Note: With a nod to Black and White for the concept that is mentioned in this episode!
A knock at the door. "Liz?"
The beautiful girl with the flaxen-shaded blonde hair partially styled back in a ponytail, possessing sky blue eyes on a face that was beautifully tanned for a native of southern California, perked on hearing her name called out, and then she looked up from her work desk in the offices of her school newspaper, the Oracle, to see her best friend standing nearby. "Enid?!" Elizabeth Wakefield then breathed out. "What is it?"
"What's wrong with you?!" Enid Rollins demanded as she came over to gently touch her friend's now-wet cheek. "You've been crying! Did you have a fight with Todd?!"
Elizabeth gaped, and then she laughed. "Oh, no! No! No! It's nothing, Enid…"
Before she could try to explain off what she had just felt minutes before when that very subtle wave of meson-based energy have washed over her from the general direction of Japan, the room suddenly began to shake violently. "EARTHQUAKE!" Enid screamed out as she immediately dived under a nearby desk. "Get under cover, Liz! Hurry!"
Elizabeth moved to do so…
…but then stopped as she heard a faint scream echo through the open window of the office from somewhere off to the hills north of Sweet Valley High School. As the ground began to settle down from that savage quaking, Elizabeth turned quite pale as her mind quickly deduced who had just screamed out like that. "JESSICA!" she cried out before racing out of the office as fast as her legs could realistically move her.
"LIZ!" Enid screamed out…
"Elizabeth! Stop! Stay still!"
Ignoring her favourite teacher's command, Elizabeth concentrated as she felt the tiny sliver of meson in her cerebellum — one she had put in there herself years ago back on Yiziba after she had been Gifted to become the Wise One of the Circle of Thought, the Academician — pulse with new power. "«Nexus One! Locate Rampage! Engage teleport mechanism! Take me to her!»" she barked out in the language of her adopted people.
As the considerable amount of people inside the hallway watched in wide-eyed disbelief, bright white energy formed around the older and more cerebral of the famous Wakefield twins for a second…before she VANISHED from sight!
"ELIZABETH!" English teacher Roger Collins cried out…
Oh, fuck me! If Liz is willing to do THAT in PUBLIC…?
A brown-haired man with reading glasses over dark eyes stared at the spot where Elizabeth had been seconds before, and then he sighed as he moved to slip away from the gathering crowd of students and teachers who were moving in to examine the place where the elder of the Wakefield twins had just been. Trying to be as unobtrusive as possible — which was aided by the fact that few people really cared for someone like him…which, while it did hurt at times, could also be incredibly helpful — Winston Egbert quietly made his way towards the nearest boy's washroom.
And if she's panicking like THAT, something's happened to Jess!
Stepping into the thankfully empty room, the resident prankster and clown of Sweet Valley High's Class 10-B took a deep breath, and then he relaxed himself. "Okay…" the man who would be addressed on Yiziba by the battle-name Lightmage breathed out before he placed his fingertips against each other in a splayed-finger formation before his chest. He then began chanting in the native language of that world…
…and in a flash of light, he also vanished.
North of Sweet Valley, seconds later…
"It is most agreeable that you are once more functioning properly, Mistress," the disembodied voice of Nexus One — the Academician's personal sentient super-computer — stated as Elizabeth Wakefield appeared on an overgrown path leading into a meadow valley that was officially part of the California State Parks system but was legally owned by the Fowlers, the "new money" family whose heiress, Lila, was Jessica's best friend. "What caused such a terrible malfunction in your synaptic processes?"
"I don't know, Nexus," Elizabeth stated as she felt the ground jolt again. "I'll submit myself to a full medical scan once I get back home. Where's Jess?"
"Miss Rampage is currently sixty-two yards ahead of you, bearing three-four-eight magnetic," the computer replied helpfully. "I have also detected Miss Trebuchet approaching your position from the direction of Sweet Valley High School. Miss Cyclotron, Miss Manacle and Miss Oblivion are also en route to your position."
A sigh. "Bless you, girls! Nexus: Battle suit!"
