Shmd

Heya, a new chapter !

Where we take flight for the first time!

Happy reading,

With love, Sh'.

 

Chapter 77 : Dawn of a new era (Assembling part 2)

 

The Walker’s House, Forest Hills, Queens, New York City, 5th of May, 15:48, in Jessica Jones’ mind

 

Jessica had to stifle a laugh while listening to Patsy’s latest antics as pop-music rang around the both of them in the latter’s room.

 

It had been…Difficult to adapt to life with the Walkers after the incident.

Granted, learning in the same breath that your family had died and that you were being adopted by the family of one of your classmates probably hadn’t been the right way to break both of the news. Dorothy Walker was a lot of things but subtle didn't count among them.

 

It had taken months for the two daughters of the house to form a tentative sisterly bond but another incident, Jessica’s life seemingly revolving around those, finally brought them together, at least a little at first.

 

It was uneasy at first, which was sort of expected considering the fact that their relationship had been built on mutual blackmail.

 

Jessica with her powers.

 

Patsy with her relationship with her mom and its ‘complications’.

 

Again, Dorothy Walker was a lot of things but caring or loving didn't really count among them.

 

Because of Dorothy, Patsy had already taken some ad and modeling gigs which had allowed her to build up a bit of fame. And since Patsy didn’t really want anything to ruin the small amount of clout she'd earned for herself, she and Jessica had made a silent pact to keep each other’s secret on threat of mutually assured destruction.

 

What finally managed to put some grease in the gears after months of cold-war and pinched smiles had been Jessica’s decision to follow along with Aria's lofty-goals of making a superheroic team with the powered folks of her school.

 

More precisely, what made mending her uneasy relationship with Patsy Walker possible at last had been the fact that Jessica had finally some friends to hang around too.

 

It had been surprisingly liberating to share her abnormality with others in the same situation. Jessica hadn’t realized how much it had weighed on her before she did.

 

The fact that Aria, as grating on Jessica’s nerves as her peppy self could be on a daily basis, apparently also shared a lot of her misgivings about life and how shitty it could get had been the cherry on the top.

 

The two of them didn’t talk much, really. Yet, knowing that someone had it bad enough too and still managed to be annoyingly positive about it had been a boost on Jessica’s mood that she had sorely needed.

 

Now, she wasn’t alone anymore and her newly improved mood had apparently bled enough out of her to contaminate Patsy in the process.

 

It still weirded her out sometimes, how much her life had changed since the, admittedly fake, blond had seated her ass at her table in January.

 

Yet, here she was, wasting away time with Patsy as the two of them finally managed to have a Saturday off of their obligations.

 

She had even slept in this morning, so bad that Patsy had decided that jumping on her bed to wake her up had been an acceptable decision.

 

Stars had apparently aligned because the always fakely prim and proper Dorothy had an appointment for a new contract in the afternoon, prompting the girls to still laze around in their PJs so far in the afternoon.

 

Which was the reason why she was currently enduring her adoptive sister painting her nails while trying not to move too much as the chatterbox kept going.

 

Thankfully for Jessica, Patsy had enough grace and a sufficiently wide enough range of cosmetics for the nail polish to be black or she would have never accepted.

 

She still had some standards, after all.

 

“...Anyway here he was, gawking like a dumbass, looking at her like she had just slapped him, and you know what he said?” Patsy chirped, handling her brush with a steady hand and focused on her task with a laser like focus.

 

“Nope, but I have the feeling I’m going to know soon.” Jessica deadpanned.

 

“Jerk.” Patsy bantered while batting her other hand, “He said, hold your horses :”

 

She momentarily dropped the brush back in the polish, her face taking an expression a beaten dog would have been proud of and her eyes going teary.

 

“That mean you don’t like fish?” Pantsy said, her voice suddenly two octaves deeper and her hands clasped before her in a disbelieving and hurt expression.

 

Jessica stilled, drawing a blank for a beat.

 

Then she started to laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

 

After whipping a tear away after her hilarity calmed, she finally managed to get her breath back under control.

 

“That’s what he chose to remember from all of this?” She asked, her tone heavy with disbelief and repressed laughter.

