Chapter 17

Luz shut her mental screaming up with a firm nod.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Uh ... right. Okay.”

All I need to do, she thought. Is have the good guys heroically stop us while actually allowing the Evil Horde’s plan to reconnect ancient Etherian technology together to form Hordak’s portal generator so I can go home and get back to my girlfriend while also, not hurting the feelings of my current girlfriend who, herself, is a part of the Evil Horde.

Luz nodded and stood there, her eyes going slightly out of focus.

“ ... are you okay?” Adora asked. Her voice grew concerned. “D-Do you have ... brain damage?”

“She did get hit pretty hard by Shadow Weaver,” Glimmer whispered back.

“Uh no!” Luz said. “My good am brain!” She shook her head. “I just need to, uh, think of a ... a ... thing! To, um ... do ... stuff!”

“What?” Glimmer asked.

“What stuff?” Adora asked.

“Well, uh...” Luz tapped her fingers together. “I need toooo ... buy ... time!” She nodded. “By, uh, that is, I need time to, for, for, uh, for-”

“For me to show up.”

Everyone’s heads jerked up. Standing atop the large First One biomecha that Luz had helped to capture and Adora had quietly shut down via direct application of Sword of Power to central control and power unit, was Catra. She had her arms crossed over her chest and was smirking down at Adora, Glimmer, Bow. “Hey Adora,” she said, before hopping down to land on the sword’s hilt, which still jutted from the side of the wormbeast. She kipped down from that to land next to Luz, her arm snaked around her shoulders. “How do you like my best friend? She’s pretty sharp, huh?”

Adora was looking deeply betrayed, her blue eyes flicking from Luz to Catra to Luz again.

Luz’s throat choked.

“Now, this is the part where she shows off her magic,” Catra said, smirking. “Right babe?”

Adora and Glimmer looked at Luz, blinking. Luz felt Stringbean squirm in her pocket. Her brain locked up – the choices were too impossible. She almost felt like she wasn’t even moving her arm as she reached into her pocket ... and she watched, in slow motion, as she flicked her rune out with a single finger. It landed at Glimmer’s feet and exploded upwards with a spray of ice, shooting a fist right at her jaw. Glimmer vanished into an explosion of sparkles and Catra grabbed Luz by the nape of her neck and yanked her back seconds before Adora’s fist connected with Luz’s jaw. Instead, Adora’s fist smashed into the biomecha, crunching into steel plates and causing Adora to yelp and hiss, wringing her fist out.

Then there was no time for thinking.

No time for thinking at all.

Catra shoved Luz forward and to the left. Luz tumbled, rolled, came to her feet, saw that Catra was yanking the sword of power out of its resting place. She grinned, holding it away from Adora as Adora snatched for it, shoulder checking Catra against the metal. Bow drew and knocked an arrow, dropping his homemade tablet into the snow. Luz grabbed onto the tablet and smacked his knee with it, jerking his shot off so that the arrow and the net that exploded from it winged over Catra’s and Adora’s head. Bow yelped, jumped, and Luz sprang to her feet.

“Lo siento, lo siento, lo siento!” she said, dropping the tablet. Before Bow could do anything more, Glimmer appeared behind Luz, locking a muscular arm around her neck, snarling.

“You frigging jerk!” She shouted. “Was trying to let me out part of a plan!? Did you scheme that up with Catra!?”

“Gurk!” Luz choked, stumbling backwards. Catra snarled, dropped under Adora’s arms, sprang through her legs, grabbed onto Bow’s shoulder, flipped over him, and smashed the heel of her face into where Glimmer would have been, had Glimmer not vanished. Catra instead ended up landing on Luz’s shoulders, and Luz flailed her arms to keep herself from collapsing into the snow.

Catra hopped off her back as Adora yanked the sword from the metal housing that she had plunged it into. At that exact moment, Scorpia came up and over the stilled biomecha, her claws clacking as she leaped up and landed behind Adora – who was holding her sword up.

“By the power of Grayskull!”

