Chapter Text
Vi was alive. It was all she could think about. She was alive in a different universe, but this was a meaningless distinction to Powder. She had spent every regretful second since the accident wishing she could turn back time and get her sister back. It was an impossible pipe dream, and now it was real. It wasn't even hard, she had helped build the device after all. Ekko and Heimerdinger had only designed it to work one way, but they were just trying to get the thing up and running as fast as possible. There was plenty of ways to improve the efficiency, miniaturize it, to make it portable enough for her to come back without having to rebuild everything. She could be gone just a couple of days, she could easily make some excuse for Vander and the others, they wouldn't even notice she was gone. It was far too tempting not to try.
Even then, she didn't expect it to take her only a week. It felt almost too easy to be true, but had she triple checked the math and repeated every calibration test and it all just seemed to check out. The end result was a device—V Drive, she decided to call it—that didn't need an external power source to travel between realities, only some time for the blue stone shards to charge its capacitor. Plus, integrating the shards into it had the added benefit of letting her recreate the anomaly if anything happened. The only thing the V Drive needed that wouldn't be carried along with her was the metal structure needed to contain the wild rune once it expanded, but she had already solved that problem by finding ways to easily recreate them with easily available materials. All that was left was actually using it.
Powder wasn't sure what she had thought inter-dimensional travel would feel like, but THAT was absolutely not it. What she did know is that she was going to have nightmares about disintegrating into fractals for quite a while. At least it was over—it was only then that it hit her—, she had managed to travel to another universe, she was finally going to see her sister… Once she managed to get out of the rusted remains of a turbine that had never become her lab.
As she started making her way out through the old ventilation tunnels she noticed something weird in the air. There was the old scent of rusting metal and stagnant water that she remembered from she cleaned up this place in her world, except now there was some other smell she didn't recognize that reminded her of burning tires and mad her nose itch. She ignored it and told herself it would get better as she got close to the exit, but it just kept getting worse. Once she was finally outside she understood why.
The city surrounding her was almost unrecognizable. It looked like if the corpse of the Zaun she grew up in had been haphazardly buried in layers of factory smog. Even its inhabitants seemed more like animals who just got caught feeding on the carrion of the dead city. The bones of Zaun—its buildings—were all crooked masses of stony patchwork, as if they had been broken again and again and never given the time to properly heal. And the mood? It felt as though she had just arrived halfway into a decades long funeral where grief seeped into people's bones along with the cold. Tears filled Powder's eyes and she wasn't sure if it was because of the painful sight or the obviously noxious chemicals permeating the air. She knew things had to be bad from what the other Ekko said and how he acted, but knowing it and seeing it are entirely different things. It made something in her desperately want to go back the way she came, to go rally her family and friends and convince them to save Zaun once again. That would have to wait, the V-drive was charging and her sister waiting.
Despite knowing the route to The Last Drop like the palm of her hand, the moment she actually reached she had to check twice to make sure she was actually at the right place. She had expected the bar to look different, run-down, less vibrant, maybe even closed. The idea of Vander letting it become some kind of seedy club was simply unthinkable. “Maybe he had to sell it to someone else?” she tried to rationalize, and what she saw once she entered the creepy establishment seemed to support her theory. The place was full, but she failed in finding any familiar faces, not even among the employees. Admittedly, finding any faces at all was already a difficult task on its own, since the apparent abundance of glowing chemlights hanging on every single wall and piece of furniture, somehow, didn't seem to translate into actual light. Instead, they created some sort of neon colored twilight. Too dark to see normally while also too flashy to ever let your eyes get used to it. Looking for anyone in there felt like a loss of both time and eyesight.
Time for Plan B: even if The Last Drop wasn't Vander's anymore someone among the employees should still know where to find the previous owner or at the very least where to ask. With that as her new goal, Powder started weaving her way through the drunken crowd towards the bartender, dodging bumbling bodies along the way. If anyone was likely to know something, it was him, she knew it from experience: it was impossible to work as a bartender without learning about everyone's life through osmosis. As she got closer, her view of the man improved, he looked malnourished. He was tall and not too thin, but his face… It looked as if nature had forgotten to put fat and muscle over his skull and had jumped straight to covering it with skin.
