To Prevent Smart Choices (Magical Mayhem)

by Emily Martha Sorensen

  Magical Mayhem Part 4:

  To Prevent Smart Choices

  by Emily Martha Sorensen

  Copyright © 2017 Emily Martha Sorensen

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: The Eavesdrop

  Chapter 2: The Nightmare

  Chapter 3: The Mission

  Chapter 4: The Dream

  Next Book

  k12

  Chapter 1: The Eavesdrop

  Paint dribbled from the thick brush as Kendra swiped it from one side of the crack to the other. Swipe swipe swipe.

  “. . . So I don’t think Florence is going to come,” Kendra concluded, finishing the interminable story that had felt like it was never going to wrap up.

  “Good,” Chronos grunted from below her.

  “Good?” Kendra’s head spun around, glaring down at her. “Florence said no, and you say good?”

  Chronos dunked her thick brush into the can of housepaint beside her. Truth be told, she hadn’t listened for the last ten minutes, but she wasn’t going to admit that. If she did, Kendra might feel the need to explain the whole spiel all over again from the beginning.

  “You were asking her to join you, right?” Chronos hazarded. The last thing she had paid attention to was Kendra going over a long list of reasons why Florence would have made a perfect member of their still-unnamed villain team.

  “Yes!” Kendra said impatiently. “Weren’t you listening?”

  No, Chronos thought.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well,” Kendra said huffily, shoving her paintbrush into the can of paint perched precariously on top of the ladder she was standing upon, “then you should know there’s nothing good about it. We needed Florence!”

  “Then maybe you should’ve told her that before you quit your team and left her behind,” Chronos said tartly, jabbing her paintbrush into the cracks in the paint beside her.

  She was feeling rather cranky to be doing this chore in the first place. Tiffany’s “FIX IT!” power had fixed the structural damage on the outside walls of the lair, but the paint had stayed cracked, leaving exposed stone and bricks underneath. Chronos hadn’t even noticed that, much less cared, but then Kendra had shown up in her bedroom this morning with two paintbrushes and cans of paint.

  “C’mon, oracle!” Kendra had said impatiently. “We have to make this place look respectable!”

  “Why?” Chronos had asked incredulously. “Who’s going to see it?”

  Logic hadn’t worked on Kendra, however, and then next thing she’d known, they were both outside painting walls for no good reason whatsoever.

  That girl is way too obsessed with appearances, Chronos thought grumpily, poking her paintbrush into the holes in the paint and moving down a step to reach the next part. I hope she and Rhea never meet.

  “. . . which was why I couldn’t tell her then,” Kendra was saying. “But of course I thought of it! I knew we would need Florence! She has powers to incapacitate without injuring, and she wouldn’t have had to give them up because she was in no danger of turning evil! What do you take me for?”

  A person who can’t stop talking long enough to notice that I’m not listening? Chronos thought.

  “Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” Kendra said, glaring as she swiped her paintbrush back and forth again across the spot that was already perfectly smooth. “‘That’s just an excuse! She just wanted her best friend back on a team with her!’ But that’s not it! We needed her!”

  Is she ever going to stop talking? Chronos wondered.

  “Because we need her powers,” Kendra went on. “Nobody else on the team has magic!”

  Chronos stopped painting to stare upwards incredulously.

  “We need at least one person who —”

  “You mean, apart from me, you, and Tiffany, meaning all three members of the team, right?” Chronos interrupted.

  Kendra let out an exasperated sigh, shaking her head. She didn’t even look down at Chronos. “I mean useful magic.”

  “Right, because my ability to see the future isn’t useful at all, which is why you didn’t pester me into joining you.”

  “I mean magical girl magic!” Kendra said. “You’re a born mage!”

  “And the magical girl powers you and Tiffany both still have don’t count because . . .?”

  “Because we’re not magical girls, we’re verges! And I don’t have any powers whatsoever!”

