Welcome to Architects! I hope you old readers have been looking forward to this. If you're a new reader, it is not technically necessary to read all of the previous story, Crucible. That doesn't mean you shouldn't, but Architects is a semi stand-alone so you can get away with it.
As I have previously stated, this is something a world-building story. It starts to flesh out some of the elements introduced in Crucible's second half and helps to lay the foundation for many of the upcoming stories. Since it focuses on the Metropolis PD Special Crimes Unit, Superman is more of a guest character than a main. Architects is me turning the spotlight on the characters who might tend to get a little passed over in the Superman-centric stories.
Reviews and comments are wildly encouraged. I can't stress this enough. If you like the story, say something. If you have a question, ask it. I will respond. No one's time is getting wasted here. Reviews make the world go 'round and honestly, they keep me motivated to write. plz review i just hit writer's block on flash story. i think i'm in the doldrums chapters cuz they are kicking my ass big time. it's been a really unproductive month
Shatterpoint: Architects
Chapter One: Making Do
The Metropolis P.D. Special Crimes Unit handled "the weird stuff". Anything that came down the pipe tagged Code Veitch, which meant "So weird I won't pretend that I know how to describe it". According to their manifesto, Code Veitch meant anything that was alien, supernatural, or super-human. A special crimes unit was specifically tasked with bringing the rogue elements of those groups under control.
The thing was, any and all Special Crimes Units across the United States had been police-level extensions of the Department of Extranormal Operations, as to avoid any legal SNAFUs regarding jurisdiction. When the manifesto had been written, it was the early sixties, not too long before Jay Garrick the Flash had faced off against his long-time nemesis for the very first time. Back when meta-powers and superheroes were all over the news. When the Agency had overseen the likes of the DEO and its sister organization, the Department of Metahuman Affairs. Back when there existed superhero teams like the Freedom Fighters and Shadowpact and Infinity Inc. Back when death lasers and doomsday devices were built with such frequency that people shrugged instead of panicked, and villians spent so long monologuing their evil plans they barely noticed when the hero dismantled the doomsday machine and summoned the police.
Before a revolution had swept across the coastal and mountain states, bringing a swift end to the Age of Superheroes and the wide acceptance of meta-powers.
Many special crime units had been disbanded with the dissolution of the DEO, but the Metropolis branch had been absorbed into the general police force. A precautionary, just-in-case measure.
Just in case metahumans made a resurgence and were itching for payback.
Four months ago, the entirety of the SCU (just eleven people at the time) would have giggled manically at the idea that metahumans would appear in their city. This was Metropolis and Metropolis was normal.
They weren't Central or Keystone City, both of which had been subjected to a great amount of bizarreness over the four decades during which the Flash had operated as one of the most prominent heroes of the late twentieth century. Super-speedy speedsters had only been one part of the long history of the Gem Cities' metahumans. On that note, Keystone City had literally vanished off the face of the planet for a few days only to be discovered behind some kind of forcefield that had kept it out of sync with the rest of reality (the Flash looked back on those days with some embarassment, because even despite the shock-factor, the press had still had a field-day with how the Flash had managed to misplace his entire home city).
They were not like Star City, which had taken a beating from the Scare back in the day and had recently begun to experience a growth in drug trafficking. The scuttlebutt was that the Chinese Triad had set up shop there and the rumors coming down the pipeline was that the S.C.P.D. was slow to react to this sort of very organized, underground crime.
And if there was any city that was out of sync with the rest of the world, it was Gotham. Metropolis's sister city might as well have been on another planet altogether for how disconnected it was. Anyone who visited came away saying that Gotham seemed to exist in a world all its own.
The Met P.D. had never had a true, insidious problem with organized crime. Mob-buster policeman Captain Ron Harper from the seventies had practically re-written the handbook on dealing with the mob and the procedures continued to be followed to this day. As such, mafia-based crimes had a hard time finding root in a city like Metropolis. It wasn't the fertile soil it needed to be for them to thrive.
