by Matt Carter
As for the Grand Sorceror, well, there’s few records of what happened to him after the Mary incident, but I’m a fan of the theory that he was fed to Mary by a bunch of pissed off, Golden Age heroes as payback.
#LessonLearned: Don’t fuck with magic users.
17
THE WORST THINGS ALWAYS STICK AROUND
Maybe it came from hearing too many stories about how awesome Mary Risings were when I was a kid, but I was a bit let down when we first teleported in and saw that it was really just an overcrowded, small-town carnival. There were rides and games, cheap food and screaming kids, poorly piped in music, and that ever-present smell of popcorn and vomit. The early evening air was cool and bracing, enough to wake you up and remind you that winter was right around the corner.
It reminded me a lot of home, actually.
My old home, at least.
The mine entrance itself was the centerpiece. It was surrounded by large light towers and cordons to keep people out of harm’s way, and vendors selling hero pennants, Mary balloons, and “Genuine Mary Teeth.” There were no heroes yet; they would come a few minutes before sunset (when Mary typically rose) to get ready and probably sign a few autographs. Until then, we had to make our own fun.
Showstopper acted as master of ceremonies, trying to cheer us all up at any cost. He talked us into games, terrible fried food, and one by one even got us all onto the mechanical bull. We couldn’t use our powers—not if we didn’t want to attract any attention—but it was actually pretty fun. Nevermore and Trojan Fox were naturals. Showstopper and I weren’t. I tried to hold on, but wound up wrapping my legs around my head when I faceplanted off the front. Showstopper’s fall was more spectacular (weighing three hundred–plus pounds will do that, I guess), but he took it in good humor, waving to the crowd and bowing as he hobbled back to us.
“That was awesome,” he said. “I need food.”
“Don’t mention food now,” Geode said, holding his stomach. I tried to look stronger, but I shared his queasiness. Maybe combining fair food and mechanical bulls wasn’t the best idea after detoxing.
“More for me then,” Showstopper laughed.
He may have been fat, but he was a breath of fresh air. He was energetic, he was positive, and he didn’t judge us. He was just glad to be free.
I couldn’t say the same for Ghost Girl.
I’d never seen her in public (it was weird seeing her with that scarf wrapped around her face instead of her usual mask), and maybe that gave her some of the awkwardness, but that could only account for some. The way she looked at us… it seemed like she was only hanging around out of a sense of obligation, talking when spoken to, following us where we went but never adding anything. She wasn’t hostile, but she wasn’t friendly.
She wasn’t the Ghost Girl I’d remembered.
I was glad when we’d decided to split up. I knew she would make a break from us, and it was easy enough to follow her, for a while.
I’d forgotten how fast she was—and in what poor shape I was in. She might have actually gotten away if I hadn’t put up a small wall of focus in front of her.
She stopped.
“Let me go, Aidan,” she said without turning around.
“No. Not until you tell me what your problem with me, with all of us really, but especially me is!”
She turned around. Her eyes weren’t angry, not really, but they were pretty close to it. “You want to know my problem?”
“Yeah, I think I’ve earned that much!” I said, doing a pretty good imitation of sounding strong and confident. “I mean, after what we shared—”
“You earned nothing! We had sex, Aidan. Desperate sex because I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see the light of day again and because I briefly thought that you might still have some human decency hiding within you. Seeing you now, I’m beginning to regret that decision.”
That hurt. A lot.
I didn’t love Ghost Girl—at least I was pretty sure I didn’t love her—but I did like her a lot. Probably more than any girl I’d ever known (even more than Kelly Shingle). Though she was creepy and quiet a lot of the time, she was also kind, smart, and hid a pretty good sense of humor.
She was my friend. One of the best friends I’d ever had (and a mostly hot one, too). I’d hoped beyond hope that I would see her again someday, even knowing that it would likely mean seeing her as a drummer, just so I could show her what a big man I’d become.
And now she was looking at me like I was the worst person she’d ever met.
“Back in training, I thought you all might be decent people. That beneath the pretext of villainy we were all just scared, misunderstood kids who got roped into this because the capes backed us into a corner. That we did this because we had to, not because we wanted to.”
“But we did want to do this. At least, I know I did.”
She shook her head. “I know that, now. I knew it then, but I thought you stood a chance at being something different. You had this naïveté and sweetness to you, beneath all the selfishness and stupid fucking posturing, that I thought might have made you into a better man once you saw what supervillain life was really like.”
“You were wrong about that,” I laughed.
She started to walk away, further into the carnival, but did nothing to stop me from following.
“You let this life poison you. You let them poison you,” she said harshly when I caught up.
“The heroes?” I asked. She nodded. “Nah, they’re cool, mostly, when they’re not being dicks I mean, but we’re all friends when they’re not.”
“And where were these friends when you were screaming in withdrawal? They made a good showing of not cleaning you up while attending their premieres and galas and their courtship of the paparazzi, while Showstopper and I made sure you didn’t die!”
