Leaf
Chapter Eighteen
Grue made slow progress through the warehouse. He and Regent couldn't move twenty feet in a straight line without running into a group of gang members that they had to avoid or distract and run past.
Then they ran into Bitch, and gang members ran from them.
"What happened?" he asked, climbing onto a dog's back. Judas, probably. "When I woke up after the explosion, you were gone."
"Brutus brought me back to the kid. The kid healed me."
"That was nice of him," Regent said, climbing onto Angelica. "I noticed that your dogs didn't bring us back."
She stared at him as though he had said something stupid. "Yeah? Got a point?"
He laughed. "None at all."
So Leaf was still okay. "Have you seen Tattletale?"
Bitch whistled, sending the dogs into a run. "She just got back."
Grue breathed out a sigh of relief. Trying to attack Bakuda had been a complete disaster, but maybe they could still escape with their lives.
But before he could get comfortable, they reached a squad of ABB members barricaded outside the room where they had left Leaf. He raised his arm to cover them in darkness, only for them to ... nod politely to them. No one opened fire, and one man even raised his fist in salute.
Bitch dismounted, the dogs being too large to fit through the door, and walked inside. As Grue did the same, he noticed that some of the guards had torn and bloodied clothes as though they had been stabbed or, more likely, bitten, and then healed.
There were more people through the door, some lying down with similar bite marks waiting to be healed and more up and moving about. His globe of darkness was still intact in the middle of the room, though blurred as though too many people had gone through it, and right next to it was a pile of snacks.
Inside the darkness with Leaf were Tattletale and Panacea, and Leaf was finally getting healed.
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"Alright," Lift said after the second test managed to not blow up anything at all. "I'm ready."
Panacea let out a tired breath and extended her hand. Storms that girl needed a nap. And a snack. Lift considered offering her one of the many, many snackrifices her new friends had brought her, but ... maybe later.
When their hands touched, Panacea gasped and her eyes grew wide. "What?" Lift asked. Panacea stared at her and glanced at Knowitall and back. "What?"
"N-nothing," she said, in a tone that never meant nothing. "For the sake of informed consent, I will be dissolving the back of your skull, expanding the blood brain barrier to an inch around the bomb, and removing a portion of your occipital lobe. Do you understand?"
"Uh ..." She glanced at Knowitall, who looked pretty worn out too.
"It will be fine," she promised. "It's the same procedure you saw her do already to those other two guys, and Bakuda's pretty consistent with her trigger mechanisms no matter how creative she gets with everything else.
Lift hesitated, understanding about half of what was said. "Well, if this works, you can have the rest of these chips. Otherwise, they're going down with me."
Panacea gave her a bewildered look. "Are you trying to bribe me with half a bag of chips?"
She put a few in her mouth. "They're pretty good chips." That was a lie. They were half crunch and half salt, but Panacea didn't need to know that.
"Whatever," she said, closing her eyes. "Let's get this over with."
And with that, things began to get weird.
It felt squelchy. Like, super squelchy. Her whole brain was squelching in her head like thick pudding. Pudding that would go really good with cookies and ...
Then she went blind.
"Ah!"
She became awesome on reflex, and Panacea and Knowitall jumped back.
"Don't do that!" Panacea said. "Don't ever do that! Until I'm done getting the bomb out, you need to just ... not."
Knowitall picked up the phone she had dropped, the only other light in the darkness. "Just relax, kid. I know it feels weird, but we're here for you."
Panacea took a deep breath. "Some of the side effects of removing the backside of your brain include blindness and loss of visual agnosia. I suppose I should have mentioned that. Look, just close your eyes, and it will be over before you know it."
Lift closed them, and Knowitall took her position behind her while Panacea took her hand in front of her.
Squelch. Squelch squelchy squelch. Lift clenched her eyes shut until finally ...
Glop.
"It's out," Knowitall said. "You can do your thing."
Lift became awesome again, and it felt wonderful. Before there had always been that swollen, pressing lump in the back of her head that her power couldn't touch because it wasn't her, but now the lump was gone and she was whole and she was free.
