Chapter 93: Trauma

The City of Townsville. Suburbs. The House.

04 MAR (Saturday) 1989. 2120.

Bunny knocked on the door to Dad's office. It was only polite.

"Come in," a woman's voice called out from within. Bunny opened the door slowly, afraid of what she might find in the office despite all the assurances that Dad and Mom could give. The youngest of the quartet slipped through when she had opened the door wide enough. She didn't dare look up at the woman. Instead, she kept staring at her feet. "Now aren't you the shy one? Bubbles won't be the only one now. Please, have a seat on the couch."

Bunny complied and stiffly walked over to the couch. She perched on the edge of it, still staring down, this time at the coffee table as if she might need to leap into battle. She heard footsteps, then the crinkling of the sofa cover. The woman in cardigan picked up a bowl of sweets and thrust it closer to her. "Would you like one or a few? Bubbles made sure to phone me about what kind of sweets you'd like…"

Looking down at the bowl, Bunny saw orange gummy candies shaped like carrots, sheathed individually in transparent packaging. She would be lying if she were to say that she wasn't interested. So, reaching out for the bowl of sweets, Bunny took just a couple of gummy carrot sweets meekly before looking up cautiously.

It was Miss Alice, the psychiatrist attached to Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, and now she would be tending to Bunny as well.

"My, my!" Miss Alice remarked while adjusting her spectacles, smiling. Reaching out, she took Bunny gently by the chin so that she could take a good look at her face. "Your eyes, they're beautiful." Bunny smiled at the compliment, but then remembered that her teeth would usually put people off so she made sure to close her lips tightly. Alice didn't miss the facial reaction.

"I'm not bothered by it, Bunny," she said. "Your teeth, I mean. It's pretty normal - not all kids have straight teeth."

"R-really?" Bunny said.

"It's not my job to lie to you, little rabbit," Miss Alice said candidly with a laugh. "But it is my job to talk to you."

"Talk about what, Miss Alice?" Bunny asked.

"Anything really, especially something that's been bothering you," the psychiatrist said. "You can trust me, Bunny. Your father and I go way back. We've been friends for years. Sure, we have our ups and downs-" Miss Alice remembered how Professor Utonium had gone ballistic on her when he felt his Girls were threatened, but she also remembered how she had helped him deal with grief, and he was grateful for it. "-But our friendship is still as strong as ever…"

Bunny was still apprehensive about talking to a woman she had barely met. If she couldn't even divulge the secrets of her missions, then she was sure she couldn't talk about them to her - even though she wanted to. It hurt to keep such secrets inside her. Had she been allowed to, she would have told anyone about them, even a stranger.

"I know we've just met and we have a way to go before you'd trust me," Alice went on, and it felt as if she was reading Bunny's mind. "Before we jump down that rabbit-hole, why not let's start with whatever you want to talk about?"

Bunny did not reply immediately. Instead, she played with the couple of carrot sweets she had taken with her hands, unsure of what else to do.

"I'm sorry if it's all too intense for you - it is your first session, after all," Alice said with worry in her voice. It wasn't what she expected. Professor Utonium mentioned before she took on Bunny that the youngest of the four sisters was also the strongest, the toughest. She had read reports about Bunny, all of which didn't exactly gloss over her achievements in training, but instead described in great detail how effective she was as a black ops agent. When Alice finally met Bunny, she thought that Bunny would take after Buttercup, but that did not prove to be the case. "How about if we talk about something recent? How was today's mission?"

Bunny's eyes flitted up to Alice's, and upon realizing that she had made eye contact with her, she looked away again. Bunny had been to a mission earlier today while Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup were flying off to hang out with a friend. However, unlike her other missions, it wasn't black ops. It was a mission her elder sisters would have to embark on had she not been available. It was the very first mission she could talk about, she remembered now, and now she couldn't wait to talk to Dad about it! But first…

"It felt like a normal day at first, when I had to leave to protect my family again…" Bunny recounted.


The City of Townsville. Townsville Port. Quickdrop Warehousing Co.

