B 3 C 13: A RETURN TO…?

I need a moment to recover from that fight with Mata, so I’ll make camp for a couple of hours in a dugout alone. I know I won’t be able to regenerate mana, since my entire regeneration rate seems to be pilfered by my buddy. Not that I’d begrudge them it anyway. The dugout is still fairly quick to create, since I’ve now got talons, and slightly stronger limbs. I also don’t need much space when it’s just going to be me, as long as I fold my wings in.

I didn’t really lose much in the fight. Mataalii didn’t lay a scratch on me, it’s more the emotional toll of facing off against a brother, and basically using Lil as a weapon. That last part makes me feel like a monster. I’ve done exactly what Lil accused me of when it seemed like they hated me. I wish they were out here, able to hear my thoughts. Lil would tell me that it wasn’t really them saying those words. I can almost make myself believe that Mat somehow knew I would have Lil in my inventory again one day. Does Mat have the time skill too?

That thought sends a shiver down my spine, and I deeply shudder. If Mat knew how things would play out though, why bother to attack me before he’s ready?

I spent at least an hour, maybe two just circling the drain of the dark thoughts within my own head. Nothing productive comes of doing things like that, yet every time I’m alone I can’t help myself. Anyway, the first thing I need to do since I’m rested is get somewhere that I can draw all of the ambient temperature down to nearly absolute zero. I need to do that to be able to regenerate any mana right now, and do it without damaging any of the flora. The only place I can think of is the sky. Can I manage a few JT shots safely upwards? What about the fall? Wait, I have wings. Wow, yeah. Do I even need to JT myself upwards? Come on Reggie, pump those brand new muscles!

Well that’s not working. I’ve never had the raw strength of Lil or Teuila. Even when I tried to seriously hone my physical abilities more than my magic skills, I ended up needing to rely on my magical skills or equipment to carry me eventually. I guess we all have to start sometime, right?

Reggie mentally asked to no one that can hear them. It sucks to be alone in my own head. I’m so used to at least Luni riding around in it almost nonstop, or Te or Lil pulling me into thinkspace for snuggles or random chats. Or someone chastising me for being hard on myself. I’d settle for a grumpy hedgehog yelling at me to get off their lawn telepathically right about now.

I glance around making sure the world doesn’t spawn a grumpy old hedgehog to make fun of my train of thought. With how much I believe this world relies on self-actualization, I worry that sometimes an accidental or fake wish might come true. I do have an actual shooting star that happened to crash into my best friend. It also happened to knock sense into them, knocking out an evil entity’s influence. Lil wouldn’t have been hurt by the heat of a falling object due to their infinite thermal resist. Lil also has pretty great blunt resistance due to their draconic scales. Alright, get out of your own head Reggie Shellcracker, you want Lil back, don’t you? Yeah. Then get your rear in gear and get in the air. Righty-o me.

I may be cracking under the pressure of being solo again even for only a few hours. I blast off into the air with JT propulsion, now guided by my wings. I’m also able to stay aloft and glide, so I don’t really have anything to fear from getting distracted anymore, like just now. I could swear I just saw something darting about beneath the canopy, zipping around making crashing sounds. Regardless, I’m up here to regain mana. I’ll suck every last bit of atomic motion out of the atmosphere. This will probably cause a small snowstorm or hailstorm. I think the trees will weather that better than having their own atoms slowed to a crawl at least. Hopefully.

Drawing in every bit of kinetic energy I can with a massive flash freeze storm, I find myself plummeting slightly with the denser air falling below and around me. Pumping my wings twice I’m able to right myself, correct my course, and glide onwards to a less dense patch of air that my FFS hasn’t reached yet. Every few patches of air lends me several hundred energy. There’s that zipping again. A motion below me, beneath the canopy. Are they following me?

Do I risk falling below the treeline to see who they are and what they want? I think I’m going to need my full mana capacity to return Lil to meatspace, but if Lil is glitchy or vulnerable, I don’t want to risk bringing them back. Not until I know whether this zipping entity is hostile anyway. I guess I’d better just top off my mana, and hope that it doesn’t come to a combat.