The explosion of radiant white light that blasted into Catra and Luz made Luz blink and then gape.

Adora as She-Ra was...

Still...

Wow.

She was an eight foot tall blond goddess, rippling with muscle and clad in a pristine white gambeson and fluttering red cape and skirts. She loomed over even Scorpia, her eyes fierce as she looked down at the whole lot of them. Scorpia lunged, her tail plunging forward, but Adora didn’t so much move as simply snap her hand into place – it was eerie, like watching a machine at work, faster than human eyes could track. She grabbed onto Scorpia’s tail, then whipped her up and over her shoulders and down into the snow with an explosion of white powder that almost bowled Bow over.

“Oh, sorry!” Adora said, her voice sounding remarkably similar, despite the fact she was now a giant.

Catra grinned, then sprang over and kicked Bow’s bow from his hands. He scowled and sprang backwards, while Adora swung her sword in a curving arc, which Catra nimbly dodged, her hands sliding into her pockets, as if she didn’t even need them for this fight. Or she just had cold fingers.

“Wow, I knew you were jealous, but this is getting a bit ridiculous,” Catra said. She was drawing Adora’s focus – and Luz knew why.

She’s setting her up for a shot. For my shot.

Fortunately, Luz didn’t have to choose between blasting the objectively correct heroic woman who was fighting the woman that Luz was desperately, madly in love with. Why was it that it took a giant swinging a sword at someone’s face to make what was obviously true impossible to ignore? Luz’s entire body was blazing with a need to protect Catra, her sweet, cunning, evil, sneaky, brilliant, hurt, sad, precious kitten – the contradictions of Catra only made Luz want and need even more stark and intense.

Of course, all that want and need was moot because, currently, a woman with the ability to teleport five times every three seconds was trying to kill Luz with laser beams. Glimmer appeared, blasted, appeared, blasted, appeared, blasted. Each concussive burst of glitter sizzled past Luz’s face, shoulders, arms, while she focused entirely on dodging and yelping. She threw out two ice runes, slapping both before they even finished fluttering to the ground, and formed a shield wall that shot up out of the ground and blocked two blasts. Then she sprang backwards, away from Glimmer’s focus, and saw that Entrapta was sitting on the side of the First One’s biomecha, humming as she pried open the side with a crowbar.

“Entrapta!” Luz said. “Help!”

Entrapta wordlessly tossed her a package, which landed in Luz’s chest. It was a roughly star shaped object wrapped in paper, with a big warning label printed on it that said Danger: Disables First One Technology!!! Do Not Use!

“But this says not to use it!” Luz said.

“Put it on her sword,” Entrapta said, then slid into the hole she had made in the side of the biomecha with an alarmingly moist squish noise. “Aha!”

Glimmer appeared before Luz, panting softly – catching her breath, or catching her magic? Luz wanted to study her in a lab. You know. Later. And with her consent. She was not evil!

“You’re ... so ... evil!” Glimmer exclaimed. “You put on this innocent, sweet, woe is me act, but every single thing you do is some kind of lie!” She clenched her fists. “You made rescuing me a lie! Who does that!?”

“I-I...” Luz stammered. “Listen, if I could explain-”

“You can’t explain working for the people who are destroying my planet!” Glimmer said, her voice thick with rage, her eyes almost brimming with tears. “You can’t explain fighting on the side that killed my father. You just can’t.”

Luz felt as if she had been smacked.

Behind Glimmer, she saw Catra had been backed up against the First One’s artifact. Adora’s hand was on her chest, jamming her in hard, pinning her against the wall. Her sword was raised – and Adora was saying something. But all Luz could see was the gleaming sword. It’s razor sharp edge. Luz reached up, grabbing into her pocket for Stringbean. And she felt the reluctance. The hesitation. The urging voice from her precious Palisman.

Luz thought back: I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it, I’ll-

She scrawled the rune on the parcel. Glimmer blinked, realized what she was doing, sprang forward.

Luz slapped it.

