Supers never stop. They may change sides or disappear or die—and many do—but you will never see a superhuman retire.
- Foreword of On the Nature of Superhumans by Vincent Hyde et al., published 2017
#
Hypothermia occurred when the human body dipped below 95 degrees Fahrenheit, which Vivian knew because she’d spent an anxiety-ridden night searching up every possible manner of death that her college town could offer her. She could only hope that she hadn’t already crossed that threshold.
Vivian had made a guess at the extent of Lycoris’ power and been correct enough for the “plan” to work. The red-clad heroine’s ability let her take a snapshot of herself, anything on her body, and anything—or anyone—she happened to be carrying at a given time. Later, she could expend the anchor to teleport to its location and restore herself to the physical condition of the snapshot.
The only caveat was that anything else that went back to the anchor had to be in direct contact with her and willing to come with, so Lycoris had to come back to the jail one more time.
Vivan wondered if a police officer had snapped a shot of her being princess carried by Lycoris. She could hear Lachlan’s voice already: It’s great for the numbers, Viv. C’mon! Just post it!
That wasn’t important right now. She shook her head as she sprinted, trying to recenter herself. The cold made her delirious. Sent her down unproductive trains of thought.
Stick to the plan, she told herself. Stick to the plan.
Alexander was faster than both of them with his flight, so he made it to the jail first and kept going. If everything went as planned, he would enter very loudly through the back.
As Vivian ran, every step sending a jolt of pain through her freezing legs, she used her telekinesis to unclip two stun guns from their holsters at her legs, keeping them hovering around chest level.
Lycoris cheered at that. “I love seeing Kinetics in action. You guys make me wish I was one.”
“Thanks?” Vivian tried. She wasn’t sure what was so interesting about her power, especially when she was barely D-rank. Lycoris had the better deal by far.
The heroine in question looked like she was about to reply, but then they were at the shattered remains of what had once been a glass front door. The next part of Vivian’s shoddy imitation of a plan required them to stay as quiet as they could.
Distantly, they heard the sound of metal slamming against metal.
“He says he’s in,” Lycoris whispered.
I can hear that, thanks. “Got it. We should hurry. You know the way?”
A nod.
Neither of them were chattering anymore, Vivian noted, which might have been because she couldn’t feel her face anymore. That was not a good sign.
It wasn’t getting much colder than it was outside, but that was still lethally frigid given the outfits each of the heroines wore. It was a good thing they had Lycoris’ anchor.
As cold as it was, or maybe because it was so cold, Vivian’s eyes drifted to the cells around them. She’d never seen the inside of a superhuman holding facility outside of movies, so she didn’t know what to expect, but it was immediately clear that this was no ordinary jail.
Rather than traditional metal bars, each of the scant few prisoners they passed were sealed in airtight, hotel-room-style cells behind a thick, semitransparent material that Vivian knew from the Internet was a Synth-created titanium alloy designed to withstand impacts from everything up to a A-rank Brawlers and Marksmen.
Vivian recognized a couple of the prisoners from news articles from the past year in West Lafayette. None of them were conscious, which made it harder. Every inhabited cell they saw had an electronic pad next to it glowing a bright red. The lights were out, unless red lightstrips mounted in the walls and floors were what passed for lighting here.
“Sedated,” Lycoris explained. “It’s a security measure. The emergency lighting, too, which is why it’s so red.”
Despite her early cheeriness, the flower-themed superhero didn’t seem nearly as energetic anymore. The cold was insidious and never-ending in sapping every last iota of life from their bodies.
The sounds of voices ahead brought Vivian’s attention back to reality. Lycoris bent her knees into a stealthy crouching pose that definitely did not help with her stealth in any way, shape or form, and she put a finger to her lips, beckoning Vivian to come silently.
She followed Lycoris as quietly as she could, wincing with every misplaced step. As it turned out, heavy-duty sneakers were not, in fact, sneaky.
Thankfully, Alexander made up for that by being so goddamn loud that anything short of a shout would have been lost.
“—cannot in good faith allow you to walk out of here with a prisoner while you threaten our people,” Vivian heard him bluster a hall or two down. The response was muted, muffled by the walls between them.
She couldn’t feel her ears anymore, she realized. Even within the helmet, she couldn’t.
Have to hurry up, she thought disjointedly. Lycoris was faring slightly better, but only slightly. The first hallway they turned into was a dead end. Vivian caught the other heroine cursing under a puff of white breath as they about-faced.
