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Emma
Theo Anders and the Black Exaltation OMAKE
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"Nose..."
"Eye..."
"Mouth..."
"Well, you can hide the ears with the hair. So maybe I'll take both. Which will it be?"
With each 'choice' she was given, she could feel the cold touch of steel of One-eye's knife. The thin long blade that tapered to a wicked point.
She almost twitched at the coldness, almost attempted to jerk away. But she couldn't. Was unable to, not with the way that she was held down by his hand.
Her world narrowed down to her body, the pressure from One-eye's hand as he held her down, the coldness of his blade.
"Unh?" She couldn't process, couldn't sort out the information as the terror within her blossomed even as a warm... wetness spread betweeen her legs, as One-eye traced her face once more with his knife. The touch of cold metal was almost gentle.
"One eye, the nose, the mouth, or both ears." The voice was patient, relentless. And yet, the way it drawled with its accent was enough to make her wits and intelligence scatter like chaff. "Yan here thinks she has what it takes to be a
member, instead of a common whore, so you choose one of the above, and she goes to town on the part in question, proves her worth."
"Holy shit, Lao... that is so fucked up that she's wet herself." The girl with the eye shadow, Yan, laughed with gleeful amusement, as if from a distance to Emma's ears.
"Pick." That voice hammered in on her thoughts.
Bit by bit, the darkness followed after the spots and purple shadows filled her sight as she found herself focused on the silver reflective surface of the blade as her heart pounded unceasingly.
Ćo̵mmunic͜a͝t͡ìo҉n
̕Ąg̀reement͠
Hęr̕e an͢d͟ No̵w
͘T̶h̀er͞e a͝nd then̛

She looked up, as the twin moons drifted in the darkness... folding in on themselves, countless sinuous tendrils twisting amongst themselves as they bent space and time around their movements. A soft luminous glow spread from the dreadful light in their hearts.
And yet, they were shattering...
Falling apart...
Falling down on the world...
Falling on her.
To crush her into the earth grinding beneath her. Tectonic plates crushing and grinding the filth of the world away. And beneath that, molten earth. Always flowing like the sea with its eternal tides.
And the world sang to her.
An unending song that started in primordial times when the very universe was young.
She found her breath paused on that cusp on in and out, as she
heard and
listened to the song.
The magnetic fields that spun and pulsed in time with the song, propagating it out into the endless void, to mingle with the other worlds and the sun's songs.
A glorious whole.
That single moment spanned an eternity as she listened to the world's heartbeat, it soothed her, calmed her.
And she knew peace...
Even as she
forgot the shattered moons, the insignificant creatures that walked upon her skin... for she was the world.
And the world was her.
That single sublime eternal moment.
Shattered.
And her perception fell, tumbled down from that of the world... into a single human body.
Constrained and bound.
One-eye... no, Lao held the knife to her cheek... the slightest of leaning his arm's weight against to give weight to her decision did not bite into her skin with a warning cut. Despite its sharpness, it might as well be a chopstick for all the blade did to her.
He put more of his weight on the knife and it did... nothing against skin that was marble white and as durable as the very bones of the world. She could feel its sharpness... but it didn't... couldn't cut her. His breath sucked in quickly as he moved away from her body.
She could feel the warmness in her heart beat evenly... guiding her as she looked up.
She was... strong.
No more did confusion cloud her mind.
Purpose and clarity instead filled her.
They were hers as the very world beneath her feet empowered her. It was at that moment, that she realized that the world was hers. That she was free, glorious, and powerful.
A brilliant whiteness flared forth from her body, filled with the sharp lines of gems and crystallized minerals.
Lao's knife clattered to the street, Lao and Emma both looked down at it briefly. He moved to pick it up. She allowed that roiling heat in her heart flow up and out her arm that she thrust at him.
A sphere of nothingness
twisted and
erupted from her palm... the air screamed in its passage before it struck him, forcing him backwards a step.
There was another single moment as he looked at her in shock before that sphere of unseen force expanded, twisting and swirling outwards for a moment before imploding inwards as he screamed before being silenced.
She looked down at her hand in wonderment, before looking back up at where Lao had stood.
The only evidence that Lao had been there was the splattering of blood.
Beyond that, there was her father's car where a dark figure was unsteadily getting back up on to her feet from when she had fallen. The dark hooded cape that fluttered out of sync with the warm sea breeze that flowed from the general direction of the beach. She could see the whites of the girl's eyes through the eyeholes of the painted black hockey mask.
There was a moment of silent understanding as they looked at each other, followed by a nod. Words were not needed here.
The girl in black swept her cape to one side as she twisted, turning into a mass of shadows momentarily, a living shadow, a translucent and almost transparent blur... twisted around Eye-shadow girl, Yan.
When she changed back, she was in a different posture. She had Yan in a vicious hold, knife hand twisted behind the girl's back.
With a sharp, calculated motion, the arm was twisted a measure too far, the eye shadow girl jerked off balance so the weight of her body would only help twist it further. The girl screamed, dropping the knife, and she flopped to the ground, her arm gone limp, dangling from the shoulder at an angle that shouldn't have been possible.
As Yan flopped to the ground screaming and weeping, Emma could see the girl in the cloak clearly. She was short, certainly younger than Emma. And yet, that impression didn't stay long as she moved, becoming a sinuous black blur of translucent shadows that moved faster than a normal person could.
