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Author's Note: Welcome to the first chapter of Book 2, everyone. As always, a big thanks to my readers and Big Closet for your continued support. ~Amethyst.
 

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 Chapter 1: Moving

Friday, August 30st, 2041 - Evening

“You don’t have to go,” Aunt Maya tried to convince us one last time as she practically crushed both my sister, Kelly, and her daughter, Ainslee, in a hug. “You can stay here at home with us. That goes for all of you, you will always have a home here with us.”

Thankfully, Poppy and I were both small enough as Sprites that we could avoid being crushed in her arms like that. We likely wouldn’t have survived the experience anyway. She and the twins had already given us far more gentle hugs before getting ahold of Ainslee and Kelly.

“Mom, we’ve been over this,” Ainslee replied with a sigh as she hugged her mother in return. “It’s not like we have to pay for our dorm room, and things will be much easier for all of us if we’re on campus. Besides, Karen could really use our support, we’ve arranged to share a dorm room with her, and Lily already has Moonlight’s stall set up in the stable there.”

Kelly quickly added, “It’s not like we’ll be far away either, Aunt Maya. We’ll be just across town, and we can all come for dinner or visits when we have the time.”

Samantha and Selina seemed to be taking this as hard as their mother was. The Mermaid twins loved their sister, of course, but they grew up with me and Kelly too. We kids all grew up like family, and all of them had just gotten used to having us back in their lives over the past few weeks after thinking that we were either dead or captured by Titans.

There were more hugs and a lot more tears as the four of us promised to call them once we were settled in and climbed into Karen’s hover-jet. The Dark Elf had loaned the luxury model vehicle to Ainslee and Kelly so we could move our stuff to the dorm after we had helped her move everything that she wanted to bring from her room at the base and from her home a couple of days ago. It showed just how much our relationship with our prickly teammate had improved over the past couple of weeks.

Karen was starting to let us in more, and I liked to think that she was starting to trust us more as well. The walls that she kept up between herself and others wouldn’t be easy to break down by any means, but we were seeing more cracks in those walls by the day, at least where we were concerned. She was still cautious and prickly around other people, but it seemed like she was starting to accept us as real friends rather than people she was being forced to spend time with since that clusterfuck of an assignment to take down Alistair Davenport, the asshole who was stalking her and had plans to do a lot worse.

I was glad that she was starting to trust us, and her hover-jet had a lot more space than Aunt Maya’s, and made it so we were able to get everything we wanted to bring to the dorm with us in one trip. Not that any of us had much to bring. My sister and Ainslee had almost a dozen mid-sized boxes between them, packed with their clothes and a few personal effects, and Moonlight’s stuff was already in her stall at the university stables. As for me and Poppy, everything we owned was packed in my new little house. Once we were all settled into the vehicle and Kelly got into the driver’s seat to take us across town to the University grounds, I snuggled with Poppy on one of the far too large seats and thought about my family and my life since I woke up and broke free from the grisly cocoon that had once been my body.

Honestly, we were all lucky to be alive and together after the Incursion that had decimated our hometown of Boulder Creek, Montana and the surrounding area, including the ranch where Kelly and I grew up. The farm next door, which belonged to Aunt Maya and Uncle Gavin, was the epicenter of the Incursion, and both of our homes had been destroyed by the Titans. Somehow, though, most of us had come through the attack alive and had found one another again in Amethyst Harbour.

Some of the people we cared about hadn’t been so fortunate. Our father and Uncle Gavin had both been killed in the attack, Mom and Kelly were taken through the Breach as captives, and Aunt Maya had spent months in the hospital after nearly dying when their house collapsed with her inside. Kelly may have come back to us somehow, but she wasn’t unscathed.

I think Kelly had the worst of it, in fact. My sister spent most of the last four years as a Titan captive before being discarded during an Incursion in Egypt when she became Altered due to what the doctors said was exposure to Wild Magic and elevated hormone levels from being pregnant. From what little she could remember during the nightmares she still had almost every night, being a captive of the Titans was a fate worse than death.

