A/N: Sorry it took me forever to upload this one. 7-8 days, last I counted. However, there's a bit of good news in that. It's because what you see in this chapter is less than half of what I've written so far in the past 7-8 days. At first, I had 2000 words that I decided after the fact should belong to a future chapter further down the line, then I wrote something like 6000 words before deciding that I should split things up into a multi-parter. Yeah, in other words, I've written really far ahead. Expect the next couple of chapters to be posted in rapid succession. Merry Christmas!


Chapter 72: Sacrifice (Part 1)

The City of Townsville. Tenements District. Tenements-Slums Border.

01 MAR (Wednesday) 1989. 1221.

"Sorry we had to take you out from your class, Blossom," Detective Mullens said to the leader of the Powerpuff Girls as they strolled through the sidewalk of a street with crumbled curbs and potholes at places. "I know you like to do your ABCs and 123s, but crime is changing now ever since you came on board. They know you're a kid, and some of them thought you'd be less inclined to fight crime during class."

"I hate missing class, but if people need help, I don't mind," Blossom said, hovering beside him.

"Ah! Who needs classes anyway? Math isn't going to help me beat up the bad guys!" Buttercup exclaimed dismissively. She wasn't stupid - quite the opposite of that - but she'd be damned if she was willing to admit that she needed something so insubstantial as alphabets and numbers.

"I'm just glad to see you - and Olivia, and Stanley…" Bubbles added. It managed to coax a smile out of Mullens.

"Yeah, it's been forever since we met - what happened anyway? Why aren't we seeing each other more often?" Blossom asked though she had some ideas of her own. Helping the Amoeba Boys help her fight crime might have something to do with it - but shouldn't good people be on the same side? Even if they weren't friends? Even kids knew how to make it up to one another!

"It's a long story," Olivia said. "We'll talk about that after this is all over." In truth, she knew that it would be difficult to explain politics and the ugly side of law enforcement to the Girls, and she knew that her father had the same thoughts too.

"Rit's not rhat long a story," Stanley the talking dog commented but said nothing more - he disagreed with Olivia's stance, but only because he knew better than the Girls. Bubbles touched down next to him, sensing something negative in him, and began walking next to him with an arm around the large German Shepherd's neck. She thought he was just lonely, but the talking dog appreciated her company all the same.

"What are we doing anyway? Who're we beating up?" Buttercup asked impatiently. She didn't like the conversation they were having. It was too boring, and she wasn't in the center of it.

"Hey! I was just about to ask that!" Blossom retorted. Detective Mullens stopped, his hand going up to her shoulder. They were close to a T-junction. Strangely, the area was bereft of moving vehicles - something that the Girls were beginning to notice.

"The three of you aren't going to like this…" Olivia muttered. She didn't like putting the Powerpuff Girls through the dirty side of law enforcement – and this time, it was quite literal in that sense.

"I don't like the sound of that…" Bubbles mumbled, afraid of what Olivia meant. No one had to explain anything, for when they rounded a corner on the T-junction, they were faced with an open manhole on the streets. The stink came after that after it occurred to the Girls why there were no moving vehicles on the streets and in the area.

"Ewww! Not again!" Blossom exclaimed. "The smell's worse this time too!"

"The bad guys stink!" Buttercup added. "Why do they have to be down there anyway? I'd die if I have to live down there!"

"Yes, they do stink. There were reports of them using the sewers as their personal underground railroad even long before you were born," Detective Mullens explained. "With the three of you kicking their butts every other day, they've started using it more often than ever to move their souvenirs around."

"We're catching on to them," Olivia added. They stopped right beside the manhole. "We're not the only ones flushing them out. Some pals of ours - good officers I know - are doing the same thing. Have at it, kids."

"I hope this is the last time we're going in there…" Blossom said. She couldn't help but pinch her nose as she jumped down the manhole upon reaching it. Everyone was looking down after her, and they saw that she had lit up her eyes and illuminated the chute she was going down at first, then the muck in front of her.

"I'm going to hand them an extra-large knuckle sandwich when I see them!" Buttercup threatened the unseen criminals as she jumped down to follow her leader sister, lighting up her eyes the same way.

"I'll never get the stink off this time…" Bubbles mewled.

"Hey, at least you'll get to enjoy a long bath," Olivia joked.

