Charlie hesitated at the door to the changing room. "Arf!" xe whined. I gently patted xir shoulder. "Don't worry, we'll be practically invisible the whole time we're in there" I promised. I strolled in with practiced confidence followed closely by Alice and Charlie. True to my word, we went completely unnoticed besides Jessica bumming a tampon off me.
Today the gymnasium was setup for basketball. I gave Charlie a smile. "So here's how it works. Every day we py a typical normie sport. However, use of powers is allowed and encouraged. I don't usually use mine because that sucks the fun out of everything. There are two groups, shifters and everyone else. The shifter games are horrifically violent and you might actually lose an arm. Meanwhile, the rest of us py a game where you're not allowed to seriously injure each other. Any questions?" I expined.
"Woof!" replied Charlie. "I'll take that as a no" I smiled. Charlie fixed me with an upset head tilt. I ignored xir. I'm not going to lie, this was incredibly funny. We broke into teams of five. As usual I snagged Rose and Alice, plus Charlie and on this occasion Jessica. Teleporting the ball was against the rules (as always) but she could do some really cool handoff stuff where she threw the ball and teleported to catch it.
Rose of course was in her element, using her telekinesis to prevent so many balls from nding in the basket that the other team tried to have her power banned. Besides them though our team was garbage. I of course had my chronic pain problem, and while being allowed to skateboard around the court improved my mobility I was still sluggish to react to pys by the other team.
Alice was pretty passible. Her turning into members of the other team wasn't fooling anyone, even when she remembered to not have boobs, but she did her best, throwing balls in the general direction of our basket with admirable spirit. Charlie was just pin terrible, to the point I suspected xe wasn't even trying. The points scored by our team were pretty evenly divided between Rose and Jessica. I managed to throw a few balls the right direction but none of them nded. We won our first match but the margin wasn't precisely overwhelming.
Then we went up against a team with Felix and got utterly decimated. Felix just needed to touch the ball once and it was immediately on our side of the court. And he wasn't bad at actually nding baskets either. Sure he only nded one in every ten but he made so many attempts that his low hit rate didn't matter much, and neither Jessica nor Rose had the reaction time to intercept the ball. When we were thirty points down Rose insisted I bind his power, which felt fair. It was too te for victory, but I did get a woman of the match commendation afterwards.
Not for taking Felix out of the equation. I brought the ball close enough to the hoop for Rose or Jessica to course correct it into the basket so many times I had more assists than either of them individually had points.
Charlie scored a point in the next match through no fault of xir own. Someone bowled the ball and it bounced off the back of xir head, ricocheted off the ceiling and nded square in the basket. It was the coolest thing to happen all day to be honest. I mean yeah, Jessica's passing to herself three times and then axe kick dunking the ball was pretty cool, but Jessica did cool stuff all the time, wheras nobody had "accidentally scored an own goal off of Charlie's head" on the bingo card. I voted Charlie enby of the match for that one.
After basketball I escorted Charlie to the town archive so xe could read up on magic and maybe find out if xe had a power and then took Alice home to watch owl house. She insisted we skip to the second season where the lesbian stuff happens and in spite of my distaste for watching stuff out of order I found myself agreeing with her.
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The next morning I took Victoria and Elder Laurent out for a shopping trip. I intended to have one of my own with my own friends ter, but the town's new budget was burning a hole in his pocket and he was excited to replenish the town's propane supplies.
We drove to a dozen walmarts, trading propane canisters in various states of repair (plus about twenty dolrs each) for full propane canisters. I don't think I've ever seen a man so excited by propane outside of a cartoon.
The trunk of the car was pretty small, so we could only carry four or five canisters at a time. "Why don't you drive one of those pickup trucks?" compined the elder. "Well besides the fact beggars can't be choosers, smaller cars guzzle less gas and I don't exactly have an abundance of money" I replied evenly. "You took nearly half the profits from the stall" he groused. "Most of that's in escrow. I'll give it back after you make things right with Emily" I snapped.
"Why are you so concerned about her anyway? You normally go out of your way to remind us you're not one of us. Surely this is an internal matter" he replied with a mixture of annoyance and curiosity. "She likes girls. I like girls. I see a bit of myself in her. I'm a lesbian first and a witch second. She is my community in a way the town hasn't earned" I expined. "It does not seem wise to choose your people based on something so shallow" noted elder Laurent.
"LGBT people are always on the shit list. Looking out for one another is survival" I expined. "Does the same not go for witches?" he pointed out. "Aye. But if its witches or lesbians I'm picking the lesbians" I replied. "Would it not be prudent to consider the situation as a whole and judge who is wrong on a case by case basis" he chided. "Well in this case its clear to me that the witches are in the wrong" I replied with a knell of finality.
"She has a history of violence" the elder noted. "She's done nothing that doesn't happen every day in beastshifter sports games" I replied. "That's different. Beastshifters do not feel pain in the way we do" stated the elder. "You know there's a lot of socalled doctors in outsider society who'd say the exact same thing about people with dark skin" I noted. "This is not the same thing. Beastshifters aren't even human some of the time!" he excimed. "You are so wrong I'm not sure how to expin it to you" I retorted. "What do you mean?" he asked.