  Uh huh. Right, Chronos thought, watching Kendra haul herself up to the top step of the ladder and reach high above her head to paint a spot she really shouldn’t have attempted. Either you’ve got an inhuman sense of balance naturally, which is possible if not probable, or you’re using some low-level magic right now without noticing it’s there.

  “Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” Kendra said.

  You’re remarkably poor at knowing what I’m thinking.

  “You’re thinking, ‘Born mage power is just as good as magical girl power!’ But you’re wrong.”

  No, I was wondering if you might be an extremely weak born mage and not know it, Chronos thought. An unusual sense of balance is exactly the sort of power that’s common to weak born mage families. Did you ever volunteer as a police aide? They would have screened for that if you did.

  “A magical girl has no theoretical upper limit on her power,” Kendra said pompously. “And she transforms into a second life, meaning she’s protected against dying for real. It’s the perfect defensive ability, and all magical girls have it. Not to mention the fact that a magical girl can improve when she powers up!”

  “Terrific,” Chronos muttered. Why do I care?

  “Tiffany is only a verge,” Kendra said, speaking the last word in a tone that was distinctly snobby. “She can’t transform or power up. The only way her powers can change is to get weaker as they fade away. You can see why that doesn’t count.”

  “You’re a verge, too,” Chronos reminded her, finding the scorn with which Kendra had said the word a trifle ridiculous.

  “Only technically,” Kendra said haughtily, catching the paint can as it teetered and fell. She whipped it around so fast that the paint sloshed back in, and plopped it back on top of the ladder without looking at it. “I have no powers at all.”

  Uh huh. Right, Chronos thought.

  Kendra sighed, a long sigh of frustration. “But Florence said no.”

  For an instant, Chronos imagined what would have happened if the former magical girl’s best friend had agreed to the arrangement. Kendra would have then approached her other teammate, and then every other acquaintance she’d ever known with useful powers, all of whom would have converged upon Chronos’s new home in a mass of humanity . . .

  Chronos shuddered.

  “Good,” Chronos repeated, meaning it this time. “I already have too many freeloaders.”

  Kendra glared at her.

  “Guess what? Guess what? Guess what?” Tiffany shouted, coming running out of the lair. Her arms were waving wildly, her two braids swinging. “I came up with a great team name for us!”

  “I fear to ask . . .” Chronos muttered.

  Tiffany spread her arms in unbridled joy. “The Daffodils!”

  There was a crashing sound as Kendra lost her balance at the top of her ladder. Her paintbrush went flying. Her quick reflexes helped her grab the top of the ladder, and she hung there, swinging, for several seconds.

  Not a born mage power, Chronos noted. Born mages can’t turn their magic off, and she lost her balance while distracted.

  “Isn’t it perfect?!” Tiffany babbled. “I can use Clyde the Clothing Cupboard to make us all ruffly dresses covered in daf
fodils —”

  “Tiffany . . . we’re villains,” Chronos said wearily.

  Kendra swung to the ground, landing with perfect grace.

  “Crocuses?” Tiffany asked hopefully.

  “Villains,” Kendra snapped, picking up her fallen paintbrush. The bristles were now coated with strands of dead grass.

  “Marigolds?”

  “VILLAINS!” Chronos and Kendra both shouted.

  “Well, I want a better villain name than ‘Hey You’ this time!” Tiffany sobbed, stomping back into the lair and leaving them behind.

  Still not offering to help, I notice, Chronos thought. She watched Kendra climb up the ladder to a new spot, then watched Kendra pick the dead grass out of her paintbrush, wrinkling her nose.

  “How about you?” Kendra asked at last, looking up.

  Chronos was startled. “How about what?”

  “What’s your villain name going to be?” Kendra asked.

  Chronos blinked. “Chronos.”

  “Soothsayer,” Kendra growled, “that’s your regular name.”

  “Yes,” Chronos said, “and?”

  “And a regular name is not a villain name!”