"God, this is disgusting," Knowitall went on, staring at the lump.
"Really?" Lift said, turning around. "Let me see!" She looked at it, and it was disgusting. It was a chunk of meat dangling from a strand of long, black hair. She poked it. It was squishy.
"You don't want to keep that as a souvenir," Panacea said, standing up. "I gave it a rudimentary circulatory system, but in about an hour it won't be able to maintain homeostasis, and after that, well, you can figure it out. Also, I shouldn't need to tell you this but I will anyway, do not shake it, crush it, jostle it, or do anything at all to it, because that would be incredibly stupid."
Knowitall nodded. "Got it. Throw it at Bakuda."
"No!"
"I'm joking, joking," she said with a laugh, then her face grew serious. "Hey. I ... owe you for this."
Panacea shrugged. "Just get me home and never bother me again."
Knowitall nodded. "Sure."
Lift looked at the two of them, knowing she was missing something but not sure what it was. Well, she had gotten through most of her life without knowing anything at all, so she'd manage. Her gut told her to give Panacea a hug, so she did. Panacea didn't return the hug, but she didn't push her away either, and Lift left her with the bag of chips because promises were important.
Then she stepped out of the darkness and into the light.
How long had she been in there? It had been meant to keep her safe, but it hadn't made her feel safe. Just kept. When you were kept safe, you didn't feel safe, you just felt kept. Now she was free, and it was all she could do not to dance. Wyndle circled around her happily, even more relieved than she was, and look! The rest of her friends were here too. Fluffy was standing by the door, and Skullface and Fancypants had gotten back. She grinned at them, feeling like she could float away.
"Glad to see you're okay," Skullface said, even now bothering to keep his voice spooky. "Quick question. Did you start a cult while we were gone?"
Lift looked over at the people she had gathered and healed while her friends were gone. "No."
She hadn't meant to start one, but after Fluffy came back alone they had needed something to do. Fluffy couldn't wander through the entire warehouse looking for the others, so she started stealing Bakuda's dinner, one person at a time. Some stayed to help out after Lift healed them, and after they started offering her snackrifices, well, it had just kept going.
"Yeah, Grue," Fancypants said. "They're not a cult. Clearly they're just a group of devoted followers who believed that Leaf could save them from a terrible fate by participating in ritualistic suicide." One of the first members of her cult, a bald man she had named Shiny, gave a nervous wave.
"'Exactly," Lift said. "Besides, I was really bored. You guys left me in there forever. What did you think I was gonna do?"
"We were gone for ten minutes."
"Literal years."
Skullface shook his head. "Doesn't matter. All that matters is that you're safe, and we can get out of here." He turned to her cult. "We don't have room for all of you, so you'll have to find your own way home. As long as you act like you know what you're doing, the ABB should be too distracted to stop you."
"What about the ones I haven't gotten to yet?" Lift asked. "I still got ..."
"Eleven," Wyndle offered.
"Eleven more to go. Then we can leave."
"No," Skullface said. "We've been toying with death this entire time, and I'm not going to push our luck one inch more than we have to."
Lift looked to her cult, then back to her team. She couldn't abandon all eleven of them. Storms, she couldn't abandon one of them. But her team wouldn't abandon her, and if she stayed she'd be forcing them to stay with her.
What can I do so no one gets forgotten?
Then she remembered.
"Hey, wasn't Vista with you?" She hadn't actually seen her, but she hadn't seen a whole lot recently. "What happened to her?"
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The steel and concrete that covered Vista shrank away, and she saw Miss Militia standing, barely, before her. One arm hung limply at her side and she leaned on a sword with its point driven into the floor, but she was alive.
Oni Lee, lying on the floor next to her, was not.
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"What do you mean, he's dead?"
Bakuda's underling babbled a response, which she ignored. This whole encounter had been one fiasco after another. Had she been arrogant to try to outthink a Thinker whose powers she could only guess at, or just unlucky? And where the hell had Miss Militia come from?