Very recently, the Met P.D. had stopped a massive drug trafficking operation and in the process of doing so, they had ripped out the very last of the organized mob crime. The Gigante family had come out by the roots with the arrest of its matriarch, Sofia Gigante. The ensuing collapse of the mob network had happened in stages; first with the lieutenants attempting to flee for safer harbors before they could be arrested. Then the foot-soldiers catching wind of the closing dragnet just a few seconds too late. And then the bottom-feeders trying to scuttle into their bolt-holes, often to no avail.
Two of the biggest problems to the city's infrastructure had been handily dealt with in one smashing blow and everything else that had depended on the mob's generous patronage would come apart on its own. Maybe it would need a little prodding here and there, but it was no longer had the potential to become the problem it might have been otherwise.
Since its 1989 absorption into the greater police department, the SCU had only rarely handled the strange and unusual, for there had always been very little of that around the city. Metropolis had produced a significant number of superheroes in its superhero heyday, but none of them had ever come to fight crime there. No need to. Metropolis was just too normal for that sort of thing.
Three months ago, however, at the end of November, the SCU had been bitch-slapped broadside with proof to the contrary.
Between the first appearance of Superman and the return of the hero Guardian, and giant fire-breathing dogs from hell-like places, it was clear that Metropolis was suddenly no longer immune to meta-powered weirdness. It was like havoc and hell had begun spilling over the retaining wall, for not a full week of December passed before another metahuman with a penchant for breaking things had decided to test out his powers on the roads and skyscrapers.
If Officer First Grade Colletta "Etta" Kanigher had had any idea what kind of disasters were coming in the near-future and the distant one, she might called in sick and stayed in bed.
But she didn't know what was coming, so she had rolled out of bed all the same to shower and dress and find something palatable to eat for breakfast.
For a young lady as bubbly and bright as Colletta, full of pep and vim and joie de vivre, bursting with pluck and grit and gumption, the few people who saw her outside of her standard cop-wear seemed stunned that she trended towards darker colors. They had come to expect bright, bold, contrasting colors from her, to suit her personality and general outlook on life. Instead, they found her in combinations of blue, gray, white, and black.
Being part of the SCU and the demanding nature of the job meant she was permitted to go plainclothes (the uniform was only for particular occasions). It was just that there was still something of a dress-code to adhere to. Really, it was more of a color-code. The dark colors were considered more professional and Colletta had gotten so used to seeing herself in them that she wasn't much in the mind to wear other colors.
It made dressing in the mornings that much easier.
Her room-mate Patricia was up and about by the time Colletta came into the main living areas, eating a breakfast of Greek yogurt and something that crunched like nuts. The two room-mates grunted a 'good morning' at each other as Colletta passed on her way into the kitchen. They weren't close, barely friends. They had met through mutuals during the apartment-hunting process, but hadn't exactly gotten along swimmingly. Mostly, they stayed out of each other's hair and for the most part, didn't see much of each other.
Colletta opened the pantry and noticed a distinct lack of palatable content. There were bagels, yeah, but sesame seed bagels. Urg. Patricia bought them specifically because she knew Colletta hated them. Some sort of healthy grain cereal that boasted real flax seeds. More urg. The fridge yielded even more food stuff that the cop was not in the mind to eat. There was more of that Greek yogurt, a lot of packaged fruit, but no eggs, no milk, not even lunch meat.
"Patricia, can you stop shopping only for yourself?" Colletta wondered, slapping the fridge door shut. "There's nothing to eat in here."
"Yes, there is. There's plenty." Patricia said a touch defensively. She could all but smell the upcoming argument.
