A/N:
Hello, and welcome to this Wednesday's update, dear readers! The complications are beginning to build and things are going to start getting hairy as we move into the second half of the second act. Expect things to get more thrilling as the chapters go on to the end! Break time is over. :) No more notes for today before the chapter, I'll see you at the bottom!
Chapter Summary:
We catch up with Valerie, after Danny's weekend off, and see how her and the town are fairing...
Chapter Specific Warnings:
Description of Physical Illness, Paranoia
Chapter Title:
(En)feeble(ment): Deficient in physical strength ... Lacking force, vigor, or effectiveness in action or expression; faint. ... (The act of enfeebling; debilitation, enervation or devitalization)
Malaise: A feeling of general bodily discomfort, fatigue or unpleasantness, often at the onset of illness. ... An ambiguous feeling of mental or moral depression ... Ill will or hurtful feelings for others or someone.
7:43pm; November 14th, 2005; Amity
She leaned on the board, relying on her armor to hold her up against the pull of gravity. Every part of her felt like she'd fought a possessed aluminum bat, leaving bruises and swollen joints along the way. Her head ached as if someone was squeezing it like a grape. She's given up sleep the last three days to cover the entire greater Amity area so Phantom could have his sick leave, and now she was paying for it. She landed on a roof in the restaurant district, opposite Rossi's Place, and leaned into the cold brick wall. Even her suit's warming system was on the fritz after running nearly three days straight. She could feel the frigid fingers of the wind clawing at her skin, or the breath stealing stab of frosty air on every inhale. It kept her warm enough to continue patrols, but they were uncomfortable. She pulled up the map, taking in the array of blinking incident reports and closing her eyes against the throb of pain looking at the display caused.
The suit compensated, dimming the glow somehow while retaining the clarity, but the entire system chugged, slow and stuttering, through the process. She'd even noticed visual glitches and errors in the display. I guess every computer starts to bug out if it hasn't been shut down in a while. She hadn't let the suit sit idle for more than half an hour the entire weekend. After Phantom had taken off for his sick leave, the incident numbers had exploded. Worse, even though the previous groupings had been docile, these incidents tended towards the aggressive. That meant being woken up from a dead sleep to fight a gas range turned flamethrower, or keep a bus from crashing off a bridge taking all its passengers with it. She'd even wrestled a couple of pieces of dock machinery gone rogue and tossing heavy steel containers hither and yon, while eating through her supply of rockets and grenades.
She'd need to get a resupply from Mr. Masters soon, and with her suit malfunctioning, she dreaded the conversation. One little glitch in front of him is all it would take for the slimy creature to dig his talons deeper into her and her suit, and with the going rate of misfires lately, she doubted it could hold off for a whole visit. She hoped a complete reboot and some proper rest would cure the issue, and she realized some of this was her own fault. Her brain was connected to the suit. So, if she was tired, worn thin, and distracted, it was less responsive and slower on the draw. She moaned when a new aggressive report popped up in Phantom's sector near Beverley's. The tech at the mall, what remained of it, were large heavy machines or wigglers they'd previously cleared as docile. An incident over there signaled a hard fight.
A notification popped up in the top right of her visor, flashing the forum profile of Phantom. She pulled it up as she made her way towards the mall. He'd better not be asking for an extension.
"Hey Red, sorry I've been gone so long. I'm back on patrol and got everything in my zones tonight. I know there's a lot of stuff flashing, but I promise I've got it. Just grab the stuff near the Nasty Burger, and leave the rest to me. Get some rest."
His message took a few extra seconds to register, and when it did, she couldn't even feel relief. There were fewer incidents in Elmerton and around the restaurant strip, but after the weekend she'd had, anything above zero felt like an impossible task. She stopped above the iconic fast food joint and considered her options. There were a few quick docile wigglers in the neighborhoods near the strip, and a couple small violent ones in Elmerton. All of those were tiny things, like can openers and cell phones that their owners had trapped inside laundry baskets or under Tupplewear containers. She didn't feel the urge to rush to any of them.
