“This is the right thing to do,” Bedevil tells herself as the trap springs into place. She ignores the bloom of guilt… As soon as Home Run called her yesterday, she informed the Houston Heroes and her mother, and they drew up a plan to capture Home Run and the Front, and potentially even Pandahead, all at once. Now, it’s apparent Pandahead isn’t here. Meaning the two birds, one stone thing wasn’t going to pan out. But, well, perhaps she can still untangle that after they have Home Run in hand.
The Front are now making an escape, but Home Run and his kid friend are still trapped in the yard. Much like the Fence surrounding the Null Domain, the Fence surrounding the yard can’t be crossed by any conventional means. The Front’s empath, of course, was able to get herself and several others out, but it looked as though she’d deliberately left Home Run and Volition behind.
The pair retreats into the house. Their last refuge.
Hadn’t been easy, fooling an empath into thinking the area was safe. She regards the crate of leftover False Affects - small, black, cylindrical devices that project a false shroud of Affect. Oracle told her they were based on designs from Lilac.
Earlier in the day, they’d evacuated the entire neighborhood and brought in the False Affects to simulate people still being at home. They’d also prepared for the mask named Silent’s super hearing with small speakers. It wasn’t perfect, but at that distance, just the simple sound of people sleeping played over the speakers had been enough to fool her, too. They’d made a gamble that Home Run’s blinders would be on, and it had paid off. He hadn’t even looked at the houses around them.
Home Run really gave them everything. Gave her everything.
One of the houses on the next street over from Shortfin’s house is their temporary command center. Dozens of Houston’s capes are gathered there, including the Houston Heroes. Bedevil has all the resources she needs to bring Home Run in. “Highheart, can you go after the Front with Krater the other capes? Flashfire, we’ll go for Home Run.” She’s shut off the part of herself that is screaming that this is murder, this is betrayal, this is evil. Because at the end of the day, what matters is that the world is protected, whether or not it kicks its feet and wails in protest about it.
“Always on the sidelines,” Krater grumbles, joining Highheart to chase after the Front.
Flashfire has a hungry look on his face. “I can’t fucking wait to get this cocksucker.”
“Steady,” she says. “Let’s push in with the drones. Get ready to lower the fence so we can extract. And Flashfire, take it easy. There are civilians inside and we can’t have any collateral damage.”
The storm of drones surrounding the building pushes through the windows and threads into the doors, their deadly needles seeking out the two masks inside.
Bedevil glances down at the monitor showing them the camera feeds from inside the building. Home Run crawls on the ground, almost like he’s in pain, or weeping. The part of herself she is cutting off until she can get disentangled again weeps with him. Wants to rush in there, to pick him up, to tell him it’ll be okay.
But then, Home Run stands up. Bedevil can’t help but admire that he squares his chest and lifts his head and shoulders. He’s going to fight, she realizes. He’s going to make a stand.
“I think we should go in there. If we give him any breathing room, he’ll build up strength,” Flashfire says. “You said his power puts off a lot of heat, right, and he seems to hold himself back around other people? If we push now, we could get him with those civies and the kid holding him back.”
Bedevil nods, ignoring the guilt again. But as they make to leave, one of the other capes, a woman in a purple bat like costume, pulls up another monitor with drone footage of multiple mask gangs in the area. “We may have more than just the Front here tonight.”
Great. Bedevil can barely stop from grabbing her temples. “Alright. That’s why we’re all here. Everybody, mobilize - arrest any masks on sight. Lethal force authorized; the neighborhood is clear of civilians.”
She floats across the road, suspended by her tendrils, Flashfire just behind her. Everything is empty and quiet around her, dark and ominous.
The fence is still buzzing. Projected at a slight angle, it completely surrounds the estate, forming a golden pyramid around the house. There’s an Affect current running through the ground, too, so Home Run can’t dig through the earth to flee.
She calls Dotty up and speaks into the drone to project her voice: “Please come out with your hands up. If we detect any Affect flux, we will use deadly force.”
Flashfire lands just behind her. “Can we just go in there and get this cocksucker?”
