4.2 - Aquisition (Patreon)

4.2 - Acquisition

Emma

She woke up to a world that didn’t make sense.

She woke up in a world where she crawled out of the carcass of a squid. Where elves, and druids and magic and all other things were treated as normal.

She woke up in a world where Taylor was a cape.

Capes were strong. Sophia was strong. Sophia was a cape. That fit. That made sense.

Taylor made sense… before this. 

Too Weak to stand up for herself, Too ineffectual to get anyone to care. Too powerless to change anything. She couldn’t have helped Emma like Sophia had. She couldn’t even stand up for herself, nevermind save anyone. 

She is what Emma was. 

Frail, pathetic.

Prey.

It made sense. It fit. The world was tilted right side up.

And then… just like that, just like before, it suddenly didn’t.

Because Taylor was a cape. 

Capes weren’t weak. They weren’t pathetic. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t fit.

That night, the first night,  the paradox had rolled around her head and she tried so much to make it make sense, to make it fit.

She woke up the next morning and watched Taylor. Watched how she acted, how the Dragon, Durge, kept calling on her, asking for her help, expecting Taylor to fail, for the weak little weakness Emma had left behind to fall flat on her face as she always had whenever they played heroes when they were little. Like the time she broke her glasses when pretending to fly like Alexandria.

But she never did.

She gave directions, helped lead them to the grove, discovered an ambush, intervened in that ambush, helped the others slaughter the monsters.

Emma wasn’t… good at many things. She knew that. Taylor had always been smarter. Sophia had always been stronger, even Madison could play the “cutesy” act better than Emma could. 

But one thing she was good at was reading people, reading social cues, understanding groups. Its how she could rise in an environment like Winslow while steering clear of both the ABB, E-88 and Merchant kids. It’s how she could see how much she could push to get away with things. It’s how she understood where to hurt Taylor.

She understood what Julia would be willing to do and not. She knew that Cohen the old Janitor couldn’t be bothered to notice anything short of a straight knife being pulled. She was aware of how much she could intimidate Charlotte to keep quiet.

She knew it all. There were levers to pull. Pressure to exert. Mechanisms to abuse. 

And she knew Taylor. 

Even if every day it became a little harder. Even if every day it was tougher to read her, tougher to get a reaction, Emma still knew how and where to sink the knife.

And so she could see, in real time on even just the second day how Taylor was changing. Not herself but in how the group was viewing her. Useful, dependable, capable… strong.

Her first instinct had been to correct things, to push her back down where she belonged.

And… that’s when Emma realized, where it truly sunk in, the true enormity of the paradigm shift that had happened literally overnight.

There was no pressure point to exploit. No levers to pull on. No mechanisms to abuse. 

And now… it was almost like she didn’t know Taylor at all.

Everything, the whole world order that had made things fit that had made things click where they were supposed to click and made them fit where they were supposed to fit had fallen away, pulled out from under her feet.

And then… Auntie Ethel came.

‘I want to be strong.’

She’d said the words, felt them spill from her lips… Ethel smiled… and then, even in the midst of her spiraling, chaotic thoughts she wondered with perfect clarity. 

‘What does it mean to be strong?’

The answer didn’t come. 

And as she drank that potion that had tasted strangely like ginger as she felt power -strength- flooding her limbs, turning every cord of muscle into bandied steel and raw, contained force. She still didn’t feel any stronger, even though she knew she had enough strength to crush stone to gravel with her bare hands. 

It was like… she was falling, or about to fall. Teetering on the brink of something.

She’d walked out towards the beach, staring out into the crystal clear river they called the Chionthar, the sun gleaming across its surface like shimmering gold.

And the answer wouldn’t come.

As much as she reached, as hard as she searched, clawing through the depths of her mind, as… increasingly desperate as she became…

She couldn’t answer.

What does it mean to be strong?

And then, right behind it, another question hiding in the shadow of the unanswered silence. 

What… was it all for?

And that… that silence was terrifying.

She didn’t remember the moment she grabbed that rock that was the cause for the jagged scar along the side of her neck. She didn't remember her blood spilling across the rocky cliffs and dry sands.

She didn’t remember the druids or the magic, or even the phantom of Ethel’s voice laughing in her ear as the world went dark behind her eyes. 

— 

When she woke again she didn’t know where she was, tied to a cow with everyone staring at her, in a hut that smelled of herbs, moss and rotting wood. 

She looked at all of them, Madison, Shadowheart, Gale, Durge- her mind swimming through mud and fog.

And then she looked at Sophia and it was like jumper cables had been snapped onto her spine. Awareness returned, coherency returned, and the first question that sprang forward from the back of her mind to the forefront couldn’t have been more clear. 

“Where’s Taylor?”

And then she saw her.

And right then the memory, the question, that unanswerable horrifying, all consuming question returned. 

And Emma still had no answer. 

She barely remembered the descent down into the Hag’s lair. She just put one foot infront of the other, held Madison’s hand like it was her only lifeline, focused on just following after Taylor, trying to run from the question she still had no answer for as it pressed down on her like a crushing pressure exerted by the world around her.