If she took her time, worked carefully from where she was back towards home, she'd be done in no more than an hour. Then, she could grab dinner, a shower, and her pillow. She leaned on her less sore left side, and took a look at the map one last time. Yeah, that'll work. She sent back a message agreeing to hand over Phantom's patrol zones back to him and headed off towards the first group of incidents in the Sandy Shores neighborhood. She'd been there not too long back, to escort some elementary school kids home after dark, and remembered it from the air well enough. She could land in one of the cul-de-sacs and walk up to the door to check on the new Gameswitches that had animated. The owners already had wigglers in their house, but the newly arrived tech had gotten infected as well.
Not a great sign. That means if places try to order replacements or get new pieces in, they can just become wigglers too. She'd been worried about that the moment Phantom confirmed it was some form of contagion. They still had no plan to get rid of the curse. Christmas, and shopping for the holiday, were coming up fast. There was a chance a bunch of new tech would animate and cause her more headaches. She banked the board to the left, circling over the cluster of houses below, trying to pick out the one with the report through the gloom. She would have the suit highlight the house in question, but it'd been so buggy the last day, she didn't want to stress out its systems more than necessary.
A new message from a different text thread, from Ellie, popped up into her helmet, and a small smile broke through her ill mood. It was likely another set of pictures. The other girl had taken to sending her updates every time she made it to a new country. A thought opened up the text and flooded her visor with images of a tropical destination paradise a world away. 'In Indonesia', Ellie had tagged the images, and it included shots of the jungle, the local architecture, and plenty of food. Bogged down with work, she longed for the adventure and freedom on the other side of the texts, and she practically moaned when she got another set of pictures with the beach and ocean waves. I bet it's actually warm there. She dismissed the pictures when the suit alerted her she was above the right neighborhood.
She spotted her target and went in for a landing, descent placid and controlled, and then terrifying and rapid. The board sat unresponsive under her feet, and it took every ounce of her concentration to arrest the fall and bring it to a stop a few meters above the street. She caught her breath and grimaced at the feeling of frozen condensation building up on the outside of her mask, clogging the fresh air. The new air filtration system had failed two days ago after the first 24-hour-long patrol. She turned up the heating unit so it would melt. She'd hate the feeling of the unthawed spit dripping down the front of her face, but at least she'd be able to breathe.
She landed with a metallic thump as her boots cushioned her fall from a few feet higher than she'd enjoyed. The jolt of the landing, after her board had suddenly retracted, left her knees throbbing. She rubbed at them, hissing as a squishy ball of fluid on either side pressed back. The joints in her legs had looked like softballs since the suit's...whatever it used to cushion impacts started going in and out of functionality. She tiptoed around the bikes sitting on the front lawn and knocked on the door.
On the other side, a balding man with a bland and forgettable face answered. "Huntress?"
"That's me." She replied, sullen and thin.
"You sound awful. Is Phantom back yet?" The man motioned for her to come inside, waving at a soft and cushy looking spot on his couch. She fought back the temptation. She'd be stuck if she sat down now.
"He just returned, so I'm back to normal duty. What seems to be the problem?" She stuck to professionalism, leaning on it like she'd leaned on her suit to take some of her weight earlier that evening.
"Just this darn Gameswitch I bought. It's gone and wiggled out. I tried to keep it away from my other tech, but even though it was in the box and in the garbage, that doesn't seem to have helped."
"You kept it there the whole time?" she called after him as he disappeared around a corner to presumably grab the gaming toy.
"I did yeah. I wanted to see if it helped. I bought it, well because I wanted it, but also to help gather data. Us regulars on the forum aren't sure how far away tech has to be to wigglerify or how many days it takes." He came back, carrying a jiggling handheld gaming device, electric green sticking out against his dark skin. "The average seems to be four days for new stuff, and it doesn't unwiggle if it leaves Amity. So whatever this is—"
"You shipped a wiggler out of Amity!" The shrillness of her voice caught her off guard, but it was a serious situation. If curses were contagious through energy alone, and they could travel through solid objects, like the boxed Gameswitch suggested, he could have just spread it all over America.
