Wonder City Stories

Wonder City Stories III #20

2013-03-19T19:26:16Z

Sorry about my post-fail last week. It's been a little rough weather here. But so is it rough weather in Wonder City.

Partying the Hard Way

Tam Lane was pressing her up against a cold metal wall, bending over her, his long auburn hair shading their faces. "Come on, baby," he was whispering, pulling her hand against the bulge in his jeans. "Do it."

Before Nereid could say anything past her horror, Tam was dragged away from her and thrown to the ground. Sophie brought a baseball bat down on the man's pretty face. There was a crunch, and a wail, and Nereid turned away.

A warm hand pressed against her back. "It's okay, Pacifica," Lucid's sympathetic voice said. "It's just a dream."

Nereid turned back to look at her, slowly rising into lucidity through her paralysis and confusion. "Really?"

Lucid smiled at her. "Yes, really. I should know, right?"

Nereid looked toward Sophie, who was still plying her baseball bat, even though most of the dream was fading away around them. Lucid said, "Sophie, time to go."

Sophie dropped the baseball bat with a little grimace and nodded, pushing some of her hair out of her face.

They walked silently away from the disintegrating scene, Lucid keeping an arm around Nereid's shoulders. Shortly, they came to a train station and mounted the steps into one of the waiting silver cars. They sat down along the side of the subway car, and the train started into motion, the rubber loops swinging silently with the motion of the car.

Nereid blinked, and took deep breaths, and looked down at herself. She was wearing her uniform, the swirling blues and greens in close-fitting spandex. She ran her hands over the fabric and forced herself to feel the texture, still breathing deeply. She'd done this a number of times, visiting Lucid's Dream Party, but it had been a while since their last trip.

"Just a baseball bat this time?" Lucid was saying curiously to Sophie as the train slanted downward into a dark tunnel.

"I've got a lot of anger issues right now," Sophie said.

"Apparently," Lucid said. "How've you been doing, Pacifica?"

Nereid blinked hard and smiled. "All right, I suppose, Leah. Wonder City is just kind of... hard."

Lucid nodded. "Seattle's no bed of roses but at least we're not having a modern-day Les Mis, like in California."

Nereid looked at her and said, "Les Mis?"

Lucid smiled briefly and bitterly. "Food riots. Water riots. Police declaring martial law and killing people left and right. It isn't just the LAPD, but that's where it started."

Something flickered in the window opposite Nereid. It was one of those advertisements consisting of a series of stills posted on the subway tunnel wall that become a little animated movie when the train rushes past them. This one only had a man's face in the center of a bright starburst. He was a handsome thirty-something with short, sleek ash-blond hair and bright, earnest blue eyes. He was speaking in the image, enunciating carefully so, Nereid supposed, someone could lip-read what he was saying.

Almost against her will, she was drawn to stare at his mouth, trying to puzzle out the words.

Lucid got up, walked across the car, and yanked down a window blind that Nereid hadn't seen there before, breaking the spell. "I am so very tired of that fucker."

"Who is he?" Nereid said, rubbing her eyes.

"Pastor Al," Sophie growled. "Tent revival boy. Is he appearing in the dream world a lot?"

"All the fucking time," Lucid said. She sat down heavily. "He's always trying to say something to the dreamers. It's not like he's actually here -- believe me, I've looked. I think that he's just a really potent symbol."

Suddenly, his face reappeared in every window of the car, and each face was saying something different, smiling a slightly different way.

Lucid's eyes narrowed and she stamped on the floor. Blinds snapped down over every window.

"We'll be there soon," she said after a moment.

"Good," Sophie said. Then, more softly, "Thanks."

Lucid squeezed Sophie's knee and patted Nereid's shoulder. "I couldn't let down some of my favorite people."

The Dream Party was less populated than Nereid had ever seen it before. The buffet was still busy. There was still a small jam session in the corner, consisting of variously-dressed people playing guitars, Vulcan harps, and drums. But there were definitely fewer beings chatting in little groups, and they spoke in lower voices.

Nereid noticed a woman sitting nearby, calmly watching roses grow from her left arm. Green sprouts burst through her skin, grew and extended, and eventually exploded into blood-red blooms. When one bloomed, she carefully snipped it off at the base with a pair of scissors, and slid the rose into a nearby glass vase that was overflowing with flowers. The water in the vase was red.

A small blue dragon alighted on the table, arranged its feathers carefully, and watched this ritual for a few moments before asking, "Does that hurt?"

The woman said, "Like a bitch. But it's the only way I know to get rid of them."

"Your friend is waiting in the private room," a second Lucid said, gesturing over her shoulder toward a door. The two Lucids nodded to each other and stepped together into a single Lucid. "Let me know if you want anything."

Sophie cast a longing glance at the buffet, but said, "Thanks," and, taking Nereid's hand, went through the indicated door.

X was seated on a straight chair with long legs crossed in the very masculine way Nereid had noticed before when X was angry. The outfit for this Dream Party outing consisted of a dark blue velvet cutaway coat over tailored black trousers and waistcoat. X was also wearing sunglasses.

X looked in their direction but didn't get up or say anything, though there was a nod to Nereid.

Sophie shut the door and said, without any introduction, "This is why I asked you both to come here." And then there was a sound like wrenching metal. Sophie let out a little gasp and staggered to one side, while another woman staggered away from her in the other direction.

The other woman was a stocky, dark brown African-American woman of medium height. Her dark hair was shaped into a short afro. There were deep lines around her eyes and mouth, lines that made her look a great deal older than Nereid would have guessed from the rest of her body. She was wearing a t-shirt and old jeans. After she caught her breath, she straightened up and put her hands on her hips.

"This is damned weird," she said, looking around at the three of them.

Sophie coughed and slid into a chair. "X, Pacifica, meet Renata Scott."

"Oh!" Nereid said, then covered her mouth with both her hands. Renata, the telepath who'd been in her head when she'd killed Sator. Right.

X rose, swept off the sunglasses, and crossed the room, extending one elegant hand. "So pleased to meet you."

Renata looked at X, grinned, and -- somewhat gingerly -- shook hands. "Hah!" she said. "This is damned weird. I'm glad to meet you finally, X. I saw you at Ruth's birthday party and didn't get introduced." She looked at her hand, then Sophie. "You must be filtering me big time."

"Well, me and your prison, I think," Sophie said, then waved a hand. "Tell them what you told me."

Renata shook hands with Nereid. Nereid gave her an embarrassed, somewhat hopeles little smile.

Then Renata threw herself into an overstuffed chair and said, "Sit yourselves down, and I'll tell you about the aliens."

X sat obediently, eyes fixed on Renata. Nereid sat down more slowly, glancing over at Sophie, who was leaning her forehead on her hands.

"They've been trying to get me to work for them," Renata said. "They won't say outright what it is they want me to do. But I suspect."

"They're projecting some sort of psionic energy via mechanisms Brainchild built," X said, and Nereid was a little startled by hearing X use Sophie's spandex name.

Renata nodded. "I know," she said, and glanced aside at Sophie, who hadn't raised her head. "And I know whose psionic energy it is."

X sat forward in the chair, perching on the very edge. Nereid blinked at Renata.

"Look," Renata said, looking at them, but running her fingers over the tooled leather of the chair she'd ended up in, "I'm imprisoned on the spaceship until I either work for them or they decide what else to do with me. They've given me a very comfortable apartment, and I'm heavily shielded from psionics there. The only reason I can project to Earth, in fact, is because I stuffed Sophie back into her head a few years ago, and so I know her better than any other human on the planet and could probably find her anywhere. The aliens have captured and imprisoned Ruth and the rest of the Gold Stars in an interdimensional prison, and they've got some jackass as their 'human liaison' whose wife is an empath. Somehow, they amped her up and she's projecting her own emotional dogma down at the U.S. of A."

X slumped back in the chair, exhaling, "Shiiiiiittttt."

Nereid looked over at Sophie again, but Sophie wasn't moving. So Nereid said, "Does she know about the new church and stuff down here?"

"Probably," Renata said with a shrug. "What little I got during my brief interviews with them was some serious right-wing religion."

X said, "That's probably what's doing it, then."

"Doing what?" Renata said.

X sat forward again, counting off on slender fingers. "Here it is: resource riots, little teams of men in black roaming the streets, martial law, nationwide mental health crisis, tripled suicide rate."

Renata stared.

"I can't get hold of Simon any more," Nereid said slowly. "Every time I call, his friend Megan answers, and she doesn't seem to know that... that Simon's human. I don't think he can be human any more. He told me he was feeling horrible about himself about and... you know he's trans, right? He was even thinking about... going back to living as a girl, just to try to make it easier to be human."

"I think the men in black may be minor telepaths," X said. "I think they may be altering potential troublemakers. A therapist I know told me that people who say they've met up with a group are often... never quite right afterward."

"I met some," Nereid said with a shudder, and started remembering like a nightmare. "For a little while afterward, I felt better. Or I thought I did. Everything was so clear. They gave me a ring. Every time I met them, they gave me a ring, and Sophie took it away from me. But after a couple of days, things weren't so clear any more, and my brain was like thick soup, and I'd feel even stupider than I used to in high school."

X reached over and put an arm around her shoulders. Nereid could feel herself shaking in the circle of that arm, but was so grateful for X's familiar warmth.

Renata's face had grown stern. She looked like an old woman, Nereid realized, though her body was young. "I can't play any more," she said. "I can't hide in my room. I didn't... I wouldn't face what was going on, but I've got to do what I can to... make it less horrible." She stood up, and her hands were clenched into fists.

"We're doing what we can," X said, also standing. "Or we'll try. I have friends who're trying."

Renata nodded sharply. "Once I know more, I'll get Sophie to bring us together again. Perhaps Lucid will be willing to bring in some of your friends, X."

"Will you come if we need to talk to you?" X asked.

"Tell Sophie," Renata said. "She knows how to get in touch."

Renata walked over to Sophie and laid a hand on the younger woman's shoulder. "Quit beating yourself up," she said quietly. "You can't help anyone that way." And then she vanished.

X sighed and said, "She's right, you know. We all need to work together in any way we can."

"Easy for her --" Sophie said, gesturing over her shoulder and upward violently "-- to say. She's not party to mass murder."

"You made an outstandingly shitty choice," X said, going to stand over Sophie, hands on hips. "I'm certainly not going to argue that you didn't. But you've got to find a way to try to make up for it now. It isn't like you're the first para to accidentally almost destroy the world."

Sophie snorted. "I could at least have done it more cleanly if I'd done it myself."

Nereid walked over to the two of them. "Yes, we all know how much better you'd be as a supervillain. You tell us all the time." She crouched down in front of Sophie and butted her forehead against her girlfriend's, looking up cross-eyed into Sophie's glasses. "But you're not, and I won't let you be, all right?"

Sophie almost smiled as she pulled back, shaking her head. "Puppydog eyes don't work at that range, dammit."

X smirked. "They do, though. From Pacifica, at least."

"That's her other damn superpower," Sophie said, standing and pulling Nereid up too. "Class 10 puppydog eyes. Let's eat, for fuck's sake."

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Wonder City Extra: Soundtrack of Renata's Captivity (so far)

2013-02-20T17:20:50Z

Many of Renata's episodes in this story arc have been punctuated by the music she's listening to at the time. I thought I'd do a little collection of that soundtrack -- let me know if I've forgotten something!

( Cut for videos )

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Wonder City Stories III #18

2013-02-19T21:02:08Z

We have heat! It's amazing how grateful one can be for singing steam radiators.

All the Pretty Little Horses

The door chimed, and this time, before I could acknowledge it, the door popped open and in rolled one of the alien Hoover suits.

"Excuse you," I said, deciding to get up, wanting the advantage of height. My dog had abandoned me for whatever hiding place she'd found this time.

The Hoover hesitated, swiveling its hair dryer toward me. It said, in the 50s machine voice, "Unclear transmission."

I crossed my arms and stood with as much hipshot attitude as I could muster. "Well, you sure aren't Joshua."

"You may address me as Joshua if you wish," it said.

"I'm not buying this 'We are all Josh' shit," I said. I noticed a few little differences in this Hoover from Joshua's Hoover -- a subtle metallic weave through the breathing bag, a very slight difference in color. "You can at least introduce yourself after busting in here."

"Our names are private," it said. Although I couldn't read it telepathically, I could certainly perceive an aura of what I chose to perceive as annoyance. "You may address me by whatever misnomer you prefer. Clarify your first transmission."

"I was telling you that you were being rude," I said, deciding that blunt communication was the way to go with this Hoover. "And I think I'll call you Fluffy."

"Ah. In the future, you will perceive that humor does not translate," Fluffy said.

"Oh, I knew that," I said. And neither does politeness, apparently. "What do you want?"

"Our peacebringing efforts are not working with adequate speed," Fluffy said. "We require your powers. You will cooperate."

Although humor doesn't translate, I couldn't help mocking its machine voice. "CO-OP-ER-ATE," I said. "No, it just doesn't have the same ring."

Fluffy apparently had decided to ignore anything I said that it didn't understand. "My family is now in charge of this mission. We require your cooperation."

"What exactly is your glorious mission?" I said. "No one has been able to tell me."

"That is why I have been tasked to be your liaison in place of the one you call Joshua," Fluffy said. "Your world is excessively turbulent. Your people are reaching out beyond the bounds of its orbit and of your solar system. We bring peace to newly developed worlds so that the dimension your people call Psychespace does not become cluttered with your unpeaceful transmissions and interfere with our movement through it."

"Peace through force," I said.

"However necessary," Fluffy said. "We will only interfere for one of your generations, but we will educate your telepaths and others with similar abilities so they can maintain the peace."

"I doubt you'll manage on this world," I said.

"We have successfully pacified hundreds of worlds," Fluffy said.

"How many of them did you pacify by killing everyone?" I said, fists on hips.

"That was unnecessary," Fluffy said. "If they did not accept peace, then they destroyed themselves with their unpeaceful transmissions."

"I begin to see that by transmission you mean speech, thoughts, or bullets," I said.

"You will cooperate," Fluffy said, its aura of annoyance increasing. "We have studied your transmission archive and have identified the individuals with whom you have familial connections."

"You will not fuck with my people," I said, my stomach twisting in a knot at the thought of these fucking vacuum cleaners taking up my mama or my sisters.

"We have no need of further acquisitions," Fluffy said, and something blinked on its hair dryer.

I felt the telepathic screens on my holding apartment fall for just a moment. If I'd been prepared, I suppose, I could've grabbed someone's mind on Earth and told them where I was. But I hadn't expected the exposure, and the sudden influx of the shipboard human minds -- as well as the weird pressure of what was probably thousands of Hoovers -- brought me to my knees.

There was an agonizing psychic ripping sensation nearby, and for a split second, through all the psychic noise in my head, I could feel Ruth. She wasn't conscious, but I'd know her anywhere. And so help me, I recognized the feel of the place she was in on the other side of that bleeding dimensional wound.

The Hoovers had stuck her in the psychic dimension I'd been slowly exploring for the last decade or more. It was just a pocket, but it was stuffed with a bunch of other minds that I didn't have the energy or attention to focus on beyond Ruth. I didn't feel any way out before it sealed back up and my apartment's shields came back up too.

"You fucker," I spat, wiping my face where the involuntary tears had started to run down as soon as the shields dropped. "You shit-sucking sockfucker." I crawled slowly to my feet. "I will see every one of you passive-aggressive imperialist weasels in hell for this."

Fluffy said, "You perceive the reason for your cooperation."

One mistake a lot of people have made with me is assuming that because I'm a fat girl, I don't move fast. But I have spent a long time with not a lot to do but work out and swim, and I am lightning when I put my mind to it, which I did, right then. I had one hand wrapped around the neck of Fluffy's hair dryer and the other bunched into the breathing bag, and I ripped those things sideways with all my might. There were one or two pleasant rending sounds.

"Cease! Stop!" Fluffy squawked.

I lifted the Hoover over my shoulder -- it wasn't much heavier than my mama's Hoover at home -- and walked to the door, which opened for me. I threw Fluffy down as hard as I could on the deck outside the door, and it bounced on the metal floor, pieces clattering off it. It squawked wordlessly.

"You don't come back in here," I said, careful to stay inside my shields. "You send Joshua. Or no one at all, by preference."

I stepped back inside and let the door shut.

I cussed and cried and even screamed for a while, and smashed a couple of plates against the not-glass of my view of Earth. If Ruth was captured, I was utterly screwed. So was the Earth. So was the whole human race. I couldn't think of anyone else who had the ability to stop this fucking huge ship while it was outside of Earth's atmosphere.

I finally settled down and extricated poor terrified Floribunda from my closet. I cried with her on my lap some, and finally settled into the kind of flat vagueness I get after a psychic thumping like I'd just had. My dog tucked her head under my arm and shivered.

My music started to sink in through the exhaustion after a while, though, and I tuned in just in time to hear Sister Rosetta singing,
Everyday (everyday)
Everyday (everyday)
There are strange things happening every day.

If you heal right through the lies
You can live right all the ties
There are strange things happening every day.

I thought, slowly, There's one person who I know feels the same way I do about Ruth, and I have spent considerable time inside her head.

And then I thought, even more slowly, Tomorrow. I'll take that right up... tomorrow.

And Sister Rosetta sang me to sleep.

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Wonder City Stories III #14

2012-12-14T20:35:21Z

Something to distract you from the news of the real world. Let's pretend that Wonder City is somehow having a worse time than we are.

Where We Must Be

I stared at the Earth on the wall-sized screen that pretended to be a window in my exclusive, yet mandatory, penthouse. My dog slept on my lap, trailing a leg off one side and lolling her head off the other side. She snored, occasionally obscuring Billie Holiday's "Lady Sings the Blues". I kept music playing constantly now -- my "hosts" had put the entirety of any repository of music I'd requested at my disposal--and it made my confinement somewhat more tolerable.

I was lonelier than I'd ever been in my bunker under Wonder City.

I wondered how my mother was doing. I wondered if my sisters had noticed anything had changed in the world. I wished I knew where Ruth was. I considered trying to reach out to get hold of Oum Veha, my old friend in Cambodia. He and I usually communicated via a mental link -- he can't be around electronic devices easily, since he is a Class 10 electricity generator -- and he's one of the few people I think I can reach out to easily. But it occurred to me that the aliens had definitely neutralized one of the Class 10 club -- me -- and may have neutralized another -- Ruth -- so what was the chance they had him? Or, worse, had used one of the low-grade telepaths I'd sensed around the ship to somehow alter his mind?

Besides, I'd tried to reach him first thing and couldn't penetrate the shields.

So I sat and stared at the Earth, and wondered if I had any options at all in this clusterfuck, or if I would just be sitting here until some superheroes (or supervillains -- it had happened!) Saved The Day (TM).

Which is when there was a hesitant, barely discernable knock at my door.

I only really noticed it because it was in a break between Lady Day and my girl Nina. Floribunda raised her head, perked her ears, and looked at the door when it happened.

I thought about getting up, but could not summon sufficient damns to give to the effort, so just said loudly, "Come in."

The door opened after a moment. I swiveled the chair to look at my visitor.

She was the sort of woman who had probably been pop-and-fresh pretty at 16, with dark hair and big dark eyes and milky-white skin with a few strategic freckles. However, at what I guessed to be about thirty, she had wilted into one of those women with transparent skin and dark circles under her eyes and blue veins running over the backs of her hands. She was wearing a rumpled pink blouse with a polyester sheen and mommy jeans, and well-worn girly running shoes.

We stared at each other for a long moment as Nina sang along,
But oh, I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood.

Then I felt something sliding over my mind, something that I supposed to most people would feel like a soft fleecy blanket, but to me felt like...

Let's put it this way. I mostly only ever felt like that in middle school, before my trip to the institution, when some of the little white girls would feel up my hair and then ask permission to do so.

I mentally swatted at it, and it was sticky, clinging to my mind with gooey pink tendrils until I gathered my wits enough to just burn it the fuck out of my mind.

She recoiled hard, grabbing for the door jamb to hold herself up. Her other hand went to her forehead. "What happened?" she said in a soft, fading sort of voice.

"I just pushed you out of my skull," I said through gritted teeth. "In my world, it's polite to ask before you go fucking with someone's head." Unless it's a case of self-defense, I added to myself.

"Oh, I... I'm sorry," she said, checking her ponytail and the hair that was pulled tight against her scalp in front. "I just... I don't really control it. I mean, I never have controlled it, until now, and now I'm still not very good at it..."

I gave her a bored look. "Come in or go out," I said, laying a hand on Flori's neck. "I don't want my dog to get out." Lord only knows what she'd get into in a spaceship, I thought.

The woman made a little incoherently apologetic noise and scooted inside the doorway enough to the door slide shut behind her. That was not the side I'd hoped she'd choose.

"So I..." she began, but then she looked up, saw my extremely unwelcoming expression, and immediately stumbled over her words, flushing blotchily. She pulled her ponytail over her shoulder and nervously wound a strand of hair around and around her finger.

I let the silence fall. I found it vaguely interesting that Flori wasn't reacting as badly to this woman as she'd reacted to the man, but then I suspected that whatever mental bubblegum the woman emanated might work on dogs too. I'd have to check that later.

She sighed. "My husband told me about you," she assayed.

I raised my eyebrows. "Oh, so you're Mrs. Mark West." And the "the most powerful paranormal human" in the aliens' employ. "I'm sure he was very complimentary about me."

"No," she said. "My husband is a man of... fast judgments."

"Hasty, even," I said.

She gave me a fleeting vaguely hunted look from under her brows that made me think, Oh, hell no, I will not have to have this conversation here.

"So why are you here?" I said. "It would be nice if you'd get to the point. I have a busy schedule of dog-grooming and window-staring to get on with."

Aretha came in for a bit here, while girlfriend tangled her own hair up, singing about chains of fools. Hah.

"Do you have a name?" I finally said, and thought, Because I am so not calling you "Mrs. West," junior miss white lady.

She looked up at that, giving me a big-ass blank stare before saying, "Sara."

"And just so you know, my name is Renata Scott, though your husband probably referred to me by a different word altogether."

She flushed all blotchy again, and I knew I was right.

There was another long pause, long enough that Aretha finished up and we were back to Nina, and Nina was singing,
Now you're living high and mighty
Rich off the fat of the land
Just don't dispose of your natural soul
'Cause if you do you know damn well
That you'll go to hell (yes, you will)
You'll go to hell.

Finally I said, "Well, this has all been just stimulating..."

"I just wanted to know!" she said suddenly, clutching the end of her ponytail.

I waited.

"I just wanted to know," she repeated more softly, "if this... having all this power gets... easier. Because they gave it to me. I had it, only a little bit, before, and I didn't know it, but then they did something to me when I was sleeping -- Mark told them it was okay -- and now I have all this... this." She waved her hands in a helplessly grand gesture.

I watched her for a moment, lips pursed, and then said, "It depends what you're doing with it."

She met my gaze soppily, looking like she was about to burst into tears, looking like she wanted someone to pat her head and tell her it was all right. "I'm making the world a better place. Only it keeps not working the way I think it will."