That means opening the box to try and get the hissing snake out. But even with Volition as collateral, doing so might let Home Run get away, so they’ll need to move fast. “He can’t let loose, but neither can we.”
“You’re sure he cares about anyone but himself?” he asks.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
We’re doing the right thing.
She holds out her finger to Flashfire to say one minute and steels herself for what might be a seizure-inducing use of her power. If they’re going to have to turn off the Fence, they’ll need something else that Home Run can’t punch his way through.
Lonsdaleite is an allotrope of carbon that, in its purest form, has a Mohs hardness scale rating higher than diamond. When formed naturally during the immense heat of meteor strikes, impurities weaken the atomic crystal structure. However, when synthesized by, say, Bedevil’s power over subatomic structures, lonsdaleite is theoretically one of the hardest materials on the planet.
She starts propagating this change in a hollow cube with six-inch-thick walls around the entire estate, outside the Affect trap. At first, it’s fine, but as she gets to the three-quarters mark of being done, around 30 seconds in to using her power, the pressure starts to build behind her eyes. As when they were buried under rubble, she begins to feel like she’s slipping into that abstract space between molecules, the cracks between reality.
She grimaces, fights against it, pushes through. Just a few more seconds and-
The box is complete. Flashfire laughs when he turns around and sees the wall of extremely dark carbon behind him, sealing off the world. Everything goes pitch black, but Dotty’s sapphire gaze lights up the world for them.
Now Bedevil hasn’t so much as opened the box with the snake as she has sealed herself in with it. But she didn’t have a seizure making it happen, so good. She takes her handheld out, where she has the controls for the barrier. “Careful with your power. Fire might use up our air, although we should have plenty.”
She hesitates before pressing the button.
This is still the right thing to do, she thinks, before lowering the Affect barrier.
Flashfire’s white fire lights up the entire boxed-in estate as he flies in to find Home Run. Bedevil latches onto him with her tendrils and rides him in.
The attack hits as they make it to the front door. From one of the nearby trees, a set of four dining chairs rips toward them at the speed of sound, aimed right at Flashfire’s head. Bedevil extends her barrier of air to protect him, and the chairs turn into molten pancakes as they smash against the shield.
Home Run has done something very smart - Volition is barricaded behind tables and chairs to keep him out of trouble inside the house. And right after the opening salvo, Home Run tackles Flashfire to the opposite side of the box, taking all that heat and fury as far away from the kid as possible. Flashfire snarls, yells, kicks and punches while filling his fists with blinding white flame, but none of it seems to slow Home Run at all.
“You stay away, imperialist!” Volition cries, pointing his finger out from the thorny bush of cafeteria furniture he’s hiding in. He has a hissing, whirling ball of light in his hand he’s about to lob through the metal bramble.
Bedevil can barely stop herself from rolling her eyes. She doesn’t even dignify it with a response, but instead marches forward.
“You asked for it!” Volition hurls the ball at her. It hits her shield, and she’s surprised to feel how sharp it is against her power. If it had hit her bare skin, it would have chewed through her.
But Bedevil is covered in her power, and while it’s not easy, she melts through Volition’s barricade. “C’mere you little shit.”
“Woah, déjà vu!” He tries to slice her head off with one of those light disks she’s seen him fly around on.
But the simple fact of the matter is she’s Heavyweight, and he’s Cruiser at best. She wraps him up in invisible cords of air and drags him outside. He tries to cut through his binds with his power, almost succeeds, but Bedevil reinforces the areas he cuts.
When she gets outside, Flashfire is not doing well. Their situations are entirely reversed.
Home Run has his arms wrapped around Flashfire’s neck, despite the cape blazing with phosphorous fire on every inch of his skin. She knows that Home Run could squeeze Flashfire’s head off in that position.
Flashfire squirms in his grasp, hissing with rage. “I’ll get you, I’ll fucking get you, fucking dickhead.”
Home Run is deadly still, his gaze locked on Bedevil. And then, realization and horror roll off him like the tidal wave after a meteor impact. Bedevil can’t help but echo his emotions.
He recognizes her. “You’re Kitsune.”
Bedevil can say nothing.
“She’s your fucking girlfriend?” Volition shouts.
