She's not sick

Arbor knew exactly where she was going. It was late when she got onto the campus, late enough that the entrance was onto spotted with people, the occasional benched studier, the flirty couple. Arbor walked right by them; she had a purpose, a place to get to in time. A piece of paper floated in her hand, flapping against the autumn wind as she walked up the path. She opened the bright door to the Infirmary, and sure enough, she was there.

Kayla Croft. Arbor walked up to the desk, the sound of change jingling in her vest pocket, and leaned up against it with her arm. The girl was studying the paper in her hand and the person in front of her with narrowed eyes. She said nothing for a while, just flitting back and forth. A hood was over her head, and she looked dark and suspicious, except for her face; it was young and soft and confused.

Fuck. She hated desk duty.

Kayla leaned back in her chair, with her feet propped up on her desk and the bill of her cap pulled over her eyes. Her mouth was frozen in a hard frown. Each tick of the clock made a small pop! of electricity go off above her head. This place is gonna drive me crazy... The Headmaster had said that her abilities were being wasted, so why did he force her to sit behind a desk handing out band-aids all day? She flexed the fingers on her left hand. Her broken wrist had finally healed after a couple weeks, so they couldn't use that as an excuse not to work with her anymore. The cast around her arm had been a constant reminder of the diamond girl in the courtyard.

Restless. That was the best way to describe it. It was suffocating to be sitting here, trying to play out the same routine life as everyone else in this fucking school. Everything she did here left a bitter taste in her mouth.

Her eyes drifted up to the hooded girl leaning up against the desk. How long had she been there? Kayla watched on in silence, waiting for the usual requests, but after a few minutes of quiet between them she was forced to speak. "Do you need something?"

It took her long to speak. To be honest, Arbor was expecting something a little more agitated. When Alfie ran her through the database, he said she'd be irritable. Impatient. Angry, insulting, crude, independent, a thesaurus of words all pointing to a response opposite to that. But her words were respectful. Arbor didn't like that. She hoped the data they found was correct, or she'd kill all of them at the restaurant.

Arbor brought down her hoodie, revealing short brown hair, cooling the back of her neck that had been dampened by the late-summer's heat. "You're Kayla Croft, right?" She knew that was Kayla Croft, it surely looked like Kayla Croft, albeit not so much acting like Kayla Croft. She had to confirm.

What the hell did this girl care who she was? Kayla raised an eyebrow, electricity crackling around her head, her expression unchanging. "I might be." There was the hint of an edge to her voice now. She didn't have the patience for games like this. Did she need something or not? The girl didn't exactly look like she needed emergency surgery. How'd she know her name, anyways? Kayla had made a lot of enemies since she'd enrolled here, but she didn't remember ever seeing this girl in her life. Was she supposed to be recognizing someone? "Are you lost or something? This is the infirmary. If you don't need stitches, then get out."

Arbor looked at her blankly. The threat did not seem to register. So she finally found her, Kayla Croft, her first opponent. The girl folded the paper and put it in the pocket of her shorts, before taking a coin from her vest pocket. She flipped it in the air, an old-looking penny. "Fight me." Her voice was low and nonplussed; as serious as winter was cold.

...What?

Lightning flickered over her head, an incredulous expression passing over her face, like she hadn't heard what the girl had just said. Fight her... She wanted a fight, huh? Kayla suddenly rolled back in her chair, her hard expression bursting into laughter that bordered on mocking. When she stood up fully, a wolfish grin split her face. It was like flipping a switch. "You want to fight me? Why? Did I make your boyfriend cry or something?" she asked, a sadistic amusement tinging her voice. Electricity flared down her arms, her legs, her back, a blue so bright that it almost looked white. "Or are you just one of those smug fucking superhero types?"

She flexed her fingers, sparks crackling around her hand. This was just what she needed, just what she was looking for, and this time she didn't even have to start it herself. "You know, I don't even care. Just make this entertaining, alright? I don't beat on helpless wimps."

Kayla still had her shift, but her shift could wait. Everybody needed a little entertainment break, right? All that sitting around had started to rot at her brain.

"I'm so generous, I'll even give you a head start." She held out her hand and snapped her fingers. A blue bolt of electricity went shooting past the mystery girl's head. It hit the door in an explosion of splinters and shattered glass, sending the charred remains flying off its hinges and skidding fifteen feet along the hallway floor. "So you better run, brat!"

Only the whir of the electricity past her head made Arbor do anything close to flinching. So, she was okay with a little interior damage? That was fine with her. The infirmary seemed empty that night, unless all the patients were in the back room. Arbor nodded blankly at her statement, and began to walk backwards, coin in hand. At a distance, she flicked it in Kayla's direction, a little penny spinning in the electric girl's direction. She spun to, twisted on her heel and began running, hand reaching behind her back. The penny began to fold over on itself, began to get small, real small, like a dot, engulfed in a sphere of semi-visible pressure. Then, her hand retracted, and there was a loud pop, a small explosion that lifted some beds from the ground, and almost lifted Arbor from her feet. She got a head start, though, and was outside before it detonated, beside the door that was blown from its hinges.

Damn, this girl moved like a fucking robot. At first, there didn't seem to be any kind of urgency in her steps, as if the bolt had barely even phased her. She raised her hand again, electricity rippling down her arm, when the girl flicked the penny into the air.

Kayla knew better than anybody that a coin could be a dangerous weapon. As the penny began to fold in on itself, collapsing into a tiny barely visible dot, she dove behind the desk. The explosion shook the infirmary, and would've slammed her into the wall had she still been standing. When she crawled back to her feet, there was soot blasted all over the floors, walls, ceilings from where the penny had detonated in the air. Small fires had popped up over the beds and cabinets, leaping and dancing through the thick gray cloud of smoke that had filled the room.