Your problem is that you're trying to be subtle, she thought.
She looked at the warehouse that contained her workshop which she didn't need, some of her soldiers that she needed even less, and her enemies which she didn't need at all, and she raised her grenade launcher.
Let's fix that.
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"Get out!"
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There had been no warning for Vista. Just the sound of thunder, and the sky fell on top of her. Right after Miss Militia, who tried to shield her with her own body.
It mostly worked as they were buried alive.
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"Tattletale! On lookout! Leaf! On healing! The rest of you, with me!"
The rubble shifted, and a massive dog erupted from the ground, a mangled body in its jaws. Fluffy. She had been the furthest in the building when it collapsed. Lift ran over and healed her, and she opened up her eyes. The dog licked her face with its long, rough tongue and whimpered like a puppy.
Lift looked around at the people who were out and tried to figure who was left buried. Knowitall, Skullface, now Fluffy and two of her dogs, Knees, Shiny, Big Ears, Glasses (who had lost her glasses), Rosey Cheeks, and Shrimp. That left ... more. People she had healed. People she hadn't gotten to.
People she couldn't remember.
No, she had to! But she couldn't. She had barely glanced at most of them, and now ...
Wyndle grew into the cracks in the rubble, enveloping it as she had seen him do with books. "Over here, Mistress!"
"Over here!" she passed on.
"There's someone about three feet down." He grew in a vague oval shape along the ground, then formed into a short glaive in her hand. She cut the blocks into smaller pieces, and the others dug through it to pull out ...
"It's Regent!" Skullface said, recognizing his mangled costume.
Lift healed him, and he opened up his eyes. "Ugh," he groaned, sitting up. "Did I get into the Back to Life club, or am I still stuck in the Hurt and Healed?"
"We didn't check your pulse," Skullface said. "Get up."
He pulled himself to his feet. "What are we doing? Search and rescue?"
"No, we're leaving."
"No, we're staying!" Lift said. "There're still others down there!"
"We don't have time! If Bakuda drops another nuke on us—"
"She won't," Knowitall said. She stood on one of the taller piles of rubble, but she seemed to be listening for trouble more than watching for it. "She's distracted."
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Bakuda looked down at the two bodies her people had brought her. Miss Militia and Vista. Vista wasn't in costume, but there weren't a whole lot of twelve-year-old white girls in this mess, and someone had been playing jump rope with the fabric of reality.
She considered killing them both just to simplify things, but after the headache the entire morning had been, she couldn't pass up the opportunity. The ABB had lost Lung, now Oni Lee, and after pissing off the entire city everyone was going to come down on her, unless every last one of them was too afraid to go first.
"Wake them up." And let the show begin.
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"There's one there," Regent said, sending a group of people digging through the rubble. "And there. And there. Anyone else is dead, if that still means anything. Oh, and if you find my scepter, give it to me. I need it for style."
His power gave him a vague sense of where people were, and nearly everyone was out. Enough so Grue could leave without feeling guilty, but he wasn't the one holding the team back.
"So Bakuda is distracted right now."
"The whole organization is," Tattletale said. "She's making a performance out of ... whatever it is she's doing."
"She's gonna eat their souls," Leaf said. She was sitting next to Panacea, who had just been dug out. The healer had been healed, but she was silent and listless, clutching, of all things, half a bag of chips.
"I doubt that."
She looked up at him, her normally dark eyes as hard and brilliant as diamonds. "She's gonna carve up their heads and make them kill for her."
He sucked in a breath. He couldn't imagine Vista killing someone any more than he could see, well, Leaf doing it. But ... "Let the heroes save the heroes. We have to look out for ourselves." Leaf's gaze didn't falter. "Besides, I offered to team up with Miss Militia, and she made it clear she didn't want anything to do with us."
"She did?" Leaf asked.
"Yup," Regent inserted. "That was ... right after she saved our lives, actually." Grue shot him a glare, and Regent shrugged. "I'm sure she didn't mean to."
