Chapter Text
Presto examined me through a frame of thumbs and pointer fingers. Her head tilted, lips pursed, and one eye closed as though she were a connoisseur judging a sculpture. I shifted awkwardly under her scrutiny. Would she judge my look and find it wanting? Was there some critical weakness her tinker abilities let her discover? Had she decided that I wouldn’t be able to go?
“You look badass,” she declared. “Can’t wait to see it once you’ve got it all polished up and shit.”
I clenched hands sheathed in grey-black metal, feeling the poor quality iron creak ever so slightly. Each finger came to a sharp point, the ends curving inward like talons. “I’ll need some better materials before I even think about shining it up. The shit my power makes is, well, shit. No sense in polishing a turd.”
She waved a hand dismissively. “I consider that kinda stuff included under ‘and shit’. Could I see it without the cloak?”
It was starting to feel like we were cutting close to the deadline she’d set. “Sure,” I said, taking it off and handing it to her. She draped it over an arm, giving me that speculative look again.
Her face broke out into a smile. “You look great. Love the feminine touches, all the curves faithfully represented.”
“I may have exaggerated them a little,” I admitted, twisting to look down at the metal skin encasing my hips. It was a relatively subtle effect, or so I’d hoped, pushing the part of the breastplate raised to deflect blows up a bit to let everyone know I had boobs without resorting to boobplate. It tapered down toward the waist before flaring out to cover the hips in an exaggerated skirt of plates.
Presto shrugged. “I figure everybody should get to choose how to present themselves. What costume to wear.”
I sighed. “Wish more people felt that way. Like my parents, to name a totally random example.”
“Parents can be hell,” Liang said slowly, voice strangely small. She cleared her throat. “You ready to go? Moonlight’s burning.”
I hesitated. “Would we get in trouble if we’re caught? Do you have some fancy tinker bullshit to hide us?”
She snorted. “We’re not prisoners, we can just go out if we want. You’d be surprised how often supposedly straight-laced heroes get in a little off the book patrol time. The thing is to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability. If someone sees us while we’re out we can just tell them we were practicing mobility techniques or whatever the fuck.”
I sighed. “You’ve got a talent for making me feel worse and better at the same time. I’m not very good at lying.”
Presto patted me on the helmet with an indulgent smile, somehow managing to look down at me while being three inches shorter. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that, I can do enough lying for four of us. Besides, we’ve got my ‘fancy tinker bullshit’.”
“You really think I’m pretty?” I asked in an exaggeratedly simpering voice, covering the cheeks of my mask with my gauntlets like I was trying to hide a blush. That I was in fact blushing was neither here nor there.
She grinned, stepping ever so slightly closer. Her eyes caught the bright lights of the lounge for a brief moment, giving them an amber shine that made me think of a cat on the prowl. “Did I stutter? You’ve got nice hair too, even if I can’t see it right now.”
“I’ve always loved your hair,” I blurted out, my brain apparently too distracted to do its damn job and keep my mouth shut. I paused several seconds too long. “Oh, right. Thank you. I mean for the compliment.”
Liang smiled, fondly shaking her head. “You’re too damn nice to be in this line of work. You really think you’re ready for what cape life has to throw at you?”
I puffed up, drawing myself to my full height. “You’d be surprised what nice is capable of. I’m ready.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said, putting a hand on my arm.
The next ten or fifteen seconds was a dizzying series of shifts, each lasting only a brief moment. I caught glimpses of unused stairwells and obscure supply closets, eventually finding myself next to Presto on the roof of a nearby building.
My knees crumpled as my stomach violently protested the experience. For a few moments I laid curled up on the roof, all of my effort spent on not throwing up with a full face mask on, a task I clawed a hard-won victory from. Eventually I stumbled back onto my feet, only needing a little assistance from the rooftop.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked, voice coming closer to a whine than I’d have preferred.
She slumped, actually looking a little ashamed. “I can’t do one big teleport. Not in the cards for me. Gotta do a bunch of little ones in quick succession. I kinda forgot how disorienting it could be if you’re not used to it.”
I made an annoyed sound in the back of my throat. “Okay, new rule. Warn me what you’re doing next time instead of trying to make it some dramatic gesture.”
She gave a small bow, sweeping off her hat. “Your wish is my command.”
