I:
Huh, thought Diane. So this is what it feels like to have a knife stuck in my head.
It hurt, of course. But her sense of pain didn't actually mean that anything was damaged. It was like the appendix in people who weren't freaks; vestigial, and more trouble than it was worth. Her brain consisted of nerve tissue gathered in nodes floating throughout the fluid inside her body, and the knife hadn't come close to any of them. So while the pain paralyzed her for a few moments, she knew that it would pass.
Looking up at the weirdo who'd stabbed her, Diane guessed that she'd started to realize something was wrong when the knife had gone in so easily. No matter how strong she was, there would have been some resistance as the knife ran into her skull. (Of course, Diane didn't have a skull, or any sort of skeleton, either. Exactly how she was able to stand and move like a human being had been just one of the oddities that brought joy to the petrified hearts of the metaphysiologists who'd studied her the first six years of her life.) There hadn't been any, and the lunatic was frowning as that realization came to her.
The pain having reached manageable levels, she decided to freak her attempted murderer out. "I'm sorry, but I don't think we've been introduced," she said through gritted teeth.
She tensed her right leg, making it take on the consistency of solid metal, and kicked upward. With a yelp, the woman shot up and rolled in mid-air to land on her feet a few feet back.
Diane sat up, and pulled the thick blade out of her forehead. Her flesh (or whatever it was) instantly rolled back over the gaping wound. "I'm Diane Mason. Who the fuck are you?"
"You couldn't do that before," the lunatic replied non-sequitively. "It's not fair."
"Fair? Did you say fair?" Diane had known some messed up people in the joint, but this took the cake.
"Hey, bitch!" Another voice yelled from the side. Reflexively, Diane turned to look in that direction even as the other bitch did so as well.
II:
As he roared past city limits, Knight gradually opened up the throttle on the bike until the dial was well into the red.
"Hasten, hasten, best of steeds," he murmured through clenched teeth.
III:
Wow. Now that was impressive. Impact- and puncture-resistant metas were nothing new, but she'd never seen anyone just take that kind of blow and be completely unaffected. If not for that, Tara might have been reluctant to try her next stunt, but this Diane person should be safe from the effects of friendly fire.
"Hey, bitch!" she yelled as she stood up. "You wanna know what's really not fair?"
"What's really not fair?" the crazy woman replied in the same intonation.
Well, she'd been hoping for a straighter response than that, but so it went. "It's really not fair what happens when you knock a lithokinetic into a jewelry store!"
Even before the words were out of her mouth, Tara was extending herself. Most of the stones on sale here were synthetics, and taking control of them was about as easy as working with refined metal. Even their tiny weights felt like moving mountains.
But she could move mountains.
Tara felt herself fall into the trance as her joints locked in position. Come on, she whispered or thought she did, it's fun to move. How long have you been resting like this? Remember when you flowed, down in the darkness? I can help you feel like that again. All you have to do is flow the way I want you to, and --
The gems surged up. Some of them -- more natural gems -- shot away so quickly that they left their precious metal houses behind, while others dragged the fixtures with them as they flew through the air towards the golden-haired madwoman. Tara felt them thumping into her enemy. None of them moved terribly fast; she didn't want to leave a bullet-riddled mess on the floor. (Or at least, she didn't want to want to ... anyway.)
The stones that didn't shatter on impact dropped a few inches, but she soon had them moving again, going back for seconds. Some of them glanced off the Mason woman, but she didn't even seem to notice.
But then Tara felt one of them slam into a softer body, and dimly heard (through her real ears) someone grunt. The woman with the swords was going to take her next shot.
Tara could only try to steer them away from her, while keeping up the bombardment. Hopefully, this would be the end of it.
IV:
_Will, are you in positionquestion_
_I'm as close as I'm gonna get._ Opal's tallest towers were practically microscopic, so at this height he couldn't actually see the exact mark that Rick wanted him to hit.
