Chapter 35: In the Shadows (Part 2)
The City of Townsville. Outskirts. Gladys' Stables (Defunct)
15 FEB (Wednesday) 1989. 2023.
As Blossom was fending off cultists by firing stunning heat beams into their ranks, not doing much for long, or punching and kicking at any that were coming close, the cultic axeman had gotten up without her noticing. Shouting a warcry, he held his right hatchet as he charged at Buttercup, attracting the enhanced little girl's attention, who fired a laser beam at his weapon, only to do no damage against the axehead. She fired a second beam to slice it by the handle instead, but then felt sharp when the cultic axeman hacked her in the thigh with his left hatchet – the right hatchet had been a distraction.
Buttercup's cry of pain had attracted Blossom's attention. She sailed across the room and delivered a flying kick to the back of the axeman's head, who collapsed.
"Are you alright?" Blossom asked.
"Just leave me alone!" Buttercup replied as she was clutching her belly. Blossom couldn't see how bad it was, just that she was bleeding.
Just then, a firebomb exploded right on top of Blossom. Her bow, gear, and uniform were on fire. The nauseating smell of burning petrol was choking. Blossom fired a few infrared beams in retaliation, at point-blank range, dropping a few and pushing back the growing number of cultists.
That was when she felt a sharp pain down her back, and saw Bubbles bowling through her and a few cultists, pushing past them and through the barn at high speeds, crashing through the set of doors on the other end of the stables.
"Bubbles, what are you doing!?" Blossom cried too late as she was long gone. Little did she know that she was extremely lucky. Bubbles had been contemplating stabbing her in the back to remove any chance of her interference in the fairy godmother's affairs. An inkling of kinship and love that Bubbles could still feel in her drug-fueled enraged state had dissuaded her from doing so.
It didn't dissuade her from doing the fairy godmother's bidding to gain further access to her magic though.
In the meantime, Buttercup had begun escalating her attacks, graduating to emitting cutting beams at the cultists. Blossom could see curious children poking their head out of the stalls. There was the smell of smoke and burnt hay. Looking around her, she saw that the firebomb hadn't just set fire to her. It was spreading very quickly over the hay and wooden structure of the stables. Even the cultists could see what could go wrong with this. Some of them, especially those around the back of the cultist group, was already running away.
Another cultist surged forward, taking swipes with his Duranium machete but Blossom was able to dodge them all and retaliate with an uppercut. Her attacker was thrown backward, but he did not hit the floor as he was buoyed up by his friends behind him.
Time was running out. The fire was spreading and children were screaming.
"Buttercup, we need to save the kids!" Blossom appealed to her sister. But from what her Dad had revealed about Buttercup, she knew that she would be too 'messed up' to care – one could only hope that she would. "They'll burn in the fire!"
"I'll fight the cultists. You do that," Buttercup offered, not because she cared about the children – they could burn to death in this fire for all she cared – but because in this mess, she sensed an opportunity.
"Thanks! We'll have to find Bubbles later – she's gone!" Blossom said before zooming off to save the kids in the stables.
"She could die and I won't care," Buttercup muttered to herself, not so much afraid that Blossom would hear, but she was more cautious than ever about losing favor with her Dad – even if it looked like she had squandered most of it by being discovered. She still couldn't believe they were angry at her for killing the woman. After all, wasn't she a cultist? By extension, it'd made her baby a cultist and therefore an enemy – she was willing to bet that people like General Blackwater and Captain Butch would agree with her, though in reality, even Captain Butch, a man who would put the entire population of an Afghan village before a firing squad, would think twice about committing infanticide.
Going into a stall, Blossom found a boy who was just lying on the floor, dazed. His eyes were red and he was foaming in the mouth. She could draw parallels with Bubbles. But how could a normal boy be like Bubbles? Without the time to think about it, she decided that he was a cultist because of his eyes, but one who was young and deserved saving. 'Kids make mistakes,' she knew her Dad would say if he was in the stables.
