Wonder City Stories

Last episode of 2015! Thank you for all your continued support, and the kind reviews I've been seeing around the web! I hope 2016 is kinder to you than 2015, whether you had a great 2015 or a terrible one (or an okay one, like I did).

Print and ebook versions of Wonder City Stories available! Find links to sites where you can buy them at judemclaughlin.com!



A Man Does What He Can; A Woman Does What a Man Cannot

"Guys," Nereid said into the general hubbub of the Young Cosmics meeting room. The loud conversations—particularly from Mercury holding court—continued unabated. "Guys?" she said again.

Sophie looked over at her and raised her eyebrows. Mercury was playing his boyfriends Gemini and Deflector off against each other in some sort of flex-off. Gemini had just done his power trick, making his two muscular brown arms into four, and Deflector was peeling his shirt off to reveal his pale but muscular chest. Vector was egging them on, to the annoyance of her girlfriend Meridian, who had not just turned away, but turned her entire wheelchair toward a conversation with Tin Lizzie, giving the gayboy display the cut direct. Wildstar, their featureless mask off for a change, revealing their androgynous tan face and short black hair, was chatting with Citizen Pain. Pay was giving Nereid side glances of attentiveness, but was also trying to be polite to Wildstar, their newest member. Wire was leaning back in her chair, arms crossed, one foot braced against the edge of the table, scowling at her boot, with her blue forelock drifting distractingly across her face.

Irritation bloomed and spread inside Nereid, making her feel like her skin was stretched taut with fury. Why did they elect me commander if they had no goddamn intention of paying attention to me? She fumed in silence for a few more moments, until Deflector was reaching for his belt, apparently to drop trou, and the anger exploded into her vision. She came to her feet, slammed both hands on the tabletop, and bellowed, "This meeting of the Young Cosmics will come to order."
( Read more... )

Next ep will be a little lighter, I promise.





Believe to Understand

Nereid took a deep breath and walked into Sophie's lab.

Sophie, sitting amidst a circle of junk and parts, barely looked up at her. "Hey," she said.

Nereid walked around the bench and took hold of Sophie by her heavy leather belt with its many hooks and compartments. "Come with me."

"I'm working," Sophie said.

Nereid pulled her backward on her rolling stool, drawing a squawk out of Sophie as she did so. "No, you're coming with me right now."

"What the actual fuck, Pacifica?" Sophie said, trying to stand up, pull away, and turn around at the same time.

Nereid kept her grip, bracing herself to catch Sophie when the stool inevitably tottered over and Sophie fell. "I am removing you from your laboratory because we have to talk."

"We can fucking talk here," Sophie said, stumbling over the stool and barely managing to keep her feet under her as Nereid towed her toward the door.

"No, we can't," Nereid said. "I've tried. I talk, you don't listen, lather, rinse, fucking repeat." Her voice broke and she gave up trying to keep from crying. "You're coming with me right the fuck now and we are going to talk somewhere that it's harder for you to ignore me."

"What?" Sophie said, stumbling again, since she was trying to walk backwards. Nereid caught her with her free hand, lifted her, and bodily carried her out of the room. Fortunately, the doors were Star Trek slidy doors and Nereid didn't need to manage that somehow.

"Put me DOWN!" Sophie bellowed, struggling.

Nereid noticed that Sophie neither used a single move that would have hurt her, nor any of the nearly failproof escapes of which she was capable. Nereid kept walking, tightening her grip.

Sophie finally stopped struggling when Nereid deposited her on the sofa in her own apartment. Nereid snapped, "Sit there. Don't move," and went into the kitchen for two glasses of soda. She mopped her hands off on the dishtowel before carrying the glasses back to the sofa.

"What is it you want to talk about?" Sophie said sullenly, taking the glass but not drinking.

Nereid set her jaw. "Us. You. Whether you're still interested in a relationship with me."

Sophie blinked. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that you've spent the last month and a half in your lab," Nereid said. "The only reason you've eaten, as far as I can tell, is because I've brought you food. The only reason you've showered is because I reminded you to. You've been sleeping in there for three weeks. You haven't come out at all for more than a week. I only see you if I come to the lab and beg you to talk to me. We only sleep together if I beg you to."