04 MAR (Saturday) 1989. 1525.

It felt like a normal day at first, when Bunny had to leave to protect her family again. In and out - Bunny could not believe that she could actually get used to something like this, especially something her Dad wouldn't be proud of. But her Dad was safe because of her, even if he was wounded. Her sisters were safe, even if Blossom was mad at her, Buttercup couldn't care less that she existed and Bubbles was upset all the time and she was helpless to comfort her.

But the moment she reached General Blackwater, she knew that it wasn't a normal day.

"Today's operation is simple. You'll finally get a taste of what your sisters' been going through. While it won't be an off-the-books black operation, you'll still need to conceal yourself while you're on the way there to preserve your edge as a secret weapon," the general said to her while they were hiding out far from the mission zone as usual, in some windowless, poorly-kept and dimly lit office. He, Rook and a few others were hunched over a map. Bunny could just barely look over the top of the table. "We're helping the police this time. There's a homegrown American mafia in the warehouse here-" the general pointed out a building on the map. "Their leadership has been hiding here ever since they found out that criminal gangs are being targeted."

"What do I do, general?" Bunny asked, even though she knew what an operation usually entailed. Deaths, lots of deaths.

"Kill anyone who resists. Ensure the arrest of those who didn't, or those who couldn't put up a fight anymore," the general said frankly, bluntly. "At least this way, you won't have to feel as guilty as you used to about the lives you have to take. Yes, I know exactly how you feel, Bunny." What the general said made little difference, Bunny knew; criminals, especially the cornered ones, would surely resist arrest. She would then shred them or break them apart, and few could survive her rampage.

General Blackwater turned to Bunny, hunching down. In a rare instance of compassion, the general stroked Bunny's hair, running his hand across her deceptively soft, brown hair, out of the view of his fellow USDO officers, of course. "You are your father's daughter. Of course, you are."

"T-thanks, General Blackwater…" Bunny said; she couldn't think of anything else to say. There was something odd with the way he'd put it, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. General Blackwater seemed proud that she was Professor Utonium's daughter, but weren't they little more than enemies to each other?

"Don't thank me, Bunny. What I said does not deserve gratitude," the general said, but Bunny was stuck when it came to what he meant. As if realizing he had done something wrong, the general withdrew his hand. He opened his mouth, only to shut it again as if wanting to say something more but decided against it. "Let's just begin planning your operation."

And so they did. The American Mafia's leaders were holed up in a warehouse attached to the Townsville Port. Intelligence suggested six of them, backed by twenty made-men. Just like in Bunny's attack on the warehouse where a criminal conference was being held, there were many entrances into the warehouse, but most of them were locked or chained up or even barred to fortify the warehouse - except that these slipshod security measures would be their undoing, making escape almost impossible. It was a tactic that would have worked on conventional police or paramilitary raid, as it would likely result in casualties. However, with Bunny, it was a death sentence for the mafia; their stronghold would become their trap.

The major difference between the warehouses was that the port warehouse was larger and contained more rooms.

When Bunny took to the field, she only had one entrance to worry about, and it was guarded by an excess of eight made-men. With the operation being conducted in broad daylight and the lack of any need for concealment beyond avoiding civilians on the way to 'work', Bunny did not have to take great pains in creeping up to her targets. On the commencement of the operation, she had darted from shipping containers to shipping containers to hide only for the sake of maintaining the element of surprise. The moment she had reached cover behind a forklift that oversaw the American Mafia members, she broke concealment immediately by firing on the guards.

Shots rang out from her modded MP5. She was able to aim and fire in quick succession, and before they could even flinch, four of them were dropping dead, leaving the rest panicking. Two of them crouched where they were, afraid to even move. Bunny executed the rest while they turned their back in an attempt to flee inside the building. By the end of it, the only things moving were the wind and fedora hats that were still falling.

Wasting no time, Bunny sprinted forth into the entrance and pulled one massive gate shut, followed by another, ignoring shouts coming from behind her. Shots were fired, but she wasn't concerned even when she felt one bouncing off her nape. Picking up a crowbar from a fallen mafia member, she stuck it into the handles of the gates and twisted it all around, making it impossible to open the gates again.

