Chapter Text
“Oh, I’m so glad it finally found its way back to you. I was beginning to worry Lilly had…” the blonde woman in the mirror trails off and shakes her head, smiling. “Sorry, don’t mind me. Just a little scatter-brained is all.”
Jay opens and closes his mouth a few times, trying to think of something to say. He can’t come up with anything.
The woman snorts. “You look confused. Everything’s explained in the journal. You got that too, right?”
“Oh,” Jay says. “Um. Yes. But I can’t read it.”
The cheerful front she’d been putting on drops instantly. Her brows furrow and her mouth contorts in a scowl. “What did she do to it?”
“Uh…” Jay sputters. He has no idea who the ‘she’ is that would have ruined his mother’s journal. Frankly, he’s still rather hung up on the fact that the mirror on his bedroom wall seems to be malfunctioning. Normally his reflection doesn’t look like a woman. “Well, it’s…the pages are water damaged,” he explains. “So all the ink bled together and I can’t read anything. Except for one page. I don’t know how just one page stayed dry, bu-”
She snaps her fingers. “The blueprint. Is the blueprint safe?”
“...Yeah?” Well, a blueprint is safe. Who’s to say there weren’t multiple blueprints in there? Jay doesn’t mention this, though.
“Okay. That’s all that really matters anyway. Explanations will have to wait. Don’t worry, we’ll have all the time and the world—and then some—once everything’s completed.”
Alright. Jay’s fairly certain this person’s crazy. But she does look familiar. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think…
“Here’s what I need from you right now,” she continues. “You don’t need to build a whole other machine, but the one that the other me already made is probably not in tip-top shape right now. I’ll give you the coordinates to its location, and you can use the blueprint to fix it.”
“Wait, what machine?” Jay asks. “I mean, obviously the one in the blueprint…I mean, what does it do?”
The woman steps back and looks at something supposedly inside the mirror, seeming distracted. “Listen, don’t worry about that right now. I don’t have time to explain just yet. Just follow the directions, and everything will make sense, okay?”
Jay does not plan on following instructions given to him by a stranger in his mirror in place of his reflection, but before he has time to argue he wakes up.
Usually when Jay wakes up from having been asleep, he is still lying down. Not that he’s never sleep-walked before, but suddenly regaining consciousness sitting at his desk with a pen in his hand sure is new. Had he been…sleep- writing?
Jay looks down. It’s his mother’s notebook, open to the first page. On it is scrawled a set of coordinates and an unlabeled list that reads:
- Go outside during a thunderstorm and redirect a bolt of lightning into your nervous system
- Once charged, your powers will increase tenfold for a short time.
It’s not in his handwriting.
“Hey, Edna,” says Libber, eyes fixed on the composition notebook in her hands as she enters the junkyard. “Got any extra transformer cables?”
“Oh, of course we do, dear, there’s a whole box of ‘em over there. Here, I’ll show ya,” Edna says.
“Thanks,” says Libber. “How about-”
She attempts to follow Edna, but because she still has her face buried in a notebook, the first thing she does is trip over a giant spring coil sticking out of a pile of unsalvageable car parts…and then fall face-first into said pile of unsalvageable car parts…and then knock said pile of unsalvageable car parts over right into Edna, which in turn knocks her over too.
The crashing and banging, along with Edna’s surprised yelp, drown out the string of curse words and frantic apologies that Libber sputters. She waits until the last rusted hubcap stops wobbling before she yells, “OH MY GOSH, I’M SO SORRY!” from underneath half of a car door.
Edna, who’s already gotten up and brushed herself off, offers a hand to help Libber, laughing. “Oh, don’t worry about it, dear! Happens all the time!”
Frazzled, Libber staggers to her feet, and then looks down at her empty hands in alarm. “Shoot, where’d my notebook go?” She dives back into the pile of junk to retrieve it.
When this is all over Libber is covered in grease and oil and has several cuts from rusted metal, which prompts Edna to anxiously ask when the last time she’d gotten a tetanus shot was.