"Then you're doing it wrong," I said bluntly. "Controlling other people is wrong, full stop. No matter what the aliens say, no matter what your charming hubbykins says."

"But there's so much I can do to help!" she exclaimed, taking three steps toward me, still with that look of appeal.

"If you think that before you think of the harm you can do," I said, "there's nothing more to be said." She staggered one more step, reaching out, opening her mouth to say something, and I snapped, "Don't come to me for comfort. I am no one's mammy, but especially not yours."

She made a little gasping noise, turned, and ran out of the room.

I sat and fumed for quite a while as I picked chewed bubblegum out of my dog's mind before it hardened and stuck. Nina went on to sing,

Some say that hell is below us
But I say it's right by my side
'Cause you see evil in the morning
Evil in the evening, all the time
You know damn well
That we all must be in hell
We got to be in hell
We all must be in hell
We must be in hell.

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Wonder City Stories III #10

2012-08-02T17:22:53Z

First Contact

I had a few moments' warning that I was going to start having a really terrible day: Floribunda scrambled out of my lap abruptly and disappeared into the kitchenette. I had time to frown, and just as my girl Ella on the sound system busted into, "Oh, the shark has/pearly teeth, dear," the door chime came.

I could feel something strange outside the door, so I stood up and said, "Come in."

In rolled an alien Hoover-hair dryer, which I had expected. The door slid shut behind it, and unexpectedly, I could sense a human outside that door.

"Greetings, Renata Scott," the Hoover said in the smooth, modulated voice from last time. "I am the one you may call Joshua."

"Hello," I said. I almost asked about the human outside, then decided against it -- it would be bad to indicate that I could reach outside their barrier at all. I locked my mind down as hard as I could. "To what do I owe the honor?"

Joshua paused, and I wasn't sure whether it was to process my question or because it was reluctant. "I have been asked to introduce you to the human liaison," it said. "It is felt that perhaps another human can convey the information you require without damaging other aspects of our cause."

Now that was interesting. It implied that either the human was expected to be better at filtering information or that the human didn't know enough to damage their cause. "Well, I'm a captive audience," I said. "With an emphasis on 'captive.'"

A little arm of Joshua's suit extended a small wristwatch-looking thing toward me. "This is a piece of technology some of our people use to reduce external psychic impingement. We have tested with other human telepaths and it seems to work similarly. It does not reduce your ability to reach out, but it provides some psychic quieting."

I took it and eyed it. Holding it, I did, indeed, feel a blanket settle over me that muffled the alien's mental activity. I reached out and could find the alien's mind again easily. I shoved the item into the pocket of my trousers and nodded.

Joshua opened the door remotely, and I heard Ella singing, "So there's not, not a tra-a-a-ce of red," as the thirty-or-forty-something white man in a suit walked into the room.

He had one of those really generic, square-jawed, square-browed white faces and the politician-smooth brown hair with just a few white threads showing. His dark blue suit was expensive as hell, and the plain red tie was set off with a tastefully small diamond tie tack, but neither could conceal his big square worker's hands or the pot-belly at his waist. This, I thought, was a man who had recently risen in the ranks. What made him so special that he was the human liaison for the aliens?

"I'm Mark West," he said, stopping a good ten feet away and not even offering me a nod. He had an accent, but I'm terrible with American accents. It could've been Midwestern or Southern or something I just wasn't familiar with. "You're the super-telepath the aliens have been telling us about?"

"I'm Renata Scott," I said, "and yes, I'm a telepath."

"Well, you can kiss messing with my mind goodbye," he said, with an ugly little smirk. "My good friends here have given me something that stops all that."

I didn't disabuse him of this notion. His mind was noticeably fuzzy around the edges, and I expect that most of the other human telepaths couldn't read him at all. But if I'd wanted to walk in to that mess I could sense from where I stood, I could have. "I have a strict code of ethics about mental invasions of that sort," I said.

His lips compressed. "How strict is strict?" he said. "Am I just wasting my time here?" he added impatiently to Joshua.

Joshua said, in the stilted 50s voice (which told me exactly where I stood on the who-needs-to-be-impressed ladder), "You are here to discuss why we need Ms. Scott's assistance."

"We don't need her," Mark West said, gesturing at me and grimacing.

"We need her assistance, Mark West," Joshua said, very slowly and carefully. Even with the stilted voice, I could tell the alien was being condescending.

"Don't you sass me, you... scientist, you," Mark West said. "The people I usually talk to are more reasonable about this sort of thing."

"What sort of thing, Mr. West?" I said as politely and icily as I could manage.

"You stay out of this," he snarled.

I said, "No. I won't." That made him stop and stare at me. "You will tell me what you have been ordered to tell me--" he started to turn brick-red at that "--and get the hell out so I can talk to someone civilized--" I gestured to the Hoover that held Joshua "--about your information."

"You do not have a say in this," he said, forgetting himself enough to take two long strides toward me and shake his stubby damn finger in my face.

Okay. I showed off. I wasn't smart about it. But I was really fucking angry.

He turned an even darker red as I seized hold of his motor centers and forced him to cock that hand back and back until he stuck the finger into his mouth and pressed the tip against the roof of his mouth.

Then I said, "Bang," and let him go.

He staggered back until he was pressed against the wall and he stared at me for several moments. He straightened his suit coat. Then he ripped the diamond out of his tie and threw it at Joshua disdainfully. It pinged off Joshua's hair dryer. The fuzziness cleared away from West's mind, and I regretted being able to perceive more of what was going on in there. "The aliens think that they need your help," he said, spitting the words in my direction, "to bring peace to the world. There are large sections that are out of control. At war. We humans are working, with their help, to make it a better world."

"And how, exactly, are you working to make it a better world?" I said, watching him like I'd watch a rattling rattlesnake.

"Politics and media, mostly," he said, staring at me challengingly. "We use paras to control and cure the worst troublemakers."

"I see," I said. "You've had your say. Now get out."

"I don't take orders, missy," he snapped. "I give them around here."

I gave him my very best bored look. "You will address me as Ms. Scott. I'm nearly old enough to be your mother." Not exactly true, but I know I look older than my years.

He turned on his heel and stormed out. The gentle swish of the door shutting behind him was such an anticlimax.

"And so we leave you, in Berlin town," sang Ella after his departure. "Yes, we've swung old Mack, we've swung old Mack in town."

"I apologize for the disruptive nature of this meeting," Joshua said, back in his human voice.

"He's your human liaison?" I said. "You have got to be shitting me."

"He is an ambitious human, if I understand the concept correctly," Joshua said. "And I believe he is attached to his life-partner's position as the most powerful paranormal human in our employ."

I blinked at Joshua's hair-dryer a few times, chose not to ask about West's "life-partner", then said, "You people have a lot to learn about human competition. And racism too. That man hates me for my skin color, you know."

"We had guessed that would be the case," Joshua said, sounding almost mournful. "I have studied some humans who have experienced similar but not identical intolerance based on their ancestry. And Mark West seems to possess a..." It paused, apparently searching for a word.

"A larger share of intolerance than the average Joe?" I suggested.

"As you say," Joshua said vaguely.

"I'm not interested in helping you 'bring peace to the world', Joshua," I said. "Not by the means that your human flunkies are using."

"Please do consider it further," Joshua said. "Perhaps out of the agitating presence of Mark West, you will find advantages in the situation."

"I doubt it," I said.

"We feel that your ethics could be a valuable asset to the humans in our employ," Joshua said, trying another tack.

"Please go away, Joshua," I said. "I have a headache from that man, and I would like to be alone."

"Of course," Joshua said, and it hurriedly rolled out the door.

I hunted for my dog, who had hidden inside a cabinet I didn't even know she could fit in. Spending the better part of the next hour coaxing her out with treats while trying to figure out if I had any tools for taking the cabinet apart helped my headache a lot.

---

Renata has had a bad few months.

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Wonder City Stories III #5

2012-06-27T23:02:10Z

How Dystopically Futuristic

The aliens arrived at least a year before I was given my luxury condo with a magnificent view of Earth in the window and a lock on the door.

I had refused to help the aliens with... whatever it is they wanted -- at least partly because they wouldn't tell me what they wanted -- so they'd given me a choice: prison or death. I chose the lesser of two evils, and refused to leave without my dog Floribunda. So Flori and I had been spirited away from my lonely underground bunker/household and we'd been in this weird shipboard prison for at least two months.

There was something about the walls of the place that flattened out even my telepathy. I think it was meant to completely suppress it, but I don't think they knew the extent of my power, so I could still feel and "hear" the minds on the ship beyond my walls. I was grateful for the suppression, though, because being around so many minds unprotected would have driven me mad fairly quickly, and we all know how productive that is.

I did, however, hope for a short while that maybe some para would happen to fly through my narrowed field of transmission and I could pass on what little I had found out. But then I recalled that Ruth and the rest of the Gold Stars had been off on some farflung space mission for at least the last six months, and they were the most likely "good guys" to be found in orbit.

I worked very hard to make the aliens believe they'd completely contained my mind in these bare white walls. Since it was clear from the first that the aliens themselves were skilled telepaths, this required a lot of self-discipline. Luckily, it became clear pretty soon that they really didn't understand the human mind. I couldn't understand their minds either, but that didn't worry me too much. There were non-telepathic humans on board whose minds I could understand, and they were working with the aliens. Some of them were telepaths -- and by definition (Class 10 means, in the government's books, "off our charts and easily the most powerful para of that class known to be in the world"), they were less powerful than I am. Some of them were other types of paras whose power I couldn't immediately guess, and I didn't go digging, so as to avoid detection. Some were just plain jane humans.

Flori didn't like the ship, and so I spent an inordinate amount of time with a large brown Pit Bull glued to my leg or lap. She drooled a lot and was very, very stressed.

So there I was, watching the Earth turn under us, Flori curled into a ball on my lap, when my door chimed. It chimes once per day, first thing in the morning, when the cleaning robot comes through. All my food -- and Flori's -- would appear mysteriously in the small pantry next to the kitchenette where I could do a modicum of cooking for myself with a set of saucepans and cast iron frying pans that would do credit to many kitchens. It required that I bust out my rusty skills, of course, but I managed.

So the door chimed out of time, and I said, "Come in," because I figured that anyone walking the halls could walk in anyway, and it was too much trouble to pry the dog off me and go be polite or something. Because, really, why should I be polite to my jailers anyway?

What rolled in looked like an unholy fusion of my mama's 1950s-era sea-green-and-gunmetal Hoover upright vacuum cleaner and a massive beauty salon sit-down hair dryer. The vacuum cleaner bag expanded and contracted, for all the world like someone breathing. The hair dryer hood was all closed in and dark, so there was no seeing whatever was inside. I could feel, though, that there was a mind in there, one I couldn't decipher at all, so this was not a robot.

"Greetings," it said in a tinny, stilted voice. "You are Renata Scott, yes?"

"I am Renata Scott, yes," I said. Flori attempted to hide behind me in the chair. I sat forward some and let her. "Are you seriously telling me that a species that can build this ship and wish food into my pantry can't make a decent imitation human voice?"

The vacuum cleaner stopped rolling toward me, and the voice said, still tinny and stilted, "The other humans we interact with prefer a less fluid vocalization."

"I prefer you to not sound like some bad BBC-alien knockoff," I said, putting as much boredom into my voice and mental emanations as I could.

There was another pause, and then a rich, mellifluous male voice said, "Is this preferable?"

"Yes, thank you," I said, impressed despite myself.

"Thank you for expressing your preferences so clearly," the alien said, and I thought there was some relief in there. "You are the greatest mind on this world, and we would rather have your respect than ridicule."

"Flattery," I said, "will not get you far. You obviously don't value my mind that much, since you threatened to kill me if I didn't consent to be locked up."

"I regret that you were contacted first by one of our more aggressive families," the alien said. "I was to be the liaison with all humans, due to my experience and research, but... plans changed."

"So you've been researching humans," I said, leaning back against my dog and crossing my arms, not willing to play "good cop, bad cop."

"Yes," the alien said, almost eagerly. "It has been a longstanding project for my family, you see..."

"Maybe some other time," I interrupted, "you'll tell me all about your sciencey science of science. But right now, I'd like to know why you're here." Yes, I'm rude. It was my only advantage, if advantage it really was.

… Okay, it just made me feel better.

The alien paused again, and I suspected it was studying me, or making notes in its lab notebook or something.

"We would like," it said hesitantly, "to know if you would be willing to cooperate with us yet."

"That depends on what you call 'cooperation'," I said. "I am not down with mind control, and as far as I could tell from what was going on down there two months ago, that was exactly what you were up to."

"There are other humans cooperating with us," it said. "They are knowledgeable about human minds and reactions, and therefore, we allow them to pursue our ends by their means."

I gave the vacuum cleaner the side-eye and stayed quiet.

"Your abilities show what your species is capable of," it said finally. "We would like your assistance in helping your species reach greater heights."

"You will forgive me if I don't believe a single bleep of your speaker system," I said.

"Yes, of course," it said. I doubted it could really "get" sarcasm. "Please consider it, though. I am not permitted to give you more details until you indicate your willingness to cooperate in a manner the other humans find convincing."

"Oh, we'll get real far then," I said, thinking about some of the human thoughts I'd overheard.

The vacuum cleaner turned and rolled to the door. "Goodbye for now."

"Do you have a name?" I said. "If you've studied humans so much, you know we like to have names to call people. Or we make up our own."

It seemed to consider, then said, "Our names are private, but... you may call me 'Joshua'." And then it let itself out.

I hauled the dog out from behind me and wrapped my arms around her. She was, of course, shivering like the big old coward she is. Comforting her gave me something else to think about for a while.

---

Author's Note:

For those of you who check out the source of every title, today's episode title is from the song at the climax of the musical, 2010: Our Hideous Future, a show in which a good friend of mine, Julia Lunetta, plays the MC, the evil AI who has taken over Earth. The show is unbelievably geeky, unapologetically queer, and funny as hell. 2010 is in what is very likely its final tour of shows. If you are in or around Salem, MA, Providence, RI, or Brooklyn, NY? MAKE TIME TO GO.

No, seriously, if you are a fan of Wonder City, you NEED to see this show.

Barring scheduling hiccoughs, I'm going to try my damnedest to be at either the Salem or Providence show. Extra bonus points if you want to meet me!

And if you aren't in the Northeast? See if you can get your local college or queer theater group to put it on, because the creators would LOVE to see that too.

The soundtrack is on Spotify. Just search for "our hideous future". The music is worth it. And I don't say this lightly -- I say this as someone who is very picky about musical theater, okay?

Don't forget to vote for Wonder City Stories at Top Webfiction!

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Wonder City Stories II #91

2012-02-22T16:57:52Z

All Water Has a Perfect Memory

"I'm really not sure about this," Nereid said, hanging back under the maple tree at the edge of the street. The day was hot and humid, and a sun-drunk bumblebee swam lazily through the thick air, narrowly avoiding Sophie's head.

"Ruth must be sure, or she wouldn't have invited you," Sophie said, tugging on Nereid's hand. "Come on, we'll be late."

They were both very firmly out of costume, in shorts and sandals and t-shirts. Sophie was even wearing a normal pair of glasses. They'd driven over in Sophie's deceptively rattletrap decade-old compact car. Nereid didn't know what customizations Sophie had added to the car; she just knew that any car that had a full keyboard integrated into the steering wheel couldn't be normal.

The Ultimate's house was a small, neat surburban box of a ranch house with a large green lawn and several copses of trees. There was brick trim and a two-car garage, and everything looked so very normal. Sophie had parked on the street because the driveway was full of vehicles that also, surprisingly, looked normal.

It was a quiet party, once they got inside, but Nereid was so nervous, her later memories of it were spotty. She remembered things in chunks:

1.
The Fat Lady took a glass of lemonade with a sprig of mint in it from the Ultimate. "So glad you could make it, Pacifica," she said in her beautiful voice. "Have you met Madeline Fukuda?" She gestured to the young Asian woman sitting beside her on the beige sofa.

Nereid felt a shock of recognition at the name. "You... you're...," she said, shaking hands with the woman.

"Yes, you've probably read about me," Madeline said with a sad smile. "It's all right. I get that a lot."

"Speaking of history," the Fat Lady said, "what's going on with that documentary?"

"Ah, well," Madeline said, shrugging slightly, "it's going forward, but slowly. There's very little funding, and, as you can imagine, the government and military are not pleased with the idea of it being made. People have almost forgotten World War II now, and they'd like to keep it that way."

"How are the girls doing?" Renata Scott said, carefully seating her dark copper android body on a nearby easy chair.

"Well, Annie died last year," Madeline said, and Nereid realized that she was talking about one of the clone bodies that had been grown from parts of her by the Army during the war.

"I'd heard," Renata said, and Nereid could hear the sympathy that the android face couldn't express. "I'm so sorry."

"Well, they've none of them had what you could call a good quality of life ever, though lord knows I've tried my best," Madeline said, shaking her head. "They weren't raised, like us, they just became. Barbara still has nightmares and violent episodes -- she's physically the strongest of them still, and earlier this year, the group home said they couldn't handle her any more, so she's in an institution. Georgina had a stroke a few months ago and has been paralyzed ever since; she refuses to do the physical therapy, and they've moved her out of the general home area into the hospital ward. Zeta has become even less verbal than she ever was. And, of course, Dorothy and Edith have been gone for years. Sandra, Theresa, and Iris are still living in the group home, and are doing all right, I suppose. Certainly the other people living there are doing better than they might otherwise." She grimaced a little.

"Are they... it sounds like they aren't all still young like you," Nereid said hesitantly.

"They're not," Madeline said, gently and sadly. "We don't know why I stayed young and they didn't. It's like they got a... a limited supply of my power, and the Army used it up. It's just as well, really. Like I said, they've always been... limited. In other ways." She pressed her fist flat against the center of her chest. "It still hurts when they go, though. Like I'm losing children."

"I hope the documentary happens," Nereid said, clenching her own hands angrily. "What they did to you, that should be more than a note in a textbook."

Madeline smiled. "Mine was just a small story in a much bigger story. Have you heard about the musical that George Takei man is putting together about the Japanese-American internment camps?"

2.
"How. are you. doing. Jennifer?" Avis Wysocki said, via her curiously stilted and old-fashioned computer voice, to the young olive-skinned woman seated on the floor.

Jennifer Lombardi looked vaguely in the direction of the middle-aged woman with the speaker on her shoulder and the keyboard on her lap. "I'm okay," she said in a faint, fading sort of voice. "I'm trying not to watch something really horrible right now, so I'm looking at about three dozen preschools."

Avis looked at Nereid and typed. "Jennifer. sees. everywhere. at the same. time." Nereid noticed that the computer voice had a faintly... Swedish?... intonation.

"That sounds hard to manage," Nereid said, unable to think of anything else. All those days working the tables at the diner and listening to people talk about their lives had helped after all.

"No, not difficult," said Jennifer in a distant tone. "More... distracting. I tend to walk into doors. And get lost. Of course, I do have to remember to keep an eye on certain things."

"Speaking of which," the Ultimate said as she passed through with a plate of hors d'ouerves, "are the G-men still bugging you?"

"Oh, yes," Jennifer said, with a few signs of animation. "They never seem to get tired of it. I just make sure I'm never home when they call."

"Does that mean the G-men are responsible for the time I had to fly to Venezuela to get you?" Sophie said from her perch on a tall chair at the breakfast bar.

"I don't remember," said Jennifer.

"Did you at least like Venezuela?" Nereid said.

"Oh, yes," Jennifer said, handing a bright tropical flower to Nereid, apparently from nowhere. "Of course, I don't have to be there to like it."

3.
Oum Veha, a plump, dark-skinned Asian man, sat in a carved wooden chair surrounded by a lovely confectionary wall of filigreed copper wires. When he hiccoughed briefly, there was a flash of blue-white light, a sizzling noise, and a loud, startling pop. After a moment, he said, sadly, "Ruth, I'm sorry, but I seem to have shattered another glass."

The Ultimate snorted something like laughter and went into the Faraday cage with a couple of dishtowels. The two of them muttered to each other, and Veha laughed at one point, accompanied by the tinkling of the pieces of glass.

"They have crushes on each other," Sophie whispered, handing Nereid a can of soda.

"Really?" Nereid said, trying not to stare at the round brown woman with the threads of silver in her corkscrew curls and the younger man, both stooping to the floor of the protective cage, their heads close together.

"Totally," Sophie said, popping open her own can. "She won't admit it, though he does, cheerfully. They see each other every week. It's adorkable."

Veha's hand brushed the Ultimate's as they both reached for the same shard of glass, and their gazes met for a moment before the Ultimate snatched the glass up, crushing it in her hurry. "You're being klutzier than usual, Veha," she said audibly, standing. "How many glasses are you gonna break today?"

Veha straightened up as well and smiled as she slid out of the cage. "Oh, as many as it takes."

4.
"I. like. your new. outfit," Avis said as Renata sat down next to her.

"Thanks! Larentia made it for me," Renata said, running a hand over the shining copper thigh of the android body.

"She. made. my. set. up. too," Avis said, gesturing at her keyboard and speaker.

"Really?" Renata leaned back a bit and the android head shifted obviously to bring the cameras to bear on the rig. "Why didn't she give you a smoother voice?"

"I have. gotten. used. to. this one," Avis replied. "I can not. imagine. my voice. being. any. different." She shoved light brown curls out of her eyes.

"Um, can I ask?" Nereid said.

"We told you," Renata said, the unnerving android eyes looking at her, "no questions are off-limits. If you ask something hurtful, we'll tell you. But we would like for you to feel like you really can ask us anything."

"Thanks," Nereid said, ducking her head a bit. "I was wondering, um, Avis, why you have to use the computer voice?"

"My. power. is. command. voice," Avis said. "If I say. something. imperative. most. people. have to. do it."

"Oh," Nereid said. "Oh. Wow."

"Yes," Avis said, looking skyward and shrugging. "It. was. awkward."

"And you can't control it?" Nereid said.

"I. could. for a while. as. a teenager," Avis said. "But. you. know. teenagers." She shrugged again.

Nereid looked faintly embarrassed. "You could, but you didn't. And then you couldn't at all?"

"No," Avis said, shaking her head, for emphasis it seemed.

Nereid started to say something, then paused to bite the inside of her cheek hard, which was one of her best techniques for stopping tears. "It's really hard... when you do something you didn't intend to."

Avis and Renata exchanged glances. "Yes," Avis said after a moment. "I remember. telling. a boy. who was. picking. on. me. to just. go. away. And his. parents. could not. find. him. again. I still. do not. know. what happened. to him."

Nereid clapped a hand to her mouth. "Oh god, I'm so sorry."

Avis grimaced and said, "Most. of us. should think. before. we speak. but I. need. to think. a lot. more."

5.
Nereid thought how strange it was to see the Ultimate laughing. She'd seen her laughing at the birthday party, but that had been so big and glittering and unreal that her laughter seemed so too.

"Veha, you are such a tease," the Ultimate said, sliding her hand along the doorframe of the Faraday cage.

"I have to make the most of my qualities," he replied, sipping his drink.

Madeline leaned closer to Nereid and said, "You're quiet."