_Right. Home on my position, plus two meters y axis. When I give the word, go._
_Gotcha._
A few mouth movements later, his goggles were displaying the targeting computer with a big red X just in front of Rick's location. Will closed his eyes, concentrating on just breathing in and out. No matter how many times he did this, it still terrified him.
V:
The swarm of flying gemstones that engulfed the madwoman had already sent at least two flying back at her, but Rumiko ignored them as best she could while she slowly, silently approached her foe from behind.
There were those who held that to attack a foe from the blindside was dishonorable. And indeed, Rumiko agreed with them -- when it came to duels. This was not a duel, it was a battle. She would take whatever advantage she could get.
The gems pelted the madwoman, the one called Diane was lashing out at her with not-terribly-coordinated kicks and punches, and Rumiko raised up the katana that was her nomme de guerre and prepared to drive it through the golden-haired woman's midsection. Hopefully, that would be the end of it.
But something went wrong.
The woman's leg swept up to kick Diane in the chin, knocking her back, and even as the sword drove forward at her, she sidestepped its thrust and reached back to grab Rumiko's swordarm in a lock of iron. "Thanks," she said sweetly, and threw Rumiko up and to her left, though the air at the self-proclaimed lithokinetic. They slammed into each other, with Rumiko barely keeping her own swords from doing her ally serious injury.
She looked up just as the enemy produced a blade nearly the length of her forearm from one of her sleeves, then threw it at Diane's midsection with enough force to go all the way through her and knock her down. In the same motion, she lifted her leg and stomped down on the blade's hilt, effectively stapling Diane to the floor.
Unbelievable, Rumiko thought dizzily.
"Now," the woman said in a little girl's voice, "you're all going to die! Won't that be fun?"
And then there was the sound of glass shattering.
VI:
Ahead of him, the police line around the Bridwell Building. Behind him, a few police fliers in what they perceived as a high-speed chase through downtown Opal.
Nothing at all like old times.
Knight slipped his booted feet out of the bike's stirupps, and braced himself as best he could. At the last possible instant before he rammed into a police van, he slammed the throttle back to maximum choke. It bucked, of course, and sent him flying upward.
*If* he was right about the limits of the police encirclement of the building; *if* he'd calculated the angles right; *if* the window on the eighth floor was only glass, instead of any of the glass-like composites favored these days; *if* the others there hadn't already been killed; *if* the Harlequin hadn't got bored and left. If all this was right, then he'd arrive in the right place at the right time. But he didn't think of any of that as he flew upward at the building. In the end, it all came down to faith.
Knight folded his polykev-armored forearms in front of his helmet, and went through the glass like a bullet. The impact against the window had slowed him down enough that he could turn his upwards motion into a somersault that landed him on the floor, in one piece.
"Harlequin!" he shouted, the acoustics of his voice changed by the helmet.
And his oldest enemy turned to look at him with a bright smile and said, "'Bout time. I was starting to think something happened to you! Wouldn't want that, would I? Well, would I? Huh?"
The most annoying thing about her, he'd realized, was the fact that she could keep right on with her spiel as she fought. Fortunately, he'd learned to tune it out.
Mostly.
VII:
Okay. This *really* hurt.
Diane tried to tell herself that she didn't give a rat's ass why it hurt more to have a knife poking all the way through her torso than one stuck in her head, but truthfully, she felt more than a little concerned. It might be that this really was it for her.
Hopefully, that would be the end of it.
Through pain-fogged eyes, she watched as the Harlequin -- that was her name, apparently -- turned her attention towards the guy who'd just come bursting through the window. As soon as that happened, she started to struggle against the paralyzing agony to bring up one of her hands so that she could make a start on pulling it out.
She'd gotten one of her hands up onto her abdomen, where it was going to rest for a minute in the ooze underneath the knife's hilt. She was shying away from the thought of what that ooze might be when what else she was seeing finally penetrated.
