Chapter 15

Luz woke from a dream of liquid warmth and cuddling to the sensation of an entire catgirl sprawling across her body, curling up and then making a soft mumbling noise. Also, pain! Pain in her wrist! Luz blinked and since moving would wake Catra, and Luz would rather be ripped apart by slavering handbeasts than wake any girl who was using her as a mattress, she simply remained very still until she was certain she could lift her hand up to see why her wrist hurt.

Stringbean looked a little apologetic and bumped at the small dimple he had left on her skin.

“S’fine!” Luz breathed under her breath. It was actually not fine, she felt as groggy as a pirate on labor day. Her brow furrowed at her Palisman as she tried to communicate silently ‘why did you wake me up at this ungodly hour of the morning?’ – and her Palisman communicated back equally as silently, by shapeshifting into a perfect replica of the curvy, pink haired girl from the Princess Prom.

Glimmer.

One of Catra’s prisoners.

Oooh, Luz realized.

It was here where the fact she was a girlfriend came in handy. Not only was she better at kissing than Catra, she was also more adept at handling the intricacies of bodies in bed. Specifically, Luz had once needed to slowly wriggle out of Amity’s grasp so she could get her hot loco and breakfast of spiced snails and kam. She started by wriggling a bit here. Gently shifting there. And to her surprise, Stringbean didn’t just immediately spring to help, she actually shifted her shape into a tiny version of those crank-powered flat topped unfolding ladder things that people used to get up to tall places. With their efforts combined, Catra was gently shifted off Luz’s chest and belly and onto the bed. Luz then tugged the blankets atop her, petted her head six or seven times, then kissed her cheek.

Not that she was in love with Catra. Luz’s cheeks burned as she started to sneak away from the bed and towards the open door of the barracks, past sleeping teens. Definitely! Totally! Absolutely not in love with Catra. Not even a little bit! Luz kissed many arch-villains on the cheek. Like ... uh...

Luz stepped into the corridors, still wearing her Evil Horde issued PJs, and peeked up and down the corridor. No guards. Stringbean flitted out to hover before her nose, wriggling happily, then turned into a shockstick. Luz caught him as he dropped from the air, then twirled her Palisman cum melee weapon. “Huh!” she said. “ ... can you do the sparky?”

Stringbean, obligingly, sparked and hissed from the tip of her new shockstick body.

“Wow, Stringbean, you are just ... the best Palisman,” Luz whispered, hanging Stringbean from her hip, where she could be nice and unnoticeable. She padded down the corridor, her heart in her throat, peeking around each cross corridor as she made her way from the barracks, to the mess hall. There, she saw some burly, squiddy looking fellows cooking up the breakfast the cadets were going to be eating. The smell caused her belly to gurgle, but Luz wasn’t sure if it was hunger or fear. She crept past, then entered into one of the connecting mazes that ran between the factories, foundries and laboratories. But where were the prisons?

“You got another load of food for Shadow Weaver?”

“Her and her guest.”

“Poor kid...”

Luz’s ears perked and she peeked around the corner, seeing two of the helmeted guards that made up the masses of the Horde shaking their heads – one of them was pushing a tray covered in foodstuffs. There was fancy food, and there were bricks of ration bars. Luz was fairly sure who’d get which. She darted from corner to pipe, her back pressed against it, as the two guards split up, one of them heading down a northern corridor, the one with the tray heading down south. She snuck after him, her heart in her throat, wishing she had Gus with her. Or Amity. Or Eda. Or ... anyone, really. No, wait, why wish Gus was here, when she could instead wish she was with Gus.

I miss my friends, Luz thought, while Stringbean bumped against her hip as comfortingly as a trumped up cattle prod could manage to be.

The guard got onto an elevator. Luz weighed running into the elevator and bashing him with the shock stick ... but then she spotted something else.

“Oh ho ho ho!” Luz whispered to herself.

