4.2

Madison still wasn't convinced Quest was correct about either of the topics they'd, well calling it an 'argument' might have been a bit too generous. But that hadn't stopped her waiting until she was sure both of her parents had gone to bed before donning her 'technically vigilante,' but what she was mentally referring to as her Independent Hero costume. Sure Independent Heroes had to actually register to count, but there was no way she was strolling into the ENE building in some random hoodie thank you very much.

In the end she wasn't sure if she'd just allowed herself to buy into Quest's arguments because a large part of her simply wanted to get out, wanted to start doing her part and start being the person she was trying to be. Not that the end result was any different either way.

She'd triple checked everything before she'd left, her other three domino masks in her Inventory along with a few other things just in case. At first she hadn't been quite sure where to go. As far as she knew she could only teleport long distances to places she'd been or could actually see properly. Which meant she couldn't just pop into the Docks itself or the shadier places of Downtown that she'd had every reason previously to stay away from.

That had still left her deciding where she wanted to go and in the end she'd decided to make her way towards the Docks proper. It had been a surprise to her younger self when she learned that the 'Docks' everyone had spoken about wasn't literally referring to the actual docks of the city. Instead it was essentially just an even worse version of the bad parts of Downtown for the most part, things generally getting worse the further in you got.

There were still houses, apartment blocks, businesses and so on like anywhere else, it was simply an area of the city the average person generally didn't want to be in at night and in some areas, parts of the day too. Unlike other places in the city however, a whole swathe of the Docks was effectively an abandoned industrial estate that was complete with rotting factories, empty warehouses and other crumbling infrastructure.

If you asked five random people who actually controlled the Docks you'd probably get six different answers for your trouble. The 'Docks' were a nebulous area to begin with and she'd heard enough insults towards Taylor for supposedly living there, despite the fact her house was technically outside of it.

The ABB had their protection rackets on the areas they controlled and then did most of the rest of their crimes in the areas they didn't. The Empire had their dog fighting rings and other underground fighting rings outside of all of their other crimes and the Merchants just stole from everyone whilst selling drugs to anything that had a pulse. That wasn't even counting all the other minor gangs and petty criminals that called the place home. It wasn't as though the rest of the city was crime free, but The Docks had its reputation for a reason.

Teleporting as close as she could, which left her in the street closer to Taylor's house than the Docks themselves, Madison started to walk to her destination. As late as it was there weren't many people about and those that were gave her a wide berth when they saw her.

When it came to unknown capes it didn't matter what they looked like, even if they were a nine year old girl wearing a sundress it was better to exercise extreme caution. You never knew if they were the kind of person that might be able to rip you in half with their bare hands or worse after all and there were enough horror stories floating about that most people wouldn't take the risk, well the sensible ones at least.

Knowing she didn't exactly look particularly heroic either was also plenty of a reason for people to stay clear. A non-descript hoodie and a domino mask wasn't going to inspire anyone to take a closer look and ask her who she was, especially in the dead of night. It was something she found herself grateful for as she slowly got used to walking around in the open in her cobbled together costume, enduring the cautious, wary looks and the number of people who immediately gave her a wide berth.

She'd ended up walking for about ten minutes when she paused and with a thought teleported herself further down the street, turning to check how far she'd gone and nodding in satisfaction. She still needed to know where she was going, but Madison figured alternating between walking and teleporting would cut her travel time in half and help her build up her mental map of the city, or at least that's what she hoped. That it would also help her practice with her powers was a happy side effect as she blinked down the streets at seemingly random intervals, making sure she took a moment to figure out where she'd appeared before teleporting to the next spot ahead.

There wasn't any obvious cut off point for where civilisation apparently ended and the Docks began, but after a while there was a noticeable difference. The sidewalk was more obviously cracked and broken, with the occasional uneven slab jutting up or missing outright. Potholes appeared more frequently in the road in ones and twos and clusters that it was obvious any vehicles would have to drive around entirely and there was a general sense of walking through a part of the city that was starting to decay.

The few looks she'd gotten from those that had noticed her had gone from alarmed to a mixture of cautious or even outright disdain, which had been a surprise. She'd stopped teleporting as much early in when she'd reached the Docks proper, wanting to save her power even though she hadn't been feeling any strain. But better to spend another half an hour walking than find she'd run out of superpowers if someone decided she was an easy mark was her reasoning at least.