Nereid blushed. "I'm just... everyone is so... famous."

"Famous people are just people," the Fat Lady said, twirling the fan in her hand skyward. "Even Sophie is famous, in her way."

"Yeah," said Nereid, glancing at Sophie, "but I met her before I knew she was famous."

Sophie flopped down at Nereid's feet and tilted her head back into her lap to say, "I can't believe you didn't know I was famous."

The Ultimate quirked a smile at them. "Not everyone's into cypherpunk or fanfiction like you are, kiddo."

Sophie looked at her mother, eyebrows high. "Hey, I've done quite a lot more than just that stuff."

"Being responsible for Gogo and the Gadgettes is important," Madeline allowed.

"I swear, I didn't tell her to crash the party!" Sophie said for the fourth or fifth time that afternoon, letting her head fall backward again. "And she's just Gogo now anyway."

Nereid gave in to the urge to stroke Sophie's hair, and blushed when she saw the Fat Lady wink at her over the top of the fan.

"I liked the album," Jennifer said while staring at a corner of the ceiling. "It goes well with all kinds of music."

Avis said, "Of course. Jennifer. someone. like. you. has to. listen to. a lot of. music. at. once."

Jennifer replied, wistfully, "People like us need a lot of music, don't you think? So you don't have to listen to the scary parts."

The Fat Lady said, "That's why I often sing in harmony with myself. More complexity, more concentration."

"'Swhy I play guitar," Sophie said, waving a hand. "Inside my head is pretty scary sometimes."

"Interesting," Veha said. "I started taking lessons on the khim a few months ago. It's a kind of hammered dulcimer," he added as explanation. When the Ultimate gave him a startled look, he ducked his head. "I didn't want to tell you, Ruth, until I got, you know, better. You sing so beautifully."

Nereid gave the Ultimate a startled look and tried to imagine the woman singing.

"Sometime, we ought to all have a family singalong around the piano," Madeline said with a dreamy little smile. "My parents did that, you know. It was so American. Could we, Ruth? Next time?"

Avis grinned. "I even. know. how to. play. I will. have to. practice."

"And I'll hafta get a piano," the Ultimate said, frowning around the room, hands on hips. Her gaze fell on the Fat Lady. "You're gonna insist on a grand, aren't you?"

"What's the point of anything less?" the Fat Lady said, fluttering the fan below her chin.

"Seriously, Ruth," Renata said. "Since when do you settle for the upright when you can get a grand?"

"You know better, Rennie: I don't settle," the Ultimate said, smiling around the room. "And neither should any of you. All right, there'll be a grand piano here next time. You gonna be here, Pacifica?"

Nereid blinked, looking around at the expectant faces, then smiled hesitantly and said, "I wouldn't miss it for the world."

She was pretty sure she meant it too.

END of Volume 2: Deep Freeze

---

Note from the Author:

Welcome to the finale of volume 2! Thank you for sticking with Wonder City through TWO novels! I'm kind of amazed that I've managed to write this much, and that we'll be hitting Wonder City's third anniversary this coming May.

This isn't the end of Wonder City, of course! In March, we begin the Zoltan miniseries, which is the last Interlude I owe for the wonderful response to the Julia Penelope fundraiser last spring. Being Zoltan, he couldn't just settle for a short story. At some point in March, I also plan to do a one-card draw event in collaboration with Madame Destiny and her Wonder City World War II Tarot Deck.

And then in April (or possibly May, depending on when Zoltan's story finishes up), we begin Volume 3 of Wonder City Stories. We will jump from summer 2010, which is when this episode occurs, to 2012, and so there will be some off-screen development, and there will be a new POV character added to the mix.

Thank you, everyone, for all your support and kindness and enthusiasm over the past two volumes. Please keep sticking with Wonder City Stories! There's lots of fun and drama on the way!

Best,
Jude

---

Wonder City has been nominated for the Rose & Bay Crowdfunding Award! Thank you! Now, y'all should go check out all the nominees for fiction, webcomics, art, poetry, patron, and other projects. And VOTE!

And remember to vote for WCS at Top Webfiction!

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Wonder City Stories II #90

2012-02-14T15:20:31Z

Jubilee

It was my first time running the android avatar that Larentia Canis had built me in a crowd, but I was going to by damn be AT Ruth's birthday party, not just watch it on a camera.

She was somewhat awkward to handle at first, no matter how much practice I'd had running her in my home. I called her Metro because Larentia, in a fit of whimsy, had recreated the android from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, with the feminine body and helmet-shaped head and deco styling, only with a dark copper finish. I was sititng in my long distance chair, wearing the control coronet. I was also drugged to the gills. Metro also had all sorts of electronic filters that affected mental powers, but the meds brought me down to a level actually manageable by those filters. I had full physical sensation, just as if I were there, without the mental onslaught of the people around me. I was just me, walking around on the hot sand beach of the remote island where everyone had gathered.

I spent a little time enjoying the feel of the sun warming the metal of my skin and the smell of the ocean and hot sand.

Of all the (few) people who knew me, Suzanne Feldstein found me first. "Renata? Renata Scott?" she said, a brown-haired, middle-aged white woman peering into Metro's eyes inquiringly.

"That's me," I said through Metro's speakers, and offered a hand. "Glad to meet you in the flesh, Suzanne. Well, flesh and metal."

Suzanne shook my hand vigorously. She was dressed in a yellow-floral-print sundress, and the sun was already starting to redden her shoulders. "I'm so glad you could come. C'mere, let me introduce you around some."

And so I met Simon, and he was just as fine in person as he was on camera, and if possible, sweeter. "Ms. Scott!" he said, shaking my hand. He was wearing a blue muscle shirt with "TEAM SIMON" on it in block letters and loose black shorts. His hair and Van Dyke were sharply trimmed. "I'm glad to meet you! Oh, I'm glad Mom did such a good job on that android body; it's really gorgeous."

How could I blush at a compliment meant for his mother's handiwork? Don't ask me. "Your mother has been very generous and kind to me over the years. This is only one example."

"She's like that," Simon said, then he stepped back and gestured to someone. "And here's someone who's been wanting to meet you too. Ira, this is Ms. Scott."

"Please," I said, shaking the old man's hand, "both of you, please call me Renata."

Ira beamed at me. He was wearing a big straw hat, a yellow polo shirt, and khaki shorts that showed his pale knobbly knees. He was a little thin and stooped, but otherwise looked younger than his 83 years. "I'm honored to meet you, Renata. You did such a bangup job that night, though I can't imagine it was easy."

"You did a pretty good job yourself, sir," I said.

"Ira," he corrected me.

"Ira," I said, wishing Metro's smile wasn't so very... scary, and that Larentia's attempt at the overlay projection (a la Maria's duplicate) hadn't failed so spectacularly. Someday, I'd be able to smile at people too.

Suzanne, I realized from her movements and her half-empty drink, was already more than a bit tipsy. She reached out and snagged the arm of a mousy, bespectacled white woman in jeans and a t-shirt. "Watson, Watson, come meet Renata."

So there was an orgy of introductions conducted by Suzanne, who was adding every moment to her "sheets to the wind" quotient. I met Watson Holmes, Megan Amazon, Ivy and Malik Canis (each holding a squirming puppy they introduced as belonging to their sister Jasmine -- I wasn't entirely sure what they meant by "belonging", given that the puppies were exclaiming my name delightedly), Ana Hernandez, Flo and Ebb Starr, the Silver Guardian (who was an old friend of Suzanne's apparently), and Sekhmet of the Gold Stars, and... a lot of other people whose names I'd heard but who I'd never met "live" before.

I was glad to be drugged to the gills, honestly. It was the largest crowd I'd been in for over 20 years.

Simon finally, kindly, as the afternoon advanced alarmingly toward evening, led Suzanne off to the buffet tables, saying, "We'll catch you later, Renata," over his shoulder. He winked at me, the little devil.

Left to my own devices, I made my way from the beach, where I'd been trapped by the introduction nexus after arriving there via the teleport link, up toward the line of umbrellas and beach chairs where I spotted Gloria Revelle's lean, solemn face peering around periodically. I figured that wherever Gloria was, Ruth was likely to be.

I was right. Ruth was ensconced in a thronelike wooden beach chair with some colorfully umbrella'd adult beverage in an enormous glass in one hand, grinning like a fool up at me. "You did make a gorgeous thing there, Larentia," she said, glancing up at Larentia, who was standing nearby. Ruth carefully balanced the glass on the arm of the chair, and got up to hug me. I saw Sophie reach out and steady the glass behind her, just as Ruth got me in a careful bear hug.

I leaned Metro's chin on her shoulder and enjoyed the various sensations of a solid, muscular, warm human body in my arms. I loved Ruth for many reasons, not least because for her, hugging one of her friends manifested in an android body was hardly the oddest thing she'd done in the past five minutes. "You look so much better than you did last I saw you, Ruth," I said.

"I feel so much better, Rennie," she murmured, not letting me go yet. "You helped give me back my baby. I won't forget that."

"Hell, Ruth, you gave me my life," I said, not willing to let go, feeling like I'd been in the desert for 20 years and was just getting a small sip of water. It had been so long since I'd touched a human being, and I can't actually remember when I last hugged someone without immediately being inside her or his head. "I'm glad to give something back. I mean, what do you get the most powerful para on Earth for her birthday anyway?"

We laughed, and finally stepped back a little, but our arms lingered around each other's waists. Ruth gestured around, saying, "You know Gloria, of course."

I shook hands with Gloria, and was amazed to actually see the woman smile. She had a little lopsided smile, with a mostly closed mouth, and I noticed that she had a bit of an overbite -- I suspected that might be why she doesn't smile more often. "Gloria, thank you for everything you've been doing lately with the chef roster. The variety has been really wonderful."

"I thought we could use some new blood in the kitchen," she said in her deep voice and blunt MidAtlantic accents. "You're my lab rat, you know. These are all chefs I try out on you before using them for catering and events."

"Glad to be of service," I said. "Delicious service."

"Here's Olivia," Ruth said, drawing the Fat Lady into the circle. The Fat Lady was wearing a remarkable gauzy white dress that drifted dramatically on the breeze and looked just right with her complexion, and her sleek black hair was caught up under an extravagant white sun hat.

"Renata, I've heard so many good things about you," Olivia said, turning her famous dimples and dazzling smile on me.

I confess to feeling just a little overwhelmed and, well, fangirlish, so I think I managed to mutter something polite and possibly gushed about loving her work before Ruth sicced Sophie on me.

The girl had some of the most intense dark eyes I've ever seen, and even though I technically shouldn't have been able to sense a damned thing about her, I could feel the wheels of her mind turning and turning. It was almost like I could see and feel the clockwork moving through those remarkable eyes. That's what you get from the intimate connection of stuffing someone back into her head, I suppose. There we were, caught in mid-handshake, staring into each other's minds, I think, for what felt like a piece of eternity, before we both shook ourselves and she said, "I've been wanting to thank you for everything you did."

I shrugged. "There were lots of folks who did more than I did."

"Yes, well," Sophie said, flashing a grin. She reached behind her and dragged another white girl her age foward. This one was brown-haired and utterly average in terms of looks and overt charm, but I recognized her.

"Pacifica," I said, shaking her hand. "Glad to meet you outside your head."

She smiled shyly, pressed her lips together and hunched her shoulders a bit. "I'm flattered you remember me, Ms. Scott."

"Renata," I said, thinking, Girl, how could I possibly forget you? Aloud, I added, "Your arm seems to've healed up nicely."

"It's still stiff," she said, "but Sophie makes good healing accelerators. Even if I did have to spend time in tank full of blue goo. Why was it blue, anyway?" she added, turning to Sophie.

"I didn't want anyone eating it," Sophie said.

"No one would eat that, it smelled too bad," Nereid said.

Sophie grinned. "You'd be surprised..."

There was a loud crack of lightning overhead, and everyone tensed. Ruth looked up quickly, then rolled her eyes and said to Sophie, "Didn't you give that child an invitation?"

Sophie shrugged. "I did," she said, "but she always prefers to crash." I thought I picked up just a bit of mischief there, as if, perhaps, she'd had some idea in advance.

High above us was a flying stage, limned in neon and flashing lights against the twilit sky. It slowly lowered until it was hovering just above the ocean, with the spectacular painted clouds of sunset sprawling out behind it. Myriad small, hovering robots levitated from the stage and sprang into formation in the air, turning colored spotlights onto the platform. A backdrop of enormous metal struts extruded from the back of the stage, arching up into Gothic points and then blooming into weirdly delicate curlicues that suggested tentacles, or possibly fruit.

"What the hell is that?" Sister Power said, as though she knew exactly what the hell it was but was a bit afraid of the answer. She crinkled a smile at me, her dark brown face highlighted by a glorious mane of silver hair. I'd forgotten how old she was; she'd gotten her start in the 1970s, so she must be in her 60s by now.

Ruth massaged the bridge of her nose. "It's Sophie's little friend. You remember her, Imara. The one who started a band in college. Calls herself Gogo."

Sophie snorted at this description.

An enormous grinding noise silenced us all and a pillar rose up from the middle of the stage. It appeared to be girdled with a bank of steampunk consoles and quite a lot of flashing lights. The grinding noise stopped, and then, in a burst of music, it flew open, revealing a young white woman whose top was dressed in a silver jumpsuit, and whose lower half was a kickline of seven sets of robot legs. A drum line started. She leapt down to the stage with surprising agility for someone with fourteen legs, and subtle instrumentals started up. She started to declaim in a deep voice that was projected to several points around us.

People keep saying it's the end days,
Skynet's won, we've run the maze.
In the center is Room 101:
Can we boldly go when all is done?
All the things I tried to save
Are just putting flowers on a mouse's grave.
Game over, man, and everybody dies
And there's nothing to eat but lies, lies, lies.

"I do believe," Gloria said, "we are about to have a concert."

"Oh, god help me," Ruth said, taking the umbrella out of her drink so she could swallow it faster.

A robot guitarist, keyboardist, bassist, and drummer emerged from the surface of the stage, apparently fused to their instruments. I noticed the drummer had long hair so it could swing it back and forth. All of them were silver-skinned, like Gogo's jumpsuit and legs, but with gold accents. Gogo strutted down to the front of the stage (there's a lot of strut in seven sets of robot legs), seized a microphone that was dropped from above by one of her ubiquitous flying drones, and burst into song with a crash of music.

I won't be just a worker in the heart machine
I'm going to see the light of day.
I'm going to crack the world's shell is what I mean
Put on my wings and fly away.

Everyone asks me am I bad witch or good
Or one of the genetic elite
But I am telling you I'm Lilith's Brood
And we have never known defeat!

We're from Ultima Thule
And we include me and you.
She's the hero we need
Cause she makes us heroes too!

"Oh, no," Ruth groaned, and finished her drink.

Sophie looked contrite. But only a little. Nereid was watching Gogo with her mouth hanging open. An attractive androgynous Asian person appeared over Nereid's shoulder and raised inquisitive eyebrows at Sophie, who said defensively, "It's not my fault!"

Just living day to day
Learn to rise up and say
She's the hero we need
To sing Hero of Heroes today!

She's the Ultimate test!
In her Prometheus rests,
She's the hero we need
Because we give her our best!

I was pretty amazed at the dancing you could do with fourteen legs in perfect unison. At the end of the first chorus, backup dancers also melted out of the stage. I felt distinctly upstaged when I realized that they all looked just like my android body, except in silver. Talk about embarrassment for wearing the same outfit to the party.

"Hey," Larentia said faintly. She patted my shoulder apologetically.

Gogo spoke into her microphone again.

At Yoshiwara's we'll dance and fight
Always alone in the night,
But reaching out, touch hand to hand,
Galadriel or Servalan.
Is the Slayer really born this way?
Or Sleepless walk both night and day?
Or maybe we'll stand up and see:
You have no power over me.

Sister Power said, "None of this makes any sense. What the hell is a servalan?"

Sophie started laughing helplessly into her hands.

The music kicked up again.

For some reason, Gogo threw her microphone into the audience. Then, with a satisfied little smile, she leaned back and another one sprouted, or seemed to sprout, out of her chest. She grabbed that one and kept singing.

I noticed a middle-aged black woman, oddly wearing a suit on the beach, making her way through the crowd with purpose in her eyes. She didn't even flinch at the volume of the music. I nudged Ruth.

Ruth looked over. "Marilyn, heeeey, girl!" she said, waving her hand. I wondered idly how many of those giant glasses of booze Ruth had already consumed.

The woman, who I now recognized as Marilyn Henderson, lawyer to paras, arrived in front of Ruth with a grim little smile on her face. "Interesting entertainment."

"It's not what I would've chosen, true," Ruth said. "But the girl's got a good heart."

"And is showing a great deal of leg," Marilyn said with a glance upward.

"What're you doing, wearing that penguin suit here on the beach?" Ruth said. "Take that jacket off and set a while."

Marilyn straightened her shoulders in an ominous way that made both Gloria and I tense up. "Ruth Thomas, I am here to give you some important paperwork."

Ruth laced her fingers together and placed them under her chin. "At my birthday party." She didn't make it a question.

"Yes," Marilyn said. She whipped a folder out from under her arm and extended it to Ruth. "It couldn't wait."

Gloria's thin form had risen up and arched in a predatory fashion, inclining very slightly toward Marilyn.

Ruth sighed and took the folder.

We'll come down like angels on Tokyo

And we don't need roads where we're going.

At the end of the world can you tell me where

And in what way the time is flowing?

I can build my friends but I can't build you

A place for opossums to call their own.

But don't look back, don't blink I'm telling you

It's dhoom again but we are flown!

A hero right through

Like flying snow in bamboo

She's the hero we need

Cause she makes us heroes too!

Take my ansible call

'Cause it's for one and all

She's the hero we need

Cause she makes us stand tall!

She won't be suppressed

Or sent into the West

She's the hero we need

Because we give her our best!

Gogo chose that moment to distract us all with another spoken piece.

We need a hero that's worth our while
Whether Wonder Woman or Trio-style
So put on your clothes, or dye your hair
And sing electric grandmother
From Alderaan to Whileaway
The winning move is not to play.
They tell us we're beyond the pale
Bionic-made or automail,
Whether you are you or me
Virtual or karakuri
Rise up and greet Red Dawn today
Like Nauscicaa we'll fly away;
To Iskandar we'll fly away;
On ships that sing we'll fly away.

And she then started singing again.

Ruth looked back down at the folder in her hands, heaved another sigh, and flipped it open.

I have never before seen Ruth stunned. I'm not sure anyone has. Her whole body jerked and her eyes went wide and she stared fixedly at the papers. Then her hands began to tremble, and Gloria snatched the folder away before those tiny muscular tremors could reduce what she was holding to paper pulp.

Sophie had moved to stand at Ruth's shoulder, and I noticed her giving Marilyn what I sensed was a conspiratorial and questioning look. Marilyn's smile widened incrementally.

The thing about Ruth is that she is the most powerful para in the world. And so the fact that none of us saw her move is just not that surprising. The look on Sophie's face changed to triumphant delight as Ruth threw her arms around her, though.

"You two!" Ruth roared, only locally drowning out Gogo's band. "You two!" she said again, apparently at a loss for other words.

"What's going on?" asked Imara, peering curiously over Gloria's shoulder.

Gloria said, mock-grumpily, "That girl finally pulled her head out of her ass is what's going on."

Sophie said, breathless with embarrassment and her mother's embrace, "My adoption papers. I signed them."

She's returned from the blue

And Zaha'dum too--

She's the hero we need

Cause she makes us heroes too!

Dark Lords big and small

We will spit on them all

She's the hero we need

Cause she makes us stand tall!

Stand tall, stand tall, stand tall

Stand tall, stand tall, stand tall

Stand tall, stand tall, stand tall...

Gogo's army of tiny flying robots, which looked, I noticed, like dragonflies, chose that moment to shower us with her new album.

Larentia caught one and so did I. The cover was a brown-skinned woman's arm, reaching up as if to pluck a fruit from a tree, but the fruit was a giant oval containing a twisty, maze-like structure. To give Ruth and Sophie a moment of pseudo-privacy, Larentia began to read from the cover. "'Mitochondrial Eve,'" she said. "I like the title."

I overheard some people passing nearby. One of them said, "I liked her second album the best, 'Amazon Women and the Space-Time Continuum'."

The other said, "Oh, I haven't heard of that one."

"It was back when she was Gogo and the Gadgettes," the first said, and they drifted out of hearing.

"'My Mother's Positronic Brain,'" Larentia read from the track list bemusedly. "'Dear Mr. Heisenberg.' 'Cyborg Manifesto'?"

I skimmed down the list myself. "'Bad Chemistry,' 'Soylent Blue,' 'Love Me and Despair'."

Gloria said, with a roll of the eyes, "Anyone else get the feeling that child is trying too hard?"

Nereid, who I had forgotten, said wistfully, "She looks like she's having fun."

On stage, Gogo had swung into her well-known song, "A Robot of One's Own."

The well-tailored Asian person to whom I really needed an introduction said, "There's a dance floor over there, Pacifica. Would you care to join me?"

Later, around the time that Sophie was finishing up her guitar-playing on-stage with Gogo (oh, yes, she'd just happened to have her guitar with her), I overheard Suzanne saying to Watson, "Is this your work? Remind me never to piss you off!"

I looked over and saw Suzanne showing Watson her StarPhone. Watson frowned down at it, clearly puzzled. "No," she said after a moment, "that's not my work."

Suzanne noticed Metro looking her way, so she turned the display toward me. "'Aloysius MacCready, legally 93 years old,'" I read aloud, "'has been arrested on a charge of second-degree murder and multiple charges of armed robbery, among other offenses. MacCready was processed for a temporal displacement grant upon his return to this dimension, and had disappeared from his stated address. More in-depth analysis of historical records found that in 1932, he participated in an armed robbery of a bank for African-Americans during which he pistol-whipped a bank teller. The teller, 26-year-old Norman Jefferson, later died of the head trauma.'"

"I know the statute of limitations doesn't expire for murder," Suzanne said. "And the temporal displacement laws extend the limitation for the armed robbery charges. But the witnesses must all be dead, so how can they prosecute?"

Watson skimmed more of the article. "They had eyewitnesses who knew MacCready by name and appearance, and who gave depositions identifying him. So with that in hand, they could use the Stefanopolous Laws."

Ana had looked over from her conversation when I started to read, and now she spoke up with, "I think I've heard of the Stefanopolous Laws, but I've never been sure what they're about."

Suzanne said, breezily, "Watson'll have to explain. I'm too drunk. But they involved a vampire."

Watson quirked a smile. "Andrei Stefanopolous was a vampire who was a repeat spree killer. He was notorious in Europe in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and then he moved to New York City. They caught him after a rampage through an Italian and Greek neighborhood in the 1880s, but of course, there weren't para-ready prisons then, and he escaped to go underground again. He resurfaced in the same neighborhood 1952, and the grandchildren of the original people victimized went to the police with the photos from the 1800s and their own photos of him in the neighborhood, begging police to pick him up. They didn't -- all the original witnesses were dead and it seemed like too much trouble and besides, there weren't many people who actually believed in vampires at that point. So then he went on a much wider-spread killing spree."

