Flare: A Supers Setting Pitch

It starts with the intense, red glow over the rooftops. I'd been walking for hours and was ready to pack it in for the night, but sometimes that's just how the luck breaks. I started running toward where I estimated it had been fired from. Fancy gated community. It wasn't hard to find, there were two black-and-whites and an unmarked in front of one of the houses. You could tell the unmarked from just any other car because it wasn't expensive enough to belong in that neighborhood. I pulled my mask on, a really basic one with just a domino, and opened my jacket so the insignia on my shirt was visible. Then I jumped the fence and came in through the back.

The police were expecting us, of course. They weren't allowed to send up the signal anymore. Technically they weren't even allowed to have them, just in case there'd be a misunderstanding, but the older ones, especially the detectives, especially anyone who had been on the night shift a long time, they had them anyway. It was all very deniable. Wink and a nod law enforcement. Not that what we were doing was really law enforcement.

"Can you find him? Can you find my baby? We can get the money, we'll pay it, but the police say we can't just pay the money, that it doesn't help..." She was wringing her hands right next to me, the mother, and I never knew what to say in situations like this. Did I try to play it up with bravado and maybe make her feel better. Should I try to hedge my bets and be honest? I told her the truth. I told her that I could find any lost or missing thing, and that if her little boy was still alive, we would come back with him or not at all. She broke down crying and I don't know if I said the right thing or not, but it was true and I will always stand by the truth.

I assumed there would be a 'we.' Within ten minutes or so, two more showed up. I knew Lighthouse, but not the other one, who said her name was Staccato. The police showed us what had happened. There in the boy's bedroom, and he wasn't really a baby, from the robots and toy guns I'd say he was eight or nine, there was a shadow under the bed. An umbral darkness, like a hole in the floor. Lighthouse shone a light at it, but the darkness ate it up...no. You could see dust motes. There was a space down there.

I went and knelt down and there was a blackness floating there in the space between the bottom of the bed and where the floor should be. I knew that this was where the boy had gone, that it was the shortest route to him. I put my hand in there, and it was like a doorway into another room. Some kind of dimensional thingy. You never really knew. The wrongness of it was revolting, sickening. Everyone who wasn't a mask had to look away, it was like some weird Escher thing, sitting dark and hungry in the middle of a normal well-lit room. I reached to where the bottom of the bed should be, and there was nothing but dark space. My hand should have been sticking out of the top of the mattress, but from the shoulder on I was in some other place, not a little boy's bedroom at all. The uniforms had all stayed outside the bedroom, couldn't take looking at it and there was no reason to.

The detective was a tall, wiry man, bald with salt-and-pepper eyebrows. He stayed, but had to struggle to keep from throwing up. It took most people that way. He showed me the ransom note. Low seven figures. I didn't get anything that mattered from the note, but he was brave to be here and ashamed that he could do no more than that, so I thanked him and told him he'd been a huge help. That I wanted him to keep the family calm for us. Three was enough, you almost never got more than three, and so Staccato and Lighthouse and me dropped down into the darkness under the bed while the sick, scared, brave detective held the frame up for us. I know that putting even his fingers into that shadow had to be one of the scariest things he had ever done. Most people couldn't have done even that. Normal people, anyway, people who didn't have a second face.


***

The way it happened to me is not the way it happens for everybody. I think it's always different. But I've been around the block enough times that I've actually talked to some of the others. Real Talk, not just terse discussion or whispered conference. So I guess the following is a pastiche of themes I've heard repeated and things that I believed enough to write them down.

You have to live in a city. Nobody has ever heard a of a mask from a rural area. You have to feel like some inchoate thing is missing from your life, like there's a part of you that just isn't there. You need to fast, and make a dark room and line the walls with mirrors, and light it with only a candle. No sunlight. No clocks. Nobody should know you are there and nobody should be checking on you. You have to watch the mirrors, from at least one dawn to the next dawn. Eventually you'll see your other face in the mirror. It might take a few tries, a few whole entire days spent staring at yourself, hungry and thirsty, never looking at your watch or taking a break to go to the bathroom and not dozing off. It's going to seem like a huge waste of time and it takes a big leap of faith to make it work, but eventually you might see your second face.