Sophie looked away, flushing. "Working," she muttered.

"No, you're not," Nereid said. "You're punishing yourself."

Sophie's lower jaw jutted out stubbornly, even though she still wouldn't look at Nereid.

"You're not only punishing yourself," Nereid said, "but you're punishing me. You're punishing all your friends. You're punishing your mother. You feel guilty, and you're pissed at all of us for existing so you have to feel guilty."

"When the fuck did you become an armchair shrink?" Sophie snarled.

"The moment I realized that I hadn't done a damn thing to deserve being punished," Nereid snarled back.

Sophie's head snapped around, her mouth open.

"I'm not buying this 'working' excuse any more," Nereid said, and cursed herself for the tears that started, that she couldn't stop. "Either you are in a relationship with me and you start figuring out how to live with yourself, or I have to assume that you're purposely doing this to manipulate me, and that this relationship has gone to fucking hell."

Nereid had to admit to herself, despite how angry and upset she was, that she enjoyed seeing Sophie speechless.

Still, she had to steel herself for the words she'd promised herself that she'd say. "You need to give me one good reason not to walk out the door right now. And if you don't, I'm not only leaving you, I'm leaving the Cosmics, because I can't be here with you like this. I won't sit and watch you destroy yourself, and I won't let myself be pulled further into your spiral of making the world around you shittier. I'm at the end of my rope. I keep giving but there's nothing coming back."

Sophie's mouth worked for a moment, her eyes wide, and then Nereid watched her face change as she mentally played through everything Nereid had just said again. Her jaw closed with a clack of teeth.

They watched each other in silence. Nereid prepared herself to wait through the silence, as her therapist had suggested.

Sophie was good at waiting too, but apparently Nereid had pushed some buttons.

"Look, I nearly destroyed the goddamn WORLD," Sophie said, bouncing to her feet. "I need to help put it back TOGETHER."

Nereid set her glass down. "Okay then," she said. She gritted her teeth and stood up.

Sophie had clearly been about to continue, but stopped and stared. "Okay… what?"

"You gave me your answer," Nereid said. The damn tears just kept coming, and the pain in her chest didn't help it.

"Wait, what? No I didn't…"

"Yes, you did," Nereid said, working just to keep her voice steady. "Your guilt is more important than me. Okay. I understand. But I'm not going to stick around to watch."

"You didn't let me finish!" Sophie looked completely off-balance at this point, and Nereid felt sorry for her.

"Look," Nereid said, unable to keep her voice from squeaking, "your first reaction when I basically said that you needed to figure your shit out or I have to assume that you're purposely driving me away and we're over was to tell me that the world needs you."

"I… what? Wha…?" Sophie reeled back onto the couch.

"Sophie," Nereid said sadly, "this whole cycle is abusive. To both of us. I want you to break out of it and come back to me. But you have to want to, and if you don't want to, there's nothing I can do to make you. If you're depressed, then tell me. If you just can't cope with life, then tell me. But also try to do something about it, because I can't save you this time around."

Sophie stared at her, then tried to say something, but her voice failed.

Nereid felt like she'd lost the thread of her argument. It didn't feel like it was coming out right, or anything like how she'd rehearsed it with her therapist. It had gotten all mushy. "Two years ago," Nereid said, "you sat me down and told me you loved me." She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and said, "I need to know if that has changed."

Sophie took her glasses off and scrubbed at her eyes. She said, "No."

"Then will you try to get out of this?" Nereid said. "Will you find someone to talk to if you need them to help?"

"Will you leave if I don't?" Sophie said.

"Yes," Nereid said, choking on the word. "I would have to. I can't live like this."

Sophie put her glasses back on and looked up at Nereid. "Please don't go."

Nereid knelt in front of Sophie, taking her hands. "Then please come back."

Sophie swallowed hard. "I'll try."

Nereid pulled her into her arms, which were regrettably damp with emotion, but Sophie slid off the sofa onto her knees with her.

Nereid said, "Thank you," into Sophie's neck.

This episode was hard to write to start with, and given recent events it became exponentially harder to write (something you will likely understand as you read).


Best Intentions Going Down for the Third Time

"Sophie," Ruth said at the door of Sophie's apartment in the Young Cosmics Building, "we need to have a talk."

