Wearing the Cape 6: Team-Ups and Crossovers

by Marion G. Harmon

  “Okay.” Not safe didn’t sound like a big deal to the voice, and Vel wondered if its owner was in shock. Or drugged. It beat freaking out, anyway. Following Joe, she stepped around a concrete pillar and froze.

  The girl on the other side of the pillar shouldn’t have been shaky—she should have been screaming. She was covered in so much blood that Vel couldn’t be sure of her hair color or what the shredded tank-top she wore had printed on it. The bare legs below her spandex shorts were just as red-splashed and dripping as her upper body, and shock wouldn’t protect anyone from that much pain.

  The girl held a steady hand up to shield her eyes from Joe’s light. “Is that a toy?”

  “Are you okay?” Velveteen asked stupidly. “How are you—” Then she spotted what seeing the horrifyingly blood-soaked girl had made her miss. The shredded corpse at her feet.

  The blood covering the girl was all splatter.

  Vel was back-pedaling over the glass-covered floor, emptying toys of every kind out of her utility belt pockets as she went, before another thought registered. Both the girl and the way-too-dead corpse had been here for the explosion. Which meant the blood-covered girl was a superhuman of some kind.

  “Stay right where you are! You’re under arrest until I figure this shit out! Did you do this?”

  “Maybe?”

  Fucked up times a thousand. “Don’t move!”

  “Toys? Your arresting me with toys?”

  Bare feet crunched over glass and Vel’s army of plastic green soldiers opened fire. Granted even the bazooka-soldier couldn’t fire that big a plastic round, but they stung. At least they stung normal targets—the freaky-scary girl didn’t flinch. “Hey,” she said, hands raised “It’s okay, I’m—” Vel threw a tangle of rubber monkeys in her face. They wrapped around the girl’s head, cutting off whatever she’d been going to say and Vel managed to get some distance. Hitting the window frame, she almost tripped backwards into the street—which would not have been good for her admittedly reinforced crushed-velvet bodysuit.

  “Now that’s just—” Nightmare Girl stopped where she was, carefully peeling the clinging monkeys away from her face so she could see. “—rude.” She tossed them away one by one, frowning as she tried not to rip any rubber arms off while pulling them apart.

  “I’m trying to tell you,” she said, voice getting stronger. “I’m Astra. Whatever happened I didn’t intend to do it. Where’s here? It’s not my bathroom.” Coming to the window, she looked down at her hands in the light of the street lamp. Then she looked back into the shadows. And then she threw up.

  “So, where am I?”

  The paramedics had arrived with the police, and while Portland’s finest were keeping their distance and letting their resident superhero sort out the superhuman stuff, the EMTs had provided Astra with an emergency blanket after rinsing and wiping her down to make sure that, under the blood and shredded nightclothes, she really was unhurt. She’d patiently let them do it, and didn’t that just say volumes about her experience with paramedics. Now she sat on the back of the emergency vehicle watching the police move through the taped-off wrecked building.

  “Portland.” Vel watched her blink. “How did you get here?”

  “Portland? I know the Portland Guardians, and they don’t have a bunny-girl.”

  “Oh, come on.” Vel rolled her eyes. As famous—infamous—as she was with the Super Patriots and by extension pretty much the entire superhero community, the blonde girl had to be lying. “And who are the Portland Guardians? There is no licensed team in Oregon.”

  “Licensed? Not certified?” The girl’s brow wrinkled. It was cute. Under the blood everything about her was cute, from her diminutive size (Vel was actually taller, a rarity), to her bobbed blonde locks and fresh faced and sweet sixteen, girl-next-door looks. She looked like the peppy high school or even junior-high school cheerleader from every teen movie. Or possibly the good-natured but slightly dim supporting friend.

  “Of course I was certified. The Super Patriots don’t let anyone on one of their teams without it. But they’re not here.”

  Astra shaped the words, “Super Patriots,” with her mouth, again cocking her head. She’d been doing that a lot, like she was trying to listen for something. Whatever it was she didn’t hear, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Super Patriots. Okay. They formed when after The Event?”

