Chapter Text
My eyes fluttered open, sunlight filtered through the blinds playing across my face. I shot bolt upright, some animal part of my mind certain of impending attack. I sat on the unfamiliar bed and fumbled desperately for my bearings, trying to get my breathing under control. In a few moments the panic had passed, leaving me to try and remember what I was doing here.
The memories fell into place as I woke up, each one weighing me down further. Right, my roommates, my power, the… other things. All of that happened, it wasn’t a dream or a fleeting nightmare. The weight of it all made me want to lay back down, but trying to sleep right now would probably be futile. I’d locked the door last night, and then barred it when that hadn’t felt like enough. Now it seemed terribly inadequate- anyone could get through the plaster walls with nothing but a pickaxe and determination.
The temptation to start fortifying my room warred with the basic fact that I wasn’t going to be sleeping another night here and the PRT would probably like to use it for other things. Eventually I settled on a compromise, reinforcing the door but otherwise leaving the room be. I needed to get ready anyway.
I’d taken a quick shower last night, but I desperately needed to find some way to relax before going to Seattle. A luxurious bath seemed like just the ticket. Before too long I’d managed to find where they kept the towels and spare toiletries, which were better stocked than I’d have dared to hope. The towels were fluffy and soft and delightful. It was nice having the place all to myself, not worrying about stepping on someone’s toes or getting harassed about some bullshit. Not to mention getting to see a new place instead of wearing a groove in the floor. Though come to think of it, I didn’t need to be in a place for very long to do that now.
I headed to the bathroom, eyes still leaden as I waited for the bathtub to fill up. It was obviously going to take a bit, so I set my phone up to play music. While I waited, I took the time to thoroughly floss and brush my teeth. It was nice to exert some control over my life and presentation, even if only a little.
Soon enough, I was ever so carefully lowering myself into the just-this-side-of-hot water. It took a few attempts before I was able to get a whole leg in without recoiling from the heat, but the feeling of being enveloped in the water like a warm, comfy blanket was well worth the effort. I let my head loll back, closing my eyes and just floating. I focused on my breathing, letting all my concerns and pains go for a little while.
Not touching anything except the water wasn’t like standing on one of the big roots in the forest or being in the air. I could still sense it, still sense the bathtub and a bit of the floor, but it was blurry and vague. As an experiment, I tried making a small spike sprout from the lip of the tub. Nothing happened. I tried shaping part of it upward, but all that accomplished was splashing the water around a little. My arm brushed against the side, and my awareness of the surroundings snapped into focus. Just like that, I could affect the tub again.
I deliberately pulled away, happy to reduce the burden on my poor, overworked brain. I let myself drift for a few more minutes, but I didn’t have all day to lay around soaking. I washed and conditioned my hair, steeling myself for my most difficult challenge yet: shaving.
I lathered my face with conditioner and shaving cream, letting it soak for a bit. At that point I recalled I’d left my razor back at the apartment and very nearly smacked my forehead. Before I could start castigating myself over it I realized I could just make a new razor with my power, easy as breathing. It was funny how natural it felt to just reach into the wall next to me and pull out a classic folding straight razor with a wooden handle. This time I was slow and careful enough to avoid getting any new cuts on my face. First impressions were important, and I wanted to put my best foot forward for my new team.
Speaking of feet, I thought, looking down. I should really shave my legs.
-||-
Back in my room with a towel wrapped around me, I basked in the feeling of cleanliness. After yesterday I’d seriously wondered if I’d ever feel clean again, and not just metaphorically either. Turns out that doing improvised first aid on a half dozen bleeding and screaming people in quick succession was dirty work, who’d have thought?
I gently ran a few fingers over my chin, reassuring myself there wasn’t any stubble long enough to be noticeable. If I’d had my way there wouldn’t be even the tiniest hint of facial hair, but there was just no way to get that close a shave without slicing half my face off. I sighed, letting my hand drop.
There was no point in obsessing over something I couldn’t control. I deliberately directed my attention to the meager collection of clothing I’d managed to rescue from the old apartment. Not that there’d been much before, really. Now I was down to a grand total of one dress, two pairs of pants, and my purple jacket.
How could I possibly decide what to wear? I thought drily.
I pulled on my clothes, going over my mental checklist for this morning. I’d washed up, taken some time to relax, so all I had left before getting driven to Seattle was doing some serious research on the cape scene in general and my future city’s in particular. The safe house had WiFi, thankfully, so I just pulled up my laptop and logged onto Parahumans Online.
