Rebekah Green and Mimic
Rebekah got up and followed Mimic towards the training room. A couple of butterflies danced in her stomach, but she did her best to calm them. She told herself that even though she would be fighting Mimic, he wasn't aiming to hurt her, only test her skills. She had her bag, and it was a comfortable and familiar weight on her shoulders.
I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.
She stepped through the door into the room and looked around. It was about 20 metres square, and half as high, lit by five hanging lamps. It was bare of any furniture or equipment, save for the dark blue padding on the floor. She wouldn't have a heap to use in her environment, then. So be it.
Mimic stood impassively, just inside the door, but Rebekah walked right the way to the other end of the room before turning to face him. Unlike Kyle's fight, which was almost exclusively at close quarters, her skills didn't lend themselves to that type of fight. Turning back to face him, she slipped her kite shield out of an outside pocket of her bag and grew it from the size of her hand up to about a metre tall. That was all the preparation she was able to do for now, not knowing exactly what was coming. Deep breath in, time to begin.
Rebekah faced mimic in a fighting stance and reached out to the material of his super suit. She figured that the material would be tough enough to survive a small change in scale while retaining its strength, so she shrunk the fabric around his neck, pulling it a lot tighter around his throat. Hoping that would give her a moment's opening, she focused on a spot just behind Mimic and appeared there an instant later, and swung her shield in a sold blow towards his wings.
Mimic didn't seemed phased by the fact his own suit was chocking him. Within seconds, the suit returned to its normal appearance, mimic breathing fine and as Rebekah disappeared, Mimic spun about, raising a hand and catching the shield.
"You will find that trying to use your powers on my person won't work too well. I'm not called mimic for nothing, child"
He leaped backwards, watching to see what Rebekah would do next. For now, Mimic maintained the same tactic he had used with Kyle, waiting and watching
"Hey, worth a shot" Rebekah shrugged as she regathered herself. "Might have bought me some time at least."
She was fine with him watching and waiting. That gave her another opportunity to do her thing. There had to be somethings he couldn't copy from her, things like plans, circumstances and equipment. She needed to find an advantage in those. She looked up to the cieling for a moment, but decided to keep up with her first line of attack. She'd exhaust this trick before moving on.
Rather than shrinking part of Mimic's suit, she expanded everything in a burst. His shoes became clownishly huge while his clothing got incredibly loose and baggy. She assumed that he would shrink it back down pretty quickly, but she didn't want to give him that time. Quickly teleporting in again, she grabbed for his left sleeve, which was now hanging down to the floor. She popped a couple of feet to the right and made to tie it up with the right one, both behind his back.
It was a long shot, but against Mimic, so was everything. All going well, he'd end up with both hands tied behind his back and encased in his own super-durable costume, no matter if he shrunk it back to normal or not. More likely she'd get summarily shoved away, but perhaps the rest of his clothing would impede his movements enough to give her that chance.
Mimic buffeted his wing rising into the air, soon returning his suit to normal. Mimic teleported away from Rebekah, as soon as he reappeared again he was moving. He darted to Rebekah, maintaining a control over his suit so Rebekah couldn't manipulate it again, he decided to change tactics.
He slid into the shadows, borrowing Kalinda's ability again, when he was close enough the Rebekah to throw a punch. He appeared directly behind her, and grabbed her arms, wantin to see if she could figure a way out
Truly, teleportation was a double-edged sword. It let each of them attack very swiftly, and cut down the time the opponent had to react, but it also let them escape just as quickly. Mimic's hands around hers were no obstacle, since anywhere she could see, she could be. She popped to the other side of the room and was free in an instant. She didn't wait to be caught again either, but kept jumping to different spots, leading Mimic around in a game of teleporting cat and mouse.
Mimic's brand of teleportation seemed to be slightly different to her own, both when he had been fighting Kyle and again now. He was melting into the shadows on the ground and popping out of them again. He used darkness while she used light. That was a difference she might be able to use.
Still jumping from place to place, Rebekah extended her power up to the lamps hanging from the ceiling, and started to slowly grow their shades. As the plastic hemispheres expanded, they blocked out the sideways exposure of the bulbs and directed more of their light straight down. While they had been lighting the whole room equally, the floor was now spotted with five pools of bright light with the rest falling into shadow.
With the new arrangement, she found it easier to stay ahead of Mimic. If she kept to the middle of the light patches, there would always be a metre of space between where she stood and where he would suddenly appear, trying to grab her again and cut off her vision of the next spot. That space gave her enough reaction time to stay ahead until she could spring her trap.
