A shocked shriek tore loose from Tabitha. Acacia grit her teeth as the shared sensations of the ocular penetration sang through our nerves. The shared, pleasurable sensations were still pain, despite their altered context, and were no less distracting for it.
That was such a stupid decision I'd made.
Tabitha staggered back, her knees almost buckling, as one hand pawed uselessly at the knife and the blood that streamed out around it. The blade had pierced deeply into her left eye, so deep that the tip had lodged in the inner surface of the back of her skull. Even I would've been in trouble, if that body's brain remained in its cranial cradle. But I'd moved it, allowing Tabitha to remain active, if hampered by the delectable agony. A detached part of me, focus drawn to the wound and the way Tabitha's torn flesh and spilt blood caressed the metal, noticed engravings on its surface. Words, four of them, two to a side.
GET OUT
STAY OUT
Paz's gasp of surprise became a scream as she noticed the bloody mess Tabitha was making. She stumbled back, legs giving out and dropping her to the grass beside the walkway. And her fear, vocalized, focused my aimless shock and bafflement into sharp anger. Hot, searing anger, more than I'd felt in my aimless life of drifting dissociation, before being dropped here. Someone had attacked me, and moreover, whoever it was had done so in a way that put Paz, someone I'd quickly come to care about, in harm's way.
Acacia lunged for Paz, falling to her knees in a slide to reach her side. The sidewalk distorted, arcing up to form cover, three layers of inch-thick concrete separated by packed dirt, shielding Paz and herself from any further attacks. Tabitha, at the same time, threw herself forward aggressively, aiming for the person crouched on that rooftop across the road.
The moment she lost contact with the ground, momentarily airborne in her headlong rush, a tearing sensation flashed through her as her connection with her senses for the surrounding solid matter, and part of her connection to Acacia, blinked out. It returned an instant later as her foot hit the ground, but the moment of intense discomfort was almost enough to make her fall on her face. The solution to that issue was close to mind: simply don't lose contact with the ground. And so, in blissful agony, Tabitha bloomed.
Her body and limbs elongated, growing big, pale, sickle-like claws that sank into the asphalt as she fell to all fours, the perfect traction to keep her hurtling forward. Two new pairs of limbs burst out from her sides in sprays of crimson: long, lean, clawed, many-jointed, and corded with dense, wiry muscle. Writhing bulges under the skin of her torso hinted at her skeleton warping to support them. Her spine split and extended, erupting from her back as tails, clad in razor-edged segments of bone and tipped with scythe-like blades. Extra arms emerged from her original elbows, forms inspired by the barbed, snatching forelegs of the mantis, only fleshy and bony with a few freckles rather than chitinous and bug-like. A thicket of long, segmented quills emerged from her scalp, neck, and upper back, joined by plump petals of rhythmically pulsating flesh. And to round things off, a messy bramble of tangled bone sprouted from around her knife-gouged eye socket, studded with sharp thorns and staring eyes aplenty, forming a mask of sorts over her face.
Scraps of her clothing, caught on her altered anatomy, whipped behind her as her headlong charge turned into a ground-eating scuttle, myriad claws gouging into the concrete when friction proved insufficient for the traction she needed. A detached fragment of myself wondered at how well I'd adapted to my changing forms. Fionnuala's current physiology, decidedly non-humanoid as it was, barely made her stumble even as it grew in mid-stride.
A connection clicked into place, then another, and another, my train of thought hurtling through my mind at speeds rivaling Fionnuala. While she clawed her way up the shop's wall, I was thinking about the Las Vegas Protectorate team. How they'd taken secondary aspects of their powers and focused on them, like how the woman who could make crystalline buds that would unfold into complex shapes given certain circumstances were met had an enhanced eye for detail that, if I recalled correctly, made her essentially a lesser Tattletale. I wasn't about to focus on a secondary power when I was so early in my career as a parahuman, mind, but clearly my self-biokinesis power came with something that enhanced my adaptability, letting us use newly grown limbs without long and frustrating practice with them. And if it made me more adaptable in that respect, might it also make me more adaptable in other ways? The way I'd eased into life here on Bet so smoothly seemed beyond the "heightened neuroplasticity" the message had mentioned. Maybe they were stacking together. Or maybe I was barking up the wrong tree with this line of thinking.