The elevator doors closed and she sprinted for the largely marked door next to it. The language and letters weren’t English, or Spanish, or the Belosian script of the Boiling Isles, but Luz had seen enough emergency exits in her life to recognize the type. And lo, her supposition was rewarded with stairs. Lots and lots and lots of stairs. She started to take them five at a time, bounding up the stairs, her heart pounding. If she hadn’t spent so long in the Boiling Isles, working on her own body, she was pretty sure she would have literally died most of the way up the stairs. Instead, she merely kind of wished she was dead. She came to the highest level, opening the door and peeking out – and there was the guard, trundling his trays down a corridor about twenty feet away. He took a corner and Luz breathed a sigh of relief.

“Made...” She gasped several times. “It!”

Peeking around that corner, she saw the guard shoving the tray into a room, then turning and walking away, shaking his head. An angry voice floated after him. “When I get out of this stupid-” The door shut automatically and Luz smooshed herself against the wall as the guard came around the corner and walked past her without even noticing.

Hah! She thought, and Stringbean turned into a hovering palm with a twinkle of magic. Luz laid her palm down low and Stringbean gave her a whole high five, then turned back into a shockstock. Luz padded to the door, then tried the key-lock.

It was locked.

“Auh!” Luz hissed, then frowned, holding up Stringbean. “Stringo, can you ... uh, become an optical cable attached to a camera, like in that TV show? The one with the cops?” She couldn’t remember which show with cops she was thinking of, but how many cop shows could there be? Stringbean chirruped and quivered in her hands, then turned into a narrow cable with a kind of gun-handle device with a screen mounted on it. Luz’s smile was so big that she nearly forgot she was trapped in a terrifying alternate universe mostly ruled by an Evil Horde.

“Have I mentioned?” she whispered, threading the optical cable under the table. “You’re the best shapeshifter ever?”

Optical camera cables could not, as a rule, speak. Somehow, Luz still felt as if Stringbean was quite proud of themselves.

The camera came on and she twiddled the cable left and right.

There was the Black Garnet. There was a floating orb of glittering energy that held Glimmer – naturally, where else to hold a captive princess but an orb? – and there was no sign of Shadow Weaver. She grinned. “Now, how to get the-” The view cut off. She blinked, then frowned at the handheld device, but before Luz could ask Stringbean ‘yo what the dealio’, the door opened, revealing that the cable had grown a hand and slapped the door open on the inside. Luz beamed even brighter as Stringbean turned into his little snake form, allowing her to hug them as tightly as possible.

“Whose there!?” Glimmer asked, her voice sounding fierce. “Come over here, let me ... frigging punch you!”

“It’s me! Luz!” Luz said, pocketing Stringbean and hurrying around to Glimmer.

Glimmer shot her one of those murderous death glares that Luz was sadly getting used to getting.

“You,” she hissed.

“I can explain!” Luz whispered, hurriedly. “But, trust me, I am here to help!” She looked around the room, eyes flicking from console to console, trying to find something, anything, that looked like a big off switch. Ah! Power cables. There were thick, huge power cables running along the floor. They were also arranged like spaghetti – cables twined under and over one another, spilling out in all directions. Some were plugged into the wall, some into the Black Garnet’s ominous technological cage, some into the device projecting Glimmer’s bubble.

Before Luz could even start complaining about the cable situation, Glimmer ... shimmered. She buzzed, crackled, and turned into a haze of pink sparkles, which slammed into the orb, which distended outwards like someone had punched it with a fist made of glitter. Luz yelped and sprang backwards, almost tripping over a cable as Glimmer re-cohered into her curvaceous self. Luz blinked several times. “D-did you do that, or did the orb do that?”

“I’m going to punch you ... so hard!” Glimmer said, angrily. “I saw how Adora was looking after you showed up – you and Catra planned this, didn’t you?”

“No! Well, yes, I mean, Catra planned it, I was more of an unwilling participant,” Luz said.

“Didn’t look unwilling!”

“Well, looks can be deceptive! I’m actually trying to defeat the horde. Well, kidna, I want to go home, but, like-”

“Riiight, back to the First Ones,” Glimmer said, rolling her eyes. “Maybe you should pick more believable lies.”

