Eventually command changes again. The new guy makes a lot of trades, but keeps Aegis, and makes her a toon leader at last when she's nine and a half. It takes this long for Brighteyes to make good on his promise to try to trade for Aegis, but the new commander knows what she's worth and won't part with her for any price he offers.
Aegis watches Sue in the rosters. He gets an army when he's just barely eleven: Phoenix. He makes a lot of trades too, but not for her. That's okay. She's got a toon, and she teaches them to throw her where she needs to go, to make formations that will stand up to all kinds of busting moves like the ones she knows, to freeze their elbows if they can't hold their arms steady like she can to shoot straight.
Everyone's rapidly terrified at Phoenix's hivemindy mutie kuso.
When he starts out, he only links his toon leaders and seconds, and a few key soldiers from the rest of the army. (Anyone who refuses to link, he trades.) He wins one and loses the other. But that's his first two battles. For the next, he puts half his army under the command of his best toon leader and links the other half, and his half-army of perfectly synchronized soldiers takes the enemy formation apart while he hides among the unlinked command. In the battle after that, he divides his army into ten groups of four, with two linked and two unlinked soldiers each, and with him as their communications hub they conduct a vicious guerrilla campain through the densely packed field of stars.
In his fifth battle as commander, someone gets in a lucky shot that freezes him five minutes in. Rabbit fights his unlinked army to a draw, with both commanders frozen and four damaged-but-not-disabled soldiers remaining to each side.
The hivemindy mutie kuso isn't the only thing they've got going for them.
Flame's commander knows about Sue being in Aegis's fantasy game environment. "Pull some psychological shit if you can," he tells her.
"Sue barely have psychology," she snorts. "He crazy. Fun crazy but not psychological-shit-works kinda crazy."
"Well, then figure out what his plan is, Aegis, I'm not going to have you friends with an enemy commander playing birds together every day and not try to use it."
Heh. Sue might just tell her if she asked.
"If I can, sir."
She signs on to see if he's there.
He's still working on her castle, far downriver on a small island in the ocean. It's taking him a while, because he insists on doing detail work despite the fact that his avatar isn't really built for it. Rejected stones are forming a pile underwater that will probably be a land bridge to the island by the time he's done.
There are a lot of rocks around. Aegis starts collecting pebbles: forty small ones and one big one. She scatters them on a clear spot on the ground and then picks up her magic-rock crown and waves it around and points at the pebbles: you make your army like this, attached but not contiguous.
With quick movements of his talons, he gets the other pebbles moving in patterns that more or less track with what he does in the battlefield: coherent shapes made of synchronized individuals, splitting and coaelscing as necessary. His own pebble occupies no special place in all this. The sixteen formed-up soldiers remain where they are.
"Well, what would you do, Aegis?"
"Sue's army's not a slouch even with him out of commission, but the main threat is still the coordinated core of it. We can flash up to thirteen linked guys and he'll just rotate more in before we can actually hurt that core; if we even damage them, he can swap them out for efficiency and leave his less maneuverable ones on their own. Freezing Sue should still be our top priority as an army, but -"
"But?"
"Sir, I don't know if this'd work, but if we don't get Sue right away, I kind of want to try engaging them hand-to-hand, man-to-man, and taking their guns before trying to flash anybody besides Sue. The guns are all the same; they register who's holding them when they fire, not who palmed it out when we suited up. I think they'll try to get the guns back instead of rotating out of the link the way they will if they're flashed, or at least they will for a few minutes. My formbusters can take anybody in Phoenix one-on-one and I can do some emergency training for everybody else on it too except whatever toon you want to assign to take out Sue. We can also work on shooting with both hands, although I don't expect anyone to match me on that in the prep time we have."
"Interesting," says her commander. "I'll give B toon the mutie hunt. You borrow everybody else in practice, you and your toon catch them up on hand-to-hand, anyone slightly ambidextrous you give them a quick primer on shooting two-handed."
"Yes, sir."
"Flame to battleroom! We're practicing!" shouts the commander.
Phoenix blasts out of their gate like water from a hose, or fire from a flamethrower. Groups of soldiers form and scatter without discernible pattern, in twos and fours and the occasional eight, scrambling along the walls or cannoning between stars after the initial explosion. Anyone who has a shot at a Flame soldier takes it.
Aegis herself is a photon. No one can train a beam on her long enough to shoot unless they are her, and she's not trying to shoot anyone yet, although she does seize a lost gun on one of her bounces from wall to star to star and have it ready in her hand while she kicks other weapons away from their owners. She looks for Sue, so she can shout to B toon's leader...
They're entangled enough that if she flashes the Flame soldier's arms, Sue won't be able to move and she'll be able to freeze him at her leisure. She does. Sue's stuck; the guns float off into the air. She lands on the star, clings, flashes both of her pursuers who she's failed to lose at the same time, one with each gun, and then gets Sue neatly in the back. With that handled, she flips over the edge of the star to help with the cleanup. She doesn't even stop to say you idiot, that was Sue, him we were supposed to shoot not engage. She just gets up speed again, although little enough that she can shoot stationary or slow-moving soldiers from her flight.