The way they treated her and the things she told me that they made her do made me sick and filled me with a burning fury, especially when I thought about our mother still being in their hands. Kelly couldn’t even control her own body to tell them no, no matter how hard she had tried. Then, when she was finally back on Earth, she had to deal with her changing body, losing the baby, and believing that she had lost everything and everyone she cared about.

She was locked up in the mental ward and on suicide watch when we reunited, not that she could have succeeded since she was seemingly invulnerable now. Both of us were very different from how we used to be. She was now a nine-tailed Huli Jing and burdened by her trauma and a power that wouldn’t let her take the easy way out, while I was now a five-inch-tall Water Sprite.

Until I ‘sprouted’ a couple of months ago, I was in a gory cocoon made from my former body and skipped out on the past four years while my new Sprite body grew inside. Getting used to being a girl (well, sort of, since Sprites only have one gender) and being a five-inch-tall Fairy was easy compared to finding out I lost four years of my life when I became Altered and thinking that everyone I cared about was captured or killed in the Incursion that changed me. At least I had Moonlight to keep me somewhat sane while I adjusted to things, and I met Poppy while I was in the Fairy Ward of the hospital.

Now, I couldn’t imagine my life without the Unicorn and my Fire Sprite girlfriend, and on top of having them in my life and being reunited with my sister as well, we were also reunited with Aunt Maya, Ainslee, and the twins. They were different, too; the twins were Mermaids now, and Ainslee was a girl and a Baobhan Sith, but there was one thing that would never change. We were like family, and we loved one another. It was probably a good thing that we weren’t really related, though, because Ainslee finally worked up the nerve to ask Kelly to be her girlfriend last week.

The past couple of weeks, since our camping trip and the sting operation to bring Alistair Davenport to justice, were actually pretty hectic overall. Between training hard individually with our trainers to master our magic and the other abilities that our respective Altered species possessed, and group training sessions for Incursions under the watchful eye of Sergeant Vale, we were all very busy girls. In fact, someone had sent the sergeant footage from our fight with Davenport and his hired muscle, and after pointing out absolutely everything we did wrong, he insisted on giving me some extra lessons in battle tactics as well.

I would probably be learning more of that once we started at the University, since I would be taking the officer’s track, but he wanted us ready in case my teleportation ability was needed to drop troops at an Incursion. At least the Incursion simulations that he was putting us through now were not quite as brutal as that first day when he had pushed all of us almost to the point of breaking. These sims weren’t no-win scenarios like that first time, either; there was a way to win if I was clever enough and we worked together. We might have lost more than we won so far, but I liked to think that we were improving.

It probably helped a lot that we were getting used to the stomach-churning things that we were seeing during those simulations and were freezing up less. Hell, some of the things that we had seen, done, and experienced during the fight with Davenport and his goons might have helped with that, but I also think that we were all starting to come to terms with the reality that this was war and that if we were reduced to a blubbering mess during battle it could mean that our teammates and civilians would pay the price. None of us wanted that.

Our teamwork was improving as well, and maybe that was because Karen was starting to feel more like a member of the team. She wasn’t as closed off, she trusted us more, and the animosity was disappearing now that we were all on more friendly terms. We still had disagreements sometimes, of course, but now it was getting easier to put those aside and focus on the task at hand.

Training hadn’t been the only thing keeping us busy recently, though. On Wednesday, we helped Karen move her stuff into the dorm after a couple of hours of Incursion simulations with Sergeant Vale, but we had all been too tired to do much more than that, so we put off moving Kelly’s and Ainslee’s things until later. Then yesterday, we spent the afternoon after our individual training sessions doing a major shopping spree.

Poppy and I both had to replace everything we lost when the Sprite-sized house I was gifted was destroyed. I had to buy a new house too, using the money that I got to replace my worldly possessions when Davenport’s accounts and assets were all seized by the Vanguard. That hadn’t been finalized until yesterday, though, so I didn’t have the funds to replace everything until then. So, we spent a lot of the day shopping, which was why we didn’t get to moving into the dorm until today.

