Summus Proelium

Okay, so once the match was over, I didn't quite go sprinting through the tunnel and out to get back into the outside world so I could start working on a way to talk to Safeguard. Part of that was because I still had yet to actually come up with a single idea about how to do that without setting off Casura's alarm bell. But another part was the fact that I was exhausted. Seriously, I was dragging as I walked off the field and back through the tunnel. We all were. The five of us were a group of very tired and rather bruised Touched. Things had gotten pretty intense out there before all was said and done.

I didn't come away with first place (Turbow took that one pretty handily), but I did get second. Which meant I was walking away with two more LEAT points, for a total of six so far. Four more and I would be guaranteed a spot on the field with a sapphire ring. Which was… sure, swell and all, but I'd be about five million times happier about it if the ceremony could happen after Casura was nice and dealt with. Or at the very least, after Paige and the others were back safe with me.

Tired as everyone might've been after that match, there was still a fair bit of ribbing back and forth. Frey, who had come in last, didn't actually seem all that bothered by it. She gave as good as she got, making it clear that she was absolutely going to make up for it in whatever the next match she played was. Meanwhile, Pascenic and Wrecker, who had come in fourth and third respectively, were settling up a side bet they'd made about which of them would beat the other.

So yeah, it was a good thing we all had those automatic sonic showers to walk through. And to be honest, I could've used a solid few hours in one of the fast forward resting rooms so I could catch a nap without feeling like I was wasting all that time. Actually, even just spending an hour in there without sleeping would've given me a head start on coming up with a plan. As it was, I had to keep reminding myself that running right up to Safeguard and blurting out the whole story to him was a phenomenally stupid idea. Desperate as I was, there still had to be a better way.

I did my best to participate in the ribbing, but it was probably pretty obvious I was too distracted to really be part of it. Especially when I made excuses for not going out to hang out in the park with Wrecker and the rest of them when he offered. I apologized repeatedly, promising I'd see them later and try to actually hang out a bit. I meant every word of it too. I really would try to be able to hang out. Mostly because that would mean the others were safe and this entire nightmare was over.

For the moment, however, there was no such luck. I was still trapped between a rock and a hard place. I had some idea of what Casura was up to, or at least I thought I did. But if I acted on that by warning Safeguard about it, Paige and the other three would… they'd die, that was all there was to it. I couldn't risk that. But if I didn't warn him and she pulled this off, not only would she take control of all these Touched, she'd become even more unstoppable with his power added to her arsenal. And, of course, she'd end up killing one of Mingle's best friends. A friend who was still trying, even after all this time, to bring her back. Again, rock and hard place. This sucked.

I was tired, physically, emotionally, and mentally, as I left the ready room and went through the tunnel. Part of me was expecting to find Dani and Izzy waiting when I came out, but there was no one in sight. I also didn't have any messages from them. It felt odd at first, but honestly, they were probably just as upset about not being able to know what was going on as I was about not being able to tell them anything. Maybe it'd be better if they just stayed away for a bit. I still felt awful about the whole thing either way, but it was worse when the two of them were right in front of me.

Actually, maybe the two of them were busy focusing on a situation they might have a slightly better chance of getting somewhere with. Namely, what was going on in Detroit. They both had plenty of reason to want to make sure the Minority were okay. Hell, maybe Dani had managed to swing a teleport ride back there. I wouldn't put it past Blackjack to have a way to get his people around like that. But would she take Izzy with her? And just how would our parents react to that if she did? I had a feeling they wouldn't exactly be thrilled about Izzy leaving our vacation to run into a fight with a group of completely unknown Fell-Touched. Even if that was almost certainly just what they had done. Yeah, I was starting to think I might be the only one actually still stuck here. But hey, at least I wasn't exactly twiddling my thumbs. I had plenty of other things to keep me busy.

And speaking of the Detroit situation, once I was back in my normal clothes and made sure no one was around, I checked my phone again to see what the hell was going on back there now. Not that looking helped that much. Apparently everything was still too chaotic up there for anything close to the full story to be online yet. There were at least five different stories about what had happened, and right now I had no way of knowing which of them was actually accurate. And Amber wasn't responding yet, which didn't exactly fill me with joyful feelings. It made me consider texting Izzy or Dani to see if I was right about them taking a trip back there.

Hell, it made me consider texting Mom and Dad, or even Simon to get some details out of them. And wouldn't that be a fun way to reveal how much I already knew. Hey, if you guys aren't too busy using your great superhuman criminal empire to make sure your fiefdom doesn't fall apart, would you mind letting me know if my superhero friends are still alive and in one piece?

Was it bad that I was actually, genuinely considering going with something like that for a hot minute?

Okay, so Amber wasn't responding to any texts or calls, I couldn't actually ask my parents for any details, and there were too many different stories online to get a good idea that way just yet. Oh, and I wasn't having any more luck with Peyton, Murphy, or the others. None of them were responding. Which either meant they were too busy helping out with all that, or something else was going on. All it came down to was the fact that I was just going to have to wait to find out.