"Oh, yes, the Vampire Murders," Ana said. "That's all in the college para history books."

"Yep," Watson said. "And after they caught him and the Gold Stars imprisoned him, the story broke that the police had refused to pick him up and why. So the Stefanopolous Laws were passed in a hurry to cope with immortal or temporally displaced violent offenders."

"Technically," a sleek, black-haired, white -- very white -- man said, sliding easily into the conversation and gently twirling his black parasol, "it is for the long of life, not the immortal. Because no one is truly immortal, yes?" He had an eastern European accent and what had to be a hand-tailored white linen suit. He was also the only person I'd ever seen wearing a Panama hat on whom it looked stylish.

Watson nodded and waved a hand of acknowledgement. "You're the authority there, Zoltan."

"Zoltan," Suzanne said in that floppy-headed drunk way some white women have, "it's night time. Why are you carrying that parasol?"

"Ah, dear lady," he said, "to protect against the bites of sharks."

"Oh," Suzanne said, blinking.

"Not to mention robots," he added, "and other undesirable things that fall from the sky."

"So what will happen to this MacCready anyway?" Ana pursued, having produced a StarPhone of her own and apparently searching for the article.

"He's being held in prison," Watson said. "Apparently some anonymous person provided the police with both his DNA and a single-use scanner to locate it, because he has para powers that enable him to avoid direct detection." She looked up and past the dance floor and nearest buffet table toward a line of well-occupied comfortable chairs.

I glanced in that direction and saw Sophie sitting there, with Nereid on her lap, chatting with Simon and Ivy.

"Who could've supplied a device like that?" Ana pondered, frowning at her phone.

Watson and I looked at each other, then back at Sophie. Sophie noticed our regard and gave us a smile and a little finger wave, as if she knew exactly what we were thinking.

---

Note from the Author:

Apologies if the table format didn't work well for you -- I optimized for what I thought would be a usual sort of view.

Gogo's song was written as a winter holiday present for me by my multiply-gifted, brilliant, beautiful, magnificent wife. I had been banging my head against how to do it, and then she volunteered. I don't think I've ever seen quite so many SF&F references packed into one place so effectively, and I think it also works beautifully as a pop song. (And yes, Lady Gaga DOES exist in the Wonder City universe, so Gogo IS in fact purposefully referencing her.) See this document (PDF) for most of the references.

Also, in case you're interested, the full track list for Gogo's new album, "Mitochondrial Eve", contains:
My Mother's Positronic Brain
Mitochondrial Eve
Dear Mr. Heisenberg
Cyborg Manifesto
Les Guérillères
Bad Chemistry
Soylent Blue
To Milton, Love, the Monster
Ultima
Love Me and Despair
The Doom Song
I Can't Be Having With This
Bonus Track: Schoolhouse Rock Mashup (feat. "Sufferin' for Suffrage")

---

Wonder City has been nominated for the Rose & Bay Crowdfunding Award! Thank you! Now, y'all should go check out all the nominees for fiction, webcomics, art, poetry, patron, and other projects. And VOTE!

And remember to vote for WCS at Top Webfiction!

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Wonder City Stories II #85

2012-01-17T13:48:54Z

Asking No Questions, Passing No Criticisms

"So you said you had something to tell me, Ruth," I said from my seat on the floor. Floribunda, my newly-acquired Pit Bull rescue puppy, cocked her bowling-ball head at me. She was mostly white, with brown ears and a set of adorable worry lines on her forehead above her big brown eyes.

"I thought you'd like to hear the latest from the Wonderful House," Ruth's voice said from the speakers. Flori wobbled over -- she was only 8 weeks old -- and sat in front of the nearest speaker, looking for all the world like a tiny version of Nipper in the "His Master's Voice" painting.

"Oh, god, there's more?" I said, tossing a squeaky toy toward Flori. She pounced on it in that floppy-puppy way, her legs stiff and jaunty.

"Better believe it," Ruth said, and I could tell she felt immensely pleased with herself. "One of the producers apparently was a plant from another network. He'd been sabotaging the whole production since before it started to air."

"Really?" I said, not really surprised. I reached out for the toy, and Flori nipped my finger accidentally. I told her Careful. She sat down in surprise and looked around, apparently puzzled as to the source of the voice. It would take her a while to figure it out. "Was Brandon his brainchild too?"

"Oh, no, that was the director," Ruth said. "The director actually wanted the show to succeed, and everyone, apparently, loves assholes."

"Ah," I said, nudging Flori's butt with my toe and sending her into a frenzied sprint around the room with her butt tucked under. "So what sort of sabotage was he engaging in?"

"Oh, things not getting edited," Ruth said. "Equipment going missing or breaking. Permits and licenses for things not being processed on time. But that's not the best part."

"Quit holdin' out on me, girl," I said, watching my puppy carom crazily off chairs and tables.

"Someone got a wild hair up his ass," Ruth said, "and thought that maybe if this guy was sabotaging the production, he had hired that guy to kill Brandon. So now the mole is singing like a bird to get out from under the conspiracy to murder charges."

"That would explain why they wanted my 'inside information,'" I mused. Flori trotted over and flopped into my lap, where she almost immediately went to sleep.

"Exactly," Ruth said. "I was wondering why they were harassing you like that. It took a few days for my lawyers to dig up this dirt."

"That is fascinating," I said. "But not altogether unexpected. I figured something hinky was going on. I'm glad the kids are out of it, though. The producers are settling out of court, I heard?"

"Yeah," Ruth said, and I could hear her typing in the background. "For a pittance compared to what they were supposed to win, but it cuts all ties and makes for a nice deal if the company decides to release it on DVD or something."

I watched Flori breathing, her eyes tight shut. "I'm glad," I said again. "How's Sophie?"

"Much better," Ruth said, and I heard her stop typing and felt her giving me her full attention. "Though the kid's up to something. I'm not sure what."

"Maybe it's to do with your birthday party," I said, and Flori rolled onto her back in my lap, all four paws in the air.

"I guess I'll find out soon enough, right?" Ruth said, though she didn't sound too displeased. "How's the dog?"

"She's perfect," I said, grinning like a loon as Flori's too-large paws twitched in some vague puppy dream. Her mind radiated pure uncomplicated contentment. "Just perfect."

---

Note from the Author:

Because we don't have enough crazy dog ladies in Wonder City yet.

The Rose & Bay Crowdfunding Award nominations are open, and I would love it if someone were to nominate Wonder City Stories. Take a look at the other categories, just in case there's something else you want to nominate for voting! Nominations are a little low compared to last year, so please go nominate!

And remember to vote for WCS!

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Wonder City Stories II #81

2012-01-06T16:16:14Z

Ghouls and Cannibals

Those asshole producers from It's a Wonderful House tried to call me.

They tried to call my black para ass because they'd "heard" that I had been part of that whole midnight disaster that ended up with three people dead (though only two dead bodies) and a bunch more injured. I apparently hurt their fee-fees by not calling them back, so they started calling once a day, then twice a day. They just wanted information, they said. They knew I was a telepath, they said. I had more information than anyone else, they said. They could pay me, they said. They could give me a nice television, or a car, or, gosh, even the Wonderful House itself.

When honey didn't work, they tried threatening me. With subpoenas. I finally took one of their calls so I could laugh at them in person.

"You do realize," I told them in the conference call, "since you claim to know all sorts of things about me, that I am legally unable to testify in court, or even to show my face in the courthouse, don't you?"

There was a long silence, punctuated by murmuring I couldn't hear with my ears, but could very well hear otherwise.

What does she mean? Producer #1 said.

No one can be legally unable to show in court, Producer #2 said. Can they?

There was a click and all noise on their side ceased as someone hit the mute button.

Well, technically, yeeeeessss, Attorney for the Producers said. If she's, um, covered by the Jane Liberty Law.

... Is she that powerful? Producer #1 said. Actually, I think he wrote it down so there was no way I could hear it should the mute fail.

The guy I talked to said she was the most powerful telepath around, Producer #2 said. But he didn't say she was THAT powerful.

"I am that powerful," I said. "I am legally a Class 10, boys. Just by talking to you, I can now find you and read your minds anywhere in this galaxy." Which is a little exaggeration. Maybe. I've never really tried it with someone I only barely know.

Oh, fuck, Producer #1 said.

The mute came off. "Well, we'll discuss the matter and get back to you, Ms. Scott, thankyouverymuchforyourtime," the lawyer said, and then he hung up.

I laughed myself nearly sick, but then had to go for a swim to scrub the producer smarm out of my head.

---

Note from the Author:

As I said earlier in the week, I'll be posting on a bit of an accelerated schedule over the next several weeks; you find out why soon enough. The plan is for 3 (short) episodes next week!

And remember, if you've ever wanted a Team Simon t-shirt (or tank top, or mug, or water bottle), just check out Wonder City Wonders, my new store at Cafe Press.

Please remember to vote for WCS!

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Wonder City Stories II #77

2011-12-13T18:53:26Z

The Grave of Your Deserving

The Wonderful House boards were crazy with the news.

Somehow, it didn't surprise me, though. We'd never heard about Brandon's family on the show. They'd talked about Professor Canis, we had the memorable visit from Lizzie's father, Tom's aunt and uncle had come up from time to time, and Jeshri's family was always in her conversation. But not Brandon's. It seemed somehow fitting, karmically, that even his family abandoned him in the end.

Of course, it didn't seem fair that the people who had the most reason to dislike him were forced into the position of taking care of him. And of course they had to, especially after their closing video laying claim to him as "their jerk." They would have been ripped to shreds if it had come out that Brandon's body had been surrendered to the government for dissection.

I popped to a different screen and signed a half dozen petitions to do away with the Gold Stars research law. I knew that Ruth -- or someone -- would take care of me when I died, because god knows no one wants the government to dissect a Class 10 telepath. But didn't all the other paras, all the regular paras, all the homeless paras, anyone at all who wasn't quite the ideal human being, have a right to be buried with their secrets? Patriotic duty, my left asscheek.

It also didn't surprise me that the show's producers had abandoned any responsibility for Brandon along with their responsibility for payout or, you know, the safety of their "contestants". I did notice, however, that the producers tried to jump on the funeral bandwagon once it got rolling. In an interview with Simon:

WonderBlog: So will the funeral be televised?

Simon: We'll be livestreaming it for the fans.

WonderBlog: But no TV?

Simon: We couldn't reach an amicable compromise with the show's producers, who are in the best position to produce a televised version. They were interested in the funeral, but not interested in meeting any conditions, and we weren't interested in being screwed over again.

WonderBlog: Speaking of screwed over, who's paying for the funeral?

Simon: Fortunately, not us. There's a fund established by the Guardians and Gold Stars for the funerals of paras without families who die in a supervillain action.

Oh, good, I thought, at least the kids weren't going to have to cough up for the ridiculous costs of a funeral.

The livestreamed funeral was fascinating. I tuned in late (after taking practically every drug in my pharmacopeia that suppressed my powers without just knocking me out), just in time to see hundreds of fans packing into the largest room of the Weinstein Funeral Home. The camera view switched to Simon, in a tailored black suit, and Jeshri, in a somber brown skirt suit, walking out to meet Tom, who was pulling on a tweed sportcoat over a black polo shirt and khakis as he crossed the parking lot.

"You made it!" Simon said, shaking his hand.

"I couldn't let you guys face this without me," Tom said, next hugging Jeshri. "No luck with his dad though."

"What happened?" Jeshri said, and they all turned and started walking toward the funeral home.

"I stopped at the address you gave me, just outside Pittsburg," Tom said. "Parking the rig was a bitch and the neighbors all came out to stare. Upscale but older neighborhood, almost all white."

"Surprise," Simon muttered.

"Anyway," Tom said with a shrug, "I rang the doorbell. The lights were on and the TV was going, so I kept at it till he opened the door. And guys, the fumes just about knocked me the fuck over."

"Drunk?" Jeshri said.

"As a skunk," Tom said. "He was in his wifebeater and a pair of sweatpants and had about a week's worth of stubble. Looked just like Brandon would have after twenty years of partying and smoking."

"Yugh," Jeshri said.

"I'll spare you more gory details," Tom said as they neared the door. "Let's leave it at him telling me he wouldn't attend anything associated with his wife's filthy para crotch-dropping, in those words, even if it was the funeral for every backstabbing bastard para in the world at the same time. And then he mock-apologized that his wife was on the other side of the world, probably screwing someone who looked like me, when she could have been here, comforting me for the loss of my buddy, if only all paras weren't also great big homos."

"I think I'm going to be sick," Jeshri said, looking the part.

"Guess we know more about why Brandon was such a jackass now," Simon said.

"It's no excuse," Lizzie said, emerging from the doorway. "I mean, look at my dad."

"Must I?" Simon said.

"He's at least as big a jerk as Brandon's dad," Lizzie said, "and I, at least, try to be decent to other people." She was wearing a white blouse and pair of dark blue slacks.

Tom nodded. "You've got a point."

They hesitated outside the door, and then group-hugged.

"Time to butch up," Simon said, breathing deeply.

"Let's get this over with," Lizzie said, breaking away from the others and opening the door.

The camera switched back to the interior of the packed room. My computer system was blurring out faces except those I knew personally, so I noticed Ira and Suzanne Feldstein sitting in the front row, Ira in a crisp, bright Mister Metropolitan uniform and Suzanne in a dark burgundy suit. I saw Ruth, Olivia, and Larentia sitting together a couple of rows back, noticeably not in their more recognizable Ultimate, Fat Lady, and Professor Canis personas. The Steel Guardian was there with Sekhmet, representing for their particular teams. Brainchild, looking pale and wan, all nose and glasses, in a shirt, vest, and many-pocketed trousers, sat next to Wire, whose weirdly floaty blue forelock only briefly distracted me from the shining metal hand she flexed idly in her lap. And just as people were settling in and a man was stepping to the podium, the Equestrian and her horse (in his human form) strode up the aisle to sit with Ira and Suzanne.

The camera view then shifted to the plain black coffin with chrome trim and rails, against which leaned a small easel holding a photograph of a slightly younger, pleasantly-smiling Brandon -- probably a school photo of some sort. I could see any number of floral offerings around the coffin, including an ostentatious bunch of white lilies from the "It's a Wonderful House" producers.

The man at the podium was pastor of a local church who knew Tom (we were not vouchsafed an explanation for that). He was an uninspiring speaker -- I wished for the preacher from Mama's church, whose eloquence she always spoke of in glowing tones -- but white preachers have never particularly impressed me. I tuned out everything he said and concentrated on the images: the camera pans over the crowd (mostly young white people, I noticed), the expressions on the faces of the Wonderful House cast and crew (my system recognized Eartha the camerawoman in that group, and from her face I guessed she shared my assessment of the speaker), and the repeated switches back to the coffin.

He spoke for only about five minutes, which was a blessing, and no one else apparently cared to speak, so Olivia got up and sang "Ave Maria" in her most restrained voice, accompanied by a pianist I didn't know (and so couldn't see). When she was done, the pianist swung into something slow and somber, and Simon, Lizzie, Jeshri, Tom, Eartha, and another crew member I didn't know went forward, lifted the coffin, and carried it out on their shoulders. The crowd began to pour out the doors after them.

I walked away from the livestream while they drove to the cemetery. My computer system was excellent, but with the speed the cars were moving, it would inevitably miss blocking some people, and I just didn't need the headache. My family phone rang while I was pouring myself a glass of tea.

"Hey, Mama," I said.

"Are you watching the funeral?" she said.

"Of course," I said.

"You made yourself so sick over all that," she said, sucking her teeth in annoyance. "I can't imagine why you want to watch that horrible boy's funeral now."

"Because he's the end of the story," I said, adding three teaspoons of sugar to my iced tea. "It's about closure, Mama. He was that man's last victim."

"Well," she said, somewhat mollified. "When you put it that way. I suppose. Is that woman there?"

"Suzanne Feldstein? Yes, she was in the front row with her father-in-law," I said, sipping the tea and going through a door into one of my little parks, where I kept promising myself to start an aviary so I could have birdsong, another one of those things I miss.

"She wrote a very nice memorial to Yenaye and the other women, I thought," Mama said.

"Yes, I thought it was good too," I said, sitting on one of the wooden benches. The tone of her voice was detached, and I could tell there was a pressure of something she wanted to tell me. I waited.

"Rennie, I called you to tell you something," Mama said finally.

"What's up?" I said.

"Well, first thing, your cousin Benjamin asked me to ask you if you were serious about wanting a puppy, because he knows one that needs a home," she said. Mama doesn't like dogs, and that dislike dripped off her voice.

"Tell Ben that I absolutely want a new puppy, and he should send me photos," I said, feeling really excited for the first time in a while.

"You know him and his foolery with dogs," Mama said. "Of course he'd find you a dog. It'll have fleas, you know."

"There's medicine for that, Mama," I said, tamping down the excitement. "What else did you want to tell me?"

She fell silent. "I had one of my seeing dreams, Rennie," she said, her tone uncharacteristically hesitant.

"And?" I knew better than to say anything else at all, because she'd take it as disbelief and never tell me.

She cleared her throat uncomfortably. "I saw you alone with your dog. All alone, mind you, and not in your house." She always called the bunker my "house". I guess it made it sound less like I was locked away. "Looking out a great big window over the city." Throat-clearing again. "That's all. But I knew it was a seeing."

"Thank you, Mama," I said, feeling chilled. "I don't know what it means, but I'll remember it."

"You do that," she said, but I could tell she was gratified. I was the only one of her children who believed in her seeing dreams. I had reason to. "All right, I'd best be getting on. You take care now, Rennie."

"I will. You too, Mama," I said. "I love you."

"And I love you, girl," she said, and hung up.

When I got back to the screen with my half-glass of tea, they'd gotten to the cemetery and were lowering the coffin into the raw hole in the green earth. As I watched fans and acquaintances pass by the grave to throw flowers into it, I raised my glass. May it be sweeter for him next time around.

---

Note from the Author:

Renata's not the only one grateful for closure here!

Please remember to vote for WCS!

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Wonder City Stories II #73

2011-11-19T02:13:18Z

Full of Evil Clowns

I'd finally conquered my headache after drugging myself unconscious for about twenty hours, and I'd rescheduled all my clients for the next two weeks. I felt better -- sore all around the edges, but better -- and I'd been swimming a lot.

Ruth called and I managed to keep the call short. "Have you talked to Nereid and Wire?" I said after the initial greetings and stream of gratitude.

"Yes," Ruth said. "Well, I've talked to Wire. She said the whole thing was Nereid's idea, so I've been trying to get in touch with Pacifica. She hasn't returned my calls yet."

"She's shy," I said, but I frowned and made a mental note to talk to the Equestrian. "And probably exhausted."

"That's what Wire suggested," Ruth said. "Anyway, thank you, Rennie, for everything. I know what you did with those kids wasn't easy at all for you."

"They needed me," I said. "And I wanted to be part of bringing that bastard down. He killed a friend of my family."

"Damn, girl, you didn't tell me that," Ruth said.

"Sorry," I said. "I just... well, you were busy."

She sighed. "All right. Well, I'm glad you could be part of the resolution, at least."

"Me too," I said. "Hey, Ruth, you know I love talking to you but..."

"You're still fried, I know. Take care of yourself, boo," Ruth said. "You're still coming to the party, right?"

Until that moment, I'd completely forgotten about Ruth's upcoming 50th birthday party. "Oh, hell, yes," I said. "I wouldn't miss it."

"I'll tell Sophie," she said. "Love you."

"Love you too," I said, and we hung up.

I was grateful that I'd managed things so well, because I had a chance for a swim before the last episode of Wonderful House.

The speculation on what this final episode would be like had run wild on the Internet. A memorial to Brandon? The other housemates talking in detail about that night, since very little of the real story had come out? Lizzie reconciling with her father? (I vehemently hoped not.) Simon and any of the other housemates confessing their undying love for each other? (The biggest part of the fandom I frequented was pro-Simon/Lizzie, but a not-insubstantial proportion was pro-Simon/Jeshri. There were lesser contingents for all the other combinations, including triads and even all four together, and even smaller groups that 'shipped non-Simon pairings.) (I don't go to the parts of fandom that like Brandon.)

I think that no one, not even me, expected what we got: an hour of retrospective, talking heads analyzing the interactions and relationships, and a lot of voiceover on the scenes of the housemates packing their rooms. Not a single line of current dialog from the housemates. The only time any anger at all was allowed to show was when all of them were sitting in the producer's office, glowering at the PARABI executive who was, reportedly, letting them know that Brandon's death violated the agreement and there would be no payout.

I could almost hear the "OH HELL NO" in all their minds as I watched that scene, even though the voiceover was attempting to spin their glares as anger about Brandon. I wondered what the fan response would be, so when the episode ended, off I went to the forums.

Many people were baffled. "Wait, why isn't anyone being allowed to talk?" More were angry: "The deal was no damage to the house! How does getting killed in a freak accident off the property count as violating the deal?" Others were paranoid: "Brandon was killed by one of his housemates, probably Lizzie! The lawyers have a gag order on everyone!"

The forums exploded for about half an hour, and then the link appeared.

A few of us were half-waiting for it, and pounced on it.

SuperTube's dynamic hit counter started running up while I was waiting for the video clip to load. And then the video started to run.

The usual Wonderful House logo appeared, then "It's" was crossed out and replaced by "It Was Never", and the theme music slowed and morphed into something more sinister.

Simon was sitting in a leather chair by a roaring fireplace, dressed in an impeccably tailored black suit with a red silk pocket square and matching tie. He looked squarely into the camera and said, in a voice more mellow and trained than he'd previously demonstrated (why, yes, he had attended acting classes in college after all, thanks, Parapedia), "After learning what the final episode of 'It's a Wonderful House' was to show, the cast and crew met in secret to discuss what to do. All of us felt that the episode was a copout, cheating the fans who stuck with us all this time. Today, we would like to present you, our fans, with our best gift, the only gift we can give you: the truth."

The usual opening, sans music, played, and Simon's voiceover said, "We thought we were participating in a perfectly normal, every day reality show. What we didn't know was that the deck had been stacked -- both knowingly and unknowingly -- against us by the powers that be for the show."

"Knowingly," he went on, and the view zoomed in on one of the all-too-common images of Brandon, leerly vaguely and drunkenly at Lizzie and Jeshri in the living room, "because there is now documented evidence--" the view switched to a file folder in Brandon's disaster of a room, opened to a contract clearly branded with the IaWH logo "--that the producers paid Brandon a considerable sum to appear on the show to act as a prod to induce conflict." The key clause of the contract was circled in red, and a clickable link to the document appeared. I let the video continue to play.

We were then treated to a montage of images of Brandon getting shoved aside by one or another housemate, of Tom only just stopping himself from throwing a punch at Brandon's grinning face, of Jeshri electrocuting Brandon (leaving him rolling on the floor, his shorts showing a wet patch in front -- I note that this had never appeared on the show, of course), of Simon going semi-lupine in the face and snapping at Brandon with his flashing teeth, and finally of Lizzie throwing the boiling water on him, hitting him up the backside of the head with a sizzling frying pan, nailing him in the balls with his own baseball bat, and throwing the dishes at him so that he fell backwards down the stairs.