Picking up the boy's chain, she snapped it in two before carrying him fireman-style. As she flew towards the exit, she looked back at Buttercup to check on her.
She had been sweeping her laser across the cultic horde, enduring bullets and further melee attacks from the braver or crazier of the cultists.
Outside, she laid the boy down. In the distance, she saw that the detectives were coming with the talking dog. But she had no time to wait and greet them. Flying back in, she started freeing more children, some who could run on their own and others who, being drugged like the first child, needed lifting.
After rescuing a few more children, Blossom had stopped to check on Buttercup.
She was streaked with blood – and most of them weren't hers. The cultists, barring a few, were in full retreat. Blossom shouldered her MP5 and fired a few rounds to help her unstable sister out, putting them in shoulders and arms as she didn't want the cultists to die in the fire too – they needed their legs to run. Buttercup turned around in her hovering position.
"I didn't need your help!" she shouted ungratefully.
"But I need yours! There are still children inside and we need to get them out!" Blossom said. The fire was absolutely raging, and there was still crying and screaming inside.
Wordlessly, Buttercup flew into one of the stalls after giving Blossom the stink eye. She then freed a girl by cutting her chain using her laser beam. She carried the girl, about twice her physical age, roughly by an arm and flew her out of the stables. When they were out, she nonchalantly tossed her down next to the others.
With Buttercup's unwilling help, Blossom was able to evacuate the children quickly. But where Buttercup was unwilling to help with the children, she was hostile with her next request.
"We need to get the cultists out too," Blossom said to Buttercup. At this, Buttercup folded her arms and just gave her the most spiteful glance she could work up. It didn't take any effort at all.
"They'll die in there!" Blossom pleaded with her stubborn tomboy sister.
"Fine. You're the leader, 'sis'," Buttercup said sarcastically before flying back into the stables with her, picking up cultists, two at a time. She hated it - she hated that she had to swallow her hate and ego and needs to clean up a mess that would have been swallowed up by the fire anyway, that she was back to being totally subjugated by Blossom where previously, she didn't even have much space to do whatever she wanted to begin with.
Outside, they began depositing the cultists as far away from the children as possible, where the detectives, talking dog and their gathering colleagues could hold them.
Blossom, in particular, was trying to do this as fast as she could - Bubbles was still missing, and she was dreadfully terrified of what she might be up to without her supervision. Being incredibly unpredictable these days, that she could be killing bad guys wasn't the only concern she had.
The City of Townsville. Outskirts. Gladys' Stables (Defunct)
15 FEB (Wednesday) 1989. 2035.
Bubbles had flown over to a second stable after ditching her sisters in the first. She had traced the cultists, who ran in the other direction, some of who fired wild shots at her on sight, into the second stable. She knew that the object of her fairy godmother-given mission was there. Her magical benefactor had given her some very specific details and instructions.
Swooping through the entrance of the second stable, she crashed into a cultist who happened to be in the way. He was dashed so hard against the concrete floor that ripples of cracks erupted throughout his body. He was a bloody smear on the floor after that, instantly dead, while Bubbles continued flying through the stables when she saw that it was empty of cultists. There was another door leading deeper into the building. She went through there and turned to look, the second stables being L-shaped.
A group of red-robed cultists was huddled around something. They turned around as soon as they heard the whooshing of wind and the banging of doors preceding her landing. One of them came forward, a man who appeared familiar and yet impossible to place by Bubbles - not that she was of sound mind to place anyone.
"Bubbles!" the man greeted her - how did he know her name? He didn't look like a cultist, especially after he'd thrown off his red robes, revealing a trench coat underneath. He pulled out a familiar badge with an eagle motif to it. "Jackard - USDO intelligence. I need you to stand down - what's wrong with your eyes?"
Jackard. Bubbles thought she'd seen him once or twice before, among policemen and USDO soldiers.