The parcel flashed into a thousand glittering sparkles.

Then it appeared again, landing right on top of Adora’s magical sword.

The paper surrounding the package ripped apart in a flurry of brown paper – revealing ruby red crystal, and worming, writhing tentacles, which spread first like moss, then like grids, their organic texture transmuting into something mechanical and yet still chaotic as they bifurcated and spread throughout the metal of Adora’s sword. She gasped, cried out, clutched at her head as Catra dropped nimbly away, skidded abckwards, and grinned as she stood beside Luz.

“Nice one,” she said. “We’ve see this tech before – it makes Adora loopy. Like she just got really-”

Adora screamed. Her eyes turned brilliant, ruby red as her muscles seemed to bulge even more than they already did. Red filiaments burrowed along the underside of her skin, glowing brilliantly. She turned to face Glimmer, Bow, Catra, and Luz. Her eyes flashed and she stepped forward, crushing Bow’s discarded tablet with a spray of sparks.

“Uh, Adora!” Bow said, scrambling to his feet. Then he yelped and sprang backwards as Adora swung her sword in a curving arc that nearly took his and Luz’s head off – Bow was saved by Glimmer, Luz was saved by Catra. But before any of them could do anything, Adora started to hack wildly, swinging her sword like a maniac berserker, smashing it down onto the icy ground with every blow. The hissing noise of cloven air split the battlefield with every swing, and Luz turned and sprinted away from Adora, shouting at the top of her lungs.

“Berserker protocol! She’s gone all Quib-Quib! Run! Run! Run!”

The whole group joined her – with only Scorpia left behind, ignored as she laid in the pile of snow that Adora had tossed her into.

They came around the First One drone and saw that there was another one emerging from the snow and the gathering storm. Catra, Luz, Glimmer and Bow skidded to a stop. “Oh come on!” Catra growled. Luz, though, already had one of her runes out. She flicked and the paper slapped to the chest of the construct. She hoped it was big enough – more magic for more mass, but also, short range meant ... she rushed forward, leaped up, and slapped the rune seconds before the construct smashed into her friends. It vanished in a spray of sparkles, and appeared between them and Adora, while Luz dropped back into the snow.

“Come on!” She shouted, gesturing with one hand, thinking furiously as she did so. There had to be a way to deal with this! There had to be!

“You stole my magic!” Glimmer shouted as she ran up to her side. “That’s the weird glitching I’ve been getting! You’re stealing my magic!”

“I’m more using the same power source,” Luz gasped out.

Behind them, the construct flew into three large, sparking pieces as Adora stomped through it, her sword smoking and sparking – she had cut through it like it was butter and tossed the pieces aside as if they didn’t weigh anything at all. The only reason, Luz realized, why they weren’t all already dead was that Adora was walking after them at a fairly sedate pace.

Is that her trying to slow herself down? Or the berserker in her toying with us?

Luz hoped it was the former. Much more power of friendship. Much nicer.

“I have an idea!” Catra said, then banked off to the left. Luz followed her, since there was a 0.00% chance of her not following Catra. Then she realized that Catra was, quite literally, leading them towards a cliff. Okay, there was a 0.05% chance that Luz might not follow Catra. The cliff in question was the one created by the huge drilling machine that Entrapta had packed up and brought to drill to the ancient Etherian machinery buried beneath the snows and ice. Catra came to the edge of the cliff, stopped, then turned. Luz turned with her.

Bow and Glimmer had both gone the other way – and, lo, Adora was still coming after them.

“We have to get that thing off the sword!” Luz hissed to Catra – unaware that, at that moment, she was saying the exact same thing Glimmer was hissing to Bow.

“Are you stupiud?” Catra asked. “We need to get the sword away from Adora. I’ll get you the opening.”

She grinned, then walked forward. Adora, panting, stopped as Catra came within swinging range. She lifted her sword up above her head and Catra cocked her head – and Adora hesitated.