And then, somewhere in that blur of movement and disorientation, Taylor screamed.

Emma had heard Taylor scream many times during their life.

The screams she gave when they were children and she got hurt, the screams she gave when she was happy, like when Uncle Danny threw her into the air real high. Or the kind of excited screams when a book or music band she liked came out.

Emma even remembered the scream she gave when Aunt Annette died. 

None of those were this scream.

Nothing Emma had ever heard sounded like this scream. 

It made cold spread through her insides, it made her whole body freeze like it didn’t know what to do. She felt Taylor’s mind slam into her own and the wave of agony that came with it had made Emma fall to her knees.

And then it was over. 

Like passing under the eye of a storm the winds died down even as one could hear them howling.

So too did the Hag die, but Emma could feel Taylor’s eyes on her.

She met that gaze, reluctantly, fearfully.

And Taylor’s face had been horrifying.

Twisted, malformed. Her expression was a rictus of raw malice, eyes blazing with some fathomless, nameless hate as Emma and Taylor’s entire worlds shrunk down to just eachother in that second and Emma couldn’t fully grasp what she was looking at.

Or rather, she had, but her mind had been incapable of accepting it. 

Because Taylor never looked like that. Not in any reality.

Emma hadn’t been scared of the bugs. Not like the others.

No.

She still… knew Taylor, and she knew, the Bugs wouldn’t hurt her.

Taylor wanted to do that herself.

And then she’d been stopped.

The fire woman was there, and Durge was there, and Taylor had just collapsed, crying, wailing… howling. And tadpole or not Emma could feel that pain, that bottled up storm of emotion being let loose.

It should have been a moment of weakness, a moment where everything clicked back into place. Little Taylor back down where she belongs, a worm crawling on the ground.

But that vindication, that triumph never came, and though the question did not loom over her, did not press down on her mind with the insistent impossible yearning to answer it… it was there now. 

Inevitable. Inescapable.

It was there.

What had it been for?

—

She didn’t sleep the night after the rescue. Couldn’t.

She lay down on her bedroll and stared up the length of the hill towards where Taylor slept. She didn’t even know why; didn’t know what she wanted to say or do. Her mind was a whirl of conflict, fragmented shards of jagged glass grinding and scraping against itself in prismatic discordance. 

Tear her down.

Apologize.

Gloat.

Beg. 

Hate.

Love.

It didn’t make sense, none of it. This world didn’t make sense. This place didn’t make sense. Where she stood, what Taylor was, what Emma was, what Sophia was.

None of it made sense.

None of it clicked.

None of it fit.

…

What was it all for!?

She wanted to scream. She wanted to rage and cry and claw and bite but her body wouldn’t move. She couldn’t let herself move. If she moved how could she be sure her body wouldn’t just break apart?

The morning sun crept up, crawling slowly up along its path through the sky.

Emma had already been awake. She went through the motions expected of her. Moved when she was prompted did what she was told.

When the group moved, she moved with them. 

Because Sophia was with them.

Because Taylor was with them.

It didn’t fit. It didn’t click. The world didn’t make sense. They didn’t make sense, not anymore. They didn’t fit. Didn’t click.

But she followed because it was them. Because they were all she had left. The only mooring she had to cling to. This broken, wretched thing she had suddenly, all at once, devolved into in this place that had taken everything in an eyeblink. 

She kept following, kept going through the motions, and the hours passed like grey fog. Her eyes barely seeing, ears barely hearing and lips barely forming words. 

And then, she felt a small, delicate weight settle over her brow.

And for the first time since she arrived, something pierced the fog. It breached the haze and fugue of her spiralling thoughts.

It was like her horizons suddenly expanded, bursting outwards.

“Miss Barnes?” Her eyes snapped towards Gale, Gale Decarios, Wizard of Waterdeep. Five foot eleven, one hundred sixty five pounds. Educated, speaking in what back home she’d call a middle Southern English Estuary-leaning accent.

Her eyes widened.

“What?” She started looking around, towards the others, her mind flooding with information.

“Seems the enchantment is still in effect.” Gale smiled at her, a smile that held a confidence, a self assuredness of a man unused to failure. “How do you feel?”

It didn’t change anything.

It didn’t make things fit. It didn’t make them click.

The world still didn’t make sense.

But Emma had always been good at one thing.

Reading people.

Understanding them.

So she smiled. 

“This is amazing!” She gushed, telling him he’d been right. Assuring him, he hadn’t made a mistake.

All the while one question came with perfect clarity, and absolute focus- hidden from everyone around her as she grasped it in her hand and promised herself to answer it.

What. Is. Strength?

Because if she answered that… she could answer the other question. That one terrible, looming monster now placed over her mind, refusing to be ignored… the lingering curse that Ethel’s death could not break…

What was it all for?

She would find the answer.

(X)(X)(X)

As many of you suspected... Emma is totally and completely sane.

Nothing to worry about.