Chapter 47: No Going Back (Part 2)

The City of Townsville. Sky. Towards Central District.

19 FEB (Sunday) 1989. 0857.

"Bubbles, slow down a bit!" Blossom shouted at the top of her lungs at Bubbles, who was forging far ahead, nearly out of earshot. It was by dint of her superior lung capacity that she was able to shout loud enough. The winter wind was especially strong this day, and both Blossom and Buttercup were unable to extend their glider wings with the former boosting the latter and the latter's arm around the former's neck. They were slower as a result, and without their glider wings, they were spending more effort steadying their flight path.

Bubbles slowed to roughly their same speed, only to look back with hellish red eyes as if with ill intent, a frown on her face that scared even the freshly-empowered Buttercup - something even the tomboy couldn't manage.

"I think we should stay away from her," Buttercup mumbled, afraid that Bubbles would hear.

"You really shouldn't have followed us, Buttercup," Blossom turned to her and said. "You're still weak and so you need rest. I didn't even think you'd get your powers back. Dad said you wouldn't."

"She's getting away!" Buttercup exclaimed. By the time Blossom looked at Bubbles, her streak of baby blue streak (with a red core) was all that was left.

"We need to hurry!" Blossom screamed and pushed herself to maximum speed. "Fly faster, Buttercup!"

"I'm trying!" Buttercup shouted. But they couldn't catch up with Bubbles. Despite the dark sky, they couldn't even see Bubbles' X-energy contrail anymore. "Why is she in such a big hurry anyway?"

"Oh no…" Blossom uttered when Buttercup had made her realize Bubbles' intentions. "We need to hurry too! She'll hurt lots of people if we don't stop her!"

There was no other reason for it. Blossom knew intimately how it was like to be really, really angry. Whenever she was, all she ever wanted to do was to scream at people and hit things, even hurt people, like Bubbles - something she had regretted time and time again. Something she knew that Bubbles would regret in the future, for a long time to come.

What she couldn't understand, however, was the reason why Bubbles would be set off like that. Blossom thought she'd been very accommodating and serious about mending their sisterhood. She thought she'd showed it well enough with her carefully chosen words and playtime activities, which was the first thing on her mind even before breakfast. What had gone wrong?


The City of Townsville. Central District. City Hall.

19 FEB (Sunday) 1989. 0857.

Amid blaring orders in the radio from the various flight control towers to control Bubbles, Blossom and Buttercup flew towards the City Hall, where the emergency was. By the time they reached the governmental building, there was a hole that looked like it was made by a wrecking ball, but they both knew who made it.

Flying through the hole, they could immediately see for themselves how right Blossom was - though it had gone way further than what Blossom's innocent mind could conceive.

Bubbles stood in the center of a lobby area, her back facing them, her MP5 held in one hand, smoking. Her legs, her arms, and her gun were covered in blood. But that wasn't the worst part. The floor was completely carpeted with them - with whoever had started the emergency in the first place. Bodies were torn up, bisected, blown up, split apart, intestines spilling, blood streaming, pooling around the mat of torn flesh, organs and skin. Heads had rolled, and this time in plentiful quantities, all over the place.

Blossom and Buttercup landed a distance from her, afraid to come close. Had this been a week ago, Blossom wouldn't have believed it - Her! Afraid of Bubbles! Buttercup had her own submachinegun drawn - without her powers fully restored, she had become fully dependent on conventional weapons. The leader sister signaled for her to keep her weapon down.

"Bubbles?" Blossom called out to the blonde enhanced little girl. There were beads of red in her hair, too. "What did you do?"

"What I'm supposed to do," Bubbles said, her back still facing them. Her gun still smoking. Blood still dripping down her vest, her hands. Her gloves were torn again. She had been clawing at whoever the carpet of human remains used to be. "Fighting crime."

"But this is not the way to do it," Blossom said in a hushed tone as she was afraid that speaking too loud might set her off again.