.

.

Madison wasn't sure what she'd expected to find, that maybe she'd stumble upon a mugging and heroically save the day, but all she'd seen for the past hour or so that she'd been walking were people hurrying from one point to another, keeping to themselves as much as possible and the only thing that made her standout from everyone else was that she was wearing a mask.

The first warehouse she'd come across she couldn't help resist a peek inside as she heard the sound of voices from within, but it was only a group of homeless drinking around a fire and she'd quickly moved on, trying to squash the odd disappointment she'd felt at the sight.

The further in she got, the fewer people there were and she had wondered if her obvious capeyness was scaring people away before she'd even seen them, or if she'd accidentally picked the one direction with no crime as she continued to walk further in.

"This isn't working" she muttered to herself as she paused under one of the few still working streetlights and spared a glance back the way she'd come. "Just walking about isn't going to cut it, is it?" Even if it did mean that when she went out in future she could simply teleport straight to any point in the Docks she'd passed up to that point.

"What do the other heroes do?" She pondered for a moment whilst her gaze tracked steadily back down the empty street around her, but the only ones that jumped to mind were Shadow Stalker and Glory Girl. The former wore black at night so she had stealth covered and Glory Girl could literally fly, which probably made finding random crimes a whole lot easier. Madison hadn't tried teleporting directly up into the air yet and definitely wasn't planning on it any time soon either. Still, getting some height wouldn't be a bad idea she considered and her gaze moved to scrutinise the various rooftops around her.

She couldn't really see any of them properly she quickly discovered. It was night after all, the street she was on was fairly narrow to begin with and the buildings around her were a lot taller than she was. Still, the idea of getting a bird's eye view was appealing and she wandered towards what looked like a long abandoned warehouse, wondering if there was some kind of ladder or fire escape she could use to get to the roof without trying to chance a blind teleport.

There wasn't, but the one adjacent to it did and climbing up the rusty ladder of peeling paint made her very appreciative of the gloves she was wearing by the time she'd gotten to the top.

Carefully walking near the edge of the flat rooftop as the wind nipped at her, Madison looked over the expanse of the Docks she could see. It was mostly a mixture of blocky brick buildings of different sizes, interspersed with stretches of what looked like commercial or residential areas if there was anything there at all, the general sense of disrepair the only thing everything seemed to have in common. There wasn't really any true organisation to the layout that she could make sense of, just a part of the city that had grown as it needed to and had been left as a sprawling mess of dilapidated buildings and the various people moving about between them.

With her new perch Madison found she'd gone from seeing the occasional person on the street trying to make themselves scarce to dozens as her gaze flitted between those she could see. It was impossible to try and keep track of everything, even as she couldn't help but try to regardless. Her gaze searching for anything untoward or more suspicious than simply hurrying down a poorly lit street late at night.

Teleporting to another rooftop and then another, the process repeated itself as she acclimated to her new perspective and just what seemed to pass for 'normal' in the Docks at an hour she was pretty sure had rolled over into early morning at some point.

It was some time later before she thought she'd spotted something, her continued practice with her power letting her slip almost seamlessly from one unoccupied rooftop to the next. In the relative darkness - And by that point she was pretty certain she had at least some level of low light vision, since she didn't think she should have been seeing things in the dark nearly as well as she had been - It was difficult to always land with her feet on the ground. Even as she'd gotten a better feel for where to 'aim' there had been plenty of moments where she'd appeared an inch or more off from the rooftop itself and had experienced the brief momentary panic of weightlessness before her feet had landed on something solid a moment later.

At first she'd thought the man she'd been following might have been a mugger or worse as he'd seemed to be eying people speculatively and she'd been psyching herself up to drop into the alleyway he and a woman had disappeared into before she'd realised he was 'just' a drug dealer with a customer.

She'd still had the thought of dropping down after the woman left, since crime was crime at the end of the day, but she'd decided to wait and instead settled in to follow him, curious to see if he might lead her somewhere more useful than random back alleys. One thing she'd noticed over the past couple of hours was that people rarely looked up and considering she wasn't wearing white and gold or anything else that drew the eye, she'd been almost invisible against the backdrop of the night's sky when they did happen to do so.