Sophie held the door and mutely gestured her mother inside.

Nereid wanted to stand up and go, but Sophie pinned her in her seat with a fleeting, desperate glance. She sat still. She could understand why anyone, even Sophie, would fear a confrontation with the Ultimate.

Ruth glanced at Nereid, then Sophie, and nodded.

Sophie cleared her throat and said, while heading for the kitchenette, "Would you like something to drink, Mom? Pacifica?"

Nereid shook her head, and Ruth said, "I'll take another of whatever you're having."

Nereid could see Sophie pause to contemplate her liquor cabinet, then turn away to pour two glasses of iced tea.

After they were all sitting down, Ruth turned a look on Sophie. "So, Larentia Canis has been disassembling some things."

Sophie nodded, and sipped from her glass.

"She says that some of the technology uses components she knows you built."

Sophie nodded again, setting her glass aside.

Ruth's voice continued calm and measured. "Do you know how that technology came to be in the hands of the aliens?"

Sophie looked at her hands, spread on her knees, for a long moment, then swallowed, looked Ruth in the eye, and said, "I built it for them."

Ruth and Sophie remained locked in their poses, staring at each other. Nereid had a nearly uncontrollable urge to turn to water and sink through the floor just from the reflected pressure of those looks.

Ruth finally said, choking slightly over the word, "Why?"

Sophie's gaze dropped at last, and after fighting to get words out for a few seconds, she covered her face with her hands. She scrubbed her eyes hard for a moment, took a deep breath, and said, "Because they had you."

Nereid had a fleeting glimpse of something she never wanted to see again: unbridled rage in the Ultimate's eyes. Ruth clamped it down, looking away from both of them. After a moment, she said, "I can't say that I'm comfortable with being party—even passively—to that."

"There is nothing about what I chose to do that implicates you in the least," Sophie said through her teeth. "Don't you dare try to ladle on more guilt here. I know I made a wrong choice."

Ruth's head snapped back around to face Sophie. "You're damned right you did."

Nereid thought about speaking up, about what she saw as ameliorating circumstances—that the empath, or even a telepath, was probably fucking with Sophie during that entire conversation she was having with the aliens, that there was no way Sophie could have known that the equipment would be used to broadcast the empathic powers of someone with abhorrent political views, that Sophie had helped save the world... yeah, she kept her mouth shut.

"What you did was beyond irresponsible," Ruth said, her voice clipped and hard. "It was selfish, and it was stupid, and both are high crimes for someone who has an unclassifiably high-Class para brain."

"I know, already," Sophie said, control slipping off like a leash ducked by a terrier next to a busy street. "I'm selfish for putting family first over the rest of the fucking world, I'm stupid for not miraculously foreseeing who they were going to put behind that, and that I was so irresponsible by actually doing shit to stop it…"

"You close your mouth for just a moment," Ruth snapped. "First, you're famous for thinking ahead for consequences. You're going to tell me that you didn't even suspect how this was going to go wrong?"

Sophie's shoulders sagged. "Of course I did," she said, but there was almost no attitude to it.

Ruth rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. "Also, do not give me the line about putting family first. I invented that line. For para shit, anyway."

"Oh, bullshit," Sophie said.

"What did you just say?" Ruth turned a slow stare on Sophie.

Nereid didn't think they'd notice if she just seeped really slowly through the floor. Except she knew she couldn't seep through these floors, because Ultimate Construction built superhero bases too well. Every suite was a separate, contained entity with layers of armor around it.

Sophie lifted her chin. "Bull. Shit. I don't think I've ever seen you put family first. How many goddamn times did you leave me with Gloria, or Olivia, or with some other babysitter, while you kited off-planet to fight an alien menace? Or the way you stuffed Renata into a bunker and left her there alone? Or the way you've never said what happened to any of your own actual family? And then there was Fort Starr, Colorado."

"You do not know shit about that," Ruth said, "and I am not here to listen to you talk shit about..."

"Fort Starr was hit by a fucking tac nuke," Sophie said, back straightening. "A few thousand people died. Where the fuck were you at the time?"

Ruth looked away again, but Nereid saw her lips and jaw tighten. Nereid wished she'd gotten up and walked out despite Sophie's appealing look.