"Then HOW am I supposed to DO IT!?" Bubbles screamed anyway, whirling around and marching up to them, her eyes flashing red and bloodshot to boot. Her face contorted by hatred. "Isn't THIS what YOU want!?" The way she was acting right now had reminded her of Buttercup, but much, much worse, and Buttercup was supposed to be 'messed up' in the head.

"Bubbles, I think there's something wrong with you," Blossom finally said - expressing the epiphany that was going on in her mind. If Buttercup wasn't right in the head and Bubbles was much worse, then she must be something worse than being 'sick in the mind', as Dad had explained in simple terms. Somehow, she was starting to think that it couldn't be her BerXerker power. None of their other powers had that effect on them, no matter how deadly they were.

"Gee, you think?" Buttercup had muttered unwisely, the lack of wisdom in it topped only by the volume of her mutter; both Blossom and Bubbles heard it.

"There's ALWAYS something WRONG with ME!" Bubbles screamed in what was becoming her usual manner: unhinged and aggressive to the extreme. "NO! There's something WRONG with YOU! BOTH OF YOU!" She took aggressive steps towards Blossom, who backed away a few steps. Buttercup raised her MP5, putting it to Bubbles' head in the hopes that it would scare her as it used to, but Bubbles didn't even react to it.

"Bubbles - stop!" Blossom pleaded with her sister. "We talked about it yesterday! Please - w-we're a family…"

"NO! I WON'T STOP!" Bubbles screamed madly, knocking away Buttercup's MP5 and standing closer to Blossom. "I'll NEVER stop! I CAN'T stop! I can't! From now on, I'm flying ALONE!" With that, Bubbles flew back through the hole she made with a louder explosion of energy, rather than the usual, quiet and even soothing 'pew' sound. She had disappeared so quickly that they couldn't tell where she was going.

Before Blossom and Buttercup could give chase, however, a familiar voice had called out to them.

"Powerpuff Girls!" Mayor Wilford had emerged out of a door leading to some kind of a lounge area, Miss Bellum and four mayoral bodyguards, with bandoleers thrown over their suits and armed with heavy weapons, behind him. He didn't look glad at all to see them. "I need to have a word with both of you. Now!"

"Powerpuff Girls?" Buttercup muttered, confused.

"That's our team name now," Blossom clarified with her sister.

"It looks like the emergency's over, Mister Mayor," Blossom said. Despite being far from Bubbles' handiwork, some of the blood had managed to get under her boots. She made a face and side-stepped the stream of blood flowing towards her. "Even if it didn't end the way I want it to…"

One of the mayoral bodyguards had gone up to the pile of dead bodies. Kneeling down and setting aside his M16, he rolled one of the more intact bodies over. He looked like he recognized some of them. The mayor and his USDO contact, Bellum, turned to look, and they, too, had that face, the kind one would make when someone was familiar.

"Over? Over!?" Mayor Wilford turned to Blossom and exclaimed all of a sudden, incredulous and angry. He stamped his cane on the marble floor. His one good monocled eye was glaring so hard at her that she thought it might emit laser the next moment. "Your sister, Bubbles Utonium, is out of control! She's worse than these... suicide minions the Lombardi had sent!"

Blossom's eyes drifted to the floor. Her hands felt like they didn't belong anywhere all of a sudden, so she kept them folded over one another in front of her. It felt as if her past was coming back to haunt her again. The mayor's harsh, loud words had reminded her of Highway 13, and how he had dressed them down for wounding over sixty civilians and accidentally killed several of them while chasing a few criminals in a car.

"Three of my bodyguards were out here, Blossom Utonium!" the mayor shouted at her, jabbing his crooked finger, which resembled a twig, into her collarbone. He was surprisingly strong for a man born in the previous century. "You are supposed to be her leader, her commander!"

"I know, I've been trying to-" Blossom couldn't finish a sentence when she was cut off.

"Remember that surprise I mentioned a couple of weeks ago? I have half a mind right now to cancel it! And it's a huge, huge surprise too!" the mayor reprimanded the little girl.

"No!" Blossom exclaimed - she had been looking forward to the surprise, thinking about it almost every day.