 

“Well, it definitely looked like that.” Patsy answered, going back to her self-assigned task with gusto, “But at least he leaves her alone now.”

 

“Good for her, I imagine.” Jessica snorted.

 

“She’s thrilled.” Her adoptive sister added helpfully, “Who even asks someone out by asking them if they like fishing in deep water, I’ve no idea.”

 

“Well, now you do.” Jessica pointed out.

 

“I guess, yeah.” Patsy giggled.

 

A rather catchy ringtone suddenly interrupted the two’s fun.

 

Jessica’s attention snapped to her cell phone immediately, bending on the sofa to catch it as fast as she could.

 

Instead of the identity of the caller, ‘EMERGENCY CALL’ was blinking in rhythm with the tune.

 

Jessica swore aloud as she picked up the phone.

 

“Yes?” She asked as soon as she felt the line connect properly.

 

“We have a situation.” Aria’s voice, heavily distorted for extra anonymity, answered, “Suit up and meet us in the East Bronx at 16:00 sharp.”

 

Jessica closed her eyes for a second, calling her limited geographical knowledge of the city.

 

She swore once more.

 

“I’ll never be here in time.” She hissed at the phone.

 

“You’ll manage, I trust you.” The golden girl’s distorted voice answered easily, “Time to be a hero, flying menace.”

 

The line hung up with Aria’s final tease.

 

Jessica looked dumbly at her cellphone for a beat.

 

“Well, fuck.” She said aloud.

 

The dark haired girl turned back in Patsy’s direction, an apology on her lips.

 

The redhead looked at her with an elegantly raised eyebrow and a mocking smile.

 

“Totally Spies?” She said, her lips quivering, “Really?”

 

“Shut up!” Jessica stammered, her cheeks reddening, “I didn’t choose the tune.”

 

Jessica bemoaned the fact that Patsy didn’t know the identity of the members of her little heroic club or she could have pinned the blame appropriately.

 

Patsy, of course, knew why she'd been absent so often for the past few months, which was only fair since it was she who had been constantly pestering Jessica to use her gifts for good.

 

Patsy’ hmmed’, her expression thoughtful.

 

“It suits you, now that I think about it.” She declared, totally straight faced.

 

Jessica growled at her adoptive sister as she tittered.

 

“Shoo! Shoo!” Patsy said, banishing Jessica with her hands, “Go save the world, miss hero.”

 

“Right.” Jessica answered, releasing her hold on her personal gravity as she started to beeline toward her bedroom, “I’m already late!”

 

It didn’t take the girl long to find herself face to face with the heavy metallic trunk that held her latest armor.

 

Without a word, she squatted in front of it, her feet firmly planted on the front clamps and her hands on the lid’s upper latches.

 

She heaved up, straining under the weight of the ‘lid’ that rose totally parallel with the floor, arming all the hydraulics inside the device that acted both like a safe for her armor and an aide to suit its wielder up.

Unless another cyberpath ever swung by or someone with an ungodly level of strength who knew the trick tried to open it, the trunk was, for all intent and purpose, completely unbreachable. It only switched from a plain army look-alike trunk to an armoring up device if you armed the hydraulics inside with good ol’ elbow grease.

 

Dorothy hadn’t been thrilled when the newest addition to Jessica’s bedroom had made its appearance one day.

 

She had tried to remove it a few days after, even going as far as enlisting Patsy and Jessica’s help after a while.

 

The two girls had to remain straight-faced while trying to move a very compact piece of machinery that weighed a solid ton for a good hour until Dorothy had finally given up, not really understanding how Jessica had even managed to bring the thing in her room in the first place.

 

Once she had reached the top of her squat, she pressed back the ‘lid’ in its starting position.

 

With a resounding ‘Clack’, the magic then started to happen.

 

Gears and hydraulics started to jerk and come alive as the trunk started to transform from its deceptively common appearance to its real form, khaki colored panels folding and shifting away to leave room for a broken up display of Jessica’s armor, held still by a number of clamps.

