Bec was surrounded. There were men and a single woman armed with all sorts of odds and ends. One man, face covered in scars, stepped forward and indicated, silently, that Bec should surrender.
"What do you wa—” He shot Bec in the knee before she could say anymore. A surprisingly effective answer, all things considered. Bec screamed, a tinny sound of the mic in her mask topping out crackled for a moment. Bec pressed her hands into the coarse gravel ground. What the fuck do I do? Thoughts racked her brain. Even the thought of just dying and restarting crossed her mind. NO! Bec had to survive. She was strong. She didn’t need restarts. She needed to come up with a plan. She didn’t have one, so she just improvised.
“Uh.” She stammered, gulping air. “Uh. Uh. WAAAAAAH.”
She cried out, causing everyone in the enclosed space to clutch their ears in pain. Her arms were weak, but she grabbed a handful of gravel in one and used the other to steady her wrist. She began flicking empowered, high-velocity pebbles at the people stumbling around and trying to take a shot at her. The first shot exploded into powder against the clothes of the man who put a bullet in her. Armor?
There was no time to think as a lady raised her arm. Her hand began to glow, and Bec decided to glow in response. She flash bulbed her whole body and rolled around onto her stomach as the lady tried to take a shot. No one could see, no one could hear, it was utter chaos. Bec took a prone sniper stance and tried flicking even larger rocks at the people still causing a disappointing amount of damage. Two of the men had started to double over and collapse to the floor as Bec screamed her head off and strobed like a rave party. Another man ran into the center of the room, using his memory to locate and subsequently stab the thing that was making all the noise. He was off the mark and was about to trip over Bec’s flashing body when she whipped her noodle arm into his ankle. She was tired, but her power still worked.
This strike crashed into the most delicate part of the leg blasted the foot clean off, and the man fell to the floor with a scream that was utterly drowned out by Bec.
Bec had to breathe. As she drew in air, she saw the four still standing people start to collect themselves. The lady chucked a rock at the screaming man on the floor next to Bec.
“No, no, no!” The man looked at the thing rolling towards him. That was all Bec needed to know the rock wasn’t a rock and was actually a terrible thing that she needed to avoid. She flopped her arm as hard as she could into the man, punching through him, his armor, and into the ground, causing an impact that blew her away across the floor in a wild roll. Her wrist was trashed, and she had rolled into an unconscious man whose skin had turned bright red from Bec’s flashes. She felt a wave of heat douse her body. It was an explosion. Searing pain dashed her body. Fragments of metal riddled the side that faced the explosive… but it wasn’t that bad. Not nearly as bad as she had thought at all!
Bec realized that her attempt to flee from the unknown grenade blew her back, but it also blew the grenade back to sender. She saw shreds of body smoldering where the majority of people had once stood far off to the other side of the room. She could hear her own heart pounding in her chest… no wait… that was the man she was laying on. She lifted her head and slammed down on the chest, caving it in and it all went black.
~~~
“BEC!” Black kicked down the door and… well… he just stood there with his mouth agape. He took in the scene. There was a spiderwebbed fracture in center of floor and a man partially bisected and smeared across the floor like a red crayon. There were limbs and other bits of gore scattered all over the place centered around a smoking scorch mark off to one wall. And there was Bec, in a far-off corner, nestled in the chest cavity of a man… snoring.
“My Word, Bec. So messy.” Scarlet followed Black into the room and soaked in the carnage.
“Scarlet, what kind of monster have you turned my little sister into?”
“Black, I just taught her a sliver of what I know. This.” She waved her hand at the everything. “This is mostly just her.”
Robert was a bit taken aback. This was not the response he was expecting. The Scarlet Demon herself seemed to be a little surprised at this. He put his arms on his waist.
“Well then…”
~~~
When Bec woke, she felt unbelievably sore. She was in a room, concrete walls honeycombed with hexagonal black bars on all sides. It was quiet. She took in everything bit by bit. First, that device was on her head again. Scarlet’s doing. Annoying. Scarlet was staring at Bec, back to the door coated in the barricade tech. She looked tired but she was emanating an odd presence that Bec couldn’t pin down. Equally hard to pin down was the odd face she was making at Bec. She seemed to be measuring Bec with her eyes.