"Unknowingly," Simon said, "because they failed to carry out background checks on any of the crew, though they checked the cast out very thoroughly, even down to checking our credit ratings."

Watson appeared onscreen, with an identifying caption ("Watson Holmes, Consulting Detective"). She was dressed up only slightly, having added a tweed blazer to her usual buttondown shirt. "It took me all of fifteen minutes to run superficial background checks on the entire camera, sound, and light crew, as it would for any professional. I found that there is a member of the sound crew who likes to drive very fast, a member of the light crew who had recently divorced with allegations of abuse on both sides, a member of the production staff with a history of stalking, and a member of the camera crew with a history of domestic violence, sexual assault, and even a rape arrest that did not end in a conviction, due to technicalities rather than a failure to prove guilt."

"We got our first indication that something might be amiss," Simon said, returning to the screen, "when a member of the cast received a tip from a para fan that she had picked up a detail during a live broadcast that suggested we had a murderer in our midst. That cast member shared this information with the rest of the cast, other than Brandon, because we had some indication that Brandon might be violent himself."

We then saw the clip of Brandon bragging about raping the drunk woman from the frat party, and the clip of Brandon talking to his cameraman about Simon and making vague threats. Then there was a scene in the dark of him coming in drunk late one night and wandering into random bedrooms until there was a wild scuffle that ended with Simon walking him up to the third floor, twisting Brandon's arm up behind his back and holding onto a handful of his hair.

"Then someone tried to blackmail Jeshri," Simon said, "by threatening to release personal photos of her to the Internet at large. The condition for not releasing them was meeting the blackmailer at a nearby park in Staybird in the middle of the night."

The camerawork was uninspired, but showed the housemates walking through the park. "Of course, we weren't about to let her go alone," he said in voiceover. They came around a curve and there was Brandon, clearly visible in the streetlight.

They played a bit of film that showed Brandon confessing to being involved in the blackmail, and then events dissolved into the chaos of the fight. The picture froze on Brandon's confused face. "Yes, Brandon was party to the blackmail, and was part of setting up the meeting, but we believe he didn't know about the murderous aspect of his partner in crime. Our best evidence is the casual manner in which the true criminal cast him aside." The video played forward, and even played through the killer hitting his scrambler device, so the bug cams were certainly hardened. We got a slo-mo image of the killer slamming Brandon in the chest, played from several angles.

"This blow, unbeknownst to us, ruptured Brandon's aorta," Simon said, and the picture returned to his cozy parlor. "Several of us went after the killer, while others called the ambulance. Tom rode to the hospital with Brandon, who was declared dead shortly after reaching the emergency room."

The view switched to Tom, who appeared to be sitting in a cafe. "He never woke up," Tom said in an uncharacteristically rough voice. "He said, 'I thought he was my bro,' and passed out and never fucking woke up again. I mean, what kind of fucking epitaph is that? He thought everyone was his bro, even people he insulted. He was like some kind of malevolent golden retriever. But goddammit, he might've gotten better some day."

Then Simon was sitting at that table, wearing casual clothing and looking angry. "I'm told I shouldn't feel bad about not staying to check on him," he said in a subdued voice. "I'm told he was a dead man, sitting there, and there was nothing I could have done. I'm told it was better that I went after the killer to try to keep him from hurting anyone else. But, you know, it's hard to believe that."

Jeshri was looking up at the ceiling and saying, "It pisses me off that every time I think about him, sitting there on the ground trying to breathe, I start tearing up. I don't want to cry for him. I thought he was an asshole and worse. But I can't get it out of my head: that look on his face when he couldn't understand why he couldn't stand up, why he couldn't breathe, why the one person who he thought was his friend had just hurt him so badly, and..." She wiped her face savagely with her sleeve. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

Lizzie was sitting there now, being filmed from the same angle, and she was slowly tearing a cardboard cup sleeve into thin strips as she spoke. "When I started giving him mouth-to-mouth there in the park," she said, not looking at the camera, "all I could think was that when he woke up, he was never going to let me live that down. There would be all the stupid comments about missing out on kissing me and everything, and I would kick myself every time he said anything. I hated every second of taking that stupid moral high ground of trying to save his life. And then the shit died. And I felt so goddamn guilty about thinking bad stuff about him I could barely breathe. I still feel guilty. I feel guilty for being relieved that I never have to face him again." She crumpled the mass of cardboard in her hands and gritted her teeth, saying, "When someone you love dies, you cry and scream about it. What the hell do you do when someone you hate dies?"

Back in the parlor, Simon stood up gracefully and posed with an elbow on the mantelpiece. "Was this tragedy avoidable? The cast and crew of 'It's a Wonderful House' thinks so. Was this tragedy the fault of the producers? Certainly in part, since the killer was one of their camera crew -- one that a simple background check would have revealed." A clickable link to a file appeared on the screen. "Does a tragedy in which the producers were partly complicit, even by omission, void the contract of the cast? Our lawyer doesn't think so."

A black woman a bit older than me appeared on the screen; her caption said she was Marilyn Henderson, Wonder City attorney. "I have reviewed the contracts of all surviving cast members and I find nothing in it that would suggest that the manner or fact of Mr. deJong's death would void the agreement, as the producers of the show have claimed."

Back to Simon. "The cast and crew have discussed the matter, and, given our own limited resources and the comparatively limitless resources of PARABI and the producers of 'It's a Wonderful House', we feel a lawsuit would be worth less than the energy we would have to put into it. Our fans are the only good thing to come out of this experience, and so we decided that it would be most productive to give this information to you. If we manage to instill a little shame in the producers while we're at it, good." He shrugged and smiled, and Jeshri, Tom, and Lizzie came in from the wings (Tom in a suit, Jeshri in a little black dress, and Lizzie in a white blouse and black slacks). "Thanks for sticking with us. I, for one, will be glad to get back to the coffee shop."

"Me too," Lizzie said.

"I'm looking forward to my own apartment and my own truck," Tom said. "And about a month's worth of sleep."

"I love you guys, but I want my own roommates and my life back," Jeshri said, and they all nodded.

"And maybe some of us will go on to do stuff in the spotlight," Simon said. "Or maybe not."

"I'll still be on Twitter," Lizzie said.

"Me too," Jeshri said. "I've met some awesome people that way."

"I was thinking about writing a book about all this," Tom said thoughtfully.

"You better change my name," Lizzie said, punching him playfully in the arm.

"Mine too," Jeshri said. "And no wild imaginings about our 'alone time'."

The camera pulled back and back, the audio fading into an instrumental song that was nothing like the theme song, the former housemates moving into a group hug as they faded from view.

Credits rolled. At the end of the credits, on a black screen, the words, "In memory of Brandon deJong," appeared, and after a second, under that line, in fake typewriter script, "He was a jerk, but he was our jerk."

I sat back from the screen. "Hoooooo," I exhaled. "I hope they've got Ms. Henderson on retainer."

---

Note from the Author:

Sorry, y'all. I spent all day yesterday in a car, and just didn't have the brain juice left to post anything. I keep hoping things will get back to "normal" again after Thanksgiving, but I just know I'm kidding myself. :)

We've been falling down the list, so please remember to vote for WCS!

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Wonder City Stories II #70

2011-10-28T00:37:59Z

Wider Than the Sky

"She's tucked in and sleeping," I told the Equestrian on the phone. "How's your end of things?"

The Equestrian sighed. "I'm not an expert in stuffing souls back into bodies, but Maelstrom agrees with me that she's pretty well anchored in there."

"Got all the spiritual band-aids applied?" I said.

She laughed, more than a little ruefully. "Think of it more like a splint. I'm going to see if I can find someone who can apply the legitimate dressings. Though I suspect Brainchild is always going to have a bit of a habit of walking out of her body. I need to find someone to teach her how to find her way back."

"So you don't have to go hunting again?" I said.

"God, yes," she said. "Thanks for all the help, by the bye."

"Not a problem," I lied, clutching the icepack to my head.

"Hah," she said, clearly not believing me at all. "Are you going to be able to reach Ruth?"

"I'm going to do my damnedest," I said.

"I have to go," she said. "Give Ruth -- and Brainchild -- my best. I have a dimension to go patch up. I'm better at that than I am with souls, fortunately."

"Good luck," I said, and we hung up.

I leaned back in my seat with a moan, closing my eyes and trying to wish the migraine away. The original link had taken a little more than half an hour -- when I'd opened my eyes at the end of the fight, the clock had read 12:34. Helping the Equestrian get Brainchild back into her body had brought us up to 2 am.

"Your medications, Renata," Eliot said, wheeling up next to my chair.

"Thank you, Eliot," I said and fumbled for the container on his tray without opening my eyes. My hand closed around the plastic case and I sighed. "I have one more thing to do before I take my meds, though."

"You should at least take your pain medication," Eliot said. "You have recorded notes saying that we should remind you that you make poor decisions when you're in pain, which go badly with your magnitude of telepathy."

I sighed again. "Thanks." I opened my eyes and cracked open the medication case. I picked out the blue capsules and washed them down with the glass of water Eliot also carried. "I have to attempt a long-distance contact."

Eliot said, "Will you be moving to the astronomical console?"

"Yes," I said. The remote rerouting doesn't work as well -- it has a lot of lag sometimes, depending on what other functions are going on in the household. And lag could kill me in the sub-time tunnels.

"Do you require assistance in walking there?" Eliot said.

"I'll... see," I said, steeling myself for becoming upright. After a moment of deep breathing, I slowly stood up out of my long-haul chair. I was pleased to find that my knees were steady and my head didn't hurt any worse. "No, I think I'm all right."

Eliot scurried out of my way as I made for the bathroom, but he was waiting for me -- with a refilled glass of water, my favorite protein bar, and the rest of my pills -- when I entered the small, plain room with the astronomical console and a chair in a clear sphere.

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy... that was this one, actually... there was a highly psychic alien race, as far as we can tell. And after they achieved interstellar travel, they started construction on an extratemporal space where only mental emanations could travel. Only one or two other people knew about this -- Jane Liberty had discovered it in the writings of a para German agent whose powers she'd absorbed, and she'd done a little exploration. The problem is that this space, or plane, or whatever it was, wasn't something that our undeveloped little monkey brains were really prepared to handle. Jane had so many other powers, her telepathy was the least of her interests, and so had passed the information to a Class 7 telepath named Sarah Benson. Sarah Benson was a friend of Sister Power's. When Ruth told Sister Power about this crazy-powerful telepath she'd rescued, Sister Power saw an opportunity. So I got the information and a brief guided tour of the nearest entryway -- a point I have named the Lilith Gate, because I can, which is near one of the Trojan points in Earth's orbit -- from Sarah a few months before she died.

I didn't really do much exploration, since I was mostly concentrating on how to control my power. But then fate -- and Ruth -- dropped something else in my hands: a piece of alien technology that, when tied into a high-powered computer system, could render the data I was receiving from the sub-time space into comprehensible visual imagery that would allow me to navigate through them and have real-time telepathic contact over astronomical distances. Professor Canis got it all set up for me, and periodically improves the function, so now when I use the astronomical console, it's this virtual reality environment that I "fly" myself through.

The pain meds were starting to hit, fortunately, as I strapped myself into yet another comfortable chair and put on the headset.

"We are monitoring," Eliot said.

"Thanks," I said. "Activate sub-time navigation system."

The room disappeared, replaced by the imagery projection of a dark starfield on the walls of the sphere. Joysticks popped out of the arms of the chair. I spent a little time reacquainting myself with the system -- it had been more than a year since I'd last sat there -- and then told the system, "Beginning ascent to Lilith Gate," and threw my mind out into space.

It always takes me a little time to find the gate, feeling around blindly in the approximate area I knew it to be, trying not to accidentally hook myself into whoever is on duty in the Guardians' satellite or on the All-Africa Starwatch space station.

Just to let you know: space is big.

I finally found it, a tiny anomaly with mental echoes drifting out through its pinhole in spacetime. I took hold of the joysticks and the starfield turned around me as I dove straight through the Lilith Gate.

The starfield was replaced by my preferred imagery, a brightly sunlit hedge maze. It's kind of Escher-esque, of course, because the maze and the hedges were three dimensional. It always takes me a few moments to orient myself, fiddling with the turns and twists.

So then came the hard part.

Here's the thing: my power is officially Class 10+. I'm off the charts. My mind can theoretically reach anywhere in the known universe, but whatever telepathic emanations are, they can't defy the laws of physics. In the sub-time tunnels, though, my subconscious mind can get ahead of me. It runs merrily off in multiple directions at once, while I'm consciously attempting to navigate through this twist or this turn or this broken-down area (because there are a lot of broken-down areas in there, being that the place was built a long, long time ago and there's been no maintenance staff). My subconscious pokes out through exits into real space, seeking the person who is my target.

One of the things that makes my power so damnably powerful: megamultitasking, I can do it.

This means that my subconscious will guide me through the tunnels to the person I'm seeking, but like any normal human being, I'm taught to consciously question all my subconscious's messages -- what most people call "hunches". So I have to disengage my critical faculties, which is much harder than you think, and try to fly by the seat of my pants. "Captain Kirk" it, as Larentia said while she was fine-tuning the navigation system.

So there I was, "flying" myself through the hedge maze, twisting, turning, spinning, all while trying very hard not to think about what I was doing. It can be fun when I'm doing it fresh; when I'm exhausted and hurting (despite the pain meds), all it does is nauseate the fuck out of me. I second-guess myself worse when I'm tired, so I made a lot of wrong turns, bouncing off overgrown passages, shying away from an area that was thick with psionic activity, hacking my way through strange vine-like overgrowth with a mental machete.

By the time I found Ruth (in a system, of course, where most of the sub-time gateways were crumbling, so I had to use one quite far out, then stretch in to the planet she was on), I had no idea where I was and no interest in knowing.

Ruth! I said into her head without any of my usual preamble.

She was startled -- mid-flight, I think -- and I responded to her flurry of bewildered cursing with tired apologies.

What's up, Rennie? she said.

Sophie's back, I said.

A cautious upsurgence of joy. She's back?

Yes. Nereid got the Equestrian to take her into Faerie, and they found Sophie's... mind or spirit, I guess, imprisoned there. They brought her out, and Molly and I stuck her back into her body.

I'd never been in mental contact with Ruth when she broke down in tears before; she is not a woman who weeps often, or gracefully. The flood of relief and gratitude was almost painful. I let it wash over and past me, trying not to hear her chaotic thoughts.

Ruth, I have to go, but I needed to tell you to come home, I said.

She pulled herself together and said, Rennie, are you all right?

It's been a long night, big sister, I said, feeling just absolutely done with everything. I'll tell you all about it when you get home, but I have got to go knock my ass out now.

I should be able to find jumps to get me home in a day or so, she said. I'll call.

Go see your girl first, I said. I think she should be awake by then.

I could feel her thanks, and then did something I rarely do on these astronomical reaches: I just stopped. Usually, I navigate back; it helps me cope with "reentry" after a lengthy stretch of my powers. But I just didn't have the wherewithal to do it, and I just stopped transmitting. There's no snap back into the body or anything -- I never left my body -- but there is a fair amount of disorientation.

I yanked the headset off, fumbled the harness off, and staggered out of my chair. "Eliot," I croaked.

"Here," Eliot said, rolling up next to me.

With his help, I got to the bathroom to vomit, then choked down my half dozen rough pills and fell headlong into bed.

---

Note from the Author:

My apologies for failing with the rerun post yesterday. I hope that actually getting a new episode up this week will make up for it.

Remember to vote for WCS!

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Wonder City Stories II #68

2011-10-11T13:54:10Z

Resolving Powers

The wind was screaming. Simon leapt between Sator and Brainchild, teeth flashing. The Equestrian and Maelstrom banished the spell that entrapped them.

For one hollow second, the right side of Sator's face darkened and his eyes opened wide, mouth frozen mid-incantation. A pink mist coalesced in the air to the right of Sator. Then Sator dropped to the floor, his flesh crumbling stickily around his bones. The mist rained down and was lost in the general oversupply of gore.

The wind blew itself apart and the gears stopped cold.

There was silence.

"Well," said the Equestrian, staring at the remains of Sator. "That's a thing."

Holy shit, Simon said. Did she...?

My god, Ira said, she killed him. Took all the water... or blood... or something right out of his body.

It was the only thing to do, Suzanne said firmly, but I could feel her reeling with nausea.

We'll deal with that later, Watson said grimly. Start cleaning up, we're on our way.

Be careful, Maelstrom said. Magicians generally leave nasty surprises for posthumous applications.

So a few minutes later, a handful of Gold Stars bounced through the portal and found the Equestrian exclaiming, "I found your hand, Wire. I... think it got in the way when Nereid did her thing, though." She looked up from the object on the floor and said to Sekhmet, "Oh, hello. About bloody time you got here."

"My gods!" Sekhmet said, staring around the blood-spattered room in horror. "Who...? How...?"

The Equestrian snapped, "Later. Look, we've got a massive injury over there--" pointing to Wire "--and another couple of people down. Could you, perhaps, lend a hand?" She looked back at the floor. "I mean, help out?"

Simon was gently nudging Nereid with his cold nose, and Nereid was waking up slowly. I noticed he wasn't trying to, say, lick her face. She was blood, head to toe. (Of course, so was everyone else.)

Sekhmet and her compatriots (I recognized the Blue Eagle costume, but knew it had to be a new one -- or maybe not, if he'd somehow come back to life, which wasn't unusual for the spandex teams -- and the Green Hood) spread out, inspecting Megan and Nereid and Wire from a distance and looking up at the ceiling, where the hole was slowly closing up.

Watson and G went through the portal together and straight to Megan, who was still out cold (because I do my work right). They struggled a little -- she's a big girl -- but between them (and their minor superstrength) they backboarded her (why wasn't I surprised that Watson knew how to do that correctly?) and got her onto the giant-sized stretcher they'd brought.

Professor Fortune, in his cape and with his wacky Einstein hair looking especially Einsteinian, strode into the room like he owned it. "Ah, Molly," he said, smiling benignly at the Equestrian. He looked around quickly, and his gaze lingered on the funnel. "Oh, good," he said softly. "Nice to see the thing with the machine worked out."

Watson and G were slowly walking Megan out, and paused at the door while Watson gave the professor a strange, unreadable look. Her mind was shuttered completely from me. G shook her head at the solicitous Eagle and Hood, and gestured to Watson with her chin. Watson nodded and moved forward; they carried Megan out into Sator's shop, and the Eagle and the Hood followed them.

Sekhmet knelt next to Wire, producing a thick band of leather from some part of her costume to tourniquet the girl's arm.

"Bugger off, you useless toad," the Equestrian said to Professor Fortune. "This is my gig, not yours."

"Molly, my dear," Professor Fortune said, beaming at her, "I'm just here to help out with an analysis of the situation. The Gold Stars called me in."

"Analyze this, Harvey," the Equestrian said, flipping the bird at him (she did it both ways, in case he was too dim to figure out the British way). "Get out of here before Her Nibs notices that the self-styled Grand High Poobah of Earth is standing on her turf, from which, I note, he has been banned for more than four decades. I won't be responsible if she shows up."

The pool of blood on the floor rose up and coalesced gracefully into a replica of Nereid. It wasn't an exact twin: the replica was wearing a long gown streaked with all the shades of red and brown found in blood. Her face kept shifting and it took me a moment to figure out why: I was seeing her through the eyes of several people, and I guessed that her face altered according to the viewer's ideals of beauty. It was like looking at a very peculiar animation, especially since it was still recognizably Nereid's face.

I didn't even try to get near that mind. I'm stupid, not suicidal.

She turned and stared at Professor Fortune with the mad, cold expression of a bird of prey. He tried to smile urbanely and failed. She said in a voice that resonated in several registers, "You know the penalty, of course. I need not insult you by repeating it."

The Equestrian radiated an unholy glee as Professor Fortune backpedaled toward the door. I felt unadulterated terror from Tam Lane, who was trying to shrink behind a bit of debris.

"No offense meant, of course, Your Majesty," he said, pausing at the threshold and producing a handkerchief to mop his suddenly gleaming brow. "We had no idea that the door led to..."

The woman stared at him, motionless. Her dress rippled toward him liquidly where it met the floor.

He caught his cloak in both hands and bounded hastily through the door.

The Equestrian and Maelstrom both executed handsome bows to the creature that had manifested from the blood. "Your Majesty," the Equestrian said. "My apologies for not detecting this mess sooner."

She lifted a hand and gazed incuriously around the room. "You have stopped it, according to your bargain."

"I think we've a good bit more to do," Maelstrom muttered ruefully. The Queen ignored him as she swept into a walk so inhumanly graceful that it reminded me of a jellyfish.

Tam actually ducked his head beneath his arms as she glanced in his direction; I wasn't sure, but I thought I caught the traces of a smile on her face through the Equestrian's eyes.

The Queen paused and looked down at Nereid. Simon, who had turned human in order to lift Nereid's face out of a puddle of blood, looked nervously up at the Queen and I could sense from him that she didn't smell right -- not like blood, not like anything he'd ever smelled. "It is impolite to tamper with the lifeblood of another's realm, yet sufficient unto the day is the repayment thereof." She turned her head towards the Equestrian. "I forget the words," she said sweetly, with an undertone of malice so clear it was like metal. "How is it I should curse her?"

Nereid, who only just recovered real consciousness, looked up into that face and began leaking blood incontinently: I could see it dripping from her fingertips and it streaked her face like tears. I could feel her sheer, bone-draining terror: the closest I can describe it is that of an acrophobic being pressed to the edge of a sheer precipice.

The Equestrian blinked. Then her expression hardened, and she answered, "Your Majesty, I believe it is him you usually threaten, at least in the songs I am familiar with."

Tam came out from under his arms for long enough to shoot the Equestrian a hateful look.

The Queen raised a hand with impossibly graceful fingers -- and possibly too many of them -- to her lips. "Ah, now I remember. I cannot call shame upon her face, because after all, I am using it. Such shame as her ill-favored face may have is only that which she herself shall bring upon it. Let it be so."

She smiled at the Equestrian, as though she had just won a round of a game, and said, "Be off with you all, I want no more of you." With that, the figure collapsed to the floor in a viscous splash, the blood spreading once more into a shining pool.

"Can we get out of here now?" Simon asked the Equestrian. "Before someone changes her mind?"

Maelstrom strode over, nudged Sekhmet aside, and, with an interesting impulse of protectiveness I didn't poke at, picked up Wire, who looked grey and chalky. "Let's."

Sekhmet acquiesced to Maelstrom's preference and walked over to Simon. "May I? At least if I carry her, I can feel like I did something here."

"Please," Simon said. "Feels like she's broken her right arm and maybe some other things." He turned wolf again.

Sekhmet moved around to Nereid's left and carefully picked her up. Nereid's eyes closed.

Tam looked cautiously out from his hiding place, then rushed out to Nereid's side. He reached out for her hand, paused and grimaced. It was coated and shining with blood. Overcoming his squeamishness, he gripped her hand and looked into her face, murmuring, "Ah, my dear, my dearest." He trotted alongside as Sekhmet carried her out.

