The crowd burst into cheers, shouts, applause; raucous, frenetic energy. Who would have thought they’d be eating this shit up the way they were? With the release of the psyPhone Epsilon, basically a rerelease of the Delta in a slightly larger frame, and just in time for Christmas, the company would be moving millions of units in every major market on the globe. No one would have minded if it had been something indistinguishable from the Delta, they just wanted something new, something special; something to spend their money on so they could show off their new acquisition to their friends, colleagues, loved ones, something to make them feel admired by their fellows for that one, fleeting moment, that one meaningless drop in the endless, flowing river of time. It wouldn’t be hard to argue that she was no different than them, the crowds who surged at her every word threatening to well up and flood over the stage for the chance to get their hands on the newest product. Sure, she’d made a few fortunes in her time, spent a few, too, and if you’d have told her that the girl playing with circuits in her friend’s dad’s garage in Lowtown would be here, on the global stage, speaking to a larger audience then any world leader commanded because of just how admired her technology was among the peoples of the world, well, she’d have probably called you out and kicked your ass out a window, but she wouldn’t have believed you. She was smart, talented, sure, but she’d be lucky not to take a blade to the gut by the time she was twenty three.

That girl had taken a blade to the gut, when she was nineteen, still had the scar to prove it, too. She could have had it removed, she had doctors and not doctors, and even a few not human not doctors, the likes of which no one could buy, the kinds of eldritch contacts that can only be established in flesh and duty over a lifetime of dealings in the darkest reaches of the shadow, supernatural world under the one lit by the glowing banners and towering buildings instructing those who could see to go out and get the new psyPhone, but she kept it, as a reminder. She might be the most powerful woman alive, with aspirations on becoming and staying the most powerful person alive, but it could all be over the first time someone decided to bury a blade in her. That’s probably the hardest thing for the wealthy, the powerful, the intelligent to ever come to understand, just how fleeting it all is, how easily it can all come tumbling down around you. She had never been the type to advocate toughening up the young and meek through pain and loss, she’d been through the same kind of treatment and had never felt thankful for it, but maybe the meanness, the harshness of her earlier years had given her something uniquely valuable among those who tower over their fellows, something that had little to naught to do with how she had gotten here, but everything to do with how she remained here, how she continued to appreciate just what it was she had and stayed willing to fight to hold on to it.

She loved her kids, Ken and Aster, and she’d leave them a legacy both in blood and empire, but she had greater aspirations. She would never be content to get a first look at the newest psyPhone, to create the newest mass consumer product, no, not even to own the company that created the hottest new electronics on the market. She would change the world, fundamentally alter it, like the first antibiotics and the first humans who could fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes had changed the world. The ex, oh, seven project would fundamentally alter reality, our reality, and it would be the legacy she left for her people, her children, her species. “Ma’am, there’s been a situation at the Longstreet site,” how can there have been a situation? What, is it over already? These idiot security, “The site went into lockdown, and then came out of, --,” before she could think, react, her security team rushed the stage, and then they were moving, down the flight of stairs to the exit, not the one reserved for regular celebrity entrances and exits, the public fire exit. Then there was a blinding brightness, a shuffling of boots on the pavement, and she was in one of the company SUVs, the fancy ones that can drive with blown out tires and take rockets head on without being disabled. “How serious is it? Put me through to Ashley,” hardly even had to ask, the looks on their faces said it all. “Jan, then, where’s, --,” oh shit. “He didn’t?” He had flown in to surprise her, some stupid romantic gesture no doubt, that f#$%ing fool.

“We sent a team to retrieve him, --,” that asshole, “don’t bother, he’ll get lost in the City. Send the team to commandeer a jet,” they looked at her dumbfounded, “commandeer a jet, ma’am?” she pulled out her phone, hit the protocol zero function, though she knew it would have already been sent out. Savannah’s in the Midwest, Faust is somewhere off the map, Jan, that asshole, is here, Nucleus isn’t going to get there in time to do anything useful… “yes, mine isn’t going to work out. I don’t care if you have to buy one from the government, get it done,” the guard nodded before pulling out his own phone. Nothing like having every available Guardian somewhere hours out of range on the same day that someone somehow knows to go for ex, oh, seven… She’d have to look into where the leak had come from, couldn’t have been supernatural, the wards she had on that facility. No, couldn’t think about that now. This situation had to be dealt with, and if the grownups were too f#$%ing foolish to have their shit together and leave at least one super in Halcyon, dammit Jan, then the kids, “oh shit, the kids,” she almost jumped out of her skin, they hadn’t checked in? Why hadn’t the protocol zero teams picked them up? “We just picked up Aster, Ken’s on the move, fast. Must be in a car,” had he… Oh, great. He got the call, and didn’t check in. That phone’s probably in the backseat of a cab. She got a message, psyPhone, obviously Ken. “Dad went to see you, on my way to Longstr. Ok?”