Then Bec saw Black. He was a mess. His prim black shirt was gone. Not completely, but it looked like it had partially singed off his torso. He still had a shoulder strap worth of clothes hanging on his body. Bec gawked as she saw a metallic plate on his chest protecting endless sprouting devices that wrapped his body and arms. Hinged rods, rings, and a ton of incomprehensible machinery hung close to his body. He looked almost half electronic. His eyes shown bright green but betrayed deep exhaustion. Clearly, the world did not stop turning as Bec slept.
“What happened?”
Black perked up. “You’re awake. Let’s go.”
“Wha—”
Black ignored Bec’s question again. “Scarlet. We’re rolling.” The barricades collapsed, and only then did Bec realize that that the room was actually coated in a membrane that evaporated as the device on the door collapsed into Scarlet’s pocket.
“Black, what happened?”
“Extremely not important right now, Gray. We need to start today’s run. Eat.” He tossed a bar of calorie dense food at her.
Bec didn’t argue. “Al? Health Report?” She started to chew.
“I… I don’t understand this. You aren’t hurt at all. I… things are hazy for me, Bec. I don’t know remember anything. I just… I don’t know. I can feel like I’m drawing blank on the minutiae of repairs. You’re good. You are completely fine. You are completely drained on food energy though. You have lost a pound or two in the time you were out!”
Bec looked at Black with a nod. “Let’s go. I won’t ask.” Things must have gotten weird in between.
~~~
“What the hell happened while I was out!” Bec emerged from the basement to see… well… nothing. The entire area was flattened. The building line seemed to restart in the distance. There were drones flying around everywhere rebuilding streets and random bits of infrastructure.
Black shook his head. “Not important right now. Let’s get to the city. Please.”
The trek was on. They were so much closer to the city than Bec remembered. She didn’t remember the towers being visible when they called off the run, but now they felt so close and looming. Maybe she hadn’t really noticed because the buildings blocked her view, yet, somehow, she didn’t think that was really the answer. Being close was a good thing, but it reminded her that she was currently totally in the dark about what happened when things, well, got dark.
Scarlet had told her in the prep that it got more dangerous the closer they got to the city, “until suddenly it isn’t anymore.” Bec asked her to explain what made it suddenly safe but all Scarlet would say was she would never dream of spoiling a chance to see Bec’s first experience with ‘it.’ Bec didn’t like the sound of ‘it’ at all. As she ran, she took account of the situation as she could observe it. Black seemed to have some sci-fi, exo-suit hidden under his clothes. Bec knew he had a quick draw mechanism under his shirt, but he actually had a whole lot more going on under there than she previously thought. Knowing his technical savvy, there were probably countless tricks hidden under his now nonexistent sleeve.
Bec’s outfit was also a mess. Her Word gives her the unique privilege of being able to look at herself in her entirety. Her whole gray ensemble was now smeared brown. Her mask, once pristine, was now covered in a crescent of copper. The memory was a bit hazy due to the concussion she gave herself, but she was fairly sure she should have been still recovering. How long had it been? Al couldn’t remember anything either which was extra disconcerting. Did she give herself brain damage so severe that she was damaging Al?
Scarlet and Black, according to Al, were not running with the same vigor as they were last time they ran. Bec told him that she couldn’t really tell. Al said Scarlet was likely putting on a brave face for Bec. Black, Al added, just always ran the same way. There was something odd about Scarlet and Black that Bec couldn’t pin down. They had an aura of some sort. Focus, Bec! Focus!
She spent most of her thoughts on this as they ran until it suddenly dawned on her.
“Scarlet!” Bec whispered directly in her ear. “You’re… irradiated. Severely! And Black, too! Did I do that?”
Bec saw a slight headshake from Scarlet as she ran up ahead. “Focus Gray! No. You didn’t.” She paused. “Thanks.”
Thanks? Now Bec was really confused, but she couldn’t let her mind wander anymore.
Slowly, as the day ran on, the crystalline floating towers neared, and the suburbs reformed around them. Around noon, the sun fell behind the towers. Sometimes the sun would shine through the gaps of the endlessly tall black tower and its six sister structures, but for the majority of the run, they were in the massive shadow of these structures. They ran for hours making a barely imperceptible dent on the distance from them. They seemed endlessly far and out of reach, yet Bec knew they were slowly approaching. She smiled. The anticipation bubbled up inside her, and she felt excited. Genuine excitement.
