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The office in which Amanda worked was too evenly lit, and too matte, with carpet and upholstery on the floors and the cubicle walls. There were no highlights but the white translucent panels in the ceilings, and the few shadows were flabby and gray, hazily leaking from the objects that cast them. The lack of contrast wearied the eye. It was a noisy place, too, despite all the carpets. Amanda had learned to hate the shrieky voice of a particular co-worker a few cubicles over, and to dread it when she heard any conversation start up in that quarter, for it would inevitably go on for at least ten minutes, and be all about the misbehaviour, ill-health and ingratitude of her family. There was a water-cooler at the end of the hall – why couldn’t they talk around it? She understood from references in tv commercials that that was the prime purpose of water-coolers; sort of like a reverse campfire, Amanda thought. Then again, tv also told her that watercoolers were for discussing tv, and swapping “juicy gossip” about the escapades of fellow-employees. Maybe griping about family was what one was did in one’s cubicle. She wondered if anybody in the place had even thought of doing anything outrageous, or even interesting enough to qualify as juicy gossip. Maybe moderately well-hydrated gossip. Maybe.
She walked home at the end of the day, opened a can of onion soup in her apartment and poured it into a heavy ceramic bowl. She topped it with a round of bread and some cheddar and put it into the oven to heat up. Then she turned on her computer , entered a number of passwords and wondered if it was stalkerish to look up your date in the employment records of the Public Works Department. It probably was, if you weren’t really supposed to be in the database outside of work hours. Oh, well, she told herself, you couldn’t be too careful when you were a single woman, especially in Gradient. Victor seemed to have been around a bit, employment-wise, though everything in his record suggested he was a reliable employee. He typed 43 words a minute, too. Cute.
The Obscurant placed a string of small bombs along the outer wall of the warehouse. This particular design of pre-fab building, he knew, didn’t really have adequate internal support beams – the company had in fact gone out of business for that reason, and its existing models were being phased out. Indeed the owners of this warehouse were probably breaking one or more local bylaws just by storing hair care products in an uninspected building, and their insurance company would probably not look kindly on them for it, but he had no sympathy – Flexikeratin Industries had no call to be so cheap, the way their mousse was selling like hotcakes. For a moment Victor amused himself with a mental image of mousse-garnished hotcakes. They probably underpaid their night watchman too. The Obscurant took his place behind a concrete pylon, right in line with the back door. It would have been in full view of the watchman when he came for a smoke, if the pylon itself had been visible. After half an hour of leg cramp (come on, you bugger, is this the night you decided to think about your lungs and give it up?) the guard propped open the door, scratched himself, and began to rummage in his breast pocket for the packet. The Obscurant triggered his message rocket.
It went even better than he had hoped: words of fire in the parking lot behind the warehouse, spelling out RUN NOW OR DIE. The night watchman dropped his lighter in the face of such a display. His eyes widened till even at a distance, Victor could see two rings of white around each iris. Then he fainted.
Victor swore. He had of course long contemplated the possibility he would have to, in the course of his supervillain career, harm and kill people, even civilians, and he believed he could use deadly force if it came down to it; but he had no grudge against this old guy, and anyway his plan called for a witness. His whole coming-out caper, of which this was only a small part, absolutely depended upon creating as much confusion and rumour as possible.
Pulling out his taser in case the guard came out of his faint too rapidly, The Obscurant dashed forward in a sinister crouch and began dragging the watchman away from the building to the shelter of the concrete barrier. It was as well for his career there were no conscious witnesses, as he was muttering in a somewhat incongruous vein for a supervillain.
“Come, on you old bastard, don’t die on me. You’ve got to live to annoy people with your tale of the night you saw the Obscurant blow up the old warehouse.” Finally the watchman’s eyelids lifted painfully and he snorted back to some degree of consciousness. There was a volatile smell about him of cheap booze, and Victor suspected he could not take all the credit for the man’s faint. He was also glad he had not dragged him any nearer the sparks from the fireworks.
“Bwa?” The old man asked. An improvement on his original plan had occurred to Victor while waiting for the fellow to wake, and he now adopted an anxious, dorky manner that to be honest, came a little too easily to him.
“Oh man, oh man,” he blurted, “we have got to get out of here, dude. There’s some kind of spooky guy in a mask or some sort of helmet, and he said he was going to set off a bomb, and then he laughed and disappeared into thin air. I thought I was tripping, but look, those letters are still there, burning.” Filling the guard’s head with the wildest tales he could think of about The Obscurant’s monstrous appearance, Victor pulled the guard to his feet, then he quietly clicked the detonator in his pocket.