I rolled my eyes, making sure to exaggerate the head movement so she could tell what I was doing. “Where are we headed? I think this building is a couple blocks southwest of the Space Needle, but I don’t know the city very well yet.”
“No, you’re right. I was thinking we’d head a bit closer to downtown. It’s safe, has lots of densely packed buildings, and there’s this really great Thai place I wanted to show you.”
I perked up at that last one. “I love Thai food, but first things first. Return my cloak posthaste, or face the wrath of Sepulcher!”
“Please spare me frightful sorceress,” Presto said, voice shaking with mock fear. She held the cloak in front of her as if warding off an evil presence. I snatched it from her hands.
Once it was properly settled on top of my armor I faced her again, striving to look stern. “You are forgiven for your transgressions this day, but be forewarned! Sepulcher may at times forgive, but she does not forget.”
“And you called me a dork.”
I generously elected to ignore her comment, instead clanking towards the edge of the building we were on. Downtown Seattle loomed in the distance, a loose mountain of glass and steel sliced through with irregularly spaced rivers of light. Streetlights, cars, lit windows and signs bathed everything in a perpetual twilight that didn’t quite touch the rooftops making up our path. I’d always loved the feeling of a city at night, that hinted sense of mystery and adventure glimpsed through the window of a car and given life in my imagination. There were horrors out there, I knew, things I could potentially put a stop to.
Presto leaped off the edge with a running start, turning around to give me another wink. The next instant she teleported up and forward, reappearing halfway to the building facing me. Her fall was slower than it should have been, making what should have been a deadly plummet into a graceful glide. The toes of her wing-tipped dress shoes alighted on the edge of the building’s rooftop as though she were light as a feather. She turned around, beckoning me over with a grin I could see all the way across the street.
I took a deep breath. Then another. The rooftop beneath my feet began to ripple and warp, a spring slowly being pulled taut. It snapped back into its proper shape, launching me into the air far faster than I’d intended. I flailed as I completely overshot the building Presto was on, foregoing screaming entirely in favor of a sort of panicked gurgle. My face smacked directly into the next building over, and without even looking I could tell the impact had created a fucking Looney Toons crater right where anybody could see. Right in front of Presto.
At least I didn’t land on someone’s car, I thought.
Once I’d taken a few moments for self pity, I extracted myself from the apartment’s facade and started making my way up to the roof, making sure to repair the damage as best I could. Here my talons and the spiky bits at the ends of my boots proved their worth, making the climb just a little bit easier. Presto was there by the time I reached the top, surprising exactly no one. I gingerly accepted a hand from her, constantly careful of the rough-edged iron clinging to my fingers. She pulled me up with surprising ease, helping me get my feet firmly on the roof.
Presto looked at me, expression unreadable. Her lips twitched, and what started as a chuckle quickly devolved into graceless snorting laughter. “The fucking sound you made! And then with the you-shaped crater, oh my god. That was perfect.”
“Thanks coach, I’ll keep that in mind for next time,” I deadpanned.
“I can hear you smiling,” she taunted in a singsong voice. “What advice am I supposed to give except keep practicing? It’s your power.”
She had a point, much as it galled me to admit it. I walked to a side of the building adjacent to an apartment of similar size, this time using my thinker power to visualize the arc of the jump I’d need to take. As my thoughts clarified it became easier to parse my tremorsense, and this time I carefully tuned the amount of force stored in the twisting coils of concrete under my feet.
Again, it snapped back into its proper shape and flung me toward my destination. Again, I flailed through the air with my cloak in my face. This time, though, I was actually on the right trajectory. My foot clipped the short wall topping the apartment building I’d been aiming for; I landed face first, carving a small furrow in the concrete rooftop as I slowed to a stop. The material surrounding me rose up and set me back upright, flowing to repair the bumps and grooves my sloppy landing had created.
“Nice one!” Presto said, suddenly sitting on the wall next to me. “That was definitely an improvement.”
“Not that high a bar but I’ll take it. I guess I’ll just have to learn on the way.”
“There’s the spirit!” Presto announced, grinning and giving a little air punch. “Being a cape is all about adapting to what life throws at you. Think you can keep up with me?”
“Nope. Still gonna try, though.”