The thugs who had held her arms were whimpering as they clutched their arms as they bled. It appeared that the white light that surrounded her was, if nothing else, good at hurting people, at scouring flesh like a sandstorm.
That left the woman who had been standing by Emma's father. There was a beat, as Emma looked at the woman who could only look back in shock and horror, before the red head pushed off and slammed into her with the speed and fury of an avalanche. Her small girly fist punched out and folded the older woman in half before she vomited out her lunch into the street of the alley. She felt something give way in the older woman's chest.
Emma turned to look at the cloaked vigilante. The younger girl had flung herself down the length of the alleyway, chasing one of the thugs who had held Emma earlier. He had a hold of Emma's backpack in one hand, open, the contents from the glove compartment falling free. A bag of candy, the driver's handbook. It wasn't much, nothing more than trivial things. And yet, he had taken them because he
could.
She raised her hand to shoot a bolt of force at him...
Before lowering it, the knife that had been used by Lao to threaten her was in the younger girl's hand, and she had moved pass him low to the ground, almost horizontally as she pushed forwards with her legs. The knife glided across the back of his knee and he fell, twisting about as he kicked with his good leg.
The vigilante fell as well, her legs tangled by his, tumbling on top of him.
The resulting fight was brief, to the point, and absolutely one sided. One could not grab hold of shadows. He righted himself to push himself up, but only found the heroine already in position to fall on him once more, to slam his face into the pavement with her full weight.
A second later, she pinned his hands to a wooden door to their right with the stiletto.
With that, the fight was over, and Emma found herself breathing out silently as she found the light around her collapse into nothingness.
"Emma," her father said. He was out of the car, gingerly embracing her. It appeared that he had seen the way the light had scoured away at the thugs. "Are you hurt? Emma?"
She could only shake her head wordlessly at him as she enjoyed the hug, the reaffirmation that she lived. That she was still there, alive and unhurt. She looked at the vigilante who had helped. There was a nod from the younger girl in the black cloak as she limped away from the fallen thug before slipped into her shadowy form and drifted away up the fire escape on the sight of the building, untouchable.
- - -
She had researched the vigilante who had helped her online. Who would have saved her if she hadn't gained her powers. She'd gotten a single name... a relatively newcomer to the scene, who went by the name of Shadow Stalker.
But there was no patterns, no evidence of how she could be met.
And so, Emma had returned to the alleyway. The dumpster had been moved, the van was no longer there.
Even so, there was a certain risk of coming back. Of being recognized and pointed at as a parahuman.
"Takes guts."
Emma turned about, a part of her was scared it was her... that somehow the girl with the eye-shadow, Yan, had also gotten powers and had come back. But it wasn't. The girl was dark-skinned and slender, with long and straight hair. There was a lazy air of pent up energy around her, lending her an intense presence.
"Guts?" The red haired girl tilted her head in puzzlement as she mulled over the words of the shorter girl.
"Coming back. The only reason you'd do it is because you were looking for revenge, or you were looking for me. Or both, depending on how cracked you are."
Emma blinked, as she opened her mouth before closing it. This was the vigilante, Shadow Stalker, introducing herself. Declaring who she was. Still, she was here for a reason. "No... I just wanted to thank you."
The girl nodded at that.
"I also wanted to ask you something." That had the other girl's curiosity, and so Emma continued on. "Why do you do this... go about fighting gangers and saving people."
There was a moment of silence.
"There's two people in the world. Those who get stronger when they come through a crisis and those who get weaker. The ones who get stronger naturally come out on top. There's ups and downs, but they'll win out." The vigilante explained. "But just because someone is strong doesn't mean that they can't help those who are weak."
Emma nodded at that, it made a vague sort of sense. "I want to be strong, or stronger than I was."
"I don't do the partner thing, or the team thing." The answer came out flat and almost far too quickly as if rehearsed.
That Emma had gathered, even as if she nodded again.
The other girl's eyes studied her, and she seemed to come to a decision. "It's a philosophy, a way of looking at it all. You can look at the world as a… what's the word? One thing and another?"
"A binary?"
"A binary thing. But not black and white. It's about the divide of winners and losers. Strong and weak, predators and prey. I kind of like that last one, but I'm a hunter."
Emma thought back to how readily the girl had taken the thugs apart. "I can believe that."
The girl smiled. "And what you have to keep in mind, is the biggest question of all is one you're answering for yourself, right now. Survivor or victim?"
"What's the difference?" Emma frowned at that question.
"On this violent, brutish little planet of ours, it's the survivors who wind up the strongest ones of all."
- - -
"I think Gravitas is a good name for me... since my powers are mostly earth and gravity based." Emma looked at Sophia while tapping on one of the names that she had written down on the paper.
There was a frown from the more experienced girl. "Gravitas? That sounds like something that isn't really... scary."
Emma had to roll her eyes at that. "You mean like Glory Girl or Mouse Protector or Alexandria?"
"Point. Gravitas it is. You worked out what you want for your costume yet?"
Here, Emma had to sigh. "Kind of. It's hard... you have it easy with your power."
There was a knock on the door, before the voice of Emma's mother could be heard. "Emma, Taylor's here."
There was a moment of silence as Sophia looked at Emma, before she replied. "I'll be out to talk to her."
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To be continued... maybe
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