I may have still been pissed with Adam some, but I shook the thought off. She didn’t know them like we did. “They’re busy people. You’ll see that once things get back to normal, once you know them like we do.”
She laughed. “I don’t want to know them. Not after what they have made of you.”
“And what did they make us?” I said, defiantly.
“Puppets.”
“Yeah, but we knew that going in. We get to be their puppets; they let us live like celebrities, it’s pretty sweet,” I said, proud to have outmaneuvered her.
“Okay, how about we find another word for it: whores.”
That word wasn’t nearly as cool-sounding as puppets. Not that puppets inherently sounds cool, but whores was much worse.
“We’re not whores.”
“You’re paid to do something illegal.”
“Hello, it’s called a job!” I shot back.
“So none of those heroes you fucked ever paid you for sex?”
“No!” I exclaimed, indignant.
“Did they ever give you gifts?”
“Sometimes!”
“Did they ever give you drugs in exchange for sex?”
“No! Wait, yeah, maybe a couple of times. Maybe more, but definitely less than half!” I said. There were some fuzzy memories of some of the older superheroes propositioning me, me considering if I wanted to do anything with them, then them offering me some Montage or pills to get things going.
“Then you’re a whore. So, is being a celebrity whore everything you’d hoped it would be?”
I was trying to raise defiance again, but with her eyes (human eyes, this time) boring right through me, I couldn’t do that.
“People liked—like me. I mean, they say they like me. I think they mean it, but maybe they don’t. But even if they don’t, it’s a lot more than I got before. I never had people even pretend to like me before. And the sex… so what if it’s meaningless? I never got any before, and now I’m fucking some of the hottest women on the planet.”
“You do know how pitiful that sounds, right?”
“Some, yeah.”
“And that they were only ever fucking
Apex Strike, not you, right?”
I shrugged. It sounded right. It didn’t sound as bad as she was making it out to be, but it did sound worse than I’d had it in my head.
“Would you like to hear a story?” she asked.
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
“Then go right ahead.”
“I wasn’t always like this…” she said, motioning to her face. A sick sense of anticipation filled my stomach.
Is she finally…?
“I was pretty. I was happy. And I had a family. A mum, a dad, two younger sisters, and the coolest older brother in the world. Justin was into surfing, biking, extreme sports… everybody loved him; it was hard not to, he always had a kind word or a present for me…”
I could see where this was going. I put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. “He raped you, didn’t he?”
She looked at me, confused. “Oh, God no! Ewww. What would make you—”
“I’m sorry, it just seemed like—”
More Afrikaans cursing. “—you watch too much telly—”
“—I SAID I WAS SORRY!”
“… Do you want to hear the story or don’t you?”
“YES! Yes, I mean yes, I’m sorry.”
“Good,” she shuddered. “My powers manifested when I was fifteen. They scared me at first, just like everyone’s I’m sure. But once I realized what I could do, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I always wanted to help people, and looking into their auras I thought I could really help with that. The only real problem I saw with these new powers was the Black Strings.”
She’d talked about these during training. The way she’d described it, auras appeared as a mass of swirling, multi-colored strings in front of and behind a person. They couldn’t tell you everything about their life, but some things stood out better than others. Events that were really bright and important showed up behind a person in white. Terrible, negative events showed up in darker shades.
The worst things people could do showed up in black.
“I hated seeing people’s deepest, darkest secrets, because in all my sheltered life, I didn’t want to believe they were possible. That was why I didn’t test it on my family, at first, but finally, I was just so excited that I couldn’t help myself and I looked, and I saw Justin’s Black String.
“I didn’t want to know what it was, at first, and for months I tried to ignore it. But when another appeared… I looked deeper, and I saw a vision of he and four of his friends beating a homeless man to death for kicks after a night of drinking. The second string was the same, but worse, because this time they weren’t drinking. They were hunting. This was getting worse, and he had no remorse for it. I… I knew I was the only one who could do something, so when we were home alone one day, I confronted him in the kitchen while he was cooking lunch. I thought, coming from me, that he’d see the light, that he’d get just how wrong what he did was.”
“I’m guessing he didn’t?”
“No. He yelled at me like it was my fault for finding out, then he forced my face down in a pot of boiling oil.”
My stomach churned at the thought. The fact that I was just admiring the smell of a fried-food booth a moment before didn’t help.
“I should have died. I wanted to die. Instead, I grabbed a knife from the counter and opened his belly. After he let me go, I was able to scream. Then I opened his throat. The police came. They took me to the hospital. What I’d done was clearly self-defense, so I wasn’t punished. Doctors told me I was lucky to keep my eyes, tongue, and most of my lips, and that they might be able to restore some of my face in time. I told them I didn’t want them to. I wanted the reminder of what happened when I allowed myself to be willfully blind to the world. My parents thought I was mad, and maybe I was,” she said, her voice trailing off.