"Are you seriously asking your mom for permission to go out and do badass super hero stuff?" the girl he held in his left arm asked as he frantically texted with his right. "Yes, Tal, I am asking my mom for permission to go out and do super hero stuff," he narrowly dodged a skyscraper after casting a quick glance up from the screen. "Because," he interrupted her, didn't have to look up to know that she was about to say something, "if I don't ask per, --," another close miss, but he was reasonably sure they were moving in the right direction now, "mission, then when her people find my phone in that cab, they're gonna assume someone grabbed me, and she's gonna have everyone in a mask, who should be responding to this threat," a roll, and the site was in front of them, "tearing up the city looking for me," she would, too. Mom might love her work, but she cared more about her kids. Aster was fine, her blinker had already come back in with the code her detail, and to the best of his knowledge only her detail, would have access to, leaving him as the only loose end in need of rescue. His dad had flown over to Europe to meet up with mom, some kinda romantic thing Ken supposed, and he knew Savannah Newman-Hathaway, Lodestar, was speaking at some political thing in the Midwest, and the rest of the team were all off radar or, in the case of Nucleus, at least far enough off the beaten path that she wouldn’t show up for about an hour at least.

If anyone was gonna show up and help her, mom’s, people, it was gonna be them. “You know, this would be a lot cooler if you didn’t need the scooter,” it was true, this little one person flier was super lame for super heroes who should be flying on their own. Of course, he couldn’t fly, not yet anyway, and she wasn’t likely to ever be able to get into the air on her own. Tal was great at what she did, but flying wasn’t exactly in her repertoire. Either way, he was strong enough to carry her and pilot the thing, which either required a lot of practice and precise controls or overwhelming strength to operate effectively, and they had been in a hurry, would’ve taken them twenty minutes by train. He had only had the one, he’d gone out flying with Alex Hathaway earlier and though she made fun of him for needing it, too, he’d held on to it for his regular Cuban coffee, medianoche, and dancing with Tal, it folded up into his backpack and even though she could use the thing better than he could she couldn’t exactly lug him around with her. The phone buzzed, and the shock of it almost sent him flying into the side of a building, but Ken recovered and checked the message. “Aster’s safe. Go get ‘em,” pfft, mom. He snapped the phone in half with his thumb and index finger, before tossing it down to the street. “Hey! That’s my phone!” he shrugged, sending the scooter careening down, fast. “I’ll buy you a new one,” he corrected, barely. “I didn’t have my pics backed up!”

He knew she did. She took pictures religiously, usually embarrassing ones of him, or at least when they were hanging out that's what she seemed to mostly take pictures of. Guess it didn't matter now, though, the thing was broken and in the street somewhere, and the encryption would delete anything that wasn't already destroyed if anyone tried to back it up now. "We're almost there. North or South parking lot?" didn't seem to matter much, but they were approaching from the North, and getting to the East or West sides would make this a hell of a bumpy landing. She didn't answer him, like he knew she wouldn’t, probably still pissed about the phone. They couldn't have anyone placing Talia here, though, of course he had to break the thing. Those were their personal phones, they didn't have business stuff like the Guardians, 'cause, well, they weren't Guardians. They were just kids, mom wouldn't have let them tag a class B villain yesterday. Or today, for that matter, if they weren't the only masks in town. Guess there was Alex and Andrea Faust, somewhere around here, that kid Nucleus had taken in, maybe some other people loosely connected to the community, but for the most part, they were it. She, mom, probably wouldn't have let him do it alone, either, but he used Talia's phone to text her, and she'd recognize the number. Had a photographic memory for phone numbers, Anne Scarborough, he'd done it on purpose. Distract anyone who was coming looking for him with his phone, use Tal's to get mom's attention and let her know the two were together moving on the target.