At length, they found their destination, turning into a final corridor barely wide enough to fit Lycoris and Vivian side-by-side. Halfway down the corridor was a single door marked EMERGENCY BUNKER.
Standing in front of it and obscuring Vivian’s view of the most insufferable hero in Lafayette was a super clad in a costume she’d never seen before. She could only see his back, and her vision was starting to blur with tears, but the frosty mist that emanated from every part of his body confirmed that he was their target.
The plan Vivian had hastily slapped together relied on too many unknowns to go right, but she was grateful that at least one of them had gone correctly. The cold-based super was a Ruler, if she remembered her classifications correctly, and a quick conversation with Lachlan over the phone had confirmed that the widespread control over cold was his only power.
In essence, now that she was behind the super with Alexander distracting him, he wouldn’t be able to detect her so long as she didn’t make herself known.
Which was going to be easier said than done. She had to hug the wall to even walk. Her blood must have been freezing in her veins, because she couldn’t feel anything below her knees. Moving with uncooperative limbs was near-impossible to coordinate properly.
That brought her to the first unknown that hadn’t worked out.
The super was definitely more than ten feet from her. At least twice that, at a guess, and he wasn’t moving towards Alexander at all. Vivian had to close the distance quietly. Alerting him could very well mean the death of everyone inside the bunker.
They were going to be gambling with those lives either way. She hoped the odds were good. The last thing she needed was more blood on her hands.
A sudden surge of doubt crashed into her like a wave into a dike, and it was only the sheer pain of her skin freezing off that kept it from overwhelming her.
Just put one foot in front of the other. Now do it again. Every step felt like an impossibility, especially when Lycoris was no longer leading. She’d opted to stay back, urging Vivian onwards. That hadn’t been in the plan, but Vivian wasn’t going to argue and reveal their position now.
Left. Right. Left. Right. How had she not gotten into range yet? How—
She took one final step and her much-abused limbs finally gave up on her. Vivian tripped.
The cold-Ruler whipped his head around to look at her as she crashed to the ground, eyes widening behind his mask.
He took a step towards her, freezing fog rolling off him in waves. “Stop!”
Vivian hit the ground with a clatter as he took another step forward, her limbs tangling. Shit.
“I don’t want to hurt you, but I will,” the super said, gesturing. The fog stopped before it could roll over her prone body. “I don’t want violence. Ephi needs my help, please, just—“
And he stepped into Vivian’s range.
She smiled from her position on the ground, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to see her through the helmet, and she raised an unfeeling hand.
Can’t show them the limit break, she thought dimly. Can’t—have to—showoff—
With the last of her energy, she formed a finger gun and “fired” it.
At the same time, she activated her power, targeting one of the few places she remembered from those nights spent studying anatomy instead of her actual homework.
She’d drilled herself again and again on a model head liberated from the biology department, repeating her power usage until she was absolutely, one hundred percent sure she wouldn’t hit something fatal.
The fifth cranial nerve was located between the ears and the eyes, just under the brain. When compressed only a few millimeters, it caused a condition known as trigeminal neuralgia, a condition painful enough that it was often described as a lightning bolt stabbing into the face.
Moving a nerve a few millimeters was nothing to her telekinesis.
The super screamed, holding both hands up to his face, and the entirety of his power coalesced around him, surging towards Vivian.
Her vision faded. The edges at first, then all of it at once.
Vivian heard a buzz, a crackle, and then—nothing at all.
#
It’s so warm.
Vivian yelped in surprise. She could see again, and she wasn’t even cold. It wasn’t the odd, fake warmth that the mind produced in the final stages of freezing to death—she was genuinely, actually warm.
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“Wow, you really came down to the wire on that one,” Lycoris said. Her voice was oddly close—oh.
Right. Lycoris’ anchor returned people to the state they were in when she created it. Given the final sensations Vivian had felt, she assumed the power had to have triggered, which in turn meant that she was being princess-carried once more.
“I’m not freezing to death anymore, so I assume it worked,” Vivian said as Lycoris set her down. The other heroine just looked at her for a second, aghast.
Is there something on my face?
“Okay. That was fucking awesome, Mantis. I see where you got the name,” Lycoris said, giving her two thumbs up. “Are you… alright?”
Mantis. Not Shrimp. I’ll take that, Vivian thought, trying not to let her smile show.
