The Opposite of Carnage
"I fold," Vista said, throwing down the hand of cards she'd been holding.
"Good," Ashley said as she put down her own cards, "because we've got nothing."
"Oh, I had a pair!" Vista exclaimed in frustration. "It's not fair, your mask covers your whole face."
Ashley laughed. "You've got to know when to hold em... Know, when to fold em..." The assembled Wards, consisting of myself and the entire Arcadia division, all turned to stare at her. "What? A girl from New York can't like country music?"
"You're weird sometimes," Clockblocker said after a moment.
"Nuh-uh," Ashley replied, "this whole world is weird. There's only one kind of superhuman, no magic, stuff I take for granted never happened, it's five or six years ago, Splatoon hasn't come out yet, and Johnny Cash never did I Won't Back Down or Hurt."
I laughed. Being a Ward wasn't as bad as I thought. Dad had been acting a bt weird The rest of the team, other than Shadow Stalker who I hadn't seen much of, had all at least tried to be nice and had respected my privacy. The PRT's vocational program consisted of basically leaving halfway through the day and either hanging out at Wards HQ, at the PRT's monitor room on Monitor Duty, or shadowing a hero or PRT Agents on a patrol. If there was an emergency we might get sent out to help, but that was part and parcel of being a hero.
Well, Ashley and I had to talk to PR again
Now, the program hadn't been set up for Winslow, so I still had to do the work for the classes I was missing, but doing my homework in Wards HQ was preferable to sitting in class at that shithole. I dotted a few i's and crossed a few t's and was done. Then I switched from homework to another notebook and started working on the design of my new costume. PR had wanted to design it, but when I'd pointed out that I was the only one who could make spider-silk costumes and wasn't going to make a costume for myself that I didn't like, they relented. Well, they had some suggestions. 'Less edgy than the original costume,' was the primary one. Shadow stalker only got to keep her costume because she already had a rep to her name and she refused to be rebranded. I was thinking white, with purple or black accents and maybe ditching the mandibles on my mask, since they looked a lot creepier than I was intending. Also real armor panels instead of ones made of bugs. PR was going to present Ashley and I as a team, resulting from her attachment to me and our simultaneous joining(She was reluctantly considering the compromise name "Cuddlebug,") and had suggested some kind of shared image between us-especially when they'd found out that Mister Snuggles could change color and texture. Ashley had gotten really excited all of a sudden and suggested a spider-emblem. she'd made the dark blue part of her symbiont form a couple of different ones and we'd settled on a simple stylized one, a fat oval with eight bent legs, right over the sternum and just big enough to draw attention. I was gonna have to double up on chest layers and make sure to armor up my torso in case someone with a gun decided to take a shot at the obvious target.
I'd finished a rudimentary sketch of what I was thinking-it'd be a while before my spiders would get here, plenty of time to finalize the details-when I noticed my surroundings again.
"...sapiens superior are born with an extra gene that activates and enhances dormant mutations," Ashley was explaining in a tone of voice that said she was paraphrasing something from a textbook, "while mutates get superpowers from a mutation that happens after they're born. Like The Fantastic Four. They went up into space, got hit with Space Energy, and now they can stretch, turn invisible, light on fire, and be made of rocks. And then there are people who have powers because they're aliens or ancient gods and stuff."
"How can one gene give people superpowers?" Kid Win in his red and gold powered armor asked.
"Uhdunuh," Ashley said with a shrug. "How can a bump on the brain?"
"So, are you a mutant or a mutate?" Vista asked.
"Oh no," Ashley corrected. "I don't have powers without Mister Snuggles. Wait. Mister Snuggles says I have extra chemicals in my blood, so maybe? I don't know. Anyway, superhumans are like, normal here, right? They're just a thing?" Ashey sounded confused. "It's not like that where I'm from. They've been around for like ever, but they're still a big deal and there are people that don't like them. Especially mutants for some reason, but Mommy and Daddy never liked it when I asked about mutants and none of my history lessons covered them." That... I was starting to get suspicious and was wondering if her ending up in this universe wasn't for the best.