"Not for me. I'm not the kale-munching veggie-saurus in this apartment. I need my protein or I'm a dead little cop on the road-side." Colletta argued, instead going back to the pantry for the bottled water they kept on the bottom shelf. Seemed like she would be eating out for breakfast again. "Look, I know you don't eat meat, but I do. And since you insist on doing the shopping, would it kill you to... I dunno, buy some chicken breast or ground beef for me? Hell, cheese and eggs would be a god-send."
"You'd be much healthier on a vegetarian diet." Patricia said primly, a fact she had been extolling ever since she had cut meat and animal by-products out of her diet three years ago.
"I'd be much deader on a vegetarian diet." Colletta muttered, rolling her eyes.
One could live healthy on a vegetarian diet, but Colletta didn't think she could get away with it over the long-term before she went full-zombie on a pack of bacon. Not with her daily activity level these days; running hare-mad across the city to chase down leads on meta-humans and other such weird stuff. She needed that muscle-repairing protein and the energy it provided, and as much as she liked fruits and nuts, she had found they didn't have the same effect.
But try and raise that argument with Patricia and all Colletta ever got out of it was a haughty expression and a short lecture about inhumane farming practices. It was always short because Colletta never stuck around to hear the full thing.
Patricia claimed that she was definitely healthier and had more energy, but there didn't appear to have been any significant change in her health. She was as hale as a twenty-five year old yoga rat could be.
"Etta--" Patricia started with the tone that suggested she was about to begin the very lecture in question.
"For the last time, don't. Don't give me the lecture about where my eggs come from." Colletta said firmly, holding up a hand. "Veganism is not for everyone, Patrish. I'm asking you as a decent human being to at least start buying eggs and cheese for me because I can barely make it to the store on a good day, let alone the bad. You wanna talk healthy eating? Then stop making my only option for breakfast fast food egg muffins."
"There's bagels."
"Sesame seed bagels. Which I don't like, and you know it."
"Fruit and yogurt."
"I'm a goddamn cop. I need something more substantial and lasting than that if I'm gonna make it to lunch." Colletta grabbed a water bottle out of the package and raised her hands in apparent defeat. "Y'know what, I'm not gonna make an argument out of this 'cause you never listen and I don't have the patience or the time. Gotta jet. Bye."
Patricia made a spluttering noise of outrage, like she had really really wanted to get that lecture in as if she thought it would stick this time. Colletta was practically running for the door, scooping up her bag and her coat along the way. A quick shake of the pockets assured her that her keys were still in there and she was through the door before she had even gotten the coat over her shoulders.
She knew already that she was going to have to try and find some time in her schedule to do grocery shopping for herself. Patricia was good about keeping them stocked in hygenic essentials, but when it came to food and buying meat and associated by-products, she would sooner throw up in the shopping cart than look at a carton of eggs.
She wouldn't even buy snack cakes.
Truly, Patricia was as stubborn as the earth's gravitational pull when it came to her veganism.
And that was saying something, considering that Colletta was associated with Lois Lane, Daily Planet reporter and near-death experiencer extraordinaire.
Outside the apartment building, it was starting to really feel like March, with the weather clearing up a little more every day and the sun was shining through the clouds with greater frequency. Colletta could practically smell spring in the air and she couldn't resist inhaling a deep breath before she set down the front walk to her car. There was a warmer breeze sweeping up from the south, turning snow into rain. The morning air was still nippy and it was definitely coat weather, but today was bright with sun and the promise of proper spring by the end of the month.
It was going to be a good day.
Hopefully.
Colletta was optimistic about the potential it had of being a good day. It was hard to judge anymore now that they were regularly dealing with the strange and unusual. Any day was now entirely capable of taking a sharp left turn.
Four months ago, Superman had appeared in the sky during what had had every appearance of the end of the world - or at least the end of the city. On what had happened two miles above Metropolis that day, the details were still a bit murky. It didn't sound like anyone had gotten the full story, even Lois who had been right smack in the middle of it. Her blog post on it had detailed what she knew, but it had been clear that she had gotten yanked into an existing situation that had previously nothing to do with her and everything to do with Superman.