Fionnuala crested the roof of the shop a little over fifteen seconds after that fucking knife had interrupted our relaxing walk. Her fingers twitched, the mouth-like tears from which her sickle-like claws emerged gnawing on and drooling around their roots. She clambered over the roof, heedless of the shingles she dislodged in the process, her quills thrumming with desire to sate aggravation with violence. But as she passed over the roof's peak and caught sight of her quarry, she paused.
The woman in question was bedecked in asymmetrical clothes of green and silver, her face done up in immaculate silver face paint with more in emerald around her eyes and lips, lines of it forming tear trails and other designs on her cheeks. She stood with absolute surety in her footing on the sloped, uneven surface, not even looking away from Fionnuala as she slowly backed away, hands up and empty.
I didn't trust that gesture, knowing she could have a weapon in her hands with a thought. But for the moment at least, Fionnuala accepted the clear communication of surrender, and held off from attacking Circus.
And it was Circus, of that I was certain. Which complicated things further, because I felt decidedly less than sanguine about trying to rough up a fellow queer person, even if she was the one who had thrown the knife. But despite my misgivings, Fionnuala remained ready to fight if necessary.
Fionnuala let out a huff and said, "Alright, stop moving." She curled her body loosely around Circus, hemming her in. "Wanna tell me why you decided to chuck a knife through my head?"
Circus looked surprised, before her expression returned to a blend of cautious and unsettled. She did stop edging away, though. After a moment, she held one of her hands out and waggled it a little, the corner of her mouth jumping in a grimace for a moment.
Fionnuala blinked all of her couple-dozen eyes at that, choosing to ignore the blood that took the opportunity to burble forth from her wound. Weirdly enough, the minimal motions made some level of sense. "You… didn't want to? What?"
A moment of surprise, then another hand waggle. Circus gestured to her own eye, then crossed her index fingers. She tapped her shoulder, then shrugged.
"You were aiming for my shoulder?" A nod. "So when I flinched…" Another nod. Fionnuala scowled. "That doesn't exactly make me feel much better."
Circus cringed and shrugged.
"Look, I know you can talk. Is the silent act some kind of in-costume affectation?" A blink, alarmed, then careful nodding. "I suppose I can respect the commitment to the bit, as irritating as it is." Fionnuala rolled her shoulder and cracked her neck. "That said…"
A buzzing from one of Circus' pockets interrupted Fionnuala. The cape flinched at the sound, then looked at Fionnuala with an inquisitive tilt of the head and a gesture to the source. A bladed hand motioned for her to proceed, and she opened the pocket and pulled out a cell phone, a cheap-looking thing which was still buzzing. It looked kind of like an old Nokia I'd once had, except without the pull-out antenna. Odd that she didn't keep it in her storage space; maybe that interfered with signals? Regardless, she answered, then fiddled further with the phone, until a voice rang out.
"Hello, there!" Whoever it was was clearly a woman, though I couldn't guess at her age outside of 'not older'. Her tone was light, though I thought I heard tension beneath that. "You're Fionnuala, yes? Yes. I… aaaaand you just got a good idea of who I am, just from that, huh?"
"Hello, Tattletale. Thanks for pronouncing it correctly."
"You're welcome," she snarked back. "So, you know about me, but you don't know me. Did you read some in-depth dossier on me or something? Yes-but-no? Aaaaand I'm just going to try and forget that whole… ugh. Disturbing."
The corner of Fionnuala's lips twitched up despite herself. "What do you want, Tattletale?"
"Oh, I don't know, maybe I'm just trying to make sure a nominal ally of mine doesn't end up subjected to the tender mercies of the kind of person who burned ants with a magnifying glass as a kid."
"I wasn't—" Fionnuala took a breath to calm herself, trying to settle the feeling of offense wafting like wisps of smoke through us. I hadn't been expecting her to dig up something I hadn't thought about in so long. "I have no wish to seriously hurt Circus, much less whatever it is you're implying."