With that an impromptu ‘race’ began, though it mostly consisted of her staying just ahead of me and offering her unique blend of encouragement and mockery. Whatever else I might have said about Presto’s methods, she was definitely good at making me want to catch up with her and wipe the smug grin off her face. It took almost half an hour to reach downtown, though the majority of that time was spent getting my jumps to land where I actually wanted to go. The way I moved my body also took practice, over time I learned that turning my side toward the direction I was moving reduced air resistance and the risk of spinning out. The buildings started getting taller, and I eventually started running around the sides and jumping off rather than going through the trouble of reaching the top.
They got shorter again as Presto lead me to a slightly more out of the way area, mostly squat apartments and a few strip malls. I recognized a sandwich shop from my hometown, feeling a strange sort of melancholy as I was reminded of a place I didn’t miss but wished I had reason to. Presto pointed, and I saw a place with Ayutthaya printed on the cloth overhang above the entrance. Under that were the words ‘Thai Cuisine’, presumably making this the place she’d been referring to. I was pleased to see a rainbow flag prominently displayed in the window.
“So are we both going in?” I asked breathlessly, both more and less winded than I’d have expected. More winded because my power did most of the work of moving me around, and less winded because my chubbiness and general lack of interest in physical activity made me pessimistic about my athletic ability. My armor had never really felt heavy per se, but over time I’d started to feel the extra weight slowly sapping my energy. A detriment now, but hopefully over time wearing it would help build up my endurance.
Presto shook her head. “Nah, just me. PR would wipe us both off the face of the earth if I let someone leak pictures of you in an unapproved costume. I was thinking we’d eat while we did our stakeout thing. What did you want?”
I gave a thumbs up, plopping onto the ground. “Could I get vegetarian Pad Thai with some spicy curry sauce?”
“You mean white people spicy or actual spicy?”
I snorted. “Actual spicy, if you please.”
She grinned and returned the thumbs up, strutting out onto empty air and gently gliding out of sight.
-||-
I landed dead center on the darkened office building, stumbling slightly as I made impact. Presto followed shortly behind, sticking the landing as casually as most people walked down the street. She leaned over the guard rail, pointing toward an ostensibly abandoned warehouse with a suspiciously large number of street toughs hanging around it. Really I was just assuming they were street toughs; they were too far away for me to make out much detail.
“Do you have binoculars?” I asked, but before I even finished the question a pair had appeared in my gauntleted hand. “Oh, thank you.”
With the binoculars I could see that more than a few of them sported horns, claws or inhumanly muscled physiques. The Westlake Bastards.
“This is supposed to be one of the Bastards’ minor warehouses,” Presto explained, watching them with a quiet intensity behind her eyes. “Probably gonna be a little bit of cash, drugs, or weapons stored here at any given time, but far as I can tell it's mostly used in human trafficking operations.”
I didn’t bother hiding my shudder. “That’s fucking horrible. Are there people in there right now? Like, ones they kidnapped or plan to sell off?”
“Not sure,” she said, voice hard. “It’s probably just used as a brief pit stop. If there are people there would only be a handful; they don’t want to risk losing too much ‘merchandise’ at once.”
“So what are we going to do?” I asked, anxious but determined.
She casually sat down on the gravel rooftop, her back against the short wall separating us from open air. “Stakeout, like I said. We wait and watch, trying to pick up as much information about their operations as we possibly can. If something happens while we’re watching we might, I repeat might , intervene.”
I tapped my chin in thought, jumping slightly in surprise when it made a loud clink. “Depending on what?”
She answered with a distracted air, most of her attention on an array of small holographic screens floating in front of her. “How dangerous it is, mostly. If I got you killed on your first day out I’d never hear the end of it.”
“You’re all heart,” I said, sitting down next to her. I leaned over to peek at whatever it was she was working on. The screens showed a live feed of the warehouse, security cameras she’d presumably hacked mixed in with indecipherable readouts I assumed were from whatever tracking or scanning devices she’d planted inside. With time and patience, I’d probably be able to use my power to correlate the changing spatial states of the screens with each other and eventually start to infer what they were tracking. Or…
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a screen that was covered with a mass of rhythmically blinking dots.
She raised an eyebrow at the offending digit but otherwise ignored it. “Biometric sensors I snuck inside the place a few nights back. The dots follow people’s hearts. Best person tracking thing I’ve got, at close range it can get a readout of their entire cardiovascular system. Surprisingly useful to have when you’re fighting someone.”
I took a few moments to process that information. “It’s a little creepy, but on the other hand it’s a lot useful. And these guys are human traffickers? Fuck them.”