The middle lampshade had kept on growing after the others had stopped, and was now a heavy plastic dome two metres across and a metre high. She had needed to thicken the wire to keep it hanging, but now as she gave it a quick shrink, the wire snapped under the weight and the improvised cage fell from the ceiling just as Mimic appeared under it and Rebekah popped away.
She turned back to look at her handiwork from a pool of light in a corner of the room. Would it hold him? Was it heavy enough that he couldn't just lift it up? Could he teleport through opaque barriers? She couldn't herself, but she also didn't know about the type of teleportation Mimic was using. Was it limited as well?
Mimic was gone in a heart beat. Engulfed in shadows, he appeared behind Rebekah, just as the room descended into complete darkness, shadows expanding to the walls and engulfing the light. He grabbed Rebekah again, "clever" he said, "but you must always be adaptable"
The darkness was complete, they would both need to rely on other senses. At least for the time being. mimic was merely trying to see how Rebekah's abilities worked, while also testing her.
Damn. She had really hoped that would work.
The lights went out, and for a moment Rebekah thought she had been caught in her own trap under the lampshade. Throwing her hands out around her and even jumping up soon confirmed that no, she wasn't under anything, Mimic had just killed the lights. Her hand had reached half way around to her backpack before she paused to consider the teacher's words. Be adaptable.
Easy for him to say, but what was he trying to tell her there? Was it a clue of some kind, something he wanted to see from her? As far as she was concerned, she had been adapting ever since she walked through the training room door. She had realised years ago that the best application of her powers wasn't in a straight fight but in hacking preparedness to an absurd degree. She didn't need Batman's famed talent for bringing exactly what he would need for a situation when she could carry a house's worth of gear in a single backpack.
Did he really think she wouldn't have a light source on her? Her hand hovered over the pocket containing a flashlight, but she also had lamps, flares, and even a searchlight, all shrunk down and stored away. Pulling out some of that was the obvious thing to do, but was it adaptable? Was it unexpected? No, Mimic was asking her if she could do something else in this situation. If that was the test, she would have to rise to the challenge.
She couldn't see anything in the pitch darkness, or pick where Mimic was. With his moving through darkness, he could have been anywhere in the room. She couldn't hear any footsteps or other movement, so she figured he was just standing still waiting to see what she would do. Well, not see perhaps, since it was totally black, unless he was using one of his umptillion copied powers to see her in spite of it. Anyway, he certainly wasn't taking advantage of the darkness to attack her, so she thought she had a bit of time to prepare something. Something different. Something adaptable. Something about other senses.
So far, she had been trying without success to hit Mimic with physical attacks: choking, hitting, tying him up and and trapping him under a wall of plastic. She wasn't one of those supers who could challenge him by hurling lightning bolts and laser beams, so what did that leave? Mentally running down the inventory of what she had in her backpack, she settled on the row of vials she had brought from Dr. Arcturus's chemistry lab at Super School - various substances that could be useful in super endeavours. Normally she would be hesitant to go throwing these around in a fight, especially after Mimic had rebuked Kyle so strongly about avoiding anything lethal, but one of them might just fit the situation. It was a different tack. It might even have been called adapting. She would give it a go.
Crouching down, she slipped off her backpack as quietly as she could and reached inside to undo a zipper. She felt for an airtight cylinder with a small nozzle on top, and a spray bottle, which she grew up to its normal size. Not so with the other container. She didn't want any more of this substance than what was already in the tiny thimbleful she carried. In this situation, a single drop might be too much, especially if she didn't want to effect the other students waiting next door.
She fumbled in the dark for a second, but then the seal on the vial connected with the spray bottle, and she was able to transfer a little of the substance inside. She shrunk this down a little, just to be sure she didn't overdo things, and then reached further into the bag for her oxygen mask. Only once it was securely strapped over her face did she stand back up and take hold of the loaded spray bottle.
All was still dark and silent, with no indication of where Mimic was or what he might be doing, so Rebekah took her chances and unleashed a single pump of thioacetone - the world's smelliest substance.
Ever since Rebekah had heard the story of this compound back in high school, she had had a kind of morbid fascination with it. It was so bizarre to think of a chemical that could incapacitate people with nothing more than its odour. When people thought about dangerous chemicals, the images that came to mind where of explosives, corrosives or horrible toxins. Thioacetone was none of those. The idea of a chemical that attacked with the power of smelliness was almost laughable. So, when she had the chance, she jumped at the opportunity to get her hands on the stuff.