My new house wasn’t quite as fancy-looking as the one I had before, but it was more practical and probably a whole lot more durable since Vice-Commander offered to have one of the Vanguard’s defense magic specialists place some protective wards on it for me. It was still somewhat large, boasting three bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen, though this time, the kitchen had a sink for cleaning dishes and a tiny wood stove that looked like it was painstakingly crafted for both appearance and utility. It would allow us to cook when we wanted to and keep the kitchen warm if it got cool. The kitchen also had plenty of counter space, small cupboards, a pantry, and space for a table and chairs.

Much like my previous Sprite-sized house, this one also had working electricity, lights, heating, a fireplace, and a bathroom with running water for the bathtub and sink, and a magical equivalent of a toilet for our size that disintegrates waste. All of the water in the house came from an indoor, heated reservoir and was filtered through a water purification system before being recycled. The internal walls of the house were painted in soothing colors like mint green, lavender, and baby pink, with white trim and doors.

One thing that I was on the fence about was that instead of having plush carpet like my previous house, this one only had carpet in the bedrooms. The rest of the floors were ceramic due to the wood stove and fireplace, which I guess made sense for safety and fire prevention. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but it was a necessary evil, and overall, the new house was very comfortable and cozy.

The exterior was much like my former house, except that the paint was white with a light blue trim rather than a mostly solid powder blue. It still had proper windows, chimneys for both the fireplace and wood stove, and weatherproof walls and roof, so I could still place it either indoors or outdoors as needed. It even had one of the little magitech batteries that my last house had to draw mana from around them for power, but I guess that was something that the company was putting into all of the Fairy houses that they built. The power was only really used for the lighting and heat, but it would be a boon outside in winter when things got cold and the sun set a lot earlier.

After Poppy and I chose the house together, most of the rest of the afternoon and early evening were spent buying furniture for it and new clothes for us. We had bought a few outfits to last us until we could buy the house, but we needed a lot more clothes, especially with school starting so soon. I was glad that we had gotten all that done yesterday, because after another grueling Incursion simulation today, followed by putting everything in the house so it was ready to be moved while Ainslee and Kelly packed their stuff, I was looking forward to snuggling with Poppy in our comfy new bed tonight once we were all settled in the dorm.

I almost fell asleep on the ride there. I mean, I probably could have just teleported us all there with our stuff, but I had been pushing my special ability as hard as I could for the past two weeks, trying to increase the size of my area of effect and how many people and items in that range that I could carry with me. Frankly, I was exhausted, and I just didn’t have the energy to do that after a long week and a day full of training, something that Moonlight had noticed.

-I am glad that you took my suggestion and did not push yourself too hard, my Maiden,- the Unicorn’s voice said gently in my mind as Poppy and I flitted outside the car, and I stretched my aching muscles. -You have been working too hard recently.-

“I’ll be fine, Moonlight. It’s Friday, and we have the long weekend off from any sort of training until classes start on Tuesday,” I assured her, breathing a sigh of relief at the thought of a bit of rest and relaxation. “Why don’t you go to the stables and get settled in? I’ll probably be calling it a night early, and if I need you, I’ll call you in my thoughts.”

When she answered, it was with a measure of reluctance in her mental tone. -If you are certain, Lily. Sleep well. If you need me, I shall be there in a breath.-

Thankfully, it didn’t take too long to get everyone’s stuff into the dorm room. Poppy and I didn’t have much we could do to help at our size anyway, so we just needed to worry about placing the furniture and such properly in our new little house now that we were in the dorm room. So, while my sister and Ainslee started unpacking, Poppy and I set up our bedroom and decided to save the rest for the weekend before relaxing and talking with Karen, while we chilled on the empty bunk where our house had been placed.

The dorm room that we were in was larger than I was expecting, but I guess it had to be fairly big if it was expected to house four students, or five in our case. The plain white walls were not decorated so far, though there was evidence that they had once boasted posters or other decorations before the previous tenants moved out. The floor was covered in pale blue carpet, and the space seemed to be well-planned.