“What? Yeah, of course,” she said, making a show of dusting herself off.
Lycoris’ eyes were hidden behind her mask, but her lips quirked for a second before smoothing. What was her deal?
“Alexander says he’s got the super in a cell now,” Lycoris said. “Good shit, Mantis Shrimp. God, your full name’s a mouthful. I don’t like it. I think you should just pick one of those to go by. I’m calling you Mantis.”
Vivian shrugged. “I think it’s fine.”
The red-masked heroine stuck her tongue out. “Your funeral. Come on, let’s get inside. I wanna talk credit.”
“Credit?”
“C’mon!” Lycoris set off to the jail once more, this time some sixty degrees warmer. “Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”
“Five minutes. If we’re not done by then, I’m out.”
#
Okay, Vivian thought. Maybe five minutes was a bit conservative.
Even though the outside temperature was closer to thirty or forty degrees than negative twenty, Vivian and Lycoris had still been majorly affected by the chill at the time of creating the anchor and it was still a rather chilly autumn.
Once Vivian had taken the A-rank Ruler down, his power had dropped near-immediately, bringing power back to the jail. It was warm in here and barely above freezing outside, so she’d spent the last few minutes in the headquarters heating herself with a scratchy wool blanket and a paper cup of hot cocoa made from a packet.
“So, credit,” Lycoris said once she’d had her fill of a drink shitty enough to have come from a dining hall but warm enough that neither of them stopped drinking. “Alex, how do you wanna get your clout?”
The hero in question stood with his back to the seated women, tapping away on his phone. “Working on the incident report right now. That’s all I need.”
“Hang on,” Vivian said. “Lycoris, you’re going to have to explain this one to me.”
“Sure thing!” the heroine said cheerily. “Do you know who I am?”
“Uh, I, sorry, I think I might—“
“That’s fine,” Lycoris said, waving a hand. “I’m an up-and-comer. Just rebranded, actually. I’m with EHC. Echelon Hero Corporation, based in Chicago.”
“Wait, I thought you were a Guardian,” Vivian interrupted. “Alexander made it sound like that.”
“Used to be,” Lycoris said, shrugging. “Plus EHC Chicago’s contracted with the Guardians, so I just tapped into the comms. Alex, stop bullying the indies.”
“Just trying to help,” Alexander said automatically. Vivian considered pinching one of his nerves too, then decided that trying her luck against an Aegis while inside a jail meant for people like her was a bad idea.
“Anyway,” Lycoris continued, “you’re not a Guardian, Mantis, which means that you’re in the same boat as me. To get paid to do what we do, we need to do it visibly.”
“I’ve seen some of the promo,” Vivian said. “You’re talking social media and press releases, right?”
“Yep! Actually, I got a Synth who specializes in cameras to give me some tech, so I have recordings of everything. How much are you comfy with me showing?”
“I think you can—hold on, what?”
“Doesn’t your helmet do the same thing?” Lycoris asked. “It should have the tech.”
“I don’t know,” Vivian replied. There were like a dozen features in her helmet that she didn’t know the function of; it was entirely possible one of those was a recorder. “You want to leak footage from the fight?”
“Not leak, share. It’s not just raw footage, either. Look, look! Here’s one from a couple months ago.”
Lycoris shoved a phone under Vivian’s eyes, showing her a clip from @lycoris_official on TikTok. It was high-resolution footage of an entire fight against a villain who looked to be a Marksman of some kind squeezed down into sixty seconds through the power of extreme editing, all set to a backing track of a vaguely familiar earworm.
Not all of the footage was from the flower heroine’s point of view, Vivian noted. There were shots from security camera, a few seconds of drone footage, and a couple similar-quality shots that must have been from her teammates.
Vivian had to admit it was a nice video. It made Lycoris look effortlessly badass, teleporting her team from anchor to anchor and easily outpacing the unnamed villain’s laser attacks, a (censored) display of four superheroes beating the piss out of the Marksman, and it ended with a fantastic pose for the camera. If she had just been a casual superhero fan, she might have started following Lycoris’ activities from this.
“Four point two million views,” the heroine in question crowed. Her face fell, just a little. “It probably won’t go as well here, since we’re in, well…”
“Bumfuck nowhere,” Vivian supplied.
“Ha! Yeah, that. We won’t have as much footage, so it probably won’t go as viral, but I think we can make something work.”
“I… guess. I posted an introduction to my Instagram. That’s all I really have.”