"All the history books, even the private Gold Star records, claim there was warning from Techmeister, the supervillain behind it," Sophie said, throwing herself headlong into what Nereid could already see was a defensive attack going horribly awry. "So where were you when your sister was killed?"

Ruth sat back in her chair and folded her hands across her belly with a snort of laughter. "How long have you been holding onto that? Damn, girl, you work for your derailing arguments, don't you?"

Sophie opened her mouth to continue, but Ruth leaned forward suddenly, one hand spread on the coffee table, and said, "Let's get this all out on the table, shall we?" Sophie's mouth shut with a snap.

"I started avoiding my family after I met Sister Power," Ruth said in a low, even voice. "Who warned me that just by being a para woman, I was putting them in danger. A year in, my parents, sister, and brothers were all in the witness protection program, moved far from anyone they knew or loved, because some supervillain had tried to kill them. I stayed away from them to keep their covers, I offered, and they asked me to. My sister was para too, only a little, really, and she kept that under wraps as much as possible, but whereas I kept refusing the draft, she joined up. The government did not love the fact that I wouldn't let them draft me into the Gold Stars, but what were they gonna do?"

Nereid knew her own eyes had gone wide with all this, and was so focused on Ruth that she didn't think to look at Sophie.

"I'll tell you what they did," Ruth said. She paused, swallowed, continued: "They finally warned me that there would be 'consequences' if I didn't join up, if I didn't stop my 'activities' — which consisted of little things like stopping wars, interfering in police actions, taking medical supplies and food directly to refugees. I was young and stupid and surprisingly idealistic for a black girl, and didn't think they could do anything to me. Except they had a para on tap whose codename, amusingly enough, was Tac Nuke."

Nereid covered her mouth reflexively.

"They took out one of their own facilities to punish me. Six thousand seven hundred and seventy-three souls killed by a para whose only power was making big atomic explosions with himself at ground zero. When I blew into that general's office, he said, 'We know where your parents and brothers live too.' And that's when I joined the Gold Stars." Ruth leaned across the table until her face was within inches of Sophie's blankly horrified face. "Never, ever tell me I don't put family first, Sophia Jean. Never pull Fort Starr, my sister, my parents, or my brothers on me. Never tell me I didn't put you, or Renata, or any of the rest of my people before myself, before everything else. You used to ask me when you were little why I didn't just take over the world. The answer is: because I'm just one woman, and they would kill everyone I held dear while I slept."

Ruth held Sophie's gaze for a few more seconds, until Sophie said, in the tiniest, hoarsest voice Nereid had ever heard, "I'm sorry."

Ruth nodded once, and stood up. Despite Ruth being such a short woman, it felt to Nereid like she was towering over them both. "You're right, you made your own choices, and you know they were wrong. And I'm disappointed that you made them. You're trying to do whatever it takes to make it right. I'm proud of the fact that you're trying your best, because if I didn't teach you anything else, at least I taught you to clean up after yourself." She walked to the door. "I'd better see both of you Sunday night for dinner." She opened the door and went out.

Nereid and Sophie sat in stunned silence in the aftermath.

Finally, Sophie said, "You'd think that after all these years, I'd know better than to try to pull that kind of shit on her."

Nereid nearly laughed at the rueful tone, and said, "Sweetie, I've only known her for two or three years, and I know better than that."

Sophie quirked the corner of her mouth. "Yeah, but you're the one with common sense in this relationship."

Nereid reached out and touched her cheek. "Yeah. Don't hold that against me though."




10 Ways to Help the People of Ferguson, Missouri

Made it! Thank you so much!


I Am Nobody's Friend

"That's the last one we need to hit," Sophie said. "The whole system is destabilized, but we need to take out the projector now. Come on up, Jane."

I felt the G-force rip at my consciousness as she changed directions to fly upward. How did she manage this kind of flying without passing out or puking? I was carefully not looking not looking out through her eyes unless I had to, because I was afraid of agoraphobia or acrophobia or everything-phobia.

Oh my god, how was space going to feel?

"Hal, you shithead," I whispered over the coffin. He'd been fucking around with some of the other women on the team ever since I just couldn't do that to Dottie any more. We hadn't spoken since. Now he'd keeled over and we would never...