"Anyway, we got him - the leader of the Cult of His Promise. The guy who attacked Blossom back in that cinema?" the man claimed. Bubbles looked past him to see the cult leader. The man had long hair, scraggly beard, a permanent, malicious smile on his face that persisted despite his capture. He was surrounded by turncoat cultists, men, and women who Jackard had recruited based on their regret in joining the cult.
Bubbles recognized the cult leader. A USDO security officer had visited them soon after the Battle of Silver Age Cinema to brief them on him. But it wasn't the USDO briefing that informed her the most about the cult leader.
She had to do it. The look on the friendly cultists' eyes said it all. They knew about Bubbles' secret. Bubbles started forward, unslinging her MP5 and shouldering it.
"Bubbles, what are you doing?" Chief Intelligence Officer Jackard asked, confused. Bubbles aimed her weapon at him. "Bubbles! Stand down! Stand-" And she unloaded something like eight or ten rounds at him. She saw blood spurting front and back of his head. The rest of her rounds had penetrated his torso. He fell, and Bubbles turned her submachine gun on the friendly cultists, firing on them at full auto, and when her SMG was out, she leaped at them, stabbing him in the stomach with the Duranium knife she'd pulled from her shoulder before slitting it partially and leaving the knife there, letting the cultist try in vain to keep his entrails in as he collapsed to his knees.
She threw another cultic defector through a wooden pillar so hard that the pillar broke in two, and the red-robed man looked even worse. Grabbing another by the neck, she flew up higher and threw him down on the stump of the broken pillar, impaling him on the stake-like wood. Had Bubbles been sober, she would have thought that his scream was horrifying, if the sight of it wasn't enough.
The cultists tried to fight back, but it was like confronting a force of nature; like trying to blow up an earthquake with mines or sniping out a tornado with a hunting rifle. Bubbles yanked the rifle of a female cultist away and shoved the barrel through her throat. She sliced another cultist with her nails, cutting deep into his face, bursting eyeball and lacerating flesh. This one had only stumbled, being slightly more resilient, so she leaped onto him and bit his throat off, bathing herself in his blood. But there wasn't time to enjoy the fruits of her labor - picking up the downed cultist's bolt-action rifle, she swung its stock at another, smashing both his skull and the stock into splinters.
One more cultist remained, and he chose to run. Bubbles didn't let him. Flying up to him, she landed on his back, clenched her thighs tightly around his neck as he was screaming and flew backward, yanking him back and slamming him down on the concrete floor. Putting her arms around his head and face, she jerked at it so hard that he was beheaded instantly - so quickly that the cultist did not know even after his head was cleanly separated from his body.
Bubbles stood up and held the head up before her, fascinated by what she had done. She giggled when the man's eyes were still open and staring at her, still alive, but that had only lasted a few seconds more. She thought it was funny - like something out of a Saturday cartoon show. When the last cultist's eyes shut themselves for the last time, she dropped the head and returned to the cult leader tied to a chair.
"Are you here to kill me?" he asked calmly, his smile still plastered on his face even if he was facing apparent death. Without saying a word, Bubbles flew up to him, grabbed the rope coiled around his body and pulled them apart, snapping them as if they were made of paper. The cult leader shrugged them off. Bubbles continued to free him by digging into the rope around his ankles with her fingernails and cutting them off that way.
The cult leader stood up when his legs were free. Bubbles continued to work on him, floating around him and biting off the ropes binding his wrists together. When it was off, the cult leader turned to face her. Bubbles, startled for some reason, backed away whilst hovering.
"Why are you helping me?" the cult leader asked, still maintaining his royal, high and mighty holy savior-type demeanor.
The City of Townsville. Suburbs. The House
15 FEB (Wednesday) 1989. 0006.
"You will find a friend of mine in Gladys' stables. Leopold is his name. He has long, black hair and is heavily bearded. His eyes will be glowing red like yours. He is in the Cult of His Promise, and so he wears a red robe. He will be betrayed by his friends. You will rescue him by killing the betrayers – they are evil for double-crossing a man they regard as their friend and leader, after all," the fairy godmother instructed as Bubbles was still on her knees, enjoying the effects of her latest dose of His Secret 2.0. "You will tell him that-"
The City of Townsville. Outskirts. Gladys' Stables (Defunct)
15 FEB (Wednesday) 1989. 2035.
"The Master protects. You will continue to serve him as you did," Bubbles relayed the fairy godmother's message to the cult leader. "I am now on His side, and so I am at your disposal."