“ ... we’re sleeping together, you know,” Catra said, casually. “Luz and I, pretty...” She lifted her right hand and made a huge dramatic production of retracting her pointer and middle finger claws. “ ... regularly.” She smirked at Adora.

Adora brought the sword smashing down. Catra sprang back. And Luz sprang forward and slapped the rune right onto the side of the sword. The sword buzzed, crackled, and there was a definite lurch as it tried to resist the magic. But Luz clung on tight and the sword and her vanished from Adora’s grasp with a spray of sparkles. She hit the ground, rolled, and came up just in time to see that Adora had returned to her normal red jacketed self, shorter, more slender. She wobbled, then fell to the ground, caught by Catra’s arms.

Luz stood, holding the sword in her hands, her heart hammering.

I can ... I can fix this. I can fix this. I can fix this, she thought, frantically.

Glimmer clenched her fists and Bow lifted his bow.

Then both stiffened and fell over.

Scorpia grinned as she stood behind them, having slipped around in the confusion and the chaos. She clacked her claws together. “Thanks for the distraction, Luz! Couldn’t have done it without you!”

I can fix this! Luz thought as she lifted her hand up, giving a shaky thumbs up to Scorpia.

It was a lot of hard work, fixing an ancient Etherian machine. Luz did it all in a daze. Part of her brain was squealing in excited shock at every connected port, every new realization of how the massive machine that was Etheria worked. The planet had to be honeycombed with immense power conduits and rune-channels, connecting each runestone to one another, turning the magic of the place into ... something. The First Ones had built it to do something, but what still eluded her and Entrapta.

But the whole time that she worked Adora, Glimmer and Bow were in prison, watched over by bots and by Scorpia. And the whole time, Luz felt Stringbean’s nervous wriggling inside of her pocket. Her mental connection was a little frayed. A little unfocused.

It’s okay, Luz kept thinking. I’ll fix it.

Now, she stood behind Entrapta as Entrapta hummed cheerfully and clacked away at the keyboard sitting before the circular table where she had the Sword of Power ensconced. Cables ran into and away from the sword, and several scanners had been aimed at it – while Entrapta fed data out of the sword, Luz paced back and forth.

“So, uh, where are the prisoners being held?” she asked.

“In the prison, probably!” Entrapta said.

“Right, right!” Luz said.

The door to the room opened and Catra walked in, sighing. “I don’t know what was worse, all the work at the north pole, flying back here, or the debriefing with Hordak,” she said, her whole body shuddering slightly from her head to her toes. “At least it’s flipping over with now.” She smirked at Luz. “What are you still doing here? You’ve done basically everything you need to do today.”

“I, uh, need to help Entr-”

“Nope. Force Captain commands you take the rest of the day off,” Catra said, grabbing onto Luz’s hand.

“But Ent-” Luz stammered.

“Entrapta,” Catra said.

“Hmm?” Entrapta lifted her head. “What?”

“Do you need help, or do you want to do me a big favor and let Noceda escape to relax with me?” she asked.

“Oh! Uh!” Entrapta swiveled in her chair, using her elongated hair to shove and spin the chair around to face the two of them. She regarded Catra, who was giving her a big, obvious nod, then looked at Luz, then back at Catra. Entrapta narrowed her eyes, then hazarded: “Y ... Yes!”

“See! She’s fine,” Catra said, yanking Luz towards the door. Luz yelped, flailing her free arm, looking back at Entrapta, who waved cheerfully as the door shut between Luz and her. Within the room, alone with the sword and the data emerging from it, Entrapta smiled.

“Note to self! You understand social dynamics perfectly,” she said, sounding pleased with herself. Then she started to tap away at the keyboard again, narrowing her eyes. Data began to feed out of the sword – and Entrapta began to run it through the database. She narrowed her eyes and then cocked her head. A sine wave began to scrawl its way across the screen, warbling and twisting. Then, slowly, the sine wave started to become more and more erratic. Entrapta leaned back in her seat and her hair reached out to pick up a cup – tiny, of course. She drank from it, watching as a simulation started to play out.

