“Howdy.”
The word felt almost like a taunt.
Almost.
If years ago you had told a young Enid Sinclair, newly arrived at Nevermore and brimming with all the hopes and fears of a young teenager werewolf, that one day, in the presence of another version of herself, her first impulse would be to decapitate her with her bare hands, she would have looked at you in horror.
A decade and a half later, Enid Addams had embraced the sweetness of horror, but fortunately she still retained enough self-control not to shorten The Bright One by a head right then and there.
That didn't mean that part of her wasn't eagerly hoping for it, waiting for the slightest excuse to come along so she could justify doing it.
Maybe something like that wasn't even necessary.
Enid had begun to move, claws outstretched, almost without realizing it, as a muffled growl reverberated in her chest. Only Wednesday's hand resting on her shoulder stopped her before she did something… drastic.
And The Bright One simply smiled at them, as if she were happy to see two old friends.
“Okay, who’s the old lady?” Agnes asked. As Moon Raven’s sidekick, Sparrow, the young woman might not have been as good a detective as her mentor, but even she could sense the immediate shift in the atmosphere and the body language of many of those present upon the revelation of Morningstar’s identity.
Her question seemed to break some of that tension, or at least shift the focus just enough.
“I know who she is,” said Cutting Wolf. The cyborg Enid had crossed her arms and was casting a calculating glance at The Bright One. “She’s an evil version of us that this gang recruited us to fight against a few years ago. Although she’s supposed to be dead.”
“She was,” declared Friday, in a tone of voice that was unusually chilling for the Addams in pink, “I myself plunged one of my daggers into her heart.”
“And it was a magnificent blow, let me tell you,” said The Bright One, “Painful, direct, and deep. It reminded me what it was like to be flesh and blood before I drew my last breath.”
“Well, I can infer,” began Mami, the other Wednesday who had just arrived, “that this woman is a variant of Enid and a former adversary whom you believed to be dead, and who has been providing you with logistical support under a different identity in your current campaign against the new enemy who has just devastated us physically and morally. Am I wrong?”
“No, no. You hit the nail on the head,” said Eamon as he hugged his wife. The normally gentle werewolf’s face was marked by the same aggression and distrust that had appeared on the faces of his female counterparts when they set their sights on The Bright One. “The question is, how the hell is she still alive?”
“I was dead,” said The Bright One, “Have no doubt about that. But you are Addamses. You know better than anyone that death is not necessarily an ending.”
“You’re not an Addams,” Enid growled, her eyes flashing gold for a moment.
The Bright One returned her gaze, without blinking. Her expression was suddenly serene and solemn.
“No. I’m not.”
Needler, who had remained by the side of her wife Parker since Morningstar’s revelation, using her as a support to stay on her feet despite her exhaustion, took a few steps with some effort approaching Enid and Wednesday.
“How she survived is irrelevant right now,” said the mad scientist. “We have a lot to talk about, and this location is compromised. We must leave.”
“Needler, did you know?” asked Enid, never taking her eyes off The Bright One. “Did you know it was her all along?”
The Addams scientist looked at Enid in silence for a few seconds before replying, “No. My suspicions centered on the fact that Morningstar knew how the enemy’s weapons actually worked and that she hadn’t really told us everything she knew about their plans. The revelation of her true identity… I’d be lying if I said I didn’t suspect it, but it was a possibility I never seriously considered.”
“Morningstar,” said Wednesday, frowning, “Aside from the Luciferian connotations, it also refers to the brightest star in the sky. I suspected there might be some connection, but my writer’s mind took over, and I decided it was too obvious.”
“A red herring,” said Enid and Saint-Clair in unison.
A chuckle escaped from The Bright One’s lips, “Just like communism!”
“Great, now she’s making movie references,” Taylor grumbled. “Can we just kill her already and get out of here?”