She suddenly ran right into someone. Black. He had stopped along with Scarlet and Bec was too busy looking up to notice. It hurt! Running into him was like running into a brick wall.
Ignoring the bump, Black said, “We need to wait a minute. Something is happening up ahead.”
Bec focused down the street, cranking up her hearing and putting her fingers out to read the details of the horizon. It was quiet. So quiet.
*BANG*
*CRACK*
Bec flinched as her empowered hearing was far, far too sensitive to handle the sudden racket happening up ahead. A plume of dust rose in the air about two kilometers down from the group. An explosion, even louder than last time, rang out causing Bec to jump.
“Watch out, Bec.” Scarlet said, with a neutral tone and serious face.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Watch out for—waah!” Bec was interrupted as a massive hunk of debris came bouncing down the street, hurtling towards the group. It was on them in moments, Scarlet raised her arm, and, with a stroke of her hand, shifted its trajectory, shooting it perpendicularly into the building to their left. It punched through the building cleanly, leaving a cartoonish neat hole in the walls. Bec fell on her ass in a panic, far too late.
“Fights like that have a lot of collateral damage. In just a moment, a fight you had nothing to do with could ruin your day. You’ll probably need to react faster than that next time.” Blacks said all of that while never breaking his focus from the carnage happening far off in the distance. “It’s about over.”
Just as he said that, a whistle filled the air. Black and Scarlet covered their ears on reflex. Bec was pulling herself onto her feet when the third and final explosion happened. It was magnitudes larger than the last, cracking the air, feeling like a whip had struck Bec's chest. Then the shockwave hit like a punch to the chest, shattering all the glass in all the buildings and lamps she could see, bowling her over back onto the asphalt. She would have been utterly deafened without her Word and earmuffs.
“God damn. GOD DAMN. What the fuck was that?” Bec shouted out as the tinkling of bits of glass now filled the silence that followed the massive detonation.
“Hmm?” Black looked over to Bec. “Oh, just some powerhouses duking it out. It’s over, no worries.” He helped Bec onto her feet. “It happens all the time.”
~~~
"We need to stop."
"What? Why!? We're so close to the City!" Bec balked. They were literally in the shadow of the towers, already well within the inner circle of the multicolored towers that dangled towards the sky on massive chains. At this point, Bec could see the textured paneling of the megastructures, betraying the manufactured quality of the giant crystal-shaped constructs.
"We need to find a safe spot for you to figure out how to move in the vacuum. Here is a good spot." He pointed at a bland building. All the buildings of the Suburbs were bland, but this one somehow trumped all of that.
Bec opened her mouth to complain but closed it. She learned her lesson about trusting Black. Or wait, maybe she hadn't.
I wouldn't have been stolen away if we didn't stop and his premise that I couldn't fight? Well... Bec quietly chuckled to herself at that. It was stupid, and she was certainly letting the last victory against multiple armed foes go to her head, but it felt good fantasizing about the power she had. As they held up in the basement, Bec suddenly grasped something that was only barely registering in her head up until that moment.
The power she had witnessed a few hours back was astronomically greater than she had. It hadn't even really felt real. Had she fought any of the parties that were involved with that, she wouldn't be just dead in a comically large crater, she'd be a smear on the asphalt in moments. Could she get that strong? She had thought her punches were nasty, but was she "incidentally careening metal girders flying at hundreds of kilometers as a side consequence of battle" nasty?
Woah. What was this blood lust she was feeling? She didn't even pay a single thought to the people she had slaughtered except for gloating over her win. Al tried to reassure her that she was merely defending herself, but could only say so much before Black gave out a simple warning.
"Bec. The vacuum is coming. Hold on to as much Fabric as you can."
"What does that mean? Hold on to wh–" Suddenly, a wave struck her. It was a wave of pure darkness. No, it was a wave of nothingness. Bec was completely and utterly blind. Again.
"Damn! Have I been teleported–" Bec reached out and felt Black. He was standing right by her, like he had been. Bec composed herself as Al explained that this suddenly explained something he had read in one of the books Scarlet gifted him. Bec was surprised to see him say the books were for him and not them, but that was not the important part. She straightened herself and tried to act like she knew what was going on, even if it was just a shred of insight.