"Just go! I don't think your crazy lunatic of a sister is done yet. I don't want to hear it - actions are louder, so go and stop her before I do it my way!" he said as he stamped his cane on the ground harder.

Blossom and Buttercup scrambled off before Mayor Wilford could say anything more, and took flight, with Blossom wiping tears from her eyes.


The City of Townsville. Sky. On Patrol.

19 FEB (Sunday) 1989. 0907.

Much of the day had been spent trying to catch up to Bubbles. The flight control people had been trying to help, too. The plan was simple: they would issue a mission over the radio on the Powerpuff Girls' general frequency. All three of them would hear it. Mission parameters would be exaggerated to lure Bubbles to the established location. Externally-issued missions from the TPD and other federal and local agencies were rejected and Project Powerpuff was officially brought offline until the matter was resolved.

Bubbles, however, simply did not want to be found. But she had left a trail of breadcrumbs in her wake. Bloody, gigantic breadcrumbs, smeared against sidewalks and brick walls and lawns. Blossom, feeling responsible for the citizens Bubbles had assaulted, attended to all of the victims. Those who would talk told the same stories. An office worker had littered and was given a savage beating for it. He had to be taken to the hospital for a few broken bones. A kid whose basketball had smashed a window by accident was punished by being thrown through another window. He suffered numerous cuts and bruises as a result and had to be taken to the hospital as well. A woman who was dragging her son across a street had the snot beaten out of her. Blossom had gotten the story from the son, not the mother. The mother was still unconscious with blood pooling beneath her head on the concrete when paramedics were attending to them.

All these minor incidents, little more than vigilante justice, were perpetrated by Bubbles while she was flying from one operation to another. The criminals who happened to be found during the operations had suffered worse. None of them survived their encounter with the out-of-control Bubbles, and all of them had to be scraped off the floor, wall, ceiling or furniture after she was done with them. The only good news – and miracle – was that no other innocent lives were lost.


The City of Townsville. Tenement Area. Long's Apartment.

19 FEB (Sunday) 1989. 1318.

It had been hours and five operations, and Blossom and Buttercup were still unable to catch up with Bubbles. The trail of injured civilians and mutilated criminals, torn apart as if by animals or heavy industrial machinery, was becoming bloodier every step of the way.

A flight control officer had put it down to misfortune, as they had to select real crimes-in-progress to act as bait for Bubbles, most of which wouldn't happen anywhere close to each other.

The next one, however, was therefore fortuitous. A major case of arson which resulted in a burning apartment building, and it was just a few minute's flight from where Blossom and Buttercup was. Still, they sped towards the burning building as fast as they could, afraid that they might miss Bubbles again - which would be a waste as they hadn't had such an advantage the entire day.

While they were on the way, someone else's voice came through the radio.

"This is Agent Blake to Blossom. I'm speaking on a private one-to-one channel. Do you copy? Over," Blake said, his voice almost a whisper, discreet, as if afraid that someone else would hear.

"Mister Blake, I'm here. What's going on?" Blossom replied, immediately sensing that something wasn't quite right - besides the fact that what was supposed to be her sweetest timid sister had gone ballistic on practically everyone.

"Detective Mullens and Olivia contacted me just this morning. There's a reason why Bubbles has been acting this way, and it's more serious than I thought," Agent Blake said, and Blossom found it odd that he wouldn't reveal the specifics. Her thought process was simpler though: Why all the mystery? "We need you to bring her to a secure location for neutralization and extraction. Somewhere she wouldn't suspect a thing. How about the roof of the Townsville Mall in Downtown?"

"Wait, Mister Blake - isn't Bubbles acting this way because of her powers?" Blossom asked - while she had suspected something else, she had no idea about the cause. By now, Buttercup had caught on to the fact that Blossom was talking to someone special, and not some random flight control officer.

"No. It's… I will discuss it with you once we have Bubbles," Blake said over the radio. "For now, I just need you to get Bubbles to the Townsville Mall. Can you do that?"

