Chapter Text
First Contact, 1
The door of the bathroom banged open. I froze. I didn’t want to rustle my lunch bag and clue anyone in that I was eating lunch hidden on the toilet, so I kept still and listened.
I couldn’t make out the voices. The noise of the conversation was obscured by giggling and the sound of water from the sinks. There was a knock on the door, making me jump. I ignored it, but the person on the other side just repeated the knock.
“Occupied,” I called out, hesitantly.
“Oh my god, it’s Taylor!” one of the girls on the outside exclaimed with glee, then in response to something another girl whispered, I barely heard her add, “Yeah, do it!”
I shot upright, letting the brown bag with the last mouthful of my lunch fall to the tiled floor. Rushing for the door, I popped the lock open and pushed. The door didn’t budge.
There were noises from the stalls on either side of me, then a sound above me. I looked up to see what it was, only to get splashed in the face. My eyes started burning, and I was momentarily blinded by the stinging fluid in my eyes and the blurring of my glasses. I could taste it as it ran down to my nose and mouth. Cranberry juice.
They didn’t stop there. I managed to pull my glasses off just in time to see Madison and Sophia leaning over the top of the stall, each of them with plastic bottles at the ready. I bent over with my hands shielding my head just before they emptied the contents over me.
It ran down the back of my neck, soaked my clothes, fizzed as it ran through my hair. I pushed against the door again, but the girl on the other side was braced against it with her body.
If the girls pouring juice and soda on me were Madison and Sophia, that meant the girl on the other side of the door was Emma, leader of the trio. Feeling a flare of anger at the realization, I shoved on the door, the full weight of my body slamming against it. I didn’t accomplish anything, and my shoes lost traction on the juice-slick floor. I fell to my knees in the puddling juice.
Empty plastic bottles with labels for grape and cranberry juice fell to the ground around me. A bottle of orange soda bounced off my shoulder to splash into the puddle before rolling under the partition and into the next stall. The smell of the fruity drinks and sodas was sickly sweet.
The door swung open, and I glared up at the three girls. The three of them were laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world, but the sounds of their amusement barely registered with me. My attention was on the faint roar of blood pumping in my ears and an urgent, ominous crackling ‘sound’ that wouldn’t get any quieter or less persistent if I covered my ears with my hands. I could feel dribbles running down my arms and back, still chilled from the refrigerated vending machines.
I didn’t trust myself not to do something I couldn't take back if I let myself react, so I stayed silent.
Carefully, I climbed to my feet and turned my back on them to get my backpack off the top of the toilet. Seeing it gave me pause. It had been a khaki green, before, but now dark purple blotches covered it, most of the contents of a bottle of grape juice. Pulling the straps around my shoulders, I turned around. The girls weren’t there. I heard the bathroom door bang shut, cutting off the sounds of their glee, leaving me alone in the bathroom, drenched.
I approached the sink and stared at myself in the scratched, stained mirror that was bolted above it. I had inherited a thin lipped, wide, expressive mouth from my mother, but my large eyes and my gawky figure made me look a lot more like my dad. My dark hair was soaked enough that it clung to my scalp, neck and shoulders. I wore a brown hooded sweatshirt over a green t-shirt, but colored blotches of purple, red and orange streaked both. My glasses were beaded with the multicolored droplets of juice and soda. A drip ran down my nose and fell from the tip to land in the sink.
Using a paper towel from the dispenser, I wiped my glasses off and put them on again. The residual streaks made it just as hard to see, if not worse than it had been.
Deep breaths, Taylor, I told myself.
I pulled the glasses off to clean them again with a wet towel, and found the streaks were still there.
An inarticulate scream of fury and frustration ripped free from my lips, and I kicked the plastic bucket that sat just beneath the sink, sending it and the toilet brush inside flying into the wall. When that wasn’t enough, I pulled off my backpack and used a two-handed grip to hurl it. It crunched audibly on impact with the wall.
"What the fuck!?” I screamed, my voice echoing in the bathroom. Tears blurred the corners of my eyes.