  “The what now?” Vel blinked. Was the girl going into shock or something?

  “The Event. How about the Big One?” Astra looked at the EMT on her right. “Ted? Anything?”

  Ted shook his head. “Sorry, girlfriend. I know a lot of big, but no Big One. And the biggest event around here recently was the Oregon Truffle Festival. That’s probably not what you mean?”

  “That’s—” She put her hands to her face for a moment, sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Can I borrow your cell phone?”

  “Uh, sure.” Vel handed it over and watched as Astra punched in a number. A bad one. Her shoulders slumped.

  “Got a couch I can crash on?”

  It wasn’t that simple of course. Vel had to fill out the usual forms—the fact that she hadn’t been there until after the explosion made things easier, but the police were reluctant to “release” Astra officially until the crime-scene analyst guys gave a preliminary judgement that whatever had caused the explosion hadn’t been an apparently invulnerable teen.

  When asked who the body was, Astra had looked green and said “We only just met before the boom, and he tried to gut me.”

  Since the obvious cause of death was a million shards of flying glass, the police took Astra’s name (just Astra—she refused to give up a civilian name), remanded her to Vel’s custody “pending resolution of her status,” and left them alone.

  “My status?” Astra asked as they walked away from the scene. The cool night air and colder sidewalk wasn’t bothering the girl at all.

  “You’re not a registered superhuman, are you?” Velveteen looked at her sidelong, wondering how the night had ended with her getting a problematic houseguest. “And you’re not confused anymore, so mind telling me why?” She was tired and the adrenaline rush from getting the absolute shit scared out of her by a blood-dripping girl had long worn off.

  “I’m not from around here?” Astra’s laugh was bitter. “Which is so cosmically messed up, considering what I went through last year to make sure this wouldn’t happen.” It was the first crack in her careful calm, and Vel recognized the sound. The girl had hit the end of her personal rope, and the next step would be to lose her shit.

  Spotting a taxi, Vel waved frantically. Amazingly, it pulled up and she practically shoved Astra into the back seat before the driver could realize just how not-normal his fare was. “Thank you, George,” Astra said automatically, squinting slightly to read the cab license dangling from the mirror without straightening from where she’d flopped against the opposite door—a nice trick. Enhanced vision, too?

  “Yeah, thanks,” Vel seconded, giving him her address.

  “I don’t want any—” the driver started, but whatever he saw in his mirror made him stop. He grunted weakly. “Let’s get you home.”

  “I don’t think you’ll go that far,” Astra laughed with an edge, covered her mouth. “Sorry.”

  And that was it from her for the rest of the ride.

  Velveteen—a name that perfectly fit a toy-animating, bunny-suited superheroine—let Hope stew quietly until George pulled up in front of her place; a kindness for which she was desperately grateful. She almost as silently pulled Hope inside, showed her where the bathroom was, and left her with a fresh fluffy towel and a pair of sweats to change into.

  Most of Hope’s jitters swirled down the drain with the blood—the wash and wipes the EMTs had used hadn’t cleaned her, just cleaned her enough for them to know she wasn’t the source of any of it. She turned the water up to scalding (not for her, of course) and washed and rinsed her hair three times before it felt sufficiently un-yuck
y, scrubbing hard enough to half-destroy Velveteen’s loofa.

  Opening the bathroom window to let the cloud of steam out, she blow-dried her hair and pulled on the sweats. They were too big for her, but not by very much and her University of Chicago tank top and sleep shorts were beyond recovery.

  Closing the window, she hung the towel, opened the bathroom door, and stopped.

  A love-worn teddy bear waited for her in the hallway.

  They looked at each other. He wore a Build-A-Bear tux, and had one eye. Since nothing else about him was piratical, Velveteen had obviously taken the time to give the little guy his dashing eyepatch. What was toy etiquette?

  “Hello? Can you take me to your person, Mister Bear?”

  He nodded and turned to lead her back downstairs. Hope smothered a half-hysterical laugh.