The answer to this, actually, is last week, because Libber had also cut herself on rusted metal the last time she was here, so Libber isn’t too concerned about it. Nonetheless, Edna insists on fussing over her and giving her first-aid before they go looking for transformer cables.
“Ed!” Libber complains, as Edna drags her into the trailer. “Tell your wife I don’t need immediate medical attention!”
Ed briefly looks up at his wife from the newspaper he’d been reading at the kitchen table. “Edna?” he says. “Does Liberty need immediate medical attention?”
“Yes she does!” Edna confirms, voice muffled from behind the cupboard door as she rifles around for the first aid kit.
Ed shrugs. “Sorry, Libber. Edna says you do.”
“Wh-” Libber huffs. “You don’t even know what happened!”
“Well, it sounded like a pile of junk got knocked over just now, so I would assume that means you injured yourself again.” He tuts and turns the page in the newspaper. “You really should be more careful, Liberty.” Then he does look up, something occurring to him. “You didn’t get hurt too, did you, Edna?” he asks anxiously.
“No, dear, don’t worry, I’m just fine!” Edna says, pulling the first aid kit out. She makes Libber sit down at the table and begins cleaning the wounds with alcohol wipes, which is the real reason Libber was so averse to the prospect of first aid in the first place. She hisses at the sting, and Edna doesn’t even apologize for it.
“It is rather early for you to come all the way out here,” Ed says. “What were you looking for?”
“She said she was looking for transformer cables, Ed,” Edna tells him.
“Well, not just that,” says Libber. She nods towards the notebook that she set on the table. I woke up this morning and found a blueprint in there.”
Edna pauses, perking up in interest. “You found a blueprint?”
“Yeah, look-” Libber wrenches her other arm back from Edna—which is harder than it should be; geez that woman is strong—and opens to the middle of the notebook, smoothing the pages out flat and turning it around to show them. “I don’t know where that came from. I don’t remember drawing it. And I have no idea what it is, either.”
“You’re going to build it without even knowing what it does?” asks Ed.
“Yes,” says Libber, without leaving any room for argument. “But I was wondering if you had any ideas.”
Edna quickly patches up the rest of Libber’s injuries while Ed examines the mystery blueprint. “Well, it certainly doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen,” he says, stroking his beard. “How do you think it got in here in the first place?”
“I have no idea,” Libber says, which isn’t entirely true…actually, she has lots of ideas about how it got there, but most of them include somebody breaking into her house at night just to draw up schematics for some bizarre machine in her notebook, which, if she’s being honest, is not particularly likely.
For one thing, Cliff has a state-of-the-art security system installed in the building, and for another, even if someone managed to get past that, why would they leave without taking anything? Cliff has all sorts of expensive art pieces around the house, as well as cutting-edge technology, both of which seem like they would be rather attractive for a person in the habit of breaking-and-entering.
The other theory she has is that her dream reflection put it there, but that makes even less sense.
Edna, having quickly patched up the rest of Libber’s injuries, takes the notebook out of Ed’s hands without asking. She adjusts her glasses. “Oh my,” she muses. “This is certainly unique.”
“Neither of you know what it is?” Libber says, deflating slightly. She’d hoped Ed and Edna might have some idea. “Well. Do you at least know where to find all these parts? There are a few things on there that I’m not even sure are real.”
“Ed, does that say quantum batteries?” Edna says, and Libber’s pretty sure she’s just been ignored.
“Does it?” Ed leans over and squints at the page. “Oh. Well that makes a whole lot more sense. I thought it said ‘qualms tv butter.’”
Edna wacks Ed over the head with Libber’s notebook. “Why would it say that, you nitwit?”
“Well, I don’t know! Maybe it’s an experimental kind of alternative lubricant to oil-”
“That’s ridiculous!” Edna wacks Ed over the head with Libber’s notebook again, and then sets it down on the table to show Libber where it says ‘quantum batteries’ and not ‘qualms tv butter.’ “See? It says your machine is powered by quantum batteries.”