“The hell am I supposed to do!?” I needed to hit something, break something. To retaliate against the unfairness of the world. I struck the mirror with my fist, screaming more in rage than pain as the glass cracked and my knuckles bled.
The buzzing at the edge of my consciousness was growing worse. My hands shook as I bent over and gripped the edge of the sink, let out a long, slow breath, and let my mind open up. For three months, I’d held back. Right now? I didn’t care anymore.
I shut my eyes and felt the buzzing crystallize into concrete information. As numerous as stars in the night sky, tiny knots of intricate data filled the area around me. I could focus on each one in turn, pick out details. The clusters of data had been reflexively drifting towards me since I was first splashed in the face. They responded to my subconscious thoughts and emotions, as much of a reflection of my frustration, my anger, my hatred for those three girls as my pounding heart and trembling hands were. I could make them stop or direct them to move almost without thinking about it, the same way I could raise an arm or twitch a finger.
I opened my eyes. I could feel adrenaline thrumming through my body, blood coursing in my veins and dripping down my knuckles. I shivered in response to the chilled soft drinks and juices the trio had poured over me, with anticipation and with just a little fear. On every surface of the bathroom were bugs; Flies, ants, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, earwigs, beetles, wasps and bees.
With every passing second, more streamed in through the open window and the various openings in the bathroom, moving with surprising speed. Some crawled in through a gap where the sink drain entered the wall while others emerged from the triangular hole in the ceiling where a section of foam tile had broken off, or from the opened window with peeling paint and cigarette butts squished out in the recesses. They gathered around me and spread out over every available surface; primitive bundles of signals and responses, waiting for further instruction.
I'm going to be a hero , I told myself.
That was why I didn't just go Carrie on the school and give the trio their just desserts. Even though it would be so easy to make them regret what they had put me through: the vicious e-mails, the trash they’d upended over my desk, the flute –my mother’s flute– they’d stolen from my locker. It wasn’t just them either. Other girls and a small handful of boys had joined in, ‘accidentally’ skipping over me when passing out assignment handouts, adding their own voices to the taunts and the flood of nasty emails, to get the favor and attention of three of the prettier and more popular girls in our grade.
I wanted to hurt them.
I was all too aware that I’d get caught and arrested if I attacked my fellow students. There were three teams of superheroes and any number of solo heroes in the city. I didn’t really care. The thought of my father seeing the aftermath on the news, his disappointment in me, his shame? That was more daunting, though it still didn’t outweigh the anger and frustration.
But I was going to be a hero. That's what I told myself, the goal I used to calm myself down at moments like these. It was what I used to make myself get out of bed on a school day. It was a crazy dream that made things tolerable. It was something to look forward to, something to work towards.
Most days that was enough. It had to be enough. I had to become a hero, had to make something worthwhile out of my hell of a life, or what was the point?
Today, as I stared at my stained reflection in the shattered and blood streaked mirror, it wasn't enough.
The bathroom was stiflingly silent. Not a single insect moved. I breathed in, one breath after the other. I just needed to calm down, pull myself together, and send the insects away. Then I could go back to class and-
And-
A hiccup interrupted one of my breaths in. For half a second I couldn’t get enough air. And that was too much.
I crumpled my knees hyperventilating, hands pressed down on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. All I could think about was that I couldn’t go back to class. I’d kill them if I did. With a thought I could pick out every venomous insect in my swarm, how much venom they had, and a general feeling of how much damage that venom could inflict. And it was too much.
Hundreds of thousands of my insects carried venomous payloads, bees, wasps, spiders, centipedes, and even caterpillars. I had even more poisonous insects which could be torn apart by their fellows, causing chemical burns to whatever their fluids touched. It would be so easy to use them. I could kill my tormentors a hundred times over, bury them in a stinging, biting, choking hell like they’d locked me in. I’d still have more left over afterward, too. Enough to lash out at everyone who’d participated in their torments, everyone who’d ignored it.
I could make it all stop.
Tears rolled down my face. I’d never be a hero. Never do anything worthwhile with my life. If I did this I wouldn’t have even that distant hope anymore. The real heroes would lock me up forever and I’d deserve it. But in that moment, desperately sucking in one breath after the other, sobbing my heart out, surrounded by the unblinking stares of millions of insects I could use to make it stop, I couldn’t imagine any way around it.