"Yes…" Blossom said.

"Is Buttercup with you? I have reports from my friends in the towers that she is," Blake on the radio said.

"Yes. She's getting her powers back," Blossom said. "But she's weak…"

"Hey!" Buttercup exclaimed behind her.

"Good. We'll need all the help we can get," Blake said. "I'll figure something out for her. Carry out the plan, over and out."

Shortly after, Blossom and Buttercup had reached Long's Apartment. The building, which was about ten floors high, was ablaze. The fire had reached the upper floors. The fire department had arrived with several fire engines, and firefighters were dragging hoses out of their trucks, spraying water at the lower floors to put the raging fire there out. Ambulances were rushing into the scene. Crowds of bystanders stood far behind, some watching with shock, others with morbid interest. Some were crying. Some looked like they were evacuated from the building as they were poorly dressed for the winter and looked roughened up by the emergency. The police had formed cordons to hold them back.

Before Blossom and Buttercup could land, Bubbles had streaked towards them, giving them a dirty look when she hovered up close. An explosion in Long's Apartment distracted the three of them, and they turned to look at the scene. It wasn't the first time they had seen a fire going out of control. All three of them descended down next to the firefighter giving the orders on the ground. An older man with a bushy, gray mustache.

"It's the Powerpuff Girls!" the fire chief's aide exclaimed. The both of them looked up as the city's most celebrated little girls came down next to them.

"Powerpuff Girls?" Bubbles spat - perhaps not all was lost since she still had the capacity for curiosity.

"It's our new team name, Bubbles," Blossom said, hoping that it would distract Bubbles somewhat from the crazy inside her that Blake had refused to explain. "It's nice, don't you think?" She was ignored, of course.

"How can we help, Mister Fireman?" Blossom offered as she was hovering at the chest level of the fire chief. The firefighters around him were still unable to believe what they were seeing - most had never seen them in person, and only knew about them from the television or news.

"Get back to work!" the fire chief screamed at his men, waving a hand at them. His men skittered away, returning to their job on hand. Then, turning to Blossom and her sisters, he continued: "There are still some people trapped on the tenth floor - you can see some of them at the window. We estimated fifteen of them, even up to twenty, and some of them might still be deep inside the apartment - trapped or fainted from the smoke."

Several men and women had broken through the police cordon to see the Powerpuff Girls, despite the officers' best efforts.

"Please, my husband and baby boy are still inside! Please, help them!" one of the women screamed, followed by the others.

Fifteen people were in danger. Maybe even up to twenty. Blossom felt that it was impossible - they would have to save up to twenty people between her sisters and her, and one of them was still weak and the other was out of control and even antagonistic.

"This is Flight Control Five, you are cleared to render humanitarian aid, but keep in mind our primary objective: secure Bubbles. Do your best, over," the Girls' radio crackled and the flight control officer in the area said. Blossom turned to her sisters immediately. She knew from the raging fire and explosions and screaming that time was running out.

"Buttercup, I need you to carry the people at the window down to the ground," Blossom said to her recovering tomboy sister, then turned to Bubbles - who wasn't there anymore. Alarmingly, she was already flying at full speed towards the building, her corrupted baby blue streak forming a line that bystanders wowed at; they had no idea what was really going on. "BUBBLES! Stop!"

But it was too late. Smashing through the brick wall of the burning building, Bubbles began her 'rescue work' solo.

"Buttercup, let's go!" Blossom ordered, and together with her remaining sister, began flying up to the higher floors of the apartment building, taking people and lowering them down to the ground four in total at a time. There were only six men, women, and children at the window. Ascending back up to the top floor, they flew through the windows and dived back into the inferno. There were more explosions inside, but they didn't sound like they were caused by fire.

Bubbles. It must be her. Blossom could only hope that she was rescuing people and not… something else.

"Let's split up and save anyone we can!" Blossom ordered. She grabbed Buttercup by the shoulder before she dashed off. "And if you find Bubbles, stay with her."

