Another Pause
author: teri, stana, estela, ian 
Date: Mon, 31 May 1999 17:23:02 EDT
***********************
"I don't think we can turn back even if we want to but..."
Estela shook
her head, feeling the tired coldness rippling from
Teri....and then
suddenly something clicked into place in her mind. "Stay
where you are!" she
snapped sharply at the others.

Everyone froze except Shinji.... who upon reaching Estela's
10 foot limit,
glanced back to see if they were following. On finding they
weren't, he
turned and glared at them, arms crossed. Estela nodded, a
different
kind of cold in her eyes than that which afflicted Teri.

"Teri."

"Yeah?"

"How does he feel to you? Right now?"

"Angry....cold," she hesitated, looking at Shinji. Her own
thoughts and
feelings were so confused-- anger, resentment, concern, and
a fierce
protectiveness. She realized she'd had her eyes closed, and
opened them.
"Something is wrong with his aura."

"Some thing is wrong, period." Estela narrowed her eyes.
"Draining you like
that, anger and cold...to me that sounds like darkness."

Shinji narrowed his eyes as everyone else's went wide. He
regarded Estela
with an annoyed curiosity. A sinking feeling radiated from
Teri. Estela found
something in that look discomforting, and took a deep
breath to calm her
nerves.

Teri unconciously chewed her lower lip. She cast a glance
at Estela, then
flushed with effort as she tried to dim the Empathetic
power she had been
having trouble controlling since Shinji attacked her.

Estela shut her eyes and gathered her power, the taxation
on her over-used
psionics growing quickly from uncomfortable to painful. Her
eyes still
closed, she reached down and scooped up a bit of the cold,
damp material of
the Nachtmer. She rose, then stalked a cold, graceful path
towards Shinji,
wings spread behind her, even as she focused her will. *The
Aethyr is fluid.*
Tadrin's voice echoed in her head. Fluid...easier, she
hoped, to manipulate
with Telekinesis.

Shinji had seen her coming, and had more fully turned to
face her. Teri
noted with a trace of worry that he had dropped his hands
to his sides, and
had slowly begun to crack his fingers, one by one.

"I don't know Shinji well....but you're still not the
Shinji I met.
You're....dark. And that means I can't leave you loose,
where you can hurt
the rest of us somehow," Estela informed her quarry. At
first it had seemed
that Shinji would have lashed out at her, his current
personality seemed to
indicate so, but instead a thin smile crossed his face.
Somehow it seemed far
more disturbing.

"And this is your great epiphany?" he asked, unimpressed.
Estela
stopped several feet away, for caution's sake. The others
had fallen silent.
"That I am not who I say I am? Based on what, may I ask?
The impulses your
miniscule mastery of telekenesis has been feeding you, or
the almost equally
useless things the Empath has been able to tell you?"

Estela's fist clenched tighter around the Nachtmer soil at
the insult.

Shinji took a single step forward. "And yet even upon this
obvious lack
of concrete evidence you proceed." He chuckled briefly, but
it was a
forced one, with nothing but scorn behind it. "A danger to
you? Wake up, you
pathetic example of a psionicist, didn't I risk my neck to
save yours?"

Another step.

He shot Estela a death glance. "And as I recall, you did
nothing at all
to help Teri when she went to face that nightmare alone."

*Not alone,* Teri thought, *with Shinji...*

Another step. Suddenly Estela noticed how quickly he had
closed the
distance between them, and fluttered her wings a bit in
concern. In fact if he
wanted to he could probably have reached out and touched
her. Or worse. He had
managed to distract her with those eyes, those hate filled
eyes that had
locked onto hers, and which she had been...what? Afraid to
look away
from?

Not completely, but fear had been a part of it. She pushed
the fear
aside as best she could. Estela narrowed her eyes in
concentration and smiled
faintly. "Jedi mind tricks? On *me*?"

Before Shinji could do anything else, Estela gritted her
teeth and thrust
her hand forward. The Nachtmer-stuff flared out in long,
paper thin ribbons.
Estela noted the speed in which Shinji had fallen into a
defensive stance
and was thankful she had waited no more to use this
technique.

The ribbons swirled about Shinji, surrounding him
completely. His right
arm flew out and sliced though a bit of the stuff, but it
reformed as
easily as if he had struck water. Before he could attack
again, the ribbons
had
him surrounded in a transparent, inescapable bubble.

"Another of your toys, I assume?" he said through the
bubble. Estela just
stood there, fingers splayed and trembling a bit with
tension. She could
feel cold sweat beggining to bead on her pale skin, the
effort of maintaining
something like this already causing her weaker-than-usual
power level
incredible drain.

Shinji noticed with a small hint of satisfaction the
exertion this was taking
her, and stepped closer to the edge of the bubble.
"Interesting. Perhaps,
given a longer life span, you might have been able to
perfect this. However,"
he raised his right arm, which was quickly engulfed in
black and blue flames.
Estela felt the energy build up burn upon her nerve
endings. "I am not going
to give you the opportunity."

His arm lanced out and struck against the film of the
bubble. Estela winced
painfully. She could feel her legs starting to give.
Violent energy swirled
inside the bubble, reminding Teri of some awful, corrupted
Jiy. With a small,
pained voice, Estela called out, "Clip...help me..."