I’d kill them if I went back to class. I couldn’t run away and never come back to school, then they’d win. And I couldn’t lie on the bathroom floor sobbing forever.
I needed another way out.
-----
"Fuck!" Geralt shouted, as a four-legged mass of chitin the size of a pony slammed him into a tree. He grunted with the force of the blow. His armor prevented the spikes on its eyeless carapace from punching through his chest, but the impact still hurt.
"Aard!" he yelled, taking a hand off his polearm and twisting it in an open-handed gesture which summoned a wave of pure force to blast the kikimora worker off of him. But the damn thing had already done its job, keeping him pinned long enough for an even larger kikimora warrior to close with him. This monster stood almost as tall as him and was far heavier than its kin, with massive chitinous clubs for forelegs where the workers had slender manipulating arms.
The witcher didn't stick around to contemplate the kikimora dimorphism. The warrior swung at Geralt and he threw himself into a desperate roll which took him under a strike that shattered the tree into splinters. He sprang to his feet already in the motions of an attack, swinging the axehead of his silvered polearm with all his might into the shoulder joint of the limb which had delivered the blow.
The inhuman force of his swing cleaved all the way through in a spray of green blood, leaving the kikimore tottering on only three limbs. The flesh under its carapace blistered from contact with the silver and the monster screamed. Geralt allowed himself a momentary smile. Kikimore were as tough as monsters came and would claw their way across the ground to keep fighting so long as they had even a single limb left. But between the allergic reaction of monsters to silver and the poison he'd coated his weapon with, the warrior wasn't long for this world.
There wasn't more than a moment for satisfaction though. Three workers charged him from the left, driven on by another warrior. Their legs churned up the grassy topsoil with the force of their furious charge and he couldn’t afford any distraction.
"Quen!" Geralt shouted, holding up his forearm in a shielding gesture. A transparent golden sphere surrounded him moments before impact, bowing inward from the force of the workers' charge. Then, the moment their momentum halted, the sphere bounced back violently and exploded into a shockwave of force which hurled the kikimore back.
Even as they crashed to the forest floor the kikimora warrior surged forward, bellowing a challenge. Geralt knew how kikimore’s tactics worked though, and had drilled to defend himself against them until his limbs moved without conscious thought. Geralt leapt towards the monster before the backlash of his magical shield had even faded, taking it by surprise before it could strike out. He brandished the spiked end of his poleaxe at the charging warrior and planted the butt in the ground.
Kikimore warriors were juggernauts, armored behemoths meant to smash through everything in their path. They were not designed to stop quickly. Geralt's braced poleaxe pierced through the warrior's armor with a wet pop before it could react. It smashed to a halt against the crosspiece, causing the poleaxe to bend and flex in Geralt's hands. But its shaft was made of thick well-maintained hickory and even the kikimora's force couldn't snap it.
Geralt grunted as he used Aard to heave the dying warrior off of his weapon. But while he'd been killing it, the three workers who'd charged him had been getting their legs back under them. And they'd been joined by three more workers. Individually kikimora workers may not be the powerhouses their warriors were, but six of them could still bury a witcher in bodies and blows.
Geralt rolled his shoulders and stepped back through the trees, doing his best to avoid being surrounded. When he and Ciri got back to town, he was going to explain to that slimy fucking tradesman exactly how much lying to a witcher cost. The fuck this nest was 'only a few weeks old at most'! If the tradesman's wagons had been able to take this path to the city in the last three months, Geralt would eat his armor.
Then the kikimore charged at the exact moment Ciri's terrified scream echoed through the woods, and Geralt decided that the tradesman didn't deserve the privilege of having all ten fingers.
-----
No matter what Geralt said sometimes, Ciri was not addlebrained. Or foolish, or born with more bravado than wits, or whatever angry thing he was growling out that really meant "I was more scared than you were because I’m silly, are you okay?". She had enough sense to know when the time was to actually do what her guardian said and run, regardless of what he claimed.
And that time was when the road suddenly collapsed into a seething den of kikimore.