The fire was spreading quickly. The Girls worked even faster, breaking through doors and flying through apartments for a quick pass. The tenth floor was empty, and it made sense, as those hoping to be rescued were banking it on being reached by ladders.

On the ninth floor, Buttercup found a babysitter and her charge, unconscious from inhalation on the floor. Before she could reach them, a wall came down on her and she screamed. Blossom could barely hear it, but she did. Rushing to her, through fire licking the walls and reaching even the ceiling, she lifted the entire section of concrete, plaster, and rebar off of her. Buttercup was covered with fire such that Blossom had to help tear off her flaming gear and uniform while Buttercup was howling in pain.

Bubbles was still somewhere in the building, along with more citizens in need.

"Buttercup, take them and go! I'll find Bubbles!" Blossom ordered, and Buttercup was inclined to listen, but only because she didn't want to linger in the uncomfortably hot burning building any longer, nor risk getting fire on her once more – while the Girls were immune to burning or heat injuries of any kind, it was still a painful, uncomfortable ordeal.

Heaving one of the survivors, an eight-year-old girl, on her back and picking up the babysitter, Buttercup flew off, leaving Blossom alone with the aggressively roaring fires all around her.

The explosions were still happening one after another in the building, sequentially. Blossom could tell that there was an intelligence behind it – albeit a dangerously compromised and damaged intelligence. Taking in a deep breath of burning, smoky air, Blossom started hovering towards it.

It was like being in the belly of a dragon. Blossom had read about them in fairy tales. And the explosions were like the beating of its heart, and as she flew towards it, sometimes breaking through fragile doors and walls, it got louder, until finally…

"Bubbles!" Blossom called out to her sister just after she had broken through another wall. Bubbles didn't speak – her new self didn't like to speak, it seemed. Instead, she glared at her. "What are you doing!?"

"Bubbles?" Blossom repeated herself. Bubbles, however, didn't change her tune. Curling up her hands into fists, her knuckles sung their bony threats. Blossom had forgotten how to breathe then.

"Someone help! Please!" the voice of a boy, not even seven, resounded in the building, loud enough for them to hear. Both Blossom and Bubbles turned to it. Whoever the voice belonged to was clearly distressed, afraid. Come to think of it, it sounded like part of the roaring of the flame, except it'd been the boy all along. Blossom caught a glimpse of Bubbles' eyes - it'd turned blue again, and without another word, Bubbles dashed towards the boy and Blossom followed.

The sight of Bubbles recovering from her BerXerker fury had filled her with hope. Could Blake be wrong?

Blossom could barely catch up with Bubbles - in her fervor, she was fast. Within seconds, they came by two shapes in the fire - and they had to jump through a pond of licking yellow, orange and red to get to them.

The sight was ghastly. The ceiling had come down on two persons - a man and a boy. The man's lower half was crushed by the ceiling. The boy's leg was trapped beneath. The man was completely charred beyond recognition. The boy was getting there, with his burned T-shirt stuck to his skin, half his face either charcoal black or gory red, much of his body too. He had barely any hair left.

Bubbles took the boy by both his arms as he cried in both pain and relief. Blossom pulled the piece of ceiling off of the boy's leg, instantly freeing him. His leg was a mangled mess - pale, ashen-white bones poking out in multiple places, out of charred flesh, bent like a fossilized tree branch.

Cradling the boy, Bubbles began running, herself burning - though the fire wasn't hurting her, just causing her some pain. Blossom followed, and overtook her, clearing rubble that happened to be in the way, making their path easier for Bubbles to get through. The boy coughed and vomited on the way. Sensing the urgency to get the boy to safety and some help, Blossom began blasting holes through walls with both fists and heat beams, making an expressway through wall after wall until…

They were able to jump out of the building and fly their way down to the ground, where firefighters, paramedics, bystanders, Buttercup and the people she rescued waited. The firefighters were quick to put them out with fire extinguishers. While Blossom's uniform and gear had remained largely intact, Bubbles' was another story, as they were no longer recognizable. Flakes were falling off her.