After a few more patches of air I manage to fill up my mana reservoir, so I allow my glide to carry me beneath the canopy. I haven’t seen any signs of the figure for a couple of minutes. Maybe it was a coincidence that they were following me? Or even more likely, nothing was following me and I was hallucinating. Or I could have been, what’s the term? Projecting? Pareidolia? One that ascribes meaning to meaningless things, like maybe the subtle change in the shadows of a canopy caused by anything like the breeze. Such a swaying of the shadow might be seen as looking like a face, or traces of a creature passing by.

Hm, since my danger wrap says there’s a projectile incoming, I guess it wasn’t any of the last couple. The sharp crackle of electricity along the projectile clues me in as to who it is however.

Turning towards it, I hold up my shield, imagining I’ll be blocking a bolt as some sort of friendly sparring. What I see however is a myriad of bolts of lightning coalesced into a roughly humanoid form with vaguely catlike features as it crashes into my shield.

The electricity courses over the shield, over my scales, and into the ground, mostly. Softer areas like my talon-tips, my armpits, inner elbows, and so on allow the passage of electricity into my body. Gasping, lightning threatening to bounce around inside my ribcage, I call out, “Linti!?”

The lightning coalesces until it takes on the solid shape of my recent acquaintance. Her eyes are furious. They carry the rage of one that has seen a thousand battles and the insurmountable death tolls that climb with each one. More than that, however, there are flecks of red bursting within her irises, threatening to consume her eyes with the dreadful stark redness. Its crimson mixing with her own vibrant colorings but overtaking and diluting the pigment to nothingness in the end.

Her clawed hand grasps my throat, and I can barely manage to choke out, “Linti, fight this!”

Unlike Teuila, Linti responds, “You brought this curse down upon my family!”

She’s holding back, she’s going easy on me, but she could still kill me if I don’t do something. I don’t really know what level of force I can safely use. Lil buddy? Would you be up for controlling another couple of duplicates? I know you can’t hear me or respond, but I don’t feel right just shoving two more bodies into your brain to control.

Sighing, I JT a pebble at Linti’s wrist from underneath. When her grip slackens I JT myself backwards and upwards, spreading my wings to stay aloft as I get my bearings. While I have a second, I’m trying to parse what Linti said. She said I brought down a curse. Did Mataalii do something to that beautiful cat tribe on the way to me? Or did Mat lash out at the only creatures he could find nearby? Or did he follow my aura back to the cats to specifically punish them for knowing me? That last one feels likely. I am going to kill that prick. No one seems dead, thankfully, all of their stats pages are still linked in a sub party under Fawns at Sunsets.

I call out, “Linti, did an onyx otter in a cloak do something to the tribe?”

Three bolts zoom towards me, two of them swinging out into wide arcs. If I don’t move, one will puncture my throat, and the two at the side will rip holes in my wings. I’m not nearly as mobile like this as I’d like to be, but gravity should work to my advantage here. I use a JT to thrust myself straight down, trying to fold my wings in, but the bolt on my right speeds up and tears through the front and back of my right wing twice in its folded position. The electricity arcs into the softer leathery flesh of my wings, travels up my wing’s radius, ulna, and humerus where it exits the base of my wing against the scales on my back, dissipating before entering my more vital area. I’m sent spiraling, careening to the ground with the extra velocity of my own thrust as I nurse my injured wing. Thankfully plummeting moved me out of the way to avoid having my throat punctured, and left me with one good wing.

