Fluff

Chapter Seventy-Two - Reversal

Emily snuck into the house, for a certain definition of snuck. The floor creaked, loud and grinding to her ear, and she couldn’t help but feel like every one of her footfalls was a heavy wallop.

Still, it wasn’t that loud, and she figured she wasn’t making too much noise.

Some of her sisters could certainly stand to learn a thing or two.

Teddy stomped over to the side of the corridor the Heroine had gone down, each step coming with a thump that had Emily wincing. She couldn’t exactly call out to Teddy and tell her to make less noise.

Then the Hero screamed, and any noise Emily and Teddy were making was drowned out by the cacophony of two people chasing after each other down a narrow corridor. “No! Come back here!” the Hero shouted.

A grinning Trinity shot out of the hallway opening, nearly running on all fours and tail wagging through the air behind her in all of its striped glory. The Hero followed right after her, arm outstretched as if to catch the girl.

Teddy roared, her scream turning from that of a child’s to a full-bodied, rumbling bellow that almost made the walls shake. She swung a massive paw forwards, and Emily was infinitely glad to see that she wasn’t trying to hit claws first.

A black barrier snapped up in the air, thin and wide, like a glass plane but entirely dark, as if no light was allowed to enter or escape that one area.

The Heroine stumbled to the side, her balance off as she moved to dodge Teddy’s attack.

It meant her back was to Emily.

Emily looked around, just a quick glance, enough to notice the saucepan hanging from a hook above the kitchen island, out of her sisters’ reach, but not hers.

There was a scream, loud and painful.

It sent a cold shiver down Emily’s spine, and she spun around to see one of Trinity crashing to the ground, a hole in her leg.

The Heroine wasn’t moving.

She grabbed the saucepan, and, without putting much thought into it, stepped up and swung.

The edge of the pan rammed into the Hero’s head with a loud clang of metal meeting hard plastic. Emily’s arms shook and the pan slipped out of numbed hands.

It clattered to the ground a moment before the Hero crashed down.

The shield hovering before her winked out, and Teddy aborted a second roar, looking down, then back up at Emily, then down at Trinity.

“Trinity! Are you okay?” she asked.

“Ow!” all three of the girl said.

One of the intact Trinitys rushed towards Emily while she stared, not knowing what to do. The girl picked up the saucepan and ran back to her downed body.

“Wait—” Emily said. But it was too late.

Trinity bonked her hurt self atop the head, like someone driving a spike into the ground with a sledgehammer.

The injured Trinity burst apart.

A new Trinity popped into existence next to herself. “Oh, that’s much better!”

“Uh,” Emily said.

“Whoa!” A third Trinity poked out from behind the couch. “Awesome take down, Big Sis,” they said in stereo.

“We need to tie her up,” Athena said as she moved in, entirely unphased by Trinity’s Trinity-ness. The girl grunted and shoved the door closed. “Before she wakes up. Quick!”

Emily jumped. Athena was right, of course—the Hero wouldn’t stay down forever. Unless she was dead… Emily paused, then looked down and noted the slow breathing from the figure below. Not dead, then.

“I have tape!” a Trinity said as they raised a roll of duct tape clutched in both hands. The other Trinity grabbed the roll and underhanded it to Athena, who caught it out of the air and pulled a long strip loose.

“Teddy, grab her hands,” Athena said.

“Yeah, I got you,” Teddy said. “We should tie her hands and feet together behind her back.”

“Why?” Athena asked. “I mean, sure, but you turn her around.”

Teddy dropped to her knees and with a grunt, flopped the Hero onto her front. “ ’Cause that’s how you tie up pigs, and all capitalists are pigs.”

“Wow, that’s dark,” Athena said. “Let’s start with her hands first.”

Emily blinked, everything snapping back to attention. Her sisters were acting without her input, which was probably not ideal. “Trin…” She paused, took a deep breath to properly recentre herself, then pointed to one Trinity. “Help yourself get your hands free. And get your other you inside to follow me. Uh, after that, keep watch by the front and back of the house, in case someone shows up.”