I mean, he’d have welcomed some backup of course, but there wasn’t likely to be any coming. He knew that masks often did seem to pop out of the woodwork in these situations, but on a time table like this he doubted anyone’d even have heard about anything by the time it was all said and done. Ken was actually rather pleased with himself, a minute ago he’d been dancing with Tal at their Cuban place, and within sixty seconds here they were, flying off to tag a real villain. He’d thrown some cash on their table, left the half eaten medianoches and just went out into the alley behind the joint through the backdoor, threw his phone into a passing cab without the guy even noticing, luckily he hadn’t had a customer who might make mention of the mysterious cellphone flying through the back window, made sure there weren’t any cameras which of course there weren’t in a place like that, threw on his costume in like five seconds flat while Tal did the same, unfolded the scooter after pulling it out of his shitty old backpack, grabbed Tal and just took off. It was scary, sure, but he’d fantasized about doing this for years. That one perfect storm where all the grownups just happened to be off doing their own things, and some real villain happened to pop up causing trouble that just had to be responded to, so they get tagged in, him and Tal, on a real mission with real stakes and real opportunities to prove to mom that they were ready to do this, to be super heroes. And they were… Right?

F#$%ing hell! Someone really needed to teach Ken that there were controls on these things for a reason. Yeah, if you were strong enough you could just manually drag the things around and make them go the direction you wanted them to go, but shit, that’s not what they were designed to do, or at least not how they were meant to be used. He’d get her killed doing this stupid shit someday, but they were on the ground now, hard landing, but she didn’t think anything was broken, so it was a reasonable success by his standards. Of course, by on the ground she meant on the top floor, roof, of the North side parking lot, which was exactly not where the situation was going down. They wouldn’t be able to just walk into this place through the front door, it was covered with cops and they weren’t going to let these two unknowns walk into this place, no, they’d be waiting for Gravitron, Felitrix, Lodestar, someone with some brand recognition. Australis and Cassiopeia weren’t exactly household names, if anyone knew either of them it’d be Ken, and they’d probably work twice as hard to keep him out of this if they did know who he was. They just let Felitrix and Gravitron’s kid get himself killed walking into an active Class S situation and the media shitstorm they’d catch would put them in an early grave, probably literally, definitely get them forcibly, prematurely retired. She assumed they’d have to go through a sky walk, or just straight up through a wall or something to get inside, but she knew that they had to move, now.

“Come on,” she barked at her friend’s dumb ass, still pissed to shit about him wrecking her phone. Could have just left it somewhere, should have left it in his bag in the alley, no one was likely to just rifle through that shitty old thing looking for valuables. I mean, it was a total mess of a backpack, Ken just held onto it for what she had to assume were sentimental reasons. One floor, another, another, and there was the sky walk into the main building. The cops hadn’t pushed in through the lot yet, just locked down the entrances and exits to the lots and would wait on specialists to actually clear out the floors proper, if they even chose to before things were taken care of by the supers. They ran over, the sliding glass was shut down and the metal bars had slid out horizontally, no way through steel like that without some real power tools, or… Ken just punched through and ripped the thing’s hinges out of the cement, of course. “Show off,” but even though it was true, they were in. Two more doors would be in their way, but these ones wouldn’t be locked. When the lockdown protocol was lifted, and it had been lifted, the outside doors remained locked until outside security or police opened them up, but every door inside was automatically unlocked. The exact reasoning behind that had never made much sense to her, but Tal wasn’t going to question why Anne Scarborough set her shit up in strange ways, no doubt there was some asinine contingency that made this a necessary precaution against something or other.

Flying across the floor they could see that most of the people had already been evacuated, probably right out the front door. Tal assumed that was of the villains design, chances are they were too late and the villains had taken whatever it was they’d come for and were let out with the rest of the civvies. Didn’t matter, still had to be sure. The locker rooms to the lab check in station, and, oh, oh God, oh shit, oh God. Ken had stopped in front of her, she’d nearly ran into him before side stepping just in time to see the awful, everywhere. Blood, sticky, wet, warm, everywhere blood. This place was just… And the smell. Ken was shaking, really shaking. She wanted to tell him to stop, to move, but she couldn’t make herself speak. This was just… Ken turned, finally, and went hurriedly to a trash can, just started puking into the thing. Didn’t even seem all that gross considering what they were looking at. There were bodies just hanging from the balcony, blaster rifles slung over their lifeless forms, security guards on the floor in front of them, brains showing and just limply, lifelessly looking up at her. She thought she could tell that some other people had come in, and you’d think she’d jump in shock, or turn to fight them, or run or something, do anything, but she just stood there, looking back and forth between the dead guy on the floor looking back up at her, and the bodies hanging off of the balcony, squishing the blood and mess under her shoes whenever she turned to look between the two.

