Glory Girl's hand was still stuck to my outer shoulder.
I could feel the information from the malleable outer flesh she deformed change. Structures rearranged and took on new semi-stable forms. Chemical messengers adapted to stress. Tiny sensors took in light, and I interpreted it as data. Through it all, I could just make out the shift in her pulse.
Her heart rate was elevating, her hands twitching, pheromones signaling one thing: she wasn't just here to berate me. She was here to fight.
"Glory Girl," I stated.
"Membrane."
"What did Firefly tell you?"
"Enough."
"So, are we going to sit here all day, your hand on my shoulder? Or are—"
"We're gonna fight. And then you'll leave my sister alone."
"I don't think so," I said and let the flesh of the suit around her hand flow out, bits of it picking at and dissolving the material of my shirt underneath. All I needed was a little bit of skin contact, and Glory Girl would be out for the count.
Then I'd talk to Firefly alone and we'd figure this whole misunderstanding out.
She noticed the slight shift, and pulled her hand back with a massive slorp, her strength outdoing anything my flesh suit could do to keep her there.
"Well, I do think so," she growled, and she pulled her other hand back, balling it into a fist.
I'd never been in a cape fight before, but in the three months since I'd found myself empowered, I'd thought about it quite a bit. My powers were ridiculously versatile. Touch anything organic and I'd gain full awareness and control over it. Chemical messengers became as extra limbs, easy to tweak and change.
I could have built incredible weapons. Long range gasses to flood my enemies and bring them down, modified animals obedient only to me to attack from a distance, plants that grew over cities and subsumed them until the world was nothing but my creation and those who lived within my domain.
But all of those came with the same problem: lack of control.
An animal could get out into the wild, breed and become dominant, choking out wildlife, destroying ecosystems.
A plant allowed to grow indefinitely could spread like a cancer, roots burying so deep they could never be unearthed and destroyed. Worse, modifications intended to keep it alive would also keep it from being regulated by nature's usual processes. A massive population overshoot engendered by a single humongous organism, leading to a crash and severely decreased carrying capacity. Soil erosion. Devastation. Death.
A virus designed to knock out a single target could become corrupted. Cells divide, transcription errors occur, mutations propagate. Losing its lock to that one person, it might spread, jumping from person to person, city to city, country to country, until the world falls apart, leaving nothing but me and Madagascar.
I didn't dare let any of my creations out of my control, so I'd gone and invested all my ideas into my suit and then kept it close, letting me stay in touch with my power at all times.
Without it, I felt merely human, little more than a ragdoll puppeted by a paltry 650 muscles, many of them not fully independent. A bare shell. A static interface I couldn't even rewrite. A few clumsy buttons that I was forced to mash in order to make jerky barely controlled movements. No precision, no nothing.
But clothed in my creation, and having planned beforehand, I was ready for a fight, and able to respond in real time.
The suit began to inflate before her fist even hit me, filling with air and fluid, squishy wetness suspending me within like an overgrown fetus.
Glory Girl's punch smashed me through the table, the cafe's outer fencing, and out onto the road. I bounced once before settling into a roll that took me under a fast-moving truck.
I slowed down on the other side of the road and stood up, stopping traffic.
Even with the goo, shock absorption, and rudimentary exoskeleton, I'd felt that. One of my arms was lightly bruised, the pain masked by the cooling sensation of viscous protective liquid.
The pavilion I'd just vacated was strewn with bits of shredded chair, torn up fence, and knocked over tables. A waitress stood off to the side, looking at the wreckage with a resigned expression. Glory Girl floated in the very center of it.
"Are you just going to break things? Not even hear me out?" I shouted back at her.
"I can afford it," she said.
"Why are we doing this?"
She answered by shooting right at me, fist extended.
I twisted within the suit, letting my real body avoid the attack entirely. Her fist punched through the flapping outer flesh that I'd left behind, puncturing and tearing it. Fluid leaked out as I frantically pulled the suit back together around the skeletal structure inside, reorienting it to match where I was facing.
I held my hands up, trying to placate her. "Glory Girl, please. I've done nothing to your sister," I said.
"Then why's she coming here?" she yelled as she dove at me again.
"I asked her to come?" I suggested.
"Ha! There you have it!"
"Have—" I ducked under a punch only to get a kick to the side that threw me off the street and into a building. "—what?"