If the guard had had any suspicions of his rescuer, the roaring confusion that followed drove them from his sodden mind. The wall of the building that sided the main driveway collapsed and the roof followed, as Victor had planned. Several hundred cardboard boxes full of shampoo bottles tipped over, caught fire and began to heat up. They really had better make a run for it, Victor thought. A few loose shampoo bottles had already spilled through the collapsed wall and were rolling down the drive. One exploded as Victor and the guard watched. The Obscurant was curious about the possibilities, but too wary to stick around for a closer view of the lavender-and-bergamot-scented napalm that would be raining over the area in a few minutes. He steered the dazed guard to a safer distance and made sure the man phoned his superiors with a histrionic description of hellish disaster and the mad fiend who’d set it off, before slipping away and catching a bus back to his current bachelor apartment. Not a bad start to the month, he thought. He’d met a nice girl and blown up a warehouse and now a night watchman was retailing a highly colourful account of a shapeshifting shadow that spoke in word balloons of fire. His boss probably wouldn’t believe any of it, of course, but the warehouse was down, and the ball had begun to roll. These things always built more dramatically from a slow start.
The next day was Saturday. Amanda put on a knee-length (for her) broomstick skirt and a man’s V-neck sweater that was clingy enough, she hoped, to give her some shape, and her usual flat Chinese slippers (also men’s, but the advantage of Chinese slippers was that you couldn’t tell). She draped a scarf around her neck in case the V-neck was too revealing, tied her hair back and checked herself in the mirror, turning this way and that. It was no good. She looked liked a schoolgirl; a schoolgirl the size of a landmass. She dropped the scarf, untied her ponytail and retied it lower down, just above the nape of her neck. That was better - now she resembled an office assistant, but it was an improvement on the junior-high dance look. Neither of her lipstick colours pleased her, but she tried on her favourite earrings, the dangly coral ones, and as an afterthought, she dug out her very best purse from its tissue paper, the one she only carried at weddings and funerals. With the simple outfit, it looked almost sophisticated.
Victor took a table with plenty of room around it, and not too near the window at the front of the restaurant– it was Gradient City after all - and examined his copy of the Gradient Orator as he waited for Amanda. He forced himself not to rush through it as he scanned for mention of the warehouse fire. As it turned out, the Obscurant had made page 3, two pages better than he’d expected.
“MYSTERY MESSAGE FRIES WAREHOUSE,” read the half-inch headline. They’d found his burnt warning sign, and there was a good quote from the night watchman. He said he’d seen a “ninja kind of guy” holding “some sort of flame-thrower gun” as he escaped across the roof of a neighbouring building. The flame-thrower ninja idea was a good one, and Victor wondered where the guard had got it from – it wasn’t what he had tried to plant in his thoughts, but he liked it anyway. Perhaps the old man was a secret devotee of kung-fu movies. There was no mention by the guard of Victor having dragged him to safety; probably he hadn’t wanted to admit he’d fainted. Things were off to a good start. He sent a text message to his e-mail account, releasing the credit-taking communication he’d prepared in advance to the local news and authorities, and continued with a more leisurely read of the paper, looking for further mention of the Obscurant or of other super activity.
He soon concluded a slow news day had given his explosion a more prominent place – there was little on crime – a couple of muggings and the death of a minor school trustee; and more than the usual number of silly stories. He read these anyway – often an interesting target, or a new development in potential weaponry was concealed in a “What Will They Think of Next?” article. He was trying to think if there were any potential evil applications for a doggie mp3 player when Amanda entered. She was looking, he noted, a little more carefully dressed than she had been on their first encounter, and he felt absurdly flattered that she had bothered to gussy up for him; well, for a date, he corrected himself. She’d probably dress nicely to go out in any event. But she had agreed to a date with him, he fired back, so the point still stood. Just then she bent down and greeted him with a kiss on the top of his head, before seating herself opposite.
“Wow,” he said. Amanda grinned at him, delighted to have made an impression. He wondered how she’d look in a costume. Green would suit her, something with a bit more texture than satin, but stretchy enough to move in. It’d have to be custom-made, given her size, but then most costumes were. Long sleeves and black gloves. Maybe a cute little black cowl, with an opening for her hair to fall loose.
Conversation, after they had they given their orders and while they waited for their dinners to arrive, went far more smoothly this time out, and even more pleasantly than at Murray’s. Amanda was beginning to suspect Victor was someone she could say almost anything to and he wouldn’t look either shocked or confused, reactions which she feared raising in most people she’d met. It was lovely to be at ease with someone, like sitting on a carpeted floor, wearing pajamas.
”I thought this place looked familiar,” she said, “My aunt had a photo shoot here once after hours. She was supposed to be Dolly Parton after a wasting disease. They must have taken a hundred pictures of her weakly holding a glass of soda water and a cracker. Afterwards the tabloid photographer treated us to spare ribs.”
“It must be nice to have family. Growing up it was just me and Dad.”
“It has its plusses and minusses. Aunt Lizzie is a hoot, though. She used to make me pick her up and put her in trees, and then she’d pick me fruit or flowers. What’s your father like?”
“Dead. “
“Oh.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad for asking. It was a long time ago. We were pretty tight when he was alive, but nothing so interesting as your family, by the sound of it. His most colourful trait was collecting toothbrushes. ”
“What?”
