"I'm more used to reality then you, mate. I'm a little more tied to it than you." Niesa continued to talk aimlessly, things about wedding dresses and huge guest lists and all the things she didn't have when she and Trent had gone through all this the first time. Her last dress had cost $45 and had been part of a maternity range, this time she was going to wear Vivienne Westwood and toast her own wedding. She seemed in a thorough state of bliss as she discussed it until Dead Wife popped in for another reality check. Niesa shifted uncomfortably and dropped the arrow back in with the others, she had never taken the time to talk to Ed at all about his wife and now that she was older, she realised this was both selfish and a shame. Chevonne had probably been brilliant, Niesa probably would have loved her as she loved all impossible and brave women who could possibly fill the desperate Matriarch shaped hole in her heart. She had nothing to say so she whimpered out the pathetic response of;
"Trent doesn't sleep anymore, either. I wake up and he's not there, he's in the lab. He pretends to fall asleep for me....then comes back and pretends to wake up." Feeling awkward at having admitting that, Niesa muttered, "It's..yeah. Something..."
Honestly, honestly what would her life had been like if she had gone with Ed? She couldn't even conjure a picture. Niesa wondered if he could, she contemplated looking...What was his telepathy like, these days?
"A bit different to me? Relationship?" She turned and gave him an incredulous look, "You were boning her, too? Man, you really are shameless." She snorted, "I ain't nothing like none of 'em..." She started off on a sentence she would regret for the rest of time but at the moment was too peeved to contemplate, "Unlike the rest of those wanna-be's, it wasn't just about the shit you can do, I actually like you. You know, as a person..." A loaded word if ever there was one, "...You make me laugh, that's why I liked you, not because you can pull your pelvis out...And regardless of your frankly predatory state as my teacher." When Ed admitted that he didn't remember her daughter's name Niesa gave him an extremely filthy look at fell in to that familiar sulky silence. She remembered Fluffy the Drainpipe Layers name. Who calls a kid Chase anyway? Wait, was that his name? Fuck irony. It didnt matter, Ed had like a gazillion children last time she checked. And one cute little brother, perhaps she ought to look him up...
Niesa gave a yelp as she was quite literally thrown from the sand and on to the road. She landed with a roll and a badly scraped up arm and hauled herself to her feet. Feeling the usual whaddafuck sensation sink in Niesa's eyes flicked from left to right just to take in everything she was seeing. It was fun being on her own, it really was, she liked doing whatever she wanted to, whenever she wanted to, being her own teacher but she didn't get to see shit like that before...Let alone have a shouting fit with it. It occured to her that she had handled her education in a backwards order; she had found herself many great and wonderful teachers and she had bolstered her knowledge outside of lore, too by attending Trent's lectures of physics, then there was biology, geography and a grand total of 12 languages. Nothing about squids though. Nothing about squids, fucking huge squids. Bollocks.
How would she handle this if she was on her own? Niesa drummbed her head but came up a stunned, shellshocked 17 year old again. What would she do it she was on her own? Mouth off probably. Or put boot to ass. Little bit of both.
With a whine and a click Niesa detached her bow from the electromagnetic coupling on her back. A flick of her wrist and the compound bow popped open, wheels span and tightened the string, a little lazy-slack like she liked it. She set a warded arrow to her string, that which Trent had called a Psychological Shunt, it was a means of forcefully dragging an astral form from someones body, thus leaving the body helpless. One thing Niesa had learned was that most creatures of a degree of consciousness, human and substantially more, were capable of projection and so capable of being Shunted.
Niesa aimed this arrow straight at the head of whatever-the-fuck stood in the ocean, she took a deep breath and gobbed off because it was all else she had left for now: "OI!" What now? She stumbled for a moment and gave her usual schpeil, "I am Niesa Smyth, Clan-mother of the Sisterhood of Skin, Fist of the Human Construct, Steel Hammer of Heodenings, Amazon Child. The Meandering Footsteps of Vishnu!" (That was her favourite of many collected names. It was the connotation, her tendancy to idly step in to destruction. Or benevolence, depending on who you asked.) "And I am telling you to---Just---Just fucking stop it, will you! Christ Almighty!"
Niesa's forum posts
Clone made of water! HA! I remember!
I LOVED this show, loved everything about it, even the romance bits and I wasn't one those girls. My Little Pony got the shit rode out of her by He-Man in my house!
More than anything I freaking loved that electronic voice on the opening credits...and the guitar slide opening! EPIC.
That is hot right there.
The costume feels a little Scarlet Spider-Man for some reason, but eitherway, he's my dream guy.
"Another smart boy making stupid statements...Lies are just as important as honesty." Niesa smiled at him, she had cleaned her face but when she grinned there was still blood on her lips. "Of course we're still together. Seven year anniversary soon, we're renewing our vows in sight of...renewed understanding of religious prospets." Reaching out a hand she cuffed him gently beneath the chin and directed that smile at him, "Cheer up, Sugar. You look like someone took a shit on your pillow..." She decended in to another vigerous coughing fit, her hand clamped over her mouth in the same awkward way a toddler did; she wasn't used to being ill as she hadn't been since she was early fourteen but for compliations relating to continually altering brain chemistry. When the fit was over Niesa smeared her hands down her trousers and bounded in to step with him, waiting for him to take lead.