She walked out just as the sprinklers turned on, electricity snapping around her like snakes. "What kind of gift is that, huh?" she laughed. That was interesting... Kayla slashed her hand through the air, and electricity stretched out from her hand like a whip toward the mystery girl. "So how come you know my name, but I don't know yours?"

Her mind flashed back to a black envelope filled with photographs, with letters written in a fluid crimson hand. Kayla's grin widened. "Oh, don't tell me... you're not one of 'them', are you?" Someone would've had to take those pictures of her. "You're just the person I was looking for, aren't you? Do you want to die that badly?"

Arbor did not answer her initial question. When she took a victory prize from the girl or the infirmary where she worked, she didn't want to be traced too quickly. After all, as of that day, she was an official student, though she didn't feel like one.

This talk about letters, about black envelopes and crimson writing, all this strange stuff; the girl had no idea where this was coming from. "I don't know what you're talking about." She gave her a shake of the head, digging into her pocket and pulling out a handful of 4 or so coins. She flicked one into the air, catching it without much effort.

Those coins again? They were the key to her gift, but Kayla still didn't know the intricacies of how it worked. Was it a form of magnetism...? No, there had to be more to it than that. Was it any object? Was there a size or weight limit? Maybe it was touch... If she could explode anything, then there wouldn't have been any need to deal with pennies.

There were a hundred questions running through her head, but only two mattered to her right now.

One, was this girl who she thought she was?
Two, was she immune to her own explosions?

She intended to find both out right now.

There was about twelve feet between them. Kayla suddenly started into a run, electricity crackling around her, quickly closing most of the distance. She brought back her fist when she was a little over a yard away. "Don't play dumb with me, you piece of shit!"

So she was charging her. It was rare for Arbor to admit when she was happy, whether in expression of word. However, when Kayla went to attack her, she smiled. She loved fighting. It was what she was good at, and it was what she came to that school to do. Arbor tossed the coin into the air again when Kayla began running, spreading her fingers as it flipped in the brief second of its rise and fall. It expanded, expanded extremely thin, edges extending longer than her fist. These edges were sharp. When the "coin" landed, it stuck to Arbor's fingers, and she jabbed it at Kayla's punch, distaching it from her fingertips at impact. They collided, the coin bending flimsily around Kayla's fist. Arbor quickly retracted her hand as the coin absorbed the electricity. metal conducts that shit

Now they were close, now it was Arbor's turn. She stepped to the side, quickly dropping a penny into Kayla's pocket. She began to run. At a distance, she spun and quickly put her fingers together, and the coin condensed and subsequently popped into a small explosion, wherever it was.

Before the punch could connect with Arbor's jaw, the coin flipped into the air, expanding into a thin pancake-sized shield. Electricity rippled through it like rings in a pond when her fist collided with the copper. A dull sound resonated through it like a gong, sending a low shock up her arm, but it wasn't anything she couldn't deal with. Idiot. So it wasn't just explosions, it was a degree of control over metal. Did she think she could stop her with something like that?

The bent copper shield went zipping unnaturally to the right, spinning through the air like a buzz saw and burying itself into the grass.

There was a low chink as the coin fell inside her pocket.

She spun around on her toes like a ballerina, still carried by the momentum of her punch, throwing the school blazer off in one fluid movement. The dark blue jacket went flying through the air, parachuted on the wind, before shredding into pieces in the explosion.

Blue lightning went shooting through the smoke, Kayla still charging forward. That'd been a close call, but there was no time to think right now. The fact that she'd almost just been caught up in an explosion didn't even register in her mind. This was just plain and easy movement, with adrenaline pumping through her veins.

The girl had gone running. It wasn't solid evidence, but she was sure she had her answer. Her attacker couldn't afford to get caught up in the blast.

Arbor had been concocting another coin wafer, and brought it up as the blast came at her, pushing it to the bolt. They collided, and the razor-sharp "shield flew in her direction, grazing her arm. She winced, blood oozing from a rip in her shirt. She had to be more careful with those. It seemed like everything she did was a potential weapon against herself. Flattening another coin, then another, she coiled her wrist and threw both in Kayla's direction, like frisbees. 2 years of ultimate frisbee in middle school paid off.

She eyed the door laying on the ground. Dammit, it was wooden, as she expected. Why couldn't Kayla have been in a cellar, or a bomb shelter of sorts? Those always had heavy, metal doors.

She finally skid to a stop as her bolt smashed into the penny shield. Two more pennies appeared in the girl's hand and flattened into thin copper discs. More of that? That had been her first thought, before the girl reached back and flicked her wrist. The flattened coins flew at her like frisbees, their razor edges glinting in the moonlight.

Kayla snapped her fingers. Lightning shot out from her fingers like a handgun, blasting one of the discs out of the air, but the other kept zipping towards her. She stumbled gracelessly to the side to avoid it, and the weaponized penny went skimming inches over her shoulder, grazing her neck and whistling as it sailed past.

Sparks crackled around her head, and the disc suddenly wheeled around like a boomerang, flying back over her shoulder and toward the girl who had thrown it. Except this time, Kayla was in control.

Arbor frowned. Yes, her power was metal and electricity acted like a magnet. Thankfully, so did her fingertips. She watched the disc fly back in her direction, and stretched out her hand. The disc gravitated around her body, whipping around and slingshotting even faster in Kayla's direction. It was a game of pong, and a problem for the first person to let it by them.