Episode: 6.20

--- Prosperity ---

She wandered through a dark city scape, bright lights flashing all around her as she made her way through the concrete jungle that surrounded her.

All around her the tall dark buildings rose high into the air, nearly scraping the shadows of the earthen ceiling above, the only proof of their true height in the lights that dotted the sides of each building, near perfectly mimicking the downtown of Baskerville if not for its darker tone.

This was the infamous Undercity of her Wonderland the place where all the dark thoughts she couldn’t figure out what to do with inevitably ended up. A fitting detail given how she always found herself there when in a less than optimistic mood.

After asking his piercing question Sporis had sped through the rest of his show relatively quick, giving her and the others slip away to the Undercity during his ‘commercial break’. An offer only her and Ness ended up taking, since Wormy wanted to stay behind and talk with Sporis about something. (Probably going to berate him for bringing me down…)

She couldn’t help but sigh, a mix of fondness and exasperation at her first dream’s overprotective nature.

(Something Sporis doesn’t really deserve to put up with all things considered…)

While she hated to admit it, she did understand where Sporis was coming from. After everything she’d been through in the last couple of years, she’d changed a fair amount, and given why Ariel left, she should expect him to have changed too…

The problem was, (I don’t want him to change…)

She wanted her partner, her (best) friend, not the person two years on the run could’ve turned him into…

“It’s not going to do you much good thinking about it.”

She glanced down at Ness, who was stalking at her side half on guard now that they were in his domain. While no citizen of her Wonderland would actually even think of threatening her, that didn’t change the fact that the Undercity was derived from some of her darkest thoughts, making it the most dangerous domain within her Wonderland. Something that kept Ness on edge whenever she was visiting.

“What do you mean?”

Ness sighed, before shaking his head. “Either Ariel has changed, or he hasn’t. There’s no point dwelling on it.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” She asked her (oh-so helpful) dream.

Ness shrugged, not bothering to meet her eye. “Live in the moment I guess.”

She rolled her eyes. “That’s not very helpful.”

“Neither is thinking about it.”

“Ha!” That made her laugh. (Smart ass.)

As they began to near their destination toward the center of the Undercity, her eyes slowly drifted towards Ness as a thought suddenly occurred to her.

“Why aren’t you using your full size?”

“Hm?” Ness glanced up at her.

“You aren’t using your full size.” She told him, waving her hand through the space above his head, something she’d have trouble doing if he changed into his true form.

The majority of her dreams preferred their true forms over their chibi-forms, something she could only really maintain for one or two of them at a time in the real world, but that they were capable of maintaining on their own as long as they were in her Wonderland. A detail all but Wormy usually took advantage of pretty quickly.

Ness shrugged. “Figured it was better to stay this way since it’s better at stealth, than my grown form, and I don’t see the point of jumping back and forth.”

She could understand that but still, “Who’re you trying to hide from?”

“I’ll be hiding from Ariel later.”

She frowned. “Why?”

“Because you need someone watching your back.” Ness told her, before tacking on a look that made her want to squirm. “Especially since you nearly got your ass kicked by that one Creep earlier.”

She winced at that reminder, even if her powers had healed the last of her injuries when she entered her Wonderland, she still had a few phantom pains where that Behemoth burned her back.

“L-look,” Ness gave her another look at her stutter. (That’s not what I meant!)

Shaking her head, she took a deep breath, counted to four before slowly releasing it, an old technique Jack taught her back in the hospital to help calm her nerves during the worst of her issues.

“Look,” She started again, this time willing her voice to remain decisive despite her anxiety around the topic. “I’m meeting Ariel a couple of blocks from the house, and no matter how much he may’ve changed, I sincerely doubt he’ll let anything bad happen to me.”

“Maybe…” Ness acquiesced albeit reluctantly. “But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a boy.”

She couldn’t help the bark of laughter that got out of her.

“Okay, okay, first I’m a big girl, I can take care of myself, dad.”

Ness rolled his eyes at that comment.

(Starting to think he got all of my snark when I made him.)

“Second, what exactly do you think you can do to Ariel in your chibi-form?”

“If he gets handsy I can shiv his ass.” Ness pulled out one of his knives just to emphasis that point, and it was her turn to roll her eyes.

“He’s a Malcontent, they’ve got heightened senses like you wouldn’t believe. Hell, he can probably track a drop of blood from a mile out, and hear you coming from just as far.” She reminded him, as they started making their way up the steps of a massive stone building that had a number of shadowy figures drifting out of it.

Ness tilted his head side before opening the door to the Undercity bank for her. “Eh, dreams don’t really bleed anyways, and my silent-steps are a fuck you to reality itself.”

That made her smile, as she decided to humor her most tenacious dream. “Okay, let’s say you do manage to sneak up on him, how are you going to get around his healing factor? You’re anti-Bruiser hacks are too complex for your chibi-form, and it would take you too much time to transform into your true form.”

The little imp gnawed on his lip as they started making their way past the bank’s granite grey walls and across its violently violet carpet, before finally answering. “Knife to the base of the skull, should cripple him if it doesn’t outright kill him.”

“Mm, that would take about five minutes to kill him, and he can puppet the shadow armor he wears to remove the knife.” She’d nearly had a heart attack the first time she saw him pull a knife out of his skull.

Ness’s face scrunched up in confusion. “How the bloody hell does that work?!”

She shrugged as one of the human sized shadows that acted as bank tellers let her through to the back. “Malcontent have this weird dual consciousness thing going on, and their other-selves are more meta-physical, or something, because of that quick deaths don’t really work on them outside of outright cranial vaporization, which…”

“I can only do outside of my chibi-form…” Ness finished begrudgingly.

“Yep.” She agreed just a little smugly as the shadow tellers opened a large metal door, giving her access to a small desk and a bookshelf covered in things she couldn’t trust reality to not try and steal from her.

“Alright, then what I do is follow you at a distance in my adult form and snipe him if tries something.” Ness told her as he hopped onto the desk. “In fact, I’ll use that bike upgrade you owe me to get a stealth upgrade for it.”

“I thought you needed something to help you keep the edge on your street races?” She reminded her little dream as she began looking through her important paperwork.

“This is more important.” The imp waved her off.

“I appreciate the sentiment, but like I said I can take care of myself.”

(Birth certificate… the café deed… proof of sentience forms… Those were a bitch to get.)

“I’m not saying you can’t.” Ness told her with a raising his hands in peace. “But I’d still like to gank the fucker if he tries anything with you, mum.”

She snorted. (So, he’s playing that card…)

Her hand drifted to the shelf above the one she was looking at, the one where she kept a very specific (and large) set of research papers.

“In that case, instead of trying to chaperone me, why don’t you read these.”

Ness looked up as she handed him the massive research paper, before frowning as he read the cover.

(‘The genetic influence and hereditary development of Malice on the human genome, part three of the Malice Reports by Jean Black’)

Ness looked at her then back at the paper brick, before repeating the action once more in a more confused manner.

“Da fuck is this?”

“Those are the Dark Geneticist’s research papers on Malice and the Malcontent.” She tilted her head a bit from side to side. “Well a few of them anyway.” (I never could find the rest…) “If you want to find out how to kill a Malcontent, one of the most infamously durable deviancies on the planet, then that is where you want to start.”

Ness blinked before looking back at the papers in a new light. “You’re giving me the way to kill Ariel?”

She shrugged going back to her search. “I trust you,” (and the fact that you’ll get bored of that a few pages in and drop them.) There was also of course the fact that that report had absolutely nothing to do with how to kill a Malcontent, something Ness wouldn’t figure out until half-way through the first of twelve four-hundred-page research reports.