The first thing I saw when I went to the Seattle area subforum was a thread speculating on the romantic relationships of various local capes. Not only was it a mind-numbing sixty pages long, it was apparently the eighth such thread judging by the title. I’d always found sincerely shipping celebrities with each other vaguely creepy. Did they forget there were actual living human beings under those masks, with their own hopes and desires?
The second thing I noticed was a thread titled ‘Villain attack on Evergreen!?’. I hemmed and hawed for a bit about whether there was anything to gain from reading about something that literally happened yesterday, but eventually I gave into my curiosity and clicked it. Apparently someone had already posted a video of my apartment building’s transformation, starting from when it was about a third of the way through.
It happened so much faster than I’d remembered. That moment when my powers manifested had felt like an eternity, but if this video was anything to go by the whole episode couldn’t have lasted more than a couple measly minutes. How the hell had my power worked so quickly? I’d never been able to make more than one thing at a time every few seconds when experimenting, and that rate only got slower as I tried affecting surfaces further away from me.
Eventually I scrolled on, promising myself I’d investigate the apparent contradiction later. It took about two pages of baseless speculation before any kind of official information was posted, a brief message from Snap explaining that the ‘attack’ was in fact a new trigger that temporarily lost control of her powers. There was no longer any danger, she explained, the cape in question was cooperative and managed to gain control of her power fast enough to prevent the situation from becoming a disaster.
I almost laughed. My hand clenched, tight enough that the fingernails dug into the flesh of my palm. Tight enough that it started shaking ever so slightly from the tension. How the fuck was that not a disaster? Who did she think she was, acting like it was no big deal? Part of me was tempted to tell people what it had really been like, how close I’d been to just giving up and running away from the maimed, screaming people. The way I could still feel the tacky sensation of blood on my hands, blood in my hair, blood fucking everywhere .
My eyes screwed shut against the phantom images, as though I could somehow shut out my own mind. I forced myself to count, to breathe, to rock in place, anything to keep my powers under control. Inch by bloody inch, I pulled myself out of the spiral of thoughts that always led to the same destination. There was no reason to be angry at Snap when I was only really angry with myself and my power. Besides, I’d need to make a new account for my cape identity and go through the whole rigamarole of getting it verified. If I made some kind of public acknowledgement of what happened I’d need to think through exactly how to phrase it, how to pay my dues to the people I’d hurt without getting bogged down in self-recrimination.
Alright, Carmin, let’s move on, I thought. You know this isn’t productive. Or healthy.
With deliberate slowness, I opened my eyes and started moving the cursor toward the new tab button. It would probably be a good idea to stick with the parahumans online wiki for now. For one thing, it had a much higher density of useful information; simply reading the first few paragraphs of the article on Seattle was enlightening. There were over two hundred capes in the Seattle Metropolitan area at any given time. It was mind numbing. Now that I had some idea of what having powers actually meant the numbers had stopped being a fun little factoid and started being completely fucking terrifying, to put it bluntly. How the hell hadn’t society collapsed already?
That, at least, I knew the answer to. Systems, both formal and informal, kept the phenomena of powers from turning into a total war of all against all. The PRT and Protectorate, the masks and costumes, the Birdcage. A lot of it was imperfect, even horrific, but I had to admit that even that black hole of human rights violations served a vital function in keeping things running. Maybe -once I’d had some time to understand the cape scene in its current form- I’d be able to find a better way.
Most of the capes in and around Seattle stuck to the outskirts and nearby towns, not powerful or influential enough to take territory in the city proper. That was locked down by a handful of major factions and a few particularly potent individuals. The heroes were outnumbered two to one, but they were organized and coordinated enough to keep things more or less stable. The enormity of the challenge they faced made me respect them even more, and made me equally determined to do what I could to help them.
The biggest criminal organization in the city, counting both capes and the unpowered, was probably the Westlake Bastards. They had a strong grip on the lower income areas, but the real secret to their success was a cape named Menagerie. He could give people the ability to temporarily take on traits and natural weapons from animals, with the catch or bonus (depending on one’s perspective) being that repeatedly making use of the power causes the changes to slowly become permanent. Having permanent and visible animal traits was a sign of status to them, and even their leader -Brimstone- had a set of goat horns sprouting from her head. I wasn’t too proud to admit it looked really badass on her. More importantly his power meant that even their basic unpowered thugs had a noticeable edge in a fight, and its effects were varied enough that you wouldn’t necessarily know what that edge was going to be just by looking at them.
