Lombardi empire. The two hundred or so tiny gangs of Townsville would join in the chaos, and then it was a matter of picking them off one by one. Divide and conquer, as Julius Caesar used to say.

"I hope so…" Bubbles mumbled to herself. Dad had promised her the same thing too. All she had to do was to lie for a few more weeks to be free. But then a feeling of entrapment set in - in the back of her mind, she knew she wouldn't stop taking the fairy godmother's magic even if she didn't need it anymore.

Because it felt so good, and everything else paled in comparison to it. Even if she'd punched Blossom in the mouth.