  Chronos snorted. The former magical girl knew nothing about villains. Chronos’s late parents had used their real names; Atlas and Véronique had had no fear of anyone figuring out who they were or where they lived. They would have relished a team of overzealous magical girls trying to attack them in Olympus Estates, but no magical girls had ever been stupid enough to try.

  Not yet, anyway, Chronos remembered. Avenging Angel would have laid waste to Olympus Estates, and the futures with it ending up in ruins aren’t entirely gone . . .

  Goosebumps rose on her arms, and she shivered.

  Just because she didn’t like her family didn’t mean she wanted them to all get slaughtered. Even if they did deserve it, seeing as they made a habit of attacking children.

  Naturally, Chronos didn’t mention any of this. She had no intention of letting Kendra find out she had been raised by a villain family.

  “Nobody’s ever going to have cause to ask my villain name,” Chronos said instead. “I don’t want one. Too much bother to remember.”

  Kendra snorted and rolled her eyes.

  “What’s yours?” Chronos asked.

  Kendra hesitated.

  “Dark Cream Angel?” Chronos asked.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Kendra gave her an incredulous look. “No! I haven’t decided yet.”

  “You could go by Athena, the goddess of war,” Chronos suggested.

  “How about no.”

  “Or maybe Nike, the goddess of victory.”

  “Isn’t that a shoe?”

  “Oh, I know!” Chronos snapped her fingers. “Hera! She’s always a villain when she shows up!”

  “Why are you pulling names from ancient mythology?!”

  “Ah . . .” Chronos gulped. “No reason.”

  “Besides, the only villains who use those names are from that one Olympian family,” Kendra muttered.

  Chronos flinched. “Is that so?”

  Kendra snorted. “It’s a good thing your name’s not something like those, or I’d’ve suspected you were one of them.”

  Chronos’s mouth fell open. Does she not know Chronos is the titan of time?

  Kendra sighed loudly, glaring at the wall as she shoved her paintbrush across a new spot. “It’s so frustrating. I want to think of a villain name that sounds cool, but everything I think of is one I’ve already heard.”

  “Uh huh,” Chronos said carefully. It was still amazing to her that the former magical girl had heard of the Olympian villain family and yet hadn’t added up two and two.

  “Because I want it to sound cool, but I’ve never studied villain names, you know.”

  “Right,” Chronos said. I guess I should be glad my dad named me what he did. I hated that he named me after a boy, but if it’s proven useful . . .

  “I just want a name that’s unique,” Kendra griped.

  Chronos wrinkled her nose. You’ve clearly never been teased because your name was Chronos and your sister’s name was Rhea. What kind of sane parents name a pair of siblings after the father and mother of the gods?

  Especially given that Rhea had killed Chronos. Learning that fact had not lessened Chronos’s resentment of her name as a child.

  Oh, she knew why her parents had done it. Her father’s father had started the tradition of naming his children after not just gods but titans, and Atlas had wanted to continue it. When two-year-old Rhea had stopped being able to see anything about her mother’s past, and they’d learned shortly afterwards that Véronique was pregnant, Atlas had jumped to the correct conclusion that it was due to the second child’s power.

  Since interference usually only happened when two people were closely related and had similar powers, it had seemed reasonable to assume their second child would be able to see the past like Rhea, or something similar. Therefore, naming the child after the titan of time had made perfect sense. Never mind that the child had ended up being a girl.

  “Maybe I’ll call myself Nephilim,” Kendra mused. “That’s a fallen angel in Hebrew mythology, right? Oh, wait, but I think that’s plural. And Nephil sounds stupid.”

  “I thought you didn’t want a name from ancient mythology,” Chronos said.

  “I don’t want a name from Greek mythology,” Kendra said. “Oh! Seraph! That’s not a fallen angel, but it’s angelic, and it sounds cool. That’ll be my name.”

  Even though she should have kept her mouth shut, Chronos just couldn’t let the subject go. “What do you have against Greek mythology?”

  “Take your pick,” Kendra said. “The fact that they forced me to learn it in school, and it was really boring and repetitive? The fact that there’s a villain family that worships it?”