“Well, that was a lie!”

“I knew it!” Glimmer growled – and again, she turned into sparkles and flew at the orb. Luz blinked, slowly, cocking her head. As the orb twisted out of shape, there was a crackle of sparks and a sudden pattern that she saw, for just a second. Glimmer’s straining efforts lasted longer – long enough for Luz to be fairly sure she had gotten the shape of the rune down – but when they lapsed, Glimmer looked completely exhausted, her body sagging as she re-cohered. She panted. “What are you here to do? Gloat? Try and get more information from me?”

“No, I’m here to get you out,” Luz said, her voice determined. “Hold still!”

She knelt down, then tugged out Stringbean – and Stringbean, bless their heart – had picked the exact right form.

A pen!

Luz began to scrawl the circular diagram of the rune, her tongue jutting from the side of her mouth as she thought, her brain flicking around everything she knew about runes ... and not just runes, but how they operated. If these runes were just a different alphabet, then she was in luck. She could just swap out one set of symbols for effects. But if they used an entirely different grammar ... well, then she’d need to do some more experimentation. The shaping she had created on her few Black Garnet Blast Runes (tm, patent pending) had been very similar to the shaping she had used back in the Owl House ... but ... the interaction between two runes was always where things started to get complex, and exponentially more so when-

“Noceda!”

Luz jerked her head up, blinking at Glimmer, who was glaring at her, as if she had been saying her name a lot.

“Huh?” Luz asked.

“What are you doing!?” Glimmer asked.

“Getting you out, with ... this!” Luz said, then slapped her palm on the runes. They glowed, shimmered, sparked. There was a whirring noise and the orb started to pull outwards, as if hands were grabbing onto every corner of it and tugging outwards, pulling, straining. The orb grew thinner, more frayed, and Glimmer looked completely shocked. The orb reached the outermost edges of the pressure – and then the runes cracked. They hissed, fizzled, and burned up and Luz yelped and sprang to her feet. “Ah! Dang!”

The orb snapped back and slapped Glimmer – who had stood for a moment – back onto her rump.

“Y ... You almost had it?” she asked.

“I think so!” Luz said. “The power exchange grammar on the Garnet Runestone and your runestone feeds into one another like I thought, bu the limiter effect is way lower ... it may be because there’s no Titan blood to facilitate the flow of magic...”

Glimmer blinked at her. “Huh?” she asked.

“Well, okay, your runestones are-” Luz froze. “ ... wait, no, that doesn’t make sense, there has to be a magical facilitator.” She started to pace back and forth, then drew in a huge gasp. “There magic is being shunted elsewhere! I hit the cap on the power draw for non-priority features and that’s why the spell failed, the Titan never had that limiter, but that means, there is a magical flow on this world, and that it is being tapped for something! But ... what?” She bit her lower lip. “Do you know if this world is built out of the body of an ancient dead god, or...?”

“Remarkable.”

Luz nodded. “Yeah, it is, bu-” She froze, then spun around, gaping up at Shadow Weaver, who loomed in the doorway.

“Do you not remember what I said, last time you drew on my power?” Shadow Weaver hissed.

“Uh...” Luz said, hesitantly, stepping back.

“And what, precisely, were you trying to do with the Princess?” Those white on white eyes narrowed to slits.

“She was trying to get me to talk! But I told her, I’d never talk!” Glimmer said.

“Hmm,” Shadow Weaver said. “There are better ways to ... determine this.”

Luz tensed, readying to grab for Stringbean – but he had rolled away when she had dropped him, and in his pen form, there was not a lot he could do. She sprang ... and froze mid motion. Her knees crashed into the ground as red lightning crawled along her skin, then up to her ears, into her eyes. She clenched her jaw as pain lanced along her body while Shadow Weaver looked down at her, her voice soft. “Lets see...” She clenched her hand and Luz felt the spikes of pain reaching into her mind – and thoughts began to open, one after the other, like boxes being yanked apart by fingers made of knives. Tumbling from them came images. Catra’s eyes, the warmth of her hand, the soft rumble of her purr.