"Enough." He didn't want to think about what Leaf had gone through since she had been captured. He didn't want to think about what would happen to Vista. He just wanted to get his team home and be done with it. "We can vote on this."
He knew how the votes would land. Leaf was the only one who would want to save a couple of people who would arrest them on sight, but she shook her head. "This ain't somethin' I can vote on. They ain't people I can forget."
Grue opened his mouth, then he realized that she wasn't arguing with him anymore, and he couldn't argue with someone who wouldn't argue back. All he could do was choose to either risk everything when they were so close to getting out, or leave her behind.
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Smack!
Miss Militia opened her eyes, a stinging sensation burning on her cheek. She was on her knees in a parking lot, held up by someone grabbing her by her hair.
"Good morning," a distorted, mechanical voice said. Her eyes focused on Bakuda. "Let's talk."
Miss Militia clenched her eyes shut, forcing her mind to clear. She could sense her power some distance behind her, but she could summon it to her hand in an instant. Her hands were tied behind her back, her broken clavicle screaming in pain. Zip ties, by the feel of them.
Vista knelt to her right in a similar position, an armed gunman behind her. Anything she did would likely get her killed too. That left her with a scarcity of options.
"Very well," Miss Militia agreed. "Talk."
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"Something to consider," Tattletale said. "There's not a chance in hell Bakuda would delegate her center stage performance to a decoy." Above them, the sky burned red in the dawn light. "For the first time all morning, we know exactly where she is."
Grue eyed her. "You have a plan."
She smiled.
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"Have you ever seen Doctor Strangelove?" Bakuda asked. "If you boil it down, its core message is this. If you have the world by the throat, tell someone."
Miss Militia nodded slowly. "You want us to carry a message."
"I've built a deadman's switch into every bomb I've ever built. I keep my men in line because they know that if anything happens to me, each and every one of them will go up like the Fourth of July."
Oni Lee's death had frightened her, not because the heroes could kill him, but because they would. She didn't know how her own kill order was coming along, but she wanted to discourage anything drastic early on.
"Naturally, if a rival gang like the Empire knew that, they'd take me out and consider the extermination of the ABB a bonus. That's why I made this."
She reached into her pocket and pulled out her ultimate creation. It didn't look like much, just a ball of organic material one inch across, but it was more subtle, more intricate, more deadly than anything she had yet made.
"What is it?"
It was her masterpiece, her magnum opus, but there was only one name that truly fit it.
"Doomsday."
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Bakuda called these people her army, but Lift knew a crowd when she saw one. Armies had formations and discipline and all sorts of horrible stuff. Crowds were just people, and Lift had been slipping in and out of those her whole life. She just needed a red armband, a green headband, and a big gun (all courtesy of her cult), and no one looked at her twice.
The hardest part was trying to look miserable. Everyone around her looked sick and tired and knew that they could die at any moment if Bakuda simply felt bored in their direction, and, well, Lift had been there. But that just made it harder because she had gotten out of that and she wanted to laugh and scream and run and let the overwhelming freedomness explode out of her more brightly than anything Bakuda had ever thought of, but ...
But not yet.
She made her way through gaps in the crowd with the casual ease of a lifelong street urchin. When she reached the front, she found out that Bakuda wasn't drilling into their heads to drop little bits of herself into their brains just yet. She was talking to them.
"I reverse engineered Panacea's powers," she said to Vista and Militia kneeling on the ground in front of her. "The world's greatest healer? What an underwhelming epithet. The girl can warp flesh, create life, virtually anything her dull imagination can come up with. I don't suffer from a dull imagination, so I put her powers in a bomb."
"A biological weapon," Militia said. "You've designed a new disease?"
Bakuda laughed, holding something in her hand that looked like a meatball. Lift didn't like spaghetti that much, it was too messy even by her standards and needed fancy stuff like forks, but she liked to pick the meatballs out of the sauce. "When triggered, this bomb bursts into a million microscopic spores, each with the ability to turn anything they touch into themselves. Each of the thirty trillion cells in your body would turn into thirty trillion spores to be carried off in the wind. A disease? This is dust to dust, the apocalypse made flesh."
