The doctors wanted to know what happened. Gigi told them it was a motorcycle. That was kind of like a monstrous dragon youma, but infinitely more believable. So the motorbike slammed into her, she told them, and drove off. And the rider had a helmet, you know, as they do. So where’s the rider? they asked. She told them it happened a few hours back, probably long gone. No, she didn’t get the license plate. No, she didn’t know the colour or the make. It was dark. That bit was true.

Why didn’t she come in straight away? Oh, but when it happened she was totally fine, it just kind of winded her. And she was worried about some friends, she’d been in a hurry to get to them because they’d been in a different accident, and anyway, it had hardly hurt at the time so she’d told the biker it was cool, and they rode off in their completely impenetrable helmet on their unidentifiable bike. And she’d kept walking. And then half an hour later her chest started to really hurt, and her friends said since she was going to the hospital with them anyway, she should get checked out too. And here she was.

They kept pressing for a description of the motorbike rider. She described Soda Cup Guy. His height and build, the sound of his voice. Even his uniform, a little. She remembered the agent she’d fought. He was fixed in her mind, a clear point amidst the smoke and ruin of the castle, the youma crush of the caverns back to their portal. Did Caedus know they’d failed?

The doctors took x-rays, which was kind of exciting. Gigi hadn’t had a broken bone before, even as a kid. Café lattes were just full of calcium for healthy bones. When all the pictures were lined up on the lightbox, she had two broken ribs, and two cracked, and she was lucky she hadn’t turned her chest inside out trying to breathe, or bone-spiked her own lung. It hurt. But she sucked it up. It was small change compared to the gaping wounds she’d seen on some of the others who made it to the Moon. Nothing at all compared to the ones that never made it out. She had a lot of time to think of them, while the nurses fussed and propped her up on pillows for a few days. She would send them flowers, if she could. Line the walls of those dark tunnels with bouquets, but that would never be enough. If Cosmos couldn’t bring them back, then what power could?

The worst bit, she realised several days later, was there was nothing the doctors could particularly do about it. You couldn’t stitch ribs or splint them. They didn’t even get bandages. Just rest. Quiet. No running, no heavy lifting. For, like, the next six weeks. Maybe twelve, if the busted ones shifted too much. They let her out of the hospital, but she was warned off lugging around her big bag of uni textbooks, and running across campus when she was late to class. It also meant no patrolling, no going back to check on the people whose civilian names she didn’t know, make sure they were okay. And so many of them hadn’t looked okay.

How could they keep this up? Now that they’d seen inside the Negaverse’s lair, the odds were clear. There were so many youma. Not just the one or two that dotted the city, dusted on patrol. Monsters unfolding in endless numbers, a parade of inhuman shapes, rising out of the shadows quicker than the light could take them down. They haunted her.

And she wasn’t even made to be a soldier. She was there to stand behind the lines and give her boost to those who would face the onslaught, close enough to watch them fall, never strong enough to help them. At least... At least she hadn’t been a burden to those who entered the castle. She didn’t think she’d been in their way. But no help at all, besides an extra body to divert the enemy’s attention.

She wanted to close her eyes, she wanted to go back to being that little schoolgirl who didn’t know any better, who watched the news without wanting to correct the newsreader’s terminology, call things by their right names. Youma. Negaverse. Senshi. When all that was important was school and boys and all the fights she fought were brightly coloured card games. No matter how powerful a deck her opponent had, they couldn’t break her ribs with a dragon.

But she’d seen too much, and she couldn’t shut the memories down. She could only fight, not because she was good at it, or because her powers were useful. Just because there were enough youma in those purple crystal caves to fill up the whole city if they came out all at once. Not to mention the agents, the corrupted senshi, the scythe-wielding horror stories… Metallia itself, whatever it truly was. After all this time, Order was still in disagreement and disarray, but she knew what happened next if they didn’t get it together.

Just turning up was a start. She would find something to do with herself.

Self-defence class was off the table for the foreseeable future, until her insides knitted themselves back into a functional ribcage. She lay in bed with her laptop computer, leaning awkwardly back against her pillows and feeling her own bones shift as she scrolled through other classes she could take, first aid certificates of varying levels of commitment. She refused to be helpless. She refused to not help. But she was just one person. However hard she tried, she couldn’t hope to defeat the vast forces of the Negaverse. Not alone.

She closed the laptop with a click. Once she was well enough to power up, she had some serious networking to do.


(991 words)