"That would be nice…" Bubbles said with a faint smile. She was shivering, feeling a little cold but sweating anyway. The smell was making it worse. Without another word, she jumped into the manhole.

It took a lot longer for Mullens, Olivia and Stanley to get down below. In the meantime, the leading detective had gotten the Girls to move forward, towards the crumbling tunnels below the slums. As the Girls crossed over to the sewers of the slums, they noticed that even the infrastructure below had a border between the have-nots and the definitely-have-nots, with steel bars separating the sewers of the two regions. A barred door was supposed to act as a portal that could never be crossed, but the chains and padlocks securing it were snapped open.

"We're on the right track. Must be the smugglers who did it," Mullens explained when Blossom reported the observation on the radio.

And so they went deeper inwards, and deeper, until-

Bang! Someone shot at Blossom, who ducked the moment she saw the glint of metal in the darkness. The Girls scattered, with Bubbles and Buttercup hanging onto the curved walls of the sewage tunnel, but soon, they were darting towards the shooter, with Blossom tackling him and punching him out.

But there were more of them, letting off shots that ricocheted off Girls and masonry. The Girls pursued them.

"What the hell's going on!?" Mullens shouted over the radio. As usual, he and his team had to play catch up. It was the only way, seeing how vulnerable he and his daughter were against even the lightest of weapons.

"There're lots of them!" Blossom reported over the radio. Mullens could hear more from her, though it wasn't intentional on the enhanced little girl's part: "Buttercup, right, Bubbles, left!"

Back to the Girls, the bad guys they were pursuing had retreated deeper into the tunnels, splitting up at a cross junction, necessitating that the Girls split up as well. It wasn't hard to catch up with the bad guys - whoever they were. Blossom was able to knock a second shooter into the brownish water of the sewers, which was when she realized who they were. The second man was wearing red robes.

"Mister Mullens! It's them! It's the cultists!" Blossom screamed into the radio, but before she could say anything more, a hail of bullets struck her, and a few had shredded her radio, which fizzled in its death throes. A group of them had found her, and as soon as she turned her lit-up gaze at them, they fled. "Come back here!"

The lack of communication was the least of her problem when she had cultists to catch, and they'd just turned a corner to her left, which she followed.

In the meantime, Bubbles was being led deeper to the left - which, by coincidence, was to the west. A man was running away from her, popping off wild shots with some kind of small rapid-fire weapon while he was at it. She was feeling feverish and sweaty, but that was the least of her concerns. She could feel it coming back. Delaying her medication wasn't a good idea, but the timing of the operation couldn't be worse.

Making a final push, she landed on top of the shooter before kicking him in the back of the head and cuffing him to a set of railings. Just when she thought it was safe to inject herself with the watered-down His Secret that her Dad called her withdrawal meds, more men, which she noticed were cultists from the red robes, had emerged from further down the tunnel to fire upon her once more.

Buttercup had been doing the same thing, taking out one cultist after another, following them like breadcrumbs. At first, she was doing the right thing because Mullens was around - incapacitating the cultists for retrieval later, but as she got deeper and deeper towards the eastern part of the sewers, she began to care less, and she began questioning her adherence to the 'right' way of doing things. She had been killing criminals even in full view of Blossom recently, so why should she stop now? Could they even arrest all of them and bring them in without some of them escaping?

She'd answered that question by driving her fist through the chest of the next cultist she encountered.

Killing the cultist felt like a reward. The very act of defiance was thrilling - and it was a gift that kept on giving. In the distance, further and deeper into the sewers, a couple of cultists had opened fire on her with pistols. She flew towards them, driven by bloodlust, first smacking away one of the cultists' weapons before smashing her face in. As the second cultist fired on her at point-blank range with futility, Buttercup simply looked at him from head to toe and her laser did the rest, splitting the man down in half vertically. It'd taken lots of energy to do that, but the result was worth it. Buttercup cackled with delight at her 'artwork'.

Yet further ahead was another reward - a woman in red robes, armed with a pair of scimitars. For some reason, she knew - she just knew that the swords were made of Duranium. The glint of the metal had given it away, and the Duranium had shined like never before, in a way that no other metal would do so.

It was different this time, however. Like Little Red Riding Hood, the woman in red ran away, turning a corner to disappear. Buttercup, like the Big Bad Wolf, gave chase, expecting the woman to be sloshing in feces and urine helplessly… Only to find that the woman was faster than she'd thought. Buttercup could just - only just - see her bare heels and robes flitting away in a corner.

