Earning Her Stripes Pt 3 (Patreon)

Part Three: Figuring Things Out

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

The Next Day

Barnes Household

Madison had never been one for drawing before, but now it seemed to be second nature. And she could do it almost anywhere, even when what she was lying on was rising and falling at a metronomic pace. Or rather, who she was lying on.

“Two seventy-four,” panted Emma. “Two seventy-five, two seventy-left, two seventy-seven …” Wearing a tank top and sweat pants, she steadily cranked out the push-ups, just slowly enough that she could keep an audible count. Every five push-ups, she switched from one hand to the other, with no noticeable reduction in the rate. Madison barely paid attention to the changes. Lying full-length on Emma’s back, she held a sketch-pad up above her head with one hand, the pencil in her other hand flickering over the paper.

The bedroom door opened and Sophia strolled in, drinking from a can of soda. “How’s my two apprentices doing?” she asked with a grin.

“—seventy-eight, two seventy-nine, two eighty, two eighty-right, two eighty-two …”

“I’ve got my initial furnace designed and ready to go,” Madison reported. “Plus the requirements for my first set of armour. Plus a big gun.”

“Big gun?” Sophia raised her eyebrows. “How big?”

Madison sat up on Emma’s back, crossing her legs as she restabilised her weight over the small of Emma’s back. The redhead didn’t seem to mind, or even notice. “Variable yield. At max power, it’ll splatter Lung all over the landscape.”

“—ninety-nine, three hundred.” Emma paused. “Mads, get off.”

“Okay, Ems.” Obediently, Madison stood up, and Emma bounced to her feet. Apart from a faint sheen of sweat, she didn’t even look like she’d been exercising. Madison couldn’t even tell if she was breathing hard.

“Three hundred,” Emma reported to Sophia. “To be honest, I don’t think push-ups are even doing anything for me. It was like walking down a set of stairs. Slowly.”

But Sophia wasn’t listening. She stared at Madison, the soda-can half raised. “Are you sure?” she asked at last. “Won’t that, uh, put holes in buildings and stuff?”

“And stuff, yeah. It would probably dig a crater out of Captain’s Hill if we fired it in that direction, or clear out the Boat Graveyard once and for all.” Madison tapped her chin with the pencil. “Probably a bad idea, with all the shrapnel we’d get. I think I’ll keep max power under wraps for the time being. But yeah, first I need to build the tools to build the tools. So I need to construct my furnace first.”

“Furnace?” Sophia gestured with the can. “Can’t you just … you know, build power armour?”

“Out of what?” Madison rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’m a Tinker. But even Tinkers need something to work with, and I refuse to construct stuff that’ll fall apart in five minutes. What I need is a refinery, but the first step is my furnace.”

“Okay, then, what do we need for a furnace?”

Madison shrugged. “Three cars. One for parts, two for materials. I should have the furnace done in a day, and the parts made for my second furnace in another day.”

Sophia seemed to be having trouble working this out. “Why do you need two furnaces? Why can’t you just use one? We’ve only got three weeks until school opens. You two need to be established heroes by then.”

“Because I do!” Madison’s voice rose. Turning, she stomped out of the room. She needed a soda in the worst way, and having Sophia question what was so obvious really got up in her grille.

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Emma watched Sophia’s expression as Madison left the room. If she had to guess, Sophia was pissed that her attempts to come across as the master of everything parahuman were falling flatter than a pancake on Lord Street at rush hour. The vigilante had even tried to keep up with Emma when she started the push-ups, but had dropped out after the first forty, claiming that she had to be free to mentor both of them at the same time.

“What’s with her?” Sophia asked. “She’s gonna be a cape, you’d think she could handle a little pressure.”

“You’re not a Tinker. I’m not a Tinker. We’re not qualified to decide how she does shit.” Emma shrugged. “But push-ups aren’t doing much except bore me to tears. What else should I be doing?”

Sophia got a nasty grin on her face. “Well, I might not know what a Tinker needs to be doing, but your powers are a lot more physical. I know physical. Do you remember any of those self-defense lessons I gave you that one time?”

It sounded to Emma like Sophia was looking to get some satisfaction by physically overbearing her. That was actually fine by her; if nothing else, she’d learn how to fight properly. There was no percentage in trying to learn from someone who wasn’t trying to push her past her limits, after all. “Not much of them,” she admitted. Sophia hadn’t been a very patient teacher. To be fair, Emma hadn’t been a very apt pupil. Well, this was about to change.

“Fine. We’ll start from scratch. When are your folks due home again?”

“Sometime this evening,” Emma said. “Dad said he was going to be meeting with associates again at the Augustus Country Club.” She rolled her eyes. “Which means drinks until late.”

“Excellent.” Sophia angled her head toward the door. “Let’s go down to the living room.”