Once it was complete and the final bits of debris were finished dissolving into sparkles, Entrapta smacked her lips.

“Faaaaaaascinating.”

Luz followed Catra up, and up, and up, and finally, came to a ladder that Catra ignored completely. She instead leaped over a sheer drop of almost fifty meters straight down into some whirling turbine fans that jutted from the roof of the lower levels, caught onto a radial antenna, then swung herself up onto a tongue of metal that jutted out and over the highest spire of the barracks. It was, if Luz didn’t miss her guess, an large flier docking and refueling platform.

Luz, meanwhile, simply used the ladder.

“You know, ladders exist for reasons! To prevent cats from falling to their deaths,” she said, trying to sound exasperated as she stuck her head up and over the edge of the refueling platform. Catra was sitting on her butt, her legs stretched out, her palm resting on a pillow. And a blanket. Someone had draped a blanket and laid some pillows up here. And was that a metal container, the kind normally used to schlep around ammo cells?

Luz’s brow furrowed.

“What’s all this?” she asked, swinging herself up.

“Uh ... ya know, just ... hanging out with the girl who basically won us the war,” Catra said, shrugging one shoulder.

“ ... is this a romantic picnic!?” Luz squeaked, her hands going to her mouth as she sat on her knees.

Catra opened her mouth, then closed it. She drew her legs up under her, sitting crisscross applesauce. She looked down at the metal case, then swung it open, to reveal a few ration bars. “ ... I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s ... romantic!” she said, hurriedly.

Luz’s heart hammered in her chest.

Catra, we need to talk. She thought. Just say those words. Catra, we need to talk about your evil problem. Have you ever considered quitting evil? We could get you on ... some kind of evil patch! Or a substitute evil, we could replace addictive and harmful evil with, say, healthy and entirely sustainable snark! You could try that!

Instead, she said. “Wish we had something better than ration bars to eat.”

Catra’s grin was lopsided. “I mean, we do, Noceda.”

Luz’s entire face went red. Her brain made a noise that you normally had to throw a keyboard into a blender to get. She crawled over and then laid down beside Catra. She laid her head on the pillow, then sighed. “Catra, we need to talk.”

Wow.

Those words had just come out of her mouth. Catra, for her credit, didn’t immediately bolt away. But Luz could see the shutters and bolts slamming down across her features, her eyes growing dark – and both were such beautiful colors, it felt to Luz like she had just hucked a rock through a stained glass window. “N-Not about breaking up!” she said, hurriedly. Catra blinked at her, then frowned.

“Noceda,” she said. “Just say it.”

Luz blushed. Hard. “I ... I have a girl back home,” she said.

“Yeah, and?” Catra asked, thumping back onto her pillow, looking up at the sky, her hands clenching across her belly. Luz could practically hear her tension, like a violin being drawn in a horror movie – the bow sliding along the highest, most pure note. Making her spine tighten. Her fingers clench.

“A-And I want you two to meet!” Luz burst the words out. “Because Amity’s really cool and you’re cool and ... and I like you both and ... well, I can have both of you, we can, that is, you and Amity, and-”

Catra looked at Luz as if she was insane. “What?” she asked.

Luz’s entire face burned. “What?”

“No, I’m the one asking what, what?” Catra sat up. “Luz, if I meet this ... Amity girl, she’s going to try and kill me!”

“No she ... might!” Luz said, her hand going to Catra’s hand. “Wait, you think she’d try and kill you? I mean, for me?”

“Of course, I’d kill for you,” Catra said, shrugging one shoulder.

Luz’s eyes almost filled with tears. “R-Really?” she whimpered.

“Don’t get ... mushy, Noceda, I’m a Force Captain, fighting people is my job,” Catra said, yanking her hand back and looking away. Luz threw her arms around her shoulders, hugging her tightly and making the sleek catgirl squirm and wriggle in annoyance. Then she put her hand on Luz’s chest and shoved her away, scowling. “And you can’t have two girls. You have to choose.”

“Since when?” Luz asked.