The Hyde was still in her human form, but her skin had taken on a sickly gray hue, and her eyes seemed more bulging than would be natural when she wasn’t transformed. Without a doubt, these were the first signs that Pup’s painful absence was taking its toll.
“No, we can’t kill her,” said Needler, “because we’re going to need all the help we can get.”
“Really?” asked Enid. “You’re not telling me we have to trust this viper.”
“No, not blind trust. Just practicality,” declared Needler. “In extreme situations, you sometimes have to resort to undesirable means.”
The scientist cast an almost analytical glance at The Bright One, the kind of look one would expect from someone about to cut a small animal in half for vivisection.
“And you are undoubtedly a very undesirable mean,” she said.
The Bright One smiled mockingly, “Please, you really shouldn’t be flirting with me like that, since you’re a married woman and your wife is right here.”
“No, seriously, can’t we just kill her?” Saint-Clair insisted.
“Enough,” Wednesday interrupted, placing her hand firmly on her wife’s shoulder. The she-wolf turned to look at her, her eyes ceasing to glow gold for a moment and returning to their soft blue color. Enid felt some of the rage, anger, and uncertainty of the past few minutes dissipate. It hadn’t disappeared entirely, only been softened by her wife’s dark eyes and her ever-steady presence.
“Enid,” began Wednesday, “I share many of your concerns about this situation. But Needler has saved us from a tight spot on more than one occasion, often in dramatic ways, and she has been instrumental in helping us pull through situations that would otherwise have been fatal. I can say that I trust her and her judgment almost blindly, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.”
That last sentence was accompanied by a glance at the others present, who had been with them for years. Friday, Eamon, Saint-Clair, Taylor, Eneit, Taylor… in each of them, she could see that they recognized the truth in her words.
They might not like it, but if Needler said it was better to keep The Bright One close, they would listen to her.
“That said,” Wednesday continued, “One word from you right now, mi loba, and I promise I’ll rip that wretched head off with my own two bare hands this very moment.”
Enid remained silent. For a mere instant.
A very long and uncomfortable instant.
Finally, the Volvaugr simply closed her eyes and took a breath, inhaling deeply before speaking again, “All right, let her come with us.”
Enid opened her eyes, the golden glow shining in them once more. “But if you try anything, I’ll finish what we started nine years ago. Is that clear?” she growled, addressing The Bright One.
“Crystal clear,” she replied.
“Well… Where are we going, then?” asked Eneit Synklar. The barbarian werewolf princess had remained in somber silence for the past few minutes. The truth was that the weight of everything that had happened still pressed down on all of them, and questions, fears, and doubts were crowding the back of their minds.
“My portal is still open,” said Needler. “Follow me.”
Stepping through the portal was nothing out of the ordinary for most of them. It was a slight novelty for Sparrow, Mami, and Cutting Wolf, but nothing compared to the multiversal leap they had already experienced when they were transported to Morningstar’s headquarters… no, The Bright One’s headquarters.
For the others, it was already as commonplace as stepping through the doorway of any of their homes.
And yet, after doing so, every single one of them felt a sense of strangeness as they stepped through to the other side.
The place where they found themselves was a large, enclosed room, an eclectic mix of a dungeon, similar to one you might find in the basement of any Addams’ mansion, and a state-of-the-art laboratory. Flasks and test tubes were scattered everywhere, bubbling away alongside all sorts of weird devices and massive computers, emitting a constant hum of activity that permeated the room.
But there was nothing there that could explain the sense of strangeness, even by Addams standards. Perhaps sensing her guests’ unease, Needler decided to explain things a little.
“What you’re feeling right now, that mix of unexpected dizziness and tingling in your fingertips, is your body adjusting to the process of space-time compression.
Wednesday raised an eyebrow in alarmed surprise.
“Needler, are you saying you’ve created a pocket universe?”
“Hell, no,” replied the mad scientist, “It’s just a simple pocket dimension.”
