Amaranthine

The Director escorted them to the Palace, and ushered most of the team inside, wishing them the best of nights. Cait and Kennedy, though, she bid stay behind.

“Cait,” she said, when everyone was safely inside and out of earshot, “if whatever is going on with the both of your eyes means my daughter is pregnant out of wedlock, I am going to be very cross.”

The only eyes that statement brought to mind for Cait were Ruby Red, and to be honest, that kind of served as a flashbang for her. Fortunately, Kennedy was ready to counter.

“Would you be, though?” Kennedy asked, tone implying a level of doubt that bordered on certainty. Her mother laughed, full and throaty, throwing her head back. Her flowing raven locks swirled around her as she turned, beckoning both of them to follow.

“No,” she chuckled, “I suppose I wouldn’t. Alarming development, however. Fortunately, you both are accompanying me to the one person best able to explain it.”

“Has she found anything?” Cait asked, the reminder of possible apocalyptic threat edging out the possibility of maternal ones. Barely.

“Yes,” The Director hissed, and her clenched fists didn’t escape Cait’s notice. “But none on NAAC soil. My contact in the Xi dynasty report it has been dealt with, but, to be frank, it’s concerning she found one this quickly at all. While it means its comfortingly possible, it implies it is also disconcertingly frequent.”

“It worked though, right?” Kenendy asked as they entered the Flatiron building, “what does she need me for then?”

“Oddly enough, and conveniently, I suppose, given how the two of you seem to react to animancy, she needs both of you.” The trio entered the elevator, and The Director’s eyes locked Cait’s, finger hovering tantalizingly over the button that would bring them to her penthouse, before sliding down and pressing R. “I’ll let her explain in a moment.”

Physically, the doors opened on a chamber unchanged. However, while the architecture remained Crowley-Chic, the space inside thrummed with magic.

At the center of a spectral web, Willow floated gently, held aloft by the strands of her own magic. Her eyes were open, but the pearlescent white of her irises had encompassed the entire eye, and if they still saw the room, they were seeing more than simple light.

All in all, it actually made it less surprising when her voice came as a soft whisper from all around them, completely independent of any movement of her lips.

‘Good, please, link to me, Kennedy, and approach, both of you. Elizabeth, if you would have patience, please?’

With a gentle touch on both of the women’s backs, The Director urged them forward. As Kennedy’s soul reached out to Willow’s, Cait felt her Working crash across their bond like a tidal wave, making even her and Kennedy’s adamantine connection thrum. Cait reached for Kennedy’s hand, and found hers doing the same.

‘Oh please,’ the ghost voice chuckled, ‘so nervous. Kennedy, follow me.’

Whatever instructions Kennedy received, they weren’t verbal. Cait felt them, or impressions of them, as Kennedy’s own power began to Work as Willow’s, reinforcing her spellcraft, weaving new harmonies. Cait was, for this, probably worse than useless, though she felt little tugs now and then, like hooks being attached to numbed skin.

Before a minute had passed, Kenndedy’s eyes glowed the same pearlescent white as Willow’s, and the steel toes of her boots a couple inches off the floor. If you counted hovering, she was the same height as Cait now.

‘Cait,’ Willow’s voice whispered directly into her ear, ‘I’m sorry, dear, but this is likely to sting a bit.’

A burning, sharp, but not unfamiliar, erupted across Cait’s skin as the strands of the spellweb added her own golden glow to their ethereal fluorescence. It hung in the air, thrumming for a moment with a sense of completeness, before fading back behind reality. Willow gently floated back to the ground, while Kennedy had to catch herself, lucky a big sturdy blonde was there to grab for support.

“Its done?” Kennedy gasped, and Cait noticed beads of sweat dripping from her hairline. Linked up to Cait, it was tough to make Kennedy sweat.

“It’s done, yes,” Willow sighed, sheer dress sticking to her body’s own sheen of sweat. Her words even almost matched the way her mouth moved. “Thank you, both of you.”

“What did I, uh, do?” Cait asked, understanding that all this had likely been important, but not much else.

“You were an excellent provider, Cait,” Willow chuckled, laugh echoed along the invisible strands of magic, now juuust out of phase with the room. “Worthy of the harem you’ve built.”

“Polycule,” Kennedy corrected, leaning heavily on Cait for support, but also for possession, Cait suspected. “Can I give my interpretation?”

“Of course!” Willow beamed, “your mother requested I look out for teachable moments, and I’ve been woefully lax.”

“So, Cait, that web,” Kennedy began, the way she chewed her lip and squinted as she tried to correctly package the explanation distractingly adorable, “that wasn’t just here. It’s kind of everywhere. Willow needed my help to weave a secondary support structure, kind of like the cables on a suspension bridge.”

“Very good Kenendy!” Willow applauded, and Cait had to agree, she was following so far.

“Thanks!” Kennedy said brightly, smiling as she confidently pushed onwards. “that web is a warning system, letting us know about any incursions like the one we just fucked up.”