So far as Rebekah knew, nobody had really wanted to do anything with thioacetone since the 60s. Whatever new developments waited in the chemistry and applications of thioketone polymers just wasn't worth the hazards of something going awry while trying to make them. Before research in the area was abandoned, however, there had been a few infamous incidents. In 1967, when the lid popped off a bottle of residues in a research lab. Almost immediately, other scientists in a building 200 metres away complained of nausea and sickness from the intense smell of rotting meat. Back in the lab itself, the chemists responsible got forcibly volunteered to measure how quickly the smell spread. The stopwatches proved useless and the attempt was abandoned when one drop was detected from half a kilometre downwind almost immediately.
Then there was the German city of Freiburg, where in 1889, chemists at a soap factory were reportedly working on a larger molecule called tri-thioacetone, which is still used as a flavoring and a fragrance. But when they mistakenly broke it apart into thioacetone, workers started falling ill. Spontaneous outbreaks of vomiting were reported in the surrounding neighborhoods, and it led to the evacuation of the entire city.
Here today, Rebekah wasn't using nearly as much as had been involved in either of those incidents. She wanted to affect only one room, while the rest of the class only getting enough to wrinkle their noses at the heavy training room door. Inside the room, though, the stink would surely make anyone retch. It wasn't a clean way to fight, but it probably had the best chance of anything she had tried yet.
How amazing would it be, she thought, if this actually took him down? For the students in the other room, all they would see on the screen was a sudden blackness, a period of silence, and then her, walking back into the classroom with a victorious smile on her face. It might be a stunt to rival even the Boy Wonder. She allowed herself a smile at that fantasy, unlikely as it was. Mimic always seemed to find a way, but for now, the dream was enough to keep her going.
Mimic watched everything Rebekah did, hidden in the shadows he could see everything she did. He had enough understand if the show realm from experience with Klinda, and know that his mere mimicry was no were near the same as hers, having been born to it. But still, he could do enough to hide and see through them for now, and Mimic watched the girl create something.
No doubt if I step out I'll be assaulted by whatever it is. The girl needs to work faster though
"An opponent isn't just going to sit back and watch you Crete something out in the real world, Rebekah. You need to work faster" his voice would seem to come from everywhere, even as the rooms filtration system began to work and filtered out whatever Rebekah had sprayed. "Of course in the real world they aren't likely to have a filtration system. Chances are whatever you sprayed could have crippled me for a moment, perhaps enough for you to do something else. You should keep that in mind"
When a small ping could be heard, Mimic leaped out the shadows, as vines shot upwards, to encase Rebekah. Mimic wasn't aiming to hurt any of the students, but merely test them. "I think this battle has gone on long enough. Your a smart girl, you just need to be a little quicker"
Still, he waited to see if she would do something else.
Rebekah struggled to hear Mimi'c voice over the sudden roaring of the air-con system as it was suddenly cranked up to what felt like hurricane strength. If she'd been able to see, she might have been able to shut those down, but as it was, Mimic had the right of it. Nice try, but still not quite good enough. His comment about real opponents though, still stung a little. She'd known he wasn't really trying to hurt her, and he'd given her an opportunity, so she'd taken her chances and showed her resourcefulness. What was wrong with that?
She didn't have time to make a reply before she felt ropes leap up to entangle her. Her first response was to shrink them down enough to snap her bounds, but when she applied her power, she could feel nothing happening. Was he blocking her abilities? No, she realised as a leaf dragged over her elbow, these were vines - living things that she couldn't influence.
The next option was to drop her shield and go for her bag again, reaching around with both hands to grab a torch and her bush knife, which were both in outside pockets and within easy reach. In the couple of moments it took for her to grab them and then another for the torch to gutter out and be eclipsed by shadows, Mimic was proved right again. She wasn't quite fast enough, and the vines had enough of a head start to get her well tied up. Working blind, she couldn't fend them off effectively, and her struggles against them soon tailed off. Two more vines worked their way between her fingers and forced her to drop what she was holding, and they clattered to the ground. The roaring of the filters had calmed as well, having done their job, leaving the room silent save only for her heavy breathing.
"You win" she conceded. "I can't get out"
Mimic lowered the vines and dispelled the shadows, "you did well. Your problem is you are relying to much on a bag, when you could have everything at the tip of your fingers. You should develop a super suit thy can hide everything on your person. That's part of what we do in this class, help you design your suit." He said, "you think quick, and you stay calm. You're on the right track, you just had to work on being quicker"
Rebekah took off her gas mask, and received the compliments and criticism with a nod. She bent down to retrieve the items she had dropped, and when they were shrunk back down and stowed away safely, she turned to go back into the classroom. It was almost uncomfortably bright in there, after how dark it had been under Mimic's shadow power, but she found her desk ok and collapsed down into her chair. Someone else would be going in for their assessment next, and she squinted around wondering who it would be.