As the sun sent its first tentative rays trembling through the city smog, I climbed the rickety stairs onto the roof of the warehouse containing my secret lair. Crouched just inside the door, I nervously stroked the red ribbon that I had tied around my bun.

It looked ordinary enough at first glance, although the red painted wooden toggles at either end were not what you would normally find on a hair ribbon. The mundane outer appearance hid a core of piano wire, sewn between two strips of red ribbon. Combined with the wooden toggles on either end, it would make a convenient garrotte, should the need arise to take a hostage.

This wasn’t like robbing the bank, where I could swoop down and swoop out again, easily avoiding anyone who might want to stop me. I would be walking straight into an office full of people, and the only way to keep them from banding together against me was to keep them afraid.

I carefully poked my head around the door to the roof, making sure there was no one in sight. The rooftop was silent and still in the dawn light. Gritting my teeth, I stepped out from the cover of the building and shut the door carefully behind me. The light playing over my skin made me feel horribly exposed. I longed for the comforting embrace of darkness.

Before I could talk myself out of this crazy plan, I forced myself into motion, sprinting across the rooftop and throwing myself into empty space.

The exercise eased my nerves, and I was almost smiling by the time I reached my chosen target. It was an innocuous concrete box of a building that contained the offices of “Weather AM, keeping you up-to-date on what’s comin’ at ya today!”

Weather AM had the widest viewership of any weather network in Toronto, and today there would be an extra-special treat for all those early morning commuters out there.

The rooftop was wide and large, empty of any protection against the supervillain currently stalking across it. I shook my head at their lax security. Then again, who would think to attack a weather channel? Still, the lack of rooftop security everywhere I went, made me wonder if anyone had common sense in this city. Surely I was not the first supervillain to take advantage of the fact that the higher you climbed, the laxer security became. I had only actually been in the city for a week and had already used this to my advantage on multiple occasions.

Although the building had no convenient door leading onto the roof, I simply stuck my hands in the concrete wall and slid down the until I reached the nearest window. A quick peek inside revealed it led into an empty office.

The window, which had previously led a sedentary existence, was thrilled to meet me, and moved politely out of my way. Glass was one of my favourite materials to work with, because it was always so eager to move, being halfway between a liquid and a solid already. The particles of glass stroked my arm as I pushed it inside, producing the odd sensation of passing through a gentle waterfall.

After a quick, sightless fumble for the latch, the window swung open, the glass gliding straight through my arm with a tingling sensation. I pulled my legs from the exterior wall and hauled myself through the narrow opening, tumbling to the floor with a soft thump.

The office was small, but tidy. A computer was open to a web page that almost certainly had nothing to do with working here, and a steaming mug of coffee sat on the desk. I took note of both these details, and hurried to the office door, eager to get away before any...complications arose.

I tiptoed silently out of the room and down the hallway. There were offices on either side, people busily working away in many of them, but to my extreme good fortune all of their chairs were facing away from their office doors, and the hallway was entirely empty.

Ducking into the stairwell, I crept down flight after flight, poking my head out at each landing to listen for the telltale sound of a weather reporter. It wasn’t until the second floor that I finally found what I was looking for. I slipped out of the stairwell and made my way down the hallway in absolute silence, heading for a big glass-walled room at the very end. There were half a dozen people sitting at computers along the far wall, and bright lights aimed at a spot outside my field of vision. An incredibly fancy camera sat facing the same direction.

A smile crept onto my face as I pulled open the heavy glass door and entered the filming room. For a moment I stood inside the door, eyes flickering over the room. Off to my left, just as I had suspected, was a weatherman standing in front of a big green screen, which he was gesturing towards with great authority. The huge camera was pointed at him, and a bevy of camera people were gathered around it, making certain that everything proceeded as planned. My grin grew wider. It wouldn’t be proceeding according to their plan for much longer.

No one noticed me, at least not right away. I loitered at the door a few moments longer, beginning to feel awkward intruding on their workplace. That was when the weatherman looked up and caught my eye.

He stuttered, eyes growing wide as he took in my black-and-red costume and evil grin. I gave him a little wave, which made his words stumble to a halt.

No longer lulled into complacency by the weatherman’s droning voice, others in the room began looking around to see what had happened. One by one, they noticed me standing in the doorway.

Once all eyes were on me, I flitted across the floor, performing a smooth balancé that landed directly in front of the slack-jawed weatherman. I leaned in close to his sweaty, makeup-caked face.