No. That’s not yours! Stop!

Luz’s voice felt like it rebounded inside of her head, uselessly. The images flicked before her mind’s eye again – one after the other, as if Shadow Weaver was perusing them in detail. She let out a quiet scoff. “Oh my Goodness.” She waved her hand and the red lightning faded, leaving Luz gasping and sagging. “You think that you’re in love with that pathetic creature? That manipulative, sneaking, crawling useless waste of flesh?” Shadow Weaver shook her head. “You don’t know Catra like I do. She’s lying to you. She’s using you. The only emotion that she has in her heart is for herself – and she will happily shove you onto Beast Island if it gets her one inch closer to winning.”

Luz panted. “You’re ... ah ... her Mom...” She growled. “Where’d she learn that from?”

“Catra was an annoying parasite attached to my project. The only reason she’s even alive now is because she chose the right person to cling too,” Shadow Weaver said. “Now ... you are Catra’s lover, and her cat’s paw, and her dupe. But what was that under there...” The red pain came back – and Luz knew that the knife-claws were coming for deeper memories and thoughts.

For plans.

For her goal.

For her escape.

She clenched her teeth and threw every iota of her willpower against the magic. That worked.

Unfortunately, it also hurt. It hurt a lot. Luz clenched her teeth even harder, her eyes screwing shut. The pain increased, ratcheting up and up. Faintly, Luz could hear Glimmer shouting. “Leave her alone, Shadow Weaver! Stop!”

“I will rip your mind apart to get what I want, human!” Shadow Weaver hissed.

Luz screamed. She couldn’t help it. It was a scream unlike anything noise she had ever made before in her life.

“Let her go!”

The pain cut off so intensely that Luz nearly fainted. She fell to the side, gasping, as she saw a blurr shooting from the darkness. Shadow Weaver lashed out – a bolt of lightning crashing into the wall, exploding with a flare of heat. Her eyes started to drag closed, her body screaming at her to embrace unconsciousness, to just stop existing, to be away from the pain of it all.

The last thing Luz Noceda saw was Catra’s claws slashing into Shadow Weaver’s mask, which shattered in a spray of red and glittering sparks.

Those sparks remained hanging in her vision as her eyes closed, dimming one by one.

Then, nothing.

Luz’s eyes opened, inch by inch. They felt as if they had been weighed down by stones, and that every single motion of her face – and just her face – was a titanic impossibility. Her arms were stones, and even breathing felt difficult. Through the thin slits of her eyes, she could see a curious looking face peering down at her. Red goggles, bright purple hair, and a welder’s mask. Luz opened her eyes even wider, a jolt of adrenaline hitting her like a spike.

The girl flipped the mask back.

Revealing...

“So, the gravitic imploder lance that you said your ship used,” Entrapta said, her voice cheerful and a bit shrill in Luz’s pounding head. “Was the basis the same as artificial gravity technology, using a 5^th space, 3^rd space interaction effect?”

“Buhh...” Luz groaned. Slowly, life was beginning to tease into her arms. She sat up as much as she could and saw that she was in a sparse, utilitarian cot, in a sparse utilitarian room, with a sparse, utilitarian blanket. There was also two teddy bears, and something akin to a cake on a small plate on a tray that could be extended over her bed. The cake had been formed, she thought, out of ration bars, with a scrawled message on it.

GET BETR SOON

L, R, K

+C

(we made her sign this, K)

Luz blinked slowly.

“Um ... wait!” Entrapta said. “Are you suffering from brain damage? You have been unconscious for two weeks.”

“Two what!?” Luz exclaimed.

“Two weeks,” Entrapta said. “They thought you might die for a little bit there. Lots of neurological damage, but it’s all magical damage, and that stuff heals pretty quickly.” She paused. “Sometimes.”

Luz thumped back into her bed and blinked up at the ceiling.

Then she jerked back up again. “Wait, what are you doing here?”