"Don't move her arm, you git," the Equestrian called after them. "It's broken!"

Nereid's eyelashes didn't so much as flutter. I couldn't parse the terror and anxiety I could sense from Tam, so I didn't try. Then they were through the door to Earth.

You look a mess, Suzanne said as she envisioned throwing her arms around Simon gratefully, and I let that go through, just to Simon.

He gave a wolfish grin and bounded out through the door.

The Equestrian took a last look around after the others had left. This is going to be a long night, she said.

Surely you're done? I said.

Not a chance, the Equestrian said, and let me have a little of her Faerie sight. I could see gaping holes ground into the dimensional wall as far as I could see. This is all over the realm. All over the Earth. We've got to gather up the escapees.

"Speaking of escapees," she added aloud, spinning one of her green balls of fire into a net. Her gaze moved to Brainchild, whose spirit was standing, looking around her with a horrified expression, in the corner of the room furthest from where the machine used to be.

Damn, girl, you have a rough job, I said.

"Yep," she said, flicking the net over Brainchild, who shrank down inside it into a green ball of light. The Equestrian strode over to pick her up, absently tucking Wire's mummified hand into her belt as she bent to receive the ball of light with both hands. She sighed.

Beer first, she said to me. Then onward. She strode through the door.

---

Note from the Author:

Okay! The cliffhangers are over, and the denouement has begun. What loose ends are you most looking forward to seeing tied up?

(Also, much gratitude to Akycha for helping me with the Queen's characterization.)

Remember to vote for WCS!

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Wonder City Stories II #67

2011-10-04T19:24:42Z

What Your Shoulders May Refuse

A smoky indigo darkness like a tornado's phantom spun down out of the hole in the dome. It touched Sator and he laughed, spreading his hands wide so that the winds stretched out to the walls well before they reached the floor.

Nereid's arterial gout that had been, at least, distracting him a bit, was blasted around the room by the roaring wind. The air reeked of it. Everyone looked like they'd walked through a Hollywood slasher movie. Blood dripped off Nereid's nose and chin and she was badly nauseated from the smell. Everything felt cold and coagulated after the wind passed her on its way to the wall.

At least Sophie, being down on the floor now, seemed to be out of the range of the suction of the funnel, and being untouchable, wasn't covered in gore. She was moving around slowly, apparently confused by the information her spirit-senses were giving her. Nereid wondered why Renata hadn't pulled Sophie into the telepathic link.

Her mind's all slippery, Renata said. I tried.

Simon was a wolf again, leaping toward the magician and trying to lock his jaws into the man's calf muscle. Sator laughed at him and kicked him in the chest. Simon yelped and spun away, but said, in the link, I'm fine. I'm fine.

Nereid knew that Suzanne was out there, listening and watching, and kept looking away from Simon, hoping he was telling the truth.

The Equestrian was on Maelstrom's back, and they were in the air. The Equestrian said, Fuck me, fuck me, that wind is eroding the dimensional wall. He's trying to merge this world with Earth!

Maelstrom threw back his head and let out a shrill horse scream, which drew fire from nowhere to rain down on Sator and made the hair on the back of Nereid's neck stand up. The magician flinched as the flames struck him through his sorcerous shield, and then he gestured dramatically and a net of spinning, glowing barbs closed around Maelstrom and the Equestrian.

Sator flicked a hand at Nereid, and Nereid found herself sailing through the air. She tried to catch herself, knowing in the insanely dilated time as the wall came closer that she was about to hurt a lot, that she mustn't hit her head. Then she hit and felt sharp pains in her arm, her shoulder, and her chest as she crunched into the wall. But at least her head didn't hit. She slid down the wall to the floor, her costume and skin tearing on the sharp teeth of the spinning metal gears.

She looked up. Tam was crouching behind the remains of the control panel that Megan and Meteor had thrown. Sophie had stretched to life size and was crouched, staring around, not far from him, apparently bewildered. Nereid tried to get up. There were warning twinges in her right shoulder that told her: Not this arm. Try again later. She rolled to the other side and pushed herself up to her knees with her left arm. She weaved back and forth, then got her feet under her and stood up.

The world was weird and tinny and distant.

Sator had a moment of freedom while the Equestrian and Maelstrom were dealing with his snare, and he grinned down at Sophie. "Come, you'll seal my victory," he said, and reached out his hand.

Nereid -- her face weirdly numb and cold, her vision going dark around the edges, the voices in the room and in her head moving further and further away -- knew absolutely that she was going down. As Sophie's spirit stretched unwillingly toward Sator, Nereid slid to her knees and locked her gaze doggedly on Sator. There had to be something, anything she could do.

Keep away, keep away, KEEP AWAY FROM HER, she thought, or possibly shouted, her vision going black. She reached out desperately, dragging with all her might on the blood moving in his body to keep him from stalking after Sophie.

---

Note from the Author:

Possibly it's just as well you didn't have to wait till Tuesday for the resolution of this one. :) As before, 10 COMMENTERS gets you the next new episode on Thursday!

And remember to vote for WCS!

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Wonder City Stories II #66

2011-09-29T12:47:02Z

L’appel du vide

"Now you," Sator said, glancing over his shoulder. "Megan Amazon, shatter yourself." I had to drop filters in place as Megan took a magical blast that went straight through her invulnerability, ran up every nerve ending, and back down, spasming all the muscles in her arms and legs. Meteor got an accidental punch to the nose from Megan, one that knocked her backward to sprawl on the floor.

On another "channel," I apologized quickly to the Wonderful House kids and dropped them out of the link entirely: Tom was in the ambulance with Brandon on the way to the hospital, Jeshri and Lizzie and Eartha were talking to the police and the Gold Stars.

Block her motor nerves, Watson said tightly. Do it now!

She was right, the spell wasn't stopping, and Megan was apparently strong enough to overcome her own invulnerability, judging from some of the pain I was reading. I stopped everything anomalous that was happening in her motor cortex and knocked her out. She dropped limply to the floor.

Meanwhile, Simon's shape swarmed up to human form (naked) and lunged for Brainchild. His hands couldn't touch her, but he managed to catch the glass fragment -- presumably magical -- that her spirit was standing on. There was a stab of pain as the razor edges of the glass sliced into his hands. Brainchild was stable for just a second, then her spirit turned and tried to grab onto the glass, as if she was being sucked into the funnel by some secret wind.

"Oh, let her fall, child," Sator laughed. "Let her fall and see my century-old plan come to fruition at last!"

Nereid hit him with a firehose blast... of blood. While he sputtered at the mouthful he'd got, she stared at her hands, and I could feel the hysteria welling up amidst her panic.

It's not permanent! the Equestrian snapped at her. It's just this place doing it to you. Do it again!

I can't help her! Simon exclaimed, gripping the glass that was slippery with his own blood and trying to pull it away from the machine without losing Brainchild. She's going to fall!

Meteor! Ira snapped. You're a spirit when you're not in that girl's body. Do something.

The Equestrian and Maelstrom were attacking Sator again to distract him. Nereid, to give the girl credit, pulled her shit together and added her geysers of blood.

Meteor hesitated. I'm not sure I can, she said. Can't Renata help her?

I can't reach her mind, I said. I've tried. And I'm not spiritually telekinetic anyway.

Meteor, you have to save her! Suzanne nigh-shouted. You're her only hope!

Feeling Meteor peel out of the body she was possessing was like nothing I'd ever felt: like someone burning their skin off, and then being totally without pain because there were no nerves any more. Her spirit leapt out of the woman -- G, Watson told me -- and threw herself across the mouth of the black abyss just as Brainchild slipped off the glass. Brainchild hit the "surface" that was Meteor and bounced off her onto the floor.

Meteor said to me, I only ever wanted to be a hero, before her grip slipped and she was sucked into the void, her mind sliding too far away for me to reach.

G staggered backward and fell over Megan. I apologetically seized control of her motor functions, got her ass up, and walked her out the door.

One less potential victim in that room. Go me.

---

Note from the Author:

Because I'm mean, here's a new challenge for Team Commentariat: 15 commenters get you a third new episode on Saturday!

And remember to vote for WCS!

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Wonder City Stories II #65

2011-09-27T18:41:34Z

Hope Like Hell That Man Is an Evil Man

Megan shouldered Meteor aside and leapt over the contorted body of the serial killer they'd chased and through the doorway. She felt Meteor follow via the link. In a corner of her mind, Megan was very impressed with Renata's power -- not every telepath could maintain contact with multiple minds through a dimensional gate, even initiating new links on the other side of the gate. In fact, Megan couldn't think of a single telepath in the literature who could.

Sator's a showier mage-type than we thought, she reported to Watson.

Sator was inspecting his opponents coolly from his vantage point, hovering well above the floor. "Ah, you," he said, his gaze falling upon the Equestrian. "I wondered when she would send you my way."

"You can hardly imagine that she'd ignore what you've been doing here," the Equestrian said, rolling a green glowing ball from hand to hand.

You knew what was going on? Nereid exclaimed in the link.

Of course not, the Equestrian said.

What is going on here? Simon asked, and Megan could hear an echo of the question from Suzanne and Watson.

If evidence can be believed, the Equestrian said, he's collected hundreds of human souls to power an interdimensional engine.

"She rarely cares about the outskirts of her realm," Sator said.

"She cares when you start rearranging the furniture in her house," the Equestrian said, gesturing upward.

"Oh, she'll like the results," Sator said with an unpleasant smile. "For about five minutes. And then I'll destroy her."

The Equestrian looked over at Maelstrom. "Where've we heard that one before?"

"Only every two-bit pretender that's come along," the horse, now much more horselike, said.

I think you all should probably back out slowly, the Equestrian said. We're used to dealing with blokes like this.

Sophie! Nereid and Wire said simultaneously, and Megan noticed, for the first time, the bell jar containing a tiny version of Brainchild.

Dammit, the Equestrian said, and there was an edge of dawning horror from her mind. She's probably the linchpin to kick his machine into high gear. There are few things more powerful than a disembodied living human spirit in this realm.

Bugger, Maelstrom said, and stepped in front of the Equestrian again just as the room became a fireworks show of multicolored magics.

"Where did you get this many souls, Sator?" the Equestrian said, gesturing a magical shield into existence.

"I've been here a long time," Sator said. "And humans -- particularly paranormals -- are very useful for fetching and carrying."

Like the serial killer? Suzanne said. I wonder if he demanded the victim type switch for some magical reason.

"Like the poor chump you've been using lately?" the Equestrian said, raising blue vines from the floor to entrap Sator.

"Oh, he was a killer to start with," Sator said, creating a shredding whirlwind around himself that took the vines to pieces. "He came to me, pathetic thing, wanting to know how to get rid of the ghosts that were following him. So I took them away, and tucked them here for safekeeping. And he went off to make more."

"Not all girls, though," the Equestrian said. Maelstrom kicked a ball of fire up at Sator.

"Oh, it was some Oedipal thing," Sator said, flicking the fireball away. "He didn't get to kill his father, so he wanted to kill his father. I promised to raise his father so he could kill him -- imagine me going to all that trouble for a foolish little creature like that -- and he went out to fetch more souls. But temptation took him back to his original targets. Humans are so predictable."

There you go, the Equestrian said to Suzanne.

That's terrible, said Suzanne.

At least there won't be any more, Ira said comfortingly.

By this one, Suzanne said.

Megan looked around as she ducked the lightning and fire and wind. There was a big, heavy control panel nearby, behind Sator. She ran to it and found herself face-to-face with Meteor, who apparently had the same idea. They nodded to each other, bent, and jammed their fingers underneath the solid mass of steel and lights.

Megan counted, One... two... THREE! and they both heaved with all their might.

The panel tore free of its moorings and slammed into Sator's back, exploding into more lightning and fire and wind.

Sator lost concentration, apparently, as his part of the fireworks ceased for a moment. There was a whirring, whining sound that cut through the air, and Wire's trademark wires, which she reputedly never used on living things, lashed out to wrap around Sator.

His clothing was reduced to ribbons, but his skin was impervious. He pursed his lips and raised a hand. The wires rebounded, lashing back toward their creator.

Wire leapt aside just a fraction of a second too late, and her left arm just... fell off below the elbow.

Megan felt Renata clamp down on Wire's reaction, but she saw the blood burst onto the floor. Wire fell, clamping her remaining hand over the stump. Somehow, Wire stayed silent against some sort of desperate panic that Megan didn't understand.

Worse, the churning, spinning wires kept on and slashed through the glass bell jar that hovered above the funnel, sending glass fragments everywhere.

Nereid screamed as Brainchild's spirit slipped toward the abyss of the black cone.

---

Note from the Author:

Ten commenters get you the next episode on Thursday!

And remember to vote for WCS!

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Wonder City Stories II #64

2011-09-24T13:53:32Z

Meddling in the Affairs of Wizards

The door in the middle of the room burst open and the tail end of an ear-shattering scream blew in.

Maelstrom stepped in front of the Equestrian. Wire stepped between the door and the device holding Sophie's spirit captive. Tam stepped behind Nereid.

A light whipped through the door and struck Wire in the chest, knocking her flat. It continued unimpeded on its path into the funnel, spiraling down into darkness.

There was a pop. And another one. And another. The pops came faster and harder, like a machine gun, and Nereid suddenly realized that the walls of vacuum tubes were shattering, making noise like champagne corks in a fire, and the lights were diving down after the first, consumed by the funnel.

The shrieking scrapes of stone on stone and the thrum and grind of the gears sped up around them.

As Wire picked herself up, a little balding man with white hair and muttonchop sideburns wearing an out-of-date suit stepped through the door, tossing aside a small device that looked like a miniature gramophone.

He stopped, staring at them all through his wire-rim glasses, first with bewilderment, then with growing rage.

"Will interference from you confounded paranormals never end?" he demanded angrily.

"I don't suppose it will," the Equestrian said, a ball of green light growing in one of her hands.

There was a crash from the other side of the doorway, and Nereid heard a familiar voice shouting, "SATOR!"

"Megan?" Nereid exclaimed, then clapped both hands over her mouth as Sator glanced at her, amused.

"Don't worry, dear," he said, removing his glasses and tucking them in the breast pocket of his shirt. "I already knew her name. Humans are so careless."

The great golden-furred wolf was, apparently, just as much a surprise to Sator as it was to the rest of them, especially given the way Simon tackled Sator squarely behind the knees, knocking the magician on his face.

"Oh, that'll piss him off," Maelstrom said, snorting flame out of his human-looking face. "Magicians are sticklers about their dignity."

Simon looked up and around at everyone, and his gaze locked on Nereid. The next moment, Nereid felt someone in her mind.

Pardon the intrusion, Pacifica, a sweet, mild woman's voice said. My name is Renata Scott, and I'll be your telepathic link for today.

Oh, thank fuck, a way to talk, Wire said into the link.

Excellent, the Equestrian said, and her mental voice was much older than her physical one.

Sator rose up from the floor in a graceful swoop, his feet well above the ground and energies crackling around each hand. "I have no patience for this," he intoned.

The dome continued to open its eye to another sky wider and wider.

---

Note from the Author:

HERE IT IS! Third episode for the week! Thank you all so much! Next new episode: Tuesday!

And remember to vote for WCS!

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Wonder City Stories II #63

2011-09-22T14:00:02Z

Definitely a Boojum

Where the fuck did he go? Megan said through the link.

This way! Simon said, and everyone paying attention could smell slightly scorched spandex and male sweat, with a number of overtones none of them could identify, but I could feel Simon's translation: fear, rage, hope, desperation, frustration.

Meteor shrank down to about ten feet tall so as to follow Simon, since she'd lost her aerial view of the killer in the shadows almost immediately.

Down this street? Megan said, skidding around the corner after the much tighter cornering of the wolf. But this is...

Sator's, Watson said. He's gone to Sator's. Don't you remember him?

For the second time that night, Megan had a bitter taste of memory that I had to filter and poke her out of. C'mon, girl, no time for expository flashbacks, I said.

They paused outside the door of Sator's, which was neatly closed. Simon listened.

"Sator! Sator!" Camerabro was bellowing, moving away from them into the store.

"What is it?" came an irritated reply, and I could feel, via Watson and Megan, that it was Sator's voice.

"It's all gone to shit," Camerabro said. "Instead of just the kids and the dog, there was a spandex ambush."

I could hear Megan thinking, NOT spandex, very loudly. Meteor shot her a hateful look.

"And so you've come here expecting what exactly?" Sator said, and his voice was a silken-smooth growl.

"Enough power to get you what you need!" the cameraman said. "You wanted one more soul. I can get it for you. But first I need what you promised me."

"Were you followed?" Sator demanded.

Meteor started forward, but Simon said, No, wait, and kept listening.

"Damn you, give me what you promised!" the killer shouted. Then he moderated his tone: "I'll go get a soul for you. Three souls. Six souls. I'll bring them all to you! There are so many girls out there in this city, so many with soft throats and powers that bounce off me. I can kill them all."

"Were you followed?" Sator said.

"I'll bring you more souls than you can count," the man said, "just give me what you promised and I'll go out and get them for you."

Sator said, his tone hard as diamond, "You brought them here, you fool, you hopeless excuse for a human. And now I shall have to kill them myself."

"I'll do it!" Camerabro shrieked, and the shop was oozing the scent of terror now. "I'll take care of them...!"

"I don't think so," Sator said, his voice matter-of-fact. "I only need one soul, and yours is as good as any."

I didn't have time to shield myself much, but I managed to shield everyone else in the link from the mind-searing death that went with the most horrible scream Simon, Megan, Meteor, and I had ever heard torn from a human throat.

---

Note from the Author:

YES! You all did it! If you do it again (ten comments), I'll post a THIRD new episode on Saturday!

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Wonder City Stories II #61

2011-09-15T14:10:40Z

I Have a Bad Feeling About This

The energy flare receded quicker, Suzanne thought, than it would have had she seen it in the flesh rather than through the telepathic link.

The cameraman -- the killer -- was standing there, his costume tattered around the edges and smoking lightly. He laughed, a short, ugly sound, and stepped toward Lizzie, who was still dazzled by her own attack.

MOVE, LIZZIE! Simon and Megan both screamed through the link. Lizzie threw herself backward as he lunged forward.

From one side came a swoop of wind and something hit Camerabro hard in a tinkling crash of machinery. He flew backward a good ten feet, landing in a bed of tulips.

The camerawoman, Eartha, dropped the remains of her useless camera. "I always KNEW you were an asshole!" she screamed, skidding to a halt six inches above the ground.

(Renata picked her up into the link, and Suzanne could hear the edges of Renata's high-speed explanation to Eartha. The camerawoman circled rapidly behind the House crew.)

Jeshri noticed Brandon bending down and retrieving something that had bounced to his feet: it looked like a tiny gramophone, with a large black horn and a box made of moving gears.

Camerabro made an incoherent noise of rage and bounded to his feet, then to Brandon.

Brandon looked up at him, still with that silly little smile on his face. "Bro?" he said, and held the thing out to him.

The cameraman snatched it out of his hand and slammed Brandon out of the way with a backswing of his forearm, starting for Jeshri again.

There was a moment's stab of panic through the link -- from Jeshri, who was too far from the light post to grab any electricity, from Lizzie, who had depleted her stored energy, from Simon, who wasn't sure he could get there in time, and from Megan, who was leaping for him.

Then Meteor's giant hand swatted the killer away as casually has he'd just swatted Brandon. He flew in a neat parabolic arc back toward the entrance to the park.

Simon was running as fast as his four legs would carry him, which was blindingly fast to Suzanne, and snapping through the link, Goddammit, Meteor, you DON'T fucking throw the supervillain so he's CLOSER to civilians. Megan, c'mon. The rest of you, stay here and call the cops!

What was I supposed to do? Meteor snarled. Invite him to dance?

Knock him into the river. Squash him flat. I don't care. Simon bounded over a bush. But move your giant ass. Let's try to stop him from killing anyone else.

Oh, Simon, Suzanne thought, Simon, be careful. She remembered him telling her about going to classes at the Gold Star Academy when he was a teenager, learning how to be a better team leader and all that. She thought, You may not be in spandex, but spandex keeps chasing you.

The boy's all right, Renata said. He knows what he's doing.

Yes, Suzanne said, and didn't add, But so did Mitch. She wrenched her attention away long enough for a gulp of coffee and a glance at Watson's intent but calm face before diving back in.

---

Note from the Author:
Yes, I am cruel. The next new episode will be next Tuesday!

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Wonder City Stories II #57

2011-08-30T22:09:37Z

Battlestations!

I settled into what I call my long-haul chair. It's intensely soft and it floats on some sort of magnetic cloud and is more stable than the floor, so even if I lose my shit and try to get up without the proper escape sequence, it won't totter over or anything. All my monitoring systems were online and checked. All my robots were nearby to try to minimize anything physical that I might try to do to myself. I had taken my pain medications and my focus-enhancing medications. At hand was an automated system that could detect incipient psychic flares (which are like solar flares, except they disrupt mental processes rather than electromagnetic processes) and either administer a fast-acting intramuscular tranquilizer or a hard electric shock, depending on the predicted magnitude of the flare.

I took a few deep breaths. It had been a while since I last did this. Being the nexus of a telepathic network is a surprising lot of work, primarily filtering of content and translation of the way that a given person thinks about things into a mutually understandable language. Doing this for a group of non-telepaths simultaneously requires the most exacting walls and split-second multitasking. I expected, when I agreed, to be wrecked for at least a week afterward.

I had remembered to go to the bathroom before I started. My mother had crammed some valuable life lessons into my brain on those long car rides to the Shore.

"Imaging on," I said, and the computer flipped up photographs of my telepathic targets. Which first? I contemplated the Wonderful House crew and decided, as I had expected, that I felt the most connection to Simon, so I focused on his photo, paying minute attention to the perfect lines of his jaw and cheekbones, the tight ripples of his brown-black hair, the yellow eyes behind their tinted shields...

Hello, Mr. Canis, I said when the tingle of contact rippled down my spine. His was a warm, quick-moving mind, full of an idealism I'd not had since I was eight or so.

Hello! he replied, trying not to sound startled, though I knew he was. A pleasure to, uh, meet you.

He had the pleasantly repressed mind of someone who has been trained to cope with psionics. The pleasure's mine, Mr. Canis. I stopped short of telling him I was a fan. Nothing like having a telepathic fangirl in your head to make you nervous.

Now it was easy. I looked at the others through Simon's eyes (and his other senses, which were distractingly acute) and added them to my collection: Jeshri, whose mind was a sharp stacatto of thoughts like blows; Tom, who was in an agony of fast-moving anxiety; Lizzie, whose world was always a little blurry; Megan, who was quivering with a steel-jacketed terror; Suzanne, whose inner world flew apart in pieces and crashed back together with her heartbeat; Watson, whose turbulent ideas had parted and smoothed for my entry; and to my surprise, Suzanne's father-in-law Ira, who was abuzz with excitement and nostalgia.