Whenever a liar is exposed, they go one of two ways. They double down, they get angry, and they dig their heels in. Or, they hear the tinkling glass of their shattered life and tiptoe, guiltily, around what they’ve done. Bedevil finds herself caught between these two paths - it shouldn’t matter to her that Home Run knows, especially because he’s a dangerous mask.
But Bedevil hasn’t had time to go and get disentangled again. The feelings she has for him are still in her, they are still real, and they are making it very hard to think right now.
Home Run squeezes Flashfire in his chokehold again. “You… if you have any heart… if any of this was real…” he says, his chest heaving, his rage filling the air so quickly she might drown in it if it were water, “keep him safe and get him out of here. Get him way from this.”
“I have to take you in, hot stuff,” Bedevil says.
“You could have… at any time.” Home Run is on the knife’s edge of a scream. “You could have, but you didn’t. After we… after I thought you were safe… you wait until I’m fucking head over heels for you?”
Bedevil can’t answer that. Can’t tell him that’s exactly why it’s happening.
Flashfire groans, making a funny face. “What the fuck?”
“These hoes ain’t loyal!” Volition shouts at Home Run. “Come on, you can go ham, I don’t care!”
Bedevil resents that. She conjures a rag and wraps it around Volition’s mouth, muffling him. “Home Run, please. Please make this easy on all of us. We can talk about it at the Shrine.”
“No. You don’t get it. What they did to me, what they are still doing to people,” Home Run says. “They’ll put me in one of those dampeners or make me into some weapon. I’m not going to do it.”
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She remembers the PK dampener, the organic material she found in it. The people being melted in those vats.
Her faith is faltering.
“What do you mean?” Bedevil asks.
“Don’t-” Flashfire groans.
“PK, the capes, they’re building tech out of people! If you take me, if you hand me over, I won’t die, Kitsune, I’ll be made into something worse than death.” Home Run points at Volition. “You promise me, you keep him safe. You don’t let them take him, either.”
Bedevil wishes she could see who he was under the mask. But the waves of Affect rolling from him right now tell her that he’s being honest. He really believes what he’s saying.
And if he’s so terrified of going back… what is Bedevil not seeing that’s waiting for him?
Bedevil doesn’t have anything to say. But Kitsune answers for her: “He’ll be safe.”
Flashfire snarls. Fights to his feet from his knees, and manages to get free of Home Run’s grip and take a few steps back. “Fuck this. I’m-”
Bedevil has witnessed a thousand apocalypses. A thousand end of the world scenarios. She has seen necromancers and bloodshapers and things people would call gods and demons do battle. She is one of those gods.
But she has never seen anything like this. She can barely even see at all for all the light radiating from Home Run’s body. He is a piece of the sun molded into a human shape.
She raises a barrier just in time, using her power to create an invisible but impermeable shield around herself and Volition, a sheath that doesn’t transfer kinetic energy at all. And still this shield shakes as Home Run unleashes his strength. An impossible amount of force hits her like a hammer. It would have been enough to vaporize her and the kid instantly. It’s almost enough to trigger another seizure.
The sun elemental crouches. The earth shakes as he gathers up his power. The floor shatters beneath his feet as he launches himself at Flashfire. White fire pours out of the cape’s hands, washing over Bedevil’s shield, blinding her for a second.
The light vanishes. All that’s left is a cratered hole in the ceiling of the lonsdaleite barrier.
“Come with me,” Bedevil says, grabbing Volition’s hand, “Unless you want to die.”
Volition nods, awestruck at the power Home Run just unleashed.
Bedevil flies them through the hole in the lonsdaelite barrier. Once she gets back outside, she hears the sounds of fighting all through the neighborhood. Guns, powers, explosions, the alien sounds of Affected battle. And a new sun has been added to the sky, where Home Run and Flashfire are duking it out.
Bedevil brings Volition back to house manned by the other Houston capes, handing him off to the same woman who’d alerted her to the other masks. “Make sure he’s safe and restrained.”
“What the hell! You promised him I’d be safe!” Volition shouts.
“You will be. I’m not going to let anything-” Bedevil starts, but then he starts conjuring a light disk. Bedevil snuffs that out too by locking his fingers in place and sealing the disk away in another invisible sheath of air.