Miss Militia's eyes widened. "That's insane. You could get hit by a car next week and wipe out the human race!"
"Then drive carefully. I don't want the PRT getting in my way. I don't want your people tripping me up or even looking at me funny, and it would be in your best interest to clear out any of the city's nut jobs who might try to kill me just to see what would happen. Do you understand?"
Miss Militia took a deep breath. "Explicitly."
"Good." She tossed the meatball up in the air and caught it, making Militia and a lot of the crowd flinch. "Now for the next act of this Saturday morning special, how many does it take to carry a message?"
Militia's eyes widened "No."
"On one hand, you're more dangerous and I don't really like the idea of you running around ... alive." She spun on Vista, who stared blankly into nothing. "On the other, I've wanted to do some experiments with this little girl since I moved here."
Lift felt a phantom itch in the back of her head, then took a deep breath and pulled a small leaf out of her pocket.
"Mistress?" Wyndle said at her feet. "I know this is asking for a lot, but please don't do anything foolish. Or dangerous. Or particularly brave, if you can help it."
"So let's let chance decide." She pointed a finger at Miss Militia. "Eenie."
"Bakuda, stop this! I'm the one who killed Oni Lee, I'm the one who should ..." Miss Militia's voice trailed off as her eyes locked on Lift's.
"Meenie."
Lift winked at her and slammed the leaf into her face, right between her eyes. She filled it with awesomeness, making it remember what it was before she had plucked it from a vine, and it grew into a mesh of ivy hugging her face like a mask.
"Miny."
Lift darted out of the crowd and snatched the Meatball of Doom out of Bakuda's outstretched hand. "Moe!" she said, and she stuffed it in her mouth.
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Out of view of Bakuda's army between two buildings, Tattletale checked her watch. "Annnnd now."
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Bakuda stared at her. Miss Militia and Vista stared at her. The entire starving crowd stared at her.
"You ... you ..." Bakuda spluttered. "What have you done?"
"I stole your ..." She winced. Her mouth tingled, and the tingle went all the way down her throat. "... dinner. Storms, you're a bad cook. That was one of the worst things I've eaten all day." She doubled over, suppressing the urge to vomit.
"No, don't! I still have time to ..." Her voice trailed off. "You removed my stasis bomb! That could have saved us all you idiot!"
"It was giving me a headache."
"You ... you doomed us all." She started laughing, first sounding amused, then more and more insane.
Lift's stomach twisted inside of her, frothing like the sea in a storm. What had Bakuda said it did? Something about spores? C'mon, Lift. Ain't no nasty meatball's gonna best you. She poured as much awesomeness as she could into herself, and the nausea passed. She stood up straight and grinned. "Okay, I'm better now."
Bakuda froze in the middle of her laughter and turned to her. "You're better?" she asked. "You can't be better! You're supposed to be ... that was my ..." She shook her head and turned to the crowd. "Shoot her!" Some people raised their guns, but no one wanted to be the first to obey. Lift bolted forward and jumped onto Bakuda, and did the worst thing that she could do to an evil tyrant trying to enact a reign of terror. She gave her a hug. "Wait, don't shoot her!"
"Well, which is it?" Lift yanked her bandolier of grenades free and tossed them into the crowd. The people screamed and scattered, making a hole in the ring of onlookers.
Any one of them could have stepped forward and tried to wrestle Lift off of the woman, but being kidnapped, tortured, enslaved, and watching Bakuda threaten to unleash a starvin' Desolation on the world didn't inspire a whole lot of loyalty. The woman had brought them here to witness her moment of triumph, but they seemed happy to watch her get beat up by a little girl.
Assuming, of course, that she didn't blow anyone of them up, so Lift touched her mask and made it so slick it fell to pieces and dropped off her face.