I noticed that Aegis was on the phone. "Alright." He hung up. "There's a robbery at Brockton Central," he said, "they suspect villain involvement and the Protectorate is a bit busy and they want us to handle it. Any takers?" Vista in her striped green skirt and breastplate, Clockblocker in solid white and clocks, knightly Gallant, Browbeat in blue diamonds and Kid Win all raised a hand or else answered in the affirmative. "Weaver? Snuggles? Not interested?"
"Is that such a good idea?" I asked, "we haven't been presented to the public yet, and I'm still using the loaner costume." Loose plastic green tights, slightly ill-fitting black chest and shoulder armor, and the soft soled shoes from my original costume did not a compelling image make.
"Oh, you'll be fine," he said reassuringly, "there's nothing wrong with an early bird appearance before your official debut, and if anybody asks just say it's a temp. Besides, with your power, you could bug the bank," oh good, my first pun, "and let us know if any hostages are okay."
Well, when he puts it that way... I stood up, and in the time it took me to walk to the door, Ashley had already flipped from her seat and landed at the end of the line. As we left, I noticed Galant making a call.
Cuddlebug, cuddlebug, she'll run up and give you a-don't get cute with the scene transitions, asshole.
(damn it wade)
Okay, turns out that plastic tights are really useful to have when it's raining. We'd arrived and were lined up in the street outside the front of the bank. Most of us were standing, but Aegis was in the air about five feet about the rest of us and Kid Win was on his hoverboard. Ashley was crouched down on all fours, like when she was climbing the walls or ceilings.
I did my thing, pulling on the bugs in the area, checking for how many were already in the bank. A couple o ants... a surprising number of spiders... I'd have to pull more from outside to get a clear picture, and that would take a minute.
"Guys," Ashley said all of a sudden. "Mister Snuggles says that he can sense that one or two of his others hosts are nearby."
"In the bank," Aegis asked?
"He doesn't know. He says that he doesn't have very good precision with that."
"I'm starting to get visual," I said. There are five people and what looks like some kind of anim-"
"Oh, what the fuck!?" came a voice from the far side of the street. We all turned just in time to see five figures, a muscle guy in bike leathers with a skull on his helmet, a waifish boy dressed like a fop, a blond in purple with a domino mask, a redhead in street clothes, a fur collar, and a plastic dog mask, and a middle school aged brunet in street clothes, no mask were all getting out of a van. "There is no way in hell you knew about this ahead of time and somebody else is robbing the bank." She said, suddenly changing tracks.
"Um," Ashley said, "there are a lot of squirrels around here."
Then the doors of the bank flew open, and what appeared to be a woman in a gas mask stepped out with a familiar brown-haired Teenager held in front of her.
"Panacea!" Gallant shouted. The healer, the girl who'd fixed my arm the other night, had a look of unmistakable terror on her face and was wearing a vest that appeared to have some kind of devices built into it, with a card in her hand.
"Read the card sweety," the gas-masked woman said in a distorted voice.
"Attention heroes of Brockton Bay," Panacea read off, "there are powerful bombs hidden all over the city. If Lung is not released from custody within twenty-four hours, please don't do this!"
"Stick to the script!"
"If Lung is not released within twenty-four hours, then they will be set off at random and the Genius Tinker Bakuda will wage War upon the Protectorate with the Azn Bad Boyz and her hired Mercenaries."
A handful of young Asian men dressed head to toe in the Bad Boyz colors walked out, as did a grown caucasian man with rich black hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He was dragging Lung's pet spider-woman behind her on a leash. She glared at me with six hateful eyes.
"Speaking of mercenaries," the woman who I presumed to be Bakuda said. She grunted, snapped, and then-
"Look out!" Ashley shouted before pushing me away. It was quick, but when I came back to my senses a young woman with brown hair, sharp claws at her finger-tips and a long, bushy tail was crouched where I'd been standing.
"You've just got to go jumping the gun, don't you," said a voice that was coming out from inside the bank and... Was that a duck? God damn, that was a duck man holding a machine gun.
"She gave the signal, didn't she?" half asked, half declared the squirrel woman.
"We," Ashley said after a moment of silence, "are screwed."