Someone was talking, but she wasn’t paying much attention. She could feel Ken and maybe someone else nearby, she thought absently that he must have stopped puking and was saying something, but not to her. No, he was talking to the other voice, the new one, wasn’t yelling or anything, just asking a question, like how’s the weather or something. Tal, with a last, long look into the eye of the dead guy on the floor that probably only lasted a few seconds but felt like hours, looked up, back to the balcony where the Ken voice seemed to be speaking towards. There was a girl up there, just sitting on the balcony, all in blue. Seemed strange, all that blue surrounded by all that sick, sticky red. The color was too bright somehow, too strange, alien. Just shouldn’t be… Here. Not like this. The girl was pretty, blonde and brilliant blue, not a drop of red on her, somehow. It was all over everything else. She was saying something to Ken, sounded real casual, too, like, “oh, it’s a tad chilly, could stand a warm day for once,” and Ken was talking again, louder this time, “a warm day? In Halcyon City, in November?” then she was laughing, politely, hand over her mouth even. He wasn’t, though. All at once the sound came back to her, like her ear drums had popped, and Ken was yelling. “What’s f#$%ing wrong with you!? These are people!” she shrugged, that girl on the balcony. Her scarf was flowing back, like it was in the wind or something, and little neon blue butterflies were floating off of it. Almost... Pretty.

Wow, that was like something out of a dream. Here in all this blood and death and chaos, and this beautiful woman drops in from out of the sky and introduces herself with a Guardian code? Couldn’t have shown up at a better time either, him and Tal could use all the backup they could get, and she really seemed like she knew what she was doing. Warbird, Ken had heard of her. She was Nucleus’s sister, right? They’d never met, Nucleus wasn’t known to be hugely social with the rest of the Guardians, in or out of costume, and unlike him and the other young supers the relationship wasn’t really the same. His parents, Andrea’s dad, and Alex’s mom were friends, and well, old. They raised these kids together, you know? Shit, he’d been going on family vacations with the Hathaways, and Alex had been going on family vacations with the Scarborough-Poole’s since before he could remember. Nucleus had never been in a situation like that, certainly not with them anyway. She was a part of the team, of course, but she must’ve been a decade or two younger than his parents, and her sister was younger than her, she was more like a side kick to her then a kid, and she hadn’t exactly raised her. Clearly, though, she had trained her, that was an awesome entrance, way cooler than his lame ass wander into a fight and start throwing up in the closest trash can or Tal’s stand around dazed and confused act. She’d actually distracted him from the death all around him, assuaged his fears for a moment, but only for a moment.

This was seriously a nightmare. I mean, maybe Warbird had experience in situations like this, but him and Tal sure as shit didn’t. He’d never seen a dead body. Tal had seen some weird shit in her Sanctuary, he had no doubt, her experience must have been a lot different than his after all, but she looked just as lost right now as he knew he must. He was basically just going through the motions before Warbird showed up, like he wasn’t really piloting his own body, some other person was the one talking to the blue bitch, and was just using his body to do it for the convenience of his already happening to be here. He couldn’t even remember what he’d said to her, for all he knew he asked about the weather or something, but he could remember her laughing, and covering her mouth while she did it, like this was some ballroom dance and they were discussing how the host had put on weight over the past few months. At least Tal had the decency not to say anything stupid. He didn’t know how to acknowledge Warbird, and still didn’t feel all that in control of his own bodily functions, but at least he didn’t think he was going to throw up again, so he nodded to the newest addition to their silly little team and turned back to the girl in blue. She was still just sitting up there, didn’t seem very interested in doing anything about them or pressing the advantage of their stupor and obvious lack of experience in dealing with anything even close to whatever the hell this was.