“And the leaks. Don’t forget the leaks. Now that you’re a hero, you can never forget the leaks.”
Vivian winced. “And the leaks.”
“Well, that’s no good. I assume you’re not trying to just rough it? What’s the goal? Wanna go corpo?”
“Eventually,” Vivian admitted. She was suddenly struck with the idea that maybe she shouldn’t talk about wanting to go to Arina with someone from a rival hero organization, so she kept it vague.
“Oh, then you definitely want to get your name out there. They love seeing indies with good socials.”
“I mean, sure, but I can’t do all of whatever that is.” Vivian gestured at the looping video on Lycoris’ phone.
“You have good footage! Tell you what. I do you a favor, you do one for me? I can get in touch with EHC’s editors. I assume you’re fine with everything being released?”
Vivian thought it over. Nothing was terribly incriminating, she was pretty sure. She mentally patted herself on the back for remembering to gesture for her final power usage. “Sure. What favor, though?”
“Well, you were amazing today,” Lycoris said. “How about you join me sometime?”
“Join you?”
“Stop trying to poach indies, Lyco,” Alexander said without looking up.
“I’ll stop when you do,” she replied just as casually. She turned back to Vivian. “It’s win-win. You’re awesome, I’m awesome, and we can get more exposure by grouping up and taking someone down.”
“Are there a lot of those in Chicago?” Vivian asked. “This is the first villain to show his face in a while here.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe. It’s not just Chicago I go to, though. EHC is a national org. We get sent basically everywhere that needs us. Actually, I was visiting a friend here, but that wasn’t all. Have you heard about Killjoy?”
Vivian had never been so glad for the full-face helmet visor than she was now. “I did. Fought him once, actually, just about a month back. He ran a day later.”
“Scared of you, probably,” Lycoris said, chuckling lightly at her own joke. “That makes this a little easier to explain. I’m on a mission here to check out his old hidey-holes and investigate a cold case or two that’ll definitely go nowhere.”
“Cold case?” Vivian asked carefully. If this was about Jester—
“Oh, just some super who stroked out. Some people at EHC think it was an attack. It’s definitely nothing, don’t worry.”
Vivian tried not to let the shock show in her body language. “Uh, alright. So, investigating? What does that mean?”
“Mostly, I’m going to bust whoever took over Killjoy’s facilities. You wanna join?”
Lycoris didn’t have any investigative powers, did she? Was joining her safe?
Those weren’t the only questions, and as much as Vivian hated to admit it, she did want to join the other heroine. She was effortlessly good at her job, and there were benefits to going with her that she couldn’t get alone. Corporate connections, professional media managers, and perhaps most importantly, outlets for her power.
Today was the first time in a month where the neverending buzzing in her head had abated.
She’d already made her decision, she realized. Even if it was suboptimal, there was no amount of logic short of “Lycoris is literally going to kill you” that could talk her heart out of it now.
Besides, she rationalized, I can remove myself from suspicion if I cozy up to the investigator.
“Would you still want me to join you outside of the city?” Vivian asked. “I still have class, but I could make it over a break or a weekend, I guess.”
“Of course! You’re naturally flashy—“ I am? “—and look great, not to mention crazy as shit. All that will fly super well, but we’re not going to be able to make the most out of it here. No offense.”
“None taken,” Alexander said. He finished his report with a flourish. “I’m going to go back to HQ now. You two can handle yourselves?”
“Yeah, ‘course,” Lycoris said. “Tell the warden we won’t be too long.”
“Sure thing,” Alexander replied. He paused as he turned to fly off. “V—Mantis. Remember, the Guardians’ door is always open. It’ll save you a lot of pain.”
Before Vivian could think of an appropriately quippy response, he was gone.
“Asshole,” she grumbled.
“He’s just mad he took a government job when the pressure got hot instead of kicking it with a corp that offers fifty percent more pay,” Lycoris said, her demeanor shifting a shade. She pursed her lips, then continued onwards just as cheerily as she had earlier. “So what do you say? Team up with me now and then one more time in Chicago or somewhere else, get some kickass presence online in exchange?”
Vivian considered it, trying to weigh her options. She was already emotionally convinced to proceed, but she had to consider this logically. What else could she get?
Apparently, the pause as she thought was too long for Lycoris.
“Come oooon,” she wheedled. “Okay, I guess I’m asking more out of you. How ‘bout I sweeten the pot? Say… seventy-five hundred dollars cash? That sounds fair.”