She sprinted into the woods as fast as her legs could carry her, thanking her blessings that the forest floor and canopy were sparse enough that she didn't twist an ankle, and cursing Roach for being faster to realize something was wrong than she'd been. The normally placid horse had vanished through the trees even before the collapsing dirt had even finished settling.
It was okay though. She'd follow Roach into the woods while Geralt did his best impression of a scowly grindstone on the sorry beasts, then they'd come back when he gave the all clear whistle. And if one of the monsters managed to escape Geralt, well, she had her own silvered poleaxe which she'd been practicing with. She'd skewer the beast herself if she had to!
Then she looked back and every coherent thought flew out of her head.
Two kikimore -extra massive ones bigger than her with huge crushing claws!- were charging after her and she couldn't even see Geralt under the tide of grey and red insects pouring out of the ground. The sight of him being overrun stopped her heart for a second before a roaring blast of golden light exploded from the road, hurling kikimore and dirt into the air with the same effortless disdain and leaving Geralt standing alone in a crater.
"Ciri!" her witcher yelled as he charged into the forest after her, "Run!"
Ciri did not need to be told twice. The two kikimore turned back to confront Geralt but she didn't spare any of them one more second of attention. She ran. Her heart pounded so hard she had a mad fleeting thought that surely it must burst out of her chest.
A roar ripped through the air behind her and before Ciri could even think she was halfway up a tree. Its green needles jabbed into her face and its rough bark tore at her hands, but none of that seemed important in the face of her panicked drive to get one more branch under her feet, to pull herself up one more meter, to get away from the horrible roar had turned shaken her bones and innards like jelly.
Only when she got so high that the thin branches threatened to drop her did Ciri have enough presence of mind to realize she'd left her poleaxe somewhere below on the forest floor. She cursed herself as she spotted its silver glint through the branches. Geralt would never drop his weapons!
Then the glint vanished. It had been obscured by a smooth grey carapace with jutting red spikes. Ciri's breath caught and she held herself very, very still. There was a kikimora prowling under her tree!
Ciri could hear the sound of Geralt fighting in the distance. She could pick out the meaty thunk of his blade as it bit through chitin and the explosive blasts of his magic were impossible to mistake. And going by the exasperated but unstrained tone of his swears, he was winning. But those sounds were in the distance . The kikimora was right below her, on top of her weapon!
Maybe it couldn’t see her. Or … sense her, however the eyeless monsters hunted. Ciri remembered Geralt telling her that kikimore were blind, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember how their senses worked. She could only hope that it wouldn’t be able to notice her above it.
Her hopes were dashed when the kikimora reared back and slammed its armored face into the tree next to hers. Its branches were meshed with her tree’s densely enough that her tree swayed with the impact and Ciri yelped. The kikimora jerked at the sound, letting out a crackling triumphant hiss as it reared back and slammed its face into her tree this time, even harder than before.
Ciri moaned as the tall pine tree she was in swayed. She was so stupid! Geralt had taught her better than that! ‘Never show fear to something hunting you’ he’d told her, and she thought it safe to assume that ‘especially if it might be trying to bait out a reaction so it can find you’ went with that!
The monster roared and slammed into the tree again. Pine needles showered from shaken branches. Grass tore beneath the tree as its roots twisted under the strain. Ciri herself almost fell, one boot slipping off her branch before she could find her footing again.
“Fuuuck,” she swore. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Her tree shook again under another blow and Ciri absolutely did not whimper. She could handle this. Geralt had taught her how to fight. If only she could get to her weapon, if only she hadn’t dropped it underneath the damn beast , she’d be able to fight the monster off. Another crunching blow shook the tree and Ciri clutched its trunk for support. What would Geralt do in this situation?
The tree shook again, swaying closer to one of its neighbors, and a mad idea flashed through Ciri’s mind. She could jump. If she could just make it to another tree-
Her terrified thought process didn’t go very far beyond that. Flickers of hopes flashed through her mind, jumping from tree to tree long enough for Geralt to finish with the other kikimore or the kikimora being confused when it finally toppled her tree and realized she wasn’t in it. But none of them stayed long enough for her to think them through. She just knew that this tree wasn’t safe. She needed to get out, she needed to run .
