When Myra woke up in her soft bed it was with a groan. Not of pain but the kind someone doesn't when they don't want to start the day. She just wanted to sleep and stay in all day. It was a weekend she should be able to do that but no she had to steal some hero-reinforced steal today. Why because the only way she could join Joey and Marionette in whatever they are planning she had to help them get something the steel but before she could do that she had to learn more about her powers.
There was no way she would try to steal the steel without knowing a little more about her powers. Just the fact that it was reinforced meant that it would be under some heavy surveillance and depending on who reinforced it there might be "guards" just standing around it. You wouldn't believe how many villains try to steal any reinforced steel every day. Myra heard that sometimes if the area is really bad it would be under guard by a group of superheroes.
After a minute of groaning, she got up out of her bed, put on her skull slippers, and walked into her bathroom which was connected directly to her bedroom. Standing across from the mirror Myra moved her midnight black hair out of her face and grabbed the brush on the sink. After brushing for a few minutes she left and headed straight for her dresser which was right next to the door that lead to the hallway. After she got there she realized she was already fully dressed and walked into the hallway.
She turned left then right down a flight of stairs and through the front door without a word to the inhabitants of the house. When her feet touched the concrete sidewalk she began to jog at a mild pace to her left. 28 and a half city blocks later, she was at an empty field that used to house a building but was torn down because it got turned into jelly.
Myra reached for her power but this time she took her time and tried to feel it. Her power didn't like that and lept at her like an angry dog. A wave of pure force slammed into her with the weight of a truck and she promptly fell on her back in the dirt field. After pulling herself out of the Myra-shaped indent she began to look for her glowing script that was right in her face.
When she realized it was in her face she began to read line after line after line but no matter how much she read she never got to the end and the page never changed. Even when the script stopped making words because nothing was happening she couldn't reach the bottom. After trying for four minutes to reach the bottom the page flipped.
At the top was Fantasy and slowly words began to write themselves. She continued reading but not to get to the bottom but instead to find a place to write. The script spacing was weird it would always change giving her room to write or close off completely she had an idea why but first she needed to figure out writing the most painful aspect of her power but also the strongest. After all, it was how she beat the iceman.
She grabbed the script with her right and brought up her quill pen looking for a good space to write. Soon she read someone was rounding the corner that had a big space between the next line. Not wanting to be seen in an empty field this early in the morning she began to think of something to write in the space.
Her mind went back to the fight with the ice man trying to remember what she put down on the script but she was getting a blank. She couldn't remember what she wrote all she knows is that she was getting panicked and wrote down the first thing that came to mind. With a huff, she gave up on remembering and did what she thought would work.
The moment she put the words on paper the script flashed yellow and Myra lost control of her body. Her arms began to swing in wild motions that she could never repeat and a nail was driven into her head. When her arms stopped a pitch-black cloud began to billow out around her. Soon it filled the whole field.
Myra might have heard a scream from what she assumed to be the person who was supposed to round the corner before the sound of running on sidewalk but she was too busy being stuck in suffocating darkness and trying to ignore the headache. Her breath hitched as the smokey darkness invaded her lungs while her legs gained a growing sense of weakness. Soon they felt too weak to hold up her weight which made her drop to her knees. Her coughing made the darkness invade her lungs faster. She gave up on her knees and fell on her face in the dirt. The darkness in her lungs was cold to the touch so cold that her lungs were numb by her first inhale that turned into a coughing fit. Laying on the ground she twisted her head to see the darkness that was surrounding her.
This is nice she thought. The headache had disappeared a while ago so she only was dealing with the darkness, its cold, and the weakness in her legs. She liked all of it but the cold. The darkness was suffocating but like a weighted blanket and not something that blocked her breathing. Her weak legs gave her an excuse to be stuck on the ground. The endless void of black gave her the feel of a moonless night. She could still breathe with numb lungs and the smoke-like darkness was fine to breathe in except for its coldness but it was fine with her. All in all, it was the perfect situation to sleep and she even had an excuse for herself. As soon as her eyes closed she drifted to a peaceful sleep filled with nothing but the same darkness she could see with her eyes closed.