“You don’t mind if I use your equipment for a few minutes, do you?” I said. At the sudden halt in the weatherman’s droning, people around the edges of the room sitting at computers swivelled as one person to stare at me. “But since you’ve already stopped, I suppose this is my opportunity to put my two cents in.”

I stepped front and centre and grinned into the camera.

“Hello, everyone! I suppose you’ve probably heard of me by now,” I said, smiling in that particularly insane way I had been practicing in front of my apartment’s grimy mirror. “If you haven’t, then you should really watch TV more often. This channel in particular. I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot more of my smiling, masked face, so don’t you worry. Right now I just have a little announcement for you, and then we can get back to your regularly scheduled weather report.”

A red light on the top of the camera stared unwaveringly at me. I focused my attention on that little red dot, doing my best to ignore the people making panicked telephone calls in the back of the room. It didn’t matter who they called – I would be out of here before anyone could dream of stopping me. I cleared my throat.

“Hello, people of the city,” I proclaimed, giving the camera a little wave. “I interrupt your regularly scheduled weather report with this important announcement. Are you all paying attention? Good. My name is Death’s Dancer, and I will soon be taking over the city.”

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

There was dead silence in the room, only the humming of the lights breaking into the perfect stillness. I stared directly into the camera for a slow count of ten, allowing everyone watching to fully understand the sincerity of my words.

“Thank you so much for your time,” I said, breaking out my insane smile. I beckoned the terrified weatherman back from where he had been cowering just off-camera. “Come on, you have a weather report to finish.”

He inched forward, shaking visibly when I gave him an encouraging thumbs-up. The city would offer me no more resistance than this terrified weatherman. He stopped a scant foot from me, as there was not that much room on camera. I clapped him on the back in a friendly manner. The weatherman looked up at me then, for the first time, and my heart clenched as I saw his eyes full not of fear, but contempt.

“You will be dead within the week,” he said, spitting on the floor between us. “Fireball will turn you to ashes.”

Icy fury coursed through me. Had he not already seen my previous successes? I had robbed two banks and slipped right out from under Fireball’s nose each time. It was the great superhero whose days were numbered, not mine. How dare this weatherman presume to discredit me before the captive audience of TV watchers everywhere?

I had to do something to take control of the situation, or my grand reveal on live television would be ruined. A plan crossed my mind, and before I had time to rethink, I yanked one of the toggles on my hair ribbon. Before the weatherman could react, I had the innocent looking hair ribbon around his throat. The steel core bit into his neck, and he struggled against me. He was both taller and heavier than I was, but I maintained a firm grip on my hair ribbon, pulling on it with all my might, willing him to stop struggling.

He tried to get his fingers under the edge of the ribbon, but it was pulled too tightly against his skin. With a last choking sound, he slumped to the ground, his deadweight pulling the ribbon from my hands.

I knelt and gathered up the ribbon, staring blankly at the dark red stain spreading outwards from the centre of the fabric. Dimly I registered shouting all around me, but blood was rushing loudly in my ears, making it difficult to pay attention. My eyes were drawn to the weatherman’s face, purple and puffy, the side of it squished into the floor. His eyes were open, fixed on something in the corner of the room.

Dead.

The thought flickered across my mind. I immediately tried to shove it down, but it swirled unstoppably through my head. He’s dead. Dead, dead, dead.

Then a fist connected with the side of my head and I tumbled forward, almost landing on top of the dead weatherman. I threw my hands out just in time, and was relieved at the fury that flowed back through me, temporarily drowning out that niggling voice.

Shoving a hand down the front of my bodysuit, I pulled out a small cloth bag. This I hurled blindly at my attacker, before leaping to my feet and backing away. There was a small thump as the bag made contact, and glitter flew everywhere, reflecting the bright TV lights in a sparkling snowstorm of destruction. The glitter was mixed with powdered acid, which would temporarily blind everyone in the room.

My attacker, one of the camera operators, bore the brunt of the glitter, and immediately dropped to her knees, wiping furiously at her eyes. “That’s the end of your weather report this morning,” I told the camera with a shaky grin. “A storm front is blowing in and will be hovering over the city for the foreseeable future. Your long term forecast is cloudy with a chance of death!”

I didn’t wait to see what effect my glitter ball would have on the rest of the room. With a final wave at the camera, I scampered out into the hallway, pulling the heavy glass door shut behind me.