 

The girl turned around, bringing her right foot down with strength. The kinetic energy, purposely applied this way, prompted the various locking mechanisms to wire and fix the boot snugly to Jessica’s skin.

 

The dark haired girl repeated the process multiple times for each of her body parts, each time hitting the corresponding pressure plate smartly distributed on the armoring frame, an originally lengthy process that some training had managed to reduce to something akin to thirty second tops.

 

As she took hold of her helmet, the only part of the armor that she had to secure herself properly, she took a glance at her figure in the full length mirror while kicking the final latch that would disarm her armoring device.

 

The design hadn’t really changed from the first time she had seen herself in her training armor a while back.

 

The armor was slick looking, with an emphasis on mobility that allowed her to fly like a dancer when she had tried it for the first time. After her time spent with the ungodly weight of her training suit, she had almost cried tears of joy when she finally got to try the real thing.

 

It was all interlocked and layered metallic plates, still five millimeters thick like the original but with an inside layered with the strange silky substance Cindy had come up with that was apparently way better than kevlar for the same job.

 

It was a little bit hot to wear but comfort mattered little to Jessica when she had the knowledge that nothing short of military grade heavy weaponry would be able to breach the alloy the ‘twins’ had apparently come up with.

 

There was a rather notable addition to the whole thing though. Aria had apparently been successful to deny Flash’s lofty goal of arming her with heavy caliber weaponry but that didn’t mean the determined cyborg hadn’t found a way to pack as much stopping potential in its latest creation.

 

Under her left arm, three muzzles on a circular frame connected to a feed on her back that alimented the thing with both bullets and gasses to rotate and fire the device hung dangerously, bearing the promise of violence and bloodshed with gusto. Jessica hadn’t really paid attention to the details when Flash had blabbered about it, something about caseless ammo or what not, but what she did discover was that the thing packed a punch and tore through the dummies he had set for practice with a disturbing ease.

 

All she needed to do was to make a finger gun motion and she would unleash one hell of a bulletstorm in that direction.

 

Jessica rather liked its brethren though, the single muzzle hanging from her right arm loaded with the far more reassuring tranquilizers beads Aria had come up with, little beads of glass that shattered on impact to splatter an extremely strong tranquilizer that sent the target into the arms of Morpheus as soon as it touched their skin.

 

It also helped that Jessica was right-handed and a decisively better shot with it.

 

Wordlessly, she fastened her helmet, absentmindedly taking a glance at the rather bulky device jutting out of her back that held both of her ammunition and the gas necessary to shoot them. It was, rather sensibly in her opinion, even more armored than the rest of the armor.

 

Just in case someone smart enough tried to blow her up with it.

 

As the last ‘click’ of her mask’s clamps resounded, she took a last look at her figure.

 

In the end, she had chosen to go with the trusty all black look when asked what color she wanted for her armor. Aria had approved, since it would give her an advantage at night if she had to do some recon. There was only two details that added some color to her outfit.

 

One was the stylized white  ‘P’ emblem on her right shoulder.

 

The other was the drawing of a bird taking flight on her torso, reminiscent of the american eagle in a way, its gunmetal color only betrayed by the addition of a blood red jewel in its sole visible eye socket.

 

“What’s the P for?”

 

Jessica turned herself, doing some last seconds mobility check to answer her sister lazily leaning against her door frame.

 

“Prodigies.” She answered, her voice muffled by her helmet.

 

Patsy ‘hmmed’ under her breath.

 

“That’s quite bold for a team name.” She said.

 

“At least we’re not pretending to be fantastic.” Jessica shrugged, prompting a titter from her adoptive sister.

 

The armored girl started to move toward her window, praying to all that was holy not to be caught flying out of her home as soon as she went through it.

 

“And what should I call you when you’re dressed like that?” Patsy curiously asked behind her.

 

Jessica opened the window, swinging a leg over it as she gave a last glance to her sister.

 

“Raptor.” She simply answered before taking flight.

 

As she looked at the fastly disappearing figure of her adoptive sister, Patsy pondered her naming sense.

 

“A bird of prey.” She said aloud as she moved back to the living room, “Fitting.”