The would-be hero had made subsequent appearances over the course of the month until the Big One had struck. It had come in the form of an attempted bio-terrorism attack involving strategically-located bombs and an alien super-virus in a plan that -- had it succeeded -- would have not just razed Metropolis to the ground, but the world too.
The Near-Apocaplypse of '06, they were calling it now. The full extent of the potential damage had been made known; a certain reporter hadn't been about to let it disappear. Metropolis was under some kind of investigation, Colletta knew, but she wasn't important enough to be told if it was the CDC or some other shady, nebulous, tangentially evil government organization.
Only one of the seventeen planted bombs had detonated, fortunately, and no one had been injured by the explosion. Unfortunately, the detonation had taken out the SCU building. In the grand scheme of things, it hadn't been the biggest loss the city could have suffered, but it had really shaken things up for the SCU. They had lost every last bit of physical evidence, forcing them to shelve then-active cases and call off a handful entirely. Being relegated to an under-sized, slightly mildew-y office that clearly hadn't been used in years for the duration of the construction project had not helped either.
Colletta wasn't sure where the fire-breathing ten foot tall hellhound had come from, but it had eaten one person, killed another, and had swallowed the entire case of alien super-virus because the damn thing had turned out to be a bomb itself. That was when Superman had swept in to the rescue, flying the ticking time bomb of a hellhound out to space so it could harmlessly explode somewhere past lunar orbit.
Had it not been for intrepid video footage, Colletta doubted that she would have believed the entire sequence of events. It was shit like that that just didn't happen around a place like Metropolis.
But here they were three months later and the weird shit was only just getting revved up.
Colletta lived on the West River Island, one of the most run-down areas of the city. Specifically, she lived in a neighborhood within spitting distance of S.T.A.R. Labs. The construction of the enormous lab complex had drawn external jobs to the area which had led to gentrification in the eastern-most neighborhoods of Cheswalk. The rest of West River was scheduled to undergo a mass renovation, with the bulldozing of the decrepit and abandoned buildings starting next month.
Despite the island's economic reality, the neighborhood was a far sight better than the rest of the West River. The only downside was the travel problems she had to put up with getting downtown.
The Vernon Bridge connected West River to St. Martin's Island. From there, she always turned to the north to take the Clinton Bridge up into Racine, followed the road along the riverfront, and then turned back south down the Howard Bridge. It was a roundabout path, but it wasn't worth dealing with the Schuster Bridge congestion every morning.
The good news was that the Bronze Bridge was starting to look like a reality again. If she squinted, she could just make out the inspection crew walking across the jutting dead end. There was much more substantial talk about finishing the project; people had taken to their internet platform of choice to once again rant about the congestion on the Schuster Bridge. Colletta had recently heard mumbles about another bridge project, this one to further connect St. Martin's Island to West River (though it probably meant taking out part of the S.T.A.R. Labs complex). It likely wouldn't happen until after the restoration was at the halfway point and the city had a better idea what the numbers looked like.
Colletta was well ahead of the morning rush hour by the time she hit Midtown and headed south, so she encountered no traffic snarls in between stopping for food and coffee. Since there were so few members of the Special Crimes Unit, they were perpetually on call and thus had no set hours. They arrived when they were called and left when they were dismissed, which was sometimes up to twenty-four hours later. Most days, Colletta just turned up at seven in the morning and settled in for the long haul. They were paid as though they were taking ten-hour shifts.
She left her car in the Met P.D. parking garage and hurried across the street to the main building. This was where the SCU had been re-located until the construction of the new building was completed. Specifically, they had been re-located down into the empty office space down on the basement level. They had been given two large rooms and one private office. Their commander, Lieutenant Maggie Sawyer, had gotten the office and they had refit the larger of the two rooms to serve as a bullpen while the smaller one became a conference room.