“Yeah. He had toothbrushes from as far back as the nineteenth century.”
“Can I be the first to say ‘ew?’”
“Oh, they’d never been used. He was a collector, like I said, and he had to have all his brushes in mint condiition. You can probably tell that was his one joke that he used over and over again. Mint condition. God, I miss him. We’d better get down,” he added calmly, as the sidewalks and streets outside the restaurant shook and a hurled lamppost reduced the front window to a glittering heap of broken safety glass. A giant robot stomped into view – one of Dr. Vermin’s designs, by the look of it – a story and a half tall, brick red, with a single LED-rimmed eye and claws like a fiddler crab. Yep, thought Victor, def-initely trying too hard. Probably trying to impress The Kestrel again, which means…oh boy, he hadn’t wanted his date to end like this. Dammit, some of us are down here trying to woo the woman we like by buying her a nice lunch. Why do we have to lose out just because you think the way to a girl’s heart is through the water mains of the downtown core, with a sledgehammer?
A small, lycra-clad crew of people in primary colours came sweeping down the street, gesturing and shouting directions.It was the Forensic Five, all right. Victor thought about the options, while he hurried Amanda to an alleyway. The Five were boy scouts (and girl scouts of course - Wendy Witness and the Kestrel were if anything the most powerful members of the superhero team), but they were reasonable and humane, not fanatics like John Doe. John Doe, killer of Mervyn Mandrake, made Inspector Javert look like a social worker. Victor had been fond of Mervyn Mandrake - hell, everyone had, even most of the good-guy masks. The old boy had been nothing but pure bwa-ha-ha old-school supervillainy, conjuring up his boogeymen to spirit away armoured trucks or prank the mayor. Wouldn’t have hurt a fly, really, and then John Doe had dropped him with that head-melter he liked to wave around. Somewhere at the back of his mind, The Obscurant intended to get back at him for that one, though he didn’t yet know how. Amanda was looking back over her shoulder, fascinated - she didn’t know the ins and outs of this world yet, poor sweet kid - it suddenly occurred to him that he was getting way, way ahead of himself, and that she didn’t even yet know that he was a part of the super-community, or which side he was on. In fact, she technically hadn’t even agreed to another date with him yet.
They had reached the alleyway now. Maybe he shouldn’t keep seeing her at all - it scrambled his head so, when he was around her, and distraction was the leading cause of death for people like him. Better for them both tif he were to break up with her before they got too attached to each other. Behind them, the Five were running and swooping about, punching Vermin’s robot or trying to fry its circuits with directed-EM bursts. A thrilling sight, but did Amanda see it that way? Could he really ask a nice girl like that to join him in a life of grand larceny and rayguns?
Damn, Oh damn. Wendy Witness had darted around the back streets and was charging through the same alley they had picked, and right towards them. Victor was afraid she’d glimpsed his face a year earlier during a caper, and with her photographic memory and knee-jerk reactions, there’d be no time to let her know Amanda wasn’t any part of this before she was upon them both. On the other hand, if he took her out, Amanda might never want to speak to him again.
Oh well, he was going to have to tell her sooner or later...
“Do you trust me?”
“What?”
“Do you trust me?!” He tried not to snap. There hadn’t been time to rehearse this particular conversation. She stared in his eyes for a moment, then nodded vigorously. He pulled her against the wall. Trust him to have picked an alley with no garbage bins or cover. Who kept their back alleys this clean, anyway?
“Then keep still as you can. Don’t speak, don’t move, don’t make a sound.” He’d never done this on another person before, at least not one who was conscious. Why’d it have to be The Witness they were hiding from? He flattened himself against the wall next to her, and did something to the air around them with his hands. Wendy swished past them, then paused in the alley’s mouth, one gloved hand braced on the side of the building they were huddled against. Please, oh please don’t turn back at us. We’re not here, really we’re not. He had never felt this frightened when it was just himself. Wendy raised her head, looking, he saw with a rush of gratitude, down the main street at the robot battle, and took off. He made himself count ten before turning to Amanda, breaking the invisibility spell. She was wide-eyed but sane and unharmed. Victor took a deep breath and she did likewise. They walked to the other end of the alley and turned up a street without speaking, until Victor could bear it no longer.
“What was -” they laughed, nervously, at having interrupted each other. Amanda began again, slowly, “what was.. that all about?”
“Superheroes. Giant robot. You must have heard about that sort of thing before on the news.”
“That wasn’t what I meant. What did you do to us - when she ran by us?”
“I...I can make things invisible. Only when they’re not moving, though, and she’s very observant. Noted for it, actually.” Amanda looked down and sideways at him.
“Why did it matter? If she saw us or not, I mean. If you’re..one of them.”
“I’m not. Actually I’m kind of the opposite,” he waited for his meaning to sink in.