The man she was following had the appearance of anyone else she'd seen, which Madison supposed was the point. She imagined the cliché drug dealers she'd seen on TV shows weren't the ones who lasted particularly long without drawing attention to themselves after all.

Every so often he'd pause in a seemingly random area, waiting around for a while. Sometimes people would show up, sometimes they wouldn't. Some people he passed he called out to, though Madison was too far away to make out what was being said. Either way he was getting customers and she wondered just how much he carried on him, both in drugs and money as she watched contraband and cash exchange hands a dozen or so times.

Madison had been beginning to wonder if it wasn't worth simply busting him and moving on when he'd started walking and didn't stop, some obvious destination in mind as he barely spoke to the people he passed. She'd continued to follow silently, accidentally startling a guy she hadn't seen taking a smoke break behind a large stripped out ventilation unit on one rooftop, but she was already gone before he'd managed more than a curse of surprise.

If she hadn't been sure the man she was following had absolutely no idea she was there, the paranoid part of her might have thought she was being lead into a trap. She'd thought the parts of the Docks she'd already been in were bad, but apparently it was still perfectly able to get worse and she'd had to quickly backtrack more than once when several buildings on a street had simply collapsed leaving her no way forwards.

It was too dark to really make a guess at what could have caused the damage, but part of her wondered if Lung himself might have been responsible at one point or another considering the scale of the devastation she'd seen and what she wondered might have been scorch marks on some of the walls that still remained standing.

It was another twenty minutes before they reached what she was secretly hoping was a minor gang's base. A row of tightly clumped together buildings that Madison might have assumed abandoned, if it weren't for the light coming through the windows of some of them. She watched from her perch as he turned off the sidewalk and walked up to the door of fourth building down and heard him curse as he fumbled in his pockets for something before he pulled out a key and unlocked the door.

'Well now or never I guess' Madison thought to herself, her nerves all over the place as excitement warred with trepidation, not letting herself focus on either as she teleported behind him, retrieving her crowbar into her hand and hiding it behind her back. The door opened and as soon as she saw the inside of the room beyond it she teleported there, spinning back around to face the door as the man entered and she tallied the other two occupants of the room, only one of which had reacted to her appearance.

"Nobody move! I'm a Hero!"

Unfortunately it didn't have quite the reaction she'd been hoping for in her head.

"Cape!"

"Oh fuck it's Oni Lee!"

"Fuck you Oni!"

The thought of just why they all thought she was Oni Lee came second to the man in front of her jamming his hand back into his coat to pull out a revolver. Madison teleported forwards without conscious thought, swinging the crowbar down as the gun came out. There was a scream as her strike connected with the man's hand, an unpleasant crunch that was lost to the crack of the gun discharging into the floor before it fell from his hand to clatter on the ground between them.

Madison stumbled back, startled more by the noise than the fact the man had pulled a gun on her, a shadow falling over her and she moved, suddenly finding herself back outside the building as she teleported herself out of harm's way on instinct. She looked back up to see the man she'd hit in the open doorway as he lurched around, eyes widening as he spotted her.

"There they are, get 'em quick!"

And she teleported back inside.

The other two occupants, a man and woman were on either side of her as she appeared and Madison darted back with a quick step, crowbar coming round in a mean swing that drove the air out of the woman's lungs as metal met flesh. The woman cried out as she stumbled back against the blow and almost bowled into the other man, the knife she was holding tumbling forwards out of her grip to be lost in the clutter of the floor.

The other man was a lot bigger than her, a lot slower too as he tried to spin round in place and looked almost dizzy from doing so, though he made up for it by having a much bigger knife in his own hand.

"Oni Lee you fuck, I ain't dying like them others you prick!"

And then she was behind him as he swung for where she was. Madison kicked out and as overextended as he was the man fell forwards as he tried to steady himself unsuccessfully, colliding with the ratty couch that took up the center of the room and went tumbling over it with a cry of surprise more than any actual pain.

The man in the doorway was going for his gun again and Madison got there first, snatching it off the ground to have it disappear into her Inventory and she was almost too slow to react when the man decided to simply tackle her instead. She teleported back but still stumbled in place, almost tripping over the small TV on its table in front of the couch.

"Just surrender already!" She yelled as she caught herself, eyes darting between the two she could see and the back of the couch where she couldn't. "I'm not Oni Lee, I'm a Hero!"