"Don't worry, Huntress, I didn't ship it. Me and the boys took a group of them into the national park in a box with a ghost shield around it. I know it doesn't have ghost energy, or so the forums say, but it couldn't hurt to be careful. We took it outside of Amity's town boundaries and then some. No change in activity, which is a real shame, but still useful information." He held the wiggler out to her so she could scan it into their database, and had the suit send over the useful information he'd gathered as well.
"So, we know it's not related directly to the Amity area, that it can animate new tech in as little as three days, and that we still have no way to either stop the spread or cure it once it gets wiggly."
"You sure about that spread thing? We only tried with a ghost shield." She shook her head, watching as the man's face fell.
"There's been a couple other groups working on this. They've tried everything from powerful electromagnetic fields to various forms of radiation and thick shields made of metal or concrete. Thicker materials can slow things down, especially if they are dense, but nothing actually stops it." She took in his crestfallen face for a moment, before pivoting to a more positive subject. "The majority of the tech is still docile, though, even if you count ones that changed personality later. This is weird, and annoying, but not dangerous on the whole."
"You had to steer a bus into a bank of snow to prevent a deadly crash this weekend." He frowned down at her, wrinkles appearing on each side of his mouth. "I know you and Phantom are doing your best, but even if most tech is harmless, it's a matter of statistics. I didn't have to get my B.S. in nuclear engineering to know rare events over a great enough timescale are guaranteed to occur."
"We'll figure it out before then."
"I hope so. I'm not worried about the citizens; we've gotten good at dodging debris and making ourselves scarce, but you and Phantom are on the front lines. You both try to make yourself sound older, but I know a kid when I see one." He leaned against his door frame and eyed her up and down. "I don't want some teen taking a metaphorical bullet for this place because we couldn't get our shit together to solve this in time." She opened her mouth to reassure her, but he continued, "don't worry about me and my buddies, we'll be careful. Link me up with those other groups, though. The more we pool our resources, the faster we can get this handled." He waited until she'd given him the usernames of the other group leaders on the forum, before handing her a couple empanadas stuffed with cheese, spinach, beef and some type of garlic-y sauce. She munched on them the entire tour of Sandy Shores, chewing through half a dozen of the tasty treats to fend off the cold. She burned much more calories on patrol now to stay warm.
She turned away from the subdivision after a final slow circle. That took care of every incident outside of Elmerton, and a quick glance at the shared map showed Phantom blazing through his share with gusto. If his speed was any indication, he was fully recovered. She started back across the restaurant strip, eyeing the Nasty Burger with disdain. The smell of grease and the screaming customers all waited to welcome her back to work. She had a long shift tomorrow and was not looking forward to it. She turned her head away, putting the task out of mind, when one of the biggest missiles in her arsenal sailed towards the fast food establishment.
She tried to divert the trajectory, aiming it back towards the sky, but it wouldn't respond. She disarmed it with a thought, and then focused all of her will on changing the path. It turned at the last second. The hunk of cold steel slammed into the owner's parked car, totaling it in one shot. Her stealth mode activated, and the rocket disassembled itself, leaving only a pile of liquid metallic goo. No one had been outside to see the crash but her. She hated working there, but she couldn't imagine blowing up the joint. The attack hadn't even responded the first time she tried to divert it. All of those people would have—
She piloted the board back into the middle of the river separating the two towns, mind spinning in tired wheels trying to understand the last few minutes. It spun between the missile, the failed initial diversion, the desperate disarming, the kinda funny melted wreck she'd left the owner's luxury car, and back to why it fired off at all. Finally, she concluded she needed to run a diagnostic, a deep one this time. If that and some time offline didn't fix it, she was heading back to Vlad. Even if this was all some evil scheme of his to make her feel more indebted by sabotaging the suit with some form of accelerated planned obsolescence, she couldn't stomach firing off rockets in the middle of town.
She floated a few minutes longer, making sure the diagnostic was well underway, before turning towards home. The other incidents could wait. She, and the suit, needed rest.
