Amelia, Ch 212
I woke up in a nice hug. Taylor decided to be the big spoon... wait, when did she get all the extra arms? "Gah!" I shot up in my bed, only to drag the grasping arms with me. WorryConfusion. I looked down at the thing wrapped around me. Riley's damn spider. I tried to will my heart to stop beating so fast and took some slow, deep breaths. "Don't worry, Taylor, I'm fine." Then I slowly pealed the fuzzy little abomination's legs off of me. It purred at the attention I was giving it like the worlds friendliest, and dumbest, cat. I tossed the thing on my bed and hit the shower.
After that and getting dressed, I walked out where the ever friendly plant spider sat attentively on my pillow. I sighed. "Okay, Snowball, hop up." It climbed up onto me and wrapped its arms around me like a backpack while purring the whole time. I can't believe I'm saying this. "Don't worry, your mama will be home soon."
I walked out into the group area, still toting the albino furball. Lisa just looked at me. "Dammit."
"What?" I asked.
"Well, ordinarily I would have teased you mercilessly for this, but we actually have business to discuss today," she informed. "At least you won't need the coffee. It's already gone cold anyway."
"Blasphemy," I muttered as I took the pot and started pouring the lukewarm fluid into one of the disposable cups. "Coffee is life. And try working at a hospital. You learn to drink this stuff even if it's achieved a solid state."
"Your sister reports her mission as, and I quote, 'complete success, until government corruption fucked us'. Turns out, the PRT Director was responsible for the message we responded to. He didn't do the killings, he just doctored up a crime scene."
Oh god damn it. "Is this going to be one of those messes where we overthrow a PRT office and install our own puppet government? Because honestly that wasn't nearly as fun as I thought it'd be the last time. Now it just sounds like a headache."
"Nah," she replied. "Costa-Brown stepped in and saved the Director's ass. Vicky says she's 'fucking blackmailing us'."
"Is she?" I asked, then took a deep drink of my coffee.
"Pretty much," Lisa shrugged. "Slightly more polite than that. 'We wanna keep this guy, yadda yadda, we've ignored worse from your team's members, calling in the favor' stuff, no big deal. I'm not sure if the Director in question is one of Cauldron's agents or this is just a power play by Cauldron by holding it over the guy's head in the future. Either way, I talked with the Chief Director about it and very politely agreed with her assessment. Something was said about us doing them a favor, and that favors made good currency. You'll have to sell it to your sister later."
"Okay, that doesn't sound so bad," I muttered. Really didn't like us letting this kind of corruption slide, but such was our reality these days. "Anything else?"
"Yeah, Vicky's found a pet mob princess that she's inviting over for tea," Lisa added dismissively. "So, y'know, plan for a new roommate."
What? "What?"
....
"Her power's more like Lachesis than Trickster," Trevor kindly informed me. "Pretty sure she has a cousin Passenger."
"What's a passenger?" Arianna asked.
"I'll explain later," Vicky answered. "For now, they're just what powers come from. The detailed explanation is gonna take a few hours and a bottle of whiskey to wash it all down with. Then some more whiskey. Then another few hours because you forgot it all."
Trevor politely waited for them to finish, then started up again. "She compresses space and time, things go Taboo, and the target moves. If Lachesis' power works like a warp drive, then Arianna's is a wormhole generator."
I looked at him blankly. I wasn't surprised by the 'Taboo' part. Almost every power, if you analyzed its functions deeply enough, stumbled into 'Taboo'. Tinkers were the most obvious, preventing people from understanding the technology that might be used to fight the Entities. All powers that had to do with dimension warping ran into similar barricades. The Entities obviously feared what would happen if we could access Passenger dimensions. The blank look had nothing to do with that. "Explain it in layman's terms?"
"Her power works by creating a tunnel in space and time between two points," he answered. "It also temporarily accelerates her mental functions to process the information when her power's active, giving her the equivalent of several minutes to handle computing that would melt a supercomputer. This allows her to envision a scene, then scan the planet to find a matching location. She then generates a tunnel the physical size of a hydrogen molecule, compresses the target down to that size, moves them through the space between dimensions that we observe in the Labyrinth-Atropos interaction, and decompresses them on the other side. All in a span measured in nanoseconds. Like I said, wormhole drive."
"Holy fuck!" Arianna gasped. I agreed fully. "How do I do all that? I barely passed algebra!"
"It's actually only a fraction of what Khepri does," he added. "Passengers handle incredible amounts of information like it's nothing. This isn't anything new."
"Wow, way to make me feel special," Arianna pouted.
"And she has no Manton Limit?" I asked. Seriously, this could be gamebreaking.
"One," he replied. "Like Lachesis, she can't actually cross dimensions. Even right at the border of our gate, she can't cross it with her power. Not really a surprise. If she was capable of dimension jumping, she could accidentally teleport into any number of dimensions that look almost exactly like ours and never even realize it."
"Whoa..." Arianna muttered. "So there's an existential crisis waiting to happen. Good thing I'm used to those already. So now that we've tested my powers to exhaustion, am I on the team now? I'd like somewhere to put my stuff before the police sell all of it at auction."
"I'll find space to give you a room," I agreed. "We'll need a little bit of time before putting you on the team officially."
"Trust me," Vicky added. "You're not missing out on much. Our job basically consists of looking badass for the press. Pretending we don't know we're badass for the press. Avoiding the press. And making it very clear to the bad guys that we're totally badasses while our bosses are having snuggle time." Vicky had lifted up fingers as she went over each point.
"It's all here in this pamphlet that Zach made." she lifted up a sheet of paper that unfolded like a small map. "See this picture right here?" she tapped the paper. It was one of the photos of me and Taylor sitting under that tree at school. "Yeah, isn't it adorable? We have to make that look intimidating."
"Oh, I love that one!" Arianna agreed happily. "Especially the motivational poster one online!"
I actually facepalmed. God damn it. EmbarrassedAmusedProud. Glad you like it, I thought at my partner.
"Which one?"
"The 'For their one month anniversary, they gave each other a dead Simurgh' one," she chuckled.
"Really?" Vicky asked excitedly. "That one was totally my idea! I made Zach make it, but it's totally mine."
"Seriously?" she asked. "I've got a few ideas of my own! How does 'Diamonds are forever, Endbringers are for play' sound?" I cringed.
"It sounds horrible," Vicky answered with a deadpan voice. Oh thank god. "Which means it's perfect!"
God damn it, Victoria.
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A/N- A fun little chapter showing how the new girl's power and personality works.
Arianna is adorable.
