Bear's Beauties: Existential Crisis 21 (Patreon)

[center]<<Kara Zor-El>>[/center]

Hyacinth and the girls were heading back to their school in a few days so Harley grabbed Cameron and took them to some of her favorite places back stateside, while Bear, Lisa, and Taylor were living up to the promise of making sure to include me more. While I had originally been assuming that meant including me in the planning and more serious aspects, I certainly wasn’t complaining about our current destination.

The look of exaggerated unamusement on Lisa’s face as Taylor adjusted the deerstalker hat she’d purchased in the giftshop made me giggle, moments before Bear showed up and added a pipe.

“You two know I will have my vengeance, yes?” Lisa asked as she pulled the pipe from her lips and pointed the end at the grinning faces of Bear and Taylor.

“Of course,” Bear agreed, “but first do me a favor and say ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’”

“Yes, mock and tease the woman who knows each and every one of your secrets, brilliant plan.”

“I don’t need to be named Sherlock to know you’re loving this as much as we are,” I quipped, causing Bear and a few other tourists who’d been watching the byplay to laugh when Lisa shot me a faux betrayed look.

“Et tu, Kara?” Lisa asked.

“Please say it, miss?” a kid, no older than ten asked, moments before being shushed by his mother.

Lisa sighed, and muttered quietly under her breath, “Vanquished by a prepubescent petri dish.” Before much more loudly adopting an over the top, hilariously bad british accent, “‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’”

The kids surrounding us at the Sherlock Holmes Museum cheered while the rest of us chuckled at Lisa. A few took pictures, but Lisa took off the hat and pipe and we returned to the tour. I hadn’t seen much of Sherlock Holmes or read the books prior to Bear and company arriving, but on one of the movie nights Lisa had picked a movie that Bear said was made in 2009. Almost immediately it was apparent why Lisa had picked it, and it wasn’t because of the lead actor like so many twits I’d worked with would have. Bear had mentioned the actor being better in another role, though I didn’t know who “Iron Man” was, and that one Jeremy Brett was the best Holmes in history.

In all honesty, the main enjoyment I was getting from the trip was looking at the aesthetics of the rooms meant to duplicate what Sherlock Holmes’s home and office would have looked like. Even 1970s Earth had been like stepping back in time, Krypton having last had technology and architecture similar to Earth’s over a thousand years ago. Seeing a similar, if smaller, jump lovingly recreated and maintained… it made me wonder if Krypton had been wrong to cast aside its early history.

The furthest back that had been taught in schools only went back the last five hundred years, everything beyond that was the stuff of specialized courses in universities that were seen as pointless curiosities. It was, to use a couple Earth phrases I’d heard, seen as useful as underwater basket weaving or giving a fish a bicycle. But…

Earth still had its diversity of culture, and there had to be other places doing things like this. The next time there’s an outing, I should see about adding historical reenactments to the list of potential destinations. Maybe… huh, I just realized that I didn’t know enough about Earth history in order to even have a more specific type of reenactment in mind.

I pondered this thought the rest of the day, before deciding to head to a library to try to find something to give me a list to then narrow down. Lisa and Taylor went back to Grimmauld Place, while Bear had to head to a meeting with Dumbledore. I made sure to share my plans to head to the British Library, and made my way. To my surprise, I was met by someone when I arrived.

“Hello, Kara,” Nikhol said as she greeted me with a hug, her choker gleaming in the afternoon sunlight.

“Nikhol, I assume Bear told you?” I asked, only to be surprised when the taller woman shook her head.

“I asked Taylor and Lisa why you weren’t with them, and they mentioned your desire to visit a local library. A few more questions, and I couldn’t resist joining you. You have no idea what it would take to be able to visit a place like this back home.”

It was… surreal, seeing a woman I knew was capable of acts that would terrify a number of the villains that Kal and I had fought all but bouncing on her toes with excitement. Much less when she grabbed my hand and dragged me inside.

“So, what is it you’re looking for?” Nikhol asked, her eyes gleaming with a kind of giddy energy that seemed so very wrong.

“Uh… history?” I answered, still weirded out by how the Sith Lord was acting.

“What kind of history? Recent, ancient, medieval, local, foreign, war, colonization, geopolitical?”

“I’m… not sure?”

“Alright, let’s focus on British history, since they’re liable to have that in abundance. Come on!”

Once again, I was dragged along by a woman bearing the same title as two of the greatest movie villains in history, yet acting like a giddy schoolgirl. To quote Sirius Black, the fuck is going on?

“Hello, could you please point us towards the section on early history of the British Isles?” Nikhol asked a middle aged librarian.

“Of course, dearie,” the librarian responded with a smile, before turning and flipping through a cabinet full of cards.

Less than five minutes later, I was sitting at a table with a book in front of me on some people called picts as Nikhol held a book of her own. Much as I wanted to start reading to distract myself from Nikhol’s odd behavior, I couldn’t look away. Nikhol, Darth Nox of the Dark Council, was holding an old book up to her nose and inhaling it like a junkie at a drug bust.

[center]<<Lana Beniko>>[/center]

Nikhol raced off to join young Kara upon hearing that there were massive buildings filled with physical paper books. I couldn’t blame her, even the number of books that young Hyacinth and her friends had purchased were more paper and ink tomes than I’d ever seen in the Empire. Darth Thanaton had possessed two from the Golden Age of Ragnos, and that was the most I’d ever heard of a single Sith owning. Valkorion might have possessed a hidden vault somewhere, but we’d never discovered any signs of such.

But, with Nikhol recklessly running off, it left me to explain the results of our research into the chokers and collars that Cameron had found in the Yamato. Approaching Bear, I gave him a soft smile as he looked up.

“Afternoon, Lana. Do you need anything?” he asked.