“Oh.” Libber blinks. “Actually, I also thought it said ‘qualms tv butter.’” Edna hits Libber on the head and calls her a nitwit, too. “That’s why I was confused,” Libber continues, unphased. “But quantum batteries don’t sound real either.”
“Well, you’re right, Liberty,” Ed says, rubbing the spot on his head where Edna had hit him. “Quantum batteries don’t exist yet.”
“Yet?” Libber repeats.
“They’re only theoretical,” Edna explains. “There have been experiments done that imply it may be possible, but the technology we have now doesn’t allow us to go any further. A real working quantum battery is a pipe dream for the foreseeable future.”
“Aw, don’t be so pessimistic, Edna!” Ed says.
“I’m just being realistic,” Edna says matter-of-factly. Turning to Libber with an apologetic look on her face, she says, “Sorry, dear. I don’t think this mystery machine of yours is going to be possible to build.”
“Alright,” Libber sighs. “But…I still kind of want to look for these other parts. Even though it’s probably useless…maybe it might give me a better picture on what it’s supposed to be.”
“That sounds like fun!” Ed and Edna both say enthusiastically. Libber grins—Lilly or Maya would almost certainly try to talk her out of this, but of course her other best friends are down for putting together a strange machine from a blueprint which Libber has no idea how she is in possession of.
Jay knows—he swears he knows—that this is probably not a smart idea.
But, he also knows that he’s had plenty of stupid ideas in the past that actually ended up wielding good results. The stupidity of an idea is not always congruent with its outcome.
…He’s not kidding anyone. He knows he has no good reason to be doing this.
Nonetheless, the instructions he’d sleep-written for himself were just far too intriguing to ignore.
The coordinates that he inputs into his GPS take him to a forest that, interestingly enough, is right by Cliff Gordon’s estate—Jay remembers coming through this same forest, in fact, on his way to that estate during the timeline he erased.
But his directions take him deeper into the woods, which quickly thickens to the point where he has to leave his mech behind and go the rest of the way on foot. In a thunderstorm. By himself.
Maybe he should have told somebody what he’s doing. Or at least where he’s going. If he’s being honest, even now he knows that absorbing a lightning bolt does not sound very safe. What if he passes out and gets fatally injured out here in the middle of nowhere, where nobody would ever stumble upon him until he’s long dead…
Jay takes a deep breath and pushes those thoughts out of his mind. Not helpful.
Eventually, he’s led to a small clearing in the woods, where a very worn-down abandoned building sits, with boarded-up windows and missing shingles and…a strange device on the door.
Looking closer, Jay can tell it’s some kind of high-tech locking mechanism, which seems unsettlingly out of place on the otherwise decrepit shambles of what was probably once a house. (Although, Jay can’t help but wonder, what kind of a person builds a house so hidden and isolated from civilization?)
He tries to figure out the lock, to no avail. It won’t budge. Unless shocking him with electricity counts. Then it does budge—just not quite in the way he wanted it to.
Jay gives up on the lock. He can’t remember if the stranger in his mirror dream actually told him what to do when he got to the coordinates. Or if the dream was actually related at all, or just a weird coincidence.
Either way, the best vantage point to try this absorbing-a-lightning-bolt thing is the roof, where there is conveniently already a lightning pole. Unfortunately, it’s going to be rather difficult to get up there.
Jay finds a foothold on a slightly protruding brick and hoists himself up to balance on the ledge of one of the boarded-up windows. There’s nowhere to go from there. He tries a different side of the house.
It takes him longer than it probably should to successfully climb up to the roof. By the time he’s actually done it, he doesn’t even care whether what he’s about to do is unbelievably foolish. He’s gone through way too much trouble to change his mind now, and frankly, he’s sort of ticked off about it.
“This better be good,” Jay mutters angrily to himself, as he waits for lightning. As an afterthought, he adds, “And it better not kill me.” (Although, he realizes afterwards, that goes without saying when he’s already said ‘it better be good.’ Adding the part about not dying is just redundant.)
The lightning bolt he’s been waiting for strikes.
Jay reaches for it reflexively, calls it towards him and doesn’t tell it to stop. He inhales at the precise moment the lightning enters his body.