“You’re - you’re a super-criminal?” To his astonishment she began to shake with soft laughter. It would have been an attractive sight under most other circumstances. “I’m sorry, “ she said finally, wiping her eyes, “just - just my reaction to surprise really. Also, for a moment there - I was - I was afraid maybe you were involved with her and didn’t want her to see us together.” She began laughing again, until she clamped her hand over her mouth, and even then her immense body kept shaking with suppressed amusement. Unsure whether to be grateful for or nonplussed by her reaction, Victor took her other hand.
“I wasn’t sure how to tell you. If you - I mean, I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t want to see me again. I am a bad guy, after all.” Amanda’s face grew serious.
“Why?”
“I’m a supervillain - bad things are my raison d’etre.”
“No, I mean, why be a supervillain? You don’t seem like the type, to put it bluntly.”
“My sole power is making things disappear. It’s deceit. It’s not the sort of thing a person can really use for good, unless I become a magician at children’s parties, and I’m no good with kids.” He was a little annoyed by the question, which had caught him off-guard. He told her all his reasons for being a villain rather than a hero.
“That’s the weirdest chain of logic I’ve ever heard,” she said, when he had finished.
“Well I’m sorry if you think I’m mad.”
“I didn’t say you were mad, I said your logic was weird. For the record, I think most of the people I work with are weird, and I like you a lot better than them.”
“”
“Victor, you paid for our dinner before we fled the restaurant. I saw you leave the money on the table. You even tipped. Generously, I might add.”
“Well, it’s a good restaurant, and I’d like to be able to go back there again. When they rebuild it, which will take all the money they have. Anyway, I only do big crimes. Stiffing the service industry is just…tacky.”
“You’re adorable, you know that?”
“No I’m not. I’m evil. I’ve got a lair and everything.”
* * * * *
Wendy Witness - Photographic memory, lightning-quick temper. Unfortunately for her teammates in the Forensic Five, the problems caused by the latter sometimes outweigh the usefulness of the former.
The Kestrel - Another of the Forensic Five, she shrinks into a super-strong sparrowhawk woman. Object of Dr Vermin’s obsession. Group meals usually lead to tension between her and Wendy Witness (vegan).
Roadie - Techie, especially expert in the use of sound wave devices and pyrotechnics. Also good for heavy lifting, and calming the more volatile temperaments of his teammates. Roadie is the big guy who looks around at a bunch of scattered parts in need of assembly, folds his arms and says, “all righty then.” No organization can succeed without someone like him.
Poster Child - Image telepath - has the ability to beam images into the minds of others, which can be used as communication or weapon, as the effect can be highly disturbing to those unused to it. Usually works with The Witness, although even at a distance the friction between them - their personalities are as ill-matched as their talents are compatible - can slow down communications. For this reason , the rest of the team has recently convinced them to work with a relationship counselor, which has led to some improvement, if only because they both hate the counselor.
Assassin Beetle - moves fast and thinks fast - as a result, can accurately predict the course of moving objects, even those that appear to have an erratic path. Doesn’t talk much.
John Doe - Controversial, anonymous vigilante. Unlike the Forensic Five, who hold semi-official status as “City Security Partners,” Doe has never been recognized by local law and order, and word has it that’s the way he likes things, although he is sensitive enough to public opinion that he changed his original “morgue sheet” costume to work clothes after the Gradient Orator compared the outfit to KKK robes. Always, however, he wears his infamous corpse-like mask , and leaves “John Doe” toe-tags on the bodies of the criminals he kills - for Doe considers himself coroner as well as judge, jury and executioner. Loathed and feared by supervillains, and some of the other heroes as well.
“Did you know all those people back there? As opponents, of course,” Amanda asked, interested in spite of herself.
“The hero crew were the Forensic Five – you’ve probably heard of them.”
“Um, let’s see, Wendy Witness, Kestrel, Poster Child and er..”
“Roadie and Assassin Beetle,” he finished for her. “People often forget them but they’re experts in their fields. The giant robot was one of Dr Vermin’s. You can always tell Vermin’s stuff, it tends to be a bit over the top. He’s a super-intelligent rat,” he added as though that explained it . It did.
“A little insecure?”
“I’ll say. And to make it worse, he’s totally obsessed with Kestrel. I guess ‘cause she’s his size when she’s in sparrowhawk form. Of course, when she’s in sparrowhawk form, she could very well kill and eat him, so maybe there’s a masochist component there as well.”
“Yuck,” Amanda began, then laughed. “Sorry, it just suddenly hit me that that sounds like some kind of twisted take on Stuart Little.”
“Yeah, poor Vermin. He keeps forgetting human physiology is different from his, too – his eyes are really, really sensitive to light and he keeps trying to make weapons that just end up annoying people. There was this one time he tried to take control of the city with these hypno camera phones that sent out little pulses of light.”
“I remember, and they didn’t work but kids snapped up all the abandoned phones afterwards so they could get high off the flashing.”
