A Slightly Dim And Not Quite Stormy Afternoon

[whatamithinking]

It is a fairly typical rainy August afternoon. Edie is lounging in civvies with a good book, and Emily is snacking on some leftover birthday cake while transformed and working on a metal sculpture.

"I don't know why you're bothering," Edie says of the copper-and-verdigris design. "I mean, the rest of it is going to go green too eventually, right?"

"Maybe, maybe not," Emily says stubbornly. "I could coat it with clear paint or something to prevent oxidation."

"Fair enough," Edie says, and returns to perusing her book.

Comments

[whatamithinking]

Probably the other girl, then.

They make it out of the horrible spacewarped maze safely. ...And that would presumably be the assassin's distraction!

"Hi. The distraction, I presume?"

[gloriousdawn]

"You must have met Star," says the short girl standing at the maze entrance holding a pair of honest-to-God lightsabers.

Her costume is very reminiscent of the assassin's, but with a slightly more elaborate design, a colour scheme favouring deep blue rather than black, and paired moon and sun symbols instead of a set of stars. Also, she is glowing with a fierce silver-edged golden light that silently sings of help and healing and heroism.

[whatamithinking]

"My sister and I were fighting the guy who set this place up when she killed him. Nice aura, by the way."

[gloriousdawn]

"Thank you," she says, smirking. The silver-handled blue lightsabers extinguish and disappear.

Then the alarm shuts off and the walls of the maze turn from red back to purple.

"...I'm going to assume that's Star," says the girl who is apparently Star's twin. "Good thing, too, that alarm was getting really annoying."

[whatamithinking]

"We actually thought we had set it off somehow until we met your twin. It's possible if we had known that we would have just kept sneaking instead of starting to smite the walls."

[gloriousdawn]

"Oh, are they smiteable? That's convenient. Well, I was going to go in after the prisoners, but you beat me to it, so I guess I'm waiting here until Star either collapses that mess or comes out asking for help."

[whatamithinking]

"Beam attacks do better than projectiles, but yeah, which is good because the prisoner room didn't have natural doorways when we found it."

[nothing_noble]

The sun-and-moon girl snorts.

[whatamithinking]

Edie starts to say something.

She stops.

She tilts her head.

"...Are you a fusion?"

[nothing_noble]

"Who, me?"

[whatamithinking]

"...I think I have met you before, in passing. Half of you. The healer half. Probably? I volunteer at Crouse Hospital sometimes."

[nothing_noble]

"...ooooh, hell, back when I still went out solo," she says. "Yeah, maybe. Listen, can you do us a favour and maybe not talk about us much? We're trying to keep a low profile."

[whatamithinking]

"Okay, sure. You didn't come up much anyway. Any particular reason?"

[gloriousdawn]

"We have approximately zero chance of maintaining a secret identity if we ever get seriously famous, so we're trying to put that off as long as possible."

[whatamithinking]

"Fair enough. We don't really have secret identities as such--the whole reason we knew to find this place was that a friend of ours knew to run to us when she managed to escape--but I know it matters more to other people."

[gloriousdawn]

The maze ripples, and ejects a large pile of guards. The ones who were previously trapped amid Ironwill Shields are unconscious with the rest. Then the walls begin to retreat.

"Oh, I guess Star found the controls," says the fusion.

[thisbrokenworld]

Just as she's finishing the sentence, a coded message comes in from Star via the Si Vales Valeo spell: Objective complete. Safe. A pause, and then Safe again.

Then the maze implodes, and the message is obliterated by the feedback from what seems like a full-body wall impact at ten times the strength of previous encounters.

[whatamithinking]

"...Okay, so the first thing is that my sister and I have a healing spell that tells you what happens to the person you cast it on passively, and we worked out a code involving biting our hands in various places, and I cast on your sister before she went to turn the thing off and gave her the basics of the code. She says 'objective complete' and then 'safe' twice and...then when the maze imploded she. Uh. Do you know what happens when you hit the walls?"

[gloriousdawn]

"Nothing good?" she guesses, not looking particularly alarmed. "If she sent 'safe' twice, that was her way of saying 'whatever heinously alarming thing I'm about to do, I have it totally under control and you don't need to worry'."

[whatamithinking]

"I had guessed that, but I'm...not totally unconcerned, because what just happened was like hitting a wall but ten times worse. Maybe if I knew her better I'd be assured that she knew that was going to happen and wasn't just expecting one, but I don't."

[gloriousdawn]

"I mean, what happens when you hit a wall once?"

[whatamithinking]

"It hurts. A lot. And it doesn't stop hurting when you're not touching the wall anymore."

[nothing_noble]

The last ripples of distorted space clear out of the place where the maze used to be, and now there is just the interior of an abandoned factory, dimly lit and grimy, lined with skeletal rows of pillars. Some objects and furniture are scattered on the concrete floor in the distance. Presumably, Star is out there somewhere too.

"Oh, yeah, she'll be fine," says the fusion. "I mean, heal her if you're worried, if you haven't already, but she'll be totally fine."

[whatamithinking]

"...If she'll be fine I think I won't. It's sympathetic healing."

[nothing_noble]

The fusion laughs. "Then yeah, good call. One sec, now everything's settled—" and she incants something in a foreign language and steps into thin air. A moment later, there is a flare of brilliant silver light from the junk heap, and the feedback stops.