Chapter 21.5: Amy Dallon

Brockton Bay, NH, USA

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Blake was… Blake. He wasn't human, practically an entire new species unto himself, sometimes literally. He did things that made no sense to anyone but himself, behaving like he was raised in a whole different world. I never knew what would happen when I was around him.

But he was, dare I say it, fun.

The strangest part of it was that even mom seemed to like him. Mom, that bastion of self-righteous bitchiness who wouldn't know fun of it crawled up her cunt and died, liked him. Or at least, respected him a great deal, especially after talking to Aunt Sarah.

So when he came to get me today, talking like some kind of shitty fortune-teller, I had to give him a little lip. Blake was great, but his ego could use some deflating once in a while. Or once a day.

I didn't think he was serious about becoming a drug lord though…

Then the little, blue botanical miracle in my hand fed me all sorts of delightful, wonderful secrets and I stopped caring. It whispered to me, promising me priceless wonders more valuable than all the gold in the world. Literally. The tiny fruit in my hand had such exceptional rejuvenating properties that medicine made from this was literally more valuable than the entire existing pharmaceutical industry.

It could be consumed raw to act as a blanket health tonic, generally improving someone's health over a period of time. It could be concentrated into an extract that could fix most nonlethal injuries, or at least pull someone from the brink of death so other treatments could take over.

And the best part?

It worked on everything. There was no reason to worry about rejection or incompatibility with this. It'd need to be tested of course, but… but my power told me that this thing was a universal panacea, a form of organic medicine that benefited every living thing that consumed it. I knew, just knew, that it would work the same way on everything from lobsters to humans, bats to polar bears. Hell, if I made fertilizer out of this, I could have the best garden in the world, not that that wasn't easy for me anyway.

If I made a tonic out of it for post-surgery recovery patients, how many lives could I save? Or what about something to ease blood transfusion after transplants? In many ways, this universal compatibility was more useful than its restorative properties alone.

My power was having a field day, though that wasn't anything new where my "boyfriend" was concerned. He had so many unique forms that just touching him was a feast for the senses sometimes. Still, his biological marvels had never had such widespread implications before. I never thought he'd be capable of this.

And I knew then, he'd won.

He'd convinced me.

I had no choice now but to go to the PRT and advocate for the creation of a biotinkered greenhouse. I'd have to do more testing of course, but it was inevitable.

"God, Piggot's going to throw such a bitch-fit," I grumbled.

"Is she neow?" I heard behind me.

My eyebrow twitched with irritation. He was… Blake. He always found a way to get under my skin somehow, even when he showed me so many wonderful things. I just knew that when I turned around, he'd have that shit-eating, smug grin that made me want to twist his dick up into his ass.

I took a deep, fortifying breath and turned. "Fine, you were right. Gloat. Get it out of your-Wait, why are you a cat again? Did you seriously turn into a cat just so you could keep making cat puns at me?"

"Who, meow? Never. I am the picture of grace in victory."

"It's 'humble in victory, gracious in defeat,' you prick."

"But I never lose, ergo I must settle for being gracious in victory," he said with a toothy smirk.

"Ugh, you're impossible." I looked around and saw the sun poking down into the horizon behind me. "Wait, what time is it?"

He shifted back in a flash of light. "Close to six in the afternoon. So, you want a few for testing?"

"Yes. I'm going to take a mix of fruits and seeds. I think I can create a bonsai tree that bears just one fruit in my room."

"Ehh, suit yourself."

"What are we going to do about the tree though? You can't uproot it, right?"

"Of course I can. Give me a second." And when the minute passed, he stood up and held his hand up into the air like a budget Sentai Elite.

"Wait, hold up."

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"Hmm?"

"Why do you do that?"

"Do what?" he asked, with his legs spread shoulder-width apart, one hand pumping into the sky as if he was holding up the sun in his palm, and the other halfway through a windmill.

"That," I said flatly. "That weird Sentai Elite knockoff pose."

"For style," he said, nothing but complete honesty in his voice.

"It's stupid."

"It's not when I have actual superpowers."

"God, you're such a dork."

"Arceus."

"What?"

"God's name is Arceus."

"It's not."

"It is. I mean, he's a shitty alpaca, but credit where it's due, the world's a pretty cool place he made, you know? Gotta respect that."

"Bla-Menagerie, what the actual fuck?"

"Don't worry, I don't expect you to understand the truth of the multiverse just yet," he said soothingly. He then pet me. Like a dog.

I kicked him in the shin and felt my toes bruise against his stupidly hard armor. "Fuck!"

"Heh."

"God, I hate you sometimes. Fine, whatever. Do your geeky pose and get rid of the tree."

Blake chuckled in that infuriating way of his and did his stupid pose again. "Don't freak out."

"I don't like it when you say tha-"

"SHIFT! TYRANITAR!"

His voice carried. In the span of just two words, he went from an insufferably smug boy I was not-dating, to something dangerous, something inhuman.

