Turn 10

--- Maya ---

“Why am I torturing myself like this?” She groaned, forcing herself to keep pace with her sister.

(Again, I think it something to do with your big sister instincts.)

(And again, fuck those instincts!)

“You okay there, sis?” Izzy asked with a concerned look.

“Yeah, just… hearing things.” She laughed, unable to think of anything else to say.

“Uh, okay…” Izzy nodded, with a weirded out look on her face.

“Just… just ignore me.” She eventually sighed.

“Right… Um, you’re breathing ‘s a lot better today.” Izzy told her in effort to change topics.

“Yeah, I think I’m starting to get the hang of this running thing.” She agreed, though what improvements she’d made did little to help with her physical condition.

“Kind of surprised you’re getting it this fast.” Izzy admitted, as she started moving again.

(Great… more running…)

Shaking her head, she started chasing after her sister once more. “Why’s that?”

“It took a few weeks to get my breathing right, and it took you a few days…” Izzy shook her own head. “I’m kind of jealous.”

“Yeah, well… you’re twelve.” She reminded. “You’re a bit young to be putting yourself through this kind of workout everyday.”

Izzy rolled her eyes before sighing. “Maybe, but I’m pretty sure that’s just in the land of the couch potatoes.”

She snorted at that, because she couldn’t bring herself to disagree.

---

Once she was sure Izzy had returned home, she turned around and started making her way towards the nearby city bus stop.

After a week and a half without any trouble -plus the note from her crime map that her neighborhood and the path to her destination were more or less safe- She was finally willing to leave the house once more and get to work on her more heroic efforts.

Of course, due to her own lack of transportation, and a desire for a certain level of anonymity with her family, this meant she was stuck waiting on city bus to take her to her destination.

(Alright let’s see we have…) She glanced between her phone and the bus schedule. (forty-five minutes until our bus gets here…)

(Well, at least we get a break of sorts.)

Less than ten minutes later though, her impatience began to get to her as a somewhat bad idea began to form in her head.

(You know if we run to the next couple of stops, I bet we’ll make it just in time for the bus to arrive when we get there.)

(This seems unwise…)

She glanced at the time on her phone, and the time on the bus schedule before shaking her head. “Ah, fuck it. I need to figure out how to get places as a hero anyway.”

With that sentiment in mind, she turned in the direction of the next bus stop and began running. Her legs screaming for mercy the entire time.

---

If she was going to continue down the path of a Mask than she was going to need a base of operations. Normally, the place she’d been using for her testing grounds would’ve proven to be enough to suit her needs.

Unfortunately, after her kidnapping she felt the testing grounds she’d been using were a little too compromised for her tastes and in turn wasn’t willing to risk returning to them. And as such set out to try and find a new location to orchestrate her war on crime.

This was why Maya was making her way through the woods, in the hopes of finding a space she could use for her new base.

By some kind of luck their town still had a fairly large forest to the south west, with most urban expansions taking themselves more to the north side of town. This meant that once you got past a few rundown suburbs; you’d find a fair amount of preserved nature.

At least if you spent half an hour on the bus, and another half hour walking of course.

Even after traveling that far she still spent the better part of another hour wandering through the forest, and while she wasn’t winded by the end, it didn’t do her aching muscles any favors. Eventually, stumbling upon a small clearing next to a creek she took her shoes off and dipped her feet in the cool water.

“Ugh, my feet are killing me…”

(Well, maybe you shouldn’t have gone on that extra run today.) Her logic chided her.

“Fuck off.” She flipped herself off, a rather odd thing to do given the way she had to angle her hands at herself.

Shaking her head, she let herself fall onto her back. “Ugh, everything hurts…”

Her eyes drifted around the clearing as she laid there taking in the quiet nature of everything. (Huh, it’s kind of peaceful out here… Too bad there’s no cell reception.)

(Well, on the plus most people won’t bother looking this deep into woods.) Her inner reason pointed out. (Meaning our base will be fairly well hidden if we build it out here.)

(Yeah, we can build a nice little cabin in the woods to conduct all of our chaotic catastrophes!)

She paused at that, before shaking her head at her inner crazy’s bout of creative insanity.

“It is out of the way, but there’s not much I can do here either.” She reminded her other selves. “I mean all of our inventions revolve around coding or machinery. There’s not too much we can do out here in the middle of the woods.”

(That’s not entirely true.)

“What do you mean?” She asked

(Well, while we specialize in our Coding that doesn’t necessarily change the fact that we can work with more… organic materials. Which this space has an abundance of, if a little limited in variety.)

She glanced around, probing the whispers a bit to see if they did have any ideas. At first they gave her very little that she could actually understand, but after a bit of time they began to give her a few ideas that while taking some time to prepare…

(Sound kind of interesting…)

(Oh, we are going to piss god off so much! Heh-heh-heh-ha!)

---

By the time she made it back home she was too tired to deal with much of anything, and as such decided to throw herself into another project, another effort supported by the whispers’ secrets and comforts.

Once more she directed this energy into her COMP focusing on pushing its energy capacity to the next level. And while the amount of power storage she was able to add to her Device didn’t seem like much at just a thirty-three percent gain, it was still the minimum growth established by her previous upgrade.

Unfortunately, at the rate she was going she was going she could fit maybe one more upgrade into the circuitry of her COMP before she was going to start needing other solutions to her power issues.

(Still, this is better than nothing at the very least.)