"I was half expecting to see some pretty, big tittied teenage apprentice waiting with you. All on your lonesome, Ed? I gotta say, it's one change I can lean to...I met your last one, the Irish bird, I wanted to kick her fucking face out the back of her head. And the goth one, the slutty one. I won't stretch myself to imagine the justifaction there." Of course, she was jealous. Niesa would always be jealous that she wasn't unique but she didn't think that necessarilly distracted from her being best.
As they set off on foot Niesa continued to yack away, just enjoying a sounding post more than anything. Trent was good for this because he was the ultimate devils advocate, it was this convergence of science and magic that made them so unnverving to a large collection of adversaries. If one didn't have a solution then the other would and while it had started off with Trent protecting Niesa as she had taken prone to subvergence, the roles had pretty much been reversed. It was far too dangerous to let Trent fight these days, the use of his abilities beyond extremely controlled circumstance was largely avoided and so if someone was to throw a punch these days it was his bulletproof missus while he thought from the sidelines. They liked it this way and their rivalry drove them, intellectually, emotionally and sexually. Of course, as always has been the case, sparks flew but were enjoyed. Infact, those few moments were the most subdued Niesa had seen her husband in years, it was strange that Ed still had that affect on him. What he read as some unspoken fear, Niesa simply read as rivalry, he ignored him because he put up the front that he couldn't be arsed but Niesa knew it...she knew he was itching and his every thought had been 'I could have you now, you ugly bastard.' It had Niesa secretly a little bit bristled with excitement, her entire life since about, gosh, the age of 13 had been defined by boys kicking the shit out of each other for her affections, it was how Trent had eventually won her and how the boy he had taken down with his first and most spectacular punch had come to be her boyfriend. Now, married for seven years, she still wished they'd deck each other just to see how it would turn out. Men were her biggest vice but Niesa was rather good with addiction.
"So...Meeeeeet..." Niesa struggled to unclip the golem head from her belt which she held up infront of them as they walked, "Ming Ma, General of the Terracotta army, the first golem battalion of the first Emperor of China, Qui Shi Huang. Say hello, Ming." The golem stuck his tongue out at her having no ability to communicate much more since being removed at the high neck, he no longer had a voice. "Trent and I were out dicking around with the Mjolnir powersuit he'd been working on when we came across a whole bunch of these guys dressed in hoodies unloading a shipment of all kindsa crazy shit. We kicked their asses of course, it's kinda how I got in to magic trafficking. We keep Ming because he's pretty useful...unlike Hebrew or Scandanvian golem's, Chinese golems are said to be made with a third eye instead of a soul, right? He's crazy useful, knows when someone's watching us...kinda like telepathy for the spirit where mine is for the mind. And it doesn't harm that he's found someone that can hear him, does it you old git?" The head was shouting at her again so Niesa pressed a bit smooch to his cheek and hung him back on her hip. "He's been helping me map the astral plane--" She cut off half way through this sentence as ideas carried her away as usual.
"Oh, my god! Yeah--I mega have to show you this when we get a minute..." She was feeling through her arrows again tuntils he pulled one out that had red bands throughout its spoke which was hollow and contained sand, "Since we stopped travelling...adventuring...exploring..whatever...together I've been studying alone, right, and pretty much using just human magic. It works well for me, what with me being human and what not..." She smirked at him, "Well, I started reading about tribes reading flames and reading smoke for the purposes of divination and I concoted this in three varieties, reading of self--blue, reading of lost--green, reading of possibility--red." She handed it to him for him to examine, "I've mostly been using it when involved in mass combat, right? One step ahead of the opposition but recently I've been translating further, months and years. Its how I knew Trent wasn't dead when he disappeared."
This is something I have raged about for a number of years now and I have always felt it most powerfully amongst the sidekicks.
I have a soft spot for the sidekicks but there is a seriously lacking number of girls who are inspired by a heroic lifestyle that continues around them. Tim is incredibly talented and works the most obvious mystery in history ever out on his own but Donna follows family. That is the striving difference between men and women in these books; one is drive and the other is duty.
life is full of full of duty
((He's half my intellectual property anyway.))
Out of the cloudless sky lightning struck and Trent Smyth stepped from the glassy patch created by his super-heated arrival. A moment later his wife appeared over his head and fell the last eight or so feet in to the and where she landed with a groan on her back. He turned and looked over his shoulder,
'You're such a tit.'
Niesa hissed and pushed herself slowly upwards, "Are we here?"
Trent looked from her and turned to face Ed over the two hundred metres of sand between them. 'We're here.'