"So. The vacuum. This is a dead area for Fabric."
Black didn't say anything.
"I take it that this is how peace is kept near the City? No unlimited power on city grounds, eh?"
Black didn't say anything.
"Ok, I guess you want me to figure this out on my own. I can handle that."
Bec thought about her training in the Fabric. She had gotten used to reaching out and feeling every wave in a certain area of hers. Without the Fabric floating around, vibrating and tugging at her, how was she supposed to see at all?
She waved her hand around and felt that there still was a little bit of Fabric and that it was rushing past her towards the City. She sat on the ground and started to meditate on this issue.
Bec reached out and tried to wind the thinning Fabric around her wrist, feeling it resist her clothes as her sleeve flapped against the spool she was gathering. She felt the contrast between the lack of Fabric in one hand and the presence of it in the other. She transferred a little into both hands and started to gather more and more. She ran the Fabric between her fingers and around her palm in a chaotic swirl. She could feel the light dancing in her hand as she put all of her focus into seeing again.
Eventually, the Fabric managed to coat her hand in what she envisioned to be a reasonably sized wad. She couldn't exactly see with this chaotic mass of Fabric, and there was a non-zero chance that it was currently setting off little lights as she pushed and pulled on it.
She focused on relaxing the Fabric, trying to get it to turn into a thick glove on her hand to no avail. All it wanted was to creep up her arm in waves. Suddenly, Bec realized that wasn't a bad thing and she coaxed the Fabric to ripple like a rising tide up her arms. She felt the Fabric ebb and flow up and up, wrapping around her shoulders and crashing in the small of her back both the small of her back and her breasts.
The sensation of warming energy spread as the crashing ripples shot the flowing Fabric in eddies across her whole body until she reached an equilibrium. The ripples canceled out and settled as a thin layer across her body. She held out her hand and felt the world fairly clearly again, if only from the exposed skin of her hand. She saw Black and Scarlet watching her.
"So? Did I do it?"
Bec saw Black shift. He grabbed Scarlet by the shoulder and leaned it.
"Aw shit!" Bec realized. "I can't hear very well at all."
Black turned to her. He gestured towards Bec's face.
"Shit, my sensory deprivation mask! I nearly forgot!" Bec went to take it off, but Black gestured to stop. He gestured in a way that Bec could only assume was to "keep going."
"What? What am I supposed to do?" To Bec, this had already felt like a big revelation. Like, what else was there?
She could now take a seat near a wall, leaning against Black's hexagonal barrier in thought. She waved her hands in a circular motion to gather more Fabric. She found that keeping the thin layer on her body wasn't so difficult, even as she pumped more and more Fabric into her system. She wadded up more and more of the sparse energy and filled her layer thickly.
It was comforting, but it was not helping her hear. She found that she could hear them, but that it was horrendously muddled and disorienting. She was not really programmed to hear all things from all angles around her. It was mostly muffled by her clothes, too.
She focused on the soundwaves on her fingertips, two to start.
"Say something," Bec said, instantaneously disoriented from hearing her voice resonating inside her skull and from a secondary source near her fingertips.
"You are layering Fabric on your body? Keep it up." Scarlet responded.
"Yes!" Bec made a fist to pump in satisfaction, but the sound of skin rubbing skin made her jump a foot into the air. Bec cursed as she dropped her sense of sound.
"It's far too disorienting to hear from my fingertips." Bec sat back down and slumped. She had learned, via trial by fire, to sense the light all around her all at once. It only dawned on Bec, in this moment, that she had essentially rewired her perception once before, but she faced death to do so.
"Any ideas, Al?" Bec asked, seeing Scarlet and Black exchange a look.
"Can you move the Fabric beyond the immediate layer of your skin?"
Bec didn't respond, rather she tried to stretch the layer on her fingertip outwards. It didn't really respond to her initial attempt, but she re-envisioned the action as a spirling Fabric eddy and soon a vortex started to form and extend from her fingertip.
"Woah, I can. How does this help with hearing though?"
"What if you maintained a layer outside your clothes?"
"D-do you think I can do that?"
