Chapter 2: I Wanna Go Home
She saw... scales. Tentacles, wings, claws, pincers... and a single horn atop the last little one's head. The colors they all came in were pink (for the octopus), black, blue, and green, (for the horned creature) and a dark, burnt orange (the boy with the giant eye in the middle of his body).
Her body froze as she stared down in shock at the monster children and her brain kept desperately trying to deny it. No, this couldn't be. They're not... I didn't... But the similarities were far too striking to be a simple coincidence. This was how it was and there was nothing she could do to change it.
Multiple eyes looked up at her in fear and Blossom could only look back down with a sense of pure, utter horror. They were all trembling in some fashion, some outright crying, and they all looked at her as if they were staring death in the face.
There were those who clang to others, seeking comfort through physical closeness. There were others who simply shut down and cowered, hugging their knees to their chest and burying their heads on top of them. The rest just gave her an expectant look; still frightened, but more resigned to their fate, simply waiting for her to decide when she would extinguish their lives too.
They watched her wide, shocked eyes for any sign of them turning red. They tried to feel if there was a sudden change in the temperature, a building heat in their tiny, cramped hideaway that would signal that she was charging up her deadly, super-hot eyebeams. Perhaps she wouldn't fry them to death after all. Maybe she would use her bare hands and splatter their guts around the ruined walls. There were so many... creative ways this superpowered child could end them all.
Maybe she would throw a curveball and freeze them all to death with her ice breath, chilling the very blood in their veins before smashing their frozen corpses into gory icicles.
Whatever it was she was going to do, they hoped that she would at least give them the luxury of making it something quick. Something relatively painless.
A few more minutes of silence had some of the monster children crying, giving in to their overwhelming despair. Blossom tried to calm this heart wrenching scene by reaching out in silence to them, only to have the monsters recoil in fear from her, clearly misinterpreting this action as a desire to commit further violence onto them.
After everything she had already done to creatures that looked just like them, could she really blame them for feeling this way? What could she possibly say to make any of this better? Nothing even plausible came to mind on her tongue.
"Please," she whispered quietly, trying to make her voice soft and soothing. "I'm not gonna hurt you."
What reason did they have to truly believe her though? Hadn't she given them every piece of evidence to the contrary before?
So consumed was she by this entire scene that she didn't even hear the sharp movement in the air of her sisters subtly returning to her, floating on either side of her inside the ruined office building.
"Okay all-clear Bloss!" Buttercup began to report happily.
"Yeah! No monsters..." Bubbles began to say too before stopping at the unresponsive way Blossom was acting, kneeling down in front of something. "... here?"
After a moment of silence, Buttercup asked, "Blossom, what's wrong?" Then she stooped down to see what she was looking at and found out exactly what was wrong.
"Whoa..."
"Don't make any sudden movements. They're already very frightened."
Bubbles didn't take long to put the pieces of this situation together either. She gasped lightly, then adopted a sad, sorrowful tone. "Are they...?"
"Yes." Blossom nodded. She didn't need her sister to finish her question. It was clear to all of them what this was.
Like it or not, these were children. Monster children, but children nonetheless. Frightened, helpless, and now brutally orphaned. By the Girls' own hands no less in the slaying of their bigger, stronger, and more powerful, destructive rampaging parents.
Buttercup gave her a pained look. Looking helpless, she asked, "So what do we do?" It wasn't like her to be so... indecisive. To be fair to her though, this was a situation unlike any other she had previously encountered.
"I..." Blossom said, returning her sister's helpless look in full force with her own. "I don't know."
"We're not gonna-" Bubbles asked, the dread in her voice already hinting at the question.
Blossom shut it down immediately. "No. We won't."
Bubbles breathed an audible sigh of relief. "Oh, good! I didn't want to anyway."
The monsters whimpered again, bringing immediate attention back onto them for a second time, and Blossom figured that the best thing to do for now would be to try to set them at ease, as difficult-to-impossible as that little task seemed.
One of the children looked up at the girls with hollow, tear-filled eyes, and meekly asked them, "Before you kill us, will you let us pray first?"
It was an awful, heartrending question and this time Blossom was partially successful in reaching out and offering physical comfort, brushing her hand (or lack thereof) over the boy's trembling shoulder. "Don't be scared, okay?" She said shakily, even though in truth they had every reason to.
"We're not gonna hurt you." Bubbles added, tears standing in her eyes.
"It's safe to come out now." Buttercup promised, feeling like she was saying some cruel, heartless joke.
"Is it over?"
"Yes, it's over."
"Are we going to die?" The little pterodactyl, barely above the size of a fruit bat asked.
"No, you're safe with us." Blossom lied, the words feeling like poison on her traitorous tongue. They weren't safe with them at all; no monster was safe once they entered Townsville.
The tiny orange cyclops child broke down and said, "I wanna go home!"
"I know you do," Blossom soothed, reaching out to lay her hand gently on the quivering child's arm, or in this case, his pincer. His parents could probably snap buildings in half with their own pincers, but his were no more deadly than a small crab's or a lobster's. "We're gonna take you home."
She thought she had a good idea where they lived. It was the place where all the monsters that made their way into Townsville lived. "You live on Monster Isle, right?"
"R-Right." The mollusk nodded an affirmative. "Monster Isle..."
Blossom nodded grimly in understanding. "We know where that island is. We've been there before."
In fact, the last time they had been there, they left the newly liberated monsters with a warning. That if they ever saw any one of them in Townsville again, they wouldn't be shown any mercy. The monsters had agreed to these conditions cheerily and thanked the Powerpuff Girls sincerely.
"It won't take us long to get there." If they flew, it would only be a couple of minutes. "You just have to trust us for a bit, okay?" That was quite a tall order to fill, considering how they'd just finished terrorizing some of their own kind before.
"We promise we won't do a thing to hurt you."
Growing a bit more confident, the children started to slowly relax, though not all the way in the Powerpuff Girls' presence.
"Do you know where our parents are?" The pink monster who had bug features and tentacles asked. "They told us to stay here."
"N-No sweetie, I don't." Blossom lied, feeling a lump the size of a golf ball in her own throat. She knew perfectly well where they were. She knew where their corpses were too. "But... everything's going to be alright."
The girl became insistent. "Can we look for them before we go? I don't want them to be worried..."
Buttercup came up with an excuse not to have this happen before Blossom could, giving the girl a sad, broken attempt at a smile. "They won't be worried if they know you're back on Monster Isle, right? They'll know where to find you..."
Luckily for them, the children didn't question this. Their desire to go home was slightly stronger than their desire to find their parents and they agreed with the girls that their parents could probably find them.
"I don't think you should stay underneath all that rubble. There's lots of broken glass and debris and I don't want you to cut yourself." These guys looked like they had tough skin though. Skin that wouldn't be easily sliced or penetrated through even by something like glass.
The kids slowly got up and looked at their 'saviors' nervously. They hoped that the girls were being sincere and that this wasn't some kind of an elaborate trick. If it was, then they would be giving their hopes up for nothing and it would be even worse than if the girls had simply killed them outright.
"Hey," Bubbles said, stooping down in front of the standing horned monster. He didn't even come up to her height yet. "When we get out there, can you do us a favor?"
The little boy nodded, too fearful to do anything else.
"Don't look at anything." She finished. "It's really not nice."