Elesis Sieghart was almost feeling good about herself by the time the call came in to report to Director Piggot's office. Three villains apprehended in one night, the ABB's leadership behind bars, and she'd grabbed an independent villain for good measure.
The conversation did not begin anything like how Elesis was expecting it to.
"You are lucky that the PRT's reputation is more important than yours, or I would have you on your knees apologizing to that girl and her father right now. Any goodwill they might have had towards the PRT is gone. At best, we get a noncompliant Ward, and at worst, they go public about Taylor Hebert's unlawful arrest."
"I had probable cause."
Piggot raised an eyebrow, and Elesis felt like a schoolgirl being scolded by a teacher. "Probable cause to suspect a cape who was surrounded by bugs, who downed Rakshasa with bee stings, had decided to butcher two men like a common thug?"
It was the heat of the moment! She wanted to scream, but that would only make things worse. Heroes were supposed to be better than that. She was supposed to be better than that.
"And let's not ignore the fact that you had no business being anywhere near the Docks in the first place, not while Armsmaster was going out with the intention of apprehending Lung. Rest assured, I have already dealt with his lapse in judgment, but you are an adult, Ms. Sieghart, and I expect you to act like one. This is the kind of behavior I would expect from Shadow Stalker, not a fully-trained Protectorate hero."
The excuses turned to ashes in her mouth. Every clue, every little piece of reasoning - the villain alert, the costume, the scene, Rakshasa, the blood, the scream - wouldn't be enough, no matter how she tried to walk Piggot through her every thought from last night. The fact remained that she had made a mistake and probably cost them a Ward, and she was going to pay for it. Elesis was clenching her fists hard enough to leave gouges in her palms, and she waited for the inevitable punishment. Wards babysitting? Console? PR events until next year? Piggot wouldn't try to have her transferred out of the Bay, would she? She couldn't, right? They needed the capes, didn't they?
"You're off the active duty roster, without pay, effective now. I've been turning a blind eye on your mental health evaluations, wrongly assuming that a halfway-functional cape was better than nothing, and now we've lost a Ward for it."
Elesis sprang up from her chair. "You can't take me off active duty! The Empire's going to make a push for territory, you need every cape you've got out on the streets-"
"I can, and I will. Until you work out your issues, I'd rather be short a cape than rely on one with your judgment. After the press conference, you're going home - home, not the Rig - and I don't want to hear a thing about you returning until you have caught up on the past six months of evaluations and sat through the Wards courses on appropriate force and procedure when conducting citizens' arrests. Perhaps you could try interacting with normal people, as well. Now kindly stop smoldering at me, Ms. Sieghart, and get out of my office."
With another angry look towards Emily Piggot, Elesis put a conscious effort into snuffing the fire that had lit itself in her hair. "You know I can't help it, Director," Elesis snapped, before turning and walking out the door.
The press conference was just as bad as she'd expected, all false smiles and false reassurances. Armsmaster was all but preening at the attention bestowed upon him for his takedown of Lung, while Incarnate endured the camera flashes and shouted questions about a fight she never even had.
Stop looking so smug, she thought at her superior, I know they put you on half pay for it.
But Incarnate had an impeccable public face, and so not a hint of her frustration, her disappointment, her urge to just run away from this entire thing and hit something until she didn't feel anymore didn't bleed through to the cameras. She answered questions from the media with all the proper poise, dodged them gracefully when she wasn't supposed to answer, and made the perfect smiles that would be plastered all over her stupid fan pages by this evening. Just the thought of how they would be singing her praises made her ill.
Afterwards, she and Armsmaster didn't exchange a single word. What could they say to each other? All she'd given him as help for tagging along was docked pay and a lecture from the Director. Hell, considering that Rakshasa was still alive because of her intervention with the bug girl, Incarnate's presence was a clear net loss considering that Oni Lee, her excuse for being there in the first place, was nowhere to be seen.
Incarnate allowed them to confiscate her costume after the press conference without a word of debate, and once she was in her civvies began the unfamiliar route home.
Her apartment building lay in the area between the Boardwalk and the Docks, where things were run down but not in a complete state of disrepair. It was a coin toss whether or not the shopkeepers in the area had to pay protection money any given month, but the chance to get the odd tourist with deep pockets as a customer kept most of them from moving. That, and the fact that moving anywhere better was probably outside of their budget, and nobody wanted to be in Lung's territory proper.
Most of Elesis' memories of the area were bittersweet; her old home hadn't been far from here, in the decayed suburbs just a few blocks south. She used to take her little brother shopping around here, but he'd always beg her to go to the Boardwalk instead, never mind that they couldn't afford anything he'd want there.
Too many of the old landmarks were gone; the bookstore she loved to visit after school was now boarded up, and the convenience store where they'd grab chips and soda had been replaced with a laundromat.