“I knew his friends were still out there. I knew they still needed to be stopped. So once my face had healed enough, I found my first mask and cloak in a Johannesburg antique store. I became Ghost Girl, and I did things to them that were very much not in self-defense. They are Black Strings on my back that I can never lose and they bother me always when I use my powers, but they are also peace of mind.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. The words felt inadequate, but what the hell else are you supposed to say to a story like that?
“Be sorry all you want, but don’t ignore what I’m saying. I didn’t let myself see evil until it was too late because I didn’t want to. I care about all of you too much to see you make the same mistake.”
I could see where she was going. I wanted to tell her how many ways she was wrong, how great the heroes really were once you got to know them, how good and decent and fun they were to be around. I mean, sure, some of what she said felt true, and maybe the heroes were using us more than we thought, which was something we’d need to talk about with them, but it wasn’t as bad as she thought.
It wasn’t.
It couldn’t be.
We weren’t that stupid.
We were supervillains.
I sighed. “Maybe you’re right.”
“I am right.”
“Maybe you’re right, but can I say something?”
“Of course.”
The words didn’t come easily. Being honest has never been one of my strongest suits, but with Ghost Girl it was easy, and not just because she could use her power to see through you.
“I’m a supervillain. I’m a son of a bitch—not literally, I mean, since my mom was pretty nice, but I’ve done bad things, and I’ve made a lot of bad decisions. And you know what? If I could go back and fix all my mistakes, I wouldn’t. And it’s not just because of the sweet island lair or the sex and the drugs and the partying and the fame, though those have all been pretty awesome. It’s because of you guys. You… Helen, Felix, Nick, Odigjod… Nevermore?”
“Angelique. Her name is Angelique.”
Now I knew.
“… Anyway, I think I love you guys. You’re assholes a lot of the time, but you’re also the best friends I’ve ever had, and I wouldn’t give that up for anything.”
She looked me up and down. “I don’t even need my powers to know that you mean that.”
Now for the really hard part. I quickly closed the distance between us, pulled the scarf down the lower half of her face, and kissed her twisted, mutilated lips. It felt weird, kissing her, and my stomach didn’t entirely appreciate it, but I kept everything down. She resisted some at first, no doubt it’d been a while since she’d been kissed, but she didn’t push me away.
I parted from her.
“You know, you make it really hard to hate you sometimes,” she said, contorting her terrible lips into something resembling a smile.
“What can I say, I’m maybe, almost, kinda cute.”
“Sometimes,” she said, pulling the scarf back up.
It was almost dark. Loudspeakers kicked in, announcing that the Mary Rising was beginning. As if on cue, a glowing green Tri-Hole opened in the distance, spitting out a half-dozen of heroes too dark to see from where we were. Silently, we started toward them. No way were we going to miss the main event.
“Anything interesting happen while I was coming down from all the drugs?” I asked, trying to fill the silence.
“Well, Spongeman died,” Ghost Girl said, offhand.
“Really? What happened?”
“He drowned.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. He fell in a pool while chasing some criminal. He was absorbent. His lungs weren’t.”
“Huh. Did they do one of those National Days of Mourning for him?”
“Not really. The Deputy Mayor was supposed to give a speech at some park, but they couldn’t figure out how to turn off the sprinklers and had to cancel.”
“That sucks. I guess.”
“Not for Sponge Lad.”
“There’s a Sponge Lad?”
“Not anymore. He got promoted to Spongeman.”
“Huh
.”
The others had saved us a spot pretty close to the front of the cordon around the mine entrance, so we got a good view of all the heroes who had come out for this Mary Rising as they signed autographs and took pictures with those audience members who had paid for tickets to meet them in advance. Some of them I knew, like Helios, Shooting Star, Photon, and Armada. The other two (the more famous two), Arcana and the Golem, were not a part of Project Kayfabe. There’s no way they could have known who we were, but their presence was the only thing that kept me from waving to Helios.
“So much death here,” Ghost Girl muttered. Her eyes were glowing, and her body shuddered.
“Are you all right?” Geode asked her.
“I think so,” she said. “But I can’t stay for this.”
She pushed her way back through the crowd. I wondered if I should follow her, especially now that we seemed almost back on good terms, but then the ground began to rumble beneath me, and all thoughts of Ghost Girl disappeared.
Mary was rising.
The lights all blacked out at that moment, and a voice over the loudspeakers told us to quiet down and be aware of potential side effects. Sometimes, due to the imperfect nature of her curse, the laws of physics didn’t entirely behave when she was rising. Some Risings have reported mass hysteria, gravity fluctuations, and the sudden appearance of a field of sunflowers in front of the mine. I was kind of hoping we’d see something, for the full experience, but that wasn’t to be.
At once after the announcement, a few hundred hands rose into the air, aiming their phones’ cameras at the pitch-black mine entrance. Slowly, faintly, a glowing green mist began to pour from it. Green light soon began to come from the thick cracks in the earth, brighter every second as the ground began to rumble even heavier. A primal roar came from the mine.