“Hey. Sorry to bother you while you're working.” His melancholic look told her he was used to worse. “Do you know anything about the bar's previous owner? I'm looking for his daughter,” The man winced, knowing fully well the name he was going to hear “Vi.”
“What business do you have with The Hound of the Underground?” A female voice asked. She turned to see a threatening cloaked woman sitting besides her, beer jug in hand, eyeing her with curiosity.
“You know where I can find her? I really need to talk to her.”
“Talk…?” She eyed Powder up, as if trying to figure out something. “Whatever, today's her day off. Come tomorrow.”
“I can't. I need to see her as soon as possible.”
“You sure?” Powder nodded. “Alright Thieram, you heard the lady. Go call for the mutt.”
“Do I have to?” The poor bartender begged as the color drained from his face.
“It's a pressing issue” Wait, is she being sarcastic? “You don't want to anger the owner's daughter, do you?”
“Hold on, Vander still owns this place?” Something's not adding up.
That feeling only worsened when the woman whipped around with a face in between confusion and realization. “How…?” She stopped to think. It was clear that things weren't adding up for her either, then something clicked. “…How long it's been since you last visited this place?” Powder hadn't finished improvising an excuse before the woman continued. “You know what? It's none of my business.” She turned to the bartender. “What are you waiting for, Thieram? Stop staring and go call for Violet.”
After the man begrudgingly dragged himself to the back of The Last Drop, the blue haired girl felt tempted to confront the woman. She clearly knew something she didn't and, most importantly, she knew that Powder didn't know. Ultimately, she thought better of it. Vi was already on her way and she would be able to ask her directly instead of risking getting into trouble with a woman that seemed to become scarier the more she looked at her. She had some nasty bluish scars on the side of her face and an evil smirk in her lips. She was relieved when the cloaked stranger quickly finished her beer and got up to leave… Until a golden mechanical claw perched on her shoulder. She should have been worried about the hand, after all, she could easily recognize the design of a weapon made to kill, yet nothing could feel as threatening as the words the woman whispered into her ear before leaving:
“Have fun.”
She probably should have left, the whole thing was so unnerving and ominous, it all felt wrong. But she had nowhere to go, it was getting dark, many of the places she remembered were in ruins and the streets were probably even less safe. And also, Vi was coming. She took solace on that. Vi was really coming, the bartender and the scary woman both clearly knew her and acted as if a stranger asking to see Vi was normal, they acted suspicious but they weren't lying. All she had to do is stay out of danger until she arrived, then she'd be safe, her older sister would protect her.
Just don't do anything stupid: don't drink anything, don't talk to anyone and stay close to the bar counter. And she waited.
In retrospect, it had been a mistake to come wearing her dance clothes. She had thought that the occasion was just too big to fit in her usual plain attire and she just didn't own anything else. Goddess, she really wasn't used to being the center of attention, especially not like this. She could sense the crowd's eyes stripping her, it made her feel like her dress was getting shorter every second. At least Vi would probably like it, she focused on that. I'm going to see Vi and all of this will have been worth it. She just had to wait.
And wait she did, turning every time she heard the door open, hoping for a flash of crimson. Briefly imagining it sometimes. But when it finally happened, she knew it was the real deal. From the moment she entered she exerted some kind of presence, her entrance alone submerging the turbulent locale into something almost reminiscent of silence. Even if Vander didn't own the place she would.
Yet, as Vi stepped into the light, Powder realized she looked different than she had expected from the drawings. Not much, but it was noticeable to someone who had spent hours memorizing every brush stroke. The undercut was the same, except now a big scar was cutting across it, with smaller parallel ones carving that side of her head. Had she gotten injured since this Ekko had visited her? How long had it been since he last saw her? She now had piercings in her brow and nose and some purplish veins seemed to shine through her paler skin. Maybe Ekko had made a mistake when painting her? Even his photographic memory fails sometimes. Right? She couldn't follow through with that thought as Vi slowly approached her seeming anything but pleased to see her.