Making your second face is hard. It takes time and craft skills, and you have to actually get it right and not just slop something together and hope for the best. You'll know when it's right. It might take weeks or months. I know a guy who had to learn to work leather. You can't have someone else do it for you, and if you've never sewed a stitch in your life you'll have to, but by now you'll know if it's working or not.

Then you have to take it out and walk at night. Go where the road takes you. Follow the wind. Listen to the secret voices in the cemeteries and sit under overpasses with the old homeless folk. Don't talk. Watch, and listen. If you practice martial arts in the park that's okay. If you try to learn parkour, that's okay. But go somewhere new every night, and listen and watch instead of talking and being seen. Don't take a phone with you, no radio, no money, no ID, no weapons. Nothing more than a small flashlight and your mask. If people see you're wearing it, they won't bother you. People who spend a lot of time out at night know what it means, and they won't bother you.

Eventually, you'll see your first Flare. Go where it came from. Introduce yourself to whoever else appears, but keep it short. Names, how long you've been out at night, and tell them you haven't found your power yet. They may give you a hard time or dismiss you, but they aren't allowed to keep you from trying. Whatever situation is in front of you, set the wrong things right. Do your best. Your power will appear when you need it, and when it does you will know what it does and how to use it. Not before.

Your second face will give you a shield against the fear, and when your mask is on you you can wrestle with the horrors of the night. The black-eyed children, the backwards walking man, Bloody Mary, shadow people, the madmen and the asylum escapees and the inventors. Your power may seem a paltry thing, but it's not really the power that makes you able to stand when others would flee or fall.

Be brave. Be just, and fear not.

***

Over time, I learned the others that lived in my city. They called me Seeker, though I didn't pick that name myself. I met Shift, who was small and soft-spoken and polite, but who could do miraculous, impossible things sometimes (and other times could not so much as light a match without striking it on the box.) Staccato's power was that she knew how to fight. At first no one believed this was a power, but one night she challenged five other masks to put her to the test, and not one single blow landed on her. I wasn't there for that, but I knew she was a true mask after she stepped into the shadow with me. Crag had the strength of ten. Breathe would heal from any injury, with wounds sealing up before your eyes. Lighthouse could shine lights, bright enough to blind and enough to find your way in any dark. Squeeze could fit through any opening that air could pass through. Love only ever wore a red bandana across the top of his head, with holes cut for eyes. It was barely a mask at all, but nobody could remember a time that Love wasn't answering the call, with the ability to look at you and know what you wanted. Love had been out longer than anyone, and then one day disappeared and was not seen again. We plant climbing roses for Love, but we do not speak his name. Bone could touch a thing and see its past, Walker could take you on roads no one else could know, Pitch could be both heavy and light, and Cup could put things away in a secret place and draw them out again at need. Most masks do learn to fight, eventually, and some get frighteningly good at at the problems we can resolve with fists, but it's not your fists that make you walk into the dark when you should turn around and run home and throw your mask in the fire and never talk about it again.

***

One night the signal went up from a neighborhood. I came to find Crag and Walker already waiting. A monster that came in dreams to hurt people was preying on the neighborhood, night after night. The monster hid in nightmares, but with Walker to lead and Seeker to find there was nowhere in this world or any other that it could have hidden. We circled through alleys and dilapidated sheds, up trees and across roofs to crawl through attic windows, but Walker found a path to Dream and we tracked the monster to its lair. Crag wrestled with it like Jacob wrestling with an Angel, and eventually with his hands he broke it. We left Dream through a different way, and came out in a far part of the city a week after we had left.