“Fuck yeah, does that mean we might find a cow level?” Cait asked, receiving 3 blank stares. “Oh fuck you guys, B-Man and Gwyn would’ve loved that. Continue.”

“Anyway, I don’t think its specific to incursions related to the Animaphage, right Willow?” Kennedy asked, after rolling her eyes damn near out of her skull in Cait’s direction.

“Correct, as I imagine you felt, it works by disruptions in the web, which any such incursion would cause,” Willow filled in.

“Right,” Kennedy said, taking back the conversational football, “and that’s where you came in. Those disruptions would pretty quickly tear apart the web, and we’d have to do this all again, but building around the ruins of our old work, which would be harder every time. So instead, we made it like you. Unbreakable.”

With the last word, she placed a possessive hand on Cait’s abs, and Cait had to admit, she liked the way that sounded.

“Dope! So what are the odds some of these incursions have babes in ‘em?”

Immediately, that gentle touch became a punch, but unfortunately for Kennedy’s wrath, she’d said it best.

Cait was unbreakable.

“I wouldn’t know,” Willow shrugged, ignoring Kennedy’s attempted domestic disturbance, “traditionally, these have been avoided or ignored by all but fringe groups; I think you’ll agree humanity has had its hands full with the horrors swarming our own home to invite threat from elsewhere.”

One of The Director’s hand rested on the small of Cait’s back as she joined, while the other snatched Kennedy’s fist an inch from Cait’s unbothered stomach, stopping it midair.

“Dear, I raised you better than that,” she scolded. “Don’t waste the effort, if you want to hurt her do it emotionally. As far as the incursions go, we believe they are where some of the stranger Altered Beasts originated from, but expeditions have been a zero sum game: teams that find something interesting are rarely the ones that return. We don’t have the kind of combat unit abundance proper exploration requires, especially given the instability of each rift.”

“This sounds like a really good situation to tie a rope to me and toss me in to,” Cait observed, a Kirk-like desire for Green strange rearing its long dormant head. Kennedy felt that, and scowled at her.

“Cait, if we’d found hot aliens in any of these, don’t you think we’d know about it?” She asked.

“Dad says the government used to cover up UFOs and cryptids all the time!’ Cait protested.

“Yeah, well, now the government is pretty much my mom, and she has her hand on your ass,” Kennedy countered, which was true; The Director was wandering. “I think you’d know about it.”

The Director had the opportunity to do the funniest thing possible by hitting her daughter with an ‘Actually…’ but unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. Alien visitation, at least by anything with a culture that humanity would recognize, was one of the few myths the Waves hadn’t revealed, or outright made, to be true.

“I think you’ll be disappointed with the results, Cait, but that is somewhat the plan,” Elizabeth said, “We will need to explore these as they pop up, now that they represent a very real existential threat.”

“Really?” Cait asked, game, but skeptical. “I mean, these things have been popping up for awhile right, and we just took out the Coven, so what’s changed?”

“For one, we didn’t ‘take out’ the Coven,” Willow interjected. “We took out a cell. That guy in the big hat was not Zeb Hawthorn, not unless he forgot more magic than I’ve ever known.”

“No offense to our own eldritch horror,” Cait countered, “but getting turned into a Tentacultist seems like the kind of thing that might do that to a guy.”

Willow just gently shook her head, spider silk hair moving just a little longer than the motion called for.

“No.” She declared with a certainty that didn’t bear arguing with. “Zeb and I moved in the same circles, Pre-Wave. That kind of stupidly zealous rhetoric wasn’t his bag. His followers, sure, but that was his thing; he preached to his inner circle, quiet, intimate, hypnotic. They spread it to the masses.”

“Right,” Cait sighed, “well, fuck, I guess I’m volunteering anyway. What about rotating down to the DC, though?”

Cait hadn’t realized it, but The Director had carried a sort of tension about her since they’d arrived. It was apparently about this problem, rather than the DC, because when that topic was broached, her shoulders relaxed a micron.

“A lucky break,” she laughed, in a voice that said she didn’t believe that for a second, but was willing to take a win where she could, “the unrest down there has managed to break out into a full civil war of sorts. How the fuck that’s possible in the face of the Awe, I have no idea, but their border forces are retreating. We’re getting a breather.”

The Awe wasn’t something Cait understood, but she knew it was the main reason for the Divine Coalition’s name; all of the inhabitants of that area of the old US had fallen under the absolute certainty that their leader, the Godhead, was truly Divine. This resulted in an almost hive-mind level of loyalty from un-Altered citizens, and while stronger Altereds maintained some autonomy, they tended towards fanatical loyalty as well.

“So? That means we push in, right? Hit ‘em while they’re down?” Cait asked, getting looks like she was insane. “What?”

“Nothing’s happened to the Awe, Cait,” Elizabeth responded, “we tested it. Any of our people, besides you probably, that pushed in too far would become their people.”