Training - Kidman
Kidman spent her first night after meeting Carmen hiding in the swamp, crying.
For her, it was the worst thing that could have happened.
"What does she want with me? What does she want with me?" was all she was able to repeat to blackness around her. She had been wet and cold from sitting in the mud, but she hadn't known where else to go to be alone. They had all seen Carmen lead her away. They all stared now and the girl had no answers.
Now, a month later, she still had no answers, but many unsettling theories. There was much time to form them in basic training. At the very least her new home felt close enough to her old one for comfort. Another derelict compound cloaked in secrecy, removed from the world yet perpetually watching over it. Base 210 was much busier than 407 had been when she left it.
'That is an easy enough thing to accomplish,' Kidman thought as she felt about for the tumblers in her practice lock. She could have taken the lock to a quiet place to work, but she made the effort to stay with people. She didn't necessarily talk to them, she just wanted them there, proof of Carmen's power. It was easy to slip back into the background when there were others around. She could be a happy, faceless brick in her fortress once again.
Although that was an illusion Vic wouldn't let her have.
'He's watching me again. I see him, talking to teacher, glancing at me.'
She felt torn. Kidman would have loved to have met Vic under normal circumstances. The man was a legend, after all; almost a right-hand man, but it was because of this that she had reason to worry.
'He's watching me for her...'
The pick she held jumped from her fingers and hit the floor with a telling 'clink'. Vic looked up and Kidman looked away. Every time he was there she fumbled. It was especially bad if he showed while she was in physical training. She had come by most of her injuries in his presence.
'The things he must tell her.... though if he tells her I'm a failure, perhaps she might forget me.'
A wave of anger washed over her. 'How dare you wish such a thing?' her soul's voiced raged, so fierce it caused her to hunch over in her seat. 'Pick up the pick and do it again. Do it until you get it right, until you are useful. You will be useful to Carmen. That is why you are here. That is why you exist now. Don't you dare seek to shirk your responsibilities to the master.'
Kidman stared at the pick dully, then managed to pick it up with shaking fingers.
Her soul took pity on her.
'Don't you...want to help her? It's Carmen. You know where she could be vulnerable. It can't be left unguarded. We can't let her fall. She is hope, and she is wonderful. Don't you want to protect that?'
The girl sighed heavily and glanced over her shoulder. Vic was gone.
'Yes... I know what I wish for her, but I doubt I could provide. That job requires a stronger person than I am, far better than I am, and I doubt that is why she sent for me... Why...why did she send for me...?'
Suddenly the room was too noisy and open and hard, so she left.
Kidman spent the rest of her day in hiding in an empty room, mind full of fog.
---
By month two Kidman had an answer, as far as she was concerned. Even though Vic no longer showed up to watch her, she still felt that others were, and though she accused herself of paranoia, she was quite sure the trainers were coming down on her harder than anyone else.
'I'm being built up for something. I know I am. Why build up a grunt, then? Because they are expendable, yes? I was a leftover on the edge. I was already gone. I never was if records are to be taken literally. I have no real skill-'
'Except the one-'
'and no one will miss me. I'm to be sacrificed.'
The thought alternately scared and comforted her. She wasn't sure herself what she meant by 'sacrifice' and even if she did have the nerve to ask Carmen, she wasn't there.
'Not that she'd say.'
Kidman picked another lock with ease. She would have to try something harder but again she delayed, and again her soul chastised her for it.
'If you're so sure Carmen is going to 'sacrifice' you, why are you still here?'
'Go away.'
She paused.
'Carmen...'
She had little experience with the woman herself, but she knew of her, what she symbolized to her. Carmen was an outpost in the black and white world the girl felt trapped in. Someone wonderful. She was physically attractive, yes, but the girl was more or less blind to that. No, Carmen was a force, a nature, a miraculous collection of traits that should not be able to coexist with each other as they did. A beautiful machine that made beautiful tears in the flat wall of life. The black band of the underside's dark nature lay tight against that heart to be sure, and there was little standing between it. All assumed Carmen was strong enough to withstand anything. It would be a lovely fantasy, but she was human, and therefore fragile.
Such a soul... needed to exist, needed to be tended, protected. Must be. Deserved to be.
Kidman put her lock down with an air of conviction.
There was research she needed to do.
---
More time passed.
Kidman sat at the top of a concrete stairway, her head against the wall. It was a grey day, the sort she liked best, when the weather was as pensive as she was. No one bothered her. No one bothered to. The girl had made it very clear that she didn't wish to interact, politely but clearly. She kept her gray hair hidden under her standard issue cap and kept the collar of her standard issue jacket popped up around her face. She still didn't speak to anyone. Her progress, in terms of training, was average. It was almost purposeful in how average she was.
But then there were the oddities. She spent hours at a time staring at things, as if they were the most fascinating things in the world. Most assumed she had spaced out, but there was a degree of concentration in those blank eyes. One day she was found assembling and disassembling a revolver behind the supply shed. When asked, the girl said nothing, picked up the pieces, and moved somewhere else.
The only thing that was consistent was how often she was found in the computer lab, asking for files. She didn't have a computer of her own and so was dependant on the public machines. Once logged on, she didn't seem to notice anyone else.
Kidman was researching. Everything.
