Chapter Text
Epilogue
Normal?
-HELGA-
So… this was it.
Apparently, my brief career as an alien-hybrid superheroine was soon to come to an end.
"How about that," I said to Arnold. "A cure. I'll… be back to normal."
"You, uh… you don't seem too enthusiastic about it," Arnold noted.
"No, no, it's fine. I'll be able to go back to school with everyone, we can be seen together in public again… everything'll be like it was, only better because we won't have to sneak around anymore. This is a good thing. I won't miss this at all, believe me. Okay, so… maybe I'm gonna miss the superpowers… and I've gotten kind of attached to the tail… and the extra arms really come in, no pun intended, handy sometimes, and…"
"You don't want to change back, do you."
"It's… it's not a question of that, Football-head. If I could have something resembling a normal life and still look like this and have these powers, then, yeah… I would stay like this. But life kinda doesn't work that way."
"It's not fair," he said. "You shouldn't have to force yourself to be like everyone else just to fit in."
"Yeah, but that's the thing. Life isn't fair. We all gotta make compromises." I held out my hands to him. "C'mon. One last ride?"
"One last ride," he said, smiling, allowing himself to be gathered into my arms.
I nodded to Phoebe and Rhonda. "Go ahead, guys. Don't wait up. I think we're gonna take the scenic route."
--
The scenic route turned out to be pretty much a full tour of Hillwood. Westward to the docks, the salt air tickling our nostrils. Across the bay, over Elk Island, where the usually pristine wilderness was being disturbed by activity. Apparently, the authorities had gotten wind of exactly where Wheezin' Ed's organization was hiding. Didn't really matter; soon enough, that wouldn't be my problem anymore.
Back east over the bay, past the boardwalk and the fish district. Across Tina Park and the lake. Through Midtown, no longer festively lit for Christmas but still sparkling. Down southward, to the neighborhood. Familiar sights, PS118, the boarding house, Gerald Field, Green Meats, Mrs. Vitello's, Slausen's… things we would see every day, but never again from this angle. I circled around an extra time just so we could take it in.
Northward again, once again crossing Midtown this time on the east side, then up through the rich part of town. Past that, along the causeway to the industrial/corporate sector, as the MDI building began to loom in the distance.
"Arnold?" I asked.
"Yes?"
"Would it be so bad if I just… kept going? If I went past the building and we just kept on flying and never looked back?"
"Is that what you really want?"
"No, of course not. It'd be kinda stupid to just abandon my family when I'm actually talking to all of them again. But… this is just kind of a perfect moment and I want to savor it."
"Well…. You don't have to land right away."
"No, I don't, do I."
And for a few more minutes, we just circled around, enjoying the view and the togetherness.
--
Phoebe and Rhonda were already waiting on the roof when I finally descended.
"Princess, what gives?" I asked. "I thought you'd be the first in line if there was a cure."
"Well, we agreed that we'd all wait here for you and go in together."
"Yeah, you really didn't have to," I replied. "It's fine."
"That and…" She mumbled something.
"What's that? I didn't hear-"
"I said I'm not so sure I want to go back to normal."
I raised an eyebrow. "What, are extra body parts suddenly the new big thing out of Paris?"
"I know, it sounds crazy, but I've actually grown to like the new me. I know I always say 'it's better to look good than feel good', but… I feel good. And hey, I'm still pretty hot even as a mutant."
I groaned. "You make it really hard to like you sometimes."
"Ah, c'mon, you love my in-your-face self-confidence."
"If that's what you wanna call it… Phoebe, you wanna be normal, right?"
Phoebe gave me a knowing look. "A part of me does, but… another part of me doesn't. Do you want to know what I think, or do you want to convince yourself to go through with it?"
I felt my cheeks burning. "Does it really matter? The world wants us to be normal. And while I like being different and powerful, I also wanna do other stuff, like go to college and get married write a bunch of successful books and be rich and famous and maybe decide who lives and who dies. And most of that, I can't do like this, not without attracting a lot of the wrong kind of attention. Sure, Wheezin' Ed's dead and Bill's banished forever and no one is currently trying to kill us, but it's only a matter of time. We attract negative attention just by existing."
Rhonda considered my words. "You kind of make a good case there. There are a bunch of 'normal-life' things I still want to do."
"I suppose my current appearance will make attending Stamford in the future a bit hard," Phoebe added.
"Well, I guess that's it then. Here's to the final meeting of… did we ever come up with a name for this whole team thing we have going?" I asked.
Rhonda shrugged. "I don't think so. Didn't really seem important."
"Well, I guess it doesn't really matter now." I mused. "C'mon. Let's go get cured."
