Wake-up Call – Chapter 86 – Healer on Call

[Panacea]

She hasn't said anything.

Emily went out last night, and she hasn't said anything.

Right. Right. It was just a routine thing. She was just checking on some locations she had previously spotted, making sure nobody was doing something stupid.

Unlike Emily. Who never does something stupid.

Like going out at night in [Brockton] without any kind of backup, just trusting that her biomods will keep her alive long enough for me to get to her if something goes wrong.

…

This is precisely the kind of bullshit she's warned me against doing! How can the stupid hypocrite even—

"Ames? Something on your mind?" Vicky asks me from the other side of the outdoor table where we're eating our lunch during Arcadia's adequately long break for such things.

I look from her to the bowl of Caesar salad sitting in front of me, white and blue porcelain contrasting with the tray made out of plastic imitating dark, reddish wood, set in a picnic table that is [actual] wood but unvarnished and weathered until it's become an uneven set of grey striations.

Jessica is staring at me with an arched eyebrow, the bottle-blonde looking almost concerned, if only because she wants to put on a show for Vicky, the girl whose style she's been shamelessly copying for the past two years. Laura is browsing through her phone, as unengaged as whenever we aren't talking about someone's latest scandal. Mary is… politely smiling at me before rolling her eyes at the rest of Vicky's posse.

At least someone gets that I don't like being the center of attention.

"Don't worry, Vicky," I say with my own polite smile, one that is better practiced after [someone] decided I needed some remedial classes in PR. "Just feeling a bit sleepy."

She shoots me a dubious look, not entirely convinced by my performance, but she decides to let it go—and, most likely, she makes a mental note to bother me about it later when there are no witnesses to get in the way of her interrogation.

So… Yeah. That will be great.

She's already half-convinced I'm hiding a torrid romance with the mysterious cape who's been busting gangbanger skulls as of late, a conjecture that she's arrived at not out of a sensible train of logic, but because she's [Vicky], and she desperately needs our lives to be some kind of epic drama and, or, trash romance novel.

So I take a forkful of salad and lift it up to my lips, managing to get a chunk of chicken, some flakes of parmesan cheese, a single crouton, and a chopped leaf of lettuce in a configuration that seems stable enough for me to swallow it without making a mess of my green sweater.

Then I open my mouth to take it all in, and I can't help but notice Jessica's brief look of disapproval as I basically unhinge my jaw to fit all the food at once.

… Maybe Emily was right about that PR thing.

But… But, as I slide the mouthful past my lips, I…

My power washes over it. As always, the first thing it does is to eradicate any traces of harmful bacteria, no matter how small and irrelevant. It's gotten to the point where I think that if I ever became powerless, my immune system would collapse after a lifetime of atrophy.

That's the unconscious, automatic use of it. The same thing that keeps cleansing my skin of anything that could ever cause an infection or even an allergic reaction. The same thing that makes it so dust mites will never concern me, so that my very pores are constantly cleansed of anything that could try and feed off the natural lipids we all disgustingly secrete.

But… But I no longer limit myself to unconscious uses and healing. Not after Emily prodded me into exploring. Expanding my horizons.

[Changing her].

I suppress the flush of warmth that always crawls up my chest and cheeks at the thought of it. At the memory of when she first called me to save her life after she annihilated her dialysis machine. At how, once I acceded, she pushed me to go further. To reinforce bones, tone muscles, purge fat deposits, smooth old skin, breathe new life into failing organs.

To remake her. To reshape her.

To make her [beautiful].

It wasn't what she asked me to do. She wanted to be in fighting shape, no more, no less.

But I only have a single girl that defines what 'fighting shape' is to me.

So I watched the short-haired woman's flesh flow under my touch as her curves first shrank and then bloomed into what they may have been in her twenties if her phenotype had exploited her genotype to its utmost potential.

And then I pushed.

I couldn't help myself. Didn't want to help myself.

Emily was… not blackmailing me. Not coercing me. But something very close to that. She was offering to break the rules for me so that I could get my petty revenge on the one who attacked me and Victoria. The one who made it so that my sister had, once again, been bleeding at my feet, the swarm biting and roaring loudly enough to distort her screams.

Emily had found a dark, secret part of me and taken advantage.

And then… Then I was there. Touching her. Healing her.

Remaking her.

I could feel my breathing become shallower with every new tweak I made to a body that first became healthy, then admirable, then…

Then my thighs quivered as she became more.

