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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 224: Takano 154
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Brown 363
Lady Nightmare and Sewer Savage lay in the battered front parking lot, both tied to a small sapling growing out of the pavement. Tommy, Vashti, and Sockajawea were keeping watch. Since they had arrived in a cab and had no transportation, Tell had started hiking toward the city to obtain a car. Sockajawea suddenly turned her head, apparently, to scan the darkness.
Keeping up her awareness against illusions and being ready to eject them was trying, and her attention wandered at unpredictable intervals. But seeing Vashti leap protectively in front of her she gave another push against a suspected attack. Sockajawea slammed a fist into Vashti’s face with blurring speed, sending the other girl flying back into Tommy. Falling down, she cushioned Vashti as well as she could, but the ‘sis’ looked to be unconscious.
Tommy’s brain buzzed as well, as she had hit her head, and she looked up to see with horror that Sockajawea somehow had gotten a purple band around her neck. She was untying Sewer Savage who was telling her to hurry.
“Stop!” Tommy yelled, knowing this was the way to stop someone controlled by Sewer Savage’s slime. Sockajawea froze, and turned her way with a flat unreadable face. The charming Native American conversationalist was gone, and Tommy felt a surge of fear as she saw the other stood lightly as a combatant.
Speed of a mountain lion, strength of a bear–she remembered. Sockajawea had knocked Vashti cold with one punch. How to defeat her? Feeling outmatched, Tommy glanced about, and saw that Lady Nightmare was lying very still. That was good–wait, no, one did not lie ‘very still’ if one was unconscious. Somehow the illusionist had awakened, and tricked them.
Her brain was unshielded. Another push against telepathic invasion made the purple band about Sockajawea’s neck disappear, and she now saw that Sockajawea had been freeing Lady Nightmare, for the illusionness had swapped the two prisoners’ bodies’ positions. But the cold warrior’s gaze in Sockajawea’s eyes had not changed.
“It’s me, Sock! Tommy, your friend,” but even as Tommy yelled that, Sockajawea put her hands to her ears as if she were hearing something painfully loud, and paid no attention to Tommy. Lady Nightmare had her hooks into the woman’s mind.
Tommy ran to kick Lady Nightmare in the head, and Sockajawea dove at her, taking them both to the asphalt.
“Savage, you’ll not hit my friend Tommy!” Sockajawea yelled into Tommy’s face. Groaning, she tried to punch back, or break free, and got an elbow into the face. Spitting blood, Tommy tried to think of a way to turn the fight around.
What she needed to do, she realized, was counteract Nightmare’s psychic power. She wondered whether there was a way perhaps to ground all psionic powers in the area, so that whatever this psionic energy was simply drained away, leaving everyone in the area powerless. The alternative, she realized, was to launch some kind of psionic attack against Nightmare. That seemed to her to be a much more challenging skill; the question, though, was how to do the other.
Telepathically she reached out to find the minds of everyone in the area, and remembering that Sockajawea spoke of the volcano beneath them as if it were a living spirit she included trying to contact the earth itself. In a moment she formed a chain, a wire of sorts, and she felt a surge of energy pass through it, through her, and into the ground.
Suddenly Sockajawea let Tommy go.
“Let me go now, or I shall blast you with my lightning strike!” Lady Nightmare yelled.
“We know it’s just illusion, Lady, and besides, you can’t.”
“Oh for crying out loud.” Lady Nightmare snarled in exasperation. Sewer Savage and Vashti snored, the first loudly, the second lightly.
“I think I broke her nose” Sockajawea said regretfully to Tommy after pointing to Vashti. “I thought she was Sewer Savage. That’s why she’s snoring.”
Tommy didn’t answer, as she was focusing on maintaining the psionic grounding connection. She thought, and hoped, that it was a local enough area that it wouldn’t hinder Derek, wherever he was.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
