The teacher pressed inward, trying to find her way through the tangle of thought that Tiffany was putting up as a resistance. If she were impatient, she could merely have torn right to the center of the girl's being, but she knew that would be disastrous...and time wasn't pressing here. Tiffany's mind was mostly disconnected from her body right now, but all of her basic physical systems were still functioning...she could take as much time as she needed for this.
She was fortunate, at least, that the strongest things in her patient, the flaws the corruption grabbed hold on, were complex things like pride or manipulation, things that derived from more basic functions. Even if these were damaged in the process, it might not be crippling. If Tiffany were driven by simpler urges, and those had to be torn out...
No, no tangents. Back to the task at hand. If she could reach the base of the corruption, cut away its roots, it should come out with minimal trouble. The obstacles to face were Tiffany's reaction and...her own power. She knew what she was capable of, yet she couldn't afford to use more than a fraction of her ability in this...so much was at stake...
Tiffany, on the other hand...she held less potential disaster, yet she was more complex. There was so much in here that blocked her way, so many walls between her inner self and the outside...it spoke of someone who had isolated herself from an early age, built up defense upon defense upon defense until not only could nothing get in, nothing could get out.
No wonder she treated others as she did...they were barbarian hordes pressing at her walls, forces to be driven back and subdued. And her natural inclination towards dominance and leadership had been pressed into the service of that instinct, long before the corruption had found her...how ironic. For all her defenses, she must have been an easy mark.
The woman hoped that some good could come of this intrusion, beyond the mere removal of this darkness. But who knew? How any one person would react to their defenses being breached was a mystery unless you really knew them, and sometimes even then. Best to focus on the important goal for now...
She turned and came at last past the maze and into Tiffany's true being. She could sense it, sense where it had grabbed hold of her. She could almost see the dark tendrils snaked into the real human core of her patient, the tumorous corruption atop it. This was where her work had to be done...
Yet she was held back once more. Tiffany, through sheer force of will, was holding back this final intrusion, keeping her from reaching the infection. She could overpower this, if she wished, but it was not a chance she wanted to take. There had to be another way...
Mr. Saunders stared, trembling, at the scene before him. To his unchanged eyes, it was merely the room that was shadowy and two unusual but seemingly human women before him...yet even he couldn't miss the way his daughter was pinned both to the wall and to the ceiling. Tiffany's humming had stopped, and he'd nearly broken down right then and there, until he realized she was still breathing.
Everything within him wanted to tear this woman away from his daughter, bring her back even to the way she had been...yet he knew he couldn't, even if it was within his power. He couldn't explain why, but he knew the teacher was telling the truth about the stakes here...and if that was the case, he couldn't let things go on like this. He had no choice but to trust her...
...yet his daughter's words, her plea, her feeling of betrayal...it broke his heart.
"Mr. Saunders," the teacher said. He stared blindly at the two of them. "Mr. Saunders!" she repeated, and he snapped back to reality. "I have a request. It's dangerous...if things take a turn for the worse, and she lashes out...she doesn't even know where you are..."
He shook his head. "She's my daughter. I'm ready." Truth be told, he still felt the terror that had haunted him since Tiffany's change, but...he would not abandon her.
She nodded. "Come over here and be with her. Take her hand. I believe you're one of the few powers in this world that're able to truly get through her defenses..."
He gulped. Him? He was just a man, an ordinary man with no power in this strange world of forces he couldn't see battling for his only child...but if he could do anything, anything at all...
Acting on an impulse, he gently picked up the music box, the one Eliza had given their daughter years ago, and wound it. It began to play its song, so sweetly that it almost seemed to make the room less dark. He walked over to his little girl, reaching up towards the ceiling and taking her dangling hand in his - first gently, then with a firm grasp. He gasped when his seemingly-unconscious daughter returned the grasp, clenching his hand in a life-or-death grip. It hurt, but he didn't care.
Something about that had shot right through every twist and turn and barrier, right in to the very center, she could tell. And whatever this meant to Tiffany, it had, for the moment, shocked her into dropping every defense. There was no more force holding her back from getting at the darkness, and she reached for it as quickly as she could while maintaining control, and began to pull at its roots. She could simply cut them, but any part remaining might grow back and start the whole awful business over again...
