Karry was hit with another wave of magic late Saturday afternoon, and the feeling mystified her until she hear the knock at the door. She opened it to find that SwordBright had brought a girl to their planning session, and the Knowledge of Karry’s True Nature gushed out of her like the shrill wail of a smoke alarm.
She raised an eyebrow at the deadly glare that was aimed in her direction from the small girl. She shared a nose and a jaw with the hero, but it was easy to tell that however they were related, she didn’t have an ounce of their power. While SwordBright was immune to magic, as well as most other things one could conceivably be immune to, this girl was already falling under the thrall of Karry’s aura, after only seconds of being in her presence. Her eyes were losing their sharpness, her anger cooling. Karry felt her power curl around her like a snake ready to strike, and leaned into the doorway with a satisfied smirk. It was always pleasant, knowing that you had that effect on people, especially now that she was finally starting to get some of her old power back.
Karry turned her attention to the hero at last, intent on making some mocking remark, but was shocked to silence by their unusual appearance.
“What happened to you?” she blurted instead, and that moment of inattention was enough for the unknown girl to snap out of her thrall. Karry was shouldered aside as the girl stormed into her apartment, but her attention remained on SwordBright. Overnight, a fifth of the messy brown hair that came to curl at their neck and over their ears had turned white. It gave them the look of the adult she knew they truly were, now that they had come back from the future, but it didn’t go with the skirt and hoodie combo they were wearing at all.
“You look like a PTA mom,” she continued, gesturing at their temple, where there was the worst of it. “But dressed like a college student.”
SwordBright chuckled and shrugged a shoulder, as thought they truly didn’t care about the premature ageing of their twenty years old body. “Side effect of the magic that got me here,” they said. “May I come in?”
Karry moved aside to let them pass, then closed the door firmly behind them. “I thought you were immune to magic?”
“Oh yeah,” they agreed distractedly, looking for a place to put down their sword. Finally they stuck it in her umbrella stand, in the middle of her collection of goth and Lolita umbrellas. “Getting the time travelling spell to stick was a bitch. But then I realized that instead of trying to move myself through time, I should just move time around me. Like I’d been trying to do this thing where I picked me up and removed me from the time stream and then placed myself back in earlier, but I just couldn’t grip me with the magic. But what if instead I just rolled everything backwards, like rewinding a tape? Time still works on me, it’s not magic, I still get affected by it. And I mean, anyway, I might be immune to magic, but I’m not immune to things external to me that are affected by magic, you know?”
“Don’t tell her that!” came an angry yelp from further inside the apartment.
“She already knew that though!” they yelled back.
Karry was consumed with curiosity about how SwordBright had managed a time travelling spell that affected the entire world. It just shouldn’t have been possible. The energy toll necessary to realize the feat was unthinkable.
Time travel in itself was mostly impossible to accomplish. No one had managed to do it, in all the time that she had been alive, not with any consistent result. The odds of success were too small, the cost of failure too high.
It was also highly illegal, but that had never stopped anyone.
The questions burned at the tip of her tongue, but this wasn’t the time nor the place. Karry didn’t want to tip her hand too soon and let it be known that she was interested in anything having to do with SwordBright’s little adventure.
Faking nonchalance, she inclined her head toward the living room. “What’s her problem?”
“My cousin Alice,” they said. “Please excuse her, she’s still upset about that time you drowned me.”
Said cousin stalked into the entryway, and grabbed first SwordBright’s sword out of the rack, and then their hand. Karry noticed with disappointment that she was holding the sword carefully by it’s sheath. It would have been highly amusing to see her accidentally grab the hilt and get zapped by the protective spells that prevented most people from holding the weapon.
“Don’t put that down! We’re not here to be friendly!” she snapped, then pulled them further inside the apartment, in the direction of the living room.
Karry followed at a more sedate pace. “And what are you here for, if I may enquire? I was under the impression that SwordBright and I were going to plan a heist. They never said anything about bringing in family.”
“I invited myself, if you must know,” retorted the girl. She shoved the sword into SwordBright’s hands, who looked down at it bemusedly, and then threw herself down on Karry’s nicest chair. “Because my cousin doesn’t have a head on their shoulder when it comes to recognizing danger.”
The last was said with a snarl in her direction, which was meant to quite clearly indicate who she meant by that. Katarina smirked back at her. “Oh, you’ll find I’m quite in agreement with that, then. Coffee?”
“Sure,” said SwordBright, who had finally shrugged and propped their sword on the edge of the coffee table. “With that almond flavour thing from last time, please.”
Alice jerked up from her sulky slouch in the chair. “Almond?”
Karry rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m poisoning their coffee with cyanide,” she said in her most sarcastic tone, then went into the kitchen to do just that.
The thing was, Karry didn’t like SwordBright, but she didn’t dislike them either.
In fact, she’d specifically targeted them to be their Nemesis. When she had realized that being a cryptid or an urban legend didn’t do it anymore, and that she needed to do something more dramatic to aliment her powers, she’d been interested in becoming one of those supervillains she saw on tv all the time.
But part of being a successful supervillain meant having a superhero to foil you, and she had taken ages to research and then choose the right one. SwordBright was immune to magic, which made them well suited to counter her thrall and spell-based machinations. She could also kill them at any time by normal means, as they didn’t have any healing or super strength, and weren’t immune to bullets or anything of the sort, which had felt like a nice failsafe.
Plus, they were young and new on the scene, and there hadn’t been another supervillain claiming Toronto already. It had been perfect. With just a little care and the right amount of dramatic acting, they could easily be led into taking just the actions that she intended them to take, their struggle showcasing her powers in just the perfect way to get the average Toronto citizen to fear her. She felt like the two of them had quite a pleasant future of eternal nemesis-hood ahead of them.
So the fact of the matter was, she hadn’t actually been trying to kill them two weeks ago. It had just sort of happened. She wouldn’t have mourned had they truly passed away, as they’d never been more than a mean to an end, but their survival meant that she didn’t have to train another hero from the ground up either.
And she had to admit, she was reluctantly impressed by them. Not a lot of people would have the guts to return in time like they did, nor the magical know-how. Even for someone like her it would have been quite a feat, and she had to admit she was curious to see what they would do next.
Plus they’d warned her right away about the Tyrant’s future control of her. She still didn’t quite get why they’d done that, but she appreciated it all the same. Forewarned was forearmed and all that.
The water came to a boil, pulling her from her musings. She proceeded to prepare two mugs just the way she liked it, and then added extra poison to SwordBright’s cup. Once again, it wouldn’t do much, but it was still fun to watch them drink it, like getting away with a good prank while the victim was none the wiser. Karry was immortal, and time could often be dreadfully long; she had to get her fun where she could find it.
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