The chill went straight through us and snapped me out of being swamped.

"I'm turning off Blinken's power now," Jane said. "I think that will help."

"Thanks," I said. I didn't actually think it would.

My body was shivering, I could feel it, even though it was physically warm and snugged up against Floribunda. Sophie was cursing with my mouth, trying desperately to type.

PSA: Space is fucking cold.

The headline—Lady Justice Declared Dead—shredded between my shaking fingers. They'd never let me go look for her, never let me try to find the body, and when I'd finally worked up the courage to disobey them, I couldn't find the original base to search, someone had obliterated it.

Never again. Never fucking again. I would damn well do what I knew was right.

"Right there!" Sophie said, mentally drawing a circle with an arrow pointing at the center on a mental schematic of the spaceship for Jane. "Hit it right there!"

"Trying to find that," Jane said. "Fucking assholes parked in the shadow, of course, and I can't fucking remember who had see-in-the-dark vision."

Sophie scrambled for an exterior view of the ship, but failed. I held onto Jane's mind and let Sophie look out her eyes.

Jesus, every time Jane blinked, she shattered the ice over her eyeballs. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

"There!" Sophie said, spotting it, and I steered Jane.

The acceleration dropped my stomach into my toes, even though it wasn't in that body. The impact of both Jane's fists reverberated through my arms. Something exploded around us. Something rocked the ship.

"She's not killing us all here, right?" I asked Sophie.

"No, she just took the projector offline," Sophie said with a mental sigh of relief. "It's over."

Jane snapped, "Where are the ones responsible?"

The tone chilled me more than space did.

"The aliens?" Sophie asked.

"The humans," Jane snarled.

Sophie gave her a mental map of the ship, drawn from the computer files.

I swung through the corridors with Jane, hanging on for dear life. I heard someone scream as she tore his power out of him, then another, then another.

She was taking the powers of the telepaths.

I had to look out her eyes to keep from getting sick this time.

The Liberty Girls was a stupid, stupid, STUPID marketing ploy from the fucking Gold Stars Corporation. It was stupidest when I held one girl—16 years old, bulletproof, could fly a little—in my arms as she fucking bled to death after one of the Gladiators put a spear through her throat. An accident, he claimed, just before I shattered every bone in his body…

Jane hovered at a stop, having torn through the ten foot thick bulkhead into the West's quarters.

Mark West looked up from his desk, where he'd been sitting with his head in his hands.

Sara West stared at her a long moment, surprised with a toddler in her arms. She stood up, handing the toddler to a girlchild of about 8, then pushed as many of her children behind her as she could.

I think that saved her life, honestly.

"I am Jane Liberty, Defender of Earth," Jane intoned, floating a foot above the floor, looming.

"Oh my god, she did the line," Sophie squeed to me.

"Fangirl in your own head," I snapped.

I felt Jane's upper lip curl into a sneer. "You disgust me. I've spent my life walking a goddamn tightrope, trying to make life better for the most people I could. And you just spent a year of your life doing the opposite, on a huge scale. At least when I killed people I hated, I did it honestly." I felt her power reach out. "I'm shutting you down, you pathetic little girl."

Sara's eyes got big and what little color she had in her face drained out. She wrapped her arms around herself, tried to keep her feet, but collapsed in a heap. She didn't make a sound as she went down.

Mark was standing, but just stared at the crumpled shape of his wife.

Jane looked at him and said, "She'll live. I'd like to end you, but there are children here. I'll leave your punishment to someone else."

She looked back at the little knot of kids—5 of them, I think?—and thought to Sophie and me, "All of them inherited it. Especially the baby. Take care of that. I don't have time now."

Sophie said, "Jane, I need you to come here, if you're done."

Bernie was really invested in it being Hal's, so I let her think that, though I knew it was hers all along, from some time when she'd been a boy with me. Because it was hers, I wanted it. I wanted it so much. But I just wasn't made to be a mother—War is a terrible, awful, abusive mother—and my body knew it. It never happened again after that one ended.