***

One night the signal went up from a mansion on the edge of town. Love and Shift met me there, and the man who sent the signal up was waiting by his car, his family in their pajamas waiting inside. They had moved into the house and found it haunted, and if we couldn't drive the ghosts away, they would never sleep a night there again. The ghosts had not hurt them, and I think they couldn't have, but not everything has to be about deadly danger. The sound of sobbing came from their closets at night and they awoke to find a man with hate in his eyes sitting on their chests so they couldn't move. Doors slammed open and shut at all hours, and the family had the wide and staring eyes of people being driven from their sanity.

We agreed to drive the ghosts away if we could, and they thanked us for coming. All that night and until the dawn, we did our best to unravel the haunting as though it were a knot we could untie. An awful man, the kind of monster that only an ordinary man could be, had tormented the people around him and killed a few of them, then himself. His hatred, wherever it came from, could not be exhausted, and they were all forced to replay the scenes of their lives like broken records. We could not touch them or speak to them, but Love could read their hearts and I could find their hidden journals and secret passages and the old bones hidden under the koi pond. And then, an hour before dawn, we saw the ghost of a lovely young woman with features like a china doll, ready to repeat the last moments of her life and die under the knife of her fiancee. It was only an image, a spider could not have hung a web on them. But Shift reached out, and grabbed her spectral wrist, and jerked her through life and death and time and back into the world. She was there, twenty years old and alive as you or me, a hundred years away from her proper time and trembling like a leaf.

Shift could do impossible things, sometimes, and the haunting burned away like dew in the morning. The young woman had no proper place in the world, but we told the family who lived in her home that our price for our help was that they help her, and they did. She lives there with them still, and strong people find it in themselves to make their own place in the world. She hosts a talk radio program now, and she keeps company with the lonely souls who call in every night from midnight to four AM. I have personal knowledge of ten people she has talked down from committing suicide.

***

One night the signal went up from a park in the center of the city. A groundskeeper was in the grip of a nameless fear, and could barely leave his shed after the power went out suddenly. I think he was wise to trust himself, when he saw shadows moving in the moonlight and there had been no wind. There were things in the secret heart of the park that night, things for which I could not find a name. Pitch leaped from branch to branch like a squirrel, and moments later stood on the ground as immovable as a monolith. The things came for us, but Breath stood against them and could not be killed, and Pitch knew how to use fists and feet. We drove them back with torches, and though we were wounded they fled. We did not defeat the things in the park, but they have not returned, and perhaps they will not.

The Champions

The following is a short story intended as a campaign riff.

The adventurers stumbled through the rain.  They were almost back to the ancient Crossroads Inn, the closest thing that seemed like civilization.  The bard mumbled feverishly, "The stories say there has been an inn at this spot for over a thousand years.  It was built to commemorate..." he didn't finish the sentence, but he didn't stop breathing yet, either.

The gate opened when they shouted and pounded on it, and the stableboy slammed it shut behind them.  Soggy travelers looked at them, and then went back to their poor meals and watered beer.  The roof leaked, and the low fire smoked and spit.  It didn't do much to drive away the chill, but it was better than outside.  The poor young priest who joined the party to try and gain the favor of his god and a better position in his temple went to work, and did the best he could with hot water, herbs, and a needle and thread.  He thought he might be able to save the bard, but gut wounds were tricky things.  The magician, the oldest of the four, ordered whiskey and lit a pipe with shaking hands.  He'd thought so highly of his few magics, thought that surely his education and wisdom would help his comrades prevail.  It all had gone so wrong...

The warrior looked at the battered gauntlets covering his hands.  He had killed several, exulted in the feel of shedding blows from his armor.  It had accomplished nothing.  The enemy had outflanked them.  He couldn't cut through them fast enough, and the magician's spells couldn't staunch the flow of screaming humanoids.  He spoke loudly, too stunned to be certain who to address.  "We couldn't save her.  The Orcs were too many.  We were too late.  The girl...is gone."