Him and Tal were in the main room, now, Warbird would be following them shortly if she wasn’t already in here, and unlike the tight little hallway where his dexterous newfound acquaintance had gracefully appeared from the air ducts, this room had high ceilings, good for flyers which him, Tal, and unless she had some awesome jetpack hidden away or something Warbird were not and, given the blue bitch’s position thirty or so feet up on the balcony she almost certainly must be, and on floor level an open set of double doors leading to a stairway. Couldn’t tell what it was for, but he did know enough to know that there was a reason for it to be there, and that it must be what the blue bitch was here guarding. Probably the lab, and if it is the lab, there was still a chance to get these bastards before they got away. He realized it then, they hadn’t been too late, the villains hadn’t just walked out the front door with the rest of the civvies, they were still down there, and if you had to go through this kind of security to get to this point, there weren’t going to be fire exits down there. They had to come back up through this room, it’s why she was here, they weren’t late, they were just in time. Just had to take her before the rest of her team showed up, it was three on one, they had the advantage, at least theoretically, and with any luck maybe they’d get some more happenstance backup. If she’d heard the report, other costumes must have as well.

Hey, you bitch went through Ken’s mind, and as he opened his mouth to espouse the same to the woman in blue, he felt his feet give out from under him. It didn’t seem quite right, his center of balance falling away like that, all of a sudden and without any real warning or apparent stimuli. Nothing had impacted him hard enough to send someone like him flailing, he was strong enough to stop a truck at thirty miles per hour, and as far as he could tell no one had even touched him. Yet here he was, scrambling to find solid ground under his feet, and failing. He realized just as he saw Tal floating next to him that it wasn’t him who had been knocked off balance, wasn’t him falling, or her floating. Oh shit! in one, fluid and altogether unsettling motion his perception flipped from that of Tal floating next to him to her, and to the best of his understanding himself, falling, fast, toward the ceiling, headfirst. F#$%, he couldn’t fly, and neither could Tal or Warbird; the ceiling, or floor maybe, was a few stories up from the ground level, or, was it now the roof? Didn’t matter, it was a long way down, and there was no way Tal could fall that far without seriously getting hurt. Pushing aside a dead body with only a moment of nausea, he felt himself cutting through the air towards his falling companion, and grabbed hold of her, before scanning for Warbird. He just might have enough time to catch her too, if he could find her through the falling blood, bodies and random debris.

“What a bitch!” Tal had jumped half out of her skin when this asshole who called herself Warbird, ‘Guardian Code beta zero nine,’ like she was some hotshot badass or something and not just a glorified sidekick, fell from out the f#$%ing air ducts and just landed next to them with some silly ass flourish. She’d heard of her, was that lame parasite attached to Nucleus if she remembered correctly, and clearly she didn’t have half of the tact of her mentor. Couldn’t she see that they were standing on a floor surrounded by dead f#$%ing bodies? This place was a living nightmare and she’s acting like they’re, what, in a video game or some shit? ‘D-d-d-Double Points! Epic flourish!,’ what a f#$%ing c#$%. She was either seriously stupid, a literal f#$%ing sociopath, or just not paying attention to her surroundings one bit. This wasn’t some, “oh, there’s a fight about to go down? I’ll join in, and make a killer entrance in the process,” kinda moment, she could have gotten herself killed! She could have made her or Ken kill her, the f#$%ing lunatic. Just what they needed, another nut job to contend with; what, it wasn’t bad enough that they were about to face down a girl who casually killed, like, seven human beings just a minute ago, and was now f#$%ing content to just sit up there on her little perch disinterestedly watching the silly ass kids make their fancy little entrances? They were all in serious danger, right now, along with civvies and she’s doing fancy flips!? If they got out of this, she was seriously going to kill this Warbird bitch someday.

Tal stepped precariously over the bodies of the dead men on the floor, forcing herself not to take a last, long look into the one, cold, dead eye remaining to the one closest to her, from out of the hall and into the main room, proper. Whether or not this, ‘Warbird,’ bitch had followed her out of the hall she couldn’t say, and didn’t care. F#$% her, this bitch in blue was the important one to pay attention to now, not some wannabe who thought it was cool to scare the shit out of the good guys while they were trying to do their f#$%ing jobs. The hallway with the checkpoint behind her, she stood in a room with a high arched ceiling, and, about fifty feet away and directly below the balcony, open doors leading to a stairway, clearly the entrance to the tunnel leading to the main lab. Seemed like a lot of work to get down there, probably even had those little golf cart things or perhaps a tram down there to get from one end to the other, and with the blue bitch still sitting around she knew the rest of the villains must still be down there, looking for whatever it was they had come for, otherwise why post a guard at the entrance? All the bodies had been armed, so she assumed the scientists and research personnel were still down there, too, or at least the ones who hadn’t been lucky enough to have evacuated by now. They weren’t too late, they could still save those people, could still get justice for the ones that this monster in blue had killed.