In each corner was a loft bed, and underneath those were desks with a desk lamp and a chair for studying. Beside the head of each bed was a tall dresser, maybe two feet wide, a foot and a half deep, and tall enough that the top drawer and upper surface could act as a nightstand for the loft bed, while at the foot of the beds were large trunks for gear and other belongings. There was even a mini fridge for drinks and snacks underneath the window that separated the two sides of the room.

As for the bathrooms and shower rooms, they were down the hall, with one on each floor. Even though Rainbow dorm was coed, we were on one of the girls' floors and wouldn’t have to worry about boys being around to bother us. This was something that Karen was understandably relieved about after the incident with Davenport.

We all called it a night early that night, not long after Kelly and Ainslee finished unpacking. In hindsight, that was probably a good thing, and not just because we were all tired from a long week. Because just after five in the morning, I was awoken from my slumber by a very loud and insistent noise emanating from my comm crown.

Feeling sluggish due to trying to rouse myself from hibernation, I fumbled for my comm crown, clumsily put it on, and then sleepily answered what turned out to be a call from Vice-Commander Carpenter. “Mmmm…. hello… Ma’am?” I answered, still trying to shake off sleep.

The Angel’s voice was carefully controlled and very serious as she spoke. -= Lily, thank goodness you answered. We need you. Our satellites just detected a Breach forming in the middle of Rio de Janeiro, and you’re the fastest method we have of getting troops on the ground there. =- I was suddenly very awake.

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Author's Note: Here's chapter 2 of Book 2, everyone. As always, a big thanks to my readers and Big Closet for your continued support. ~Amethyst.
 

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 Chapter 2: Rude Awakening

As soon as I had gotten instructions from Vice-Commander Carpenter and ended the call, I started trying to wake Poppy. Usually, that would be difficult since Sprite bodies enter a state of hibernation to conserve energy when we sleep, making it hard to wake us up. Fortunately, though, my girlfriend had also been roused by the loud and insistent ring tone of my comm crown and hadn’t quite settled back to sleep.

“Moonlight, are you awake?” I inquired, sending my thoughts to my Unicorn companion even as I gently shook Poppy’s shoulder to rouse her and reluctantly told my girlfriend, “We need to get up, hot stuff, there’s an Incursion happening.”

-Yes, my Maiden. I do not seem to require much sleep, even when in my physical form, so I have been patrolling your dormitory while ethereal,- Moonlight responded even as Poppy looked up at me sleepily.

I had the feeling that it had more to do with the fact that it was Moonlight’s first night staying in the stables, and she worried about being too far away in case I needed her, than any lack of a need for sleep, but I let that go for now. We had more important issues to deal with right then. “Okay, can you please come join us so I can teleport us all to Vanguard Tower? We need to hurry.”

-I will be there in but a moment,- she assured me, making me think that she was either already in the dorm room or had been staying very close by.

While she was telling me that, Poppy tried to shake off her drowsiness as she murmured, “Incursion? Mmm…okay, let me grab my stuff.” With that, we both scrambled wearily out of bed to put on our chokers and for Poppy to put on her comm crown as well.

Once we had left our little house, the others proved more difficult to rouse. At least, that was what I was fearing, and since time was of the essence, I decided to use drastic measures to wake them all quickly. As soon as I was out of the little house situated on the empty bunk, I turned up the volume of my voice projection app on my comm crown as high as it would go and called out, “Everybody, wake up!”

Sure, a quick splash of water to each of their faces probably would have had Ainslee, Kelly, and Karen all up in a hurry, but there were good reasons not to wake them that way. For one thing, creating water for me to manipulate like that is advanced elemental magic that I had only recently learned from Captain Monroe, so I didn’t have the best control over it yet, and it still took a lot of mana and concentration for me to do. We did not have the time for me to fool around like that, and doing so would probably tire me. I needed to conserve my energy for teleporting people and gear, and the clock was ticking; every moment wasted was one that we could be in Rio, saving lives.

Another good reason not to do so was that if I had decided to wake them that way, I probably would have gotten them, their beds, and half of the dorm room soaked. Emergency or not, that probably would have made my sister and friends not very happy with me. This way was much quicker and didn’t risk having anyone pissed off at me, at least, not when they realized the reason behind the rude awakening.