Ciri took a deep breath to center herself, and immediately lost any calm she’d gained to the horrible creaking sound of roots breaking. Her tree lurched and she could feel from its sway that it wasn’t going to bounce all the way back this time. So ignoring the tingling in her feet and the too-late thought that this was a terrible idea, Ciri leapt.
Later it wouldn’t be the kikimora that gave her nightmares nor even the feeling of her tree, her only lifeline, being broken beneath her. It was the moment of weightlessness after she leapt, that drifting empty feeling in her stomach when her feet left the branch and nothing she could do would propel her further. When she knew , instantly in her gut, that she wasn’t going to make it.
But she did! She didn’t quite make it to where she’d been aiming for. The branch she’d meant to leap onto soared just over her head, slapping into her palms as she desperately grabbed for it. Ciri’s hands tore further as she failed to keep hold of the branch, but her failure didn’t kill her. Ciri’s shoulder slammed into the tree with bruising force and she screamed as her grip tore loose. But she only tumbled a meter down before two sturdy branches slammed her in the stomach and brought her to a halt.
Ciri sobbed with relief.
Then the kikimora slammed into the tree she’d fled one more time, tipping it over with a thunderous cracking and snapping of branches. Branches which caught in the branches of the tree she’d leapt to. Which, with horrifying unfairness, started to bring her tree down as well. “No no no no no,” Ciri moaned, as gravity once again left her behind with a sickening lurch.
The world whited out with pain. Every part of Ciri hurt. For one delirious moment she thought she’d missed her jump after all and fallen to the ground. But then reality came crashing down on her as she realized the tree she’d been in - both of them! laughed some unmoored part of her brain- had fallen, bringing her down with it. Worst of all, she was pinned beneath the very branches which had arrested her fall moments earlier.
The kikimora hissed. Creaking, crunching footsteps reached Ciri as the monster stepped gingerly over fallen wood. She was trapped. The monster was going to get her.
She was going to die.
It was then that she felt it. That same hungry maw inside of her which had welled up inside of her when her home burned and she’d shattered Cintra’s monolith. The same twisting thing which had exploded out of her and torn four men to pieces. The power which she could always feel just beneath the surface if she was being honest with herself, but never dared to unleash for the fear that she would be the one torn to pieces as it ripped its way out of her body. It terrified her.
But in that moment the kikimora terrified her more.
So Ciri breathed in. And she screamed.
----
A roar of sound smashed me off my knees and into the wall under the bathroom sinks. Hundreds of thousands of bundles of information in my head winked out in an instant. Dizzy and reeling, mind moving like a fly caught in molasses, I lifted my head and turned around.
The bathroom was gone. The stalls, even part of the floor and the ceiling had been torn apart to make place for a howling ring of rotating purple mist that held a circle of twisted rotating stars. Wha- before my mind could form a full thought, the ring screamed. Or -I shook my head- no, someone on the other side of the ring screamed.
“GERALT!” That was a girl’s voice. Maybe even younger than me, from the sound of it. “RATUNKU!”
And just like that, the chaos in my head stopped. Time lurched into motion and for an eternal moment I felt as if I could see every piece of debris falling in slow motion. There was a girl on the other side of that ring. A portal, it must be a portal , I thought. Opened by someone who needed help.
“RATUNKU!” the girl screamed again, sounding even more frantic this time. The sound of the cry jolted me to my feet. It was a scream I could feel , which made me swallow as my brain imagined the kind of damage a scream like that would do coming out of my own throat.
There was a girl in trouble on the other side of that portal.
Heroes didn’t abandon people in need.
Wherever the portal led, it wasn’t here.
Those three thoughts raced through my mind as fast as lightning, shocking me into a sudden moment of clarity. That portal was a way out. The thought was like lightning through my veins. I had a way out!
If I save her, I can still be a hero.
“GERALT! GERALLLLT!”
The girl’s voice wasn’t calling for me. But heroes didn’t wait for someone to call their name before saving people.
I threw myself into the portal.
