cassandra

[point_b]

The Swan girls have their evaluation appointment. It is largely uneventful. Alli splits and merges under various inoffensive conditions; Bella teleports to various other evaluation stations around the country and to one in a military base on the other side of the world (the evaluators call ahead about this) without incident. They have already - well, Bella has already - determined all the interesting wrinkles of the Swan girls' powers, but it's nice to have them on paper. They sign up for the Junebugs - the evaluator sniffs and says that it's the Gemini Guard, have some respect if you're going to join them! - with Bella as a solo bonus, junior grade, stratum 3 (she gets a badge and dog tags and a lollipop) and Alli as her optional/emergency support, junior grade, stratum 4 (she gets dog tags and a lollipop but no badge).

The evaluative office is crowded. A bunch of twins got their bonuses over the weekend and piled up on the Monday appointment slots. There's a pair where one can apparently conjure objects and the other wield telekinesis over them, juggling. There's a cryokinetic and someone who seems to cling to arbitrary surfaces, the one making a little ice sculpture and the other sitting on the wall (Bella supposes he can probably cling to his brother's ice). There's a set of triplets who don't seem to be doing anything, so she can hazard no guess as to what their powers are. There's a girl weeping into her hands while her brother tries to soothe her; she's crying about fire, ash, devastation, the menace lurking under the ground, and Bella hopes that's an overreaction to some TV show. But considering where she is -

"Er, what's her bonus?" Bella asks the brother.

"Not sure," he says. "Besides really upsetting. I just got a luck tweak, far as we can tell, dice and stuff..."

"So she doesn't pyro or -?"

"No, no, she's not dangerous," he assures Bella. "Not so much as a wisp of smoke, I don't know what the problem is, bonuses are supposed to help."

"I hope the evaluators can figure it out," Bella says, disconcerted, and she and Alli go back to school.

Spanish class is the next one they can catch.

Comments

[alicornucopia]

"The Guard offices are stocked," says the dispatcher. "For now, anyway. If there's anything to be had in Denver you can eat there, too - Juneau's supplies aren't going to blow in a few days, and as long as you can freely move around you shouldn't deplete them."

[point_b]

And with that, Bella appears, Junebug-jacketed and stone-faced. "Where am I putting them?" she asks the receptionist.

She gets intersections. She takes a step in Savannah's direction and puts her down near a squad of National Guard, then without further ado flickers back to the office and takes Adana to Juneau's impromptu refugee center, and then disappears again.

[blink_and]

Adana makes sure Savannah's in a good spot for a portal, and then - she opens one.

It's the largest one she's ever made. It's physically painful to open it, actually, but Adana doesn't care. And then she starts helping with the evacuation herself.

[point_b]

When Juneau's refugee center can no longer accept new input, Bella appears and takes Adana to a center in Miami, and when that one's full too, Denver's output is redirected to an accommodating location in Mexico, after which she deposits Adana back at the center where Alli is sitting because Adana doesn't need to be present to keep the portals open and it is about time for someone to feed her.

[blink_and]

Yeah, Adana does need to be fed. Savannah has managed to scrounge up food (four times) in Denver, so she's reasonably okay for now. Adana sits with Alli and eats the provided food without even registering what it is.

[alli_oop]

Alli is quiet except for when she passes on the receptionist's deployment instructions to Bella. She's not eating, at least not here.

It sounds like Bella is very, very busy.

[blink_and]

Adana's getting that feeling, too.

And then her food's gone and she asks very nicely if she can go back to manning her portals.

(It's about time to renew the latest one.)

[alli_oop]

Alli passes on the request.

[point_b]

And Bella bounces Adana out again.

[blink_and]

Adana goes back to opening portals when brought places.

Seven hours later, her sister asks for a break for a nap. Adana... Does not. She will be surviving off of coffee.

[point_b]

Bella can put Savannah in Charlie's house. She can have Charlie's bed, since he's not in it and there's a sleeping Alli in the other room.

Bella's not sleeping yet either.

[blink_and]

Without Savannah, Adana needs to be brought to where the portal will be on both sides, but with Bella that's easy enough.

[point_b]

Yup.

Bounce, bounce, vanish. Reappear hours later to retrieve Adana from an overcrowded refugee center, put her in a different one, vanish again.

Denver gradually empties through the portal.

The Allis converge whenever the one helping Bella gets tired or hungry, diverge again at once, and leave one to stay rested and fed in Charlie's house while the other reads off latitudes and longitudes and notifies Bella whenever she needs to make a detour from her relentless flickering.

[blink_and]

Adana's forced to be a bit more passive, with her powerset, letting other people do a lot of the organization around them, but she's certainly not useless. She works to organize whatever overcrowded refugee center she's at, and helps relay instructions with other Junebugs when an opportunity arises for such.