  Yeah, like you haven’t seen weirder. With only silence where Shell’s voice should be—a constant and crushing reminder that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be—Hope found herself supplying her own. And her inner-Shell was right; hanging with Ozma, and therefore Nox and Nix, gave her no room to complain about strange. She followed Butler Bear. Beartler?

  She stopped again on the stairs.

  “No,” Velveteen was saying, using a telephone-voice that told Hope she was holding her cell phone between her shoulder and ear while rifling through the kitchen. “She doesn’t look like an analogue of anybody I know, even trying to picture a mask. Of course I— What should I have— The kid was freaking out, and I couldn’t just leave her with— One wrong step, and Legal would eat her alive!”

  Seeing Beartler looking up at her, Hope realized she was eavesdropping. Thumping loudly down the last few steps and across the hallway and through the swinging door to the kitchen, she found Velveteen closing her cell.

  “Feeling better?” her host asked.

  “Yes, thanks. I think I used up all your hot water.”

  “S’okay.” Velveteen had changed too. Gone were the rabbit ears, domino mask, burgundy velvet leotard and brown tights with the utility belt that had held way more toys than its pockets had room for. Out of her high-heeled boots, Vel wasn’t much taller than Hope, and her dark brown hair wasn’t cut much longer than Hope’s bob. She looked tired. “I’ve got decaf. We should talk and I’ve made up the couch.”

  “Thank you. Really. I could hear you.”

  The older girl winced. “Of course you could. What are your powers besides not being sliceable?”

  “I’m super strong and can fly. And I’ve got super-duper senses.”

  “So you’re a flying brick, that’s pretty common. How strong?” She poured two cups while talking, set them on the kitchen table.

  “I can punch out a tank. I can’t throw it.” Hope sat and Beartler stayed beside her. After a moment she reached down and lifted him into her lap, where he settled in.

  Velveteen eyed her Butler Bear, her hard smile smoothing out. “So, maybe level four.”

  “And what are you?”

  “I’m an animus. Officially, level two, and officially my power enables a ‘Semi-autonomous animation of totemic representations of persons and animals, most specifically cloth figures, including minor transformation to grant access to species-appropriate weaponry.’ Unofficially, that official stuff is a little out of date.”

  “Wow that’s a mouthful. What did you mean when you said ‘Legal would eat me alive?’”

  Velveteen gave her a long look, put down her cup. “You gave me a superhero name. Astra.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know how it is where you come from, but here it’s illegal to be an unlicensed superhero, and against federal laws to harbor one. If The Super Patriots got wind of you, their legal division would notify the Superhuman Affairs Commission and get a warrant to bring you in as a hazard to public safety. You don’t want them to get their hands on you.”

  “Oh. You mentioned The Super Patriots before. Who are they?”

  Velveteen told her. It took a while.

  “They use children?” Hope knew she’d gone pale. Her eyes had to be wide as saucers, but she didn’t care about looking tough and On Top Of It just that second. “Child soldiers?”

  “Child heroes,” Velveteen corrected, her voice dripping her opinion of that. “I was one of them, but I thought you were the same. You can’t be what, sixteen? They don’t send you out to fight?”

  “No! I mean— Yes, I fight, but no I’m not sixteen. I didn’t gain my powers until I was almost nineteen, and— No, we don’t do that back home!” She felt sick again, blinked tears. So much for thinking this extrareality couldn’t be too different from— “Just, no.”

  “Okay, okay.” Velveteen made soothing motions, her voice gone careful again, and Hope tried to pull herself together. “So you’re nineteen?”

  “Almost twenty-one, actually. I’ve been a cape for two years, but since my breakthrough I’m not aging anymore…”

  “Got it. That’s got to suck.”

  “I’ll be carded forever.” That was actually worth a sad laugh, and laughing helped. The warmth of the coffee cup and the bear in her lap helped.

  “So, how did you get here?”

  “I wish I knew.” Shell would be all over it with hypothetical explanations. Shell wasn’t here.

  “Okay…” Velveteen worried her lip, looking tired and thoughtful. “So what were you doing when it happened?”

  “I was bait.”

  “Huh?”