She smirked. “Don’t get too excited now, party hasn’t even started yet. How about we eat night lunch and I tell you what all this crazy tinker nonsense is supposed to be?”
I fumbled with my mask for a few moments, pulling it off to give her a look of purest incredulity. “Seriously? Not a late dinner, a fucking night lunch? No way I’d say no to eating and learning things, but I’m never going to let you live ‘night lunch’ down. Not in a million years, not even if the world ends.”
“Good enough for me,” Presto said, pulling off her hat and pressing her other hand flush with the inner brim. She lifted it up, revealing two cardboard to-go containers with drinks balancing on top that were both too wide and too tall to have fit inside the undersized top hat. I felt the heat through my gauntlet as I took my box of noodles, which was remarkable given that the trip from the Thai place had taken nearly an hour. Something to do with how they’d been stored, maybe?
Finishing night lunch was something of a task with my gauntlets and the spiciness of the food, I ended up taking big gulps of water between bites while Liang laughed uproariously at my expense. When she wasn’t getting a kick out of my reactions she explained the various sensors she used and how they covered for each other’s weaknesses. Much like her teleporters, they were strictly limited in scope, narrowly focused, or both. The graphs were pretty intuitive once I knew what they were supposed to be, maps of electrical circuits or air currents.
We finished with our food and cleaned up, quickly getting back to business. After a few minutes without conversation I started talking about my power, partly to fill the silence and partly because I just wanted to talk to someone about it. She listened while we watched the feeds, nodding at appropriate points as I rambled. She noticed something on them that I didn’t see, springing to her feet in the blink of an eye. I was a second behind, eyes roving for whatever had drawn her attention.
My tremorsense picked up the sound of vehicles a minute or two before my ears did, and with my thinker power it was relatively easy to figure out approximately where they were relative to me. We ducked down as a trio of featureless black vans came into sight and smoothly pulled into the building. I nearly dropped my mask in my haste to get it back on, taking deep calming breaths to try and keep my cool. This was absolutely not the time to panic.
“What’s going on in there?” I asked, looking over to Presto.
Her brows furrowed in concentration as she paged through a dozen screens showing nothing but static, trying fix after fix that failed to pierce through. Eventually she dismissed them all with an angry gesture. “Fuck! I don’t even know who these bastards are. The new bastards, I mean.”
“What if we got in close?” I asked, not quite realizing what I was suggesting until the words were out of my mouth.
She grunted. “How good are you at being sneaky?”
“Not very,” I admitted, anxiously recounting the minions on guard. There were six pairs of them forming a loose perimeter around the warehouse, casually talking or playing cards while acting as lookouts for a human trafficking ring. Plausible deniability, I remembered. “Especially since I’m wearing full plate right now. Although I could lurk underground, landshark style. Bet they won’t expect that.”
She got a sort of pinched look on her face, staring at nothing in particular for long moments. Before I could work up the courage to prod her she spoke. “Closest backup is ten minutes out. We’re gonna very carefully sneak up and check out what’s going down.” A card appeared in her hand, and she handed it to me. The four of diamonds. “Put this under your armor or something, it’ll keep you quiet.”
I fumbled around for a few moments before finding somewhere to slide it under my breastplate. The building we were on wasn’t nearly as tall as the Space Needle, so there was no sudden change in pressure.
Presto stepped a little closer, her professional demeanor betraying a hint of worry. “You know what to do if we’re separated?”
I shook my head, too nervous to respond.
“You hide and wait for Bullrush. You got me? No going off half-cocked and getting yourself killed.”
I nodded.
She fixed me with a glare. “So, one more time. What do you do if we’re separated?”
I placed a hand on my chest as though reciting a solemn oath. “If we get separated, I will completely disengage and hide until Bullrush arrives. No getting killed, promise.”
Presto responded with a sharp nod, making her way to the side of the building opposite the warehouse and starting to slide down. I did my best to follow suit, the grooves my talons made in the side of the building akin to the wake left behind by a boat. The wall was as much a part of me as one of my legs or hands, but moreso, my tremorsense vastly more precise than any merely human sense of touch and proprioception. With it I controlled my body’s descent to match speeds with Presto, impacting the ground with a small ripple just a heartbeat after her.