We were there so fast I felt like my eyes were the spinning things in a one-armed bandit. It was really fucking weird, looking at myself: I recognized my own long-chinned, dark brown face and my big boobs and hips, my muscular forearms and hands, the comfortable clothes I'd put on that morning. But I didn't recognize that manic grin, or the wide eager eyes, on my face. No wonder Floribunda was so freaked out. I was freaking out.

In my body's voice, Sophie's brusque, syncopated words came out: "I need you to put some extra power into that conduit right there." My finger, pointing at the corner.

My perception swung around—the cognitive dissonance was too much and I reverted to my own body for vision—and watched frail, birdlike Jane Liberty float over to the corner. I could see her face was pale, that she was panting a little, that there was a fine sheen of sweat over her whole face. She was really fucking good at clamping down on some things, I guess, despite the dementia. She put her hand on the indicated spot and dumped a huge quantity of electricity into it.

"Now, Renata, you need to find the opening!" Sophie said to me.

"Opening?" I said—I had not been privy to this part of Sophie's thought process.

"My mother," she said with a surge of raw anguish. I reached out to that psychic space I'd been exploring for years—to which Jane had first introduced me, I remembered.

The opening had been nearby all along, right in the damn ship, right here and all it needed was some extra juice to the magic psychic generator become obvious.

I ripped that fucker open, projecting into it as hard as I could: RUTH.

Jane caught them, somehow, despite how shitty she looked, as the Gold Stars all tumbled out of the dimensional pocket. She did let Ruth hit the ground, but I understood—she was more likely to hurt the metal floor than herself.

"Okay," Jane said through gritted teeth. "Okay, they can handle it now." She looked into my eyes. "Renata, I need you to get me back to Larentia's house."

Sophie's control slipped and I said, with my own mouth, "Jane, you look like hell, let's get Ruth to get you to—"

Inside our shared head, Jane said, "RENATA. NOW." In the reverberating aftermath, she added a sheepish and pathetic, "Please."

Sophie pointed us out the nearest airlock, where Jane waited impatiently for the atmosphere to cycle before rocketing into Earth's atmosphere. Where I'd been too cold before, I was cooking now, like the world's worst hot flash. We fireballed downward on a direct course for Professor Canis' house.

"Oh, Mama," I sobbed, holding her hand gently, so, so gently.

"Be good, Jane," she whispered on the thin stream of air that would move in and out of her lungs. I couldn't see her face any more, all I could see was the thing, that horrible thing the doctors couldn't take from her, that I couldn't cure, that she wouldn't let me try to cure. "Always. Just. Be good."

I wasn't, Mama. I'm sorry.

The house had just come into view when Jane said, "I'm all right now, Renata."

"Jane, let me help yo—"

Then I was back in my body on the ship, thrown in with the force of someone who could move planets, her voice shouting, "GET OUT, YOU FOOL."

"Jesus," I said to Ruth as she clambered to her feet nearby. "Oh, Jesus."

I'll be at WisCon this coming weekend! I'd love to meet any of my readers who are going to be there. Let me know to look for you, if you like.



It Is Hard to Shake Hands With Her

"Okay, Jane," said Sophie, telepathically, in my head, "the first generator is here." Sophie presented Jane with a mental map of Europe, marked with a big red circle.

"Acknowledged," Jane replied tersely, sounding and feeling like she was talking on a walkie-talkie instead of mind-to-mind. "Please monitor my progress and… and… I need you two to be my brain. Just fuckin' steer me, girls."

I watched my hands dance over the keyboard, lines racing by on the screen. I said, privately, to Sophie, "I told you this was a bad idea."

Sophie snapped, "And who else was gonna do this? We don't have another spaceworthy flier with my mother locked up. Jane Liberty just handed us the second biggest gun in our corner of the universe. We just have to point it at the right things." She paused. "I… need you to be the one riding in the back of her head. I'm sorry. I need most of my concentration to hack this damn spaceship. I don't read their language."

I shuddered, which made Sophie mistype, so we had a little confab of apology. Then I said, "Fuck. All right." I had already violated one of the things I'd sworn never to do that day: letting someone else into my head to run by body. Now for my second stupid trick of the day, I would ride herd on someone with dementia.