6:37pm; November 16th, 2005; Amity
Rest, it turned out, was not entirely curative. The restart had refreshed the visual systems for the visor and rebooted the warming system and air filtration, but the weapons were still touch and go. As long as she stuck to smaller attacks and focused, everything worked as intended, but if she got distracted or let her attention drift to a new target, her shoulder lasers tried to zap it. Luckily, the shots weren't random—so they focused on the thing she'd already been attacking—but having new weapons pop up and fire without her consciously calling them up worried her. The diagnostic was still running, slowly finishing in the background processes of the suit, but her hopes for that to be a solution dwindled with every melted or scorched object pummeled by her lasers. At least it was easier to focus and fly after getting some sleep.
Still, outside of the system's buggy and janky misfires, she felt like a train had run through her bedroom and parked on top of her spine the last few nights. The soreness she'd dismissed as the result of running on fumes and fighting for three days had blossomed into an all out assault on her musculoskeletal and nervous systems. Every joint floated around a balloon of liquid, swollen and feeling like there was glass grinding inside every socket. Even with the armor cushioning the force of her turns and changes in angles, flying faster than half speed made her want to scream from bracing herself.
The weekend of constant fighting left her fatigued and her immune system run down, and now she'd caught something on top of everything else. She wasn't sure what, but with the late fall season and being stuck in the germ factory that was Casper, it could be anything from the flu to mono. The lumpy joints and fatigue felt like more than the flu, and she considered telling her dad after this patrol to see her pediatrician. She stopped, hovering over the Amity side of the river as she prepared to plan a route through that part of her patrol, and winced as she remembered the cost of doctor's visits. If it was something more serious, she could go when she felt worse. No point in wasting hundreds of dollars on her dad's newer, worse Axiom security agency-provided plan for something a few days and some rest would cure.
She marked out her route, the planned arc taking her close to Phantom's territory, and proceeded towards the first incident in the restaurant strip with apprehension. The report stated the refrigerator was "chill as its namesake", but she wasn't convinced. The last few reports had been miscategorized, and the planned routine check-ins had turned into a scuffle. She hoped the owner of the Korean BBQ spot wasn't trying to either pull a fast one to jump the line, by putting in a docile report, or fighting off the now murderous machine without a chance to update its status. Please be a nice fridge, she thought, landing in front of the store. Standing on the steps outside, fur lined hood pulled up against the chill of the wind, was one of the children of the owners. They'd met before.
"Hey Huntress, how's it hanging?" She saw his eyes crinkle up above his scarf and below the fluffy tufts of his hood, a smile evident even through all the layers.
"Well, I'm not hanging ten." She didn't feel the need to sugar coat it with other teens.
"Damn, still recovering from Phantom ditching like a loser?"
"He got sick."
"What, he catch a man-cold? Like a ghostly man-cold?" The teen hopped down the bottom step and leaned onto the railing to let her join him on the concrete.
"He got cursed, actually." She tried not to giggle at the way his eyebrows tried to merge with his hairline.
"For real?"
"Yeah. He got told to stay home, doctors orders, or she'd come to Amity and drag him back to the Zone. From the way he tells it," she worked her way up the steps to the door, "she'd kick his ass on a good day."
"Uh, I think it's great he decided to sit on his couch and watch ghost soaps."
"You think those exist?" She watched him shrug, the motion barely visible under the heavy puff of his winter coat.
"Maybe he gets human world TV at his house instead? Either way, I'd rather him stay away than lead some powerful ghost into the middle of town."
"I agreed, which is why I was covering his shifts." She knocked and waited for one of his parents to come to the door, taking in the call from the other side with a brighter mood. "He's been working triple speed since he's been back, though. So, man-cold solved."
"No, dad, I'm staying outside. I don't want to look at the fridge." He called back through the now open front door, backing down the last step and away from the warm interior. "I know it's not doing anything, but those wigglers freak me out." His dad told him to 'stop being a baby', and he groaned. "The fridge's got a face now. It's weird, dad!" he insisted, now standing on the sidewalk in front of the store.
"It has a face?"
"The digital display on the smart fridge keeps sending symbols to make faces. It's so...ugh. You can make it stop, right?"
"We still don't have a cure. I'm just here to confirm it's not dangerous."
"Oh come the... F on! I can't cook anything with it watching me. It keeps trying to cheer me on as I cook things, and it makes a bunch of beeps and noises whenever I grab something from inside. It's so creepy. How am I supposed to make breakfast?" He pulled down his scarf to reveal the lower half of his face and flipped back his hood as well. "Please, Huntress, can't you just take it with you?"