“Sure thing.” Emma strolled out to where the stairs led down to the living room; on an impulse, she jumped up on the bannister and rode it all the way down sidesaddle, slipping off just before she would’ve hit the stair-post at the end. To her personal pride, she only took two steps to regain her balance.

“Rule number one!” called out Sophia from the top of the stairs. “If you grandstand during a battle like that, you’ll get your ass handed to you. Don’t do it!” She leaped off the top step and turned to shadow, gliding down almost weightlessly. When she turned solid at the bottom, she gave Emma a glare. “I can try to teach you, but if you won’t learn, it’s not my fault.”

“No grandstanding. Got it.” Emma decided not to point out that she hadn’t been grandstanding, that it had been just as easy as walking down normally. She supposed that balancing on the rail and skating down barefoot would’ve been grandstanding. Almost as easy, but grandstanding all the same.

“Good.” Sophia moved into the open part of the living room, then turned to face Emma. “Okay, now I want you to try to hit me.” She settled into a vaguely defensive posture, though Emma could tell she was set up to deliver a stinging jab in response to any missed attacks.

“Um, shouldn’t you be showing me how to throw a punch first?” Emma thought she had a good idea of it, but she was also well aware of the concept of ‘don’t know how much you don’t know’.

Sophia rolled her eyes. “Right. Yeah. Okay.” She stepped up alongside Emma and took hold of her hand. Roughly, she folded Emma’s fingers into a fist, with the thumb on the outside. “Okay, this is how your fist should look. And this is how it should go.” Moving exaggeratedly slowly, she threw a couple of punches from the shoulder. “Got it?”

“Got it.” Emma nodded, though she was fairly sure nobody else but her could have learned anything from the rough and ready lesson plan. She closed her hands into the fists Sophia had showed her, then resettled them into something that felt more natural. “What’s next?”

Going back into her defensive stance, Sophia beckoned with one hand. “Try to hit me.”

“Okay.” Emma could see several holes in Sophia’s defences, but she knew the whole purpose of the exercise was so that Sophia could demonstrate how to block a punch and retaliate. So she threw a half-speed blow at a point where she knew Sophia could knock it aside.

“Shit!” Sophia yelped and stepped back, the punch barely avoided. There was no question of a return jab. “Emma, it’s not smart to go all-out from the word go. You’ve got to pace yourself in a fight.”

“Oh, okay. Sorry. Um, maybe you should show me what I’m doing wrong.” Emma was confused. Sophia knew how to fight. She’d seen her fight before. I didn’t try to hit her that hard … did I?

“Okay, then.” Sophia huffed out a breath, her eyes slitted in anger. “I’m just gonna hit you lightly, and you figure out how to block me, okay?” Her bunched shoulders called her a liar. At least the first one was going to sting, a lot. Maybe the first five or six, until Emma had learned her place.

“Okay.” Emma brought her hands up in front of her, ready to do her best at defending against Sophia actively trying to hit her. “Ready.”

The first blow came in so telegraphed that Emma almost let it hit, sure it was a feint covering for a sneak attack waiting in the wings. At the last moment, she gave up looking for the sneak blow, and brushed the punch aside. No sneak attack came; it seemed that the ‘feint’ had been the real attack. Was Sophia trying to fake her out by disguising her punches as ineffectual jabs? No matter. Sophia had told her to defend herself.

“Lucky,” grunted Sophia. “Let’s see how you do with this one.”

She launched a few more punches, and Emma pushed them aside, all the while waiting for the real volley of blows. None came. Sophia swung at her again and again, but the punches were so easy to avoid or evade that she stopped bothering using both arms to defend herself. Using just her left hand and arm, she pushed aside or blocked a dozen more punches. Her eye fell on Madison, who was standing in the kitchen doorway drinking a cold soda from the fridge; immediately, she felt thirsty herself.

“I want a soda,” she said.

“You don’t get a soda until you show me you can throw a proper punch,” gritted Sophia, still attacking her.

Emma sighed and slipped two blows. Letting a third one glide over her shoulder, she straightened her left arm into a crisp backfist. Sophia’s eyes widened an instant before the knuckles connected with her jaw; Emma felt the impact all the way up to her shoulder. It was a good thing the carpet was soft, because Sophia landed flat out on the floor a moment later.

Madison wandered over and stood looking down at her. “I think that was good enough,” she decided, and took a drink from her soda. “But she’s gonna be pissed when she comes to.”

Heading into the kitchen, Emma opened the fridge and got a soda. “She did tell me to show her I could throw a punch.”

“True.”

Emma watched Sophia shake her head groggily and sit up. “Hey, Sophia, You okay?”

Sophia felt her jaw and glared at her. “Shut up.”

Emma sipped from her soda. “Okay.”

 Part 4