I stopped short of picking up the camerawoman, and after a quick consultation with Watson, left her out. She had not, after all, consented to a telepathic link and all its risks. I did scan her quickly, though, and discovered that she was Jeshri's camerawoman, her name was Eartha (yes, named for Eartha Kitt), she was, in fact, para, and she was rather nervous and excited about all this. At least they'd warned her it might be dangerous.

I saved the ghost for last. Meteor was alarmingly present for someone possessing another person, and I only got the faintest whiffs of the host personality. I wondered if Watson had set this up to see if I could pry Meteor loose from her moorings. I would believe in that sort of Machiavellian scheming from her.

All right, I said to them all. Everyone's in the loop.

I naturally picked up things I shouldn't know from their subconscious emotional levels. It shouldn't have surprised me that Megan and Simon had a history, I suppose, but it did; they'd played it very cool in Megan's one appearance on-screen. Watson and Megan were lovers, and both of them had been involved with the woman possessed by Meteor, resulting in some spectacularly conflicted emotions. Suzanne and Simon, of course, were desperate for each other. Lizzie had mad crushes on all three of her housemates (that was another surprise). Meteor hated everyone equally for being strange, perverted, and living (that was not a surprise). Lizzie also felt like she really should have gone before she left the house; I had to filter that like whoa or everyone would need to pee, including me.

Thank you, Watson said once I'd delivered all the general greetings. Her mental voice was crisp and snappy, and she was also speaking aloud for Eartha's benefit. You all know where you need to be. Megan, Meteor, you start now. House crew, give them two minutes and then start strolling to your destination.

What about you? Jeshri said. She was speaking aloud as well.

I'll be only a few blocks away with Suzanne and Ira, coordinating with Renata's help, Watson said.

There was a wisp of an apology as soon as my first name came out. Nothing like being inside each other's minds to bring everyone to a first-name basis, is there? I assured her.

Amusement came back from Watson, and I turned my attention to following Megan and Meteor.

The two of them proceeded in silence that was angry on Meteor's part -- I could tell she hadn't been entirely warned that she'd have to work with Megan -- and irritated on Megan's part -- because Meteor was snappish and because she had a terrible conflict between wanting to hate Meteor and having some sympathy for the girl. They were trying not to be noticeable as they hurried to the dilapidated dock where they were to hunker down and wait. Meteor, growing, could get them to the meeting place in a few seconds rather than the couple of minutes it would normally take to run there. I would have to do a tight job of filtering on these two: Meteor not only hated Megan but was terrified of her, particularly of being touched by her. A contagion sort of terror. Homophobia at its most refined. Lovely.

I watched the Wonderful House crew trying to stroll casually to the appointed meeting place. Jeshri and Lizzie kept exchanging reassuring hand-squeezes. Tom was concentrating on looking as intimidating as possible, throwing back his broad shoulders and puffing out his chest. Simon was quivering with nerves, paying exquisite attention to every breeze and every sound. He was worried about being able to get out of his clothes fast enough, and so had worn a thin knit v-neck sweater and a loose pair of linen trousers -- things he knew he could rip easily.

Watson was chattering easily and meaninglessly with Suzanne and Ira. Ira was peppering her with questions that even I could tell came from long experience -- no wonder Watson wanted him there as part of her strategy team. If nothing else, he could make a general prediction of the behavior of most sorts of supervillains.

I took a deep breath and consciously relaxed the muscles that had tensed up during this preparation.

It was almost midnight.

---

Note from the Author:
And so...

Beginning next week, I'm starting a new comment incentive: if I get 10 or more comments on the posts I make on Tuesday -- and they can be ANY comment, from "Hi" to "+1" or whatever, anything to tell me you're out there! -- I will post the next episode on Thursday. This incentive will continue at least through the climax of the story.

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Wonder City Stories II #54

2011-08-11T13:04:40Z

Team Player

I was swimming after a tedious day of paperwork when Eliot chugged up to the edge of the pool and said, "Renata."

I popped up from floating on my back. "What's up, Eliot?"

"You have a phone call," Eliot said, his tinny voice echoing around the pool. "The caller identified herself as Watson Holmes, and would like to make an appointment to call you."

Watson Holmes calling me? Oh, no, I wouldn't wait on that. "Tell her I'll be with her in just a few minutes," I said, striking out for the nearest ladder.

After putting on a kaftan, I made my way to the panel on that level and seated myself. "Telephone on," I said. "Hello, Dr. Holmes. I'm sorry for keeping you waiting."

"Thank you for agreeing to speak with me so promptly, Ms. Scott," she replied. Her voice had a bit of gravel in it, probably from years of smoking, and was clipped and precise and very academic-middle-class. The edges of her mind, which I was already sensing, were chaotic and dynamic. If a normal human mind feels like a river, constantly flowing and changing, this woman's mind was the water at the base of Niagara, clashing and crashing and impossibly energetic. (It's a common belief among the non-telepathic that the more intelligent a person is, the more ordered their mind must be. I have never found this to be true.)

"How can I help you?" I said, patting my hair with a towel.

"We have something of a situation forming around the Wonderful House," she said. A cat meowed stridently in the background. She murmured, "Hush," to it.

"Situation?" I said. I could get glimpses, but without forging my way past that initial rush of thought, I was not going to pick up any information passively from her mind's tumult.

"One of the people in the house -- Jeshri Patel, I believe --" ("I believe," my ass; she knew very well. I wondered if she was always making comments like this to make people underestimate her.) "-- has received a threat of some sort of exposure --" (A quick flash of a photograph, then a pile of photographs .) "-- unless she meets an unknown person to discuss the matter at a particular location in Staybird Park on her next night off."

Jeshri's night off, as I well knew, was Friday. It had been a bone of contention among the household. They all lost their weekends; Jeshri had the closest thing to a weekend of all of them.

"And you think the unknown may be the killer," I said, abandoning all pretense that we didn't know what we were talking about.

"Or an accomplice," she said.

"You think the killer has an accomplice?" I said. "That doesn't make any sense at all."

"A patsy, perhaps," she admitted. "No, I don't actually think he has a knowing accomplice. Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to hide his crimes as effectively as he's done."

"Secrets don't keep well with more than one person," I said. "This is very interesting, but why call me?"

"Because," she said, and it was the first note of hesitation I'd got from her, "I understand that occasionally, you have provided a light telepathic link among the Gold Stars for important undercover operations."

I let that fall into a silence, then said, "Of course, Jeshri isn't going alone."

"Of course not," she said. "Simon and Lizzie and Tom will all insist on going with her. None of them could stand up to a superstrong, invulnerable paranormal. I guess him to be Class 5 or so, given the damage he did to some of the invulnerable paras he killed."

"So they have backup," I said.

"Yes," she said. "We'd like to have Megan Amazon and the paranormal going by the name of Meteor able to move in at a moment's notice from concealment."

"The cameras," I said.

"He'll render them ineffective," she said. "I'm sure he's considered the potential problem. There are several possible means at his disposal, given his presence in the house."

"You know who he is," I said, and caught myself before I scrabbled for purchase on that swirling mental boundary.

"I have an idea, though I wouldn't like to say," she said. "Will you do it?"

I sighed. "Of course I will, Dr. Holmes. Did you really expect any other answer?"

"No," Watson Holmes said. "Not really."

My next caller was Suzanne. "Suzanne, it's very nice to hear your voice," I said, answering because I guessed that I knew why she was calling.

"Renata," she said, and she was flustered and hurried. I could already see where she was: the tiny public gardens downtown, surrounded by the technicolor late April flowers that bloomed there. "Have you heard about...?"

"The Wonderful House threat and the plans for waylaying the killer?" I said, heading her off. "Yes. Watson Holmes called me half an hour ago."

"Simon got the information last night," Suzanne said, "and he spoke to Megan this morning. Please tell me you're helping on this. In the cold light of day, the plan to confront a serial killer just doesn't seem that clever." She stopped and sat on a bench. A squirrel started toward her. She was painfully open, her worry dropping her defenses and simplifying and focusing her thought processes; I could, if I wanted to, walk in and out of her supremely transparent mind.

"I am helping," I assured her, and I could feel waves of relief. "But has it occurred to anyone that if we're going to stake out bait, that minimizing the quantity of bait would probably be for the best?"

"Simon would never let Jeshri go alone," she said, mixed pride and something that bordered on an explosion of tension overflowing. There was a trauma there, a deep loss, and she was frantic that it not happen again. "The boy thinks that because he was able to bite Josh on the ass, he's the best-equipped to hold off the killer until the big guns can arrive."

"Well, it's really an accomplishment that he did bite a cosmic being on the ass," I said. "Though it isn't exactly something he could add to his resume: barista, god-ass-biter."

She laughed, as I hoped she would. "Still, Megan is a good choice, isn't she?" Suzanne had seen Megan a couple of times, an enormously tall and muscular woman who looked either Latina or Native or maybe both.

"I wouldn't know, Suzanne," I said. My head was starting to hurt. "I've never met the woman."

"But you knew her mother," she said.

"Suzanne, honey, are you very much like your mother?" I said, thinking of my own mother and what she'd have to say about this harebrained plan.

"Oh, god, I hope not," she said fervently. I felt her calculating the years it had been since she'd spoken to her mother.

"I think that similarly, Megan is her own woman," I said, rubbing my temples. "But all the reports I've had of her seem to indicate that she's dependable and tough."

"Meteor is a wild card," Suzanne said, and I got an image of a newspaper photo of a giant red-haired woman in a green tank suit. "Did Watson warn you that she might be difficult to deal with telepathically?"

"No," I said, and my voice went flat and verged on angry though I didn't intend it to. I have never liked surprises.

"Meteor herself is this... ghost from the war," Suzanne said. She was tossing pieces of sandwich to the squirrel and enjoying watching it eat. "That is, she wasn't in the war, Simon says, but she died during the war. And she's possessed Simon's friend G..."

"Oh, that'll be interesting," I said. Okay, pretty much done, as the area behind my eyes started to throb in time with my pulse. "Nothing I can't handle, but I'm very grateful for the warning, Suzanne."

"I'm glad I said something, then," she said. She tossed the last piece of her sandwich to the squirrel, having eaten almost none of it herself. In a small voice, she said, "It will be all right, won't it, Renata?"

I wished fervently that Ruth was on-planet, so I could say, "Yes, absolutely." Instead, I said, "We'll all try our very best. And I think that Megan, at least, will be able to stand up to the guy."

"Can I ask a favor?" she said. She was leaning forward, one elbow on her knee, her hand in her hair.

"Sure," I said, hoping it wouldn't take much longer.

"Can... can I be in the link? Just in the background. Just so I know what's happening." When I was silent for a moment, she added, hastily, "It's not the journalist asking. I won't even write about it if you don't want me to. I just... want to know." A flash, vivid: a young white man with tousled, sweaty hair, lying very still, just out of reach.

"Of course, Suzanne," I said. After all, if I'm going to be locked onto seven people's minds, what was one more? "And it would be a hell of a scoop on that Vita woman, wouldn't it?"

I could feel the slow smile spread over her face, and then she laughed. "Oh, Vita will be so green she could join the St. Patty's Day parade."

---

Note from the Author:
Tension! Mounting!

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Wonder City Stories II #50

2011-07-13T13:36:24Z

A Man Can Tell a Thousand Lies

Suzanne Feldstein and I had been having an extended exchange of emails. I think she was about to ask me if she could write an article about me when Watson Holmes told her about my localization of the killer and totally distracted her. She was obsessed with the story suddenly, grilling me about every detail I could recall from those frantic few seconds of telepathic contact. I don't think she realized that I figured out fairly early on why she was so fixated on solving the murders (she made a couple of slips in our one phone conversation).

I had to admire her. I don't think I could keep up with a young thing like Simon now, much less at her age (only a few years older than I am, actually).

Not that I've ever had an opportunity to explore that particular side of human interaction.

But anyway.

I answered with what I could, reminding her the whole time that she couldn't publish her information. She was good, though, managing to suggest a potential locale (the murder of the Jellyfish in Staybird, where the Wonderful House is located, certainly was a nice touch) without blowing the gaffe.

I was getting caught up on her latest posting after a particularly rough day of client parent conferences. If I ever have to answer the idiotic question of, "Why don't you just fix her/him already?" again in my lifetime, it will be far too soon, but I know I will; practically every parent asks it. The simple answer is, of course, that the nature of telepathy and the human mind means that there are no easy fixes. The complex answer that they very rarely understand is that to do such a thing would alter the fundamental fabric of their child's mind, personality, and being, and if they really want something like that, I'm sure there are a few supervillains who don't blanch at murder and would be happy to help them.

In any case, I was reading Suzanne's latest post when I suddenly realized that I was missing It's a Wonderful House.

I've gotten less and less on-the-spot with tuning into my show (yes, my show) since the livestream glitch. Pearl says it's natural to avoid the site of a trauma, even a minor one. I just think I'm dreading the inevitable: we will unmask the killer, and they'll televise the whole atrocity. Because death and insanity and evil are valuable commodities, dontcha know.

So I tuned in almost half an hour late. My tardiness was rewarded, though, by Simon's abs.

There they were, displayed for all the world to see on my screen, six feet of high definition wonder. The camera lingered lovingly on his well-defined six-pack, his rounded pecs, a line of sweat trailing over his muscular shoulder... and, of course, the pale surgical scars that stood out on his dark-skinned chest. As the view pulled back, I was treated to Tom's barechested glory as well, as he and Simon were lifting weights together in the House's workout room. I expect they only took their shirts off for the camera, though. Tom had a grim sort of resignation on his face as he worked his intensely sculpted muscles. Simon was less ripped, but still admirable, and had, besides, a very cute little scruff of black hair over his breastbone. Both of them were wearing baggy athletic shorts and sneakers, and had towels nearby.

I fanned myself with the nearest patient folder to hand.

The shot shifted to Lizzie, back in the kitchen that she seemed to be making her own domain. She was making a roast beef and cheese panini in one of those chic electric panini grills. "No," she was saying to someone, "I don't work out. Jeshri does -- she runs and stuff -- and of course Simon and Tom do. But I hate working hard for nothing. You don't get anything out of pumping iron, no tomatoes or chicken eggs or corn or whatever. Just a lot of sweat and trouble." She looked at the camera with a pronounced curl to her lip. "I suppose you think that makes me like Brandon."

And so, of course, we got to see Brandon lounging in his patterned boxer shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt in the living room, playing some sort of sports videogame on the television. There was an open beer bottle at his elbow. "Watch this, man, this is awesome!" he exclaimed, mashing some buttons on his controller.

Back to Lizzie. "At least I don't pretend to work out while playing some videogame, or think I can learn to dance from one." She opened the grill and took out her panini with her bare hands. I could see a small glow around them after she set the sandwich on a plate, and she shook them like they tingled. "I'm plain and simple and boring, and the producers are probably sorry they brought me on."

"I think," Jeshri said, a little breathlessly as she jogged along through a park, "that everyone is grateful for Lizzie being so exciting. It took the heat off the rest of us in a bunch of ways. I mean, I'm so dull: working girl with a functional family." As she jogged along, I could see the river behind her, trees and bushes and careful plantings of spring bulbs erupting. "I bet the producers are kicking themselves for bringing me on. Did you know that one of them asked me if I was going to have an arranged marriage and if so, could they film my first meeting with the groom-to-be?" There was a noise of disbelief from her camerawoman (the camerawoman must have been on rollerblades or... maybe flying? are all the crew para too? after all, if your para power is to fly six inches off the ground, you'd make a crappy superhero but a kickass camerawoman). "Yeah. I had to disappoint them, though. And then he asked me if my parents would be willing to arrange one -- you know --" she made airquotes "-- 'a big Indian one with all those flowers and stuff' if the production company paid them. I very nearly walked out on the whole thing right then."

One of the editors was probably going to get a pink slip, I thought, for televising that. The forums were probably on it already.

Simon was emerging from the shower with a small white towel wrapped around his waist, Old Spice Guy style. He had nice legs too. Oh, Suzanne, you cradlesnatching object of envy. If only the world knew, you'd get all sorts of hate mail. "Oh, the producers hate my lawyers. I'm so much less scandalous and interesting than they'd hoped. After the early rounds of transbashing, ol' Brandon gave it up as no fun and even his camerabro has mostly stopped giving me the stinkeye. But at least I'm on the periphery of the drama. I think Tom's a great guy, but he flatly refuses to have drama for the camera. Makes me think they're saving up some big reveal for him."

"Do I have hidden depths?" Tom said, pulling a t-shirt down over his head and adjusting it as it clung to his torso. "BLEEP no. The most I've got going on is a deep-seated desire to beat the BLEEP out of Brandon. But I think everyone's got that. Even his camerabro rolls his eyes behind his back. The guy's unredeemable. That said, I'd probably break my hand on his invulnerable skull, so I'm just not doing it." He gave the camera a surprisingly natural smile, considering that his persona was all about looking grumpy, and said, "If anyone's got to have hidden depths, it's Brandon, don't you think? The frat douchebag thing has to be an act, right? He's an accountant or something; no one would keep him on if he was that much of a douche in real life, right?"

"You'll never guess what I found out," Jeshri said to Simon and Lizzie, coming into the living room on another evening, still dressed from work.

"My breath is bated," Simon said.

"Please tell me it's funny, at least," Lizzie said. She was looking through a stack of paperwork and was kind of drawn and haggard.

"Hilarious," Jeshri assured her. "You know how he's always talking about what a great job he has, what a fabulous accountant he is, that sort of thing?"

This was rarely shown on the show, I note, but I'd seen it quite a bit on Twitter.

"Yeah?" Simon said, eyebrows rising.

"Well, one of the women I know at work has a sister who's an accountant for Bonafide and Faux," Jeshri said, grinning. "She told me her sister said that Brandon's not an accountant at all. He's a mail clerk."

Lizzie whistled. Simon smirked.

The view cut away to a middle-aged white man in a suit, who the screen identified as Mitchell Bonafide, partner in the Bonafide and Faux accounting firm, apparently caught in the entryway of an office building. He looked perplexed as he glanced at the camera and said, "No, I don't know any Brandon DeJong, and he's definitely not one of our accountants. Please talk to our Human Resources department if you need more information."

Cut back to Brandon, whose face was crimson, eyes wide and muscles in his throat straining. "You little BLEEP!" He took a step forward with fists clenched.

The view widened, and we could see Jeshri skip back a step from the foot of the stairs, where Brandon was looming. I noticed her hand going to her pocket and palming something out.

Tom said, without even looking away from the television, "What's the matter? Were you counting on your fame as an accountant to get you laid more?"

"Not like you'll ever tell any woman the truth anyway," Lizzie said, apparently bored but standing near the doorway to the kitchen. "Just think of it as fair warning via network television."

Brandon glowered down at Jeshri for a moment longer, then turned and stormed back upstairs.

They waited to hear the door slam in the attic before the three of them exhaled. Jeshri slid the screwdriver back into her pocket. They all looked at each other, and then jumped when the front door opened and shut.

Simon walked in -- no, he paced in, like a cautious animal, head subtly lowered, and if he had wolf ears in this form, they would've been flat against his head. "What's wrong?" he said, and I saw his nostrils twitching.

"Brandon just found out that Jeshri spilled his beans," Tom said.

"And he overreacted," Lizzie said.

"Just a little," Jeshri said.

Simon cocked his head.

Switch to Brandon's disastrous bathroom. I could see the patches of black mildew on the white shower curtain, and a heap of t-shirts and underwear and wet towels, and just the edges of one of the most disgustingly filthy toilet bowls I have ever seen. Then the scene was blocked out by Brandon, still scarlet-faced, now with bulging veins in his forehead and throat, as he took hold of the front of the camera and shoved his face up to the lens. "I will get her if it is the last thing I do," he hissed. "I will make her wish she'd never opened her ugly little mouth and shamed me. I will make her remember her place, the little BLEEP. I don't lose to BLEEP like her."

Back to the living room. Simon's normally shapely mouth was pressed into a thin line. Everyone else was watching him. "Lizzie, are you still sleeping on Jeshri's floor?" Simon said.

"Yeah," Lizzie said. "I can't live up there with him. I'd kill him in his sleep."

Simon's expression changed ever so slightly, becoming completely unreadable.

"Is he threatening Jesh?" Tom said, leaning over the back of the sofa and watching Simon.

Simon nodded.

"He won't just stop with her, you know, if he's really been set off," Tom said, gazing steadily at Simon. "You want to sleep on my floor, man? Or you want me to sleep on yours?"

Simon shook himself, and then he smiled. "I think I'd better do the floor sleeping. Got a doggie bed?"

When I turned off the show, I thought about that whole scene. I knew, from Suzanne and from a terse email from Watson Holmes (how did that woman get my email address?) that Megan Amazon had passed on my warning to Simon. Simon must have been wondering how to ensure both safety and monitoring for almost everyone, and here Brandon played neatly into his hands. Or had they all orchestrated it to enrage Brandon into saying something foolish? Hard to know.

Meanwhile, watching my show had taken on a whole new layer of meaning that only a small group of fans shared with me.

---

From Ye Olde Author:
Had to make sure you all got an episode before I headed off to celebrate both my parents turning 80 this year! I did promise some more fan service, this time of the non-plate-smashing-into-Brandon variety.

The comment incentive in July: if I get 50 total comments from readers in July, I will post twice weekly through August. As before, if you all post 75 comments, I'll post twice weekly through September too. Get up to 100 comments, the twice-weekly postings continue through October.

And add-on to the incentive: if you post a review of Wonder City (and link it from one of the WCS posts), I'd count that as 5 comments. And if some folks were to create a full-blown TVTropes page for Wonder City, I would count that as 25 comments. *whistles innocently*

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Wonder City Stories II #45

2011-06-10T23:18:00Z

And So the Argument Began All Over Again

I was sorting through my email when I found a message from my friend Veha's assistant, asking if I would have time to contact Veha soon. There was something about the note (possibly the three instances of "please") that made me think that Veha was feeling particularly lonely with Ruth off-planet.

Oum Veha is the only known living man with Class 10 para powers. It displeased the various First and Second World nations that prided themselves on being the sole homes of Class 10s that Veha was born in Cambodia, just after the American evacuation in 1975. Of course, his powers didn't manifest until many years later, but some idiot US politicians still seemed to think there would have been a chance to "rescue" him "if only." He's still in Cambodia now, despite many offers of "asylum" from other countries, living in a small city on the south coast and powering it with his immense electrical generation powers. He has amassed a small fortune by selling power to Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, but insists on using his powers gratis for his impoverished homeland.

The problem is, of course, that like me, he has problems controlling his powers. He can't touch a computer for fear of frying it. In fact, anything sensitive to electromagnetic impulses is generally better off far away from Veha. He's better now than he was as a teenager; he knows how to rein in his temper, for instance. But still, the only person who can safely spend a long time in a room with him without a Faraday cage in the way -- much less touch him -- is Ruth. She visits him weekly. I understand from Ruth that they play a lot of chess and she spends a lot of time fending off his romantic advances. I understand from Veha that they play a lot of chess and he spends a lot of time fending off her romantic advances. They're kind of cute that way.

I'm one of the only people who he can communicate with remotely without a lot of shielding and fuss. (A few of his assistants are also telepaths so there's an emergency line if he EM-pulses his own location.) We exchange emails to decide when communication happens; thus this email.