The faction with the most capes aside from the Protectorate itself was the League of Insidious Villainry, founded by none other than Professor Silica, the self-proclaimed greatest supervillain in the world. She, and by extension her League, was all about embodying the classic idea of villains from before there even were people with actual powers. They had a code of sorts, holding back more when fighting heroes or other villains with a similar modus operandi, but they were capable of being utterly ruthless against those that truly raised their ire. They had a feud with the Bastards going back years, even before Silica offed their last leader -and the second Space Needle- in her own inimitable fashion.
There were some up and comers I hadn’t heard of: an eco-terrorist neopagan cult called the Wildflower Coven, a handful of powered thugs that styled themselves as ‘Hospital Pass’, a guy that made fear lasers, an actual giant troll, a mysterious drone tinker, the list went on and on. Unfortunately most of the wiki articles were sparse on vital information like the details of their powers and motivations. The PRT databases had to be more extensive than this, right? Getting into a fight with an honest-to-god supervillain without at least having a decent idea of how their powers worked struck me as a bit like suicide with extra steps. Well, not necessarily that bad. Some villains preferred not to kill, and would instead gently maim me in whatever manner suited their fancy.
Before I could start reviewing the publicly available information on the heroes, I heard a sharp knock on the safe house’s front door. I flinched, but I didn’t jump out of my seat or yelp especially loudly. Hopping to my feet, I literally walked through the door to my room rather than bothering to undo all the bars and locks and then pulled the front door open normally.
It was a sharply dressed blonde woman holding a briefcase, standing straight enough to give off a military air. She smiled, offering her free hand to shake. The briefcase was in her right, so there was an awkward moment of reaching forward and then having to switch hands at the last second. The woman took it in stride, her grip firm and smile unwavering. Her skin was softer than I’d expected, and I couldn’t help noticing how small her hands were compared to mine. Her fingers were even shaped differently, tapering in a way mine didn’t.
“Hey!” I said, voice bright. She was just the sort of driver person I’d been hoping for. “You’re here early.”
“Sure am! Guess who gets to do a shitton of paperwork before they can even get in the van.”
“Ah gee, let me take a wild guess. Is it you? Did you decide to bring your tax returns?”
She rolled her eyes, “God save us, another one with a sense of humor. Presto’s gonna love you.”
I perked up at that. “Really? What do you mean?”
The woman chuckled, “You’ll see. Let’s just say she likes surprising people and leave it at that.”
“Vague, but alright.” My eyes flicked to the briefcase. “What’s the damage? If my repetitive strain injury comes back because of this I’m gonna be mighty peeved.”
“If a little thing like this scares you you better put in an order for a wrist brace, because I swear on my ass they were making up new forms just for me after Efface got her claws in me.”
“What? What happened, are you okay?”
She waved away my concern, setting her burden on the bare coffee table in the middle of the living room and unceremoniously flipping it open. There was a depressingly thick stack of papers inside.
I sighed, pulling up the most comfortable looking chair I could find and using my power to create an improvised lap desk.
“Damn,” she said, eyeing my work. “Wish I could do that.”
I smiled. “You want one? Not that hard to make, really. It’s a pretty simple shape.”
She looked at me for a few moments with an unreadable expression. Whatever she saw on my face seemed to pass muster, since she nodded and let her body language relax a little. I had the lap desk sprout from a spot right next to her on the couch, and she hesitantly made use of it.
I smiled, getting to work on yet another non-disclosure agreement, relieved to have someone to go through all of this with.
-||-
Laura -the PRT’s liaison/escort/driver person- was a woman of many surprises. We’d both gotten into our seats after putting away my luggage, and she asked -all pleasant professionalism- if it were alright if she put on some music. ‘Of course,’ I’d said, and then there was noise. The drums pounded out through the speakers and reverberated through the car, crisscrossing themselves and compounding and combining until everything washed together into an incomprehensible wall of sound. I reflexively covered my ears with both hands, but that didn’t do anything for my overloaded tremor sense. I fumbled clumsily against the car’s stereo system, trying to find- there. As the volume finally -finally!- turned down to a reasonable level, I registered a new soreness in my jaw. I hadn’t realized I’d been clenching it.
“Shit! I am so sorry about that, I can barely tell how loud it is anymore. Didn’t even think about it.”