Gunshots continued to rain down her back. Swiveling around, she returned fire, putting down a couple more gangsters before disappearing behind some shelves.

"What was that!?" Bunny heard someone shouting.

"Who's here!" someone else yelled.

"What the fuck is this!? Did you lead your copper buddies in here!?" a man interrogated another; the voice sounded important, cracked and slimy.

"I didn't! I swear!" the interrogated man claimed. Bunny thought the conversation was interesting, so she looked in the direction of the conversation with her x-ray vision; the shelves of the warehouse were no barrier to this as they weren't hidden behind too many of them.

As it turned out, there were dirty cops on the scene as well. Surrounding them were about a dozen members of the American Mafia. She recognized some of them as the key leaders of the mob, including the boss himself. Angelo the Frank, who was known infamously for collecting eyeballs from his enemies and pickling them for display in a secret room, somewhere. It was just rumors, of course - though with criminals in Townsville, who knows?

The mobsters, as well as their dirty cop friends, had begun fanning out in search of her. Bunny began sprinting towards the eastern rooms, which she knew housed the power room. Hopping over a window that was little more than a hole in corrugated steel wall, she began going through doors - a couple of them, before the third door opened on its own with one of them coming through. Without hesitation and second thoughts, Bunny unsheathed her knife and sliced the man in the throat as she hopped past him. The wound ensured that he couldn't make even a sound. He'd dropped dead nearly instantly from the trauma alone.

A second guard in the power room did not last much longer. The moment he turned to check what the commotion was, Bunny had already flipped her knife at him. The blade had gone deep into his eye socket, hitting the brain. The second guard fell on his knees, and before he fell over, Bunny pulled her knife out and wiped it on her thigh before sheathing it in short order.

Things were beginning to seem familiar to Bunny, especially when her memory of every event was so perfect. Her previous warehouse mission had a transformer too, and it had a huge breaker switch so similar to the current one that she wondered if machines could have families too. However, with no time to waste, she flipped it, plunging the entire warehouse into darkness.

This time, however, it wasn't total darkness. Coming out of the eastern rooms the way she entered, she could still see well enough without her night vision goggles. Sunlight, dim as it was from the late winter clouds, was still flooding in from windows and skylights. But now there were shadows everywhere, ideal for a little game of hide-and-seek.

As men were shouting orders and yelling into the void for answers, Bunny began laying down her traps: claymore charges rigged to explode on the tug of a string. She was running circles around the remaining bad guys before they could even reorganize themselves.

After positioning herself for the offensive, she began firing upon one search party, who fired back based on the direction of the noise she was making. Bunny was hardly flinching when bullets struck her everywhere, while men were dying left and right or getting wounded. Soon enough, they began running away - right into her claymore trap, which blew them up to little bits and pieces.

Without wasting any more time, Bunny made the jump on Angelo the Frank's group, tossing them a flashbang before raining bullets down on them. By the time the dust cleared, the only people still standing were hiding behind shelves and tables. On using her x-ray vision, she could see four of them: Angelo the Frank, who was clutching his wounded side, one of his remaining made men and the cops who were working for him.

It was at this time that Bunny and Angelo made eye contact for the first time. They didn't just exchange looks. They were exchanging hatred.

"What are you waiting for!? Get her!" Angelo the Frank ordered his remaining subordinates in a cracked, slimy voice. Sensing little choice, they rushed forward, firing their guns only to get mowed down. All the while, Angelo had remained behind. Bunny had thought that he was being a scaredy-cat at first, but then she saw the syringe in his hand. It was the same kind of stuff General Blackwater and Rook warned her about.

He'd injected it into himself before she could react, and before she knew it, his eyes had turned red and his muscles bulked up in an instant. With just a nudge, he'd sent a warehouse shelf down on her. Bunny was barely able to get out of the way of the falling shelf, and while she was busy with that, Angelo had unloaded his twin machine pistols on her; with his enhanced strength, the recoil meant nothing to him, and so all his bullets hit home, and Bunny was knocked off her feet from the force of almost a hundred bullets.