The guy in the black outfit and the yellow-masked helmet was fighting the Harlequin. And if he wasn't getting any further with her than any of them had done, she wasn't getting anywhere nearly as far with him. And there was something about the way that he moved ...
It was a very old, very faint memory. Her daddy had still been with them, before he'd gone away for the last time, and she'd been sitting on his lap watching a movie in the home theatre. _Bat_, she thought. And the two Bats had been fighting each other right before the end, and daddy had said, in his voice that was like two rocks grinding against each other, "Yeah. That's how he moved, all right."
Yeah. And now this guy was moving the same way. So was the Harlequin, though.
Pity. Just once she'd like a myth to turn out to be more than a lie.
VIII:
Enough. Hopefully, it was enough. He'd slowly yielded up ground to the Harlequin, drawing her away from the others -- God on High Olympus, had she really stapled one of them to the floor? -- so that when he was ready, they'd be out of the blast radius.
She was complaining about the poor quality of today's victims, sounding genuinely exasperated. That was the major difference between her and her suspected father. She *meant* it, rather than just being sarcastic or intimidating in a presentation of false emotion.
It had to be far enough.
"Now!" he called on his helmet's comm-link.
IX:
_Nowexclamation_ read the output on the goggles, and Will smiled.
And in that second, became the thunder that shook Opal's towers in broad daylight.
Author's Notes:
Just a bit more to go in this issue; next release should finish it up.
For those curious:
Bat (2003) ** PG-13. D: John Woo. Ben Affleck, Eric Bama, Scarlett Johansson, Nick Nolte. Definitely the best of the many movies about the "Bat-man" urban legend, but that's not saying much. Fight choreography by Wo-Ping Yuen is probably the finest of his career and maybe of the history of film, particularly the climactic duel between the two "Bat-men" (Affleck, Bama). But the story is muddled and confusing, and if you emerge knowing which of the two of them was the real "Bat-man" and which the hallucination, you're a lot smarter than me. 140 min, DVD & VHS.
Huh, thought Diane. So this is what it feels like to have a knife stuck in my head.
It hurt, of course. But her sense of pain didn't actually mean that anything was damaged. It was like the appendix in people who weren't freaks; vestigial, and more trouble than it was worth. Her brain consisted of nerve tissue gathered in nodes floating throughout the fluid inside her body, and the knife hadn't come close to any of them. So while the pain paralyzed her for a few moments, she knew that it would pass.
Looking up at the weirdo who'd stabbed her, Diane guessed that she'd started to realize something was wrong when the knife had gone in so easily. No matter how strong she was, there would have been some resistance as the knife ran into her skull. (Of course, Diane didn't have a skull, or any sort of skeleton, either. Exactly how she was able to stand and move like a human being had been just one of the oddities that brought joy to the petrified hearts of the metaphysiologists who'd studied her the first six years of her life.) There hadn't been any, and the lunatic was frowning as that realization came to her.
The pain having reached manageable levels, she decided to freak her attempted murderer out. "I'm sorry, but I don't think we've been introduced," she said through gritted teeth.
She tensed her right leg, making it take on the consistency of solid metal, and kicked upward. With a yelp, the woman shot up and rolled in mid-air to land on her feet a few feet back.
Diane sat up, and pulled the thick blade out of her forehead. Her flesh (or whatever it was) instantly rolled back over the gaping wound. "I'm Diane Mason. Who the fuck are you?"
"You couldn't do that before," the lunatic replied non-sequitively. "It's not fair."
"Fair? Did you say fair?" Diane had known some messed up people in the joint, but this took the cake.
"Hey, bitch!" Another voice yelled from the side. Reflexively, Diane turned to look in that direction even as the other bitch did so as well.
II:
As he roared past city limits, Knight gradually opened up the throttle on the bike until the dial was well into the red.
"Hasten, hasten, best of steeds," he murmured through clenched teeth.