"I dunno, you say that, but from my point of view I'm very glad I'm a good distance away and not there in person. You might make what you tell yourself is an honest effort to connect with others, but beneath that, you don't think we're real. You may have reservations about hurting Circus for whatever reason, but that wouldn't do all that much to stop you. Would you even feel guilty about it? Y—" Her breath hitched. "You wouldn't. Because you fucked with your own brain. To turn your sense of guilt off."
Acacia, in the little shelter she'd made for Paz and herself, suppresses a frown of irritation at Tattletale's words. Sounds of distress drew her away from her thoughts. Paz was hunched against the curve of the wall, hyperventilating. A few small splatters of red had dirtied her cheek, and Acacia reached up to gently wipe one away with the back of a finger. That did little more than smear it, but the touch was enough to startle Paz out of the thousand-yard stare she had going on.
Once she had Paz's attention, Acacia murmured, "Breathe with me." She took exaggerated breaths, at a much more reasonable rate, and slowly, gently, helped her friend calm down. She could feel, through her power, that the moms that'd been present had snatched up their playing kids and booked it. Aside from them, and a few people in houses, there was no one else around. No mercenaries in tactical gear closing in or anything of the sort. She broke off a fragment of herself to focus on her power, squishing and stretching its field out long, if relatively narrow, and sweeping it around, almost like a radar display from a ship. In its resting shape, blobby as it might be, the field formed a hemisphere of about forty-ish meters in radius, at least when the fields of both my bodies had pooled together. Tattletale didn't seem to be within that distance, and I wanted to find the darling little irritant. And so, that fragment searched, reaching ever further.
Circus was looking increasingly uncomfortable with being in Fionnuala's presence, glancing furtively between escape routes and the various sharp bits of me. Fionnuala's quills thrummed, her disapproval a low sound heard more through one's bones than one's ears. Circus froze, and even I could see how stressed she was feeling.
Fionnuala went to respond, but had to take a moment to form a second mouth in her throat, as her first had warped enough to prove an impediment to speech. "Tattletale… Clarify something for me. Why are you antagonizing me so, if you fear what you think I could do to Circus?"
"Well, your attention is on me now, isn't it?"
"In part, but—"
Suddenly, Fionnuala's head snapped to the side with a crack of vertebrae. Acacia's search had found something, well within her search radius, in a place she'd already checked several times: impacts, heavy ones. Something, or somethings, that my power could not sense, were lumbering this way at a brisk pace. I couldn't see whatever they were visually, with buildings in the way, but—
Shit.
Fionnuala snapped her head back to see Circus well into taking advantage of her momentary lapse in attention. The cape had leapt, up and backwards, tossing the phone at Fionnuala's face. She reflexively grabbed for it, fumbling her first attempt but catching it the second time, even as her tails and tentacles whipped 'round to intercept Circus. But the clown-clad lady hooked her fingers around a blunt span of tail plating and used the momentary leverage to contort her body through a momentary gap between her tails. She hit the roof feet-first, her body coiling like a spring, then launched herself away and skidding to a precarious-looking stop at the edge of the roof.
Another shriek, this time one of sudden anger. Fionnuala's body uncoiled violently, tails whipping through the air while limbs unfurled into fang-edged ribbons and she-
And I froze, quickly dialing my capacity for anger down, down, down. Circus, a lit torch now in her hand and raised to her lips, also paused, tense uncertainty suffusing the lines of her posture. Her eyes flitted between Fionnuala's suddenly motionless limbs. Her eye wound spurted as I forcibly cycled her blood, scrubbing it of adrenaline as fast as I could.
I needed to not get into a cape fight right now. Fighting could only hurt me right now, at least in terms of my plans and social niceties.
Fionnuala took in a deep, deep breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth and ribs. "I shouldn't," she said softly. "You're just the messenger."