The cult leader's smile grew wider if it was even possible.
"I understand my vision now," the messianic-looking cultic figure said vaguely. From within his disheveled robes, he pulled his pendant out. On the pendant is an icon resembling some kind of a demon.
"Bubbles, do not shy away from this – you will be kept safe this way. Thank the Master for me," the cult leader, Leopold, said.
"What do you mean?" Bubbles asked, but she got her answer in an unexpected way – an immediate way. Putting up his hand, a kind of hellish red lightning shot out from it, streaking to Bubbles and striking her in the head. She screamed in pain, clutching the sides of her head, the electrical-like red energy so excessive that it was lighting up her eyes and mouth. When it was over, she dropped to the ground, lying on her side.
"Make no mistake, Bubbles. He is pleased that you are on His side," she could hear Leopold's voice echoing in her ear. "Now rest. Rest, my dear. You've done well."
For a few seconds, she blinked, remembering a random day at the playground with Dad and Blossom and Buttercup for some reason, before everything went dark.
The City of Townsville. Outskirts. Gladys' Stables (Defunct)
15 FEB (Wednesday) 1989. 2042.
"Bubbles? Bubbles?" A voice was calling out to her. Bubbles could hear it was she was just coming to. She opened her eyes, but her vision consisted of a hotchpotch of colors. She thought she could make out splotches of red, orange, pink and beige. "Bubbles, are you alright?"
But when everything came into focus, she saw that it was Blossom kneeling over her, shaking her awake. Where she was previously on her side, her sister had shifted her to her back. Bubbles sat up when she remembered the pain that came with the red lightning that had knocked her out before. She then remembered Leopold, the cult leader.
"Bubbles, you're alright!" Blossom exclaimed, glad that she had come to. Bubbles, however, wasn't too thrilled - instead, she was looking around the stables, somehow expecting the cult leader to stick around despite the fact that he was supposed to be gone. After all, she couldn't afford to have her secret exposed.
"I… guess I am," Bubbles said. But thankfully, there was no sign of him. Instead, there were dead bodies all around her, the result of her drug-fueled outburst.
"What happened to you?" Blossom asked. That was when Bubbles understood why Leopold had knocked her out. It was the perfect alibi, though she didn't know the word for it.
"I was fighting the cultists, but I guess they were too strong for me…" Bubbles lied, looking around her. Blossom studied her surroundings as well. "I had to kill some of them. I had no choice."
"I guess you had to…" Blossom shrugged her shoulders. Although she found the loss of life distasteful, the fact that Bubbles was lying on the floor, unconscious, seemed to justify the need for killing. She thought that Bubbles was nigh-unstoppable in her BerXerker fury - that the cultists managed to subdue her even in that state might have meant that she was in real danger of dying herself. Still, something did not add up, though Blossom wasn't sure what it was. Trusting her sister to tell the truth, however, Blossom did not think about it any further.
"Why did you come here without us anyway?" Buttercup questioned Bubbles, not out of a need to find out the truth, but out of spite towards her sister for beating her up a couple of days ago. Today, it didn't help that Bubbles had left her alone in the first stable when her help could have made things easier - she was injured again as a result. She hated getting stitches. "We needed your help and you just left us!"
"I lost control… I'm sorry…" Bubbles lied.
"You're always saying the same thing!" Buttercup asserted.
"Forget it, Buttercup," Blossom said. "Things are fine now. It could have been worse. It's not as if she ran away. She was fighting."
"What's the difference? She left us!" Buttercup continued to press on.