Knowitall had told her that Bakuda needed her mask to detonate her bombs. She had used a lot of words like "interface" and "hud," whatever those meant, and also the word "probably," which made Lift a little nervous, but ... but underneath her creepy mask, Baukda had a boring, ordinary face. A bit too long and a bit too pale with black hair matted to her head, but in the end she was just a normal person. Hopefully, some of the hundreds of people around them could see that.
Bakuda's mouth bit into a snarl. "Shoot the hostages," she ordered, her voice sounding out of place without her mask's distortions. "Kill them both."
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Now.
Miss Militia called her power to her hand in the form of a knife. She sliced through her bonds and spun as she rose to her feet, slashing at the man behind her as her weapon took the shape of a saber in her left hand. Her momentum carried her into a second spin, pivoting behind the man, and as her weapon became a riot gun she shot the man behind Vista twice with a spray of rubber pellets.
Then she pointed the gun at Bakuda as she changed it to a Walther PPK. Her entire right arm screamed in pain from her broken collar bone, but she could aim nearly as well with her left. "If we die, you die."
"If I die, my entire organization dies," Bakuda said. "You don't want five hundred deaths on your conscience."
"People, people, people," Leaf said, still hanging onto Bakuda and sounding mildly annoyed. "Ain't no one's gonna die. Y'know why? 'Cause right now, Vista's gonna do somethin' really clever."
Vista blinked. "I am?" She had been knocked unconscious when the warehouse collapsed on them and Miss Militia wasn't sure how aware she was of— "Oh!"
In the opposite direction, three monstrous dogs charged down the street, directly into the opening of the crowd where Leaf had tossed Bakdua's grenades. The space was wide enough so Vista could stretch the opening out even more. Had the Undersiders planned that out from the beginning? Bakuda's reaction, the crowd's reaction, even Vista's? It couldn't have been luck.
Thoughts for later. Leaf jumped off Bakuda's shoulders over the head of the lead dog and onto its back as the monster grabbed Bakuda in its jaws. Vista stood and swelled the ground beneath her for an extra foot of height and stretched out her hand for the rider of the second rider. And Miss Militia ...
She had rejected their offer of a team up before, but Vista trusted them and Leaf had joined them, so she grabbed Grue by the arm and climbed up behind him.
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They stopped some distance away from the crowd. Eventually those people would realize that the monster who had terrorized them all week couldn't hurt them anymore, but for now it was best to give them some space.
"Alright," Panacea said, standing up from Bakuda's body. "She should be unconscious for the next day, long enough to lock her up someplace safe."
Lift smiled, sitting on the ground and leaning against one of the dogs. All in all, it had been a pretty good heist at the end. Smooth. She liked surprises as much as the next thief, but there was something to be said about a job where everything turned out right.
Skullface nodded. "Then it's time to part ways. Assuming you have things handled?"
Militia nodded. "My team is en route, and I doubt Bakuda inspired the loyalty necessary to incite an attempted rescue. The people she kidnapped will be taken care of and their bombs will be removed in short order."
"Well, there goes my weekend," Panacea said.
"Does it usually take that long?" Fancypants said. "I assumed you all would have arrived together."
Militia sucked in a breath. "As I initially assumed this would be either a trap or a distraction, I thought it best to leave the Protectorate in reserve until I had more information. Unfortunately, once I did I couldn't get a signal out." She turned toward Knowitall. "Though in the future it might be mutually beneficial to be more forthright about these things."
Knowitall's mouth fell open in mock outrage. "What? I was completely forthright. I told you Vista was with us, and she was, and that she would die if you didn't show up, which she would have. If you assumed any sinister plots on our part, that's on you. Oh, and you might need this, by the way." She tossed Militia a piece of paper. "It's Bakuda's passwords. You have until next Tuesday to log into her accounts and cancel the auto triggers."
"And with that," Fancypants said, stretching, "I'd say my work here is done."
"What are you talking about?" Panacea said. "You didn't do anything."
He chuckled. "Didn't I?"
"Yeah," Lift agreed. "He just saved the world. Weren't you watching?"