Holy shit. For the third time in the last two minutes, Vivian was glad the other hero couldn’t see her face. “I… yeah, that’s fair.”
$7500 was a lot. It wasn’t enough to do everything her family needed, but it was more money than she’d earned from any source in her nineteen years of life.
“Yay!” Lycoris cheered. “I don’t think I’m going to finish the patrol I was doing before thanks to this kerfluffle. Wanna come drink with me?”
That was it? Vivian had thought that real progress towards her ultimate goal of Arina would feel important, but this was just a conversation. The money was fantastic, but… that was it?
Also, hold on. “Are you even old enough to drink? I know I’m not.”
“I’ve experienced death a thousand times,” Lycoris said, leaning back. “I’ve been stabbed, shot, torn limb from limb, frozen, burned, poisoned, dismembered… I won’t bore you with the full list. If that’s allowed to happen to me, then so is drinking a few years too early.”
“Oh. I don’t know how to respond to that,” Vivian said frankly.
“Nobody does!” she replied, all smiles. Vivian had to wonder how much of that was a facade and how much was Lycoris genuinely being infallibly cheerful. Either way, it was disturbing. Nobody normal just… said that. “C’mon, Mantis. You fought a supervillain that turned you into a Popsicle. You deserve this.”
No, Vivian almost answered. She frowned. Why am I so against this? Drinking had never been a favorite activity of hers, but it wasn’t like she’d never had a beer before.
“The bars at the school suck,” she pointed out.
“Who said anything about the school?” Lycoris asked. “I’ll show you someplace better.”
#
“When you said better, this is not exactly what I pictured,” Vivian said. A gust of wind whistled over the knee-high parapet, rustling her bodysuit. She shivered. “Do you even have permission to be up here?”
“Of course I do,” Lycoris said. “It’s a Guardian spot! High spots like this are great for line-of-sight based Espers.”
“And you’re technically a Guardian because of your contract with them?” Vivian guessed.
“Got it in one!”
“Okay. But why?”
The two of them stood just shy of a three hundred foot drop on the roof of the Lafayette Hyatt, which just so happened to be the tallest building in town by roughly thirty feet.
Okay, Vivian was standing. Lycoris sat on the parapet with a bottle in each hand, her feet swinging out over a drop that would most certainly be fatal. Getting used to dying meant a lessened fear of danger, she supposed.
That, or Lycoris just gave exactly zero shits about her safety. To be fair, both could be true.
Vivian wasn’t scared of heights (which she mentally thanked seven years of rock climbing for), but even she was a little unsure of getting inebriated on the edge of a three-hundred-foot fall. She sat down with her legs on the inside.
“Here,” Lycoris said, handing her an unlabeled translucent bottle that carried some kind of pink liquid. “You said you weren’t a huge fan of alcohol, right? This isn’t too strong.”
Vivian took the glass and looked at it dubiously. She used her power to unscrew the cap and toss it aside and sniffed it. It didn’t have the same bitterly sour scent that the stuff her dad kept trying to get her to drink had, so she gave it a try. The drink tasted like slightly sour peaches with more sweetness than she’d thought there would be.
“Huh,” she said. “Not bad. Which makes it the best alcohol I’ve had, thanks.”
Lycoris giggled and raised her own bottle to clink it against Vivian’s. Hers was filled with a brownish-black liquid that looked and smelled absolutely foul.
They drank for a bit, watching what little they could see of the stars and the city together. It was almost peaceful.
Almost.
“I have class tomorrow morning,” Vivian said eventually. “I get off for the day around four or five, though. Does that work for you?”
“Sure thing!” Lycoris said. “We should probably check with the other guy, though.”
“Other guy?”
Lycoris smiled wider and waited. And waited.
The silence stretched on for nearly fifteen seconds before she finally let out a sigh, taking another swig from her shoe polish—er, her drink. “Timing these things is so much easier when you have an Esper on your team. He should be up in—”
The door to the roof clicked, and Lycoris tossed her hands up in the air, accidentally sloshing some of the contents of her bottle onto the concrete parapet in the process. She swung her legs over to join Vivian and gestured grandiosely.
“Close enough!” she announced, pointing towards the door. “Hi!”
It swung open.
“Hey there,” Lachlan said, shit-eating grin locked and loaded. “I hear we’re getting up to some trouble?”