Chapter Fifty-Eight – Don’t Wanna Do It

Emily still didn’t want to do this. At this point she was well and properly awake, so she was entering the situation with a clear head and about as much knowledge as she could hope to have, all things considered.

And she still very much didn’t want to be here.

But she was here, not in bed, and most of the work of getting her sisters woken up, dressed up, and here was done. The entire bunch was hyped up and ready to go. Even the usually reserved Maple was hugging her toaster cannon to her chest and silently bouncing up and down, like someone burping a baby.

Glamazon and Alea Iacta were standing nearby, but not within touching range of each other. Emily wondered if there was anything going on there, then decided that she was definitely not the person to deal with anything if it was going on.

“Okay,” she said. Then louder because Trinity and Teddy were both not paying much attention. “Okay. Everyone. We know more or less where Rattles is. But it’s… almost five in the morning. We can’t sneak around the way we can during the day.”

“You sneak around during the day?” Glamazon asked.

Emily ignored the comment. “So, the plan is… is to get Rattles to where we want him to be, then ambush him. Glamazon, Maple, you’re our only ranged-capable people right now. Ideally, we want to disable him and confuse him as much as possible.”

“I–I can do it,” Maple said.

Emily nodded, then she fished out a small device from her pocket. Maple had given it to her. A second, better, anti-vibration device. It came with the same caveats as the first. This might not work to stop Rattle’s power entirely. But it would

mess with his abilities to some degree, and that might be all that they needed. This one was tougher as well, able to take a hit. Rattles wouldn’t be getting away so easily.

“Ursa Minor, Bandit, you’re working to restrain him.”

Teddy gave her a thumb’s up, then Trinity added six more. “Can do, Boss.”

“Alea Iacta, I want him to be very, very unlucky,” Emily continued. “Wait until Bandit and Ursa are holding him down. You need to touch him, right?”

“He sounds unlucky enough already,” Alea Iacta said.

“Can you drain his luck, or not?” Emily asked. She wasn’t feeling like even trying to muddle her way through smalltalk.

Alea Iacta stood a little taller. “Uh, yeah, I can do that,” he said.

“Great,” Emily said. She had a plan. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was something to work on. “Owlwatch, you’re with me. I need to know what he’s thinking, if you can manage that.”

“She can read minds?” Glamazon asked with a gesture towards Athena.

“Want me to spill your deepest darkest secrets?” Athena asked.

“She can get impressions,” Emily said. “And make people afraid. Anyway, The main goal here is to get Rattles restrained and powerless as quickly as possible. We can’t afford to drag this out. Melaton can help once we’ve got him pinned down.”

“What’s her gimmick?” Alea Iacta asked.

Glamazon leaned closer to him. “She puts people to sleep.”

“Oh. Does she teach maths? I think I had a teacher with that power.”

Emily cleared her throat. She wanted to chastise Alea Iacta, but he had gotten some of her sisters to laugh and Glamazon to smile. She wished she was able to joke the way he could. Not just because it broke some of the tension, but… well, the last time she’d said a joke in public had been in middle school and it had taken all of her bravery to say it.

No one heard except one other girl who repeated it, louder, and who got a laugh from everyone. Since then, Emily had avoided humour. Not that she was funny to begin with.

“Alright,” Emily said, trying to get things back on track. “Let’s refocus. Once we have him contained, we need to keep him that way. Melaton’s good at that, but she might not be able to help. I don’t think ropes would work on him. So… uh. It’ll be tricky.”

“We’re calling in the HRF?” Glamazon asked.

“I haven’t yet,” Emily admitted. “But yeah. If we capture him, we’re handing him over. Hopefully they have ways of keeping him sedated?” The last was a question aimed at Glamazon.

She nodded. “Yeah. We had training on that. Not much, but still. The troopers have things to knock villain masks out. They have canisters of laughing gas too. It’s not lethal in smaller doses and takes most people right out of the fight.”

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Emily didn’t know that, and she was kind of disturbed by the very idea. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to see Rattles properly loopy. “Good to know,” she said, filing that information away for later. She looked at the team she had assembled. Her sisters, two… friends, of sorts. It felt like it was a lot and also too little. “Let’s move out,” she said.

“I’m going ahead!” Trinity said. Two of her spread her arms out to the sides, then back a little. “Ninja style,” she said before she took off running.

Emily considered cutting off her sister’s TV time by a lot.

The last Trinity stayed with her while her other bodies darted across the parking lot. “Alright. Be quiet if you can, and try not to be noticed,” Emily said. Trinity’s white-and-black costume was, unfortunately, not the stealthiest of costumes. She’d stick out a little.

“We know more or less where he is, right?” Glamazon asked.

Emily nodded. He certainly wasn’t parked in the parking lot of an Im Ortons. “He should be that way. We can start heading towards him, I think. It’ll be better to move now than have to run later.”

They started walking. A slow but purposeful pace through the lot, and then over a fence at the rear that had been bent already so that people could slip by. Emily and Alea Iacta both had lights on their phones, so they lit up the way. Maple had a light too, but Emily would rather not alert Rattles and also every person in the province all at once.

The soft light of their phones was barely enough, though her sisters mostly didn’t seem to have any trouble. Athena’s eyes were two large, glowing disks in the darkness, and Trinity blended in with the dark surprisingly well. Maple was the only one as blind as Emily, and she mostly kept close by grabbing onto Emily’s hand.

“I think I found him,” Trinity said.

They’d been sticking to alleys and a few back roads just behind the bigger multi-lane streets cutting across the city where most of the shops were. Emily wasn’t sure, but she thought they were getting pretty close to the cafe where Handshake ran his business. It was hard to tell. Eauclaire felt like a different world at night.

“Where did you see him?” Emily asked.

“He’s sitting on a bus bench and looking sad,” Trinity said.

Emily blinked, then took a moment to process that. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. It looks like him. He’s all in leather with a cool mask and nice hair,” Trinity said. “I think he’s drinking beer.”

“That does sound kind of sad,” Glamazon said.

“My guy’s not feeling so good, huh?” Alea Iacta said. “Is he alone?”

“Looks like it,” Trinity said. “There’s a little bike nearby. Uh, one of those not-motorcycles?”

“A scooter?” Glamazon asked.

Trinity shrugged.

“Is he out in the open? Close to the cafe?” Emily asked. She didn’t care about some random scooter.

“Yeah. He’s like, right in front of it, a little. There’s an alley nearby. If we want to sneak up on him, it wouldn’t be that hard,” Trinity said. She made some gestures through the air. “We just need to go that way, then around there, then into the alley, then out, and wham!”

Emily did want to see Rattled get ‘whammed,’ and she wasn’t above attacking him from ambush.

“Alright, can you guide us to the end of the alley? Everyone, let’s be quiet, please? We might have to turn the lights off too.” There were streetlights, so it wasn’t all that bad, and a lot of the apartment buildings they passed had a few lights on inside which illuminated things enough to see by.

The air felt crisp and cool as they circled around. Trinity gave Emily constant reports. Rattles looked at his phone. He drank another sip. He raised his mask and picked his nose a little. It was mostly useless stuff, but it was good to know that Trinity was paying attention.

They reached the end of the alley. Emily looked at her team. There was a knot in her stomach, but if things went well, then this would be it, the end of her fight with Rattles. The moment where she, inadvertently, became the only real villain in all of Eauclaire.

“Okay,” she said. “Bandit, can one of you bait him into the alley? Everyone else… get ready. Fast and hard. We want to win this so fast he won’t have time to react.”

***

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