It was dirty work, really it was. As much as she could easily wipe this thing from existence, it made her nauseous just dealing with it...but she pressed on. This was her chance, perhaps the only one she would get, and her patient was counting on her.
It seemed like an eternity for the teacher, so many tendrils to pull loose, so much care to exercise so that she didn't take any of Tiffany's real self with it...yet at last she was done. This evil had been uprooted, and the girl's spirit was already drawing it out like her physical immune system would. She pushed it out, hastening its exit, and at last allowed herself to pull free of her patient.
Back in the room, there was a vapor darker than the mere absence of light emerging from Tiffany. Seeing that her student was breathing regularily again, seeing the occasional small motions that indicated her brain was back in control of her body, the teacher let her patient down, holding her up while her father took her limp form. "Get back," she said, as the vapor condensed into a little cloud. "I don't know how this is going to go..."
Mr. Saunders rushed Tiffany out into the hall and laid her on the carpet, all but weeping when he saw that she was alive. Her eyes flickered open just as there was a burst of brilliant light from within Tiffany's room and a sound like a rushing wind. It felt like the whole house shook, but there was no clatter of anything falling and breaking...
Tiffany stared at her father, kneeling beside her. "D-dad," she said, "Dad, you...you..." Her eyes widened and she gave a great, choking sob, bursting into tears. He lifted her gently, cradling her in his arms, crying just as hard as she was. He frowned...something felt off...
The teacher stepped out into the hall, dazed and shaking. Mr. Saunders turned to her. "She's changing!" he said. "Oh my God, she's changing!"
She nodded. "She is...but remember what I said; it's a sun-change. Whatever she becomes, it won't be anything like what she was..."
With Cecilia off "investigating" a local arcade, and this area not having particularily good 3G coverage (he swore it came and went as the sun's colors shifted, though the carrier said that was nonsense,) Agent Hawkins was left to his own thoughts as he sat in the car. Not surprisingly, he found himself pondering the new developments in their investigation.
The rage was off him now, and he was back to being more analytical about the situation. He no longer had any doubt that there was an intelligence at work behind these incursions. Jenny's little animal companion certainly seemed to think so, and the talk with Collins had just confirmed what he'd already begun to deduce.
They knew of three such incursions into this reality, thus far. The first, the skirmish at the house of the news guy...er, gal...Cooper, that was it, he wasn't sure he understood. By the accounts of the family and Muriel, it had seemed more like random violence, a raiding party with no real goal...but they had to have been let through for some reason, if only as an experiment, unless it had something to do with the couple's transformation shortly before. The beast in the mall was plausibly an accident...a mere animal that had perhaps wandered through a chance opening between realities...
The affair with Anderson, though, that was the big one. Unquestionably a direct, calculated attack on a target in this world. What the exact purpose was, he didn't know for certain - did the enemy know that Jenny, one of their potential threats, was an attendee at the school? Or was it simply a terrorist action? Collins hadn't mentioned anything that indicated she knew what the motive was - of course she didn't, they certainly wouldn't tell her.
But what puzzled him was this: why three? Why not more? Even if there were a couple they didn't know about, in the month that the sun had been changed (and, theoretically, this was therefore possible,) there had been only a small handful of actions in this world by the enemy from another world. The little cat-girl - Tetra, was it? - had been of the opinion that the enemy's goal encompassed the whole planet, if not an even larger scale, but if that were the case, why weren't they actually mounting their planned invasion?
Perhaps this was still exploratory, the reconnaissance before the actual operation. But if that were true, why would they have engaged in random or directed attacks, rather than covert observation? Or if sabotage, why only the one attack that might plausibly be directed at a threat? There must be at least three other magical girls out there, yet he hadn't heard of any attacks on them...
A brighter possibility struck him. Suppose there were limits on where or when they could do this? If the enemy didn't actually have the ability to open passages between realities completely at will, that would mean they were limited in their ability to actually do what they were planning to do!
But then...they couldn't be that stupid. If they couldn't do it, why would they waste time and resources on trying? If that were the case...
Maybe it was limited, but growing less so? That would explain a bit...no known actions for over four weeks, and then three incidents with the space of a few days...but that suggested a very rapid growth, which was at odds with the small number of attacks...
So much still remained to be discovered. If he only knew someone who might clue him in on how any of this worked...but where would you even find an expert on inter-dimensional transport?