Tal decided right then and there that whatever happened, even if she had to accept for the moment the assistance of this totally inept asshole tag along, they were not going to let the bitch in blue leave this building without wearing cold steel bracelets or a person sized canvass zippered sack, and though she didn’t like the thought of killing much, she was almost hoping for the latter, those were people… Speaking of the blue lady, she was still super creepy. The butterflies kept floating off from her scarf in their macabre dance of life and non-life, here and then gone, and the girl in blue kept her seat on the balcony overlooking the blood stained floor, seemingly motionless, breathless. If the little group assembled before her impressed her all that much, it didn’t show. Even the sudden arrival of the, ‘lady,’ in the jumpsuit from the air ducts didn’t so much as illicit a blink from her, like she was watching ants in one of those glass colonies go about their regular day to day, boring old tasks and duties rather than looking at a group of super powered opponents. Finally, after their introductions to one another were said and done, and at least her and Ken were in the main room staring her down, she blew absently at the bang of hair covering her eye, revealing the insectoid wings contained within the socket as opposed to the more typical orb of complex ocular tissue, eerily bringing the wings sticking out from the sockets together as she blinked at the breath, like the creepiest false lashes ever devised. What a super duper gross subconscious tick.

Ken started to say something, and then the world turned upside down. Not like, something surprising happened, the f#$%ing gravity in the room changed course, and Tal found herself falling, towards the ceiling. Oh, shit, not only could she not fly, but she sure as shit couldn’t break her fall without harming herself at a distance like this, it was probably forty feet to the ceiling, or, floor she supposed. Blood spattered across her face, and for a fleeting moment she thought that she’d been hurt, that Ken had been hurt, that hopefully Warbird had been hurt instead of either of them, until she realized that it had come from her friend the dark haired, one eyed dead guy, and she fought back the urge to throw up while falling headfirst toward the roof. She wondered if this was what people who jumped off buildings must feel like right before the end, she’d jumped from cliffs into the water half a hundred times but she had always known that it wouldn’t kill her. She thought that she wouldn’t, couldn’t die this way, that she had to stop this, that she couldn’t stop this, and then the dead guy was floating away from her, and someone smashed into her. Ken, he had her, and then they were turning, sharp, fast, all of this had occurred in a second tops, he couldn’t fly, he’d take the blow for her, he could take it. That girl was still just sitting on her balcony, upside down, seemingly unaffected by the gravity whatsoever, just watching how things unfolded for those foolish little kids who thought they could face a real super villain.

Ken didn’t move after her, Warbird, didn’t even try to reach her once he caught sight of her through the falling debris, refuse and once people forming a cloud of junk around the pair as they tumbled through the air towards the ceiling. She was too far away, and in the opposite direction than gravity was leading him, and besides, she didn’t need his help, or anyone else’s, not for this. She was well on her way to ending this quickly, the bitch in blue didn’t even see her coming, and most of these reality benders weren’t known for being tough enough to just shrug off a blow like the one she had to look forward to in a second. He’d really have to get a grappling gun one of these days. At least, if he wasn’t going to get flight down any time soon, it’d certainly be nice not to have to, “improvise,” in these situations by using his own body as a fleshy shield. He could take the hit, of course, had the physical toughness to not just die or severely rupture tendons, organs and muscle tissue from the impact. If he was lucky and had the correct angle in the fall Tal would lend her weight to his crash, relieving her of the worst of the messy physics and he’d take the blow for the both of them, she sure as shit couldn’t take something like this without sustaining massive, irreparable damage, and they both knew it. Maybe if they’d been trained better, had done something like this in the holoroom or something, he’d be more confident in his angle and in her survival.