It wasn't an ideal arrangement. There was almost no natural light and the electric lights didn't seem to have been upgraded since the eighties. The rooms smelled faintly of mildew and damp despite the inspector's assurance that they were safe for human occupancy. The area had been used for storage for a long time, so while they weren't short desks and chairs and other sorts of office equipment, it was frankly obvious that this was where office equipment went to die. Everything had to be used gently, for it was all about as sturdy as a blade of grass.
Colletta liked to think that this had been no one's first choice, but who was she kidding. Despite the upswing in weird activity and their role in monitoring it, the SCU still got treated as something like a joke.
"Good morning!" Colletta half-bellowed as she strolled into the bullpen.
There was a tired murmur of greeting, not one punctuated by a voice louder than a mumble. No one else was quite the morning person she was and Colletta sometimes reveled in her ability to make hardened cops grumble into their coffee when she came through the door like a ray of sunshine.
She took a quick headcount on the way to her desk -- still a few heads short of the full count. She wasn't the last one here. Maggie had scheduled a meeting for this morning, though why she had set it for the abomidable hour of seven-thirty in the morning was anyone's guess.
It wasn't so much that Colletta was a morning person, but that she could be impossibly cheerful first thing out of bed regardless of the hour as long as she had some solid blocks of sleep behind her.
"Good morning, Steve-o." Colletta said, poking her sleepy cubicle buddy.
Steve grunted and lifted his hand slightly to peer at her with bleary eyes. Confusion crossed his face, like he thought something was different but couldn't pin down what. He blinked a few times and then--
"Etta, your hair!" he squawked in alarm, eyes flying open wider.
"What? What about it? Does it look bad?" Colletta asked, half-panicked. She had swapped the natural hair for box braids and they had taken all weekend to put in. If they were screwed up somehow--!
"No, it's fine!" Steve assured her, looking more awake now. "It's just... I think I'm gonna miss the poof."
"Oh yeah, I thought I'd change it up." Colletta chuckled, fingering a braid. "I wanted to go back to box braids for a while and I reached the requisite number of complaints anyways."
Maggie honestly didn't care what Colletta did with her hair as long as it was clean and cared for, but other white people had strong opinions about African-textured hair and thought of themselves as well-informed enough to tell Colletta what she oughta be doing with her locks.
"I didn't even realize it was so long." Steve commented, making a motion with one hand like he wanted to reach out and touch, but he controlled himself before he gave in to the impulse.
"I know, right?"
Worn natural, her hair barely reached down to her shoulders, but the braids went halfway down her back. It always startled even her how long her hair actually was and the braids still didn't let it fall to its full length.
Colletta was proud of her appearance. She had really great skin that was a nice, warm shade of brown and awesome dark green eyes and probably the straightest, whitest teeth anyone had ever seen and they regularly complimented her on her dental work. Which was funny in its own way, because Colletta herself was the opposite of straight and white.
Steve Trevor was the all-American pretty boy, with the straw-blonde hair and the cornflower blue eyes. He had been born in Oklahoma and raised in Philidelphia, giving him a street-level view of a fair-sized demographic. He had been through the Air Force long enough to leave as a sergeant and had been snapped up by government agencies within months of his honorable discharge.
Out of the fourteen members of the SCU, he was probably the only one with any prior experience on actively corraling law-breaking metahumans. He used to work for Bureau 39, and if you believed Lois Lane (which Colletta did), that meant he had essentially worked for the Department of Extranormal Operations. Bureau 39 had been a re-tasked version of the DEO.
However, its leader Agent Trask had been butt-fucking insane and he had fired Steve for telling the truth. As if she had gotten a wisp of premonition that he would make a wonderful addition to their crew, Maggie had literally turned around and hired Steve not two seconds later.
Colletta was still sure that the lieutenant had hired him just to watch the sputtering outrage turn Trask red from chin to scalp, but Steve did make a wonderful addition to their crew.