“Yeah, the ‘kamera kidz’ phenomenon. Boy, was that subculture overhyped. I heard they even had a cautionary classroom film for the schools, what was it called, ‘Flash Freakers,’ or something –“
“Fone Fakers - The Scourge of Childhood,” Amanda intoned dramatically. “ City works has got hundreds of DVDs of it stashed in a warehouse someplace. I always felt sorry for the people who made it – there they were, all set to warn tweens about the unspeakable evil of coloured flashing lights, and the batteries on the damn things all died before the school year started.” They both laughed, and things were all right, somehow, for the time being.
She walked home at the end of the day, opened a can of onion soup in her apartment and poured it into a heavy ceramic bowl. She topped it with a round of bread and some cheddar and put it into the oven to heat up. Then she turned on her computer , entered a number of passwords and wondered if it was stalkerish to look up your date in the employment records of the Public Works Department. It probably was, if you weren’t really supposed to be in the database outside of work hours. Oh, well, she told herself, you couldn’t be too careful when you were a single woman, especially in Gradient. Victor seemed to have been around a bit, employment-wise, though everything in his record suggested he was a reliable employee. He typed 43 words a minute, too. Cute.
The Obscurant placed a string of small bombs along the outer wall of the warehouse. This particular design of pre-fab building, he knew, didn’t really have adequate internal support beams – the company had in fact gone out of business for that reason, and its existing models were being phased out. Indeed the owners of this warehouse were probably breaking one or more local bylaws just by storing hair care products in an uninspected building, and their insurance company would probably not look kindly on them for it, but he had no sympathy – Flexikeratin Industries had no call to be so cheap, the way their mousse was selling like hotcakes. For a moment Victor amused himself with a mental image of mousse-garnished hotcakes. They probably underpaid their night watchman too. The Obscurant took his place behind a concrete pylon, right in line with the back door. It would have been in full view of the watchman when he came for a smoke, if the pylon itself had been visible. After half an hour of leg cramp (come on, you bugger, is this the night you decided to think about your lungs and give it up?) the guard propped open the door, scratched himself, and began to rummage in his breast pocket for the packet. The Obscurant triggered his message rocket.
It went even better than he had hoped: words of fire in the parking lot behind the warehouse, spelling out RUN NOW OR DIE. The night watchman dropped his lighter in the face of such a display. His eyes widened till even at a distance, Victor could see two rings of white around each iris. Then he fainted.
Victor swore. He had of course long contemplated the possibility he would have to, in the course of his supervillain career, harm and kill people, even civilians, and he believed he could use deadly force if it came down to it; but he had no grudge against this old guy, and anyway his plan called for a witness. His whole coming-out caper, of which this was only a small part, absolutely depended upon creating as much confusion and rumour as possible.
Pulling out his taser in case the guard came out of his faint too rapidly, The Obscurant dashed forward in a sinister crouch and began dragging the watchman away from the building to the shelter of the concrete barrier. It was as well for his career there were no conscious witnesses, as he was muttering in a somewhat incongruous vein for a supervillain.
“Come, on you old bastard, don’t die on me. You’ve got to live to annoy people with your tale of the night you saw the Obscurant blow up the old warehouse.” Finally the watchman’s eyelids lifted painfully and he snorted back to some degree of consciousness. There was a volatile smell about him of cheap booze, and Victor suspected he could not take all the credit for the man’s faint. He was also glad he had not dragged him any nearer the sparks from the fireworks.
“Bwa?” The old man asked. An improvement on his original plan had occurred to Victor while waiting for the fellow to wake, and he now adopted an anxious, dorky manner that to be honest, came a little too easily to him.
“Oh man, oh man,” he blurted, “we have got to get out of here, dude. There’s some kind of spooky guy in a mask or some sort of helmet, and he said he was going to set off a bomb, and then he laughed and disappeared into thin air. I thought I was tripping, but look, those letters are still there, burning.” Filling the guard’s head with the wildest tales he could think of about The Obscurant’s monstrous appearance, Victor pulled the guard to his feet, then he quietly clicked the detonator in his pocket.
If the guard had had any suspicions of his rescuer, the roaring confusion that followed drove them from his sodden mind. The wall of the building that sided the main driveway collapsed and the roof followed, as Victor had planned. Several hundred cardboard boxes full of shampoo bottles tipped over, caught fire and began to heat up. They really had better make a run for it, Victor thought. A few loose shampoo bottles had already spilled through the collapsed wall and were rolling down the drive. One exploded as Victor and the guard watched. The Obscurant was curious about the possibilities, but too wary to stick around for a closer view of the lavender-and-bergamot-scented napalm that would be raining over the area in a few minutes. He steered the dazed guard to a safer distance and made sure the man phoned his superiors with a histrionic description of hellish disaster and the mad fiend who’d set it off, before slipping away and catching a bus back to his current bachelor apartment. Not a bad start to the month, he thought. He’d met a nice girl and blown up a warehouse and now a night watchman was retailing a highly colourful account of a shapeshifting shadow that spoke in word balloons of fire. His boss probably wouldn’t believe any of it, of course, but the warehouse was down, and the ball had begun to roll. These things always built more dramatically from a slow start.