Information on VILE was much more of an oral history, but ACME's history was easy enough to get at. Tale after tale of Carmen's flights of fancy crossed the screen and the girl fell ever more enamored with her. Carmen was so very special, how she planned and by what stars she did so. She also learned more of ACME. Most of it didn't surprise her, but one person held her interest;
Chase Devineaux.
'That's the man she mentioned that night. The lucky charm....'
He had been Carmen's partner....once. Now he held a high position within the agency and seemingly devoted to locking her precious Carmen away. That alone made him frightening. She stared at his picture and an intense pair of eyes stared back, promising terrible things. If ACME was the enemy, then this was its face. She had never met an ACME before but already feared them, and not just because they meant imprisonment.
'ACMEs.... think they can just beat up anyone because they're the Law.' Kidman thought grimly. She knew of one in particular, Ivy. She had never met Ivy either, but she had seen her work on many of her friends. Bruises, sprains, broken things....
There was a certain amount of disposability in the nature of a lackey, but still, it was never a fair fight. They couldn't fight back, wouldn't fight back. Wonderful Master did not want it that way, because she was wonderful. Why the ACME's didn't respect that, she didn't know, and it dimmed her view of them significantly.
'If Ivy is bad, then this Chase must be far worse as their leader.'
She had gathered all the information she could from afar, but even with this primer, most of her more pressing questions were left unanswere. Now she sat outside, dully staring ahead as others passed by. Some waved and Kidman waved back, distantly.
'Chase...the lucky charm... She said she wants me to be a counter charm. It doesn't make any sense how, except as a sacrifice. Maybe she'll throw me in the way when he's chasing her.'
Kidman found the thought oddly funny and smiled faintly. There was something else that had recently begun to make itself known.
'Take ACME tower?'
She had looked it up. The tower was a massive structure, a symbolic centerpiece of enemy territory, of once friendly territory. Carmen was going to take the whole thing. Not just things in it, not just the C-5, which the girl hated anyway, but the whole building.
'Maybe that's just her style. It is Carmen, after all, but the risk of it, the repercussions of it... Why make that man even angrier? If he gets too angry...Master, those ACMEs are violent people!'
She wanted to talk to others about it, but something instinctively told her to keep quiet about. Still, as days went by it weighed her down. What she really wanted to do was to talk to Carmen herself about it. It was an insane thing to even consider, questioning Carmen, her questioning Carmen, but if one thing had changed over the course of weeks of research, it was the slow shift in priority from protocol to necessity.
Kidman stood up.
Someone had to question Carmen, someone with nothing to lose and really, nothing to gain. If the woman already intended to sacrifice her of her benefit, the girl figured she could sacrifice herself for the same goal.
‘So, you will allow it?' asked her soul. ‘Are you ready for what she may hand you?'
‘No....but I want to be.'
---
Things began to change.
The girl was still quiet and strange, but seemed less haunted, if by just a hair. That wasn't where the difference lay, though. As if to confirm suspicion of her conscious effort to remain unnoticed, her performance suddenly lurched ahead. She wasn't the best by any means, but her nature towards it went from apathetic rote to an almost unnerving focus. The need to consume knowledge, all knowledge spread out in all directions. If an odd course of instruction was posted, the girl was the first to sign for it. Nothing was too daunting and it seemed the only thing keeping her from running off the edge was lack of prerequisites needed for the more dangerous courses.
You could ask Kidman why, but she'd just look away shyly. Not cold, just...quiet. What kind of quiet shifted about under her calm facade, but still somewhat more approachable. Her heart was beating now.
The idea of sacrifice had had time to lie at the bottom of the ocean of her mind and the ocean had already begun to claim it. It didn't look like it had; a cold, unfeeling thing. It now supported life, and that life called still more to it. Humanity returned to her, and as it did, so did her perception of Carmen.
Kidman was fiddling with a flight simulator, as she had been for the past eight hours. She didn't have plans to ever fly a helicopter for work purposes. She doubted Carmen would trust a new pilot with one of their few machines. No, she just wanted to know it, to finish what she had started so long ago.
It nagged at her that she should be doing something else, something that would aid The Cause.
'I am aiding the cause. I'm fixing something in my head. My head must be fixed if I am to think clearly during Dire Times. I must learn concentration. That's what Master would want.'
She paused.
'That's what Master needs. Poor Master...'
Kidman didn't talk much, but she had begun to, and a more human version of Carmen was presented to her as she interacted with her fellows. Carmen's triumphs, Carmen's struggles, Carmen's possible fears and difficult past. It was a more tangible layer to a somewhat intangible being, one the girl could identify with.
'She's an orphan, like me. Well no...not really like me, but with the same... missing...ness. Our names are just labels given for the sake of convenience. There was no true beginning. We just...formed. That lack of grounding, I wonder if it affects you like it does me. I wonder if the idea of trust is as foreign to you as it is to me. The idea of safety, of permanence. You step into the current and you have to keep running. There's no where to rest...that is safe... You went deeper into life, where the current is strong, but with this tower...where are you going, Carmen? What if...you get washed away?'
Something on the control panel beeped and Kidman brought her mind back into focus.
No one else seemed worried about Carmen's dips into danger. Then again, no one knew about this one, no one so far as she knew. She would have given most anything to have someone to talk to about this.
She felt a new presence and looked up. Vic was there again, asking about her, no doubt.
'If only I could speak to you...'