Saturday, October 25
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The dice clattered across my coffee table as Su-Bin rolled to move. She cursed under her breath, and I laughed as she tapped her piece across the board onto her boyfriend Cam’s square, then forked over a few hundreds and a fifty. “I’ll get you for this. You’ll see.”
Su-Bin and Cam hadn’t been together long—they were still in their relationship's lovey-dovey, touchy-feely phase, but I’d reached out to her after the Evergreen Episode. I’d hoped that we could still be friends, and so far, it was working—as long as we kept our other identities out of it. We’d set some ground rules; since neither Bee nor I wanted to talk about APPEAL, and she didn’t want to talk about superhero shows, we banned both topics.
Instead, I’d made dinner. I’d planned and proportioned it all out as Ramsey Fieri earlier in the day, and then when the time to cook it came, I’d done it as Anika. And that brought up an interesting point—and one I’d need to talk to Dr. Ayers about.
With the Power War going, all my classes superpower-related, and most of my free time being spent researching 3V1L and planning our first patrol, not to mention recruiting our third member for Team Composition, Anika DuPont felt more and more like another Costume for Understudy to wear. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Actually, that wasn’t true. I knew how I felt about it. Uncomfortable.
Really, really uncomfortable.
So, while I waited for my next appointment with Dr. Ayers, I’d decided I wouldn’t spend any more time in-Costume than I needed to, and that I’d do normal stuff with normal people. It was a foolproof plan to keep my superhero identity and my secret one separate and make sure the superhero knew who was in control.
Foolproof except for the fact that I didn’t know many normal, unpowered people. Avan wasn’t an option for…a variety of reasons. I had a few friends from prop-making, but the play started soon, and they’d all be busy. And that left…Su-Bin and Cam.
“Nice roll, Su-Bin,” I snarked as I grabbed the dice and rolled double threes. I dutifully moved my token across the board and put the piece down on a thankfully empty square. Then I grinned. “Safe!”
“For now, but you just wait. You’re coming up on my blockade,” Bianca said, grinning. “I’ll knock you out of the game for sure.
“Like hell you will!” I rolled again. “How did you two meet? Not your club, right?”
“Right. Cam’s in my advanced Calculus course,” Su-Bin said. She squeezed his hand.
I moved my character four spaces, landing on the first of Bianca’s squares and handing over more money than I could really afford. “And are you solo-rooming this year?”
“For now,” Su-Bin said. She frowned as I handed the dice to Bianca. “Mom and Dad aren’t very thrilled about the Power War. They wanted me to go home, but I told them I couldn’t. Even the commute takes time—time I could be spending putting together the next protest, or writing letters, or trying to get people to sign petitions.”
“Shop talk!” Bee said, rolling the dice.
Su-Bin drank from her Coke cup. She wasn’t a booze drinker, so we’d agreed to let her bypass the rules. Cam was a drinker, though, and he took a shot in her place. “Su-Bin’s just really dedicated to her club, that’s all,” he rumbled. He was a big guy—the kind who looked like he’d give Punch and Grapple a run for their money in the weight room if he ever actually worked out, but who had a farmer’s physique. I felt a moment of envy as Su-Bin grabbed his arm.
Then Bianca poked me in the side, and I remembered I had it pretty damn good too. She handed me a single fifty—she’d landed on my space. “Here you go, babe.”
“Thanks, Bee!” I rolled my eyes and tucked the cash under my side of the board as she handed the dice to Cam.
“Yeah. Speaking of my club, how are you two holding up with the Power War?” Su-Bin asked. “I’d be happy to get you into another meeting if recent events have changed your mind about us.”
“I appreciate the offer, but I’m booked with classes,” I said. The plan to keep shop talk out of our conversation had failed, so I buttoned up as Cam rolled, then paid back every dollar he’d gotten from Su-Bin as she held her hand out smugly.
It was nice to be just another college kid, playing games and drinking the night away in my dorm room—even if it was a little fancier than the average one, or if we’d had pita, falafel, and lemon chicken that no other student on campus could have prepared. But as the conversation turned toward the ‘environmental, economic, and personal disaster in Evergreen last week,’ I stood up and slipped into the bathroom. I needed to think.
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Su-Bin wouldn’t ever get it, that superheroes had to be here now. And she certainly wouldn’t get it from talking to Understudy while we both had adrenaline and anger in our veins, like on the park bench. Plus, in the aftermath of the Evergreen Episode, APPEAL had come out aggressively against Magical Girl Understudy. It seemed like I was their favorite punching bag.
I’d been dealing with it by separating Su-Bin and President Pak. But it was getting harder to do it. I spent too long sitting on the toilet lid, reminding myself that they, just like Understudy and Anika DuPont, were separate people. I just had to pretend I didn’t care about APPEAL, superheroes, or the Power War. I was a normal college girl, and I was going to have a normal college Saturday night, dammit!
Then, once I’d reassured myself about that, I rejoined the game.