"Don't you need that fridge to cook things for the restaurant? Just, use a different one?"
"I do! Except my bratty little sister keeps putting my shi-stuff into the living one because she knows it wigs me out. We've got two of them, and I try to ignore it, but…"
"I can't make your sister behave."
"Neither can my parents." His voice sounded so depressed, she considered patting his shoulder to comfort him.
"Look, I'm not dragging a happy fridge your parents need to do their job out of their kitchen. I'm not in the mood, and frankly, I'm too sore to do so. I'm not blowing it up either, so get the grin off your face!" The way his mood crumpled almost convinced her to blow the wiggler up on principle. "You'll be fine. Does your sister like the fridge?" She looked back towards the open doorway, mindful of the warm air they were wasting with the conversation on the front steps.
"Only enough to torment me with it."
"Maybe stick something she likes inside way in the back, so she has to reach inside to get it. If it bothers her too, that'll teach her to stop."
"You underestimate her power...and maliciousness. Never mind," he sighed when his dad yelled at him to stop distracting her, "I'll figure something else out."
"Sure." She said, hopping up the last step and heading inside the warm lobby of the shop.
The visit was brief, taking only a few minutes to confirm it was tame and not a threat. She'd learned it liked to feed people, that it loved every member of the household, and it was hurt that the owner's son thought it was creepy. She couldn't do anything about the weird dynamic taking root in the household, but she did tell the tech to prank the little sister to convince her not to mess with Joon so much.
Turns out, it didn't like her attitude either, and gladly agreed to hide her favorite snacks...somehow. She had no idea how it would manage, but it was a 'smart' fridge. She was sure it'd think of something. All along, the owner praised it for how helpful it was to the restaurant, explaining how nothing ever spoiled anymore. It'd been a wiggler for two weeks, and he'd only reported it because his wife insisted. She was a member of the newly formed research group into the animations, and wanted to add it to their data.
She flew away, feeling less tired, but now more concerned about the entire state of affairs. If there were people hiding their wigglers because they found them cute or harmless, then they had no idea the scale of the infestation. That much was a given, considering the nature of the plague, but this report was the fifth she'd fielded in the last day about a wiggler that'd been active for over a week that they'd just now gotten around to reporting.
The research group had brought out a whole host of new reports of docile tech, and with the database filling up with new reports by the minute, she and Technomage figured at least 90% of the total Amity animations were docile. It should be good news; it was sort of good news, but now she was back to the problem of people hiding tech. They couldn't eliminate the curse from town if people sequestered their favorite wiggly pieces away. After a bunch of broken machines got replaced, there was nothing stopping the curse from surging back again, inside new tech, from a single hidden source. They would have to run an ad campaign or something to encourage people to hand over their infected tech. She thought over the issue, turning it this way and that, as she made her third and fourth stops of the evening. If the curse had a reservoir to pull from in the future, they'd never be free of it.
She stopped back over the restaurant strip, preparing to head back to Elmerton, when she saw a black streak in the distance swathed in ghost energy. Phantom. Looks like our paths collided tonight. She thought, flying to catch up with him. "Been a while, stranger." She stopped over a roof as he curved his flight around to join her.
"Hey Red." His aura shone bright against the city lights below them, easily rivaling them in its brilliance. He had a big grin plastered on his face, like he was preparing his best joke. "How's patrol, you've been quiet all night." She looked up to the top right of her visor, and sure enough, there was the flashing indicator of their text thread.
"A lot on my mind."
"Is that different than usual?"
"It is, when I realized we have a case of people hiding their zombie bites." His grin dimmed a little as he took in her sentence. "I just took care of a report on the strip at Takko Korean BBQ. Their smart fridge has been a wiggler for two weeks, and they only said something now because the wife wanted more data for the new research group on the forum."
"People aren't reporting every wiggler?"
"People are hiding their animated tech. That's the fifth one in the last twenty-four hours that's more than a few days old. I knew some of the residents liked the little buggers, but we can't eradicate the curse plague if—"
"People are hiding their zombie bites. Right." He finished, crossing his arms and looking down at the sparkling gold of the artificial lights below. He floated closer, face soft in the light of his own glow. "Maybe we just zap the ones that go feral?"