Firmly locked down, the kid resorts to begging: “You can’t do this!”
But the woman places a dampener on the kid’s wrist, and it’s over.
Bedevil glances at the monitors, trying to get a feel for the situation before she heads back out there to see if she can get Home Run to back down. Chaos is breaking out across the perimeter. It looks like there were almost a hundred masks gathered tonight - a veritable army of them.
Outside, there’s a loud boom, and then Krater and Highheart come through the door empty-handed. Highheart shakes her head. “The Front have some kind of teleportation ability.”
“They just disappeared into a wall,” Krater says. “Where’s Home Run?”
In answer, a meteor streaks over the street - Home Run and Flashfire locked in a furious battle. Bedevil sees the tempest following their war knocking capes and masks to the ground, breaking windows, even upending trees, but she has no time to react before the shock wave hits the house, shattering the windows. Bedevil almost buckles under that, just the shock of it.
“Come on!” she shouts, slinging herself out the door, leading the charge of the rest of the capes.
Flashfire lands in a haphazard shamble next to her, starts limping toward Krater while screaming: “He’s coming this way!” He grimaces, clutching his ribs, and Bedevil gasps at the blood seeping out from a jagged cut in his suit.
The hairs on the back of her neck stand up. They’re looking at another Carnality after all. We underestimated him, Bedevil thinks. I underestimated him. I underestimated him and I made out with him.
Home Run roars down onto them like a missile, streaking across her vision. She can barely see him for all the light radiating out of his skin. The heat of him is so intense it starts to turn the pavement a dull red. The hurricane force winds that come with him threaten to upend everything.
Bedevil slaps the ground with her hand, trying to conjure a wall of stone to protect the capes from what will be their blazing death. But Home Run rotates mid-air, rolling so deftly he just skids by Bedevil’s wall and misses the pair hiding behind it.
His intent is not Krater, not Highheart, not even Bedevil.
Krater smashes his fist into the street to avoid being blown away. His mouth moves as if he’s yelling, but all sound is swallowed by the gales that followed the shock wave.
Bedevil shouts at the capes, “Focus on Home Run!” but she can’t even hear herself over the roaring wind.
The missile that is Home Run strikes Flashfire. Through the light Bedevil can just make out the two of them wrestling. Home Run manhandles her teammate, one foot planted on the man’s thigh, one hand melting through his suit - a suit that shouldn’t melt, should be able to stand up to fire. The capes who were nearby scream and run, while Krater pulls Highheart to safety.
Bedevil slaps the ground with her hand, separating the pair with another wall, buying Flashfire the time he needs to take flight and for others to intervene. With Highheart safe, Krater descends on Home Run, diving into the furnace of his power. Dozens of capes follow hislead, the ones that can withstand the heat.
It’s too late, now. Bedevil was right at the gala. The fear that makes them band together to bring Home Run down is the same fear making him invincible, the thousands and thousands of engrams donated to him by high level capes. The Affect weaves as it will and it has woven Home Run into a monstrosity.
But it can’t just be that, can it? This power is insane. Beyond what any Heavyweight alive should currently be able to bring to bear.
No one can even see what is happening, only the aftermath. Krater, buried in rubble with a burning fist mark on his chest. Highheart, groaning on the sidewalk. The other capes dispatched, all alive somehow. As if he’s somehow still being gentle with them.
Bedevil rushes to Krater’s side. She pulls him out of the rubble, places a hand on his chest to cool the molten mark with her power. Krater hisses. “What the fuck, Bedevil?”
“You have to get your teams under control. Their Affects are making him stronger,” Bedevil says. “We have got to calm down, all of us.”
“How the hell am I supposed to get them to calm down?” Krater asks.
“Figure it out.” Bedevil pushes him back to his feet with tendrils of rock woven from the rubble, and then sprints off to keep Home Run from doing further damage.
Home Run seems to be cooling down: she can actually see him, and he’s not shedding that horrible light anymore. Instead, he is running among the masks that are still scrambling to safety. He waves his arm, shouts, “Run! Go! Don’t trust the gates, they shut them off!”