"I don't see what's the harm in trying." Al shot her a mental shrug.
Bec gathered a wad of Fabric by making circles with her hands again. This time, she had refined the technique and used both hands. She found that the more Fabric she had on her hands, the more she could gather, which was nice since she had a thick layer already formed.
Once she had the agitated mass of energy gathered on her hands, she flicked her fingers towards her in a single 'come hither' gesture. The Fabric lept and a tsunami of flowing energy crested and crashed past her sleeve. It coursed up her clothed arm, flooding up and around her shirt. She felt the Fabric flow across the surface of the shirt like it desperately wanted to get close to her again.
Bec momentarily panicked as the Fabric found her collar and the gap in her button-down and seemed to rush back towards her skin. She immediately began to push it out but realized that she had actually made a circuit, connecting her newly formed outside layer to the dense inside layer. She wanted it to circulate and it did, keeping the coating wrapped around her torso. She made a lame overhead arm gesture to force the Fabric over her pants and create a circuit that ran up her pant leg.
It was not the most pleasant feeling to sense the creeping energy perpetually flowing up and around her crotch, but she chose to associate it with power, hoping that feeling would eventually comfort her.
Now that the flowing Fabric managed to settle into a fairly calm river coating her body and outerwear, she focused on hearing. She made a current run like a whirlpool up her neck and collar, coalescing in a vortex that crept up past her chin and eventually to where her ears were. This spiral of Fabric felt smooth but energetic, lifting itself up her head through force of momentum... if that even applied to Fabric.
She now had to focus on the Fabric in a certain spot, on the outside of the mask. Weirdly, Bec found that she could track a spot of Fabric as it traveled through the current of her flowing energy veil and focus on a specific spot of space relative to her as long as it was within the veil. With a thought, her new Fabric ears were online.
"Say something now."
"Dust damn, Bec. What are you doing to your Fabric?" Black's eyes flashed red as he scanned her. "I swear, that is the oddest behaving Sõ I've ever seen."
"So?"
"So, I can't tell what's going on under there. Your hand is a confusing jumble of... I don't know, honestly."
"No, I mean Sō, the word you used."
"Oh, Sõ. Yeah, it means layer. It's the practice of layering Fabric over your skin. I don't do it, personally, but it's effective."
"I don't either." Scarlet crossed her arms. "But Black, I was watching her form her Sō. She's not just using that. It's an odd mix of Sō and Koto."
Black got really close to Bec all of a sudden, and she wavered for a moment. She felt the Fabric wobble in uncertainty before she reigned it back. "I see. I see. I hadn't paid attention to the technique after I saw her manifesting Sõ. It is like Sō and Koto at once."
Bec straightened her back and cleared her throat. "Explain."
"You explain what you did."
"I created a layer of Fabric on my skin by sending... erm." Bec realized she was about to say her Word and stopped herself before she blew her bet with Black.
"I coated my body. I realized there was stuff I wanted that was out of reach though. I wanted to sense things outside that layer, so I sent another layer over my clothes. When they met, I circulated the flow so they sort of cycle. It felt natural and much more stable once I let it do that. Oh, and I am spinning the flow around my head. It was the only way to get a layer up my neck without a place to bridge my skin layer and my clothes layer."
"It really is an odd mix of Sõ and Koto." Black realized he was supposed to explain. "Ah, Sō is when a person layers their Fabric over the skin. Koto is when people coat their clothes in Fabric. They're both techniques that have... reasonable followings." Black stroked his chin. "I think it's interesting that you did both though. I wonder what that means."
"It means she's gonna be somewhat more durable than she was, right off the bat," Scarlet prodded Bec in a practice that seemed to be extremely common amongst Dustites. "She's going to be insulated from direct Fabric strikes in two different ways. Her clothes layer will stop some stuff, and the skin layer will stop more. I guess that would help her not be the most fragile person in the City."
"That's a low bar." Bec frowned inside her mask.
"It's a low bar you've probably not climbed. Now come on, you can maintain that Fabric, right?"
Bec nodded. It took a little attention, but Bec was already feeling like she was incorporating the flow into a habit. It would be maybe a few days before she would have to worry about losing it by accident.
Black started to clean up the barricades. "Well, onward to the City! Every moment in the Suburbs is a moment I could do without!"