Her sincere distress mollified me a little, but I was getting really fucking tired of this whole sensory overload thing. Still, I took the time to take a few calming breaths and think through my words. “I’m not mad at you or anything, but loud noises have always bothered me. I would really appreciate it if we could keep it at a lower volume.”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t even worry about it. Won’t happen again, I promise.”
“I appreciate it, thank you.”
The next couple hours were spent scribbling out notes and ideas at a furious pace, intermittently looking up information on my phone and asking Laura for her perspective. With her help, I was able to compile a list of Seattle’s major publicly known capes along with what was known about their powers. I was pretty confident it was already more useful than the wiki, not that that was saying much. I couldn’t wait to start filling it out once I had access to the PRT’s databases.
Designing a cape persona, or at least a name and the broad strokes of a costume, still took up the largest chunk of my time. I’d heard somewhere that the most important part of character design was having a distinct silhouette, and I picked out the primary features of my costume with that in mind. A hooded cloak with a sort of poncho shape, covering the arms and angling down on both sides to a point just below the knees. The mask was full face, a lopsided smile and permanently quirked eyebrow giving it a quizzical air. More practically, I sketched out a few armor designs that I definitely needed to run by some actual experts before wearing to a fight.
My visualization abilities had improved so dramatically that drawing designs from imagination was barely any different from tracing an image. With the paper in front of me, I could imagine the exact structure and shape of a mechanism and know exactly how it should look projected onto the page. My power didn’t provide any help with the actual muscle movements, but having it as a guide meant that as long as I doggedly kept at it long enough the drawing would eventually start to look right.
Before I got past the preliminary sketches on my first set of non-lethal, non-maimy traps, I noticed a change in the passing scenery. Tighter packed and taller buildings had started appearing, slowly crowding out the seemingly endless forests between towns.
“Are we almost there?” I asked, keeping my voice calm with an effort.
“Someone’s keen. Yeah, we’re almost there. You can tell because the traffic starts out shitty and then gets worse.”
“God, you sound like my mom. Though admittedly with a lot more swearing.”
“I’ll try and take that as a compliment.”
Sadly she wasn’t wrong about the traffic. It took another twenty minutes before we finally pulled into one of the squat parking complexes serving the Space Needle and some surrounding businesses.
“Whelp, this is our stop,” Laura said, putting the car into park. “You think you’ll need any help with the luggage?”
“No, I should be fine,” I said, most of my attention on the route I’d take out of the parking garage. “Thanks for taking the time to-”
There was a stranger where Laura had been a second ago, feet idly propped up against the dashboard like she’d been relaxing there for hours. She was wearing a tux, and that was about all I had time to register before my body caught up with my brain and launched me screaming through the car door without even bothering to open it. The second I was clear I leapt over ten feet in the air, colliding with the concrete ceiling in a mutual embrace. I trusted my power to support me, a spear forming in my hands even as I turned to face whoever the hell had just teleported Laura. At least I hoped it was teleportation, I didn’t really want to think about what else it could be.
My dress hadn’t flopped down onto my face this time, I’d buttoned up my jacket and cinched it tight, so I could see she wasn’t anywhere near the car. I spun around as suddenly as I could manage, but there wasn’t anyone behind me. What the hell was going on?
“Damn,” said a voice from directly behind me, and even expecting something like it I still nearly jumped out of my skin a second time. It was, unsurprisingly, the masked tuxedo wearing woman from the car. Her skin was a dark tan, and her full lips curved up in a smile that was mischievous without being mocking. “I have to admit, that was pretty impressive.”
I blinked owlishly at her, a low wall hanging between us like a blocky stalactite. I was still holding the spear. “What was?”
She laughed -and she had a very nice laugh- like I’d just made a hilarious joke. “What do you mean, ‘what was?’. I’m talking about you walking through a closed door and flipping onto the ceiling like a fucking ninja!”
“Oh,” I said, taking a moment to kick my brain back into gear. “Thank you, but that stuff is easy with my power. It’s not really that- wait, you’re on the ceiling! How are you on the ceiling?”
The moment the question was out of my mouth I realized the answer. The tuxedo, the pranks, the casual and varied defiance of the laws of physics.
“You’re Presto!” I said barely a second after the question left my mouth. “Holy shit, you’re Presto. What the fuck was that for? Where did Laura go?”