I managed to stop just as my mind drifted to everything else that I could do. To everything I could inflict on her, as righteous revenge or twisted reward. The way I could make her feel as… as [excited] as I was. How I could wash my power over her nerve endings, rippling waves of sensation across nipples as pointed as my own as I made her eyes roll back like mine so often had when guiltily biting a pillow so that Vicky wouldn't hear me.

But I stopped.

I left her house, our pact sealed.

Over.

And then she called me again.

And [again].

And, every single time, she made me push further. She made it so I turned her into something no longer strictly human.

Something [more].

And now… Now, just touching her body floods my brain with the sheer beauty of what she's become. Of the intricate tweaks and modifications that build off one another, that offset any disadvantage I could've introduced, turning the imbalances into synergy.

Now, when she greets me, when she welcomes me into her home, when she lets me hide there from my own family…

Now the urges are different.

More intense, yet more manageable.

Because I don't want to do anything to her that she doesn't want me to do.

And… And I guess that's one reason why I'm so worried about her not letting me know she's fine with her customary, terse message, the one thing I sometimes wake up to on my phone, letting me start the day without any worries.

But… she's old. Older. She's… yet another impossible crush I can't act on because she'd rather be an aunt to me than anything else.

So I have to content myself with healing her. Tweaking her. Constantly allowing her to become something more than she already is.

Like the mouthful of salad I'm about to wash my power over.

Because I can't use my power on myself, but Emily has taught me just how little that means when I'm [me].

The first thing I do is to denaturalize the proteins of the chicken, slightly modifying it until it becomes as it would have if it had been cooked to perfection, the moisture inside of it properly distributed as the outside becomes perfectly crunchy.

I bite into it, relishing the delightful sensory feedback as I do something more complex to the rest of the food.

The cheese allows me to craft my own bacteria, to add a bit extra to my intestinal flora. It's an idea I just came up with yesterday, but it should make it so that more minerals are easily absorbed while waste doesn't enter my bloodstream.

It [may] make it so that my kidneys have an easier time keeping my blood in mint condition.

The lettuce and sauce? I don't have much of an idea on what to do with them, but… Maybe…

Yes.

Oh, [yes].

See, the one thing that stops my power from working on me is direct manipulation. I can't look at my skin and will it to be clearer, to have unsightly freckles wash away or, at least, disperse themselves into more pleasing patterns.

But I can tweak whatever enters my body and survives my unconscious power usage.

If I swallow a fly? I could, theoretically, keep it alive and secreted into my lung until the day I got tired of its frantic buzzing and let it out.

So… What if I crafted something that was just complex enough not to be absorbed by my body, but not offensive enough for my power to undo?

What if I attached a prion to lipid nodules that my body would carry to my fat deposits?

And what if, once there, I could give instructions to that prion? To have it duplicate and spread over every single one of my fat stores, inducing rising metabolic expenditure along my (slight) muffin top or firming my breasts and other, uh, [assets?]

What if this meal was the last one I spent bemoaning how every single one of Vicky's acquaintances is prettier and curvier than I am?

A slight smile spreads over my lips before I notice the drop of sauce clinging to them, and I hurry to wipe it off with a paper napkin.

Then I look at the wasted biomatter soaking into the piece of processed cellulose and regret the slight delay in my beautifying project.

So, as Jessica keeps nattering away at Vicky, as Laura's interest is briefly picked by the mention of Dean, as Mary keeps blissfully eating her BLT sandwich…

I smile at my self-improvement plans slowly coming together.

And try very, [very] hard not to bomb Emily's phone with a ream of worried messages.

***

['Need help,'] I read as soon as I exit the afternoon classes and my phone leaves the Faraday cage surrounding my school for reasons I'll never understand.

"Amy?" Vicky asks, once again worried, as I try very hard to get my hands not to shake.

I look at her.

Then at the message.

"Just… Let me answer this real quick, okay?" I tell her, my mind running a mile a second as I try to come up with—

['Can be there soon—]' I start to type.

And, before I can finish the message or press the 'send' button, Emily interrupts me.

['I have sown up the wound. Should be all right. Just worried about internal hemorrhaging.']

Because you should [fucking be!]

I—I have done [a lot] to keep that from being a concern. There's a network of capillary channels that can widen to redirect the blood flow to secondary arteries and veins set in parallel to the main ones. There're enhanced clotting agents set to act as soon as blood pressure drops below a certain, carefully calibrated level. There are constricting sphincters crafted into the start, middle, and end of any major blood vessel.

She [won't] bleed out.