"You manipulated her!" she yelled, floating a few feet away.
"I just asked her!"
"You manipulated her with words!"
"I talked to her!"
She let out an inarticulate scream of rage and dove at me again.
I jumped over her attempt, leaving her to chip the wall, and started running. Musculo-skeletal structures in the flesh suit assisted me in my run, moving me further and faster than I could have moved on my own.
I made it less than half a block before she tackled me.
We rolled on the ground for a few seconds, futilely clawing at each other. My hands slid against her. Her hands managed only to grasp globs of flesh that melted whenever she pulled at them.
She gave up, slipping her arms around me, and grabbing me in a big hug.
"Are we do—" I started saying.
She pulled me up from the ground and into the air. We kept rising, up multiple floors, until we'd passed the tops of the tallest buildings around. For hundreds of vertical feet, she continued to rise. Realizing the futility of trying to damage her, I spent the time reinforcing the bottom of my suit, moving mass down until I was pear-shaped. By the time we stopped, I could see the bay emptying out into the ocean, water disappearing into the horizon.
She dropped me.
As seconds passed, I curled up into a ball, letting myself slip through pseudo-amniotic fluid into the narrow top of my suit's current configuration. The lower structure stratified into bubbles of fluid and air. Biological bubble wrap folded over and over, oriented toward the point of impact.
When I hit the ground, the bottom layer burst, spraying colorless liquid all over a parking lot. I felt my momentum caught as if by a trampoline and then bounced up lightly.
Opening eyeholes back up so I could see, I found myself face to face with Glory Girl.
"Did you just try to kill me?" I yelled at her.
"You're a flesh blob. You would have been fine!"
"No, I almost wasn't!"
She stopped in mid-air. "Well, so-rry. I thought you could take it."
"Can we just stop and talk this out? I'm not a fucking villain!"
"Then why are you acting like one?"
I didn't get a chance to respond before she was flying at me again.
We crashed through a wall, wood splintering around us. My suit popped further, warm liquid splattering out and left behind as we went through another wall.
Another wall shattered as Glory Girl stayed her course, using me like a giant boxing glove to damage warehouse after warehouse. With each subsequent crash, I lost a little more mass. If I ran too low, I'd end up vulnerable and likely dead.
Sucking in microorganisms from the air wouldn't be enough. I tried to pull in and process as much shattered wood as I could. Production of protozoans armed with appropriate enzymes ramped up. Cellulose became cellodextrins became glucose which fed into the machinery of growth, rebuilding the suit slowly.
With enough time, I could convert any biomass into anything I needed, but at the rate Glory Girl was flying, I'd never get the chance. I needed a way to get her to stop.
I let the suit slip around her, becoming looser and slimier. She had a little bit of a grip on my real body, a left arm in a half circle that blocked my way. I began to squirm loose, doing everything I could think of to trick her grip and escape.
Parts of the suit shifted mass to other parts, leaving it lopsided. Density increased where I wanted her to believe I was, at the cost of less protection around my legs.
She stopped suddenly in the middle of a warehouse and grabbed my head, slamming it into the concrete floor.
The cushioning saved me, cracking slightly. I began to heal the exoskeleton, letting tendrils of collagen shoot towards each other around calluses that I reabsorbed almost as soon as I'd finished forming them.
Right in front of me, I could see swirls of white powder and the vague shape of someone pulling a gun.
Glory Girl's face interrupted my view. "Well?" she yelled.
"Welwat?" I choked out through the sweet fluid draining out of my throat.
Some of the white dust landed on my suit and absorbed, its chemical structure unknown to me, but based on the effect my power expected it to have on the body was probably cocaine. If not for the suit, I'd be breathing it in.
Glory Girl didn't seem affected.
She slammed my head into the ground again, undoing some of my repair work and jostling my real body.
I shrunk in on myself, ducking out of the head of the suit and filling it with new organ structures and solid plates, doing my best to help it imitate the same sound and weight and feel as it smashed into the ground.
Every impact was accompanied by yells from my tormentor. I couldn't understand any of it, especially through the shockwaves making their way to my head and the crunchy sound of skeleton on ground.
Cocaine became supplemented by smoke and heat.
I curled up into a ball as I moved into the lower end of the suit, commanding the other side to take on a pseudo-skeletal structure.