“And you say that as if it were the weekend grocery shopping,” said Saint-Clair. “How on earth did you set up a pocket dimension?”
“It’s not complicated, really. You just need a hadron collider that isn’t too big…”
“That raises even more questions!” exclaimed the werecat.
“Weds,” Parker’s voice interrupted, addressing her wife as she looked around with growing concern, “How long ago did you build this?”
“It’s been a couple of years now, but I hadn’t really used it until now.”
“And when you talk about space-time compression…”
“This small dimension is linked to our seven home universes,” Needler explained, “synchronized with them just as they are with each other, but with a calculated time lag. One hour in our respective universes is one year in here.”
Parker looked at her wife. She looked at her closely. The signs of exhaustion, her appearance even more disheveled than usual, her usually marble-like pallor now taking on an almost sickly hue, an unexpected thinness etched into her cheeks, giving her face a cadaverous look…
As if she had been working nonstop, without a break, with no time to get ready or attend to anything beyond the bare minimum necessary for survival…
With no loved one to remind her that it was good to get outside from time to time.
“How… how long have you been here?” asked Parker.
“For me, it’s been… two years. I think I’m 46 now; I’ve lost track of when October happened,” said Needler. “Two years of constant investigation, querida. Two years without you. Two years without our daughter,” she added, in a very low voice.
Parker ran over to hug her, holding back a sob, while the others processed what they had just heard.
“Needler,” Enid murmured, “Oh my God…”
“I’m sorry, it’s just that…,” said the Addams scientist, hugging a trembling Parker, “I needed the time. I really needed it. Our enemy’s technology is of a sickening complexity and design, and I needed to figure out as much as possible about how it works and what its purpose is. And if I hadn’t figured it out, I could have lost all of you, and that’s unacceptable.”
Parker pulled back slightly from her wife, though without breaking the embrace entirely, looking into her face with an expression that was equal parts devotion and reproach. “You’re… you’re the stupidest genius I’ve ever known, Wednesday Addams.”
Needler smiled. A small smile, one reserved for her wife, that she didn’t care if the others saw right now.
“Perhaps,” interrupted The Bright One’s voice, drawing several irritated glances, “it’s time we moved on to discussing the most pressing issue. At least before you collapse.”
“There’s a room I’ve been using as a living space where we can make ourselves comfortable for a while…,” said Needler.
The scientist led them down a short hallway to a room with an unmade bed and a desk buried in papers and books, topped by a blackboard covered with equations written in chalk that spilled over the edges and spread across the stone wall. There was also a chair and a shabby-looking sofa. They took seats as best they could, although some members, such as Cutting Wolf and Eneit Synklar, chose to remain standing.
The Bright One sat in the desk chair, next to Needler, who stood in front of the blackboard. From that position, all eyes were on her, making it easier to keeping her under close watch.
“All right,” Needler began, pulling a silver sphere from her pocket that began to take the shape of various weapons in her hand, as well as other tools. “You’re already familiar with this, at least to some extent.”
“Our enemy’s weapon,” said Wednesday, “Unknown material. Despite its appearance, it is not silver. It responds to the bearer’s thoughts and takes whatever form the bearer desires or finds most comfortable to use. The attack occurs either by firing a burst of what I suspect is a portion of itself as a projectile or by causing a direct cut or wound in a close-range attack. The impact of an attack causes the victim to disintegrate in seconds.”
“Everything’s correct… except for the last part,” Needler replied. “This weapon doesn’t disintegrate the victim. It disseminates them.”
Needler put the sphere back into one of the inside pockets of her lab coat.
“Disintegration is the process by which something is broken down, sometimes at the atomic level, leading to the collapse of its physical integrity. It is a process with many variations and causes, and it should never trigger a reaction like the one that follows the disappearance of one of this device’s victims.”
“The Nothing,” said Wednesday.