"We can't leave moving tech all over the city, Phantom."
"Why not if they're not causing trouble?"
"Because, every infection vector raises the chances of infecting a hostile piece of tech. And all it takes is time for something big and nasty to come to life and hurt someone. You want another Fenton Ops' situation?" She moved closer and turned her board, letting him work as a windbreak. Ghosts didn't feel cold, but she sure did. The heating had gone on the fritz again sometime in the last ten minutes.
"Good point." He floated only a few away, and from this close she could see the flecks of dark green in his eyes and the spattering of glowing constellations on his cheeks. The suit's warming function kicked back on, and she sighed in relief. "Maybe we'll have to make some announcement? But there will be people who resist, and dumbasses who insist it's their God Given Right to keep their property the way they want it."
"I can just hear the whining about the 'communist regime' coming to take their property and alter it in a way they didn't consent to. God, how are we gonna convince people to behave?" The flashing discoloration in one corner of her visor ceased, and her headache thanked it.
"Maybe we don't have to?" He drifted away, and she followed, not wanting her windbreaker to disappear so soon. The heat could kick off at any moment, after all. "If the curse can travel through solid material, I don't see why the counter-signal shouldn't. We could just blast everything from the air, and then whether or not people report their animated tech, it'd get cleansed."
"We cannot call it cleansing. That sounds like we're scouring the earth from above with an orbital laser, like in Fightstar Galaxy."
"Ok, yeah, so we'll workshop the language, but you get my point, right?" He leaned closer and she followed, brushing their arms together as she twisted to avoid another gust of wind. The warmth was doing wonders for her body aches, her joints already felt better. She flexed her fingers, taking in the heat and the way it loosened the stiff ligaments with a pleased hum.
"Yeah, I get your point. We update my suit with the counter-signal, then I can blast the whole town in a bath of beneficial ecto-radiation."
"You know," he chuckled and leaned his forehead into her helmet, eyes sparking with something primal, "when you put it like that, it sounds like we're up to no good."
"We have to irradiate the town."
"Oh my God!"
"It's for their own good." She deadpanned.
"Red, we can't say that in the announcement!" The chuckles transformed into true laughter, and he took a step back, trying to contain himself.
"Amity Park, the most irradiated place in America." She smiled, feeling better for the first time in days. "Actually, that part's probably true. Between all the ghost attacks, the Guys in White scanning everything, the Fenton's portal, and the one in the mayor's house, there's probably enough radiation to make our own version of the Brawler."
"What," he started, the face splitting grin from before returning, "you don't think that's me?"
"You're not angry enough, and you're way too twinkie."
"Hey, I've got muscle." He stopped to flex, the material his jumpsuit was made of didn't react. "I promise that's the suit's fault."
"Uh huh, you keep telling yourself that, tiger." She giggled when he pouted at her, trying his hardest to look offended. The big puppy dog eyes and stuck out lip reminded her of someone, but she was too tired to place who at the moment. "You don't need real muscle; you're made of ectoplasm. That's much stronger than protein fibers."
"Stronger than you?" He challenged. With her suit's heating system on and a few minutes to shelter from the cold, her muscles felt better than they had in days. She marched up to him and lifted him over her head.
"I thought I remembered you being a lightweight."
"This does not count. This proves nothing!" He wiggled in her grasp and then used intangibility to slip away, face tinging green. "Just because you can lift me, doesn't mean I'm not stronger than you."
"I haven't seen you pick me up, mister strong ghost-man," she teased. She'd seen him lift heavier—cars, trucks, chunks of concrete shot through with steel rebar—on the regular. The mischievous spark in his eyes made her stomach do a flip.
"I don't even have to touch you to lift you up." So declared, she felt his energy wrap around her and levitate her off the ground a few inches. "Bet you can't do that." Her armor repelled most of it, but this close, and this much, some of it forced its way inside. It brushed against her skin, hot and foreign, pressing into each sore spot on her back, working against the biggest knots in her muscles.