Microscopic bits of iron-mineralized chitin traveled in repurposed phagocytes. They'd been spread out to aid in flexibility, slowly forming over time in every part of the body, ready to be deployed on a moment's notice. As I squeezed myself lower, the hollow space was taken up by new skeletal structures, armored panels, and balloons of liquid to give it all weight.
Particulate matter and smoke toxicity were affecting the outer skin of the suit. Layers of cells died, falling before the onslaught of increasingly dense smoke.
Glory Girl had eyes only for me. She paused in her ministrations and pulled up the fake head I'd created. I synthesized hematocytes and suspended them in blood plasma, letting them pulse out of widening slits in the neck. I let a shard of bone get caught in the stream and push its way out of the skull. The suit mimicked taking in a shuddering, wet breath.
Glory Girl let go and pulled back. "Shit."
The bottom of the suit was a large pile of seemingly undifferentiated biomass, my curled up form hidden inside.
I let the fake gasp for one last breath before killing all its cells. They died in waves, starting from the head and flowing towards me. I cut off the apoptotic march right before it reached the pile containing me, rendering the fake half-body inert and cutting it off from the rest.
I rose, pulling up flesh, solidifying, rearranging, and reforming into an approximate recreation of my suit. Then, I ran, hoping the smoke would obscure my path.
I dove through the hole we'd made to enter and rolled onto the grass, pulling in as much of it as I could along the way. Weeds and worms and wilted flowers: all were subsumed with the assistance of my power.
Behind me, the warehouse burned.
I glanced back as I sprinted and spotted a screaming Glory Girl flying at me with a dumpster held by a lip. She stopped in mid-air, letting the dumpster keep moving, swinging it around once before letting it fly free right at me.
I dropped to the ground. The suit inflated to soften the blow and protect me, catching the lip of the dumpster and sending it spinning over me. Trash rained down. I absorbed as much as I could: food waste, maggots, rats.
The suit was approaching car size, its internal structures buried under protective outer layers. I redirected them to build muscles, biological pistons, fleshy hydraulics. This needed to end. It was time to turn this around and counterattack.
Glory Girl hovered a few feet away, examining my form and looking for weaknesses.
"Membrane!" a girl yelled.
I coiled my massive double-body in further, tensing it in preparation to lunge.
"Membrane!" she yelled again. I recognized the name and the voice suddenly. Firefly was calling my cape name.
"What?" I managed, just barely keeping myself from rushing at Glory Girl.
Glory Girl didn't give me that same courtesy. She took advantage of my distraction and dove at me.
I attempted to duck under her blow, but my suit didn't respond. Instead of a precise and controlled movement, it spasmed, muscles activating seemingly at random and without my direction.
My chin squished into the bottom of the head part of the suit as my head was jostled by the unexpected resistance. I felt fluid leaking around my neck and trickling down my scalp. It stung my eyes as it dripped down to my mouth.
Glory Girl's punch pressed into the supposedly brute-proof suit, failing to be absorbed by systems currently going haywire. The force of the blow transferring to my abdomen, knocking my breath out and stumbling me. I tripped backwards just as I felt a part of the suit squeeze around my ankle. Flesh and meat and almost-liquid biomass sloshed down around me.
"What the fuck!" I yelled as I hit the ground, my words garbled by the fluid. I spit it out.
Glory Girl hovered above me, looking down right into the suit's eyes. "One more move, and I—"
I ignored her. "Firefly! Did you do this?"
"Flesh Bitch!" Glory Girl spat. "I was talking to you!"
"Firefly," I enunciated, freezing the front part of my suit as best I could. "Could you please?"
Muscles seized up and released, twitching finally ceasing. My suit stopped spasming just in time for me to hear Glory Girl yelling again. "Look, you creepy bitch, I want your writhing, faux-human paws off my sister. She doesn't need you whispering—"
"Victoria! Please!" Firefly shouted.
Glory Girl glared at her sister. "What?"
"Can you calm down for a moment?"
"I'm trying to help. I'm telling her—"
"I've got it handled. She's not doing anything to me."
"But—"
"Can just believe me? Please? I'll be fine, I promise."
"You promise?"
"Yes."