Bedevil slings from building to building with her invisible tendrils, and catches up to Home Run just as Flashfire roars in overhead. The cape pours his white fire like a hellish rain on the street below.
“Damn it, no!” Bedevil shouts.
The geyser swallows Home Run and dozens of masks below, catches everything in the inferno.
“I got you, cocksucker! I got you!” Flashfire shouts in glee. Flames pour from his hands, from his body, turning him into a blazing star.
She reaches out with her Affect to sense the molecules, to see if anyone still exists in that wash of flame or if they’re all currently melting away. And what she sees shouldn’t shock her, but it does.
Home Run, diving through the flames, unhurt. The people that should have all been burnt alive by Flashfire’s careless attack, safe, hiding in a building on the other side of the road, away from the flames.
“He’d make a great cape, wouldn’t he?” she thinks.
Flashfire doesn’t relent - he just keeps bathing the street in his power.
A voice speaks like thunder out of the roaring flames. “You evil fuck. You don’t care who gets burnt, do you?” A blue-white hand emerges from the torrent. The rest of Home Run follows as he grabs Flashfire’s face. Flashfire’s glee breaks. He screams in agony.
Home Run dives through the flames and brings Flashfire to the ground. Bedevil takes advantage of their landing. She slaps the ground, her Affect stirs the cement, and a cocoon three feet thick wraps around the wrestling gods. The prison shakes and cracks, and with a horrible shriek it explodes, and a blazing meteor shoots into the sky and arcs away from the fight.
Bedevil, only a dozen feet from the explosion, blacks out. The last thing she’s aware of is the smell of iron and smoke.
She fades in again to someone’s desperate plea: “Bedevil, please, get up.”
Bedevil groans and sits up. Highheart kneels next to her. The world is only the molten street around them, smelling of blood and death.
“Status?” she asks.
“Very bad,” Highheart says, looking around at the destruction. “And Flashfire’s gone. Along with Home Run.”
Then, the shock hits her. They just got steamrolled by one person. And not just that he steamrolled them. Anyone who’s alive on the street right now has him to thank for it.
Krater runs up to them, his eyes wide. His stone skin sloughs off in heaps as he rushes to their side. “What on God’s good earth was that? Who the fuck is this guy, Bedevil?”
The word Superheavyweight sticks to the back of her throat. Bedevil knows of only a handful of that kind. Megajoule, Phoenix, Carnality, and her mother. Some Cloaks that are dead now.
And now, Home Run.
“Where’s that kid?” Bedevil asks, rising to her feet. “He’s Home Run’s friend. He’ll have answers for us.”
Volition, unmasked, is currently restrained back in the house, the PK cuff on his wrist set just enough that all he’s able to conjure are some weak sparks. He’s still got his emotions, which he makes excellent use of as Bedevil joins him in the back of the truck. He hits her with the dirtiest of glares and she can feel his hostility in the air.
But the worst thing for Bedevil is that he really is just a kid. Maybe thirteen at most. Greasy black hair dangling, untrimmed and ungroomed, over his face, which is riddled with acne.
Bedevil sighs, sits next to him. Krater waits outside the back of the truck, looking in at Bedevil’s interrogation.
“Are you injured?” Bedevil asks.
“Fuck you, I’m not telling you shit,” Volition says.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“I said-“
Bedevil snaps a finger, and Dotty unfolds out of her inert form. She shines her sapphire light into Volition’s face, and whatever he’s got in his head, now Oracle knows it, too. She’s only ever needed a glimpse of the face. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”
“What?” Volition asks, his eyes wide. “You can read minds?”
“Not me,” Bedevil says, exhausted.
“Oracle,” Krater murmurs.
Dotty beeps suddenly. Then again. A third time, and she begins to waver in the air, dipping and shaking and bobbing like she’ll fall dead.
Bedevil stands up, unnerved. What the hell is her mother doing?
Oracle weaves herself out of thin air. She modifies her height so that she just manages to fit into the truck’s back compartment, looking down at Volition like a vengeful ghost, a white, wide-eyed monster ready to snap him up with her teeth.