With Sue out, what's left of his army arranges itself into groups of four and proceeds to be an almighty annoyance to everyone. They're not going to deprive Flame of victory, with their major advantage out of commission and half their guns floating in space, but by damn are they going to make them work for it.
When they're forming up to bow and whatnot, she winks at Sue.
The Phoenix girl - did Aegis shoot her? Aegis might have shot her - doesn't seem to want to allow this personal space.
She showers faster - she's not a cripple - and then she's in Aegis's face. "So that's how you do it. They let you cheat, is that it?"
"I - it's a -"
"Water wrecks it?"
It's only soap that will damage the electronics, Aegis could go swimming if there were a pool, but she instantly pretends terror: "Don't put it in the -!"
The Phoenix girl seizes a piece of the exo - left calf section - and holds it under the spray.
"Naoko!" Aegis screams for the other Flame girl. "Get a teacher - run -"
Naoko bolts, and the Phoenix girl slaps Aegis across the face and she lands with a wet smack on the tile.
In theory she is not paralyzed - in theory she can move - but she can't quite remember how to do anything but soap herself, without her exo. She can't remember how to roll away from a kick.
Naoko's not going to be fast enough, Naoko will have to explain to a teacher, Naoko will have to get a teacher to come -
Bird bird bird bird bird Sue Sue Sue Sue Aegis thinks as hard as she can, choking on a scream when the Phoenix girl stands on her stomach and leans.
Aegis no longer has the wherewithal to keep up the effortful shield-relaxing mantra of bird bird bird. She can scarcely breathe for the knee on her chest. She can't breathe, she can't move, she might not be alive at all - something's the matter with her eyes now -
He gets back thirty-six affirmations, twenty of which come with a 'where?' or other wordless offer of help. Those soldiers he links, and exchanges locations. One of them can see a teacher down the hall. Sue pushes him a concise summary of the whole shitshow. A few want to know if they should be hunting Nina down, but Sue is very clear with them that any retribution here is going to come straight from him. They can act towards her as their feelings dictate, but if their feelings dictate violence, they are going to be in as much shit with their commander as she is.
All that before he arrives. He turns off the water and kneels by his friend's side, careful not to disturb the pieces of the exo because he has no idea how it works and he doesn't want to be the one to break it. He pings his twenty helpful soldiers to find out if any of them knows first aid. No such luck, although another one finds a teacher, and Sue summarizes for him too.
One more thing.
Who's the other Flame girl? He's seen her before, he's sure. He finds her mind and nudges it.
The first teacher to get there might be recognizable from geometry if Sue had ever shown up to geometry. "What happened here?" he asks. "Specifically, how did she fall unconscious? If it was head trauma she can't be moved until the medics get here." He's paging them, meanwhile.
"No, no, of course you couldn't wait," says the geometry teacher, still tapping his pager. Medics open the door with a stretcher, check Aegis over quickly for breaks, and get her onto it after determining that her neck is fine. They ferry her away. "- As long as I have you here, is there a Thomas Sanderson in your army? There's a page out about him."
"We're going to analyze the vids of the battle and determine if there was wrongdoing. Until we've made our decision, you sleep in the brig. Shouldn't be more than one night. The flash suits are supposed to be protective against ordinary hand-to-hand sorts of injuries; you don't put eighty-two kids in a room and tell them to fight and not get anyone hitting each other. But a few people aren't so sure and want to check for evidence that you were using your telepathic abilities on the enemy soldiers to prevent them from defending themselves," he shrugs, "which as you know is against the rules even if you aren't frozen."
I wanna fly again too. why was she so mad? I didn't have anything against her personally, you're supposed to shoot at the other army. oh and the disarming thing was my idea but they weren't supposed to close with you, they were just supposed to shoot you, they must not know what you look like or something.
I used to try to go without washing for weeks when I first got the exo. now I want to try going without again 'cause I'm scared. maybe I can get Naoko to take a personal combat class but that would only help while I'm in Flame and she is too. maybe I should ask if I can just use the guys' showers. it'd be weird but at least then there'd be more witnesses.
I'll ask somebody about shower permissions either way, I guess. and ask Naoko. unfortunately, I tried years ago to figure out a way to have only bits of it off at one time and I ruined a little piece of it in the attempt and now I have to hope I don't grow to be six and a half feet tall and need the extra insert. I probably won't be six and a half feet tall though.
it was only in prototype stages when the project got canned because of that one guy. mine is actually put together out of pieces of a few different ones because they tried not to leave any usable complete sets of pieces in case someone tried them on and got possessed, but they were able to collect enough stuff to make mine. they might be able to get me a handful more inserts if they had to, but my family can't afford to commission more to be made and I'm not sure if the IF would pay for it or not.