“The victim struck by this weapon has their atomic structure dismantled at the quantum level,” Needler continued. “They are not being disintegrated; they are being teleported into a state of disseminated matter. Transformed into pure, incorporeal energy.”
“A fast-track version of my old purification process,” added The Bright One, “though purely based on science and without any ritualistic elements.”
“The process occurs in such a way that it literally rips that person’s essence from the very fabric of reality in which they reside, leaving a tear in the very quantum existence of the affected universe. A rift that begins to grow and consume everything until the universe collapses in on itself in an entropic chain reaction,” Needler continued, “And the fact that the victims are Wednesday Addams has absolutely nothing to do with this. Any person from the affected universe being disseminated would cause the same effect.”
“That’s what happened to the Enid you shot in the universe where we were with that damn Mary Sue,” Saint-Clair said. “That’s still pretty fucked up, sister.”
“Where are they going?” Taylor asked. “All the victims… taken away… Where’s Pup?”
“And my husband,” Eneit added.
“I assume they’ll be taken to The Unkindness’s base of operations, where their incorporeal forms will be contained in some way,” Needler explained. “I just hope they aren’t conscious in that state. Although part of me would like to experience it someday, I don’t think it would be very pleasant, even for other incarnations of us. Or in the long run.”
“The containers will be cylinders with hemispheres at the ends or complete spheres,” said The Bright One.
“And how the hell do you know that?” asked Friday.
“They’re the most optimal shapes for containing that kind of living essence… nothing with angles. Angles can open doors to unexpected corners of reality if you don’t have a body but there’s the possibility of having a consciousness.”
“I have a question,” said Saint-Clair. “If she’s taken Pup, Shark… and my Willa… does that mean their universes are gone now? Does that mean my universe is gone too?”
“I don’t think so,” said Needler, “or at least, if it does happen, it won’t be as immediate as if they had been disseminated in their respective universes. That’s the same reason why The Bright One’s base didn’t start experiencing multiple outbreaks of the Nothing spreading.”
“Nah,” said The Bright One, “What causes the tear in reality is the quantum rupture between the victim’s natural essence and their universe of origin. If the person is no longer in their universe of origin, there is no tear in the fabric of their native reality, nor in that of the one where they are temporarily residing, because their atoms have not yet formed quantum bonds with their surroundings.”
“All right. I definitely think I’m going to get a headache,” said Cutting Wolf. “My thing is cutting things up and hacking AI servers. This is getting a little out of hand.”
“Why?” Enid asked suddenly, addressing The Bright One.
“I just explained that…”
“No, not that,” the she-wolf interrupted. “Why are you helping us?”
A deathly silence fell over the room, and the tension from a few minutes earlier resurfaced, having never fully dissipated. Wednesday was about to speak, but The Bright One was quicker.
“What you really want to ask is why I’m not trying to kill you,” she said.
Enid said nothing more. She simply kept looking at The Bright One.
The older version of her (and The Bright One was undoubtedly the oldest person in the room, by millennia) simply let out a sigh before she began to speak.
“You killed me. You killed me good and dead,” she began, “But you forgot that I was a witch. Not by birth, and with all my magic stolen from others down to the last drop. But when you’ve been using magic for so long, it changes you. So in the end, I was a witch in every sense of the word, whose body you left to rot in the ruins of my fortress without any ritual to seal my spirit.”
“Well, shit,” Taylor muttered. The rest of those present who had a basic understanding of witchcraft or magic fully understood the sentiment expressed in those two words.
The Bright One kept talking.
“My spirit remained there. It endured, clinging like a parasite to the only living thing in that place… a tiny flower thriving thanks to my fertile corpse. I prolonged its existence… I don’t know for how long… centuries, surely. You know how time works between universes. But in the end, I managed to gather and transmute enough energy and matter to rebuild a body for myself. After that came the hardest part… with my magic almost fully depleted, I had to cannibalize all the remnants of technology from my fortress, using old pieces of armor, or these old spacesuits left behind by some variants, and all my knowledge to create a very rudimentary version of a dimensional jump method.”