The moment she’d confirmed I was there she teleported to a slightly closer building, gesturing for me to follow. I took a deep breath, sinking beneath the ground until I was confident there wouldn’t be any noticeable ripples. Navigating underground was no trouble with my tremorsense and thinker power to guide me, so it only took a few brief moments before I popped up next to Presto. Her head turned my way and she actually jumped a little in surprise. I felt a flash of satisfaction that dissipated like a drop of water on a hot pan when I reminded myself where I was.
She recovered an instant later, blinking to the next bit of cover and indicating for me to follow. We made our way toward the warehouse with painful slowness, the anticipation thrumming through my body making the short journey seem to take hours. Incongruously I was reminded of my time in high school theatre, that strange calm I’d always felt in the moments before I went on stage. For a brief time I’d had a place and a role, and knew exactly what I had to do down to the word and gesture.
Presto stopped abruptly a couple buildings away from the warehouse, holding up a hand. I’d gotten so used to the rhythm of moving from cover to cover that I almost kept going anyway, just barely managing to stop myself before walking into her. We stood there in complete silence for a few tense seconds, just long enough for me to start wondering if it was another false alarm. Presto’s eyes widened, giving me a small shove before vanishing.
I froze, losing precious seconds as I struggled to get my brain back in gear. The ground beneath me began moving too late, and I screamed as something reached from above and picked me up by the leg. My view shifted and I screamed even harder as I got a good look at just what had grabbed me.
It was like a deer taken straight from the depths of hell. Antlers sprouted from a head that was too predatory and streamlined, with teeth far too sharp. Worst of all were the legs, long and spidery and tipped with wickedly curved claws. I thrashed with all my might, but its grip in one limb was more than enough to overpower my entire body. Soon I was level with its face, some primal part of me convinced I was about to be made a meal.
It sniffed me. Then, in a surprisingly normal woman’s voice said, “You’re new, aren’t you?”
I didn’t know how to respond and she wouldn’t have been able to hear me anyway, so I kept my peace. There was someone on the roof with her, either a rat-themed changer or the most thoroughly Menageried individual I’d ever seen. They were short, the tips of their ears not even reaching up to the deer lady’s knees.
The next thing I knew I was in cover again, by the building we were at before I got grabbed. This time I walked into the nearest wall immediately, hiding myself behind the brickwork. Through a small window I saw that Presto had swapped herself in my place, apparently unconcerned at the prospect of being in the claws of a giant horror-monster.
“Shrike, Ratking! I was wondering what that smell was.” Presto said, just barely audible with my tremorsense.
Shrike snarled, leaning forward until she was nearly nose to nose with her. “Where did your little friend go? I have her scent, trying to hide her is a waste of time.”
“Back to the Space Needle,” Presto lied flawlessly, somehow managing to give a casual shrug upside down. “She wasn’t quite ready for prime-time, so I figured I’d tag myself in. Newbies, what can you do?”
“You’re gonna regret fucking with the Bastards,” said the rat boy, his voice cracking halfway through the sentence.
Presto held up her hands as though in surrender, but I could imagine her grin. “Guess I’m beaten. But before you kill me, how about a quick game of 52 card pickup?”
That was all the warning I got before the night briefly lit up brighter than a summer day. I instinctively withdrew further into the abandoned building, taking the time to get my bearings and blink the spots out of my vision. I heard shouts of alarm and sounds of struggle through the wall I leaned on, further fueling my worry. Paranoia drove me to climb up a few floors in case they decided to start searching buildings and then form a little peephole in the wall to check if Presto was okay.
The dim light made it hard to sort out details, but with my binoculars I could see that Ratking was tied up in something brightly colored I was pretty sure was a really long chain of ribbons tied together. That would fit the magician theme, at least. Shrike was on what passed for her feet, tatters of the probable ribbons hanging off of her like garish ornaments. She struggled to make headway, a wasted strike on a hologram giving Presto the perfect opening to trip her up with more ribbon. Before she had a chance to capitalize on the opportunity Ratking managed to slip out of his bonds, turning toward Presto and projectile vomiting an impossibly large amount of bright green fluid at her.
She blinked away easily, but her distraction gave Shrike enough time to get her bearings and start scuttling after her. Ratking followed, slipping into the closest edge of the puddle he’d just made and immediately reappearing from a stray bit of the spray that hit the building Presto teleported to. As the chase continued, something that had been niggling at me came to the forefront of my mind. Presto could travel much, much faster than she was acting like she could.