[alicornucopia]

And there's plenty to organize. Screaming stray children, people realizing they've forgotten their favorite possessions at home and wanting to clog the portal going back the other way for them, refugees who are thousands of miles away from their families and friends who arrived at the portal at different times, people who made the priority list because they came with five-year-olds or twins or firefighter training but who don't know whether their sisters or boyfriends or parents are going to make it before attention is redirected to another city. They are loud, and upset, and unruly, and all talking over each other.

[blink_and]

Well, Adana isn't particularly loud or unruly, but she is important because she's got the hat and jacket and she's the one making the portals, so - she can definitely throw her proverbial weight around a bit. But she's been here saving people for a very long time, so her patience is shot.

She starts giving people things to do, she asks someone to help return stray and screaming children to their parents. She finds someone to keep a list of all people with missing family members who are thousands of miles away, and the location they're at to coordinate with other places later. She wants to redirect their - panic and anger and fear at something constructive, something that will help save more people or fix broken families or various other things that need attention.

[point_b]

The next time Bella shows up, she speaks instead of hurriedly dropping her off.

"Dispatcher's making me nap. I - almost fell. Do you want to be here or Charlie's house or the office?"

[blink_and]

"... Office," rules Adana, after some thought. "Do you know if there are any other twins that can drop me off places to put portals?"

She's about to drop, too, but - she doesn't need to do as much. She is the one that makes portals, she doesn't need to do anything once the portals are made except stay awake.

[point_b]

Bella puts her in the office.

"Don't know," she mumbles. "Ask th' - the dispatcher." And then she goes home, leaving an Alli staying put, presumably in case there's some extremely specific emergency and she has to reawaken Bella by twine.

The dispatcher (it's a different one, now) says, "It would probably be most efficient for you and Bella to sleep at the same time."

[blink_and]

"I don't need to do as much as - she does," insists Adana. "I can just be picked up and brought places to put portals, you do not need me to make complicated decisions or follow instructions correctly, you just need me awake."

[alicornucopia]

"I could call for another teleporter, but the more out of sync you get with Bella, the less time you spend awake while she is," says the dispatcher. "If it was worth having you work together today it'll be worth it again tomorrow."

[blink_and]

Adana closes her eyes and sighs. "Okay. Fine, I'll - find a spot to nap. Here in the office is fine? I don't want to dislodge the portal I have for as long as I can hold it."

[alicornucopia]

"Here's fine," agrees the dispatcher. "There's cots in the back."

[blink_and]

"Thanks," says Adana, and she goes there and flops onto a cot and desperately tries to hold onto consciousness. She manages it for about a minute and a half, and then she's out like a light.

[point_b]

The remainder of the evacuation progresses. They had some warning. Enough warning to fill up every place that can take some people. Enough warning for people to transfer their bank accounts to national branches and try to take the last pictures of this or that which will ever be taken and loot the hell out of every store in the blast zone.

They don't know exactly when it's going to blow.

As the uncertain time approaches the evacuators concentrate on places farther from Yellowstone itself: less Idaho, more Nebraskans who have been stuck in inescapable traffic trying to drive away. Bella puts an Alli next to car jams and crosses her fingers as hard as she can that "one down" will just be like "converged" for Alli if something happens. Alli makes everybody get out of their cars and line up and Bella puts them all one by one in Japan, because Japan is taking refugees today, apparently, whatever, Bella's job is not logistics on any high level, Bella's job is flicker flicker flicker flicker down the self-assembling line of people Alli commands into existence, she can do four people a second if she's really on and if that turns into three people a second it just means she needs to stop thinking and fucking teleport.

There's an earthquake.

It even shakes the ground as far away as Charlie's house, though only a little that far away, barely enough to knock badly shelved books onto the car. Alli converges in alarm, the one of her standing on someone's car screaming at the lady to get her toddler out of the seat there's no time there's no time disappearing into her other self.

And then the center of the continent heaves itself up like a bursting boil, and Bella is standing in Japan, holding a two-year-old. She puts the kid down and goes back for the mom because she can't leave a baby without his mom in Japan and she can't leave this screaming teenager to be crushed between quaking cars and she can't leave this oh god it's an entire fucking school bus how did she not see the school bus first thing -

When she's halfway through the school bus she tries to teleport back to the highway and she can't.

She can't hit a moving target.

She lands in the sky above where the school bus was and descends flicker by careful flicker and into it and it pitches onto its side and the kids are screaming and the bus driver is screaming and Bella is screaming and she grabs the nearest kid and takes them to Japan and does that six more times and then she lands in the sky again and there isn't any screaming anymore.

Bella goes home.

Alli finds that Bella's bleeding, and fixes her, hissing with sympathetic pain, and Bella flops onto her twin and sobs.