  Hope closed her eyes, hugged Beartler. “I got a call from the DSA—that’s the federal Department of Superhuman Affairs back home. They were after a superhuman serial killer they’d named Red Jack. He only attacked sorority girls. Of a certain physical type.”

  “Blondes cute as buttons?”

  “Um, yeah. He’d come out of mirrors at them. Only at night, when they were alone in a dark room—like a bathroom or bedroom with the main lights off. And he’d slice them to bits with his razor fingers. In seconds.”

  Velveteen choked on her coffee. “That—sounds like a bad grade B slasher movie.”

  “Yeah, which makes you wonder how twisted the guy had to be to make him that kind of breakthrough. Anyway he’d killed two girls, in different sororities, different states and a month apart, each on the night of the thirteenth. That was enough for the DSA’s incredible search and pattern-matching systems to figure it out. They couldn’t track him, but since they knew what he wanted they decided to give it to him.”

  “You?” Now Velveteen was looking at her like she was wondering just how dumb the girl sitting across the table from her could possibly be. Hope shrugged defensively.

  “Pretty invulnerable, remember? And not just me—a good half-dozen capes who fit the general description or could be made to with dye jobs. And since we couldn’t tell if he was picking them by location, or psychically homing in on targets that met the metaphysical qualifications too, we also all got crash-pledged.”

  Just thinking about that still made her smile. She’d long reconciled herself to the destruction of her original college plans, but the Bees had been thrilled to pledge her into Phi Mu with them. Love in our bond. Yay!

  “So then it was just a matter of spending the night of the thirteenth in the sorority house, dressing for bed and stepping into the bathroom after lights-out.” She stopped.

  “And?” The older girl gripped her mug tight.

  “Red Jack,” Hope said carefully, “Was an evil clown—talk about horror-movie clichés. He chose me, came right through the mirror and tried to slice me up.” She kept her breathing even. She’d had the smallest concern that his razor-fingers or whatever he used would be supernatural—that her normal toughness wouldn’t protect her. It had. “And I grabbed him. Your medical examiner will probably find a crushed wrist. When he couldn’t get away he reached back and— Everything went weird and then there was exploding glass. We were here.” All her smiles were gone. “Which makes no sense. At all.”

  There was silence in the kit
chen for a long moment. Hope pushed back a sniff and squeezed Beartler harder. Sleep. She needed sleep and then she’d be able to woman up.

  Velveteen sighed and Hope made herself refocus. “Call me Vel. It’s short for Velma, but I haven’t really been Velma Martinez for years.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Because you could be here awhile. I was hoping you’d tell me you’d fallen asleep or gotten knocked out or something, which would have meant that going to sleep here might have been enough to send you back. I’d wake up to an empty couch.”

  “Yeah,” Hope laughed wetly. “Been there, done that. Was trying not to do it again.”

  Coffee sloshed as Vel straightened up. “Really? Then I may know what happened.”

  “What?”

  “Slippage. You’ve traveled to alternate realities before?”

  “We call them extrarealities, but yes.”

  “Not just parallel timelines?”

  Hope blinked. “Um, no. Those exist?”

  “All over the place, potentially. Where did you go?”

  “Well, a town-sized extrareality pocket. And a Japanese spirit realm. Um, two of those.”

  “Got it. One of the documented problems of traveling is that, the more you do it, the less glued you are to your proper place in the multiverse. You said Red Jack moved through mirrors? That usually means using mirrors as gates—which means an in-between place of whatever size that’s probably not solidly fixed in your reality. Like a wormhole. So if he tried to get away, dragged you back in with him…”

  Hope felt light-headed. “His in-between place couldn’t hold onto me. And he wasn’t going back to the world, and I wouldn’t let go of him…”

  “You went spinning under huge metaphysical pressure, popped out in the ‘closest’ spot to a real-world analogue to his special place—”

  “A glass and mirror warehouse. Which reacted badly. Oh. That’s, that’s awful.”

  Vel nodded. “Kind of poetic, actually—a mirror-jumping slicer getting terminally sliced by mirrors. But the multiverse does have a sense of humor. A bad one.”