Thwack!! Clang, buzz, “errgh,”. It hadn’t been pretty, but with a quick glance at the girl in his arms, he knew he’d done it, she was okay, and he was gonna be sore in the morning, but unlike any normal human his limbs hadn’t been liquefied by the sudden, hard impact. Wasn’t every day he took a forty foot fall, and truth be told he’d rather not have to repeat the experience any time soon, but luckily for him he was more than capable of taking a hard hit without turning into a spout of blood and gooey bits. He’d even landed on his feet, which was way cooler than landing on his back like a total scrub, and besides the falling body that had whacked him upside the head leaving a trail of sticky, wet, red down his face before impacting the ground spraying his legs and lower torso region with a thicker concoction of the gory awful substance that makes people tick, Ken and Tal seemed to be perfectly fine. Fighting back the urge to throw up once again, he cast a glance in Warbird’s direction just in time to catch the aftereffects of the human body moving at speed and impacting a neck with a sharp kick from a boot heel, hard enough to send the bitch in blue facing the wrong direction then she seemingly should be given the angle of her body. Failing to keep his terror and disgust bottled inside, he unceremoniously half set down, half dropped Tal before doubling over in the opposite direction, the image of Warbird sending that woman’s head spinning, neck snapping burned into his mind’s eye.

He felt weightless, and simultaneously heavy, under pressure, the world around him hazy and confused as he heaved. This was just a nightmare. This badass angel in a combat suit and geared out to the teeth falls in from the sky in a world of death and chaos, and just as quickly casually kills her target in a second flat. Could he accept what he had just seen? A computer would, it’s input all that weighed on its memory, devoid of consideration for the ramifications and toll of what had just been witnessed. Ken, of course, was not a machine, and this had been cold, calculated, aimed and timed with a jarring, inhuman precision. Is this what being a super hero means? Watching people die, potential allies kill those villains that kill others, and somehow having to sift through the particular moments, seconds, decisions which begat yet more decisions, in some vain attempt to get some kind of grasp of who is the good guy, and who the bad? Now he’d seen a dead body, several as it were, and watched someone he considered to be a hero kill someone he considered to be a villain, all in the same shockingly small window of time. Had it even been a whole minute? Felt like a world away, a lifetime here and then gone and passed, but he knew, that rational part of his mind still whirring on as though this were all just normal old shit that he dealt with all the time, that it couldn’t have been any more than a few seconds since he entered the lobby. Was Warbird a hero? Some anti-hero? A villain?

Was she some more easily quantifiable, somewhere in between human being who had complex morals and codes of ethics who was likely experiencing her own wave of colors and emotions wash over her at her own actions this day, this moment, just as he was subject to the press of conscience and the whirring of the lizard brain in opposition to the emotional bastion that supposedly made us unique to the beasts and monsters of the world? Ken couldn’t say, everything was too fogged and overwhelmingly blue, the kind of deep, dark shade of midnight that elicits fear of the dark in those who haven’t been exposed to the chilling bleakness that reality holds in those little turns, little moments that shape lifetimes. He was no exception, and found himself simply floating for a moment, capable neither of speech or breath in the face of the obscure, alien blues obfuscating his vision like a cloak or death shroud tossed haphazardly over his face. Something was screaming in the back of his mind, but its message wasn’t coming in clear, overwhelmed by the emotions and coldness of the twilight hues. Wait. He found himself floating, cold, wet, incapable of breath or speech, even his sick seemed to be floating beside him, and this wasn’t just in his mind. Panic overtook him as he suddenly forgot all about the shock of the scene he had just witnessed, and realized that he was literally, not figuratively floating in something cold, wet, and deep, dark blue. Oh shit!! This was water, salty, near freezing sea, and it was all around him, burying him alive in it’s cold embrace. I can’t swim!!!

”Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!!” Tal curled up to Ken as much as possible, as close as she could, given the circumstances. All notions of physics, proper form and procedure, yeah, all out the window in an instant. Falling toward certain death had a habit of causing convention and reason to flee post-haste, and just this moment she didn’t feel much like any amount of training would have prepared her for this, then again maybe some holo time wouldn’t have hurt. She wanted desperately to close her eyes, but found that she couldn’t look away from the bitch in blue, their eyes locked as she coyly smiled at her f#$%ing prey, watching the amateur squirm under her effortless assault. That bitch was enjoying this, this wasn’t just something she felt like she needed to do for whatever lame ass reasons villains cause the trouble for everyone that they do, no, this was about some sicko satisfaction at watching people try to stop her, and fail. She wanted to rip this bitch in half, would even open up on her with those powers she knew would draw the attention of her family’s old foes, the ones that would one day chain her to a throne in a palace under the sea, her sanctuary, her chair, out of an old grudge toward her supposed ancestor long since dead. Even so, she’d gladly have invited their gaze to see this bitch burn, she had never wanted to see someone dead so much in her life as this living piece of semi-human garbage who wanted to splatter her brains, Ken’s brains on the f#$%ing floor, well, ceiling of this lobby.