The next day was Saturday. Amanda put on a knee-length (for her) broomstick skirt and a man’s V-neck sweater that was clingy enough, she hoped, to give her some shape, and her usual flat Chinese slippers (also men’s, but the advantage of Chinese slippers was that you couldn’t tell). She draped a scarf around her neck in case the V-neck was too revealing, tied her hair back and checked herself in the mirror, turning this way and that. It was no good. She looked liked a schoolgirl; a schoolgirl the size of a landmass. She dropped the scarf, untied her ponytail and retied it lower down, just above the nape of her neck. That was better - now she resembled an office assistant, but it was an improvement on the junior-high dance look. Neither of her lipstick colours pleased her, but she tried on her favourite earrings, the dangly coral ones, and as an afterthought, she dug out her very best purse from its tissue paper, the one she only carried at weddings and funerals. With the simple outfit, it looked almost sophisticated.
Victor took a table with plenty of room around it, and not too near the window at the front of the restaurant– it was Gradient City after all - and examined his copy of the Gradient Orator as he waited for Amanda. He forced himself not to rush through it as he scanned for mention of the warehouse fire. As it turned out, the Obscurant had made page 3, two pages better than he’d expected.
“MYSTERY MESSAGE FRIES WAREHOUSE,” read the half-inch headline. They’d found his burnt warning sign, and there was a good quote from the night watchman. He said he’d seen a “ninja kind of guy” holding “some sort of flame-thrower gun” as he escaped across the roof of a neighbouring building. The flame-thrower ninja idea was a good one, and Victor wondered where the guard had got it from – it wasn’t what he had tried to plant in his thoughts, but he liked it anyway. Perhaps the old man was a secret devotee of kung-fu movies. There was no mention by the guard of Victor having dragged him to safety; probably he hadn’t wanted to admit he’d fainted. Things were off to a good start. He sent a text message to his e-mail account, releasing the credit-taking communication he’d prepared in advance to the local news and authorities, and continued with a more leisurely read of the paper, looking for further mention of the Obscurant or of other super activity.
He soon concluded a slow news day had given his explosion a more prominent place – there was little on crime – a couple of muggings and the death of a minor school trustee; and more than the usual number of silly stories. He read these anyway – often an interesting target, or a new development in potential weaponry was concealed in a “What Will They Think of Next?” article. He was trying to think if there were any potential evil applications for a doggie mp3 player when Amanda entered. She was looking, he noted, a little more carefully dressed than she had been on their first encounter, and he felt absurdly flattered that she had bothered to gussy up for him; well, for a date, he corrected himself. She’d probably dress nicely to go out in any event. But she had agreed to a date with him, he fired back, so the point still stood. Just then she bent down and greeted him with a kiss on the top of his head, before seating herself opposite.
“Wow,” he said. Amanda grinned at him, delighted to have made an impression. He wondered how she’d look in a costume. Green would suit her, something with a bit more texture than satin, but stretchy enough to move in. It’d have to be custom-made, given her size, but then most costumes were. Long sleeves and black gloves. Maybe a cute little black cowl, with an opening for her hair to fall loose.
Conversation, after they had they given their orders and while they waited for their dinners to arrive, went far more smoothly this time out, and even more pleasantly than at Murray’s. Amanda was beginning to suspect Victor was someone she could say almost anything to and he wouldn’t look either shocked or confused, reactions which she feared raising in most people she’d met. It was lovely to be at ease with someone, like sitting on a carpeted floor, wearing pajamas.
”I thought this place looked familiar,” she said, “My aunt had a photo shoot here once after hours. She was supposed to be Dolly Parton after a wasting disease. They must have taken a hundred pictures of her weakly holding a glass of soda water and a cracker. Afterwards the tabloid photographer treated us to spare ribs.”
“It must be nice to have family. Growing up it was just me and Dad.”
“It has its plusses and minusses. Aunt Lizzie is a hoot, though. She used to make me pick her up and put her in trees, and then she’d pick me fruit or flowers. What’s your father like?”
“Dead. “
“Oh.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad for asking. It was a long time ago. We were pretty tight when he was alive, but nothing so interesting as your family, by the sound of it. His most colourful trait was collecting toothbrushes. ”
“What?”
“Yeah. He had toothbrushes from as far back as the nineteenth century.”
“Can I be the first to say ‘ew?’”