She barely heard the responsive clarion cry before the
strain left her, and
she
fell on one knee, trying to catch her racing breath. Inside
the bubble,
Shinji had stopped. A quick glance at his surroundings told
him that the
bubble had grown much smaller. It was now not much bigger
than himself. He
snarled furiously once, then he fell into brooding silence.

She spoke in a strained voice. "If you....try to fight
free....it will
tighten...until you are crushed....the only way out...is to
surrender."

"And suppose I do? What then, clever little mage girl?"

Estela felt her heart tighten slightly. She hadn't
considered...  She opened
her mouth to comment that she didn't think it was quite the
surrender she
meant, but his quick continuation cut off her labored
reply.

"...But no," he continued, smiling tightly, "I will go
along with this game.
But know this. No mortal has ever dared to force my hand
before. Perhaps you
will take small pleasure in knowing that you are the first.
Enjoy it. I
promise you it won't last."

"Mortal?" Teri burst in. "What do you mean, mortal?"

Shinji glanced at her passively. "It means what it sounded
like. Mortal: a
bieng whose life span is limited, and can easily be made
-very- limited."

Teri narrowed her eyes, moving closer to the swirling curve
of the bubble.

Stana looked over at Estela. "What is that?" she asked in
curiosity,
indicating the bubble.

"It's a mimicry of ......a power a character.....of mine
has.......called
Bubble Shield...and it came up......in my
Testing....designed..." She
suddenly dropped to both knees and one hand, wings draped
so limply that
their tips vanished in the wet mists of the ground.
"Designed to
hold.....darksiders."

Clip whinnied, and the Bubble Shield steadied around
Shinji. Estela felt him
take over completely, and lowered her still-raised hand
with a quiet
explosion of held
breath suddenly released. She braced herself on the wet
ground, panting.
Slowly she opened her eyes and got back up, willing her
clothing to dry
back out. Looking up, she found herself staring into
Shinji's imhumanly
angry eyes through the faint shimmer of the bubble that
imprisoned him. She
turned toward the others. "Thank you, Clip."

Clip flickered his gaze at Estela in acknowledgement as he
and all the others
came foward to stand just on the other side of Estela from
the bubble. *We
need to be able to move that bubble he is held in or we
cannot proceed.*

"Can we...pull it, or push it somehow?" asked Stana.

Ramdek smiled at them. "I can give you a way!"

Teri finally snapped out of simply staring at Shinji, at
blatantly sending
her emotions at him through the thin film of his cage.. to
look at the
boy. "How?"

He gestured...and the bubble lifted slightly as a sort of
wheeled cart
appeared under it, with a handle rising from one side to
permit it to be
guided. The three girls and the unicorn exchanged glances
above the boy's
head, then Teri stepped forward to grab the handle. "He's
my Guardian, even
if he isn't acting like it. I'm taking him." No one moved
to protest.

"So now...?" asked Stana.

*We seem to have little choice but to follow him, or go on
alone,* answered
the unicorn, with a jerk of his horn toward the boy.

"I can't say I trust him...but I can't see how it's any
more dangerous than
going on alone...I say we follow," Estela offered, a bit
wearily with the
strain of having initially created that bubble. With a sigh
she closed
her eyes for a moment, reattuning her distance-touching
sense to feel the
area around them. "I just wish we had some sort of weapons,
since there's so
few defenders now."

"I can do that!" cried the boy, and with another wave of
his hand all three
of the Chosen started as they found swords in their hands,
vaguely
katana-like but with strange, monsterous creatures and
thorns forming
the handguards and back ends of the pommels, and etched on
the blades. The
metal of them was an unpleasant shade of greenish black,
seeming to shift in
a queasy-making, oily fashion. All of them felt uneasy the
second they
appeared. Teri put her left hand back on the bar of the
pushcart
thing...which now that she looked at it was the same odd
material. The
three exchanged looks, two with a faint shudder, Teri with
a feral gleam, and
Clip prancing nervously at the sight of the things.

"I'm not using this," declared Stana, holding it out
between two
fingers as if she wanted nothing to do with it. "I couldn't
use a sword of
this
type if I tried anyway, and this thing gives me the
creeps."

"Your choice," answered Ramdek with a shrug as the weapon
vanished from her
hand.

Estela looked down at the strange weapon in her own right
hand. "......but we
need them.." she said, as if speaking only the second half
of the thought
aloud. She sighed as she looked back up. "You've still got
a Guardian,
Stana, so you can get away with not having it. Teri and I,
though...." she
looked to Teri for confirmation. "Especially since we're
both so drained..."

"As soon as Shinji is back to normal I'll lose this thing.
It'd be nicer if
it were just.. a steel rod or something..." Instantly the
sword remolded
itself into a twisted looking metal bar, the length and a
half of her
arm. She hefted it in one hand. "You take fencing, Em.  A
sword is of no use
to me."

"Fair enough. Are we all agreed then?" The girls and the
unicorn nodded.
"Alright...let's go, kid," Estela said, and they all set
off behind the
eager young boy, Shinji seething with rage in the
bubble-like trap.