For a mere fraction of a second, every cell in his body feels like it’s on fire, his nervous system is sent so far into overdrive he can’t hear a thing over the electricity buzzing in his ears.
And then, as he feared he might, he passes out.
“So you got my blueprint.”
Libber blinks, disoriented. She doesn’t remember coming into this room. Just a second ago she’d been curled up on the couch with Sushi, being lulled to sleep by the sound of rain pattering against the windows. “How did I…” she mumbles.
“Oh, shoot, did I grab you too soon? Sorry, I just got excited.” Her reflection beams at her and repeats, “So you got my blueprint.”
“ Your blueprint?” Libber echoes.
“Well, yes. How else do you think it got in your notebook?”
“I guess that makes sense.” It does not make sense. “What is it, exactly?”
“I call it the Eternity Emulator,” Mirror Libber says dramatically. “Isn’t it cool?”
“Great. That sure clears it up. I can’t even build it, though. Because I need qualms tv butter.”
“...What?”
“I mean, quantum batteries. Your handwriting is very difficult to read.”
Mirror Libber snorts. “We have the exact same handwriting. And don’t worry, I’ll tell you how to make quantum batteries once you’ve gotten the hang of my lightning trick.”
“Wh-” Libber shakes her head. “No. I said no. I’m not doing that again, it was awful.”
“It gets better, I swear. It only hurts the first couple times, and after that you won’t feel a thing.”
“How did you even come up with it anyway? And why would you keep doing it?”
“Oh! That’s an interesting story, actually. I got the idea from this old story about the first elemental master of water,” says Mirror Libber. “Her name was Nyad. She merged with the sea, and became water itself.”
Libber goes totally still and quiet for a few moments while this processes. “Wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you saying I’m going to become lightning?” she demands. “I don’t wanna become lightning!”
Mirror Libber has the audacity to laugh at her as she explains, “No need to freak out—it’s not possible for us. Water is permanent; lightning only exists for seconds at a time. You can’t actually become something that finicky and unpredictable.”
Libber blinks. “Well, then, what…”
“The idea,” says Mirror Libber, “is that you’ll get close. You can’t ever fully complete the transformation, but you can get somewhere in between. You can become so in-tune with your element that you lose a fraction of your humanity to it.”
“What?” Libber takes a step back from the mirror. Lose a fraction of her humanity? “That sounds like some mad scientist-level nonsense right there,” she says.
“No, it’s not…” Mirror Libber sighs. “I’m explaining this poorly. Look, I would like to show you, but you’re not attuned enough yet.”
“I’m not attuned enough?” Libber sputters. “What does that even mean?”
“I’m referring to-”
“You know what?” Libber says firmly. “No. Stop. I’m done with you.” She turns around. “I want you to stop talking to me. I think you’re crazy and-” she stops talking. A strange staticky sensation begins to buzz just under her skin, and it clouds her thoughts until she can’t remember what she was just talking about. Libber feels her body turn back around and approach the mirror again. Mirror Libber’s enthusiastic expression is gone, replaced with a dark glare.
“I had hoped we could do this together,” she sighs.
She climbs out of the mirror.
“But if you’re going to be difficult about it, I might as well just take your lightning for myself. Is that what you want?”
Libber can’t speak. Her mind moves like molasses, so slowly it’s a struggle to form a coherent thought. Even so, there’s a dull panic that grasps her as Mirror Libber backs her against the wall, her grey eyes full of such malice that it’s clear she is not making an empty threat.
“I don’t want to do it this way,” Mirror Libber continues, “But I will if I have to.”
“You…can’t…” Libber chokes out, grappling for words. “You can’t…take…”
“Yes I can. I’ve done it before. I will explain everything to you, but you must first swear loyalty to me.”
“Who… are you?” Libber manages to say. The static is hurting her head and her knees feel weak. The woman in front of her, who outside of the mirror, doesn’t look quite as picture-perfect and put together, grins, a sly, dark expression that sends a shiver down Libber’s spine.
“Just someone you could have been.”