For now, though, they were understandably upset with me. “Lily, what the fuck?!” Karen snapped as they all glared at me from their respective beds. “It’s five in the morning for fuck’s sake! I swear, if this is some kind of drill…”

“Not a drill,” I said after turning down the volume on my voice projection to something less than a parade grounds drill sergeant. “There’s an Incursion in Rio de Janeiro, and we need to get to the tower so I can start moving teams and gear. Every second counts, girls, so get geared up so we can get moving.”

The words had barely left my mouth before everyone scrambled to grab their DS-4 chokers from their nightstands, put them on, and hop from their beds to the floor. Getting dressed was as simple as pushing a little bit of mana into our metal chokers to release the armor stored inside the connected pocket dimensions. Our skintight armor quickly materialized over our bodies, and that was all that we had for gear. Kelly, Karen, and Ainslee would have to grab weapons and any other gear they needed once we got to the tower.

Once I was sure that everyone was armored up and present, I mentally tagged Moonlight through our connection, then the others, and pictured the location within Vanguard Tower that I had been instructed to bring us to in my mind. A moment later, we appeared in a gathering area on the thirtieth floor, at the very top of the tower. Most troops would be gathering in the sub-basement level that sat beneath the tower, and the entire grounds of the surrounding compound, which was the mobilization area that hosted both the underground transport hangars and the armories. We had other orders, though; we were being assigned to the first response teams.

The first response teams were based on the top floor of the tower, in the massive saucer that topped the tower and was reminiscent of the Space Needle that used to be in Seattle. The floor was easily large enough to hold two professional sports stadiums and housed the first responder barracks, their armory, the Pegasus stable, and the aerie for the Gryphons. The rallying area that we appeared in was at the very center of the floor.

The scene was carefully conducted chaos as we materialized. People in the same DS-4 armor that we wore were scrambling to grab weapons from the armory, while others saddled up their mounts. Both the aerie and the stable had open-air exits to allow flights for training, exercise, or to board the two high-speed mounted-personnel carriers that they usually used, but today everyone would be gathering here to make things easier for me to organize the transportation.

Forty-seven minutes was as long as a Breach would remain open, and that isn’t a lot of time to organize a response for somewhere halfway across the world, but these people knew what they were doing and moved like a well-oiled machine. Since those personnel carriers would take over an hour to get from Amethyst Harbour to Rio, even going at top speed from beginning to end, we were going to have to count on me to get us there while the other personnel transports were in flight. There was a Vanguard base in South America that could deploy troops to the Incursion sight as well, but they were probably fifteen minutes away, and if everything went well, we could probably beat them there using my teleportation.

As soon as we appeared, I ordered, “Kelly, Karen, and Ainslee, get geared up in the armory ASAP and then get back here so we can get moving as soon as I have a place to ‘port to.”

Two minutes later, I received a live camera feed from Vice-Commander Carpenter via my comm crown, along with a message telling me that it was the closest feed to the Breach that they could come up with on short notice. It looked like a CCTV camera feed, and it looked like panicked pandemonium over there already, as people ran toward the camera as quickly as they could, and old-style ground vehicles and hover-jets completely ignored traffic laws in their rush to flee.

Well, damn. It had only been around five minutes since the Breach had fully formed and stabilized. I was a little surprised that they were able to find anything close to the Breach in such a short time. It wouldn’t put us very close to the Breach itself, but it was probably the best that we could hope to get between the EM surge that accompanied the opening of Breaches, killing any electronics in the area, and the destruction that the Titans would be causing as they spread out from the Breach and the epicenter of the Incursion.

A moment after that, while I was still ingraining the image in the feed into my mind, my teammates returned, fully geared up. Over their body armor, they each wore gun belts with pouches that likely held spare magazines, bullets, and condensed mana clips for the standard-issue Desert Eagle Mk XXVI handguns holstered on their belts and the M7 Punisher high-powered assault rifles that they had slung over their shoulders. Karen also had a large field medic’s bag on her back for her role as the team's emergency medic. She may not have started her nursing program at the University yet, but she did at least have first aid training and a crash course she had gotten last week on field medicine.