But hey, at least I had plenty to distract me. I couldn't help with whatever was happening back home. What I could do was everything humanly (okay, everything Cassidly) possible to get Paige and the others away from Casura safe and sound. The first step of which was figuring out what I could actually do with the realization I'd had about what was really going on. If talking to Safeguard directly and telling the guy everything was out of the question, what else could I try?

I was still mulling that around in my head while leaving the park to take a little walk through the city. I needed to clear my mind and come up with a new idea. It was just after seven in the evening by that point, but you wouldn't know it from looking at the sky. The sun was still beating down on the city, bright as ever. A quick check on my phone said the temperature just outside the city was still a hundred and five degrees. If it wasn't for the fancy temperature regulation systems keeping the streets somewhat tolerable, I probably could've fried an egg on the sidewalk. I had no idea how people actually survived outside in places like this before we had Touched-Tech. Wait, scratch that, I had no idea why people survived outside in places like this before we had Touched-Tech. Seriously, why had this city existed back when they actually had to deal with that heat? What were they trying to prove? People thought I did dangerous things, but I wasn't the one going around building cities on top of the freaking surface of the sun.

Shoving those thoughts out of my head, I took a breath and strolled down the street. There were a lot of people around, so I quickly found myself disappearing into a crowd. Which was fine with me. Maybe I liked standing out sometimes (okay, a lot of the time), but for the moment, I just wanted to put one foot in front of the other, wander aimlessly, and focus on solving this problem. I knew, or at least thought I knew, who Casura's real main target was. And hey, maybe the bit with that Tech-Touched guy coming up with a cure for the rings would solve that problem. After all, if Nqobile's contact could actually stop Pittman's Biolem tech from doing its thing, Casura wouldn't be able to get past Safeguard's power. Which, yeah, she'd probably go straight to Plan B: try to kill as many people as possible, but at least it was slightly better than the alternative.

Stolen story; please report.

No, there had to be something better than that. I couldn't wait until goddamn Saturday to find the others. I couldn't trust that she wouldn't find some excuse to punish me by killing one of them, either before then or once it all went down and she found out the rings didn't actually work the way she wanted them to. I had to come up with some way of finding them first. If I knew where they were, if I could just get to them and make sure they were out of immediate danger before warning Safeguard, we could turn this whole situation around and call in the big guns to help.

But how could I figure out where she was keeping them? It wasn't like I could just go door to door through the entire city and ask everyone if they'd seen Casura hanging around the area. Though to be honest, it was getting to the point that I was almost desperate enough to try it.

No, there had to be something else. There had to be something I could do with this realization other than sit on my hands and wait until Saturday. The challenge had been for me to stop Casura, right? She specifically said she wanted me to try to stop her. That was the whole point of my involvement here. She demanded that I try to find a way to stop her. Would going to the man she was trying to take over and warning him to run away count as stopping her? Would that mean I won, if I took him off the table? And would she actually stick to the deal and let the others go if I did, or would that piss her off enough to go nuclear? That wasn't something I could risk, not with the lives at stake. But how could I stop her plan without pissing her off? That just brought me right back around to wanting to get Paige and the rest away from her before doing anything else. And I still had absolutely no idea how to do it.

Eventually, I found my way to the middle of a park far away from anyone. There were some kids playing on a swingset in the distance, but I would've had to scream at the top of my lungs for them to hear anything. And even then they might not make out details. Safely away from any eavesdroppers, intentional or otherwise, I tried talking to myself to see if that would help at all.

"Okay, so I'm by myself. No one's answering any calls or texts, and even if they did, I wouldn't be able to tell them anything about my situation. And if I did know about anything bad going on back in Detroit, there's a handful of reasons I couldn't do anything about it anyway. So it's probably a good thing all around. Good might be an overstatement. Let's call it a wash. I can't get anyone else to help me, Casura's either going to take over everyone who puts on one of those rings, including and especially her good half's old teammate, or just kill Paige and the others. Maybe both, just because she thinks it sounds hilarious. I can't warn Safeguard about it, but I can… I can… fuck, I really thought I'd come up with an end to that sentence by the time I got that far. Isn't that how saying your problems out loud is supposed to work? Why am I still talking like this? I can shut up now. Why, it's not like anything else is working. If I scream right now, those kids over there are gonna be really freaked out. Is it bad that I kinda still want to?"

Turning, I kicked the grass and muttered a curse. "This really sucks. I've gotta find them, but how the hell am I supposed to do that? I don't even know where to start. And what the fuck is going on in Detroit? Yeah, I know finding out wouldn't actually help, and it'd probably just make me feel worse about not being able to get back there, but still. How can I just stand around and not do anything? If it wasn't for this Casura shit, I'd find a way. Amber's there. She's my friend, I don't care about this dumb sports shit, not if she's in trouble. I'd be there in a second, I'd… wait."