--
"The key, I found, was located here, at the juncture of these matrices. By modifying these base connections, I was able to introduce foreign coding and rewrite…"
Stanford Pines was rambling on and on about something or other in front of a diagram of our weird "honeycomb" DNA molecules and I wasn't understanding a word of it. Rhonda looked lost, I was beginning to nod off, and even our resident science geek seemed bored. "Pheebs, for the love of Mike, pleaaaase translate this into English," I prodded.
"Helga, I'm as lost as you are," she said.
"Oh, c'mon, say it ain't so!"
She glared. "I'm in sixth grade, Helga. Do you honestly think I know as much as a sixty-plus-year-old superscientist who has traveled the entire universe? I swear, sometimes you treat me like I'm some kind of magical supercomputer!"
"..sorry. I really didn't know you felt that way."
"…and by switching out the single bond for a double bond…"
Taking mercy on us, Stella interrupted. "Long story short… We figured out how to hack the virus." She tapped the intercom. "You can come out now, Lila."
"All right," her voice answered. The door opened, and a very human-looking Lila, wearing a hospital gown, emerged.
"Whoa," I said. "You really did do it."
"It's actually a bit more complicated than-"
Suddenly, Lila froze up. "Sorry… I thought I'd be able to hold it longer," she said. Her skin rapidly shifted back to an emerald tone as her extra limbs regrew and her more alien facial and bodily features reasserted themselves. She shook her head. "How long was it this time?"
"Nearly fifty minutes," Stella said approvingly, checking her watch. "Almost a quarter-hour longer than the last time. How was the pain?"
"Much, much less," Lila answered. "It was mostly just a dull throb this time."
"Good," Stella replied. "Your body's adapting to the shifting. If all goes right, eventually switching forms will come as easily as changing clothes."
"Gosh, do you think so?" asked Lila.
"You'll probably need a few more boosters, but yes… you should have full control of your changes soon."
"Wait," Rhonda said. "What exactly are we looking at here?"
"Well… Dr. Pines got a bit technical. Let me break down exactly what this is. See,, when Lila told you we had a 'cure', it wasn't entirely accurate. It's actually more akin to a vaccine… of a sort.
"Basically, I was stuck, because I didn't know exactly what we were dealing with. I had no frame of reference for extraterrestrial viruses. Ford – that is, Dr. Pines – has over thirty years of experience with the extraterrestrial, and he was able to recognize the source of the original infection. It was a race of near-extinct plant-animal-hybrid dragons called the Ka'Thaari. When their homeworld was destroyed, most were wiped out, but some of the spores they used to reproduce clung to fragments of their world. Long story short: a few chunks of the Ka'Thaari Homeworld wound up on Earth, and you girls stumbled, literally, onto one of them.
"Once we established, exactly, what you were, we were able to start breaking down your new genome by plugging what Ford knew into what we already knew. We extracted a sample of the virus in your blood, and modified it to rewrite your DNA… or 'XNA', as we call it now… to give you the ability to restore your old appearance for periods of time that should increase as you get more used to it.
"It's not really a cure… you'll mostly still be the same on this inside… but it's the best we can do for now," she finished apologetically.
"So, what you're basically saying is," Rhonda asked to confirm, "we'll still be super-powered beings, but we'll be able to look normal and go back to school and go out in public without being stared at and all that?"
"That's about the size of it, yes," Stella answered her.
"I'm cool with that," she replied.
"Yeah," I said, "that… actually kinda sounds pretty great."
"You're not disappointed?" Stella asked.
"Not at all," Phoebe said. "Actually, all of us were rather ambivalent about the prospect of permanently losing our alien forms. They're odd, yes, and rather difficult to adapt to, but also…"
"'Unique' and 'Special'?" I supplied doing my best Mr. Simmons.
"…yes. That," Phoebe finished. "We've all grown to appreciate the gifts they bring… at least the three of us have. Though I don't begrudge Lila holding out hope for a permanent cure." She looked hopefully at the green-skinned redhead.
"To be perfectly honest," she replied, "…no, I'm not very comfortable with my new self yet. I'm not sure I'll ever be. But, well… I am glad that it's led to this bond I share with the three of you. If that remains strong in the future, well, then, everything I've gone through has been worth it."
"Awww," Rhonda said. "Group hug!"
"Wha- No! No! I'm not ready-" I protested as six pairs of arms locked around me into a crushing embrace.
Having friends better be worth this.