The sudden silence of the hallway made my ears ring. Obviously they had very good sound dampening in here. You couldn’t even hear the screams a few feet away. Shaking my head to rid it of unwanted thoughts and weakness, I darted to the stairway and ran to the top floor, taking the stairs two at a time. I burst into the top floor hallway and ran headlong into a man coming the other direction, dressed in a rumpled suit.

The man stumbled back a step, blinking at me in shock, which gave me enough time to dart forward and deliver a sharp rap to his temple with my knuckles. He crumpled as easily as if he were made of paper.

No point in killing him with no witnesses, I told myself. It was practicality, not weakness, that made me leave his prone, but still breathing, body on the floor and continue my escape.

I stepped over him and ran down the hallway, retracing my steps through the still-empty office and back to the roof. Images of the dead weatherman’s face danced across my eyelids every time I blinked. Despite all my training, I hadn’t expected a dead person to look so weird and puffy.

Standing on the rooftop, with the faint wail of sirens starting in the distance, I could no longer force down the images of the dead man’s face. My stomach rolled, and I rushed to the edge of the roof just in time to vomit down the side of the building. I stood there for a few moments, panting, staring at the yellowish stain on the grey concrete wall, clearly visible in the early morning light. Although I knew I should clean it up, leaving no evidence of my passage, all I could do was turn away.

I forced myself into a jog, then a full-on sprint across the rooftop. At the edge I hurled myself into empty air, landing solidly on the neighbouring building. The movement helped quell my nausea, although my ordinary exhilaration was nowhere to be found.

I glanced over my shoulder, making sure that no one was following me in my sprint over the rooftops. Everything was brighter than I was used to, the sunlight glinting on empty roofs, but then…dammit! That sidekick of Fireball’s, the so-called Coal, burst out from a rooftop door just one building away from me. I would recognize that ridiculous black cape anywhere.

With a muttered curse I picked up my speed, leaping over the rooftops almost as swiftly as if I were running on solid ground. All thoughts of murder fled from my mind in the pure adrenaline of escape.

Footsteps echoed behind me, and while they did not sound like they were getting any closer, they also did not appear to be fading away. I risked a glance over my shoulder, and sure enough Coal was still following me, leaping with remarkable agility from rooftop to rooftop, especially for someone without my unique gift.

“Wait!” Coal shouted.

If I had the breath, I would have directed a snarky comment at him, but I didn’t, so I just kept running.

“Wait!” Coal called again. “Delphi, stop!”

The sound of my name stopped me dead in my tracks, as it was surely intended to. All the atoms that made up my body had suddenly become motionless, plunged to absolute zero. An icy fear spread through my limbs as I turned to face the boy chasing me.

He skidded to a stop at the edge of the rooftop I had been about to leap off, leaving at least twenty feet of empty space between us.

“Where did you hear that name?” Even to my own ears my voice sounded strange and icy, like one of the cold northern winds that battered the Academy for days at a time during the winter.

Coal raised both hands and I took an instinctive step backwards. “Don’t you move!” I shouted, throwing my mind out haphazardly. The rooftop surged and bubbled, flowing up over Coal’s legs all the way past his knees before freezing in place once more.

There was a pause, Coal staring down at the rooftop that imprisoned him, his face impossible to read behind the mask.

“I was only going to take off my mask,” he said. “I thought that would explain things better than I could.”

“Explain things?” I scoffed. “You would have to be pretty good at talking to explain your way out of this one. I don’t mind telling you that I don’t see any future where you leave this rooftop alive. Should’ve brought your fiery friend along with you.”

“If you’ll just let me remove my mask without fear of you killing me...”

There was something wrong with Coal. Something wrong with this whole situation. He wasn’t supposed to know my name, first of all, but he also should not be this calm while half-submerged in a rooftop facing down a furious supervillain.

“I have a better idea,” I said. Focusing my powers this time, I called to the particles of his mask. The rough black cotton slid apart and oozed down Coal’s face, dripping off the front of his baggy black sweatshirt before reforming on the ground. I smiled proudly at it for a minute, then returned my attention to Coal. Only it wasn’t Coal who stood before me anymore.

“Wha—?” I gasped, my lungs clenching and refusing to take in any more air. I staggered back a step and sat heavily down on the roof, staring at the apparition in front of me. “Sera?”