"Okay. Alright." Glory Girl took a deep breath and lowered herself to the ground, her feet finally touching the ground. She stood there staring at the two of us. "So? What now?"
I still felt tense, the expectation of another attack haunting me.
She watched impassively, an eyebrow raised, not even twitching as the wail of sirens grew louder.
"The warehouses," Firefly said.
Glory Girl and I both looked towards the warehouses we'd fought through. A whole section of them was on fire, spewing thick choking black smoke. People were running out of them.
Glory Girl shrugged. "They're ABB."
"You knew before you attacked?" Firefly asked. Her face painted a picture. Lips turned up at a corner, a slight squint to her expression as she tried to pre-empt her sister's next excuse. A lock of frizzy brown hair dangled in front of her face, having long refused any attempts to be blown off, and always returning no matter how often she swept it to the side.
"They were filled with cocaine." Glory Girl's features contrasted sharply with her sister's. Where Firefly looked real, all human angles and imperfections, she looked like she'd been cast from a mold. Smooth plastic features deforming into infuriatingly unwrinkled expressions. Frowns drawn precisely by computer and preserved in clear glass.
Firefly's face closed off further, short eyelashes lowering just enough to barely fuzz my view of her pupils. Her mouth pinched inward, pulling her nose a millimeter in and lowering her columella. "You didn't know that before you flew in," she said, ending the sentence with a furrowing of her brows.
"Eh," she said, and stretched her arms out to the sides, lifting slightly into the air. "It all works out in the end."
"Victoria." Firefly was staring up at her sister. Her teeth were grit together, masseters bulging out the skin around the back of her slightly lopsided lower jaw. "We need to fix this. You need to talk to the PRT."
"Ugh." Glory Girl was even further up in the air now, spinning slightly as if to thereby deflect Firefly's words, redirect them into the ground where they couldn't affect her. "Alright."
Firefly raised an untrimmed eyebrow, emphasizing the arch and, by virtue of the contrast, making it clear just how sunken her eyes were.
"Alright!" Glory Girl rotated in mid air until she was pointing at the warehouses. She sped off.
I turned to Firefly. "What the hell?"
"She's like that." Firefly shrugged.
"Not that. I'm talking about how you tripped me."
"I wanted to stop the fight."
"She could have killed me!" Talking to Firefly was a little frustrating sometimes. She just didn't seem to understand the consequences of her own actions or what sort of pain she was causing me.
"Well—"
"No! Your sister is insane, Firefly!" I noticed I was shaking. The pressure of the situation having lifted, I found myself at the mercy of my own anxiety. I needed to sit down, lie down, something. I stumbled a few feet to a wall and slumped against it.
"Are you okay?"
"No, no I'm not okay. I just narrowly avoided death like five times in quick succession." I took a deep breath and let myself slip further down the wall until I was sitting down. "Holy shit."
She awkwardly shuffled closer. "Uh, I'm sorry. She's—"
I looked up at her. "And you!"
"Um—"
"You tripped me. Don't think I've forgotten."
"I also stopped her—"
"This is school all over again."
"School?"
"I—" I took an even deeper breath and tried to steady my nerves. "I'm bullied at school. There are three of them."
I was tearing up. Firefly's visage started to blur in my vision. I let the tears absorb into my suit. She didn't say anything, just watching.
"One used to be my best friend, until she turned on me."
Firefly stood there, staring. I wanted her to say something, to react, to do anything other than to just take in my pain and discard it as if it meant nothing.
"Turned on me! Can you imagine!" I was still shaking. "Can you?"
"Not… really?"
"So, I'm pretty sensitive when someone seems friendly and then turns on me. I'm afraid, Firefly. Afraid that it'll happen again. I'll give someone my trust, and they'll mangle it, tear me apart."
"I'm sorry."
"I've heard that so often," I said, breaking eye contact and letting my head fall back down.
"I could, uh, make it up to you?" she said hesitantly.
"Really?" Maybe Firefly wasn't so bad after all. Perhaps the possible friend I'd seen the other night could still develop. "I mean, well, you shouldn't. I have to handle this on my own."
"No, no, really." She was warming up to the idea, seeing the possibility of really helping me. "My mom's a lawyer, and I'm a superhero. We can help."
I looked back up at her. "I'd like that." It'd go a way towards assuaging my doubts about her and making up her attack earlier.