Further Superman-related events had caused Trask to be removed from his leadership position and court-martialed within an inch of his life. Bureau 39 had since been taken over by an Amanda Waller and re-tasked into something else, but they hadn't heard from the organization since.
"So how was your weekend?" Steve asked, sinking back down into his desk chair.
"Obnoxiously long and boring for having spent nine cumulative hours in a salon chair." Colletta replied, sitting down as well. "I'm also considering looking into new apartments."
"Room-mate getting on your nerves, huh?"
"Oh, more than usual. She's managed to forget that humans are omnivorous and a vegan diet doesn't work out for everyone. I can't even convince her to buy cheese anymore. So I'm thinking I should just fuck it all and look for another room-mate or another apartment."
"Ooh, me. I'll be your new room-mate." Steve waved his hand briefly, with only a bit of enthusiasm, too tired to muster up anything more. He wouldn't complain about a change in living quarters. He currently lived in a studio apartment that felt like a shoebox.
It wasn't the worst place he'd ever lived in. The dorms at basic training had been a hygenic nightmare and he'd spent five out of six years overseas at Air Force bases that seemed to have been cobbled together from plasterboard and plywood, when he wasn't sleeping out in the dirt. Employment at Bureau 39 had included employee housing, but the building had once been an old boarding house that still possessed most of the original drafts. Compared to those places, the new apartment was a five-star hotel.
Still, it was a tiny studio. It had been the easiest thing to get on short notice and it wasn't like he'd planned to live there for very long in the first place.
A whistle sounded from the door of the bullpen and the stout, rounded form of Detective Greg Pittarese stepped into sight. He had the body shape of a cannon ball and a smile like the Jolly Green Giant.
"I got donuts!" he announced, hefting the party-sized box above his head.
That was like ringing the dinner bell for a pack of wolves. Say whatever you wanted to about stereotypes, cops, and donuts, but the SCU adored every manner of donut regardless of its calorie content. They had strong opinions about frosting and sprinkles, pastry dough versus yeast, jelly-filled versus regular, and goddamn if Pittarese didn't have their preferences memorized. He even got them at a discount price, because the bakery he bought them from was owned by a distant cousin.
He was a wonderful man, as far as everyone in the SCU was concerned.
Maggie Sawyer arrived in the aftermath of the donut raid, feeling like she had just witnessed the tail end of a shark attack. The last of the raiders was swarming away as she side-stepped through the doorway behind the rotund detective.
"Good morning, Greg." she said, edging around him so she could dip a hand into the box.
"G'morning Lieutenant." Pittarese grinned, turning so she could reach easier. "Mostly just chocolate and glazed left, but if I remember correctly, that's what you like."
"Never hated 'em." Maggie said, plucking two donuts out of the box. She balanced them on the top of her coffee cup so she could have a hand free. "Is everyone here?"
Pittarese glanced into the box and counted what was left. "Yeah, I think so."
Maggie had no doubt that the detective could gauge attendance according to how many donuts were left, but she looked over the assembled individuals anyways. There was only fourteen of them, in total, so even when they were all moving around, it was easy to count up to twelve. She practically had their faces memorized (probably the only benefit to such a small group; they were a tight team).
She pursed her lips and whistled sharply, causing everyone to look up from their desks and the coffee. She waited until every eye was on her before she spoke.
"Conference room, five minutes."
They weren't bad, her team, Maggie thought with absent pride, as she made her way across the bullpen to her office. Each of them brought a different talent and skill-set to the table. Captain Jase brought coffee and motivation and unmatched administrative skills. Colletta was ninety percent of the pluck and gumption. Turpin and Detective Gordon had split bullheaded stubbornness between them, the latter with some fantastic detective skills. Officer Corey Mills filled their quota of recklessly overconfident. Detectives Marzan and Pittarese had the market on relentless, driving work ethic cornered. Lyle was full of unflagging optimism in addition to being their only techie and forensics expert. Sergeant Kesel was a pattern-spotter and Sergeant Escudero was a problem-solver. Steve had his prior experience in metahumans and Detective John Jones was a metahuman.