The Bright One looked at Enid. “And yes, my first thought was to find you all and kill you,” she said, before letting out a bitter laugh. “But I realized how futile that would be.”
“You’re not going to tell us you had a moral epiphany,” said Wednesday, a hint of disbelief in her voice.
“Oh, damn it, no,” laughed The Bright One, “More of a pragmatic epiphany. I’ll say it again: you killed me. When I was at the height of my power, you killed me. What chance would I have, weakened and a pale shadow of my former self, against someone like her?” she asked, pointing at Enid. “It would be like a sailor trying to stop a tsunami with a punch. Absurd beyond measure.”
There was another pause, as if The Bright One needed to gather her strength before continuing her recollection.
“So… well, the next thing that occurred to me was to start over with my plan. Take my time, be more discreet, and avoid your universes like the plague. But the strength, the drive to do it… wasn’t there. So I traveled. From universe to universe, I simply visited and observed the Wednesdays from a distance. Looking for signs of my own. Signs and traits that would remind me of her… and it was during those travels that I learned I wasn’t the only source of horror haunting the Addams family across the multiverse.”
“The Unkindness,” said Enid.
“Indeed,” said The Bright One, “I won’t bore you with the details and the things I had to do to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but I managed to figure out what she’s after. What I told you, the Normalcy Nine’s plan… Although its consequences for the multiverse are dangerously real, their motivation is a lie she’s invented to keep them under control so she can use them to speed up the process of achieving her true goal.”
The Bright One stood up from the chair. Everyone watched her movements, ready to act if she tried anything. But the old Enid simply stood before her younger self and Wednesday, staring intently at them.
“She wants to be the One,” she said, “the only Wednesday Addams in the entire multiverse. The most absolute and perfect. And that is something I find repugnant and offensive.”
“For your Wednesday,” said Enid.
An indecipherable expression flashed across The Bright One’s face. Something like longing and, perhaps, guilt.
“My Wednesday was perfect,” said The Bright One, in a tone of voice that left no room for argument, “and no other Wednesday will ever be. That’s why I’ve decided to oppose everything that harpy stands for.”
“Wait,” Agnes, Sparrow, interjected, looking alarmed, “But if she wants to be the One, why go to the trouble of capturing the essence of other Wednesdays?”
“True. Why not kill them using more mundane means that don’t endanger the very fabric of existence?” asked Mami.
“The little detective and the MILF have struck gold,” said The Bright One. “Isn’t it obvious? She doesn’t just want to be the One. She wants to be perfect… and how do you build something perfect?”
“Your plan,” said Wednesday with an expression of restrained horror, “The essence of thousands of Wednesdays concentrated to create a perfect one. She’s doing the same thing, using herself as a foundation. She builds her perfection and power by taking the essence of the others and adding it to her own.”
“Oh, screw that!” exclaimed Saint-Clair.
“But then… our sisters…,” Friday began, bringing a hand to her mouth.
“Safe for now,” said The Bright One, “I hope. I don’t think she’s going to immediately absorb freshly harvested essences when she surely has thousands or hundreds of thousands in reserve.”
“But this means we’re racing against the clock,” Needler said. “Time is against us if we want to save our sisters and all the other Wednesdays.”
Enid got up from the sofa. She took a step, then another, until she was face to face with The Bright One. Unlike in their previous confrontation, the young werewolf was now taller than her old enemy, forcing her to lower her gaze to fix her golden eyes on the pale blue, almost whitish eyes of her old rival.
“I still don’t trust you,” she said.
“Understandable,” said The Bright One.
“But it’s too late to do anything about it if we want to save the others and stop The Unkindness… Am I wrong?”
“You’re absolutely right.”
“All right…,” said Enid, turning to look at her Weds, Needler, and everyone else, “What’s our next move, and how can I kill that bitch?”
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