“Just your time. If you wouldn’t mind?” I inquired, gesturing towards the door as my gaze turned towards the others in the room.

Black turned to Lupin as Bear stood from his chair, “I think she doesn’t appreciate our company, Mooney.”

I just rolled my eyes, ignoring the childish, but ultimately harmless man as I led Bear to a more private location. Entering one of the various guest rooms, I reached out with the Force to feel for any signs of the local magic being used to spy on the room. I sensed nothing, but erring on the side of caution, I called out, “Kreacher, might I borrow a moment of your time?”

There was a ‘POP’ of displaced air as the decrepit being appeared, looking at Bear and I with far less disdain than he held for nearly everyone else, “How can Kreacher assist Dark Mistress’s Lady?”

“Can you ensure we are neither interrupted, nor spied upon?”

“Yes, Dark Mistress’s Lady.”

The hideous being snapped his fingers and vanished, though I felt a shroud settle over the room, feeling quite strongly of him.

“So what did you want to discuss? I figure if you were wanting another round of sex you would have used a different request, like last time,” Bear asked as he sat on the edge of the guest bed. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out a bundle of chokers and placed them in his hand. Bear looked at them in confusion for a moment, before his eyes lit in recognition. “I’d completely forgotten about these. It’s like I don’t even notice you girls wearing them.”

I chuckled in amusement, “Yes, they do tend to slip out of focus don’t they? Despite the fact that not one of us remembers putting them on, or even when they first appeared.”

Bear looked up at me, “I’d assumed that they were symbolic, you think otherwise?”

“Bear, what language do you hear me speaking right now?”

“I hear English, but I figured Tara Q made it so that we’d understand each other regardless of our original languages. The fact that you’re asking… what language were you speaking just now?”

“High Sith, before that I was using Huttese, and prior to this conversation I was speaking Imperial Basic. But there’s more to these than simply translation functions, Nikhol and I were examining them with difficulty, and we determined a number of other features.”

“A SEP field, obviously, but what else?”

“A what?”

“Oh, it stands for ‘Someone Else’s Problem’, it was first coined by an author for a comedic science fiction story, basically it makes people forget, ignore, or otherwise not notice whatever it’s affecting.”

I nodded, before continuing, “The chokers and collars have a number of other functions. For starters, they are all linked, connected. Provided there’s an external communication device on either end, they allow communication between the wearers regardless of distance. I suspect that, for example, I could be on Rishi, and I’d be able to communicate with Taylor on Csilla in real time without any difficulties.”

Bear blinked before glancing down at the chokers in his hand, “That’s certainly useful.”

“Quite, but I’m not finished yet. Whether or not you noticed, all of us have had various physical improvements.” I could see Bear’s gaze drop briefly before snapping back up to my face, making me smirk in amusement. “Not those kinds of improvements. For myself, aches from old injuries I’d learned to ignore are now gone, same for Nikhol. Cameron told you about the increase in her organic tissue. Lisa’s power no longer intrudes at inconvenient times nor causes her pain. So on, and so forth.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, though this next part is entirely supposition. Nikhol and I believe that the chokers are capable of physical alteration beyond the initial ‘fixing’, but we’ve yet to determine how they do so or induce such changes.”

“Do either of you have any ideas?”

“From what we have determined, all of the chokers and collars are linked to a central point, not another collar, the connection is different. It is here, on this Earth, but when Nikhol and I were trying to follow the connection it was constantly in motion.”

Bear slowly blinked, before hesitantly asking, “Up and down, like a person walking?”

“Yes… do you have a suspicion?”

“I do, and if I’m right I’m going to beat my head against the wall,” Bear said as he reached into a pocket and pulled out his primitive commlink. Lighting up the screen, Bear swiped his finger across it a few times before bringing his hand to his face and groaning. “Well, assuming you’re willing to act as a test subject, we can confirm that the collars can alter the way you girls look. I really should have turned this thing on before now.”

“By all means, if it works I have a few ideas I’d like to try.”

“Alright, let’s start simple…” Bear muttered under his breath for a few moments, occasionally glancing up at me. After a few taps and swipes of his finger, Bear glanced up and couldn’t hold in a snort of amusement.

“Yes?” I asked.

Bear didn’t say anything, simply pointing to a full length mirror in the corner of the room while visibly struggling not to laugh. Stepping over to the mirror, I took in my reflection. My face and proportions were all the same, the only change being my hair. Not its length or fullness, but its color.

Turning back to Bear, I leveled a stare at him as I asked, “Really?”

Bear finally lost the battle to maintain his composure and broke into laughter. Ignoring him, I turned back to the mirror and took in the now rainbow patterned hair on my head. Even my eyebrows looked like miniature rainbows. Walking over to the still laughing Bear, I picked up his commlink and looked at the screen.

There, in surprising detail, was a still image of myself, my hair highlighted with a side panel of dozens of different options. Including a button that would remove any changes. Selecting that, I took another look over the image of myself, and saw an option that caught me by surprise. Selecting it, I brought my finger to the meter that appeared and slowly pulled it down.

I bit back a smile as I felt it taking effect. As it finished, I glanced up at Bear who was laying back on the bed, his eyes closed as he caught his breath. Dropping the commlink off to the side, I climbed up onto the bed and straddled his hips, before leaning down and whispering in his ear.

“Do you want to punish your acolyte, Master?”

Bear’s eyes snapped open and he sat up, staring wide eyed at me as I straddled him with an amused smirk on my lips.

“Lana… you… wha…” he stammered, making me giggle as I hopped off.

“Next time perhaps, I want to see the look on Nikhol’s face when there’s a fifteen year old acolyte waiting for her in her room,” I teased as I slipped out of the guest room and made my way to the one I’d been sharing with Nikhol.