“Oh, they’d never been used. He was a collector, like I said, and he had to have all his brushes in mint condiition. You can probably tell that was his one joke that he used over and over again. Mint condition. God, I miss him. We’d better get down,” he added calmly, as the sidewalks and streets outside the restaurant shook and a hurled lamppost reduced the front window to a glittering heap of broken safety glass. A giant robot stomped into view – one of Dr. Vermin’s designs, by the look of it – a story and a half tall, brick red, with a single LED-rimmed eye and claws like a fiddler crab. Yep, thought Victor, def-initely trying too hard. Probably trying to impress The Kestrel again, which means…oh boy, he hadn’t wanted his date to end like this. Dammit, some of us are down here trying to woo the woman we like by buying her a nice lunch. Why do we have to lose out just because you think the way to a girl’s heart is through the water mains of the downtown core, with a sledgehammer?
A small, lycra-clad crew of people in primary colours came sweeping down the street, gesturing and shouting directions.It was the Forensic Five, all right. Victor thought about the options, while he hurried Amanda to an alleyway. The Five were boy scouts (and girl scouts of course - Wendy Witness and the Kestrel were if anything the most powerful members of the superhero team), but they were reasonable and humane, not fanatics like John Doe. John Doe, killer of Mervyn Mandrake, made Inspector Javert look like a social worker. Victor had been fond of Mervyn Mandrake - hell, everyone had, even most of the good-guy masks. The old boy had been nothing but pure bwa-ha-ha old-school supervillainy, conjuring up his boogeymen to spirit away armoured trucks or prank the mayor. Wouldn’t have hurt a fly, really, and then John Doe had dropped him with that head-melter he liked to wave around. Somewhere at the back of his mind, The Obscurant intended to get back at him for that one, though he didn’t yet know how. Amanda was looking back over her shoulder, fascinated - she didn’t know the ins and outs of this world yet, poor sweet kid - it suddenly occurred to him that he was getting way, way ahead of himself, and that she didn’t even yet know that he was a part of the super-community, or which side he was on. In fact, she technically hadn’t even agreed to another date with him yet.
They had reached the alleyway now. Maybe he shouldn’t keep seeing her at all - it scrambled his head so, when he was around her, and distraction was the leading cause of death for people like him. Better for them both tif he were to break up with her before they got too attached to each other. Behind them, the Five were running and swooping about, punching Vermin’s robot or trying to fry its circuits with directed-EM bursts. A thrilling sight, but did Amanda see it that way? Could he really ask a nice girl like that to join him in a life of grand larceny and rayguns?
Damn, Oh damn. Wendy Witness had darted around the back streets and was charging through the same alley they had picked, and right towards them. Victor was afraid she’d glimpsed his face a year earlier during a caper, and with her photographic memory and knee-jerk reactions, there’d be no time to let her know Amanda wasn’t any part of this before she was upon them both. On the other hand, if he took her out, Amanda might never want to speak to him again.
Oh well, he was going to have to tell her sooner or later...
“Do you trust me?”
“What?”
“Do you trust me?!” He tried not to snap. There hadn’t been time to rehearse this particular conversation. She stared in his eyes for a moment, then nodded vigorously. He pulled her against the wall. Trust him to have picked an alley with no garbage bins or cover. Who kept their back alleys this clean, anyway?
“Then keep still as you can. Don’t speak, don’t move, don’t make a sound.” He’d never done this on another person before, at least not one who was conscious. Why’d it have to be The Witness they were hiding from? He flattened himself against the wall next to her, and did something to the air around them with his hands. Wendy swished past them, then paused in the alley’s mouth, one gloved hand braced on the side of the building they were huddled against. Please, oh please don’t turn back at us. We’re not here, really we’re not. He had never felt this frightened when it was just himself. Wendy raised her head, looking, he saw with a rush of gratitude, down the main street at the robot battle, and took off. He made himself count ten before turning to Amanda, breaking the invisibility spell. She was wide-eyed but sane and unharmed. Victor took a deep breath and she did likewise. They walked to the other end of the alley and turned up a street without speaking, until Victor could bear it no longer.
“What was -” they laughed, nervously, at having interrupted each other. Amanda began again, slowly, “what was.. that all about?”
“Superheroes. Giant robot. You must have heard about that sort of thing before on the news.”
“That wasn’t what I meant. What did you do to us - when she ran by us?”
“I...I can make things invisible. Only when they’re not moving, though, and she’s very observant. Noted for it, actually.” Amanda looked down and sideways at him.
“Why did it matter? If she saw us or not, I mean. If you’re..one of them.”
“I’m not. Actually I’m kind of the opposite,” he waited for his meaning to sink in.
“You’re - you’re a super-criminal?” To his astonishment she began to shake with soft laughter. It would have been an attractive sight under most other circumstances. “I’m sorry, “ she said finally, wiping her eyes, “just - just my reaction to surprise really. Also, for a moment there - I was - I was afraid maybe you were involved with her and didn’t want her to see us together.” She began laughing again, until she clamped her hand over her mouth, and even then her immense body kept shaking with suppressed amusement. Unsure whether to be grateful for or nonplussed by her reaction, Victor took her other hand.
“I wasn’t sure how to tell you. If you - I mean, I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t want to see me again. I am a bad guy, after all.” Amanda’s face grew serious.