"P-p-power…puff…" the boy in Bubbles' arms muttered as she set him down on an ambulance gurney wheeled in quickly by a pair of paramedics. "Always… wanted to… see…" Numerous eyes were on him, and everyone knew that those were his last words when his one good eye closed and never opened again. The mother ran up to the charred boy, hugging him.

Bubbles' eyes were stuck on the dead boy. Blossom stared at her, her eyes misting up, worried too if this tragedy was going to set her off anew.

The mother's eyes soon turned to Bubbles, full of raw emotions.

"My son's dead! You put others ahead of him!" the woman screeched, completely out of her mind. "He's just a boy! A BOY! You KILLED him!"

"I- I tried to save him but he was in the fire and…" Bubbles explained incoherently as she floated closer to the woman, hoping for some kind of understanding. "He was all burned up-"

The woman gave her the hardest slap she could manage. "And now I don't even have a proper body to cry over because of you!"

"You're useless! Useless, useless, USELESS!" she screeched, and she had gone on screaming even as Bubbles' eyes were tearing up, a hand shielding a cheek as if she had been struck by a sniper bullet there.

Useless, useless, USELESS!

The words didn't just sting deep, penetrating into her very soul, tearing her nerves into a million different strands. They were like Duranium piranhas, eating away at her rapidly, destroying her, annihilating what little clarity she had left, what little sanity she could retain after taking so many syringes of 'His Secret 2.0'.

'You're useless, Bubbles! Useless, useless, USELESS!' Blossom had screamed at her once, even before the battle at the Silver Age Cinema started. 'Dad told me to forgive you! But you're USELESS!'

Just being reminded of it made Bubbles furious to the point of insanity. Her eyes glowed red anew. Without thinking or even hesitating, she pulled her sidearm out and fired at the woman with gritted, grating teeth. The grieving mother had only time to make a dear-in-the-headlights kind of face - and had Blossom not seen this and wrestled for the gun, she would have shot the woman cleanly through the forehead.

"Bubbles, no!" Blossom screamed as she managed to wrest the pistol from Bubbles' hand and kick her down to the ground. The firearms discharge had sent bystanders scurrying and hollering for help. Police officers at the cordon had drawn their guns and pointed them at the Powerpuff Girls.

"Bubbles, calm down," Blossom tried to reason with her sister. Bubbles flipped herself up to a standing position, looking like she was about to flip out again. Police officers, in the meantime, surrounded them. "Listen to me."

Surprisingly, Bubbles turned to look at Blossom despite looking like she was ready to kill every normal human being around the burning building.

"We can't do this here - just follow me, okay? I know a place where the police won't catch us," Blossom suggested. Bubbles merely glared - having been reminded of Blossom's harsh words in the past, she was at least thinking twice about listening to her again at all. All Blossom knew was that she had a plan - one that would save lives, and put Bubbles where Mister Blake wanted her.

With that, Blossom reached out for Bubbles' hand, and Bubbles let her take it, mainly because there was nothing for her left around the burning building. Together, they blasted off into the sky, flying away from the burning building, with not a single shot fired by the police as they were surprised. Buttercup followed behind them, a towel wrapped around her as much of her uniform was burned off.

After putting enough distance between them and the cops - with enough distance judged by the lack of noise coming from the site of the burning building, Blossom stopped, and the moment she did, Bubbles shrugged her hand off and folded her arms, her eyes still dangerously red. Buttercup was shivering from the cold, with only a towel and a pair of pants and boots that could barely stay on for warmth.

"Buttercup, you look terrible. Go back home and get changed," Blossom ordered her roughest sister first. "You need a rest."

"Gladly - it's cold…" Buttercup agreed and zipped off - though she was slow enough that it took some time for her to get out of earshot - at least in Blossom's view.

"We need to talk," she reached for Bubbles' hand again, only for her to slap it away.

"It's fine if you don't want to hold my hand," Blossom said, but her intention was elsewhere - on the execution of her plan, for instance. "But we can't talk here. We need to keep moving before they catch up with us."