"She's lying!" the woman yelled as she wobbly stood to her feet clutching her side. "She's wearing that demon mask!"

"It's a fucking domino mask!"

"You can't trick me!"

Madison wanted to scream, but she didn't think that would help. "Look just surrender and I won't have to keep hitting you!"

"You broke my fucking hand!"

"You tried to shoot me!"

There was a groan and Madison spun around to see a large hand gripping the back of the couch as the larger man it belonged to pulled himself up and eyed the three of them like he wasn't sure what to make of the scene, sniffing loudly as a large hand came up to rub his nose. "You haven't been ordered by Lung to kill us? I've heard the stories you know."

This was what she got for robbing, no apprehending! Damn it! Apprehending drug dealers! "I'm not Oni Lee" she tried again, though by that point she felt like she was wasting her breath, since at least two of them were obviously high on their own supply and so added: "I'm not going to kill you either. I'm going to tie you up and call the cops, that's it." 'Or I can keep hitting you' she didn't add, but after almost being shot and gutted twice in short order she wasn't feeling massively charitable.

She watched as the three of them exchange glances.

"Fuck, I surrender you fucking crazy bint" the doorway man said with a glare, still glancing at the other two and Madison caught how his gaze found one of the knives that had fallen just out of easy reach as he clutched his possibly broken hand with the other.

"Screw both you shitheads, I ain't getting shanked by the Oni!" The woman yelled, gaining a sudden burst of speed that caught Madison and probably everyone else by surprise too as the woman barrelled over the man by the doorway and burst out the front door at a run.

Madison teleported out behind her, the claw of the crowbar catching the woman's ankle as Madison swung low and she winced as the woman proceeded to faceplant into the asphalt.

The sigh of relief Madison breathed when she realised the woman herself was still breathing quickly turned into incredulity as the woman shook her head and started to stand up again and try to get away from her. Madison could only stand there and watch for a moment in disbelief as the woman still tried to continue her escape, even as her 'run' came out as more of a teetering wobble than the sprint she'd showcased just a second before.

"Please just stop."

"Nsho, gonsha shanksha mshe."

Madison really didn't want to try dragging the woman all the way back inside the apartment and with the same thought an idea struck her and she teleported forwards, grabbing onto the woman's shoulder and tried to teleport again.

She felt something, like a push on her power and then she was back inside the building where she'd last been, the woman still in front of her and it didn't take much for Madison to push her down onto her knees, where she flopped back into a sitting position in a daze.

Looking up she was surprised to find the other two were still where she'd left them and as if interpreting her look as a question, the big guy who had taken a seat on the couch only shrugged.

"Can't run from the Oni, everyone knows."

Well if it meant she didn't have to chase anyone else then she'd take being mistaken for a man twice her height in a completely different outfit.

In short order she had the three of them zip tied and facing the wall for good measure. The first thing she'd done was to strip the doorway guy of his coat and go through it after the three mooks were secured, emptying out the contents onto what was probably intended to be a breakfast bar of some sort at one point, but instead had one of the corners broken off and was covered in empty fast food boxes she'd pushed onto the floor to join the rest of the mess.

What she had assumed were bags of drugs she'd piled to one side and the money to another before she'd given the place a proper search, making sure to keep an eye on her captives as she did so. Madison had thought about asking the three of them where their stash or stashes were if they had one, but she ultimately decided not to. She wanted plausible deniability at the end of the day and having her arrestees explain how she'd asked them where all their money was wouldn't have given the best impression when said money mysteriously turned up missing afterwards.

In her search she'd found a small plastic box filled with sachets of white powder under the sink which had gone straight onto the maybe-drugs pile and it had taken only a little longer to discover a conspicuously light cereal box that was actually stuffed with unsorted dollar bills.

Deciding to sort through it all when she wasn't at an active crime scene, Madison retrieved a couple of elastic bands from her Inventory. Bundling the cash into several wads and placed them in her pockets just in case her captives were watching, whereupon with another mental command the cash was stored directly into her Inventory out of sight.

With the second half of her job done she let the big guy get some ice out of their freezer for the other two, because as much as they were drug dealers who had tried to kill her multiple times, she was technically robbing them and it felt like the right thing to do regardless.