The innkeeper nodded.  They'd been hired right in front of him.  The mayor from a tiny hamlet had come all the way here with a tiny bag of shining golden coins to find these men, the armed wanderers that stopped from time to time.  "I'll send word to the family.  Next few farmers going to the duke's market.  They'll hear of it.  You needn't stay.  Nobody expects you to tell them yourself.  I'll say you came back sore hurt, everyone will know you did your best."  He knew they had been an unlikely gamble.  They were too green, and the world was grown too dark.  It always was.  Still, he considered, it was fortunate that it had happened a few days ago.  Not today.  Any day but today.  One day every ten years, the inn must be open from dawn to midnight.  It had been explained to him on his father's knee.  Every curse must have an out, for there could never be a perfect prison in the world.  They must open the inn, day after day, and on those special days they could only pray that certain things did not come to pass.

The warrior kept talking.  "The money they paid us...I don't want it anymore.  I'd give it all up, if it'd change things."

The other band.  The one in the back corner.  The ones who had been coming here so, so long.  One of them turned to look.  "It's been a long time, my friends.  Let us offer our services."  His beard was long and ratty, matted.  When he reached for his cup his fist was like a huge cudgel.  Gnarled, scarred, solid-looking.

The one next to him was slender, with eyes that glittered out from beneath his deep black hood.  "We were sworn.  We cannot ask, nor seek."  A third leaned forward on the table, deep black tattoos flowing up and down his forearms.  His voice was like opening a trap door into a dusty, disused attic.  "And yet no geas can be utterly binding.  If the path is open, we may walk it and pass out of this prison.  I sense that opening flowers before us."

The warrior cradled his face in his hands.  "I want revenge!  We were too weak, but there must be others."  The barkeep had dropped his rag, and was speeding across the floor with hands outstretched, "Silence, sir!  Speak no more, I beg you!"  He knew the tale.  It had been passed down from father to son, for generation upon generation.  The inn must always stand, the binding must be undisturbed.

The warrior looked up at him with reddened yes, "And why shouldn't I give voice to what my heart says?  My friend lies wounded unto death, and I want revenge!."

A hush fell over the bar.  A crackle of something that couldn't be seen or heard or felt passed through the air, and the magician jumped as though he'd been pinched.  "What is this?  I sense old magic."  The innkeep dashed forward, attempted to clamp his hand over the warrior's mouth, "You do not know!  Please, listen, please! Do not offer them gold!"

The warrior stood and shoved the innkeep to the ground.  "Don't dare to lay a hand on me!  I've slain greater men for less.  And I would give all the gold I have, if it would avenge what I have seen this day.  I cannot rest until we are free from this scourge of orcs, though my strength is not enough-"

A shadow fell upon him, and the magician gasped.  "Something has broken."

The warrior turned, and saw the cloaked figures from the shadowed corner.  They seemed somehow brighter now.  More present.  Before they had been hard to attend to, but now they demanded his attention.  He could not look away.

"Our price is not so high."  An aged hand extended.  Old, but still living, blood pulsing beneath the scarred flesh.  Still strong.  "One single coin of gold is our fee, but it must be gold no matter how small it might be.  Such are the ancient ways, old already when we kept the contract.  Gold for blood, a pact made under the roof of an inn.  And this one is at a crossroads, besides.  Even the Gods must respect a contract, if it be made at a crossroads.  So it is, so it must be."

The innkeeper grabbed at the warrior's knees, "Do not do it!  It will all start again!  Some powers were better left alone!"  The tattooed man snapped his fingers, and solid ice three inches thick snapped into place around the barkeep.  He was frozen solid, and if he yet lived there was no sign of it. "No interference!  If this man would be our client, we have the right to accept his bond and give our pledge."  The magician paled.  The energy required for such a spell was beyond him, beyond his master, beyond his master's master.  He knew of no one who could accomplish such a thing.

The whole tavern held its breath.  Woodenly the warrior took one shining yellow coin, and put it in the hand that waited for it.  Five cloaked figures, as different as the forest from the mountains, or the sea from the desert, cast off their motheaten cloaks.