Glowing white light filled the air, a column as thick as two trucks side by side. I shielded my eyes and felt the earth shake beneath my feet, almost sending me to the ground. Before I could stumble, a pillar of rock reached out to catch me gently.

Then the light faded and I realized my power was, once again, going apeshit. What I thought was rock was in fact hide, scales fused into plate-like armor. No, better than armor, my power told me. More durable than damn-near everything on earth. So durable that it made Blake's usual red scale mail look flimsy in comparison.

I looked up and felt a primal spike of terror rush down my spine. I couldn't even call it fight or flight instincts, there was no such thing where this monster was concerned. This was an apex predator, the kind that could never be fought, only appeased. Nothing, absolutely nothing on earth would save me from going down its gullet.

I felt a small trickle down my thigh but didn't have the time to care.

"B-Blake?" I hated how my voice trembled.

He glared down at me and I remembered him saying his creatures could influence his own thoughts sometimes. What did a creature like this think of humans? I knew I wouldn't like the answer.

Then he leaned down to face me. He had to be as tall as a house now, maybe fifteen or twenty feet. He snorted and blew warm air in my face, making me flinch back. He opened his mouth wide and showed off his incisors, teeth longer than my forearms.

I closed my eyes. This was it; this was how I'd die, the equivalent of potato chips to an endbringer because my boyfriend couldn't control his own stupid power.

Then I felt it, a warm, fleshy, slimy sensation over my entire body.

He licked me.

He. Licked. Me.

"Ewewewewewwew! What the fuck, Blake!" I shrieked, fear overwritten by indignant wrath.

"Hahahahahaha, that look on your face," Blake chortled, though even that sounded like a rockslide tuned to make words. He flopped down onto his haunches and rolled on the ground, creating huge divots into the dirt.

"You're disgusting!"

"And you're delicious, babe."

"That's seriously not what I want to hear right now."

"Aww, don't be a saur-puss, Ames."

I glared at him mulishly. "Really? Dinosaur puns?"

"Of course. They're dino-mite."

"If your god is real, he'll smite you from on high for this bullshit."

"Shh, don't give him ideas. The last thing I need is the great alpaca in the sky thinking it'd be funny to fuck with me. Again. Or Giratina. Especially Giratina."

"Who?"

"Centipede-Satan."

"What? What the hell are you talking about?"

"Dragon of the Distortion. Arbiter of Souls. God-Emperor of Phantasms. Arceus' wild child. Centipede-Satan."

"Ugh, whatever," I grumbled, waving impatiently at the tree. "Tree. Dino. Fix it."

"Yes, ma'am." He glared at the tree like it had personally offended him. He stomped forward and cracked his knuckles; they sounded like a boulder had been dropped from a cliff. "Alright, tree, you heard the boss-lady. There can only be one."

"Oh, for fuck's sake…"

Then, he took a deep breath, raised his head to the sky, and roared. The earth shook and the sky seemed to visibly ripple at the sound as the force of his voice alone shoved me back a step.

Motes of light shone around his mouth, gathering in his jaws like fireflies. The temperature rose as more and more fireflies settled in his mouth. His tail pushed me further back with a tenderness that didn't belong on an endbringer-sized dinosaur. After he deemed I'd backed up far enough, he stomped the ground, summoning pillars of steel-hard stone that surrounded me protectively.

"A tyranitar isn't the type to be quiet. He is a king, the tyrant of the Silver peak. And a tyrant must announce himself, no?" So saying, he took a deep breath and, with another earth-shaking roar, loosed every bit of that gathered power skyward. "HYPER BEAM!"

I saw the sky split in two, the clouds parting with the force of that roar. The roar echoed for miles. That beam had to have been visible from all the way in New York. I knew Blake was strong, everyone knew that after what he did to Hookwolf, but this wasn't just strong, this was endbringer-strong.

Sure enough, I heard a familiar wail ring through the city.

"Fuck! You set off the endbringer sirens!" I yelled up at him.

"I didn't! They did!"

"You goddamn-GAAH!" I grabbed my phone and panic-dialed Aunt Sarah.

"Amy? Wh-"

"Not now! False alarm! Menagerie was fucking around!" I yelled. My sense of hearing was probably off. I cut the call and glared up at him. "Are you happy with yourself?"

"I mean… I'm a nearly invincible dinosaur so…"

"Just… Just eat the tree or something."

I then watched as he quite literally uprooted the damn thing before taking giant bites out of it like the world's most bizarre corn dog. The sound of snapping branches made me morbidly wonder if snapping bones would sound the same.

Blake was… scary… even when he meant well or was joking around.

In the privacy of my own mind, I'd rather die than admit it, I thanked the alpaca-god Blake worshiped that his power went to someone like Blake.

Though admittedly, riding the shoulder of a fuck-massive dinosaur back home tickled all my childhood fantasies.

Author's Note

Thank you for reading. To reach a wider audience, and because I enjoy a more forum-like setup to facilitate discussion, I like to crosspost to a wide variety of websites. You can find them all on my Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/fabled.webs.