Diana Closes On Her Target

For Diana, the day started very differently from a normal day. As Lisa headed to the college on the bus, which she had to do due to rules concerning fraternisation during college hours, Diana took out the list of names that she had been slowly working her way through. It had started as quite a long list, and concerned everyone who had attended more than one or two of David's little games. There were a lot of people, both men and women, who liked to see Lisa be humiliated and degraded, it made Diana's blood boil. However, with time and effort, she'd narrowed it down, scratching each of them off the list by the simple means of making a rule about them which would **** them to wear a certain thing to class, or to say a certain thing at a certain time.

Diana had reasoned that the owner of a rulebook who intended to use it against someone else who also had a rulebook would have written a rule to make themselves immune to commands from other books. Therefore, with a very small rule that no one would notice but herself, Diana was seeking the only other person in the college that it would not effect. Once she had that, the person who didn't respond to her commands, she would know who had the other rulebook.

The process had been long and slow, but at last, Diana was down to the last few names on her list. A mere three students were left out of the group which usually congregated around David and Lisa, A woman called Tracy, a man called Gordon, and a second girl who was called Samantha. Today, Diana had written rules for all three of them. Two would obey them, and one would not.

Then, she would at last know the face of her enemy.

However, as the day went on, and Diana attended classes - mumbling along with others, but not really learning anything - she wondered just what she would do when she did know who her enemy was. As recent events proved, she couldn't let this go on much longer, David was wearing down both Lisa and herself, but just because she knew who the real enemy was didn't mean that she could move against them. Since they would surely have shielded themselves, she couldn't just make a rule about them, and if she moved too obviously, she risked letting them know that she was after them.

If they didn't already know, that was... if they were smart enough to set a contingency with the rulebook to tell them who had tried to affect them, then after today, they would know about her as well.

If this was the case... what was she going to do? The rulebooks would cancel one another out, so it would become a battle between the two of them, using the world around them as their weapons. Even if they couldn't affect one another, they could still change and alter the world, make other people into their tools, and so forth.

It occurred to Diana that two rulebook wielders going head to head would be very bad for everyone else. But she didn't exactly have much choice, did she? If she left it as it was, Lisa would be doomed to a life of slavery, and Diana would very probably follow suit. If she was going to reverse the rules which had started this whole mess in the first place, she needed to get her hands on their rulebook, to erase their rules as well as her own.

So the target wasn't the person per se, but the book which gave them power. This wasn't much better, though, since anyone who knew what its true potential was would surely guard it with their life.

So it circled back again to having to face them head on. She just didn't know how to do it yet.

It would be dangerous, now was the time most likely for her own identity to be discovered, and the worst thing that could possibly happen was for her enemy to realise who she was, but she not to realise who they were. If that were the case, then she would have lost for sure, her only chance remaining would be a carefully written final backup rule, which she didn't even know if it could function as she wanted.

She didn't want to test that rule.