“The one and only,” she said with a grin, sitting on the bottom edge of the wall in casual defiance of gravity. Her mask had an operatic look to it, covering the top half of her face and somehow mimicking her expressions in a startlingly lifelike way. “Laura’s fine, she’d been complaining about missing Donut Thursday anyways. I promise it wasn’t just for my own amusement, I wanted to know how you’d react to getting blindsided.”
I glowered at her, still not entirely mollified. “Did I pass your little test at least?”
She chuckled, shaking her head. “Ain’t no pass or fail, I just wanted to see what your first instinct was.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, digesting her words. “What did you learn from your little experiment, then?”
“That you’re defensive. That your first, second, and third responses were reactionary, and that you didn’t do anything to keep me from getting the drop on you again.”
I flushed, and then wondered why the blood hadn’t rushed to my head already. “What would you have done differently in my position, then?”
She shrugged exaggeratedly, hands off to the side. “I’d have hidden, but I ain’t got your powers. Just keep it in mind, yeah?”
I nodded, but to my horror the gesture caused my poor battered glasses to slip off my face and fall toward the concrete surface below/above us. Before I could so much as cry out Presto gestured, and the next thing I knew my glasses were in her hand. Falling in their place was a colorful blur I was about eighty percent sure was a rose.
Presto walked up and gently placed the glasses back on my face before I could even think of protesting, taking the time to make sure they were sitting securely. “Uhm,” I said, my flush this time having very little to do with embarrassment. “Thank you, but you could have just handed them to me.”
“I could’ve done lots of things. I could’ve given you this.” She handed me a generic cloth mask emblazoned with the PRT’s logo. “Welcome to the Seattle Protectorate. Got a name yet?”
“My actual name is Carmilla, but you seem like the type of person that already knows that somehow.”
She snorted, but didn’t say anything as I fit the mask on over my glasses. “But I think as a cape, I’m gonna go by Sepulcher.”
“Sepulcher, huh? Kinda grim, but I like it. Good sound.”
“It’s kind of a grim power, figured I’d roll with it.”
Her response was interrupted by the sound of someone jogging through the echoey confines of the concrete parking complex. I put the spear into the ceiling point first, letting it meld into the surrounding material until no sign of it remained. A few moments later Laura turned the corner at a brisk jog, holding a white paper bag in her hand.
“You,” She huffed. “Goat-fucking,” Huff. “Inconsiderate,” Huff. “Piece of shit. Do you have any idea how far I just had to run because of your stupid prank?”
Presto grinned, opening her arms wide. “Laura! I see you brought us donuts, that’s so considerate of you.”
“Oh, no,” Said Laura, wagging her finger at her. “Don’t even think about it. I brought an extra donut for her, not you.”
Neither of them seemed the least bit put off by having a conversation upside down, but I was honestly getting a crick in my neck from looking up/down at her. I gently lowered myself, dropping the last few feet.
“Thank you so much.” I said once my feet touched the ground, genuinely touched by her thoughtfulness. “What flavor did you get me?”
“Chocolate with chocolate frosting, I figured everybody likes chocolate.”
“My brother doesn’t like chocolate,” I countered, taking it from her. “But thankfully I do.”
She raised an eyebrow at that. “To each their own. You ready for the grand tour? Figured I’d show you around the publicly accessible areas while we wait for your meeting with the director.”
I nodded, taking a fortifying breath. “I’m ready.”
“Either of you mind if I tag along? I wanted to get to know the newest member of the team,” Presto cut in, having made her way back onto the floor at some point.
“I doubt we could stop you,” said Laura, deadpan.
“I don’t mind at all, I was actually hoping you could answer some questions for me.”
Presto grinned, eyes sparkling with amusement. “Haven’t had enough of me yet? Ask away, I know practically everything there is to know about the Seattle cape scene.”
“Guess I’ve just got a masochistic streak. Here’s something I’ve been confused about, how does the whole secret identity thing work when there are capes like you that can figure them out without breaking a sweat?”
“Ah, that one’s kinda complicated. Basically how things work is that if word gets out about you going after someone’s civilian identity you get rendered persona non grata as far as other capes are concerned. And even if you don’t give a shit about other people, doing it is usually a big enough hassle that it’s not worth it.”
I nodded, taking that in. “There’s something else I need to know.”
“What is it?” She asked, voice sobering at my serious tone.
“Did you and Bullrush really used to date?”
For the first time in the entire conversation, it was Presto that was rendered speechless. That was lovely enough, but what really made it was Laura’s breathless laughter.