"Put. Me. Down." He dropped her like a lead weight. She stood panting on the roof, trying to figure out how his energy thwarted all of her suit's defenses. What had she been thinking? Bantering with Phantom like that, letting him play games with her, had she lost her mind? Even if he played sweet and kind, he was still the most powerful full ghost in Amity, and she'd just let her guard down. "Don't just levitate me like that."
"You're right," he floated closer, eyes still flashing with challenge and amusement, "I should have used my hands." He reached out, and her hands shot out to slap him away, feeling like a puppet on autopilot.
"That's not funny."
"Red... I thought," he stopped, looking confused, before he floated away, aura dimming, "weren't we just fooling around?" They were. They had been. Now, she was giving him mixed signals. It wasn't like he had brain cells in that empty ectoplasm-based skull. She shouldn't be confusing him like this.
"I shouldn't have picked you up. My bad." She took another two steps back, moving towards the edge of the roof. "Anyway," she started, giving into the desire to change the subject, "we don't actually have a meeting planned for today. I should go back on patrol."
"Oh right, there's a whole bunch of little cases that sprung up near Parkland Point I should take care of." He didn't sound serious, he sounded like he was making an excuse more than she was.
"I'll let you get to it." She summoned up her board after jumping off the building into the chilly night air. "We're still on for the meeting Friday, so you better be there. I'll message you if something big comes up." She sped away, trying to ignore the sad look in his eyes when she did, and headed towards the next incident.
She'd just cut and run like a coward instead of working through five seconds of awkwardness. Since when did a little social misfire throw her off like that? She stopped over the 7/15 closest to Elmerton, fighting down shivers. The heating system had gone out again. Just her luck, she'd almost gotten warm. The gas station was quiet, nothing but customers driving around the pumps and a few people heading inside to pay, so she took a moment to gather her thoughts.
She'd have to be more careful about being too friendly with Phantom. He was a nice ghost, but he was still a ghost. The memory of his energy, hot and searching, prodding over her body gave her another case of entirely psychologically induced shivers. She'd never felt anything like that before, and she would rather die than feel it again. It hadn't been painful, but who wanted telekinetic ghost hands groping all over them, poking at everything? Not her! Why hadn't her armor repelled all of his energy like it always did?
She pulled up her scanner and checked his energy reading. He was back to normal. She hadn't been around him at full power since the upgrade, maybe his energy was too strong to completely fend off at full strength? Also, he hadn't tried to levitate her before either, so that probably contributed. She'd sent him a message reiterating not to do the creepy ghost floating trick again, and went back to looking at her map. There were two more incidents in Elmerton to check up on, docile, and then she'd be done for the night. She groaned as her screen started flickering again, setting off her headache, and sent just enough of her suit material away to rub at her temples with her bare fingertips.
Now it was bugging out again? It'd been fine the whole time she'd been on the roof…right next to Phantom. The thought stopped her cold, a fine mist of cold sweat breaking out over her entire body as her heart raced. The heating system only broke once she'd flown away from Phantom. Her visor had stopped glitching out the longer they'd hung out on the roof. Even her armor's ability to support her weight had felt better when he was nearby. Her suit had been glitching out for days and the minute she's within a few feet of the ghost boy, everything was better?
No. No, something wasn't right. If it had been one system clearing up, she could have dismissed it, but taken together, it painted an ugly, scary picture. Did Phantom do something to my suit? When could he have done that? He could possess technology. The suit's attached to my body. He could wrap his energy around her and slip inside even past her armor's built in resistances. I have so many sensors and scanners on this thing! He had a power that let him go invisible even to her scanners. Why would he do that? She felt empty, wrapping her arms tightly around her as her suit failed to block out a large gust of wind.
She moved closer to a nearby set of buildings, diving behind the tower on top of one to block the flow of the wind. She settled there, taking a few deep breaths to slow her heart. Ok. It was possible Phantom had compromised her suit, but not definite. She had a diagnostic running, and if there was ghostly influence, that would solve it. Hell, for all she knew, letting the suit be vulnerable to ghost energy was Plasmius' doing, trying to leave himself an opening to take her out if she betrayed him. No need to panic, just work with the information you have. If things were still glitchy and if they cleared up around Phantom, she'd have evidence he'd been tampering with her tech. Before that, flipping out like this wouldn't help.