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Joey wanted to have some fun because weekends are overrated if you have nothing to do. He could finish drawing up the plan but that was Marionette's job. He could help Myra with her stealing of steel but that was her test if she wanted to join. He could do his homework and study like a good student but he never was a good student and that isn't going to change.
So what does someone do when someone wants to have fun on a dead weekend? They come up with dumb ideas but Joey's idea was so dumb he was actually contemplating doing it. Right now he was staring at his face on his desk it took him a year to make it perfect and had never used it until yesterday. He really had no idea why it took him this long to use it. Then again he never had to fight the beast of an Ice Heart before.
He touched his face tracing a single outline of a snake's open maw. Its fang had a single drop of venom hanging on the edge, almost falling out of its mouth. Eight other snakes littered his face all slightly different from each other. Some had no venom dripping, others had their tongue flicked out, others were in the process of blinking, and most importantly they all have different scale patterns.
He looked away from his face and turned to his phone which was currently on the map of Mal. A single red line was weaved on the map showing him where to go. At the top, it said it would take an hour to walk there while the bus and car had a giant red "X" on them.
Joey got up from his chair and went looking for his worst clothes on the floor. He found the rags he used to dress up as a peasant when he went to a Renaissance fair. Some parts of the rags were singed because the fair was actually a dragon-summoning cult in disguise, luckily they only summoned a dragon's fire before they all died. It was a pretty fun day if you could ignore the smell of burning hair and flesh.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
After getting dressed in the rags he went looking for a black and blue gym bag that he borrowed. It was under his desk while there he grabbed his face and shoved it inside then grabbed his phone. Joey then tip-toed to the door, slowly opened it, and snuck out while avoiding waking his mom. Then he crawled through the tall grass before running down the cracked concrete stairs while looking at his phone for where to go.
He went East which was behind his house. After slowly walking a block away from his house Joey took off running checking his phone every some often and going through alleyways for shortcuts but mainly were dead ends. Instead of an hour, it took Joey an hour and thirty to get to the giant warning sign the size of a house that said "WARNING ANY PERSON PAST THIS POINT WILL BE CONSIDER INVADERS BY THE RAT OF THE UNDERPASS."
Joey then took a big whiff of air and turned to the direction where he felt the source of the rat stench was coming from while making sure not to cross the red line that started at the sign and went straight north and south to the next sign two miles from it. After a minute of walking the smell got strong enough to make him cringe.
Deciding it was close enough he dropped the gym bag to trade his phone for his face in the bag. He held his face with his right hand and left behind the gym bag. Slowly he put his face on while continuing to walk toward the smell. With a deep rumbling hiss, his strapless face gripped onto his face. Just in time as he finally reached the location of the smell. A block-sized rotting and abandoned brick apartment building.
Those types of buildings took up most of the "Dead Zone" between the Underpass and Empty Dress where Joey lives. As Joey walked up those steps to the door that was barely on its hinges he wonder who named the district he lived in. A sudden spike of anger brought him out of his thoughts and made his fist smash into the door.
The rotten wood of the door easily gave in to the force of his punch making a spray of splinters. The spray hit nothing in the narrow hallway. Jory walked through the hole and looked at the chewed carpet. Every bite taken out of it was the size of his head, a great sign of danger. Perfect Joey thought.
He continued down the door-lined hallway making sure to listen out for scurrying sounds. The sound of creaking wood would often give him pause but soon he reached the end of the hallway without incident. In front of him was a metal ladder bolted to the wall that went to the next floor. Slowly he climbed the ten-foot ladder making sure to listen out for any sounds.
When he reached the top the transclent claws appeared on his hands and when his feet touched the next floor he could already feel the tail forming. He was confused about why they were forming so fast but quickly moved past it when he heard the screech of rats. He turned around to see the same door-lined hallway from the first floor except there was an endless wave of knee-high rats running directly at him.
He still had half the hallway between him and the rats so he began to prepare by getting into a runner's position and waiting. With only a quarter of the hallway left Joey took off running making sure to stay as low to the ground as possible. He took a leap when he met the rats and opened his mouth to hiss out a jet of invisible poison air. He closed his mouth when he landed with his finger spread apart and four rats being speared by his claws.