At least the dojo beneath her apartment was still there.
Haan Martial Arts, read the faded sign over the door. She'd poked her head in once or twice before out of curiosity. It was run by an immigrant brother and sister duo who taught local kids karate and taekwondo, the kind of place that would only be patronized by wannabe vigilante teenagers and gave out belts based on how much they paid for lessons.
The sister had seemed cheerful enough when she introduced herself, but there was something in the emptiness of the dojo and the emptiness in her eyes that made Elesis wonder if she was trafficked and the whole place was part of some ABB money-laundering scheme. She'd pointed the cops towards it a few months back, but considering the store was still standing she figured nothing had come of it.
Today, though, her eye was caught by the young Asian man taping a sign to the door.
Interact with someone normal, Piggot's words came back to her, and so instead of walking past him to the stairwell, she decided to approach.
"Ara's self-defense class is cancelled," he said, without turning to look at her.
"Oh, I'm not- that is- Did something happen?" Her cheeks flamed up as she stuttered. Why was everything so much easier when she was in costume?
He turned towards her, then. The man was somewhere in his mid-twenties, tall, attractive, with dark chin-length hair and the kind of poise you'd expect to see from a white-collar businessman downtown instead of a crappy dojo owner in the Docks.
"She was attacked last night," he answered solemnly. The pain in his eyes hurt to look at, but Elesis couldn't look away. "It was the ABB. She's in the hospital. Just… go, please."
Elesis went.
Her apartment was dark and empty, the furniture covered with plastic sheets showing just how much she actually used it. Elesis flicked on the lights, and winced at the number of dust motes dancing through the air. The fridge, of course, was empty, and the cabinets were stocked with generic provisions like canned beans. Looks like it was gonna be take-out for dinner, then.
She flipped on the TV out of boredom, immediately switching channels to the first thing she could find (that cape soap opera that Assault loved) when the first thing to appear was a replay of her interview.
How in the world was she supposed to live like this? Elesis Sieghart had no real hobbies, no job, no friends outside of the cape scene. Any of her old friends from Winslow, assuming they'd still talk to her after years of silence, would know her as the high achiever turned high-school dropout and nothing else.
Maybe there were a few essentials she could take care of - restocking her fridge, getting some new civilian clothes, maybe find another bookstore and pick up a thriller or two - but none of those compared to actually being out on the streets as a superhero and making this city better. Now, while the ABB was reeling, their two strongest capes were behind bars, Incarnate was benched for driving off a teenager with a mediocre power.
The realization came like a punch to the face: was Elesis Sieghart even a real person?
Following almost immediately afterwards was the urge to do something, not as Incarnate the perfect heroine, but as herself. It said a lot about her priorities that that something involved going after the ABB on her own terms.
You're an adult, Elesis. You are not going to run off like some hyperactive teenager to play vigilante.
But still, the urge wouldn't leave her thoughts, even throughout the afternoon and into the evening as she performed the necessary chores to get her apartment back into a liveable state. She'd joined the Protectorate not a week after she got her powers, because she knew she'd never be able to take down Lung with a group at her back. She'd never fought crime outside of the constraints of the PRT, and while she could understand that was objectively a good thing, she couldn't smash the urge to go smash an ABB brothel for the sake of her neighbor's sister.
There was a bag of old single-use domino masks sitting in her closet from before her costume was done. She'd tossed them in there when branding was finished, and didn't use her apartment enough to remember to throw them out.
It was a possibility, and that was enough to get the gears in her head turning.
In general, fire wasn't a very nice power set. Ask anyone on the street about pyrokinetics, and they'd tell you about Ash Beast, Burnscar, Lung. Glenn Chambers had talked her through a strategy to get around the association: using her power as a Shaker, not a Blaster - cutting off escape routes with walls of fire and then punching her opponent, not lighting them on fire and laughing as they burned. The PRT gave her strict guidelines on what she was allowed to ignite, and she'd followed them to the letter. Because her Breaker power let her absorb stray flames, she'd avoided any record for collateral damage, too.
That made Incarnate predictable. More than once she'd had to eat a hit she could've avoided, because to shift forms would be to put her opponent at an unacceptable risk. No boiling Kaiser in that tin can of his, either, no matter how much she wanted to. For the most part, her Breaker state was for appearances only, and for dodging long ranged attacks like Purity's blasts or Rakshasa's orbs.
But she knew that there was more that she could be doing with her Breaker state. Shadow Stalker took full advantage of her own Breaker state, particularly the weightless part of it. Fire didn't have any mass either, did it?
The possibilities were nearly endless, all she needed to do was get out in the field to test them-
We are not doing this, Elesis forced herself to think. Not today.
But maybe tomorrow.
Not technically a new chapter, I was just crossposting to AO3 earlier and realized I never updated with Chapter 6 here.