The pain was nearly unbearable. Dizzy and sick from the pain, it felt as if she could blackout at any moment. But the urgency of battle hadn't left her yet. Getting up as quickly as she could, she reloaded her modded MP5 and pointed it downrange as quickly as she could, only to find that Angelo had rushed up to her. Before she could fire her submachinegun, he kicked it out of the way before pistol-whipping her multiple times over the head; it was the first time she'd felt this sort of pain, and it was something beyond General Blackwater's merciful torture session.

Angelo the Frank didn't stop after that. He continued to smack her with his machine pistols, and Bunny could only do well to block them or take the hits when her arms failed her. Dozens of pistol whips later, Angelo's guns were broken, and so he tossed them away and slugged Bunny a few times in the face before picking her up by her neck.

"You're going to pay for fucking up my men!" the mob boss snarled at her as he pressed his face closer to her. Their eyes met again. Bunny could feel his hands going up to her face, clutching her face so tightly, it was impossible. How did a normal human being gain this much strength, even if it was through His Secret 2.0?

"Your eyes! Your pretty purple bug eyes! I want them!" Angelo shouted deliriously; he was under the influence of an enigmatic drug unknown to science, after all. Bunny was weakened. Her hands had gone up to Angelo the Frank's wrists, but for all her tonnes-strong muscles, she couldn't break the grip. She struggled and cried, and screamed when she felt his fingers going into her eyes, pressing into the eyeball that it felt as if it could burst any second.

Which was when it happened. Her eyes had emitted something, and it'd burned right through Angelo's. Some kind of purple beam; she'd seen her vision go purple in the meantime. She had seen videos of her sisters doing the same thing, but intentionally and confidently.

Bunny didn't stop emitting the purple beam, not that she knew how to, but it was all within the space of seconds, max. When Bunny had finally stopped firing the purple beam, all that was left of Angelo's face were two cauterized holes where his eyes were - and those holes had gone all the way through the man's head, slightly intersecting, looking somewhat like the silhouette of the infinity sign.

It was as if Angelo's body hadn't realized that it no longer had a face. But soon after this, with a sigh, Angelo fell on top of Bunny. It wasn't for the lack of strength that Bunny did not push him off herself. That insane moment, that surreal moment when she fired that purple beam from her eyes was still replaying itself like a rewound tape in her mind.

There were other distant explosions; other claymore traps she had set up were going off as panicking men who had lost their leadership was searching for a way out. There was another distant explosion, the sound of metal breaking and bending, gates being thrown open. Bunny could recognize it as something that wasn't her design. Someone else was entering the fray. She knew from the battle plans that it was General Blackwater's men. Captain Brian 'Brick' Griffin had been assigned to mop up any remaining resistance and arrest anyone who was still alive.

But she remained fixated on that moment she had fired her own beam with her eyes, unable to shake herself awake from that magical moment, when she was both afraid and emboldened when it felt both nightmarish and dream-like.

"Are you okay, Bunny?" a voice finally broke her trance. A male voice, deep and inquisitive and brimming with authority. She thought it was General Blackwater at first, but when she focused her eyes, she saw someone else. Captain Brian 'Brick' Griffin was staring down at her. He then bent down and pulled Angelo the Frank's corpse away from her. He extended a hand, and she took it. With strength she didn't expect from a normal human being, Brian pulled her up. "The general will want to know."

He'd said it without any emotions, without any passion. Bunny knew a long time ago that not everyone was fond of her.

"I'm fine…" Bunny said. But Captain Brick was looking at her funnily.

"There's something coming out of your nose," he said as he pointed at his own. Bunny's hand went up to her nostrils, instinctively mirroring the USDO captain. At the same time, she could feel something liquid snaking out of it. She wiped it away and saw blood on her fingers.

"Are you sure you're okay?" the USDO officer asked again.