III:
Wow. Now that was impressive. Impact- and puncture-resistant metas were nothing new, but she'd never seen anyone just take that kind of blow and be completely unaffected. If not for that, Tara might have been reluctant to try her next stunt, but this Diane person should be safe from the effects of friendly fire.
"Hey, bitch!" she yelled as she stood up. "You wanna know what's really not fair?"
"What's really not fair?" the crazy woman replied in the same intonation.
Well, she'd been hoping for a straighter response than that, but so it went. "It's really not fair what happens when you knock a lithokinetic into a jewelry store!"
Even before the words were out of her mouth, Tara was extending herself. Most of the stones on sale here were synthetics, and taking control of them was about as easy as working with refined metal. Even their tiny weights felt like moving mountains.
But she could move mountains.
Tara felt herself fall into the trance as her joints locked in position. Come on, she whispered or thought she did, it's fun to move. How long have you been resting like this? Remember when you flowed, down in the darkness? I can help you feel like that again. All you have to do is flow the way I want you to, and --
The gems surged up. Some of them -- more natural gems -- shot away so quickly that they left their precious metal houses behind, while others dragged the fixtures with them as they flew through the air towards the golden-haired madwoman. Tara felt them thumping into her enemy. None of them moved terribly fast; she didn't want to leave a bullet-riddled mess on the floor. (Or at least, she didn't want to want to ... anyway.)
The stones that didn't shatter on impact dropped a few inches, but she soon had them moving again, going back for seconds. Some of them glanced off the Mason woman, but she didn't even seem to notice.
But then Tara felt one of them slam into a softer body, and dimly heard (through her real ears) someone grunt. The woman with the swords was going to take her next shot.
Tara could only try to steer them away from her, while keeping up the bombardment. Hopefully, this would be the end of it.
IV:
_Will, are you in positionquestion_
_I'm as close as I'm gonna get._ Opal's tallest towers were practically microscopic, so at this height he couldn't actually see the exact mark that Rick wanted him to hit.
_Right. Home on my position, plus two meters y axis. When I give the word, go._
_Gotcha._
A few mouth movements later, his goggles were displaying the targeting computer with a big red X just in front of Rick's location. Will closed his eyes, concentrating on just breathing in and out. No matter how many times he did this, it still terrified him.
V:
The swarm of flying gemstones that engulfed the madwoman had already sent at least two flying back at her, but Rumiko ignored them as best she could while she slowly, silently approached her foe from behind.
There were those who held that to attack a foe from the blindside was dishonorable. And indeed, Rumiko agreed with them -- when it came to duels. This was not a duel, it was a battle. She would take whatever advantage she could get.
The gems pelted the madwoman, the one called Diane was lashing out at her with not-terribly-coordinated kicks and punches, and Rumiko raised up the katana that was her nomme de guerre and prepared to drive it through the golden-haired woman's midsection. Hopefully, that would be the end of it.
But something went wrong.
The woman's leg swept up to kick Diane in the chin, knocking her back, and even as the sword drove forward at her, she sidestepped its thrust and reached back to grab Rumiko's swordarm in a lock of iron. "Thanks," she said sweetly, and threw Rumiko up and to her left, though the air at the self-proclaimed lithokinetic. They slammed into each other, with Rumiko barely keeping her own swords from doing her ally serious injury.
She looked up just as the enemy produced a blade nearly the length of her forearm from one of her sleeves, then threw it at Diane's midsection with enough force to go all the way through her and knock her down. In the same motion, she lifted her leg and stomped down on the blade's hilt, effectively stapling Diane to the floor.
Unbelievable, Rumiko thought dizzily.
"Now," the woman said in a little girl's voice, "you're all going to die! Won't that be fun?"
And then there was the sound of glass shattering.
VI:
Ahead of him, the police line around the Bridwell Building. Behind him, a few police fliers in what they perceived as a high-speed chase through downtown Opal.
Nothing at all like old times.