Energy warped around Elizabeth, melting her normal clothes into the heavy-duty fabric jumpsuit she would normally wear as the Academician. Like other uniforms worn by metas from Yiziba, it was a one-piece affair with wide leggings and sleeves. Elizabeth's uniform was black with a stylised silver professor's cap on her chest, white slip-on shoes on her feet. Of course, said uniform hid loads of personal devices whose true technological levels would automatically prove Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Of course, given that Elizabeth was Gifted with the collected knowledge of TWENTY-SIX prior lifetimes before her current one — with all those previous lifetimes being lived on a planet that would make the most dangerous parts of any major American city look quite tame in comparison! — she never really recognised the difference and ultimately never cared that her equipment could be seen as magical to the uninitiated.
"Liz!"
The Academician looked up and behind her before she breathed out. "Hey, Lila!" she called out as the current incarnation of Cyclotron soared down to the ground beside her. Born the only daughter of the second-richest family in all of Sweet Valley — a family that had made it rich thanks to the dot-com boom of a couple decades before — the woman christened as Lila Fowler was a very pretty brunette with dark brown eyes. Her uniform was a wild explosion of primary colours in a dazzling motif that reflected her metahuman powers incredibly well; as Cyclotron, Lila was a human nuclear reactor that could fire force blasts which would put a thermonuclear bomb to shame. "Sensed it, huh?" she said as she accepted the other girl's warm embrace.
"What in God's name HAPPENED to us?!" Cyclotron demanded. "Everything was normal until about a year ago…and the next thing I knew…!"
"It was as if we had never been given our Gifts in the first place," the Academician finished for her classmate. "I know. Given the person who helped us get those gifts, I'll lay a good bet it was because of the whole thing with the Oni…"
Cyclotron gaped. "They blanked ATARU'S mind?! WHY?!"
"Don't know! And if we don't calm Jess down, we'll never find out!"
The other girl sighed. "Right."
She then grabbed the Academician's hand and pulled her into the air…
Yards away…
"Oh, man…Jess, you are PISSED!"
Shaking his head as he watched the girl in the sky blue jumpsuit with the flock of white birds over her arms and legs which marked Jessica Wakefield as the latest incarnation of Rampage, Lightmage could only shake his head. While there were three other girls — all fellow members of the Sweet Valley High cheerleading squad: Annie Whitman (Manacle), Regina Morrow (Oblivion) and Amy Sutton (Trebuchet) — close by trying to calm the screaming girl down, they were staying clear of their friend's arms in case she winged them with her fists. And being hit by a woman who had the sheer physical power — and virtually limitless energy; Rampage's power was fuelled by any form of light, which kept her going even in the middle of the night with a single light bulb nearby — of the Man of Steel himself in her very shapely California teenage beach-girl's body was something no sane person wanted to have happen to her.
What the hell happened? the technomage — Lightmage had the ability to manipulate the ambient magical energy of Earth to cause all sorts of interesting things to happen to any form of technology save for anything touched by meson — wondered to himself as Cyclotron and the Academician came down from the sky to land nearby. The girls were acting normal up to about a year ago, and then they acted like nothing…
His eyes then widened as it hit him. "Holy shit…!"
"I trust, Egbert, there's an explanation for this?"
Lightmage perked on hearing the young voice of the scion of Sweet Valley's richest family echo from behind him, and then he sighed. "I think it's got something to do with Ataru Moroboshi, Bruce," he said as Bruce Patman moved to kneel beside his classmate. He was quick to nod greetings to the three other men who had also come to join him: Elizabeth's boyfriend Todd Wilkins, the Wakefield twins' older brother Steven and Regina Morrow's older brother Nicholas. Unlike the prankster of Class 10-B, the other men had never been gifted by the Great Crystal of Power; when Professor Wyszynski had approached them after he had taken Winston to Yiziba three years ago, they had all turned him down…even AFTER learning of what Moroboshi Ataru had helped arrange for the girls now many yards away, not to mention at least a dozen or so others from all over Sweet Valley. "They started acting normal just before that whole Tag Race thing…"
"Empathic bonds," Steven explained. "Mom and Dad picked up on it right away after they came back from Yiziba after being Gifted." A sigh. "Just before Ataru faced down that Oni girl, they began acting like normal. Jess didn't even show any strength…"
"Neither did Gina," Nicholas stated. "My family's grateful to Ataru to help her get over her deafness, but to see a switch-around like that…!"