"I'm fine, mister. I… I don't think it's mine," Bunny said even though she wasn't sure at all. No, she was pretty sure the blood was hers. Angelo's wounds were cauterized by her beam - though whatever energy it consisted of, she had no idea. But why was she bleeding from her nose? And in greater amounts than before?

In the end, Bunny thought that it might have been caused by Angelo pistol-whipping her before he got his final facial therapy done. He was high on His Secret 2.0 and stronger as a result. That seemed to make sense at first, but…

Something wasn't quite adding up.


The City of Townsville. Suburbs. The House.

04 MAR (Saturday) 1989. 2131.

"How do you feel about the entire operation, Bunny?" Alice asked as she wrote something on a paper on her clipboard. Bunny couldn't help but feel as though Alice was trying to uncover her secrets and judge her. But her demeanor, the reassuring tone of her voice and the grandmother-like look of Alice, even though she was far from that age, put her at ease.

"I... don't know," Bunny said, and this time, it was hard for her words to come out. "I'm protecting my family, so I'm happy I did it."

"You don't look happy," Alice said. She had been observing Bunny closely while she was answering her question. Her shifty body language and her facial expression told an entirely different story. To Bunny, how Alice knew might as well be a magical trick. Though she knew something about human expressions from Dad, and how they translate to intelligence she could use from General Blackwater, she wasn't as aware of herself as others.

In the end, Bunny couldn't say no to trusting Alice, especially considering that Dad had already put in a good word for her.

"I hate it," Bunny said. "I sound stupid, don't I? I said I was happy and now I said I hate it." Alice had a different idea in mind. Bunny's mental development had exceeded her expectations. Professor Utonium mentioned her Chemical X2 enhancement as a possible catalyst for accelerated development in Bunny, but Doctor Alice had a different idea. Sure, Chemical X2 might have given her high IQ, accelerated thought processes and photographic memory, but her environment had played a huge part as well. Her exposure to harsh training and the reality of law enforcement might have forced her to grow up incredibly fast.

"How you feel about the operation might sound confusing, but it's normal, Bunny," Alice went on to say. "Things are rarely so simple. Why do you hate the operation?"

"I don't like to kill. I hate seeing the blood and I hate that-" Bunny explained, but stopped briefly to take a deep breath as she felt herself losing control of her emotions. "Some of the people I killed… Didn't look like bad guys. I don't think some of them are. The police officers the other day-"

Bunny stopped herself immediately, realizing that she had almost divulged classified information - and General Blackwater had specifically mentioned not to reveal such information even to other USDO personnel barring he and a few men he'd whitelisted, including Rook. Alice wasn't on that list.

"What about the police officers? Which day are you exactly talking about?" Alice pressed on, determined to burrow as deep into the rabbit hole as she could manage, and in the process help Bunny. The professor had mentioned that Bunny had revealed nothing about her activities outside The House and it was worrying him. It presented a lot of ground to cover, lots of potential for repressed emotions and unresolved trauma. "If you would tell a friend like me… I'm sure it would make you feel much better."

"I don't want to talk about it…" Bunny came up with any excuse she could grasp at.

"It looks like it's hurting you on the inside, Bunny. It'll help if you talk about it. That's what I'm here for-"

"I said I don't want to talk about it!" Bunny yelled at her all of a sudden, slamming her fist on the sofa, shocking Alice.

"B-Bunny, calm down…" Alice said, backing off. The last thing she needed was another Buttercup.

"I'm sorry…" Bunny apologized, sobbing. Despite feeling apprehensive about it, Alice reached out to her, taking her hand. It felt so stiff, and she saw Bunny stiffening up. She could only guess that her past experience with police officers was traumatic in some way, though what it was exactly about was an open question. "I'm so sorry…"

"No, Bunny. I shouldn't have pushed you too hard," Alice said; she couldn't bear the thought of Bunny taking the blame for the session going south. "It's okay if you don't want to talk about it."

"Now… How about you eat your carrots?" Alice said candidly, hoping that it would alleviate the tension between them.