Good, they had all gotten standard gear that they had become very familiar with during our group training sessions with Sergeant Vale, though I did notice that my sister had some of the grenades that Sergeant Vale had her using during our most recent training session as well. The Desert Eagle handguns were fifty caliber, and they were probably using the special loadout for those: armor-piercing shells with enchantments that would cause a magical explosion on impact. While they wouldn’t do much against a fully shielded Titan, they could serve as a distraction or be used to attack weak spots once the Titans’ energy shields were depleted.

The Punisher was a purely magitech weapon, though. While it looked bulky for an assault rifle, it was based on damaged or destroyed Titan weapons and had proven effective enough in combat with them that it became standard issue for all Vanguard troops who could reasonably carry one. Honestly, it was intimidating and looked more like a small cannon than an assault rifle, and rather than a round barrel, it was diamond-shaped. It used condensed mana clips, or if the person using it was desperate, they could feed mana into it directly. The weapon fired bursts of destructive violet colored magical energy that packed a lot more punch than the enchanted ammo for the Desert Eagle, but the downside was that it was a bit of a mana hog and could go through those clips fast.

As for the extra gear, Karen’s medical kit was standard for field medics, and if she ran across anyone with injuries that she couldn’t handle with that kit, Moonlight would be with us to provide healing. Kelly’s grenades were like larger versions of the enchanted bullets for the Desert Eagles. They were regular high-explosive grenades, but enchanted to give a bit of a magical kick to the explosions and pack more punch against the magitech defenses of the Titans. Between the gear and our combined abilities, I was hoping that we wouldn’t do too terribly out there, especially after our Incursion simulation training sessions.

Not that we were going to be allowed to get close to the action if we could avoid it. After all, I had been given strict orders for my team for this mission. We were not to approach the Breach under any circumstances, something that I was more than a little disappointed in, given that Kelly and I were both chomping at the bit to go through that Breach and rescue our mom, something that I believed Vice-Commander Carpenter knew all too well. I tried to tell myself that we would get our opportunity during the Incursion that, if the Oracle Lindsey Dimas was correct, would happen in Rust Ridge, Australia, on Saturday, October 26th, when we would launch a counterstrike against the Titans.

No, we would have to wait nearly two months, and as much as I wanted to rush in and save Mom now, I knew that Vice-Commander Carpenter was probably right, and our orders were sound since we were still raw recruits who had no business in a pitched battle yet. This time, our orders were for me to focus on transporting first response teams and to keep myself energized with as much flower nectar as I could drink between trips, because teleporting so much was going to play havoc with my energy level. While I was doing that, the others would help secure the transport site, cover my ass while I worked, and set up medical tents for the influx of injured civilians and casualties that we were bound to see by the end of this operation.

By the time that my team had their gear all sorted and joined me, I was already gathering as many people and their mounts as I could in a sphere that was a little over twenty feet in diameter. My effect range had increased by a significant amount with how much I had been pushing the ability lately, but when we were talking about regular-sized people and mounts like Gryphons and Pegasi, that still wasn’t a large amount of space. I was going to need to make a lot of trips to move all the first response teams, plus my own.

I counted myself lucky that I could still tag Moonlight while she was ethereal as I concentrated on tagging everyone around me for that first trip and focusing on the video feed from my comm crown. I needed to hurry; I could already see the distant figures of Titans through the video feed, and they were getting closer with every moment. Every second I tarried was an invitation for a stray shot to disrupt the feed or something, and we would have to waste precious time waiting to acquire another jump point for me.

People’s lives were at stake; I needed to do this now. I called for everyone nearby to crowd as close to me as they could manage and mentally tagged everyone in my range as quickly as I could with the strange sense of special awareness that came with my ability before I felt the strain from pushing myself beyond my limits and triggered the teleport, wanting nothing more than to be in that place immediately. No sooner did we appear than a burst of violent violet energy struck a hover-jet trying to flee the Incursion, less than a block away, causing it to explode. Seconds after that, someone shouted, “Incoming!” as the shit hit the fan.