The others nodded. "I always knew Jess had a major crush on the guy," Todd stated. "She always vowed that the first time she took a guy to bed, it would be Ataru."
The other men snickered; while they did comport themselves like proper gentlemen when in public, they were teenage men and did dwell often on making the score with a pretty lady. And — even for a town in California of all places! — Sweet Valley had been particularly well-blessed in that regard. "Well, what did you expect, Todd?" Bruce stated as he gazed knowingly at Elizabeth Wakefield's boyfriend. "The guy DID make sure that Jessica COULD literally arm wrestle SUPERMAN to his knees when she was just ELEVEN!"
More laughter…and then the guys all gasped on feeling a wave of energy explode behind them. They spun around to see a familiar Japanese girl in a grey jumpsuit standing nearby, her right arm raised in greeting. "Yo!" Infinity called out in accented English; hearing that, the Americans often found it baffling that when the Kansai-born girl spoke their native language, her accent switched to a weird mix of Brooklyn in New York and eastern Texas. "What's going on, guys?"
"Jess is having a bit of a temper-tantrum…and it's causing an earthquake," Nicholas stated. "Would you mind, Ayumu?"
A sigh. "Sure, Nick! 'Scuse me!"
And with that, she walked out of the grove where the guys had hidden themselves in to approach the small crowd of metahuman girls standing nearby. "Hey, everyone!" Infinity then called out as she waved at them. "You girls okay?!"
In a flash of blue-and-white, Rampage was right into the other woman's face. "DO I LOOK ALRIGHT, ŌSAKA?!" she shrilled out. "WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ATARU?!"
Infinity didn't react to the other woman's scream, even if her hair got blown around by the blast of air exploding from Rampage's mouth. "Some creep from the Men in Black used a neuraliser on him, Jess," she answered. "And because…"
"We all became empathically bonded to Ataru when he took us to Yiziba to get our Gifts, when his memories blanked out, so did ours," the Academician finished for the visitor from Japan. "Thank God Negako taught us how to keep control over ourselves when we weren't busy doing fight scenes and the like. If any of us lost control…"
"Like you, Jess?" Trebuchet said as she gazed on her former childhood best friend's twin sister, a knowing look on her face. "Look what you just did now."
Rampage winced before she gave the girl in the brown-and-grey jumpsuit with the stylised siege engine insignia on her chest an apologetic look. "Sorry…"
"Relax, Jess! We're hurting, too," Oblivion stated. "We may not always have wet dreams about that wonderful man across the big pond from here like you do…"
"But he is our friend and he will always be our friend," the Academician finished as she gave her twin's shoulder a warm squeeze. "So what say we go to Japan and get the story from the people that are there? It's pretty much after school now…"
"Shouldn't we get the other girls, too?" Manacle wondered.
"Annie, do you really want to unleash Molly on that town?" Rampage's twin asked.
Everyone winced as images of a burning Tomobiki flashed through their minds. Molly Hecht — known on Yiziba as the Dominatrix — was one of the local bad girls who had won the chance to become a metahuman thanks to Moroboshi Ataru; she had been one of the last ones to receive a Gift thanks to him. A former drug addict, she seemed almost perfect to match up to the personality of the being known in male format as the "Dominator," a high-end FISS-type Yizibajohei who got addicted to pain quite easily and gladly would mix it up with anyone that wanted to do a fight scene with her. "Good point," Cyclotron mused.
"Uh-oh…"
The native Californians tensed. "What?" Trebuchet asked as they stared at Infinity.
A sigh. "Molly's already there, Amy. Lynne and Dana are trying to calm her down."
"Which is impossible when it comes to THAT girl!" Manacle warned.
Eyes locked on the Academician. Sensing that, the woman born Elizabeth Wakefield breathed out. "Ayumu, could you get us over there, please?"
"Okay!" Infinity said as they vanished in a flash of light while we…
(Posted Sun, 11 Mar 2012 23:20)
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