(Bad End pt. 1) You attack the villains by yourself. It goes badly and you wake up much later in a hospital bed to an unpleasant surprise...

Calm and deliberation have never been your strong suits. Being a daredevil has always worked out for you until it didn't. So right now, cutting the Gordian Knot and just battering these two villains into submission feels like the right thing to do. Green Streak won't have any choice but to help you bail out Doc - you're pretty sure that word getting around that his main nemeses had been defeated singlehandedly by a novice heroine while he stood there haplessly would be even more humiliating to him than knowledge that he'd done something regrettable with his own sibling.

You weren't always like this. During your time as Nightingale you could still formulate a plan. But, probably on account of all the stress you've had to deal with, you've been feeling not quite yourself the last few weeks. You're pissed off and moody and right now, you dearly want to take it out on someone. So even though the rational part of your mind says you shouldn't rush things, the frustration welling up in your gut makes you decide that **** is the best, fastest solution.

"Enough of this shit." you say. "I just effortlessly wrecked a guy with a jetpack and flamethrowers, AND a guy who can control minds!" Well, in the latter case you didn't so much 'wreck' him as 'have an anal three-way with him' but whatever, that was totally your decision and not because his music did anything to you, and you got what you wanted so you'll call it a win. "And you... you're acting like you're some kind of deadly menace when your gimmick is ice skates? I defeated the most feared member of the Wonderland Warriors with a single punch yesterday. So the only thing your 'terrifying' ice-skating skills are going to be good for are skating the fuck away. You have until I get within range of you to grab your cuck boyfriend and use them." you say, striding confidently towards Goldie Glider.

She looks just as pissed as you do. She starts skating across the floor, swerving from side to side. You think about telling Balloon to zap her with her static-boob-lightning trick or conjure some winds, but you want this victory for yourself, so you open your mouth wide and let out an ear-splitting screech. It's painful for everyone in the room but it's focused on Goldie Glider. You're absolutely certain her eardrums have burst, and you can see a little blood trickling down her ears.

But Goldie Glider doesn't stop. She doesn't even clutch her head. She just grits her teeth and keeps circling you.... until she makes a sudden sharp turn and does an acrobatic, spinning pirouette in mid-air. As she spins in mid-air she turns, bringing both her legs towards you. It's such a telegraphed attack that you don't bother getting out of the way - you'll end this quickly, and wind up with your sonic boxing-glove to lay her out.

As your fist flies towards the approaching blonde woman you have only a split second to register a terrible mistakes you've made. Indeed, you've forgotten the basics of your own power. Bursts of infrasound are great at destroying brittle things like concrete, but the human body is mostly water, so it causes pain and internal bruising but that's all.

Yesterday you'd given it full **** to Queen of Hearts and it sent her flying. This time (mistake #1) you only put it in half power since you don't want to hurt Goldie so badly that it gives Green Streak an excuse to rush her off to a hospital. And far worse is mistake #2: Sound doesn't actually create air pressure. The reason Queen of Hearts went flying backwards when you punched her is because she levitates herself around with psychic telekinesis, so a sudden painful blow made her jerk backwards in a telekinetic version of a person flinching from an ordinary strike. Which means that even though the sonic blast is plenty painful for Goldie, it doesn't actually stop her momentum.

Mistake #3 is forgetting that as silly a villainous gimmick as ice skates may be, at the end of the day, they are still sharp metal blades. Schlick, schlick, schlick; Goldie Glider's dextrous feet trace a path all over your body. Again and again and again. It's like you dived into an industrial-scale paper shredder.

Moments later you are laying on the floor, motionless, your head turned to the side. Several voices are screaming hysterically, but yours isn't one of them - your mouth is open but no sound is coming out. You're in too much pain to even breathe, much less cry out. An expanding pool of blood makes a warm, sticky sensation on your neck and the side of your face. All you can see of Goldie Glider is her bottom half, and her skates and her lower legs are completely drenched in blood.

"Stupid fake-blonde twat." Goldie mutters. "I can't hear a thing and I feel like I'm about to puke." she takes a few steps closer and lifts one of her feet, placing her skate right above your neck as if she's about to stomp down. "Can you hear me? You really picked the wrong day to fuck with me."

Suddenly you feel yourself being jerked upwards and the world becomes a blur around you. This is it, looks like. With your last thoughts, you hope that your mother can forgive you for hurting her like this.

...

You take a deep breath as your eyes suddenly jerk open. There's something hard and plastic jammed all the way down your throat and you feel like you're tied up all over and you can't move. You can only see out of one of your eyes. Blinking and letting your eye adjust, you see that you are laying in a hospital bed, halfway suspended in the air with casts all over your arms and legs with heavy straps and bandages wrapped all around your chest. You still feel a dull ache through most of your body. You start coughing and gagging as you try to spit out the slender tube going down your throat, as you still can't move your limbs.

You can hear a female voice sigh in relief. "Oh thank God." it sounds relieved and a little exasperated. A hand reaches over and pulls the tube out of your throat. Moving your one working eye, you see that a stocky, slightly plump young woman with short hair wearing a colorful heroine costume with a domino mask is standing over you. The color of it shifts from light blue to a mellow shade of beige as you look.

This is Mood Ring, who you've seen a couple of times before. "I was starting to think my power wasn't doing any good. It's been really exhausting trying to keep channeling my 'compassion'-based healing power for days on end like this. I was just about to run out of sappy feel-good chick flicks that were watchable enough to actually help me keep my mood centered on it." she says. "Now that we've FINALLY succeeded in ransoming Dr. Rainbow the last thing I wanted was to have to explain to her that you were unresponsive in a coma. The side effects of a show of pitiful blubbering like she would've made might've made my power ring go haywire just from being near it."

"Whuhh... who... Green Streak... Balloon..." you say. Your voice is weak, painfully dry and cracked.

"That was months ago." Mood Ring says matter-of-factly. "Your mother was pretty pissed at the League over this fiasco and refused to let us keep you in the HQ's hospital ward. She mostly just kept hovering over you at Acropolis General. But eventually we persuaded her to let us try. She's gone home for the night, but you had better prepare yourself for an earful when she gets back down here. When she wasn't pleading with you to wake up, she was angrily scolding your **** body about putting her through this."

"I... why am I..." you mutter, trying to look down. You feel like you really, REALLY need to go to the bathroom, an unpleasant pressure, despite the fact that you can feel what you're pretty sure is a catheter inside you.

"Oh," Mood Ring says, "I guess it might be hazy. Sorry, I studied photography, not medicine. Let me refresh your memory. You got chopped up really badly by a villainess called Goldie Glider. Don't worry, she's locked up now. It was... pretty bad. You looked like you'd gotten sucked through a jet turbine when Green Streak brought you in. I wouldn't have thought that would put you in a coma since there was no head trauma, but natural-born supers tend to suffer from comas more often for some reason when they get beaten up badly enough. Anyway, the League has some talented reconstructive surgeons so aside from a bunch of thin white scars, the doctors say you should make a full recovery. They were even able to save your baby."

Just as you're starting to get a handle on the situation and consoling yourself that things could be worse, your thoughts come to a screeching halt. "Wh-wh... say that last part again, Mood Ring? I think I misheard." you mumble, a chill running down your spine.