Because I'm going to be there.

"I need you to take me somewhere," I tell Vicky just as I send a quick '[Be right there.']

My sister tilts her head curiously to the side and, before even letting herself be as curious as she wants to be, gets behind me and hugs me under my armpits.

And then…

Then we're flying.

To save Emily Piggot.

***

"Run that by me again?" Vicky asks as we approach the two-floor almost mansion where my whatever-Emily-is waits for me to heal her.

"Piggot's… [niece] is the new cape running around. She asked me to keep an eye on her as a personal favor," I say, summarizing the convoluted mess that is the cover-up story Emily came up with for her suddenly being a college-aged bombshell blonde.

I am blushing.

My cheeks are tingling furiously, and it's [not] because of Vicky's breasts flattening against my back like they always do when she carries me like this.

It's also not because I'm about to introduce the two people I [very much] don't want to introduce to one another. And the fact that they already know each other is just a tiny part of that.

No, my cheeks are furiously tingling because I can [feel] Vicky's exuberant need to dig deeper and find the gossip she's certain is there for her to turn into the lurid plot of one of those novels she's been addicted to since she was thirteen.

"So you [have] been helping the Punisher—"

"Not her cape name," I interrupt, trying not to swallow a startled fly and make my earlier thought experiments truer than I ever wanted.

"What is her name, then?"

"Emily."

"No, the cape name," she says, adding a little irritated 'tsk' at my apparently willful misinterpretation of her question.

"Doesn't have one," I clarify. "It's just Emily."

As we begin to descend into a green, small, secluded park that is just a couple of houses away from our destination, Vicky leans over my shoulder to look at me with a puzzled frown that does [absolutely nothing] to make the gesture any less intimate.

"Who the Hell doesn't come up with a cape name after being active for that long?"

"Someone who doesn't care if they end up with something like 'Skitter?'" I offer with as much of a shrug as her grip on me allows.

She snorts, her nose doing that wrinkly thing it's always done when she lets herself be amused beyond the point of caring for her image.

Or when she's alone with me.

… Maybe also with Dean.

I take a deep breath as we touch down on the patch of green grass, and then I step away from her arms, waving goodbye over my shoulder.

"Thanks for the lift; I can handle things from here," I say without turning around.

And then an Alexandria-tier hand comes down on my shoulder.

"Nice try," she says, the sunny smile shining through the ominous words coming from right behind me.

My shoulders slump.

And I prepare for the meeting of the blondes.

***

When I take out the key to the front door, Vicky looks at me like she's adding yet another thing to the list of questions to interrogate me with as soon as we're done here.

I roll my eyes, pretending it's no big deal and that it didn't make my heart race when Emily handed them to me, telling me it was just something sensible in case of an emergency.

Or if I ever needed a place to crash.

I also pretended it wasn't a big deal with Emily, so I'm used to it.

The door turns inward, the heavy sheet of reinforced wood a bit heavier than I would like, yet I hope to come up with something to enhance my own strength soon enough that it shouldn't bother me for long.

And then we step into the entranceway, close the door behind us, go toward the stairs that lead to Emily's bedroom (and my own guestroom), where I [really] hope, for her sake, that she's resting while waiting for me or I swear to God I will make her—

My eyes burn, and Vicky and I scream at the searing light. Then the buzzing, acute noise comes, and I drop to my knees in sheer agony, clapping my ears, unable to hear anything but the shrill siren drilling into my very skull.

Soon after, my thoughts slow down, and I slump forward, a chemical smell cleaving through my brain before seeping deep inside of me.

And, mercifully relieved from the blinding and deafening pain, I fall asleep.

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This work is a repost of my most popular fic on QQ (https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/wake-up-call-worm.15638/), where it can be found up to date except for the latest two chapters that are currently only available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true)—as an added perk, both those sites have italicized and bolded text. I'll be posting the chapters here twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday, until we're caught up. Unless something drastic happens, it will be updated at a daily rate until it catches up to the currently written 94 chapters (or my brain is consumed by the overwhelming amounts of snark, whichever happens first).

Speaking of Italics, this story's original format relied on conveying Power's intrusions into Lisa's inner monologue through the use of italics. I'm using square brackets ([]) to portray that same effect, but the work is more than 300k words at the moment, so I have to resort to the use of macros to make that light edit and the process may not be perfect. My apologies in advance

Also, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Xalgeon, and aj0413. If you feel like maybe giving me a hand and helping me keep writing snarky, useless lesbians, consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!