This whole talking to myself thing was working out well enough, and there was still no one anywhere near me. Even then, however, I didn't want to say what had just come to mind out loud. It felt like doing so would jinx it or something. But I did have an idea. I wanted to get that Safeguard guy out of here so Casura's plan wouldn't work, without setting off that alarm thing she had, right? So why not find another way to make him leave? I didn't have to say anything to the guy about Casura being here, what her plan was, or anything like that. What if I just found a way to make him go somewhere else? Like, say, if he thought there was a way to find her elsewhere or something. It was just like I had been thinking about Amber. She was a friend, so I'd abandon this whole LEAT game thing in an instant if I could go help her. From what I'd read, Safeguard was the same way about his old friend.

There was, of course, a niggling bit of revulsion in the pit of my stomach when it came to even thinking about manipulating the guy with hope about finding and doing something about his friend just to make him leave here for awhile, but it was for the greater goo-- nope, nope. No, I wasn't even going to finish thinking that phrase. Not now. The point was, if I didn't do this, he would be in a hell of a lot worse shape than just some dashed hopes and a bit of emotional manipulation. It wasn't great. Really not great. But I could deal with feeling a little shitty if it meant putting a stop to Casura's little ploy here. If Safeguard left the games, she was fucked.

But how could I convince him that he might be able to find her enough to quit the games and go running off to some other state? It wasn't like I could just walk up and tell him, 'Hey, I heard a rumor that the fused and mutated old teammate that you've been trying so hard to track down is hiding out in this bed and breakfast in Connecticut, maybe you should take a few days to check it out.' Even if he believed it (and why would he), the guy might have a few follow-up questions.

Besides, I would be treading a very thin line that way. I wasn't allowed to tell anyone Casura was here or what she was up to. Telling him Casura was somewhere else was… yeah, I wasn't sure how that would go over. I had to be very careful about how I went about this. If I actually came up with a plan to stop that bitch and ended up getting Paige and the others killed in the process, I wouldn't come back from it. I wouldn't survive, that was all there was to it. I needed… damn it, I just needed them to be okay, that was all there was to it. I needed them to be safe when this was over.

So, what if I didn't actually say anything about Casura herself, or even hint that she was somewhere? What if I let Safeguard think there might be someone who could separate the two of them, someone he needed to track down immediately? What if--what the fuck was wrong with me? No, seriously, what the fuck was wrong with me? Why was I even considering that sort of manipulation? This guy was desperate to find a way to save his old friend and I wanted to use that against him just to get him out of town for a few days? What kind of fucking piece of shit was I?

A desperate kind, that's what. No, I didn't want to manipulate this guy at all, let alone with hope about his old friend. I fucking hated myself for even thinking about it, but how else was I going to be able to get him out of town? It had to be something he'd drop everything for, someone he'd drop everything for. It sucked, it made me feel shitty, but I didn't exactly have a lot of options to work with. I couldn't tell him what was really going on, but I had to get him out of town, as soon as possible.

When this was over, once it was all done with and the dust had settled, I would apologize. I would tell him what I did and why. I would try to explain the whole situation and just hope he understood. If he didn't, if he hated me for it and held a grudge, I really wouldn't blame him at all.

In any case, I was getting a bit ahead of myself. Whether I ever forgave myself for what I was planning to do didn't really matter that much if I couldn't come up with a way to do it. How could I actually make Safeguard think there was someone out there who could help Mingle with enough certainty that he'd just drop everything to run out and find them? And then stay gone for a few days? Maybe an anonymous letter of some sort that I could slip into his room, but it would have to be something pretty convincing. I couldn't just say, 'hey go here and maybe you'll find a guy who can help.' It was too bad I couldn't just find a real guy who might be able to separate them.

Wait a minute, hang on. Maybe I did know someone. Not someone who could actually do it, but at least someone who could create a convincing fake idea about it. Wren. Her specialization was movement. If I asked her to whip up a quick and dirty idea about how to move two merged people apart, she could probably fake up some very basic design specs. It didn't have to be real or perfect, it just had to convince Safeguard enough for him to go wherever the specs told him he should go. I could make him think he really needed to track this person down immediately.

Sure, I couldn't tell Wren the real reason she was making them, but… wait, Janus. I could tell her I needed a very basic idea about how she might separate Janus if she had to and had all the tech she needed. That was an excuse I could actually make work, right?

Yeah, fantastic. Now I would be lying to and manipulating Wren and Safeguard to make this work. Absolutely perfect, what a great hero I was turning out to be. But whatever, it would be worth it if it meant saving the others and stopping Casura, right? It had to be worth it. I had to save Paige and the others..

I just… whatever it took, I had to save them.