I think I can use my wing to batter Linti without hurting her too greatly. Maybe, like with Lil, just knocking some sense into her will do the trick. Teuila might also have had some sense knocked into her when Luna plowed into us. Now, how do I track the movements of a predator cat that’s literally as fast as lightning? Or, she seems incredibly fast when she transforms into lightning at least. I can’t really rationalize becoming a being of pure electrons. Do electrons have mass? I can’t recall. I was able to rationalize thermokinesis coming from thermal resist, but I don’t think I can rationalize the full suite of electrokinesis from electro resist. I could probably coat myself in lightning, or throw a lightning bolt, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Danger on my right! I draw my valkyrie dagger in the hopes of parrying whatever the attack is, but I’m not quick enough to keep up with her, I only manage to roll my shoulder back and get my bicep up high enough to keep Linti away from my jugular. Linti draws blood as her lightning enhanced maw clamps onto my right arm. The lightning finds its way into my bloodstream and spiders about inside my arm, coursing through me excruciatingly. Each new branching path the lightning takes is its own hellish agony, but thankfully it travels down the right side of my ribcage, spine, hips, femur, tibia, and outward to ground. I try to breathe smoothly, trying to keep my mind off of Linti’s eye color so that I don’t fall into panic. I apparate a blindfold around my eyes from my inventory. I have no reason not to since my eyesight isn’t doing me any good anyway. I’m almost glad I spent so much time temporarily blinded. I’m getting more and more used to this.

Linti thrusts her weight forwards, swinging on my arm, incising a jagged circle through all of the scales, exposing the tender flesh beneath. As Linti completes a rotation around my arm, I shift my weight to my back foot so that I can push from the ball of my left heel, up through my hip, into my shoulders to batter her in the stomach with both my wing and left fist. This knocks the wind out of her, and she gasps wide enough that I can free my bicep from her maw. My blood pours from my bicep like a faucet at full blast. That’s not good. I wonder how good my space skill is at equipping me. Good enough to tightly apply a bandage mid-combat, nice. Obviously only going to lightly staunch the flow, but it buys me a bit more time before I have to decide to flee or kill.

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Come on Reggie, come on. Do I just try to brain her hard in the forehead with blunt objects? She’s holding back less and less by the second. Or maybe whoever’s piloting her is getting used to her powers. That’s a scary thought. I could kill her, I know I could flood the area with umbral shots and close off her escape paths with this much mana, but I don’t want to do that.

Wait, my thermokinesis slows down molecules, do electrons slow as well? My danger sense indicates Linti is charging directly at my front for a full on assault. I carefully apply a Flash Freeze Storm the instant she enters my range, but she covers fifteen feet in no time flat. Her lightning enhanced claw reaches for my throat again, but she’s slowed enough that I can jerk away in time. I leave her with a parting left hook to the jaw as I spin away, favoring my injured right side as I try to adjust to using it as my back foot. Traces of sparks claw at and leave ashen webs burned into my exterior scales when the punch connects, but none of her slowed lightning penetrates them, thankfully.

She’s the better hunter, the better fighter, and her powers are incredible. I’m a poor match in any nonlethal combat, but moreso against her. Actually, similarly to Valkyrie, if I get close and stay close, her deadliest abilities can’t be brought to bear. Well, she’s still a predator cat, I don’t like the idea of my neck being in the range of her bites. I really wish I had some sort of formal combat training. Though I don’t think there are any katas specifically for nonlethally repelling lightning cats. I wonder if I can trick her into thinking she’s going to get around behind me.

If I expose my flank, and she takes the bait, yeah, that might work. I once again favor my normally dominant side, now injured, adjusting my posture rotated a fraction too far, exposing just enough of my back side to be a tantalizing mistake to capitalize on. Linti takes the bait and heads for me straight on. I increase the power of my FFS as I JT to my right. I then jerk my sudden rightward momentum to a halt with forward leftward momentum using another JT. I swivel on my feet, barely managing to plant them to connect a strike against Linti’s right kidney. Well, approximately where it should be. Anatomy is weird enough to begin with since she’s an anthropomorphic cat, without factoring in this cat-woman currently being made of lightning. As Linti naturally leans into the punch to soften the blow, I’m wrapping my left arm under hers to grip her throat with my left hand. I take the deepest smoothest breath I can, layer on an even stronger Flash Freeze Storm to keep her form as solid as possible, then I JT us both straight into the air as fast as I can. She struggles for the first few hundred feet, but I’m hoping that when she’s at fatal heights that her survival instincts will win out.