“Yes, sis!” Trinity said. One of the girls hopped over to the kitchen with both feet tied together while the other ran to the front and peeked out from behind the curtains.

“Athena, can you tell when you’re using your power on someone?” Emily asked.

“Yes?”

“Then use it on her. Tell me if she’s waking up. Keep her down. Teddy—bear form. Don’t hurt her, but keep her on the floor.” Emily took a moment to still her heart while the Trinity that had been outside slid in. “Right, you’re with me,” she said.

“Okay?” that Trinity replied.

She walked past the entire disaster and into the corridor the Hero had run out of, Trinity hot on her heels. “Tell me if things change,” Emily said.

“Can do,” Trinity replied. She seemed quite pleased with herself. “I’m not tied up anymore. The other me, I mean.”

“Good. Keep a watch over the house and outside it. I don’t want more surprises,” Emily said as she walked into one of the bedrooms. There was a broken frame on the ground, glass scattered around and a likely expensive canvas flat on the floor. The place where it’d hung was obvious—a rectangle of slightly discoloured paint, with a large safe smack in the centre.

Emily considered covering it up. Another frame from elsewhere in the house, some ten minutes spent cleaning things up… she abandoned the idea. The Hero had likely seen the safe, and it wouldn’t take much searching to find it.

She stepped up to the vault and eyed the keypad, then she squeezed her phone out from her pocket. Three texts from her mom, she noted idly as she swiped over to a notepad app where she had a series of numbers jotted down from her conversation with Cement.

She tapped them into the pad with a knuckle, just in case she ended up being fingerprinted one day.

The safe clicked, and she reached for the handle, then stopped. “Trinity, when you die, you respawn, right?”

“Yup!” Trinity said. “Next to myself.”

“Right, can you open this safe in… about thirty seconds?”

The girl shrugged. “Sure.”

Emily stepped out of the room and squashed a kernel of guilt under a heavy load of simple practicality. She moved out of the corridor and found a bear sitting next to a downed Hero, one paw carefully placed on the Hero’s chest.

“She’s coming around,” Athena said.

“Good,” Emily replied.

“It’s open,” the nearest Trinity said.

Emily looked around to make sure things were still… mostly sane, then returned. The safe, as it turned out, contained a few file folders thick with loose papers, and nothing else. She tugged them out carefully and opened the one at the very top. The text within was thick and small, written in the boring no-nonsense vocabulary she’d only seen in the worst textbooks. But it was immediately clear that the file was talking about Heroes and Villains. She closed it and searched around for something to put them in.

“Trinity,” she said at last. “Can you find me a bag?” Trinity gestured to the big bag with the dollar sign on it hooked to her belt. “That’ll do,” Emily replied.

She stuffed everything away while Trinity held the bag open. “Oh, oh,” Trinity said. “The Hero lady is awake, and she’s not happy about it.”

“Oh,” Emily said. “Well, I think I’m going to have some words with her. Just… don’t call her a Hero. We’ll pretend that she’s a Villain. Can you tell that to Athena and Teddy… but discreetly? Without the Hero hearing it?”

“Uh? I guess I can, yeah. But aren’t we the Villains?”

Emily nodded. “Yes, but we’re pretending to be Heroes, so we’ll have to pretend that she’s the Villain, because Heroes wouldn’t fight other Heroes.”

“That makes sense,” Trinity said with a nod.

“Thanks, I think,” Emily replied. She gestured to the bag. “Make sure she doesn’t see that.” Emily reached back and closed the safe, being careful not to make too much noise.

“Got it,” Trinity said.

Emily dithered, psyching herself up. She bounced on the spot a few times, adjusted her coat and pants, and brushed some imaginary dust off of herself.

Enough stalling.

She walked back out into the corridor and instantly heard some struggling from the other end of the house. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

“No,” Emily said, her voice more snappish and hard than she was used to hearing from herself. “And I’d very much like to know who you are and who you’re working for… Villain.”

***