A loud alert rang through her helmet, forcing her out of her distracted thoughts. A new report flashed on her map in Elmerton. It was an aggressive wiggler and it was big. She bit back a groan as she pushed off the brick of the building, speeding off towards the new bright red dot. If the report was accurate, an MRI machine at the hospital had come to life and the magnetic interference was shutting things off. Worse, it seemed to be targeting the ICU. The report said something about 'aiming' its blasts upward. She had no idea how a giant magnet did something like that, but she was sure she'd find out soon…
The MRI took an hour to put down, fighting back with everything it had to stay functional. It lashed out at technicians, fired pieces of metal—hurtling them through the air after picking up speed in its field—at nurses, it even sent out a version of an EMP blast. Every gun and laser in her arsenal had its guidance system affected by the strong magnetic pulses, and it took her failing suit half an hour to calculate a compensatory algorithm to counteract it. Even after that, the hulking machine soaked up damage like a sponge, and with civilians around, especially medically fragile ones, she'd had to pull her punches.
She flew away from the front roundabout of the hospital drop off, taking in the cheers and hollers of the grateful medical workers with relish. It had sucked up her entire evening, but it was worth it. She saw an alert flashing in her visor about something on the forums, and dismissed it. Then, with another quick thought, she silenced her phone entirely. If anyone wanted to talk to her who wasn't her daddy, they could wait until tomorrow.
Her fire escape, and the spooky alley it sat in, came into view, and she fought back a series of hard shudders. Under the fatigue, even after the buzz of a good fight, sat the omnipresent sense she was being observed. No matter how many times, and what way she checked, she couldn't make the feeling stop. There was nowhere else to transform, she had to use the fire escape. She gritted her teeth past the feeling, ignoring the way her stomach clenched and flopped and her heart raced. She pulled open her bedroom window and jumped inside, slamming it shut. Once safe on the other side, the feeling sank away, but her heart rate did not immediately return to normal.
If she wasn't so sore from all the fighting, she'd go for a jog in the morning to calm her nerves. "Sweet pea, is that you?" Right, her dad had tonight off. He'd even delayed cooking dinner so they could eat it late together.
"Yeah, daddy, I'm home." She dismissed the suit, feeling it slip away back under her skin, ready to be called up at any moment. She felt cold without it, and worried it was dangerous with it on. The two ideas pulled at her, increasing her fatigue, and straining her already fragile mood. "I'm not really feeling hungry." She reached into her pocket to take out her cell, tossing the silenced phone onto her bed. She'd move it to her nightstand after a shower. "I just fought an MRI machine at Elmerton General Hospital. I'm gonna just take a shower and head to bed."
"Are you sure you don't want anything to eat, honey?" Her dad's face poked around the corner, mustache making a comically down-turned 'c' the same way it always did when he worried about her to the point of grimacing.
"I'll have a big breakfast." She promised. "The only thing I need right now is some hot water and a good night's sleep." He left after that, promising to pack her dinner to reheat tomorrow and to wake up early to cook her a huge meal. She grabbed her towel, heading for the bathroom to unwind.
After her bath, she slumped against the sheets, muscle turned into jello from the blasting hot water. The shower pressure was the only redeeming quality of the apartment. She pulled her phone out from under her—she'd forgotten to grab it before she'd gotten into bed—and placed it on her nightstand. She'd answer her texts, puzzle out the mystery of her suit, and come up with a rousing 'turn in your wigglers' campaign in the morning.
A/N:
Welcome to the bottom, dear reader! Valerie doesn't seem to be doing so hot. Hopefully, she can get some rest soon now that Danny's back to work. I do wonder what's gotten into her?
This week's Saturday update is on schedule, so I will see you this weekend to continue our Valerie double feature! After that, we'll be back to switching POVs. So Chapter 16 is Danny and 17 is Valerie, ect.
Can't wait that long? Feel free to follow my art blog where I post snippets of upcoming chapters, Lore, and more for your enjoyment.
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See you all on Saturday!