Here’s hoping she still needs to breathe. By the time we’re a kilometer in the sky, the air is starting to slightly thin out. At two kilometers in the air, I can feel a noticeable difference in the wind resistance. I hit three, four, five, six kilometers in the air, and even my eyes are starting to feel like they want to escape their sockets. I hope the numbers in my memories also apply to our world. I hit seven, then eight kilometers in the air as I continue to layer on Flash Freeze Storms, draining Linti’s molecular motion, keeping her corporeal. Eight kilometers in the air, I pause my ascent and do my best to hover.

Minutes tick by, and I’m worried I’ve made a grave error. When several more minutes pass, it seems like Linti’s lightning form is finally subdued. Her physical body is still conscious, and emanating bolts of lightning as her entire form crackles with power. She jerks in my grasp several times, I think more in fear of suffocation than of any attempt to finish me off. Linti begins to go limp in my arms. I hope I can land safely, quickly enough. I let go of the various JT objects I had paused with upward momentum in the air, and simply lean forward into a dive. Worrying about Linti’s safety as her heart rate drops lower and lower, I JT thrust myself towards the ground as if my inventory were a multi stage booster rocket aimed the wrong way. I’m pretty certain I’m shattering my legs as well as the sound barrier as I near the canopy. I hastily try to patch up my right wing with leather, vines, and sap, just enough to turn my diving momentum into a forward glide as I swoop low over the trees. When I’m sure we’re at a survivable height with no extraneous downward momentum, I let myself fall the rest of the way to the ground, where I’m treated with a sickening crunch as I land on my definitely broken legs.

I really need to leave speed to the speedsters. Come on Linti, come on. I splash water in her face from my inventory by the dozens of gallons. It seemed to be some combination of water from that particular river, on top of physical subdual that freed my previous friends from control. Huh, everything in my life keeps coming back to that river, doesn’t it? Lil was at the falls, Te fought me alongside its bank, I spent so much time riding it or swimming in it. No time to get distracted! Linti stopped breathing!

Okay, okay, one thing I do know from my memories is cardiopulmonary resuscitation. That should be universal for beings that need oxygen, yeah? She hasn’t drowned, so maybe just the breathing will get her lungs started. If that doesn’t work, then compressions and more breathing. I make sure Linti’s airway is unobstructed, which actually requires pulling out her egregiously long cat tongue, to droop it lazily out one side of her mouth. That tongue is a feature of hers I hadn’t seen before. I really hope she forgives me for that. I hope she lives to be able to need to forgive me for that. Pinching her nostrils proves a tad challenging, I wonder if I should close her mouth and try to breathe into them? But would her, what are they, nasal bronchial tubes or pharynx or larynx or whatever be able to handle forced air pressure? Don’t get distracted, just go with what we’re doing. Breathe, breathe,count to ten, do it again. She has a pulse, it’s incredibly slow but steady, does that mean don’t do compressions?

I don’t want to risk it. I’d rather bruise her ribs than let her die. I pass her two more breaths then clamber into position straddling her waist to be able to place my hands just above her solar plexus, between her breasts, when suddenly a lightning enhanced paw reaches up to grab my wrists.

Before I can say anything, Linti asks, “Trying to cop a feel, Shellcracker?”

I nervously chuckle, as I frantically scrabble backwards off of her waist, out of her grasp. My chuckle transforms into mildly hysterical laughter. The laughter gives way to grateful tears that burst forth as if a dam had burst, I have to remove the blindfold as it gets soggy. The tears stream freely, like the crew of the Undine, but also unbidden. I can’t find words, I don’t know where we stand right now. I don’t think I could subdue her again if she came at me full force, I’ve just shattered my legs. Nowhere near as badly as when Teuila traveled a much greater distance at similar speeds, but the scars of my rescue attempt are obvious in the way my bones cause uneven jutting of the scaly flesh on my legs.

Linti sits up, and swipes a paw through her hair, and calmly, dryly, jokes, “Ugh, wet hair, was that really necessary?” She spies that I’ve got a lump caught in my throat, and that I’m viewing her with a mixture of fear and gratitude in my eyes. She sighs and continues, “What is it with you Shellcrackers and holding back against me anyway? It’ll get you killed against anyone else as powerful as me. Where’s the little dragon?”