I sent a note back, offering a few times that afternoon or the next, and went on with my email and other work chores. One of my clients cancelled, another one arrived late; it was a relatively normal day. By the time I managed to check in again, Veha's assistant had accepted "any of the times that afternoon or evening." So I took myself off to my greenhouse with a glass of iced tea and a ham-and-cheese sandwich, arranged myself comfortably in my favorite Adirondack chair, and opened up a narrow thread of telepathy across the planet.

Renata! Thank you! Veha said after I'd knocked. My mama taught me right, you know.

Veha, what's up? I said.

Oh, you know, the usual, he said, and I could see his big desk laid out before him: piles of paper, a manual typewriter, fountain pens. I was just wondering how you were.

You were lonely, I said. There's no point prevaricating in telepathic communication.

Yes, he said cheerily. Any idea when Ruth will be home?

If she didn't tell you, why should I know better? I said.

You've been helping her with her daughter, he said.

I wouldn't call it 'helping', I said. I think that my input is what sent her off-planet.

She doesn't honestly think Sophie's been blasted out into space, does she? he said.

Stranger things have happened, I said, avoiding the straight answer. Which was, yes, it was possible that Josh Feldstein had done to Sophie what had been done to him. The cases were similar enough. But no, I didn't think Ruth could find her. Space is a big place, no matter what they show in the comic books.

Veha sighed. I wish I could help her somehow, he said.

I could catch glimpses of the extra sentiment behind the statement. Veha, quit that, I said. I know you've got the world's biggest crush on her, but I really don't need to see it.

Sorry, he said, embarrassed.

And you know nothing's ever going to happen, I said. The whole 'woman of iron' mystique goes deeper than her invulnerability. I gave him a quick glimpse of Ruth on video screen a year or two ago, saying, "I hope the man has better sense than settling for the one woman he can touch. I'm old enough to be his mama."

She is nothing like my mother, Veha said, amused.

You know what she means, I said. Hell, I'm old enough to be your mama.

You are both fine-looking women for your ancient, ancient years, he said.

Brat, I said.

Anyway, I'm sorry, he said. I'll try to keep my imagination under control. Anything new in your world?

So I told him about It's a Wonderful House and all it's bizarre appeal. He could understand; the boy had his own obsessions and hobbies. One needs to have them when one's life is as isolated as ours.

I reached the part about accidentally stumbling on the live feed, and he said, Are you sure you didn't end up with a line to him, Renata? I remember that one time a couple of years ago...

When I'd stumbled over something horrible in the mind of one of my client's parents and had had that psychic thread stuck in my teeth, as it were, for months. Ruth had come into that eventually, making sure the right evidence was gathered and the man prosecuted. I didn't like my vicarious taste of prison life, though; it reminded me too much of the institution.

I'm sure, I said. I'd gone through every ritual and exercise I could remember to exorcise the touch of the serial killer's mind. I was relatively certain I'd managed to forget what it felt like sufficiently that I wouldn't wander into his mind again.

And no identification either, he said.

Nothing useful, I said. Maybe it limits the suspects, though. We'll find him.

You're not still pursuing this, Renata? Veha said, alarmed.

I have to, Veha, I said. This waste of flesh killed one of my niece's friends. He'll kill more if he's not stopped.

You're not a superhero, he said.

No, I said. I'm just a person.

There was a conscious silence, but I could feel the torrent of things he was trying to decide to say.

It's not like I'm going out in public or anything, I said. There's this journalist who's very hot to find him. She's doing most of the work. I just gave her my tip. I just... want to feel like I helped.

You help so many people, Renata, he said. You help me all the time.

Thank you, Veha, I said. And you help me too, you know. You're one of my best friends.

We had a little rush of emotion then that wasn't very coherent, and I felt obliged to cut things short before we both got more embarrassed. My mother's supposed to call soon, I said. I have to get back to my office.

Thanks for calling, he said. Talk to you soon? Let me know if you hear from Ruth.

After all that, I was barely in a condition to talk to Mama, but I managed. She looks forward to the calls very much... and so do I. I hated to reschedule on her if I didn't really have to.

"Reesy told me your friend came to Yanaye's funeral," Mama said after the usual preliminaries.

"Did she?" I said. "I don't know her that well, but I know she's interested in finding the killer."

"Reesy said she looked like she was a hard kind of white woman," Mama said, and I glimpsed her entirely wrong image of Suzanne Feldstein, somewhere between a Jersey Shore caricature and a New York City marketer.

"She's that man's widow," I said. "That man who flooded downtown at Christmas."

"Oh, him," she said. "No wonder she looked wrung out. Still, it was nice of her to come."

"Yes," I said. "It was." And, I thought, she had probably spent the whole time wondering why she'd come and wishing she were anywhere else. She seemed nice, but hardly the sort to cope well when surrounded by black folks.

And the conversation turned to which grandchild was doing what. Mama hadn't really liked being a mother -- with a problem child like me, who could blame her? -- but she loved being a grandmother.

"You know," Mama said thoughtfully, and I recognized and dreaded the tone, "I bet you would be a fabulous mother."

"Mama," I said, keeping my tone level, "I am 45 years old. I am well beyond the point at which I could have a child."

"You have all those friends," Mama said. "All those scientist friends. And you haven't had your change yet. You've still got time."

"I would make a terrible mother," I said, clenching my fists against the old discussion. "You know that. You know how much you hated the way Grandma got all up in your business. Think of me. Child would run away from me like... like Lady Justice's children did."

"Your grandmother was an evil woman," my mother said flatly. I winced away from the abundance of hatred Mama had for her mother, who had been, in fact, an evil old woman as far as I could tell as a child -- she'd been dead by the time I got out of the institution. "You are not."

"I could be," I said. "I wouldn't trust myself here alone with a child. There's no one could help me down here, and if I lost my temper, I'd be worse than Grandma ever had been with her willow switch."

Mama sighed. "I know there's no convincing you that you'd be fine. I just have to try sometimes."

"Reesy and Lashawna gave you grandchildren," I said. "And Michael will too, soon, I hear."

That got us off on the subject of my little brother and his latest amorous adventures, and spared my sanity for another day.

When I finally got off the phone, I was irritated to discover that I only had ten or so more minutes of It's a Wonderful House to watch. (Of course I could watch it recorded. I've recorded all the episodes. But there's something about watching it immediately and being able to get onto the fan forums and... yes, I am crazy, why do you ask?) I kicked back there in my office to watch what was left.

There was Simon, looking very fine in a grey tweed vest, white buttondown shirt, and black slacks, sitting in the kitchen while Jeshri, who was in her purple yoga pants and matching hoodie, was cooking something in a wok. She happened to glance over her shoulder when Simon made a horrible grimace. "Oh, what did he say now?" Jeshri said.

The view cut away to Brandon, who was in his hideous bathroom, dripping wet and muscular and supposedly -- to the Brandon fans on the forums -- looking very attractive with just the white towel wrapped around his waist, though he doesn't work out nearly as much as Tom. He was shaving, but had paused to let out a bray of laughter. "Man," he said to his cameraman who was, I think, the last person willing to tolerate his company any more, "it was awesome. She was so drunk she didn't know what was going on."

The view cut back to Simon, who said, with a curl to his lip, "He's bragging about 'banging' a drunk girl on his night off."

"Tuesday?" Jeshri said, lifting the big wok effortlessly and scooping the contents into a bowl. "You'd think he'd be more... tolerable or something if he got laid so recently."

Lizzie shuffled into the room. She was looking less perky since her arrest; no doubt she was dealing with a lot of press and other issues. There was a stubbornly insane group of people online who hate her and spend a lot of time spamming her Twitter and other social media with vitriol for disobeying her sainted papa; I'm guessing that was part of what was wearing on her. Simon and Jeshri both paused to greet her, watching her worriedly.

Lizzie said hi to both of them, and walked straight to the kitchen sink, which was stacked high with dishes. She pulled as large a stack of dirty dishes out of the sink as she could carry, and under Simon and Jeshri's astonished gazes, walked out with them, saying, "I'll wipe up the floor in a few minutes."

The next thing we saw was Lizzie stepping between the betoweled Brandon and his room, holding the stack of dishes.

"Hey," he said obliviously. "'Scuse."

She looked up at him with a dreadfully impassive face and said, "Are you going to wash the dishes tonight?"

"Well," he said, backpedaling a step and glancing at the camera with one of his "can you believe this?" expressions. "I've got a date, see..."

Lizzie threw a plate at him, smashing accurately into his bare chest. "Are you going to wash the dishes tonight?"

"Jesus, what the BLEEP?" he said, stepping back.

She smashed another one into his chest. The bowl shattered, spraying him liberally with filthy water. "Are you going to wash the dishes tonight?" she said relentlessly.

"You're so BLEEPing crazy! Get away from me, you BLEEPing trailer trash whore!" he screamed, slipping on the water and sliding a step down the stairs.

She got him in the head with the next one, and he was covered with moldy tomato sauce. "Are you going to wash the dishes tonight?" she said again.

"Jesus BLEEP, yes, BLEEP, yes, just please BLEEPing go AWAY, you crazy BLEEPing BLEEP!" he shrieked.

"Good," she said, adding, "Think fast," before flinging all the rest of the dishes at him.

The view cut to Simon and Jeshri daintily stepping aside as Brandon fell backwards down the stairs, arms full of dishes. He landed, as one would expect, with a crash of china and glassware, and a large black rectangle over the part revealed by the falling-away of his towel.

Simon looked at Jeshri, who was blocking her own view of the offending Brandon-part with an outstretched hand, and said, "Why didn't we think of that?"

---

From the Author:
A little comeuppance fan service for all you lovely people.

Comment incentive in June: if I get 50 total comments from readers in June, I will post twice weekly through July. As before, if you all post 75 comments, I'll post twice weekly through August too. Get up to 100 comments, the twice-weekly postings continue through September.

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Wonder City Stories II #42

2011-05-19T10:54:04Z

Spooky Action at a Distance

It had been a long day with more clients than I usually saw: a few small emergencies with an almost entirely nonverbal teenager who was acting out strangely (she had started having menstrual migraines, and couldn't find a way to communicate it to her mother) and a young man with severe cerebral palsy who his grandmother suspected was being abused or bullied at his school (and who was). Heavier stuff than usual, but good and useful.

I was trying to decide whether or not to take my end-of-day meds. I thought I would probably sleep fairly well, and I didn't have any sense of lingering connection to any of the kids. I try to avoid taking my "as needed" medications too often. As I have learned over the years, telepaths medicate -- or self-medicate, or are medicated -- a great deal. If you are unfortunate enough to be a lower-class teenager of color with telepathy, you either end up in an institution, like I did, or you learn to self-medicate with whatever comes to hand. We're very fond of central nervous system depressants, and the easiest to come by is, of course, alcohol. Drink and maybe you won't hear what everyone is thinking of you. Drink and maybe you can't feel everyone else's pain. Drink yourself into a stupor and maybe you won't have someone else's dreams.

I didn't have a chance to take it up before I found myself in a lockdown unit. The doctors spent years trying to find the perfect cocktail of medications to shut me down without admitting they were shutting me down. No one wanted to believe in my telepathy -- paras were still thought of as all being like the World War 2 bulletproofs well into the 1980s, and the less showy powers put a lot of people in denial. The idea that there might be someone who could rifle through your brain as easily as most people rifle through cluttered drawers... well, I can understand the drugs.

Still, they made a lot of mistakes. Costly mistakes. Mistakes that traumatized a lot of staff and patients around me, and one grand mistake that left me wide open, like a phone left off the hook, like a microphone left switched on, and half a city experiencing electroshock therapy without any helpful medications. Ruth has never told me how many people died that day, and I have never looked it up, but it was the key event that put me into her capable hands.

So you might understand when I say that I try to find alternatives to medications. Because all medications interact with your particular state of being at that moment, and one never knows when you'll have a side effect you've never had before. I was far, far under Wonder City, but I could still walk in and out of the minds of just about everyone there, by intent or accident.

One of the very best alternatives I've found is the Internet. I understand this is pretty common.

So there I was, in my fuzzy garnet robe and matching slippers, sipping chamomile-mint tea and spending the early evening looking at cute animal pictures and horrible autocorrect errors. And I was struck by a fancy to pop over and look at the Wonderful House website.

My sisters would give me the side-eye if they knew I was turning into such a junkie for that show. Hell, I give myself the side-eye some days.

You see, they post video clips on the site, so you can always get more Wonderful House than just the hour once a week. They say that every week, they film over a thousand hours of footage. They have staff on the video feeds all the time, picking out snippets that were interesting enough to end up on the show. And then they have to sift through all of those and edit them together to make the show. Meanwhile, Terabytes of video end up on the virtual cutting room floor. So they share some of the gems.

The first one I ran into was "Brandon's Bathroom," and he's always a giant train wreck, so of course I clicked.

He was talking to the camera, sitting on the closed toilet in his unspeakably filthy and cluttered bathroom. He was flushed of face, wearing just a pair of shorts, his blond hair even more mussed and cowlicked than usual. He clutched a large Wonder Beer and stared down at it moodily.

"I'm glad I've got you to talk to, man," he slurred. "Everyone here hates me."

"Haters gonna hate, man," a strange man's voice said, and I realized it was the cameraman who he was so friendly with. "You're successful, you have more fans online than they do -- you'll always be better than they are and they know it."

Brandon smiled briefly at the camera and drank from the can. Then he stared at it again, and the smile oozed off his face. His mouth trembled a little, and his eyes were oddly bright -- I think he was on the verge of tears. "But they really hate me," he said, gesturing with the can and sloshing some of it on himself. His voice broke. "I didn't know you could be alone in a house full of people."

"Dude, it doesn't matter," the cameraman said, reaching out and patting Brandon's shoulder. "You just have to get through all three months and you've got a wad of cash to blow on a spring break trip or something. And everyone you meet will love you." He paused. "All the girls you meet will love you, too."

Brandon hiccoughed and smiled again. "Yeah," he said.

"You just have to man up, B," the cameraman said. "Suck it up. You're the only one with balls in this house, and you know it."

"Almost literally," Brandon hooted, scratching his crotch. The video chose that spot to freeze on, and ended. I scrolled it off quickly, before my eyes rolled clear out of my head.

The next clip that caught my eye was, "An Evening Event," so I clicked it. There was a longish buffering time, and then the words, "Welcome to the Wonderful Live Feed," flashed up. The picture came on too fast for me to realize what I'd done and then I was there.

I have tried again and again to describe what it's like to end up in this sort of situation, with no warning and no defenses and no meds. It's never quite enough to convey it, but I'll try again.

Imagine you suddenly have twenty pairs of legs, twenty pairs of eyes, twenty pairs of arms. You have twenty heads and twenty bodies, twenty pairs of ears, twenty noses. You are feeling through twenty skins, every itch and pain and pressure and heat and cold.

Think about how much sensory information you don't pay attention to every moment -- the sounds and rhythms and stinks and scents and lights and colors and shadows, the touch of your clothing, of the chair under you, of your hair on your forehead or the back of your neck. Think about not having those filters, and then think about having all that for twenty people. And you will understand that people's thoughts are not the thing that puts me in a fetal position when I'm surprised.

And I'm caught, like a fly in a spider's web, every kick or struggle done without leverage, every motion away getting me more firmly caught in the web.

I've spent years working out coping mechanisms to get me out of situations like this. I studied with all the most experienced (mostly self-taught) telepaths in the world. I worked with alien telepaths that Ruth took me to visit, who had all sorts of techniques and defenses taught to them in their schools from the first day they're born. I have figured out how to shut down the input, but it takes time and a fucking lot of effort.

Snapshot:
I'm wet. I'm freezing. My toes are numb. My sinuses ache with cold wind. I don't have a heavy jacket. The wind cuts right through me. Rain stings my face. My head hurts. My feet hurt. My fingers hurt. My teeth hurt.

Put a blanket on it, mug it, shove it through a door, slam the door. Every inch of my body will throb with pain for a week.

Too many voices. The director shouting, the generators thrumming, Brandon's huh huh huh laugh like nails on chalkboard. Jeshri's voice, light and breathy. Cameramen and women chattering. Shrieking feedback from a microphone. Tom's voice, low and blunt. The truck engine whines. The onlookers muttering. Simon's voice, husky and resonant. The shattering of a police siren. Screams from the onlookers, cheers from the crew. Lizzie's voice, strained and sharp.

I have to be deaf, deaf, deaf. I stick my fingers in my mental ears. I stuff cotton in my mental ears. I swath my mental head in layers of soundproofing. I focus on the sounds of my home: the hums of the computers, the low strains of Billie Holiday telling me that the systems had detected my distress and had set off my focus-assisting programs.

Everything stinks: sweat and diesel fumes and hot metal and menstrual blood and food and cigarettes and nausea and makeup and warm plastic and ozone and cheap beer and fear and desire and sour milk and garbage...

Pinch my nose shut. Duck under the surface of water. Anything to stop that visceral assault on my lizard brain. Sweet jasmine incense was burning not far from where I sat, wreathing me in its comforting smoke.

Too bright. Too many colors. Too much movement.

Close each set of eyes until I can actually see.

Simon is draped over the stone wall behind the house in his Gold Stars jacket and tight black hipster jeans. Jeshri is standing near him, hugging herself in her Wonder City U hoodie and black yoga pants and knee-high black boots. Lizzie, in a bomber jacket and jeans, is speaking to them in a furtive way, glancing around to make sure no cameras are near. Tom, shivering in a t-shirt and jeans, is being harangued by the director. I can't tell what they're supposed to be shooting out here in the back yard, in the horrible March weather. The sound people are huddled together for warmth with the camera crew. Brandon is chatting with them and drinking beer, flirting outrageously with one of the female sound engineers. The director claps his hands and everyone drags tiredly into position, production assistants fluttering around them like startled pigeons.

I close the last set of eyes and open my own. Now I can hear thoughts -- just surface thoughts, fleeting scattered things that come with several layers of meaning, memories, and disordered images. It takes some time, but I start sifting them out into distinct, coherent thought-bytes.

I hate this. I hate this. I'm so cold and tired. Poor kid didn't even give her time to shower or change she smells of sweat and terror and oh she's on the rag too poor kid. She looks like hell how dare they put her up here for the shoot? Everyone thinks she looks terrible... Should short out the generators and give us all a break. I haven't been working out this week I must look like shit why can't I put on a damn jacket? So tired, so tired, just get it over with... Oh christ you asshole just make up your mind how you want to shoot this one and get it over with we're all freezing our balls off. Beer beer beer wow nice how can she have cleavage in winter clothes? This fucking camera is fucking up again the picture's shit oh he's going to rip me a new one if he gets another day of shit footage... Want a cig, want a cig, god, why can't I just light up here? So hungry, but I'm out of points for the day, so I shouldn't go near the catering table, everyone will remind me of that huge lunch I had...

Then, from out of this morass, an icy-sharp-stinging-hate stabbed me behind the eye:
I'd like to feel her throat in my hands. It would feel so good, and I would crush it so slowly, and she would try to hurt me...

This was accompanied by vivid memories of doing exactly this thing. Memories. Plural.

Usually, I don't shut things down fast. It sometimes backlashes on me if I pull out of a big group situation too fast. But I have been in the minds of too many murderers in my life to want to spend any more time in this one's mind.

I came to with one of the maintenance robots -- Eliot -- gently shaking my shoulder and saying, "Renata? Renata? You are safe here, Renata, please wake up." It had very careful programming for situations like this.

I missed my dog Liza anyway, and her big cold worried nose poking under my chin and in my ear with loud snuffles and tiny little fretting whines, and the happy little dance she did with her front paws when I woke up.

My arm was bruised where I caught myself on the floor, and my hip was bruised where the arm of the chair had caught me as I threw myself sideways in unconscious physical mimicry of my psychic reaction. I had the taste of bile in my mouth, but I did not appear to have tossed my supper, for which I was grateful.

It took me a few moments to get myself back into my chair, leaning on Eliot to get there. I sat there, breathing deeply and slowly, for a long several minutes. Finally, I drank the rest of my tea, cold, to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

The browser window had been shut down in the emergency procedures. I stared at the blank computer desktop, trying to think of what to do.

The police were out. Even if I were willing to trust them to do the right thing, my information was vague and, more damning, telepathic. No one can legally act on a telepath's tip.

I was clicking open my telephone menu before remembering that Ruth was off-planet, searching for cures for Sophie.

I flipped down my telephone contacts, and selected one.

The phone rang twice before the deep, comforting tones of my therapist answered. "Pearl Wong, can I help you?"

"Pearl, it's Renata," I said, pleased that my voice wasn't shaking.

"What's happened?" she said, and I could feel her focus in on me keenly.

"I did something stupid, Pearl," I said. "I stumbled into a live feed of a film crew."

"Oh," she said, and there was a touch of relief. "How did getting out go?"

"Badly," I said. I took a deep breath again. "I know where that serial killer is, Pearl."

"I see," Pearl said, and the relief was snuffed out. "How are you feeling?"

"Shaky and sick," I said. "I'm planning to eat something for grounding and go for a swim later to clear things out."

"Sounds like a good plan," she said. "How about your meds?"

"I'm going to see how I feel after food," I said.

"Don't be too conservative," Pearl said in a light, reminding sort of way. One reason I love her is that she doesn't get maternal at me. I have quite enough people trying to be my mama; I don't need to pay someone to do it too.

"I won't," I said. "Pearl, what do I do?"

Pearl said, "Do you want to talk about where he is?"

"He's... someone on the set of It's a Wonderful House," I said. "I can't be more specific. There were a lot of people. It could have, I suppose, even been someone watching the filming, so even one of the neighbors? Or a passerby. Or... this isn't very specific, is it?"

"That's one of your curses, Renata," Pearl said wryly. "Specificity is hard-won with you. But this gives me some ideas of where to go with the information."

"Really?" I said.

"Yes," Pearl said. She paused, then said, slowly, "What I'm thinking about isn't strictly professional, but I think the situation warrants a little break. I won't mention you."

"Okay," I said, rubbing my face to remind myself where I was. "Okay."

"I promise that I will find someone who will listen to this, Renata," Pearl said.

"Okay," I said. "Okay, thank you."

"Right," she said. There was a pregnant pause.

I knew what she was expecting. "I promise I won't go spelunking," I said. "I don't want to. I don't want to see inside that man's head again."

"All right," she said. "I'll let you know what I hear back, okay?"

"Okay. And I'll go get something to eat." I did another deep breath. "Thanks, Pearl."

"It's what I'm here for," she said.

"One more thing," I said.

"Hm?" Pearl said.

I said, "I think I'm ready for that new dog now."

---

From the Author:
I got up way too early this morning to be entertaining, alas.

Remember that, through May, I'm running the commenting incentive again, because reading your comments is the most fun on the Internet I have all day. So if I get 50 total comments in May, I will post twice weekly through June. As before, if you all post 75 comments, I'll post twice weekly through July too. Get up to 100 comments, the twice-weekly postings continue through August.

Vote for us at Top Web Fiction. We're doing better, but we've done better before--Click! Click! Okay!

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