Bedevil stammers, absolutely shocked that Oracle would go to the effort to conjure herself - and not just for her, but for everyone. Volition and Krater both gasp at the sight of her unfolding from nothing.
“So this is where he went,” Cynthia hisses.
“You can eat my taint!” Volition shouts back at her. “You freaky ghost lady! I don’t even know who you are!”
Oracle turns her ghostly head toward Highheart. “Effective immediately, City-General, the investigation into Home Run is being turned over to new agents, Phoenix and Meltdown. Expect them in Houston by the end of the month. You will take Bedevil into custody until they arrive, to turn her over to them.”
Bedevil stands, outraged. “What?!”
“You- You have no idea what you’ve done,” Oracle says, whirling around on her. “What you have let slip between your fingers. The depth of your failure tonight because of your emotions is too grave for me to allow you to continue to waltz around Houston freely.”
“I did what you asked, I got disentangled, and I’ve collaborated on everything with you!” Bedevil shouts.
“You have allowed your love for him (“Love?” Highheart asks, stunned) to misguide you, and because you haven’t been sober in years, you’ve no idea how to manage your response to him.” Oracle turns away from her daughter, giving her the coldest of all shoulders.
“Love? I don’t… love him! Attracted, sure, but come on!” Bedevil doesn’t understand, can’t see whatever secret her mother sees. “And I’m sober! I’m sober enough!”
Her mother doesn’t answer to that, just waves her hand dismissively, before turning back to Volition.
“No! Mom, you’ve seen all of this for years, you’ve known about it and allowed it! I demand you explain, because this isn’t right!”
“No. This is beyond you now. Highheart, I meant what I said. Arrest Ruby Dawson and hold her for extraction. That is an order.” Oracle gestures for the capes in the temporary command room to arrest her. “As for the boy, return him to the Houston Shrine. Bedevil’s drone will stay with him until I’m done.”
“Mom-” Bedevil tries, but her mother silences her by speaking directly into her brain: LEAVE. ALL OF YOU LEAVE.
She tries to resist, tries not to move, tries not to get up and step out of the truck. It’s a contest of wills she could never hope to win. Her mother’s command is an unscalable cliff. Her body moves of its own accord, her muscles scream under the yoke of Oracle’s power, and she steps out of the house.
“What in the fresh hell,” Highheart murmurs when they’re outside. “She can influence at range?”
All of the capes have gone outside, just as Oracle ordered. They all shake their heads, blink, wipe tears from their eyes leftover from Oracle’s intense presence.
Bedevil groans, her body finally coming back to her control.
“You’re drunk?” Krater asks. His Affect, so easy to read, tells her that he’s overcome with a mix of pity, awe, and horror. “Right now?”
“That’s what you got out of all that?” Bedevil grimaces. She is in fact drunk right now. Her brain has been simmering 24 / 7 for the last four years of her life.
Krater shakes his head, crosses his arms and walks away from her. “Can’t say I’m not disappointed.”
It’s a drop in the bucket to lose the engrams from him, but she does feel it. With someone as strong as him, it’s easy to feel his Affect stop feeding into hers, his admiration, his deference and respect. Only a bit of pity is left, and no power comes with that.
What shocks her is that this is the thing that does it, not any of the anger at Vanguard, not how the capes here have butt heads over how to handle Home Run. This stupid little problem that her mother knew about the whole damn time, and outed in front of everyone like it was a revelation.
And that’s really what grates her now: her mother acting like this is a hindrance when Bedevil has operated more than fine, exemplary, even, for years, even while struggling with her own problems. There was never a day she was too hungover to show up for work, never a day where she was too drunk to do her job right. Never a day where the bottle had bested Bedevil.
She grits her teeth. There’s something wrong with all of this. Even drunk, her mind rankles at the missing piece at the center of it, that her mother now knows and she doesn’t. It has to be Home Run. And she has to find him, now.
“Sorry, Krater, I’m going to continue to disappoint you,” she whispers. And before any of these capes can restrain her, before Highheart can put a hand on her to stop her from using her power, Bedevil exerts her Affect and dissolves the pavement beneath her feet, slipping down into the earth, reforming it above her head as fast as she falls.