“Okay, my turn? Great!” I rolled the dice and…landed straight on another Bee-controlled space. “Shit.”
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Bee and I staggered to the door. “Bye, Su-Bin! Bye, Cam! See you next weekend?”
“Hopefully, if I can find the time,” Su-Bin said. She grabbed Cam’s arm, and the two of them disappeared down the hall for the elevator.
The moment we shut our door, Bee grinned at me. “I saw how you looked at him. What? Am I not good enough for you?” She teased, poking my side again.
“You’re plenty good enough, but did you see him? He’s built like Brick House. Even you had to be impressed,” I replied.
“Impressed, not into,” Bee clarified. Then she cleared her throat. “Now that that’s done with, let’s go over tomorrow’s plan…and the new addition.”
“Oh, right. Damn, I wanted to finish the bottle,” I complained.
The new addition to our team was Vicegrip, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about her yet. On the one hand, it meant we’d be able to write our essays for Team Compositions, and since the Trios unit was running, working with an Elementalist like her would give us a solid theoretical group. With Fursona on the frontline, Vicegrip running ranged, and me filling the gaps, we shouldn’t have weaknesses.
On the other hand, though, the Yorkston superheroine was woefully inexperienced for what we wanted to do.
We took our places in the Green Room—me on the couch and Bee at the whiteboard—and she started writing and talking. “Poudre Patrol: Investigative Episode/Patrol. Goals: We’re there to try pinning down one of the Three Vs, or at least to figure out where they like to operate. We’re also putting on a public face so the district knows they’re not abandoned like…uh…” she trailed off.
“The Foothills?”
“Yeah, the Foothills.” She wrote three columns, one titled ‘Pin Down Vs’ and one labeled ‘Public Face.’ The third stayed blank for a moment, then she wrote ‘Vicegrip Team Comp.’ “Our third goal is to work with Tractor-Beam-Girl and see how that goes. So, first objective. Ideas on how to complete it?”
“I think we set a patrol route that hits the west and north Poudre borders, gets dangerously close to Sister Sly’s little pocket around the church, and hits up places they’ve both been. We’ll do a little digging at each conflict hotspot and see if we can’t find out where the villains are going. Then, once we’ve done that, we can visit their mayor’s office or try to get in touch with the local police. Think Rathburn will give us an in?” I asked.
‘Rathburn,’ ‘Hot Spots,’ and ‘Mayor’ went under the ‘Pin Down Vs’ column as Bee nodded. “I don’t know, but he’s worth a shot. Want to call him tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “As for the public-facing stuff, how about we focus on street-level, casual interactions? We’ve been slacking in the Poudre district, so we need to be casual but serious. I think we can pull that off.”
“Yeah, me too. We’ll just answer questions, see what people need help with, and try to make that happen. I’m not worried about us at all,” Bee said.
“Yeah. The two of us are fine.”
“Tractor-Beam-Girl,” Bee said.
At the exact same second, I said, “Vicegrip. I’d be more comfortable doing this without her. She’s an unknown. All I really know about her is what her Signature Skill does, and that she’s got enough of a temper to go right after Flare. That feels like a recipe for disaster.”
“I did some digging on her Yorkston career,” Bee said. I breathed a sigh of relief; I could always count on Bianca to be well-researched. “She’s got a shockingly high win rate. Essentially no Investigatives or Patrols, though. From the Episodes I watched, she always seemed to know exactly where to be, and that tells me she had someone feeding her Episodes like a baby bird with a worm.”
She wrote ‘Baby Bird’ under ‘Vicegrip Team Comp.’ I laughed. “That’s kind of suspicious. Do you think she’s got a patience problem? I know all about those, and unfortunately, the best way to deal with them is to have to be patient.”
“No idea. But if she’s been getting spoon-fed Episodes, we’ll need to keep an eye on her. She might go chasing leads and getting in trouble,” Bee said.
“Got it.”
We spent the next hour checking out hot spots on the Poudre district’s borders before we settled on five possible places the Second and Third Vs had been, and where they’d fought Sister Sly. The first was a park next to Sister Sly’s church, the second a bar that’d been robbed by 3V1L twice in the last few months, and the third a safe house that’d been firebombed three days ago. The other two were alternates in case we couldn’t make it into the first three or we got sidetracked by a lead and had to change our patrol route.
The route itself felt weird. Instead of a single destination, we planned to move through over half of the Poudre districts in a long, sweeping arc. We wouldn’t be staying at a park or mall; instead, we’d try to be everywhere. It made sense for the goal we had in mind, but it didn’t seem like any of my Patrols with Tele-Portal.
I still wasn’t comfortable with Vicegrip, though. The whole time we got ready for bed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t ready for a fight like 3V1L. Even when Bee wrapped her arms around my waist and dragged me into the little spoon position for some mandatory cuddling time, my mind couldn’t unstick from Tractor-Beam-Girl and the Poudre Patrol.