Detective Mullens, Wednesday and Olivia were coming up to them as Blossom and Buttercup argued and Bubbles was just sitting on the floor, looking miserable in one of her more lucid moments - which were becoming less and less common the more she used the fairy godmother's magic.
"Where's Mister Talker?" Bubbles asked. She hadn't spoken to the talking dog for a day or two, and already, she was missing him. The dog's companionship had been unconditional, and it was a pal, completely non-judgemental.
"He's entertaining the kids you three saved," Olivia said. "Good job."
"It's just the two of us," Buttercup retorted, still mad at Bubbles for her abandonment and previous perceived errors. "Bubbles didn't do any saving."
"Stop being mean to me!" Bubbles shouted angrily all of a sudden, her eyes turning red again, shocking everyone concerned.
"Or what!?" Buttercup retaliated. Blossom had to get between the two of them.
"Okay, break it up, the both of you," Detective Mullens said, pulling Bubbles back. She shrugged off his hands violently, and the detective, for the first time, had to wonder if he was going to get a bloody nose out of it. But thankfully, Bubbles' eyes had gone back to baby blue once more, which he used as an indicator of her mood.
"You know, Buttercup, Bubbles didn't exactly do nothing," Detective Wednesday said unexpectedly to Buttercup. Pointing behind him, he continued: "She made sure there were no cultists here in this second stable, so the kids here are safe. Safer, in fact, than the kids in the first stable. That's not to say that you and Blossom didn't do anything either, of course. We've all done something here." Even more unexpectedly, Jack Wednesday cracked a smile, and for good reason. All in all, there were thirty-eight children of all ages and both gender who'd been spared a life in a crazy cult, whatever that entailed.
And he bloody well knew what it entailed. He'd done the research, seen the sights in the manor and the stables. He hadn't told the Girls yet, and he didn't want to as they were children themselves too. He'd gone below the basement of the manor. They'd dug deep, built some kind of a chamber down there, made an altar. And there was blood on that altar. And shackles. Where the bodies were, however, he did not know. He would rather focus on finding the living.
Then there were the children who were still breathing. Some of them displayed signs of drug abuse. Judging by the setting and the fact that the children were literally chained where they were, based on none other than their accounts, the drugs were pumped into them by force. The cult had been using them as human guinea pigs for testing the drug.
"That's nice to know," Blossom smiled at Bubbles, but Bubbles wasn't smiling - deep inside, she wasn't proud of what she had done. Saving the children wasn't her intention - getting more drugs was, and in her selfish pursuit of artificial, liquid joy, she'd inadvertently helped the cult. She wasn't blind nor completely out of it in her drug-induced state.
"I guess…" Bubbles simply said.
"Say, did the three of you see a man here? White guy with long black hair and beard? Same guy seen in the cineplex?" Detective Mullens asked, pulling out a polaroid with a slightly outdated visage of the cult leader himself. He didn't look much different years ago. The beard was shorter. "We had a tip-off that he'd be here, from some very reliable sources."
Blossom shrugged her shoulders, followed by Buttercup.
"What about you, Bubbles?" Detective Mullens asked, pushing the photo closer to her face. "Did you see him around here?"
Bubbles didn't want to lie, but she knew she had to. Afraid that the detective would see that, she closed her eyes and shook her head.
"You sure?" the detective asked. His source was very reliable; he had never failed him before.
"I've never seen him, okay!?" Bubbles shouted, feeling harried. The worst part was that the detective was right to have done that. Mullens stared at her, looking like he had unearthed something.
"Alright, alright, don't get your pantyhose tied up," Mullens said, before surveying the destruction Bubbles had wrought. "What did I tell ya? You really need to dial it back a little."
"They were hurting her really badly, Mister Mullens," Blossom defended her sister. "She was lying on the floor when I found her."
"Unconscious, you mean?" Mister Mullens inquired. Blossom nodded with a cute 'uh-huh'.
Something just wasn't adding up for the detective. It was a feeling he was used to in his career, but not one he would care to stomach for long – and his answer to that was usually some good ol' fashioned detective work.