"What?" she said, looking from one to the other. "What are you talking about?"
Lift shook her head sadly. "Sorry, Fancypants. Looks like she missed it."
He shrugged. "It was a thankless task from the start."
Panacea looked at them, trying to decide if they were serious or not. "You guys suck."
"Enough," Skullface said. "It's time to go."
"Before you do," Militia said, "there's something I need to say."
Skullface hesitated. "What?"
"Two days ago, you failed to rob a bank," she said. "Today, you may have saved the world."
"We won when it counted," he said. "What's your point?"
"You make better heroes than villains."
Silence hung in the air. "No," Skullface said at last. "It wouldn't suit us."
"Is that true for all of you?" Militia asked, and Lift realized she was looking down at her. Lift sat up, opened her mouth, and—"
"Oh, shut up." Everyone turned to Knowitall. "You're seriously trying to poach Leaf right now?"
"Tattletale," Skullface started.
"No. You want to know how she ended up with us?" She grinned, or at least bared her teeth. "Shadow Stalker found her and Grue in a dark alley and killed them both. Shot the kid through the eye with a crossbow bolt so no one would see her murder Grue. You want us to switch sides? Become heroes? Clean your own damn house."
Vista gasped, and Militia's eyes hardened. "I got better," Lift said. "'Sides, I was asking for it. Stole her boots and everything."
"I will look into this," Militia said. "I promise."
"Yeah, good luck with that," Knowitall said, climbing up onto a dog. "I know how much you people love hopeless battles."
Skullface did the same. "All the same," he said with a nod toward Vista, "it's been good working with you."
"Finally," Fluffy said.
"Well, that was fun," Fancypants said.
Lift climbed up behind him and turned around. Back at the country club, Militia had told her to call her if she ever needed help. Lift hadn't called her, but she came anyway. Vista had left her to die, but had then gone out of her way to save her. That didn't make much sense, but sometimes people had to run around in circles to figure out where they were. She'd done that herself more than once. And Panacea ... Lift knew the face of someone on the edge when she saw it.
"Thanks," she said. "I'll see you around."
And with that, the dogs broke into a run, and they all went home.
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A/n Three years ago on my birthday in chapter eight, I started this current arc with Lisa hearing the fireworks (or bombs), realizing that they could use the distraction to break Brian out of the PRT building, and declared it to be Independence day. That was just a throwaway line, but, well, happy Independence day, everyone.
(Also it's been three years? And ten chapters? My goodness this arc has gotten out of hand.)
As for what comes next, two things. In Worm, all the victories are pyrrhic. You win the fight, but now you have a criminal record. You saved the city, but you lost your friends. You saved the world, but lost your powers, arms, friends, and nearly your humanity. Stormlight is the opposite. You take your broken self, throw it at the biggest challenge around, and somehow come out of everything more whole. You learned to hold on, you learned to let go, your courage and your faith redeemed your every sacrifice, and in time even your scars begin to fade.
This isn't a Worm story with a Stormlight character. This is a Stormlight story in a Worm setting, and I want the next few chapters to reflect that.
Second, I want to tone things down a bit and focus more on Lift having fun instead of a broad cast of characters suffering. And there aren't going to be any more ten chapter story arcs for a long time. I don't know if this experience stretched me out, wore me down, or both, but I don't plan on doing this again for a while. Of course, I never planned on this arc turning out the way I did, so it was pretty exciting for me. All in all, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out while at the same time looking forward to writing something much, much lighter.
Thanks for staying with me all these years. I'm really bad at replying to your comments, but I read each and every one of them. I'd also like to thank my brand new editors, Eschwartz and HanChenYou for looking over this beforehand. Finally, I'd like to thank my growing number of Patrons, Exiled, Prime 2.0, Sphinxes, Kelsey Bull, Hubris Prime, Janember, Yotam Bonneh, Svistka, Lord of Edges, LordXamon, Victoria Carey, Kurkistan, Bernie McGuire, and Christopher Harris. You have been fantastic.