Circus remained where she was, tension joined by wariness. The oncoming impacts that I was fairly sure were Bitch's dogs slowed to a stop. "Jesus," Tattletale breathed, her voice slightly muffled from a thumb pad partially covering the phone's speaker. Fionnuala moved the offending digit. "Talk about emotional whiplash. You just went from pissed as fuck to utterly serene in under a second. Fucking disturbing as all hell."
Even without anger to fuel me, I did still want to fight, even though I'd never been in anything more than a momentary scuffle in my life. Just the modest exertions I'd experienced through Fionnuala just now had been fairly exhilarating, and I was quite curious to find out what getting burned would feel like, with the new pain. But, maybe some other time.
The indistinct sound of someone speaking to Tattletale came through, only to cut off as tiny jaws snapped shut around each of the thirty seven gnats, midges, and other small bugs that'd been clinging to various spots on Fionnuala's skin. There were likely more on the scraps of cloth still clinging to her form, but I couldn't feel them, nor did I feel like expending the effort to remove them. "Is that who I think it is, Tattletale?" she asked, even as her various appendages started to melt back into her body, the cracking, crunching, and squishing sounds ringing out across the rooftop.
Tattletale was silent for a moment, then sighed. "You don't actually want an answer to that, so why ask?"
"Mmm. Fair." With her body approaching human proportions, Tabitha pushed herself to her feet. The remnants of her clothes came free of wherever they'd gotten caught on her, swiftly getting replaced by the white-and-red pseudo-cloth of her costume. For a brief moment she mourned the outfit's loss, however briefly she'd had it. I didn't mind that much, seeing as it would be simple to get more clothes. She tilted her head until her neck cracked, then laced her fingers together and stretched her arms up above her head, extra fingers keeping a hold of the phone in the meantime. Her braid, no longer as neat as it had been before all the excitement, brushed against her bare back.
Turning her head to face Circus, who was still there for some reason, she said, "You're free to leave now, by the way." The small eyes on the portion of her mask covering her socket squinted as they were pushed aside by an emerging horn, which curled up and branched out to form her crown of eyes. "I hold no animosity towards you at this time. As I said, you are but the messenger, and the true source of the ire pointed our way is your employer." Maybe best to not actually name names just yet. Not for Coil's sake, of course. He could go romance a jar of rusty razors.
"She's being serious, Circus," Tattletale called out through the phone. "Hop to it, there're heroes already on their way. Bored heroes."
A moment's hesitation, and the torch vanished from Circus' hand. Fionnuala tapped out a short nonsense sequence with her foot, pretending to signal her sister to fix the property damage she'd done to building and road, then rose up on the balls of her feet as one-inch, prehensile heels slid into place. After a moment's pause, white, living leather encased the rest of her feet, save for their tops, up to a false strap looping around her ankle. I wasn't here to sell foot pics. Gashes in the building's wood siding and its paint closed, torn-up chunks of asphalt from the street melted into the road as their corresponding divots filled in, and tendrils of bedrock emerged from the ground to lift shingles Fionnuala had knocked loose off the grass and back into place.
Circus studied Fionnuala's face. Fionnuala smiled softly, even though the motion prompted another dribble of blood to ooze from her wound and down her cheek. I don't know what she found, if anything, but from one moment to the next she was suddenly springing down from the roof and darting away, out of sight. I didn't bother tracking her. I was more concerned with the headaches on my plate, both the metaphorical one this incident represented, and the very real ones throbbing away behind my right eye sockets. It was actual, painful pain, oddly enough, not the pain whose context I had altered to twist it into a reflection of pleasure.
Also, the knife had entered Fionnuala's left eye, so… yeah.
Fionnuala idly dragged her finger through the blood staining her cheek and smeared it across her lips like lipstick, pressing her lips together and pulling them apart with a soft pop. "And there goes Circus," she mused aloud, raising the phone. "I'm surprised you and yours have yet to leave, Tattletale." At this point, I wasn't all that invested in keeping details of my powers secret, especially when someone like Lisa was involved.