  Chronos bristled.

  “I am so glad I learned enough to get a D on that test,” Kendra added. She leaned off to the left to paint a new spot. “If I’d failed it, it would’ve ruined my C average.”

  “C average?” Chronos sputtered. “How is that possible? Every future I saw of you suggested that you’re both smart and an overachiever!”

  “I only care about the things I care about, oracle,” Kendra said, as if it were obvious.

  Chronos rubbed her forehead.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” Kendra said, climbing a step higher to paint another cracked spot off to the left. “What was your nightmare about last night?”

  Chronos was startled. “How could you —?”

  “I’m a light sleeper, and you were mumbling all night.”

  “But my room’s all the way down the hallway!” Chronos exploded.

  “Yes,” Kendra said. “And I was eavesdropping.”

  Chronos buried her face in her hands. Note to self: install soundproofing.

  Chapter 2: The Nightmare

  “Wowww!” Tiffany exclaimed, her eyes wide. “You were in the FBI Special Ops?”

  “Yes,” Kendra said impatiently. “The Wings of Justice volunteered as FBI aides. Can I get past, please?”

  “That makes you famous!” Tiffany cried, waving her arms excitedly, which made her block the walkway even more thoroughly. A dozen broken machines in pieces strewn across the floor were taking care of the rest of the path through the room.

  “That makes me trying to get past you,” Kendra hinted.

  “I’ve always wanted to be famous,” Tiffany said wistfully.

  “We weren’t famous. Would you please . . .”

  “Did you ever get to meet the President?” Tiffany gasped, clasping her hands together.

  “I said FBI, not Secret Service!” Kendra snapped. “The magical girl aides for the Secret Service are way more elite! Now would you please move?”

  Looking reluctant, Tiffany moved aside. But after Kendra squeezed past her to get to the stairs, the verge trailed after her, peppering her with questions.

  “Did you eve
r get to beat a bad guy? Do the magical girls use guns, or just the agents? Is it like you see in the cartoons on TV?”

  Kendra felt her cheek twitch. It was enough to make her contemplate digging the watch out of her pocket so that she could teleport away.

  “I saw a really fun cartoon the other day,” Tiffany said. She burst out into the theme song: “Magical Girl Rent-a-cop! Saves the mall while others shop —”

  “Okay, stop!” Kendra burst out. “First of all, it was not fixing the TVs when you made them incapable of showing anything but cartoons. Second, that show is awful. Third, have you seen the oracle anywhere? I think she’s hiding from me.”

  “She told me not to say where she was hiding,” Tiffany said.

  Kendra whirled around and gave the girl a sharp glare.

  “Do you want to help me rebuild Brian?” Tiffany asked hopefully. “I went to lots of effort to make him, and then Chronos made me break him and took half the pieces away.”

  “No, I’m not going to help you rebuild the brainwasher,” Kendra growled. “Where’s the oracle hiding?”

  “I dunno . . .” Tiffany sang, tapping a finger against her lips. “Somewhere . . .”

  Kendra closed her eyes. She was not going to put dangerous weapons back into the hands of this brat, but perhaps she could bargain with something else.

  “I’ll tell you about my time in the FBI,” she said, opening her eyes, “if you’ll tell me where the oracle’s hiding.”

  Tiffany’s eyes brightened. “Were you famous? Did you get your picture on TV?”

  “Well, it certainly wouldn’t have shown up on your cartoons-only TVs,” Kendra muttered.

  “What’s a handler?” Tiffany added.

  Kendra sighed explosively. She’d made the mistake of yelling, “Even our FBI handler gave us more information than you’ve been giving me, soothsayer!” while she’d been looking for Chronos, which was how she’d gotten into this mess.

  “Is it like a door handle?” Tiffany asked. “Could I fix it?”

  Kendra had not parted with their FBI handler on the best of terms. “Yes,” she said. “I’d love to see you try to fix it.”