It had to have been something like four years since they had seen each other last and no love had been lost. The last time they had seen each other he had been a tall but skinny kid of 19 and now (thanks to a little midhap with time travel) he was pushing thirty and had somewhere along the line grown in to himself. For the past 3 (or seven, again, time travel) he had been a test pilot and lead engineer as part of the HMT1 Project and his floppy hair was now a neat short back and sides and the dark indigo flecked by the odd grey. Constant electrocution as well as necessary work on his physique meant that he had filled out in to natural muscle, broad shoulders and strong arms. He wore a body suit under a lab coat, his face was smeared with smoke dust as when his wife interrupted him he had been welding, he had clean rings of since removed goggles around his eyes. Trent looked at Ed for a long moment or two before smiling, almost cracking up and turning his back to help Niesa up.
When she was on her feet, Niesa took his hand and their fingers interknitted. They walked side by side with Niesa literally dangling off his arm, talking a million miles a minute.
"So...So the druids experimented with rocks as conduets, which if you're willing to believe in masonic frequency is a really clever idea because...well, basically because its dense and old..."
Trent gave a snort of laughter, 'That entire sentence...I just...Yeah, I don't even know where to begin.'
"And by altering ones frequency to match the beat of the universe..."
'You're killing me here, kid...' Trent wrapped his arm around her shoulder as they reached Ed.
"It makes sense!" Niesa laughed, that smirk telling she was possibly just messing with him, "You believe in string theory right! That's what masonic theory is...tuning the strings of the universe!--Hey!" She waved to Ed as they approached. "Trent's just dropping me off. I had to let him know I was heading out with you and he offered to run me over--"
'Because last time she tried a long distance relocation she left half her teeth behind---'
"God, why did you have to--" Niesa rubbed her face and found that grin again, this was awkward but she seemed childishly hopeful, Trent had that ambigious smirk on his face. "Never mind, artillery."
Niesa had her full gear on, somewhere between a collection of bits and pieces and a uniform. She still had her stab vest but now she also carried a quiver and bow, and a brokken, a wooden sword usually used for sparring that was warded to high heaven. She wore a streak of black over her eyes like other superheroes wore a mask but hers was painting on and acted as the same perception bend as she had marked Ed with. Hooked to her waist were two items; a small book bound in leathered white skin and the terracotta head of a golem. It's mouth was opening and closing at a rapid speed, its face furrowed in fury. It dangled from a keyring screwed direct in to its head and then linked to her belt.
Trent pulled out his hand-held and began to list of items which Niesa checked back to him.
'Spring mount, dis-lock, explosive...'
Niesa reached over her shoulder and feeling little notches carved in to the prongs of the arrows counted them back, 'Six, four and three.'
'Shunt--physical and psychological.'
"Two and two."
'Flames of Future, Green, Blue and Red...'
"Two, four and four.'
'Two? You gotta stop wasting these things, honey. They're expensive...'
"But its interesting, wouldn't you want to--"
'Cheat? No. Skinnypedia?'
Niesa flicked the book on her hip, "Check and then some."
'And hows Ming?' Trent went down in to a crouch and came face to face with the silently screaming golem. It closed its mouth and its eyes roamed to look at him; Trent was after all the master in this relationship. A soldier of the Terracotta Army couldn't be expected to take orders from a woman after all, and then Trent had been the one to explode his body.
"He's killing me, man..." Niesa rubbed her face and going a little deadpan translated as the golem spoke "I demand to be returned to my shelf. There is no honour in being dangled from this harlots hips! If you will not release me then atleast afford me peac--"
'Yeah, shaddap.' Trent pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and resting on Niesa's chest plate scribbled 'Obey' and forcefully shoved it in to the golem's mouth. His mouth stopped moving but he continued to glare.
'Well, everything is in order. Be safe, yeah.' Trent's eyes were on Ed as he said this but Niesa responded.
"I'm always safe! Jeez--Been doing this for years....you've died way more often then me..."
'Three times ain't that bad.' Trent gave a grin that was simply cocky.
"Still on zero, baby. Niesa Smyth---unkillable---unstoppable--"
'Unoriginal.' Trent leant down and kissed his wife on the cheek, Niesa blushed rapidly and turned to press a proper kiss to his mouth. 'You love me, don'tcha?' He seemed ashamed to be asking this and did so in a tiny voice, continuing to ignore Ed in his entirity.
Niesa smiled and stroked his cheek for a moment, "Smart boy. So many stupid questions. See you at home..."
'Think about what I said, yeah?'
Niesa blushed and nodded, "Will do."
Without managing to say a single word to Ed, Trent gave a sigh and walked off down the beach, he lifted in to the air seamlessly and flew upwards and out over the sea. His final disappearance was marked by a sonic boom, leaving Niesa and Ed alone. She smiled, "I had to tell him I was coming with you. Honesty and all that."
Spider-Man in white is criminal to my eyes somehow.
I really hope she's not 'cured.' She's my favourite of the Bat-Clan and one of the most wonderfully written female characters in DC.
Gail Simone, you're my effing hero.
Oh, squee! He's beautiful.
And objectively, I like his look for the character. I have already decided that Green Lantern is going to be a terrible movie but I still have hopes for this.
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