Maggie wasn't sure yet what James Harper would bring to the table -- he had only been with them a month now. But he had already proven his mettle three months ago, showing cool thinking in a particularly hot situation.
They had all kept their heads together during the terrorist attack and had done their best to fend off the exploding, fire-breathing hellhound despite their steep disadvantages. It did have to be acknowledged that if Superman hadn't shown up when he had, they probably all would have died, but that was beside the point.
The point was that the SCU was painfully under-staffed and there was only so much they could do with so few people. They needed at least thirty people to meet any sort of minimum standard. They had fourteen people and that count included herself. She wasn't sure how to start addressing that problem. People weren't exactly lining up at the door to submit their transfer applications to the SCU. Gordon had been simultaneously worn down and enticed by the prospect of bringing down Sofia Gigante and had concluded that the SCU would give him that opportunity (the SCU had been trying to seduce him over to their side for a while beforehand). Steve had already been in a position to look for a new job (Maggie had just spared him the agony of hunting around). And Harper -- well he was the only one who had submitted an application completely of his own volition.
Three new members in three months was highly unusual and even more unlikely to repeat itself. They had to make do with who was already on board.
But this was a good group of fourteen, Maggie was pleased to say.
Five minutes later, they were gathered in the conference room which was outfitted with an oval table and not enough chairs to go around. As was becoming her custom, Maggie forwent sitting down in favor of standing at the head of the table (it gave Captain Jase a chair to sit in; he wasn't exactly young anymore). It made her feel slightly more official, like she wasn't addressing her team from a room that was slowly and somewhat invisibly succumbing to dry rot, and smelled faintly like wet newspaper.
"Alright." Maggie let her clipboard clatter down onto the table-top alongside a thick manual that had been in storage long enough to turn yellow around the edges. "Two weeks."
It was Turpin who asked first: "Until what?"
"Moving day." the lieutenant said, grinning with obvious excitement. "That's the time-table they've given me. If all sticks to schedule, they'll be done with the new building in two weeks."
"Yes!"
"Whoo!"
"Finally!"
All those and more came from around the table, cheers and a smattering of applause along with some fist-bumping. The relief and excitement was all but palable in a few short seconds. Three months was a long time to spend in these less-than-ideal working conditions. It was a miracle that no one had developed a sinus condition yet. Giving the SCU a new building to operate out of had been made top priority, so the construction team had worked through the winter and around the clock regardless of weather and temperatures.
"I know, it's been a long enough wait." Maggie agreed, raising a hand for silence. "But stay focused. It's still two weeks until then and we're going to be up to our eyeballs in weird stuff.
"Speaking of eyeballs, there are reports of a new metahuman who can spontaneously grow eyes on any part of his body."
Someone whispered: "Ew."
"Ew." Maggie nodded. "It's squicking people out more than causing any harm. Unfortunately, these reports are largely unsubstantiated and need to be verified beyond hysterical Chirps. Suspected metahuman is named Todd Reith, twenty years old, and he lives at Nineteen Oh Four, Lodgeville Road. That's campus housing in Mount Royal. Who wants to take the plunge?"
No one said a word. They looked at each other like they expected everyone else to raise their hand and then Steve made an uncomfortable noise in the back of his throat.
"Officer Trevor, good of you to volunteer!" Maggie trilled happily, smiling a little too widely when he tried to sputter out a protest but subsided immediately. "You can take Mills with you."
Officer Mill's face dropped in horror.
"The other recent report is Candice Watts, she's five. Her mother Sandra contacted us directly. Apparently, her daughter is capable of achieving limited flight if she spins like a top with her arms out. That also needs to be verified. Who wants that one?"
"Ooh!" Sergeant Kesel immediately thrust her arm into the air.