"Oh, don't you worry about us, sweetheart." I was a bit surprised at how little sarcasm she packed into that last word. "We'll get away just fine." And, indeed, I could feel the thumping of what could only be Bitch's dogs turning around. I did find it a bit odd that I couldn't sense them at all aside from that, since, from what I remembered, they were essentially suits of power armor made from dead flesh, and the other day I'd managed to sense an increasing amount of a dead person's body as their cells expired, but I decided to tuck that thought away for later.
"I do find it odd that this is all that your employer sent against me," Fionnuala said conversationally. "This all has the trappings of retaliation for what we did earlier today, and yet, there are no laser-wielding mercenaries trying to gun us down, no more of his hired capes, just an engraved knife tossed our way. It's almost… disappointing." Not that I wanted to fight anyone, but the whole thing felt a tad bit offensive, like I was being taken lightly.
"Wait, wait, that's what's got him all riled up? You just dumped his identity in the PRT's lap?"
"'S not like he gives a shit about the unwritten rules, save for how he can exploit them, so why should he benefit?" Fionnuala cast her gaze around the area, taking in her surroundings. Birds that'd been disturbed into flying off by the sudden and loud violence were returning to their perches, a few cats were settling down again, and even a particularly brazen snake of some kind, a small, brown critter, sunning itself on a sidewalk. No mercenaries or capes, though. "I was kind of expecting him to catch wind of their efforts to verify what I gave them, and for him to try his hand at some reprisal. Just, something more than, well, this." She moved to the edge of the roof and stepped off, a pair of those stone tendrils coming up to meet her feet, whipping around one another each time she raised a foot so they could be there to support the step taken down.
"And you're, what, asking me to narc on my boss to you?"
"No, I don't think you're dumb, Tattletale," she said in response to the unspoken question. "Nor do I think you are all that fond of the man. But regardless of what you say, he certainly won't learn of it from me."
"… Because his power doesn't work right on you," Tattletale breathed, dawning comprehension in her tone.
"Indeed. 'S why he wants us gone. So? Any insight on why this attack was so… minimal? And if he's likely to do more in the future?"
The line went silent for a few moments, and when Tattletale spoke again, she did so in a hushed voice. "So, this is just on-the-spot conjecture, so take it with a grain of salt, but… well, he's petty and spiteful, yes, but he's also cautious, though I'll grant he's not really a coward. He's just used to having a safety net, except it turns out not to be reliable when it comes to you and your sister. So he's leery of committing too much to dealing with you, not to mention the very short notice." She took a breath. "That said, he is petty and spiteful, so he'd throw his resources into fucking you over if he thought the situation was hopeless. But when I last spoke to him, he didn't seem that far gone, so he must think it's salvageable in some way."
"I see." Fionnuala set down on the concrete sidewalk, the stone tendrils slurping their ways back underground behind her to coil up under the dirt, and started across the road, keeping eyes out both ways.
"Buuuuut, given time for him to, y'know, plan and plot and scheme and all that, don't be surprised if he tries something a bit more subtle to remove you two." She lets out a quick huff of laughter. "Hell, I doubt he'd mind learning I told you that last part, if I spin it as encouraging you to leave that much quicker."
"You'd know better than I would," Fionnuala says mildly. "Now, it was lovely talking to you, and I hope to meet you again never."
"Likewise." And with that, she hung up.
Fionnuala shook her head as she did the same, then handed the phone off to one of the ribbons of her skirt to hold. She stopped beside the concrete dome Acacia had pulled up and knocked on its smooth surface. Inside, a calmer Paz stiffened, only to relax as Fionnuala asked, "Coast seems clear, y'all good in there?"
"Yeah!" Acacia called out, before returning the material of her dome back where it came from. Paz blinked in the sudden light, relief turning to horror as she took in the whole blood-and-knife situation.
"Okay, so. The person who attacked us has left, and I believe at least one hero is already en route here, so, ah, let's just sit tight, okay?"
Paz nodded slowly, while Acacia stood and stretched. I spotted a couple dots low in the sky, growing bigger as they approached, and an awkward silence settled over the little park as we waited.
Fionnuala reached under her bone mask to pinch the bridge of her nose, that headache still building behind her right eye socket. What a frustrating afternoon this had become.