"After twelve centuries, we shall ride again."  Ancient weapons gleamed, flawless as the day they came forth from enchanted forges.  "The old tales will be remembered."  Life and youth flowed back into the five, as they stood straighter.  Their hair darkened, their skin shed wrinkles for heartiness, though the scars remained.  A man who seemed now to have the muscles of an ogre tucked a single gold coin into a pouch at his waist.  "We accept your quest.  You shall have your revenge.  They will die.  All of them."

The five walked out of the inn and disappeared into the rain and darkness.  Drops of water glistened on the block of ice surrounding the barkeep.

That night, thunder split the sky like the screaming of the gods.  The next night, great fires could be seen on the mountains.  On the third, bands of orcs with terrified eyes fled through.  They slashed madly at those who stood in their way, but did not slow even to steal food.  On the fourth, the king's knights rode through.  They apologized to the innkeeper, but still they put his inn to the torch.  A thousand orcs had died.  Their tales had reached the tribes.  War was brewing.  The Five rode once more, with blades and sorcery that had not been known since ancient days.  Men not even the gods could kill, men who had written themselves into the very bedrock of the universe, laughed at time and mortality, built legends and burned empires.  They had found their way back from their long-forgotten half-life, resurrected by gold and revenge.

The stories had come to life.  The dragons stirred in deep caverns that had been beyond the ken of men.  Monsters yawned in the utterest darkness.  Demons in forgotten places felt their bindings loosen.  Young men and women pushed against their limits, and felt those limits give before them.  The Heroes had returned, a new Age of Heroes dawned.

The gods wept, and the earth quavered in its bones at memories of blood and fire.  It was all happening again.

A Short Story

This is my entry to the Inspired By Images Of Eve Competition 3. More details and links to all entrants can be found at Starfleet Comms.

Undertow

Waking up for the first time isn’t that bad, comparatively. You open new eyes and hear Aura’s voice welcoming you to wherever you had a medical clone stashed. Most of us head straight for our new pod. If you aren’t in your pod, someone actually could kill you for real. They don’t allow weapons on station, but there's always something. Heavy paperweight, shard of glass, a shoelace around your neck from behind. It wouldn’t be easy, but in a long enough career you’re going to give someone a good reason. It’s better to stay in your pod, with the equipment that will read your brain-state if you’re about to die and transmit it to your clone.

Here, they don’t wake you up in a sterile medical bay. They wheel you into one of those little hotel room quarters and leave you, so you wake up in “your” bed. The process is so standardized that nobody bothers to monitor you. I tell the machines in my room to spit out some clothes, and I get dressed. I have memories of doing this a few dozen times. I don’t cry or get the shakes, but if I did there wouldn’t be a nurse around to see it.

We are the Immortals. You can’t let the team down by letting some normal human see you upset. If I ever did the math, the average version of me probably killed ten or twenty thousand people before he was taken down. The very smallest ship that I own is worth more than most humans will ever earn in their entire lives. If I wanted to call in some favors, I could probably topple a small planetary government.

Not bad for a man less than a day old.

I can tell that I’m really new because my clothes feel comfortable. The goop-filled casket they store a medical clone in keeps the epidermis in something like a normal configuration. Same for your nerve endings. If you’ve been in your pod for a long time and do decide to decant, you won’t be used to walking around in an environment with things like air and dust and friction. It doesn’t hurt, exactly, but it’s just on the edge of hurting. It’s a constant discomfort, and it makes your clothes feel like rough bandages over an incompletely-anaesthetized wound. This is what being mortal feels like.

I open the door and walk to the station promenade. I know I should be plugging myself into my pod, plugging my pod into a huge metal body with electronic eyes and a nuclear furnace heart, but I don’t. It’s hard not to. That’s what you sacrifice everything for: You get to live forever, and you get to trade your crapsack human body for metal and fire and computer dreams.

Every storefront is sparkling clear to my new eyes. The technology gets better every day, but it’s especially good in Gallente space. It doesn’t matter what shitty DNA your parents gave you, you come out with six-pack abs and better than 20/20 vision. That stuff is so standard they don’t even ask any more. You have to tell them not to do it. There’s tinkling electronic music and the smell of coffee. Articulated mannequins pose and strut in the windows, all illuminated by carefully-designed indirect lighting.