"Are you scared, little girl!?" Buttercup yelled sadistically. She liked that she was inspiring fear in the cultic swordswoman - she imagined that she had a reputation in Townsville. Didn't they call her the 'Teeth Collector'? She liked the sound of that, and she'd thought about restarting her jar of teeth, except she'd try to hide it better from Mom and Dad.

Turning the next corner, Buttercup was met with a long corridor. She stopped. It wasn't a sewage corridor. It was like a corridor in her home – the carpet and the walls were exactly the same. Except this corridor was longer. Instead of a cultist, Mom was standing at the end of this corridor instead. It was bright at the end of the corridor, and Mom, in her red dress, looked like an angel.

"Mom?" Buttercup muttered, confused. She landed on the carpet, walking cautiously towards her. Something wasn't right – but how was this happening? Even the stink of the sewers was gone, replaced by Mom's perfume.

Instead of waiting for her, the Mom turned around and started walking away. Buttercup noticed that she was wearing black heels.

"Mom, wait!" Buttercup shouted after her and started running. The figure at the end of the corridor merely turned and laughed, beckoning for her to follow.

There was only one thing Buttercup could do as she was isolated from friends and family, led far away from them. Even her radio was picking up only garbles and static.


The City of Townsville. Tenements District. Tenements-Slums Border.

01 MAR (Wednesday) 1989. 1235.

On the other end of the local sewer system, Blossom had downed what felt like ten or more cultists. Were they all cultists? Blossom wasn't sure, as not all of them had donned robes or red clothing. She had been led into a huge circular area, where a man with a spear had rushed her from behind some kind of a water pump. The spear tip had flashed all kinds of color out in the dark. Duranium. It was clearer than before - Blossom knew that she had developed some kind of new ability, one that allowed her to see Duranium better than ever.

The man thrust the weapon at her, but she was able to hover sideways, duck and land to avoid his strikes. Frustrated, the man, robed in red so she knew he was with the cult, swiped at her with the spear. Blossom didn't expect this, but she'd blocked it with her arms out of reflex. The man wasn't strong enough, and only her Kevlar arm guards were damaged.

Throwing off his robes, the man thrust his spear at her once more, taking advantage of the momentum of his attack. All Blossom could do was block it - but something new happened. A luminous, pink bubble had formed around her, and the man's Duranium spear had bounced off of this protective shielding. Blossom didn't have time to be amazed at herself. As the man staggered back, she gave him an uppercut, sending him flying and landing in the water. The moment he emerged out of the putrid gray-water, gasping for air, Blossom gave him another punch, knocking him out before dragging him to dry land.

Blossom was surprised that she was able to pull it off, but then again, it wasn't totally unexpected. Bubbles had been teaching her and Buttercup how to form a protective shielding around them for days. It'd turned out to be similar to flying. The sensations of energy coursing through her was the same, except through the arms. It then became a matter of channeling it.

However, she still couldn't help but worry about Bubbles, even though she had proven herself to be willing and able to fight, a far cry from the helpless little babe she used to be back in the days before the Silver Age Cinema.


The City of Townsville. Tenements District. Tenements-Slums Border.

01 MAR (Wednesday) 1989. 1239.

At the northern end of the septic tunnels, Bubbles hadn't encountered many people who would do her harm. There were some who came at her one at a time, curiously, leading her deeper and deeper north, but after six or seven foolhardy cultists had fed themselves to her punches, there were no more. Despite this, she'd gone on ahead anyway, wondering if the cultists were trying to stop her from discovering something.

Deeper in, she came upon a flight of stairs leading up to a door. A man in jeans and jacket fired upon her with a sawed-off shotgun the moment she did. Kicking herself off to a high flying position while blocking the shots with her baby blue shield bubble, she unleashed an ion beam on him, paralyzing him with pain. The man's hand-held radio fizzled out of life as he fell down the flight of stairs. Not wanting to hurt him too much, Bubbles flew to his rescue and picked him up before he could roll down the stairs all the way. She cuffed him on the railing of the stairs before landing behind the door he was guarding. With bated breath, she opened it on tiptoes and went through it, expecting a squad of crack dealers to come down on her.

Except there was no one. The room was a dimly-lit, dilapidated and sad affair. The walls were naked bricks. She recognized it as some kind of office, but with the wooden furniture half-eaten by mold and other bottom feeders. The only source of light was coming from a rusted floodlight, with bulbs that were likely on the verge of blowing out. A crate stood in its glare.