She saw her then, that asshole who scared her half to death a couple seconds ago, Warbird, flying toward the bitch in blue. How is she doing that? Wait, was that a grappling hook? She was on course to knock the shit out of the bitch, moving faster than seemed at all reasonable given the fact that she wasn’t a flier and was being propelled entirely through use of a tiny little grappling gun and her own presumably totally within the normal spectrum of typical human level of physical strength, and here her and the bitch and blue were, just locking eyes with one another, her pain and fear feeding this bitch’s little ego trip. The woman in blue wouldn’t know what hit her. It was the first time she felt like she could grow to like this bitch, Warbird, knock her f#$%ing head off, girl. The timing, the angle, the speed, it was all just perfect! She’d clock her no question, she was gonna land a little high, but Tal had no doubt she would correct herself before impact and just send the blue bitch flying, or crashing to the ground. Either way, it was gonna hurt, which she couldn’t say she regretted her one bit, and she’d probably follow up with enough force to knock her out, or at least get her to stop fighting back before cuffing her or whatever it was she planned to do before handing her over to the authorities, before they finished up the job. Then they could be the heroes, save the day, and finally stop having to ask Ken’s mommy for permission to do baller super hero stuff.

THUD, SPLAT, CLANG!! Holy shit!! Am I alive? I am alive! Oh, Ken, I always had confidence in you. The thought was almost true, too. She’d thought, known that he could take the hit, at first, before the whole falling thing took away her reason and replaced it momentarily with crippling fear of imminent death by squishing off the floor. Plus, Warbird was just about to, --, Oh… Oh God, even from this distance anyone looking could see that the bitch in blue was facing the wrong way after meeting up, hard, with her face and Warbird’s boot, at speed, and with incredible accuracy. Tal would’ve wondered how she’d managed to land the hit, if she wasn’t overwhelmed with the disgust of what she had just witnessed. She’d wanted to tear the bitch in blue in half, sure, but she wouldn’t have actually killed her, not like that, not when she didn’t even have a second to react, and could have been disabled rather than just… Oh, God. That was cold blooded, she wasn’t even looking ‘till that last moment, she was looking at me! Why’d you need to do that!?!? She wanted to scream, to cry, to throw up, but mostly she just couldn’t understand why Warbird had done that. That wasn’t an accident, that blow was so well placed, computer precise, like something a robot ninja would do, that was planned to happen, meant to happen, had to be. We’re heroes, we don’t do things like that, dying in a proper fight where one side won’t give up and shit just happens is one thing, but that was just killing, cold, calculated, brutally efficient.

Tal felt cold, sick, wet, and altogether disillusioned with what she had just seen. She reached out to pull Ken closer, to take some comfort in him, her oldest and closest confidant, but found herself set down, hard, instead. Ken was doubled over behind her, throwing up again. She didn’t blame him, even if she was pissed that he was more concerned with being human and understandably disturbed by the events of the past few moments to care about her and what she needed, well, wanted from him by way of human contact. She moved to stand, to get up and get away from the bodies around her, to get somewhere else, anywhere where everything wasn’t quickly shattering apart, and taking her faith in humanity along with it, but found that she couldn’t. She could move, though she had a pain in her ankle that told her something was likely wrong and that she was probably in need of medical attention, but that wasn’t the problem. It was less that she couldn’t move, and more that she couldn’t stand, not in any proper sense of the term, anyway. As she moved she seemed to be traveling in one too many dimensions, as though floating. Well, not as though floating she realized, as she grabbed at her throat in disbelief. She found that she was floating, literally, and the chill she had felt upon seeing Warbird kill the bitch in blue, the wetness, it wasn’t exactly all in her head, an emotional response. Tastes… Salty, and it was salty. Sea water? Why was sea water everywhere? “Blub, blub, blub, blub!!” Ken can’t swim, need shelter, air, need… Sanctuary.