“Why?”
“I’m a supervillain - bad things are my raison d’etre.”
“No, I mean, why be a supervillain? You don’t seem like the type, to put it bluntly.”
“My sole power is making things disappear. It’s deceit. It’s not the sort of thing a person can really use for good, unless I become a magician at children’s parties, and I’m no good with kids.” He was a little annoyed by the question, which had caught him off-guard. He told her all his reasons for being a villain rather than a hero.
“That’s the weirdest chain of logic I’ve ever heard,” she said, when he had finished.
“Well I’m sorry if you think I’m mad.”
“I didn’t say you were mad, I said your logic was weird. For the record, I think most of the people I work with are weird, and I like you a lot better than them.”
“”
“Victor, you paid for our dinner before we fled the restaurant. I saw you leave the money on the table. You even tipped. Generously, I might add.”
“Well, it’s a good restaurant, and I’d like to be able to go back there again. When they rebuild it, which will take all the money they have. Anyway, I only do big crimes. Stiffing the service industry is just…tacky.”
“You’re adorable, you know that?”
“No I’m not. I’m evil. I’ve got a lair and everything.”
* * * * *
Wendy Witness - Photographic memory, lightning-quick temper. Unfortunately for her teammates in the Forensic Five, the problems caused by the latter sometimes outweigh the usefulness of the former.
The Kestrel - Another of the Forensic Five, she shrinks into a super-strong sparrowhawk woman. Object of Dr Vermin’s obsession. Group meals usually lead to tension between her and Wendy Witness (vegan).
Roadie - Techie, especially expert in the use of sound wave devices and pyrotechnics. Also good for heavy lifting, and calming the more volatile temperaments of his teammates. Roadie is the big guy who looks around at a bunch of scattered parts in need of assembly, folds his arms and says, “all righty then.” No organization can succeed without someone like him.
Poster Child - Image telepath - has the ability to beam images into the minds of others, which can be used as communication or weapon, as the effect can be highly disturbing to those unused to it. Usually works with The Witness, although even at a distance the friction between them - their personalities are as ill-matched as their talents are compatible - can slow down communications. For this reason , the rest of the team has recently convinced them to work with a relationship counselor, which has led to some improvement, if only because they both hate the counselor.
Assassin Beetle - moves fast and thinks fast - as a result, can accurately predict the course of moving objects, even those that appear to have an erratic path. Doesn’t talk much.
John Doe - Controversial, anonymous vigilante. Unlike the Forensic Five, who hold semi-official status as “City Security Partners,” Doe has never been recognized by local law and order, and word has it that’s the way he likes things, although he is sensitive enough to public opinion that he changed his original “morgue sheet” costume to work clothes after the Gradient Orator compared the outfit to KKK robes. Always, however, he wears his infamous corpse-like mask , and leaves “John Doe” toe-tags on the bodies of the criminals he kills - for Doe considers himself coroner as well as judge, jury and executioner. Loathed and feared by supervillains, and some of the other heroes as well.
“Did you know all those people back there? As opponents, of course,” Amanda asked, interested in spite of herself.
“The hero crew were the Forensic Five – you’ve probably heard of them.”
“Um, let’s see, Wendy Witness, Kestrel, Poster Child and er..”
“Roadie and Assassin Beetle,” he finished for her. “People often forget them but they’re experts in their fields. The giant robot was one of Dr Vermin’s. You can always tell Vermin’s stuff, it tends to be a bit over the top. He’s a super-intelligent rat,” he added as though that explained it . It did.
“A little insecure?”
“I’ll say. And to make it worse, he’s totally obsessed with Kestrel. I guess ‘cause she’s his size when she’s in sparrowhawk form. Of course, when she’s in sparrowhawk form, she could very well kill and eat him, so maybe there’s a masochist component there as well.”
“Yuck,” Amanda began, then laughed. “Sorry, it just suddenly hit me that that sounds like some kind of twisted take on Stuart Little.”
“Yeah, poor Vermin. He keeps forgetting human physiology is different from his, too – his eyes are really, really sensitive to light and he keeps trying to make weapons that just end up annoying people. There was this one time he tried to take control of the city with these hypno camera phones that sent out little pulses of light.”
“I remember, and they didn’t work but kids snapped up all the abandoned phones afterwards so they could get high off the flashing.”
“Yeah, the ‘kamera kidz’ phenomenon. Boy, was that subculture overhyped. I heard they even had a cautionary classroom film for the schools, what was it called, ‘Flash Freakers,’ or something –“
“Fone Fakers - The Scourge of Childhood,” Amanda intoned dramatically. “ City works has got hundreds of DVDs of it stashed in a warehouse someplace. I always felt sorry for the people who made it – there they were, all set to warn tweens about the unspeakable evil of coloured flashing lights, and the batteries on the damn things all died before the school year started.” They both laughed, and things were all right, somehow, for the time being.