We stayed like that for a moment. Her standing and fidgeting. Me sitting and wiping away tears. At least the wall when cushioned by the mass of my suit was mostly comfortable.
Eventually I broke the silence. "How'd you find us anyways?"
"Oh, uh, followed the trail of destruction, also tracked her cell phone."
"You can track her cell?"
"Well—"
"Can you track mine?"
"No—"
"What's the difference?"
"Mom—"
"So your mother can track me?"
"No, not unless you joined our plan for some reason."
"Oh, right. That's good to know."
She shrugged.
I tried to think of something else to say. "You know, the suit's very responsive to you."
"I guess so."
"It's not a guess. The thing almost seems to like you."
"It's probably just a weird power interaction," she said.
"I'm not convinced. Either you're doing something on purpose, or this thing actually likes you, somehow."
"I'm not doing anything," she denied, more vehemently this time. My arm twitched involuntarily.
I stood up. "Sure you are, unless you wanna tell me that this suit that I constructed and can feel every little bit of has evolved a consciousness beyond my control or ability to sense and now has the capacity for reason and attachment necessary to react to you."
"Seriously, I'm—"
"Oh cut it out. This thing is turning towards you, like a flower opening up to sun," I said, starting to advance on her. The suit stiffened a little, slight tremors running down from the head to the mass of meat that made up the bottom half.
"Please—"
"No. Look, I don't want to have to take this as an attack or anything. You're otherwise pretty cool," I said as I pointed a finger in her direction. The finger shook a little, refusing to be fully directed. "But it's mighty suspicious that this only happens around you."
I took another step towards her, and the suit started squirming harder. The skin of the top jerked to the left, slipping around my head and burying my nose in the cheek. The space between me and the suit began to fill with thick viscous liquid. I tried to take a breath and only managed to aspirate some of the sweet fluid that suspended me in the suit.
My world was nothing but the painful sensation of burning lungs and the faint redness of light filtered through skin. I tried to yell, to tell her to stop, to signal my distress, but I only managed to sputter. Bubbles formed where my voice wouldn't and were swept away with the continued involuntary motion of my suit.
I tried to tear a hole for air with my powers. Cells migrated away from hastily prepared perforations. Custom viruses destroyed cell walls and weakened internal structures. The friction of rapid uncontrolled motion finished the job, skin stretching and separating.
It wasn't enough. Shuddering muscles forced wet flesh back into my mouth and nose, smothering me. My vision began to darken, corners moving in.
I pulled and twisted and tore at my prison. I synthesized bacteria and rotted the skin, my own creation destroying itself to give me life.
Dying meat sloughed off my head and pooled around my neck.
I hacked up what was left in my throat and took deep, shuddering breaths. The air tasted necrotic, the sickly taint of death still coating my tongue.
The rest of the suit was frozen in place, immobile and safe.
"Membrane? Are you alright?"
I looked up to see Firefly staring at me.
My voice came out weak and scratchy. "I just—couldn't breathe."
She gestured at her face. "Your uh—"
"It'll—" I coughed again and a glob of thick liquid came out. "—be okay."
"Good, good, but, uh, your—"
"I can fix it," I snapped, before coughing up another phlegmy mass. "Thanks for the concern, but—" It was her fault, she knew it, and now she was just trying to help. "I'll be fine. Thank you."
"Your face?"
I touched my face with a still enhanced hand. "Yes? Seems fine other than the goo."
"I can see it."
"Oh?" I felt it again. The same wide mouth, the same large eyes, the same public—
"Capes," she started.
"Oh," I said. "Right. You revealed my identity."
I kept my hand in front of my face and had it web up, flat panels of cartilage streaked with bone growing outwards to hide me. I backed away from her.
"I didn't mean—" she started, but I was already stumbling backwards into an alley. I didn't dare pull the top of my suit back up, not while still in her range.
My facade felt like it was crumbling. Firefly knew what I looked like now. She knew that I wasn't just Membrane, mysterious hero, saviour, unassailable flesh giant.
In seeing my face, she'd reduced me back to Taylor Hebert, lonely loser, bullied student, slow failure. The weight of my past—of the identity that my life had forced on me—rose from my gut and began to smother me. I was choking again, but this time it was my own anxiety forcing its way down my throat and taking away my breath.
I turned and ran.