“I'm guessing you're the bitch who interrupted my time at Babette's.” She said as she grabbed a stunned Powder by her face. “I hope you have a very good reason for this because…” Her grab turned into a rough caress. “I'd hate to break such a pretty face.”
Powder shrunk backwards, recoiling away from the touch. “Vi? Don't you recognize me? It's me, Powder.” She meekly said. As though she herself wasn't struggling to recognize her sister in this new Vi.
“Powder…? Nope. Sorry to disappoint you,” Her indifferent smile said otherwise “I don't really bother to remember the faces and names of my one night stands.”
“What?! I'm not…! This is not how it was supposed to go.” How can she not know me? Was I not born in this universe? How am I supposed to tell Vi that I'm her sister if I don't exist here? What do I do? “Wait, Ekko!” He visited my world, he knows. “Ask Ekko and he will tell you about me.”
“Who's Ekko?” And something broke inside Powder's brain.
It couldn't be real, it didn't feel real. If it were true,—hypothetically—it would mean that she had once again made a life ending mistake. That she had missed something in the calibration that had sent her to the wrong universe, that she was now lost in a world where nobody knew her with no way to get back home. It had to be a dream— a nightmare, maybe some kind of feverish hallucination induced by overwork and lack of sleep. It made sense, it explained why everything suddenly felt incorporeal, even herself, so why the fuck wasn't she waking up?!
Somebody touched her. It was Vi, she was talking.—When had she started talking? What was she saying?—Then a cold feeling started to spread over her forehead, it was Vi's hand. What was she doing? Something about a fever? Nonsense, she should know you can't have fever inside a dream.
The world started moving around her… No, she was being pulled by someone—Vi?—deep into the rooms of The Last Drop. By the time their surroundings stopped being a wobbly mess she was in her old room siting on the bunk bed she used to share with her sister. She had stopped using it ever since she died, there was no need for two beds anymore.
Something wet on her lips brought her back to earth, where two powder blue eyes were staring into her soul as the pinkhead's mouth covered her own. Vi was kissing her… VI WAS KISSING HER! HER SISTER! Why was this happening? Why was her brain blocking out everything except the one fucking thing it should be blocking?! She desperately tried to shift her focus into anything else: the texture of the wrinkled bed-sheets under her, the dusty smell of abandonment that permeated the room, anything but the creases of those soft wet lips, pressing against—
“STOP!” She heard herself say as she pulled away from Vi's unsisterly embrace. “What are you doing?”
“Just waking you up from your trance with a kiss. It worked pretty well, didn't it?” She was smiling, her voice sounded reassuring, intended to be reassuring, yet there was something strange in the way Vi was looking at her. Something she had never seen in her sister's face before. And, whatever it was, it screamed danger. “Plus, Blue. You kinda owe me that and more.”
“Owe you…? For what?”
“For interrupting my well earned time at Babette's. I was in the middle of something when you demanded to see me, two very hot and expensive hookers to be precise.” She got closer. TOO CLOSE! And whispered into her ear like a viper readying to snatch its prey. “How are you planning to pay me back for my trouble?”
“I… I have money—”
“So do I, Blue.” She paused to sniff Powder's hair. “I have all the money I need and more. What I fancy is a more… peculiar form of currency.” Then started softly pecking her prey's neck, only to whisper the killing blow: “Like the bodies of pretty girls.”
Realization rushed into her bloodstream like paralyzing poison, immobilizing her diaphragm and settled just short of a cardiac arrest. Vi wasn't just misunderstanding things, she was a sexual predator. The girl who had once been her sworn protector was now taking advantage of her. Yet by far the worst thought was the absolute certainty that this couldn't be a dream. There was just no way her subconscious would conjure up such a horrible version of Vi, much less do it without immediately waking her up in a cold sweat. It was all real.