Knight slipped his booted feet out of the bike's stirupps, and braced himself as best he could. At the last possible instant before he rammed into a police van, he slammed the throttle back to maximum choke. It bucked, of course, and sent him flying upward.
*If* he was right about the limits of the police encirclement of the building; *if* he'd calculated the angles right; *if* the window on the eighth floor was only glass, instead of any of the glass-like composites favored these days; *if* the others there hadn't already been killed; *if* the Harlequin hadn't got bored and left. If all this was right, then he'd arrive in the right place at the right time. But he didn't think of any of that as he flew upward at the building. In the end, it all came down to faith.
Knight folded his polykev-armored forearms in front of his helmet, and went through the glass like a bullet. The impact against the window had slowed him down enough that he could turn his upwards motion into a somersault that landed him on the floor, in one piece.
"Harlequin!" he shouted, the acoustics of his voice changed by the helmet.
And his oldest enemy turned to look at him with a bright smile and said, "'Bout time. I was starting to think something happened to you! Wouldn't want that, would I? Well, would I? Huh?"
The most annoying thing about her, he'd realized, was the fact that she could keep right on with her spiel as she fought. Fortunately, he'd learned to tune it out.
Mostly.
VII:
Okay. This *really* hurt.
Diane tried to tell herself that she didn't give a rat's ass why it hurt more to have a knife poking all the way through her torso than one stuck in her head, but truthfully, she felt more than a little concerned. It might be that this really was it for her.
Hopefully, that would be the end of it.
Through pain-fogged eyes, she watched as the Harlequin -- that was her name, apparently -- turned her attention towards the guy who'd just come bursting through the window. As soon as that happened, she started to struggle against the paralyzing agony to bring up one of her hands so that she could make a start on pulling it out.
She'd gotten one of her hands up onto her abdomen, where it was going to rest for a minute in the ooze underneath the knife's hilt. She was shying away from the thought of what that ooze might be when what else she was seeing finally penetrated.
The guy in the black outfit and the yellow-masked helmet was fighting the Harlequin. And if he wasn't getting any further with her than any of them had done, she wasn't getting anywhere nearly as far with him. And there was something about the way that he moved ...
It was a very old, very faint memory. Her daddy had still been with them, before he'd gone away for the last time, and she'd been sitting on his lap watching a movie in the home theatre. _Bat_, she thought. And the two Bats had been fighting each other right before the end, and daddy had said, in his voice that was like two rocks grinding against each other, "Yeah. That's how he moved, all right."
Yeah. And now this guy was moving the same way. So was the Harlequin, though.
Pity. Just once she'd like a myth to turn out to be more than a lie.
VIII:
Enough. Hopefully, it was enough. He'd slowly yielded up ground to the Harlequin, drawing her away from the others -- God on High Olympus, had she really stapled one of them to the floor? -- so that when he was ready, they'd be out of the blast radius.
She was complaining about the poor quality of today's victims, sounding genuinely exasperated. That was the major difference between her and her suspected father. She *meant* it, rather than just being sarcastic or intimidating in a presentation of false emotion.
It had to be far enough.
"Now!" he called on his helmet's comm-link.
IX:
_Nowexclamation_ read the output on the goggles, and Will smiled.
And in that second, became the thunder that shook Opal's towers in broad daylight.
Author's Notes:
Just a bit more to go in this issue; next release should finish it up.
For those curious:
Bat (2003) ** PG-13. D: John Woo. Ben Affleck, Eric Bama, Scarlett Johansson, Nick Nolte. Definitely the best of the many movies about the "Bat-man" urban legend, but that's not saying much. Fight choreography by Wo-Ping Yuen is probably the finest of his career and maybe of the history of film, particularly the climactic duel between the two "Bat-men" (Affleck, Bama). But the story is muddled and confusing, and if you emerge knowing which of the two of them was the real "Bat-man" and which the hallucination, you're a lot smarter than me. 140 min, DVD & VHS.