I check the killmail and my insurance report while I walk. I don’t even use a neocom anymore. The new-generation implants build it all in. Direct neural interface to everything you used to use a tablet for. You can set it to project a heads-up display into your visual cortex, but I use direct cognitive access. It’s alienating for the first week to simply know what all your emails say, the status of all your accounts and assets, and a hundred other things. Still, you’ll have gotten used to worse things by that point.

I sit down at a table in the back of the bar and order something fruity and nonalcoholic. This may make you look weak, but it also marks you as rich. Anyone can industrially manufacture alcohol from base elements. Only a well-heeled person can afford real fresh fruit in a station environment. Also, I haven’t liked alcohol since I got my implants in. Personal taste, I don’t like the way it affects my interface.

If you do decide to become a capsuleer and get the interface, you should know that it’s the worst thing that will ever happen to you again. People think it’s only some plugs in the base of your skull and down your spine. That’s just the tip of the cranial iceberg. You can’t feel it, but there’s metal and semi-organic components running all through your skull, creeping all through the wrinkled gray mass of your brain. You don’t even want to think about the necessary surgeries. But when it’s done, you’re an immortal with miraculous powers. You can learn foreign languages and advanced mathematics during a long afternoon nap. You can do things with a starship that a normal pilot could only dream of. The best part is you only have to have them put in once. They grow your clones around the interface – no cutting required.

Supposedly, in the next generation or two of the technology, they’ll be able to make an interface that can do a destructive read of your brain tissue outside of a pod environment. If that happens, we’ll be truly immortal. Able to walk about, secure in the guarantee of instantaneous reincarnation. I wonder if the humans will really let us have that. I wonder if they'd really let something like that loose.

When he sits down, I don’t talk much. I’m not used to using my voice anymore. You can’t really talk in your pod, because there’s no air. You get used to using your interface, sending out plaintext to the local channels and reading it back. Some people use a synthesizer to make it sound like they’re talking, but that burns up a lot of the quantum entanglement in your fluid router. You may have friends someday, or think you do, but you won’t ever hear their real voices.

I scratch self-consciously around the shiny new interface plug at the base of my skull. The man in the turtleneck is pleased that I succeeded as a decoy, and that everything went according to plan. Suicide missions aren’t common, but you can make real money doing them. I'd been buzzing this "hidden" asteroid base in a stock Rifter, as obvious as anything, daring them to shoot me.  Of course, they did.  My job was actually over the instant they fired on my vessel, but I didn't get to clock out until after I'd felt the frigate explode around me, after they locked down my pod and shot a relativistic tungsten slug straight through it.  The last thing I remember before waking up is the sudden sucking sensation of fluid spraying out of the breach and into space. I heard Aura say goodbye, and then a subjective second later she said good morning.

He’s incredibly flattered to meet me in person. His principal has something else, a courier mission that needs to go outside of Empire space. Out where the capsuleers have formed up into empires of their own, out where the wars never really burn out, only die down to embers for a while.

It’s not exactly a suicide mission, but you should definitely hire a pilot who isn’t afraid to die.

The interface keeps your memory alive, and keeps it sharp. You’ll learn to do things, and you won’t forget them. Even if you die, a clone will wake up and it will know everything you knew. It gets those memories. Skills honed from a thousand battles, corporate takeovers, massive covert operations involving drugs, human trafficking, restricted technology. Good or bad, those memories live on.

I take his job with a smile and a handshake. My grip is firm, my hand feels just like anyone else’s hand.

I’m already remembering things that I didn’t do, that previous versions of me did. My inheritance. A few were good, most weren’t. Some were awful. You decide whether you'd do them yourself or not, and you learn to live with it. And, if you can’t, you pass it on down the line. Nobody’s going to miss you; you’re easy to replace.