"Excellent, thank you. They're expecting you by ten o'clock. I'll get you the address in a bit." Maggie informed her, writing both officers' names down so she had them on record. "This brings me to something I want to address. All the reports we've gotten so far are benign. Creepy, but benign. Most of the situations are little more than verification and monitoring. The question, ladies and gentlemen, that I pose to you is how are we going to handle the inevitable situation when someone decides to start using their unusual abilities in a way that causes harm. I'm not talking about casual property damage with that earth-shaker last December. I mean serial murderers who can do something like shoot spikes from every part of their body. A sort of Vlad the Impaler type with heavy emphasis on impale. Think about that. What the hell are we supposed to do about that?"
The answer seemed obvious, but only if you pretended that the hypothetical serial murderer couldn't shoot spikes from any part of his body. The obvious answer would be to deal with that hypothetical murderer the way you'd deal with any other murderer.
Except they really couldn't, could they.
Take away the weapons, cuff the hands, and lock the murderer in a concrete cell and the situation was dealt with. Safe and secure as long as someone on the outside didn't have aspirations to break their friend out.
But a murderer who could teleport? Walk through walls? Ones with super-strength or flight powers? Ones who had abilities beyond the norm? How were they supposed to contain a criminal who could turn as insubstantial as a whiff of fog? How could they even catch someone who could turn invisible or look like an entirely different person in the blink of an eye?
They were fortunate, so far, that those beginning to emerge with their powers were teenagers and young adults, with a bare handful of children. The timing was right. Twenty years after the Scare and the next generation was starting to mature. Many of them were more interested in trying to figure out how their powers worked at all than using them to commit crimes.
But Maggie Sawyer had a cop since she was twenty-two and her promotion to lieutenant hadn't come arbitrarily. Ten years split between Star City and here in Metropolis. She knew how the streets worked. Last December's earth-shaker would hardly be the last of his kind. Sooner or later, someone was going to get the bright idea to start seeing if they could walk through the wall of a bank vault.
The problem that the SCU was facing was two-fold. The first part (obviously) was that they had no idea what they were supposed to do with any law-breaking metahumans, provided they even caught them in the first place. The DEO had written procedures for arresting and detaining metahumans, and the Department of Metahuman Affairs had outlined the grounds for when an arrest should take place, if one needed to take place. But if these documents still existed in a written form, then it might take a court order and several months to get them out of storage and they couldn't wait that long.
At this point, Maggie strongly suspected they were going to have to make something up.
The second problem was even more pressing. They had no way of consistently monitoring these new metahumans. Finding regular old suspects was easy(ish) thanks to modern security tech, but some of these kids could do shit like turn invisible or fly or teleport through shadows and walk through walls, or hex any technology. Metahumans were far less likely to trip alarms or motion-activated cameras, which made them that much harder to track. It also felt like that because it had been nearly twenty years since meta-powers were a thing, people didn't truly recognize what they were seeing or convinced themselves otherwise. The human brain had a fantastic capacity for lying to itself.
Maggie canted an eyebrow at her team expectantly and they all looked around at each other, shifting until the chairs creaked. It hadn't been a rhetorical question; she had really been searching for an idea from any of them. If they had to make something up, then so be it. It just had to be functional.
Sergeant Escudero opened her mouth, but she was pre-empted by Maggie's phone beeping, alerting her to a text. The team shifted, knowing what usually came when the lieutenant's phone beeped like that.
"Hold that thought." Maggie instructed, tapping the screen and bringing the text up. It simply read 'Code Veitch. Urgent.' followed by an address. "Well, well, first Code Veitch of the day. Alright, write that thought down and put it on my desk." she told the sergeant. "Any of you, actually. Got a thought, put it on my desk. Harper!"
James Harper raised his head a little higher. "Yes ma'am?"
Maggie beckoned to him. "You're with me on this one. Time for you to cut your teeth on your first official investigation."
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