"See here's the thing. When pain is your every day, you stop noticing it. It becomes background noise. Something can't stay urgent forever. But that doesn't mean you are no longer being harmed. At some point, even though it hurts you just have to get on with your life. But its still there. Eating away at you. A fire that you can't put out so you just have to pretend its not happening. The first time someone rips your arm off, it feels like the end of the world. The hundredth time? I defy you to still have the energy to scream" I expined.
"But non shifters can't regrow lost limbs!" excimed elder Laurent. "That doesn't mean we can't live in pain" I retorted. "You can't know how they feel. Nobody can feel what another feels!" he snapped. I chuckled. "All is possible with magic" I replied. And then he screamed. Long and shrill. "Oh don't be such a baby!" I scoffed.
"THAT HURT!" he shouted. "It did, didn't it. Much less than getting my arm ripped off probably, but still…" I mused. "How dare you? You had no right!" he excimed. "To what? To show you a fraction of the pain that beastshifters experience every day in their sports games?" I asked. "That's different, beastshifters do not feel as we feel" he cried. "No, they do. They're just used to the pain. Like I'm used to the pain. Because I feel that every moment of every day and objectively its not even that bad. I'll share my memories of being tazed if you want to know what real pain feels like, but I'll have to pull over first because it might cause me to spasm" I noted.
"Every hour of every day?" he gasped. "Pretty much. Its no big deal. Once you experience a pain for long enough you stop noticing it. I don't even need painkillers to sleep anymore" I expined mildly. "Maybe…" he trailed off. "Maybe what? Maybe you should introduce some rules against ripping off each others arms to the beastshifter sports? Or at least make it a penalty…" I suggested.
"… No. That's not an option. If the town were ever to be attacked then the beastshifters need to be ready to protect us. They need to learn violence or a greater tragedy could befall us…" he justified. "Has it occurred to you you might be overly concerned on an outcome unlikely to come to pass?" I asked. "Fortune favours the prepared" he replied. "It might. But preparation is not without cost. And I think you need to seriously consider if the cost is truly commiserate with the risk" I replied.
He was silent for a minute. "You'll make a good elder one day" he stated. "Ew!" I gasped. He chuckled. "Would it be so bad, to truly join our community young Vanessa?" he asked. "I could never be a part of a community that marginalizes so many of its people" I retorted. "A community cannot get better if all who see the problem take flight and leave the problem to rot" he posited. "It should not be the job of a child to fix the world they were born into" I replied. "Perhaps. But can you truly with good conscience see the injustice of the world and do nothing to fix it, regardless if it be indefensible for that job to fall to you?" he asked.
I sighed. "No. If I were capable of turning a blind eye, nobody in town would even know I exist, outside of a rumour" I admitted. "And that is why Elder Sampson chose to become an elder" he smiled. "And what about you? Why did you choose to become an elder?" I asked. "I felt the existing elders cked the strength of will to do what needs be done. They were soft and sentimental. Which is no sin on its own, but they often refused to envision how a raid might go wrong, and they lost many good witches because their answer to what if the arm is raised was “it won't be”".
"After each bad raid, I would go to them with my analysis of what went wrong and what could have been done to avoid the outcome, and they challenged that I come up with such pns in foresight and not in hindsight, since they believed that the tragedies were completely unpredictable. So I started sitting in on their raid pnning sessions and making prophetic suggestions. And they came to understand my perspective was not rooted in pessimism, but in preparedness and I was named elder. Mostly I pn raids, and if ever the town were to be attacked or discovered, they would turn to me for matters of military strategy" he expined.
I smiled. "It is not thinking that gets people killed" I recited. "Yes. Yes exactly! I imagine all the horrible ways the people I protect could die, and then I design precautions such that those horrible situations do not come to pass. I might not be as sociable as Maggie or even Sampson. But my perspective keeps my people alive" he smiled.
"Can you not imagine something going terribly wrong if you let a bunch of kids out into the world?" I asked. "Your power of mind control allows you a range of responses to any potential danger. My people could not be safer with you than with me in my own person" he smiled. "But I almost lost them! The very first time I left town I got captured by witch hunters and Victoria and my friends only barely escaped" I excimed.
"And what did you learn from that?" he asked. "If I see a cop, test if my powers work on him immediately. If he's immune, attempt to flee. If that fails, put a bullet in him" I noted. "That's… perhaps not the most comprehensive or even wise strategy. But you considered what you could have done differently and learned from the experience and will not make the same mistake twice. You prepared, and if I felt that you were unprepared I need only inform you of that fact and you would reconsider your intentions" he praised. "Thanks?" I replied.
"Do shops still sell vinyl records? I think the success of your market stall idea calls for a celebration, and its been oh so long since we expanded our music catalogue" he smiled. "Sure, I can find you a second hand record store. They might be a little more expensive than you expect though" I said. "Excellent" he smiled.