At her final question, I gulp, hiccup, and sob simultaneously. It’s about as painful as it sounds to have one’s esophagus try three things at once. Her brow furrows and she asks more directly, “Hey, come on, seriously, the dragon. Where’s your buddy?”

I still don’t have my wits about me, nor the mana to eject Lil safely at the moment. Instead I summon an umbral copy of evolved Lil next to us. Lil takes a few steps, stalking a circle around us, and then sits between the two of us.. Linti first looks shocked, then dismayed as she begins to poke and prod the umbral copy. Her next question is, “What is this? Some kind of mana construct? An animate memorial statue? Come on Shellcracker, I know you can speak. We’re in a party, remember? I need you to get your act together to help me with something bad that happened.”

At her request for help I finally regain my senses slightly as I answer, “A,an,anything.”

Linti grins and hops to her feet exclaiming, “Now we’re talking!” She offers me a hand up, but as she lifts me, I crumple on my broken legs. She gazes down at the wreckage that is the lower half of my body and lets out a tsk sound. She grumbles, “I didn’t do that. I’m sure of it. Those are self-inflicted?”

I nod, gulping. I shakily reply, “I, I didn’t, I didn’t know how long, um, how long you could last, once you started to pass out. I couldn’t. I couldn’t, uh. I couldn’t risk letting you die. You’re important to your family. To me, I know you don’t consider me a friend, but, well, I consider you one. I’ll put everything on the line for a friend, anytime, anywhere.” My answer becomes more resolute as I ramble.

Linti frowns and answers back, “Meh, whatever, don’t get sappy. My family went nuts after that floating otter showed up and started launching lava everywhere. They got out fine, to the giant insect hollow, not the safest, but easiest to split them up. They were at one another’s throats. Almost as angry as I was at you. I can’t even remember why I blamed you. Do we have to beat them senseless or can we ride it out, or what?”

Scratching my chin, I contemplate, “I’ve only seen this happen maybe three times where we didn’t have to kill the possessed person anyway. You, Teuila, and Lil. The only consistent thing I can think of across the scenarios is each time the person was roughed up at least a bit, and interacted with the water of the big river in some way. Mostly splashing on their faces.”

Linti frowns at my explanation. She looks at my legs, frowns harder as her visage morphs into a grimace. Her predatory features are imposing even in these simple emotive expressions. Still, her fur is beautiful, as are the rest of her features. Uh, I’m getting distracted. She scoffs, “Your aura spells it out plain as day, but you and I both know neither of us have time for that Shellcracker. Are you able to handle riding the lightning right now?”

I flush with embarrassment, both at her implication of my twitterpative aura, as well as the accidental euphemism, since she goes by any of her three names, Linti, Lightning, or Hunter. Not that that would likely be a euphemism among critterkin in our world. Just in these stupid buggy memories of mine. Oh, right, she asked me a question.

I nod, “I can handle it, anything for a friend, right? Or, non-hostile acquaintances.”

She scoffs again, “You’ve got a pretty low bar for friendship, especially since I’ve attacked you the only times I’ve seen you. I don’t even make your criteria for the last one. You’ve got a big, soft heart. Someone’s going to stomp all over it someday. Just let me know whoever it is and I’ll hunt ‘em down for ya. Anyway, hop on in. I’m too tired to pick your arse up.”

Linti extends her arms, forming a perch for me to drape myself across the front of her chest. I do my best to acquiesce, shoving off the ground with my wings and tail as my arms wrap around her neck. Instantly I’m being consumed by lightning again as Linti speeds away towards her home. The pain is nearly unbearable, but I’m not in mortal danger, so I can remain conscious through it. My eyes swim in their sockets. I’m not certain if it’s dizziness from the blinding speed, or the sheer amount of pain I’m in. Does Linti hurt this much while accessing her powers? She’s incredible either way. If she pushes through this pain, or is powerful enough to have some sort of immunity to it.