Bubbles walked up to it, her head bowed as if the ceiling might come down on her any second. She knew what the crate contained the moment she saw it. They were only in the sewers for one reason thus far. The crate was a big one, but short enough for someone as short as her could easily see what was inside.

She stopped. She couldn't even breathe the moment she realized what was in it. It was a crate full of drugs, and not just any drugs. Stacked neatly in a grid pattern were plastic boxes filled with metal syringes. His Secret 2.0. She could see the labels. The fact that she had been sweating and shivering from the cold that wasn't even there became even more acute, reminding her of her forbidden cravings.

With shaky hands, she took one box out of the crate and opened the translucent and white plastic container. There were five in it, enough for a week if she rationed it. She pulled one out, studying it, thinking bad thoughts, wondering if she should give the drug another go, fooling herself that it'd be different this time, that she could somehow take it and be herself and be fine.

'Maybe just a little,' she thought as she continued to eye the metal syringe as if she was seeing a long lost sister or someone she loved who'd been away. Someone like Bunny.

'A little can't hurt, right?' she thought as she unsheathed the needle and began unrolling her sleeve. In the meantime, somewhere in the tunnels, there was a loud explosion somewhere, and the gunshots behind her were growing louder. A headache surged in her. The past followed - how she pursued her own sister, Blossom, across Townsville to harm her, how she hurt her entire family badly, stabbed Blossom in the shoulder after knocking out Mom and Buttercup via severe head injuries. How she nearly killed Dad.

The memories were painful, and she crushed the syringe full of red liquid in one little hand. The red liquid, sparkling with bits of broken glass, dripped from her hand. It'd hurt a little, feeling the cracked glass in her hand and the jagged metal, but it felt so much better than the Fairy Godmother's tricks.

She'd come very close to relapsing and repeating her past mistake again, and it didn't feel good. The worst part? She felt the same frustrations she would have felt in the past, had she been denied the drug. The pain of abstinence was faded, but not enough.

Screaming in anger, Bubbles flipped the entire crate over, spilling lunchbox-sized containers filled with illegal drugs all over the dirty, concrete floor. She started stomping on them, and she did it hard enough to flatten both plastic containers and metal syringes in a single motion. She was so absorbed in the drug's destruction that she didn't hear the door open behind her, nor the footsteps of a man coming up to her.

She'd only noticed when she felt a hand on her shoulder, at which point she turned around with a scream and pointed her SMG at whoever it was behind her, lightning-fast.

"Hey, hey! Bubbles! It's me!" the man behind her had put his hands up, his revolver still clutched in his hand. It was Mister Mullens. Bubbles didn't lower weapon immediately, still in her moment. She was panting like an agitated animal, her teeth gritted as she glared at the man. The detective knew immediately that something wasn't just wrong. Something was very wrong. He peeked at the floor. Drugs. He knew what it meant.

Olivia came up behind him when nothing had happened so far; she was told to stay behind as backup. Garrett didn't tell her that he was just playing it safe, making sure that his daughter would live in case he was facing down a room full of crack dealers.

"Are my eyes red!?" Bubbles snarled, still feeling the fire in her, embers leftover from her addiction. Her MP5 shook in her hands. Detective Mullens looked her in the eyes long and hard. It was difficult to do so, more so than staring into the eyes of hardened criminals, but he made himself do it.

"No," he said.

"What did you do!?" Olivia exclaimed when she saw the drugs on the floor and what Bubbles had done to them. Her father had to stop her from confronting the Powerpuff Girl. In her hysterical rage, Bubbles had unknowingly destroyed evidence and damaged the crime scene.

"Stop, Olive, it's not important right now," Mullens said.

Bubbles remembered what she'd done to Mister Mullens the day she tried to kill her Dad. When she'd put a bullet into his chest, she had thought then that she had lost a friend. In the red haze of her addiction, that wasn't a problem as all that mattered was the drug - the realization that she had nearly lost a friend only came later when she was on the Duranium table.

Her gun shook, still trained on Mullens, but then it went down. She'd done it again - that was what she thought. She'd nearly put everyone she cared about in danger.

"I'm sorry…" Bubbles cried as she scooted away. "I'm so sorry…" She'd hid under one of those desks, ashamed of herself.