It didn't kill them so he released another jet of toxic air. With his claws still stuck in the rat he pulled himself into a handstand. Closing his hands into fists he pushed off the rat his claws lagging behind for only a second. Still in the air, he used his now fully-formed tail to push off the ceiling farther into the wave of rats. He did this again and again without releasing his toxic air trying to reach the ladder at the end of the hallway.
On the third cycle, he realized the rats were not attacking him but running from something. That information didn't stop him but it did get him to wonder what they were running from. On the fifth cycle, scales slowly began to crawl up his body from his tail and his claws got longer while a hand for the claws was forming. On the eighth cycle, he found out what the rats were running from.
With a loud crack of wood, something made the hole for the ladder wider. The rats that were under the hole promptly turned into a cloud of meat, blood, guts, and bones obscuring Joey's view of whatever fell through the ladder hole. Joey tried to complete another cycle but no longer were the rats trying for the end of the hall but instead trying to chew through the wooden doors and walls wanting to get away from whatever was at the end of the hall.
With heavy steps, the unknown creature stomped out of the rat mist revealing itself to be a seven-foot-tall humanoid muscular rat with syringes all over its body. All of the syringes were filled with a deep blue liquid and its fur had the same color. Slowly it raised its right hand and began taunting Joey by gesturing "Bring it on".
Joey's mind blanked as red-hot rage poured into his head from his face and a rage-filled hiss resounded in his throat. The rats redoubled their efforts to leave the hallway as the scales on Joey's body began to form in seconds. Joey's body began to run without his permission as the scales continued to grow. The hiss slowly turned into words with such force that the walls began to shake slightly, "Ignorant little PREY."
The seven-foot beast didn't flinch at such words and began to meet Joey's unwanted charge. Joey relinquished control of his body because there was no way he could beat that beast without his face. Before Joey and the beast could meet his face stopped running and opened its mouth but it wasn't a gout of fire nor a swarm of lightning or a wave of toxic air instead it was a heavy mist that was shot out with such speed and amount that it clogged the hallway in seconds.
Joey's normal three-second breath was broken by his face as it let out the mist for an entire thirty making it impossible to see more than two inches. The beast kept running unbothered by the mist and just began swinging wildly hoping for a hit. All it got was slammed in the face by Joey's tail followed by a follow-up slice to the arm it was using to try to grab the tail. The slice didn't stop the beast in the slightest not even when blood was flowing out like a waterfall.
With tail in hand, the beast yanked it forward, and with a stumble, Joey got closer, close enough for the beast to see him. With a straight punch to the chest, Joey went flying down the hallway the still-growing translucent scales only blocking some of the force but not enough to keep his ribs from breaking. Still in the air and out of the slowly expanding and fading five feet of mist his face opened its mouth releasing a swarm of lightning that headed straight into the mist.
While Joey's ribs were slowly popping back into place the arid smell of burnt hair and fried rat filled the hall. The face reached out its claws and pierced the walls slowing down its speed immensely. Enough so that it didn't stumble when it went to put Joey's feet down. Cackles filled the hall as his mask stared at the steam that was once mist.
"Stupid prey thought it was the top of the food chain but I am a predator."
A single stomp stopped the cackles of the others. With one foot in front of the other the beast walked out of the steam that was practically boiling his flesh. Its hair was gone only its angry red boiled skin was left behind. All the other syringes were broken except the one that was placed where a human's heart would be.
With one more step out of the steam that was cracking the paint on the wall did the beast fall on its boiled knees but not before it pushed the plunger. In the second between the fall and the emptying of the syringe, its boiled skin was slowly repaired while its fur came back. It was like it went back in time before its injuries ever happened.
In a single movement, the beast got up and resumed its reckless charge. The simmering anger that was once red-hot rage became white-hot fury. A chant of PREY came from the others as one screamed, "DIE" The nine snake heads from the mask grew from Joey's transparent scaled neck all with an expression that surpassed species boundaries that could instantly be recognized as fury. Some would think that was the end of Joey's power but they would be wrong dead wrong.
Flesh, claws, scales, eyes, fangs, and tongues grew to mimic the transparent structure. No longer was it Joey it was the mask. The small wooden face mask that was being devoured by the replacement scales. The mask replied to the beast with a reckless charge of its own.