--
-ARNOLD-
Was it a rule that waiting room magazines had to be terribly out of date? The Sports Illuminated I was reading was speculating on whether 2018 would be the New York Knicks' best season ever (a thought well past wishful thinking and bordering on psychotic delusion). I was only half-paying attention; my thoughts were entirely on the treatments Helga was undergoing. Sure, Lila had already undergone them with no discernable problems, but it was still a more-or-less untested procedure and anything could go wrong. Especially dealing with alien physiology. I inwardly shuddered at the memory of Wheezin' Ed's dying form, a near-unrecognizable mass of mutated tumors. The thought of something like happening to Helga was horrifying.
"She'll be all right," my dad assured me, picking up on my nervousness.
"How do you know? They're literally hacking her DNA. Who knows what that could do?"
"I trust your mom, kiddo. The twelve-fingered science hobo not so much, but your mom'll keep him in check. And, well… let's just say I have this feeling that everything's going to work out in the end, all right?" It seemed like he knew something more than he was letting on, something very specific, but he wasn't telling and I was in too nervous a state to want to pry.
I resumed my inattentive skimming of the magazine, currently a feature on the Hillwood Caribou's goalie, Ivan Alloyshavich Smerdyakov. I tried in vain to allow it to take my attention.
"Yo, Football Head!"
My head snapped up.
She was beautiful.
"So… Helga Classic. More or less. Watcha think?"
She'd changed back into one of her old pink-and-white dresses, her hair once again set in pigtails, bow perched atop her head. Her face was almost as he'd remembered it, save one difference."
"I actually kinda miss the monobrow," I found myself saying.
"Yeah," Helga admitted. "Me too, a little. But I think those follicles are just gone now or something. What I really wanna know is where my upper eyebrow goes. It's just kinda… not there when I'm 'human', but comes back when I change back again."
"How does it feel?" I asked.
"Weird. Kinda like I'm… blunted. I sorta still feel my extra parts but they're not there. Your mom says that's gonna eventually go away as I get more used to switching forms, but for now it's kind of disorienting. And my powers just kinda… shut off when I'm like this."
"So… what you're saying is you're normal."
"More or less. My organs are still messed up and my blood is still the wrong color, and I'm not invulnerable but I still have the super-healing and I can still mentally communicate with the girls because my brain's unchanged… I'm sure your mom can explain it all to you. In the meantime, though… on the outside at least, I'm back to the old Helga. At least until I have to change back. So… disappointed I'm the plain old me again?"
I smiled. "Helga, 'plain' is not a word I'd ever use to describe you. But if you're asking if I like you any less like this… of course not! I think you're beautiful this way, and I think you're beautiful as a three-eyed, four-armed mutant!"
"What if I had ten arms?" she teased.
"That would just mean more hugs."
"What if I had two heads?"
"More eyes to gaze into and more lips to kiss."
"What if I was a big gross slime-covered worm-thing?"
"Well, getting a grip on you might be a little hard, but I'm sure we'd find a way."
"What if I learned the accordion?"
I mock-winced. "Oooh. That's a tough one. But I'm sure I could learn to love you, as soon as I got the surgery to permanently cut my auditory nerves."
"Oh… come here and kiss me, ya big lug," she said, yanking me close for a smooch.
"I kinda got used to the lizard tongue," I said when we separated. "But this is also nice."
"Flatterer."
"So… shall we go to Slausens' to celebrate?"
"Probably not a good idea since I'm not stable yet… but I will take a rain check for as soon as I can hold on to this form for more than a couple of hours."
"It's a date. How about Chinese takeout and Fight Fighters, then?"
"Sounds like a plan, Hair Boy."
--
That evening, Miles and Stella were curled up in bed, celebrating the end of Stella's late nights. Well, technically, they'd just finished celebrating. At the moment, they were basking in the afterglow.
"It's been way too long," Stella said, snuggling up to her husband.
"Waaaay too long," agreed Miles. "But hey, it was worth the wait."
"That it was," Stella remarked. "So… are you ever going to tell her?"
"Tell her what?" Miles asked, feigning ignorance.
"You know exactly what."
"I really don't see the need," he said. "It's not like it's something she needs to worry about at this age."
"So you're not ever going to mention that mural we found in the darkest depths of the Green Eyes' Temple, ten years ago. The mural of Xothipacla, the Goddess of Love… who just happens to have pink skin, golden hair, three eyes, four arms, bat wings, and a lion tail. And a mortal lover who looked an awful lot like a grown-up version of our son."
"Like I said… it really doesn't seem like the kind of thing that needs to concern her right now. Let her grow up, and if it's her destiny to be a love goddess, well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, won't we."
"Hmmm… mother-in-law of a goddess. I could get used to the thought."
"Getting a little ahead of yourself there, dear. They haven't even graduated grade school yet."
"Let a mother dream, dear. Let a mother dream."