Watching carefully from the centre of the room as the big guy pressed the bag of ice into the crazy woman's side, Madison pulled out her burner phone and dialled the police, the part of the job she had been least looking forward to when she'd decided to head out earlier that night.

"Nine One One, what's your emergency?"

"Hi, I've captured?-" 'Was that the right word to use?' She wondered briefly before ploughing on. "-Some drug dealers and am calling it in if that's okay?" And if it wasn't she really wasn't sure what she was going to do with herself.

"Thank you, are you or anyone else presently in danger ma'am?"

"Nope."

"And are you or anyone else in need of immediate medical attention?"

"I think I broke one guys hand when he tried to shoot me?"

The glare she got from said guy told her there was no maybe about it.

"Thank you, can you confirm your current address for me?"

Madison blinked, she had no idea where she was. "I can ask the drug dealers I have tied up if you want? Can't you um, trace my call though?" That wasn't just a movie thing was it? Madison was pretty sure it wasn't.

"That's fine ma'am, we can geo-locate your call without a problem."

Madison breathed a mental sigh of relief, she definitely needed to borrow a map at some point, but at least she wouldn't have to teleport everywhere with one eye on her phone's GPS just to know where she was when fighting crime.

She'd been nervous about calling the police, after all she was the kind of person who was nervous calling the local takeout place to make an order. But unlike the Chinese place she hated calling, it didn't feel like the operator hated that she existed and wasn't trying to get her off the phone as quickly as humanly possible.

The woman on the other end of the line had actually made the whole 'calling in crime fighting' thing surprisingly easy, which Madison was immensely grateful for. She'd taken Madison's statement and answered her questions, namely that whilst she didn't technically have to hang around to meet the squad car that was ten minutes out, it would be very much appreciated.

"Thank you ma'am and if I can take your cape name for our records?"

Madison froze as the horrifying realisation hit her, she'd never actually decided on a cape name! "Um I don't have one yet? I'm a new Hero, so um you can call me Ghost for now? No, Ghost Step! Okaythanksbye."

Madison stared down at her phone in horror. She'd just hung up on the police. She'd just hung up on the police after giving them a weird cape name! With a glance towards her captives, who at least seemed to have better things to do than listen to her calling in their upcoming arrests... Or more likely were too high or in pain to care, she teleported back into the street before teleporting again to one of the rooftops that had stood out to her for it's more scenic view on her route in.

"Ghost Step?! What was I thinking that's so lame!" She despaired, pacing back and forth on the gravelled rooftop. "Oh Scion it sounds so villainous too, ugh at least I actually said I was a Hero."

She sighed loudly, glad for the lack of audience for her little act of immaturity as she belatedly stored her crowbar back into her Inventory. "At least that didn't go... Awfully?" She mused as she tried to consider how much of a success she could have called her bust.

Sure she'd almost been shot twice, nearly stabbed at least twice and one of the drug dealers had almost escaped, but none of those things had actually happened. She'd taken drugs and dealers off the streets and by the looks of it got a few hundred dollars towards her costume commission! She was still going to cringe every time she thought of the name 'Ghost Step', but it wasn't the worst thing ever and more importantly it was only temporary anyway!

Part of her wanted to keep going, to keep patrolling and keep looking for trouble, if only to make the night more of a success than she wasn't sure it actually was. But even as she wondered if she didn't necessarily need to sleep quite as much as she used to, she knew she still needed some sleep if she was going to function at all tomorrow, or later depending on what the time actually was. The almost grab bag nature of her powers definitely hadn't made her a Noctis cape and Madison wasn't sure if she was grateful for it or not.

With one last look over the Docks she teleported back to her bedroom, pausing at the odd sensation of going from the constant sounds and smells of the city to the sudden silence of her own bedroom before shaking her and started getting ready for bed. "At least I know for sure I can teleport anywhere I've been before" she considered with a whisper to herself as she slipped into her pyjamas, keeping a careful ear out just in case she heard one of her parents moving about.

Madison had been slightly concerned that trying to teleport somewhere she'd only been during the day at night time instead wouldn't work since they'd look completely different and it was a relief to know that wasn't the case. It meant she could truly teleport anywhere she'd ever been as far as she knew, which would definitely make meeting up with Parian a lot easier once she figured out how to contact the Rogue and-

Madison gasped, a grin lighting up her face. 'That was it!'