Let me explain: I think of a neurotypical person's mind as being a familiar ocean. I can sit on the surface without problems—think of me as a telepathic duck, I guess—and float there, watching the waves and tides, the winds and upwellings. There are currents and rough seas, and of course there are the rogue tides that can swamp me-the-duck, but I mostly understand and can predict the physics of the place. Mostly.

The kids I work with, the ones on the autism spectrum, are unfamiliar seas, even the ones I work with all the time. I've grown to know the particular shifts and gravities and weather of the minds of the individual kids I work with all the time so I can read something of what's going on for them without diving in. But I avoid even doing my duck thing with those kids if I can help it: I prefer to let them communicate for themselves in whatever media they prefer. (It's my job to help their families learn to understand them, not to try to "fix" their minds, as some parents fail to understand.)

And then there's dementia.

I settled as lightly as possible on the surface of Jane's mind. It all seemed very understandable, as calm a surface as I could ever ask for.

Then the gravity shifted and turned everything at not-right-angles to itself and the water was blown into my face as I was falling down and sideways and the surface under me lurched and swept over me…

... Hal—The Flag—turned the corner toward the locker rooms and nearly ran into me where I was leaning against the wall. We both knew I'd been waiting for him—waiting for an hour at least for that damned meeting to end—and he wasn't surprised when I grabbed the front of his shirt and the front of his jodphurs—a handful of Old Glory, I used to call it back when we were actually together, and dragged him into the empty locker room behind me, kissing him hard. He was taller than me—taller than most everyone—but being able to levitate makes things easy, you know. Even when he was kissing me back, the bastard making my head spin like always, though, I kept praying that Dottie would never ask either of us what we did in the evenings these days...

Usually I'd pull up out of the water completely when something like that happened, but I couldn't leave Jane's mind at this point; all I could do was hang on and try to point her in the right direction. I clamped down a little to keep some portion of her mind on her job, paying attention to Sophie's instructional monologue. Damn that girl could talk.

"Right, you've hit it, that was perfect, Jane," Sophie said. "Now we've got a building in the middle of Kazakhstan…"

Ah fuck bigass wave.

... the Great Gulf was chewing away at the fabric of the world under my feet. Someone I couldn't see—two people? three?—threw themselves into that maw and for a moment, the pull on me let up. I tore away from that ravenous gravity and lunged for Dark Universal, who'd been laughing at us, calling us fleas and mites and insignificant just seconds before. I rammed my fist into his open mouth, crunching through constructed teeth and bone, and out the back of his cosmic skull, and then I dumped all the energy I'd sucked up from Sun Master's overload death down his measureless throat, shattering his empyrean construct...

"Head for north Africa," Sophie was saying. "Right here, see? I'm trying to plot a course that's reasonable…"

"You've got me jumping all over the globe like a frog," Jane groused.

"... but I'm getting my information piecemeal, I was going to say," Sophie snarled. All of us were tense. "I'm doing my best to run you over wilderness too, so you don't cause speed damage."

"You're doing fine," I said, trying to keep the peace in my poor skull while also trying not to be sick. "Both of you."

Then. There was. A goddamn. Tsunami.

... Bernie breathed my name into my mouth and shuddered under me, and damned if I didn't come too. It didn't matter if she was herself or someone else when we were fucking, just knowing it was her made the whole thing hot as hell. She changed then, changed her smooth arms, her round hips and legs, into knotty muscle and bone, and under my hand the softness and slickness surged into something else, and she grinned at me with Midnight Mask's broad jaw and slightly crooked teeth…

Jesus Christ, I didn't want to see these things. I didn't want to know these things. Who the fuck was Bernie? No, goddammit, this was too personal, too in-person, all these dead people and loosey-goosey time slipping back and forward, running me down. Go, go, Jane Liberty, and smash the thing in Sudan.

"How many more?" I asked Sophie, feeling like I was losing myself so, so fast.

"There's two dozen," Sophie said, like she was gritting her teeth. "I think we can get away with only destroying some of them, but I have to figure that out. And then I need her to go to the ship you're on and smash all their damn weapons."

"And we need to get Ruth and the rest out of limbo," I said. "Don't forget."

"I'm not forgetting," Sophie said, and I worried briefly about her snapping.

All the air went out of me.

... I was holding the heart of the man I'd just killed in my hand. It was hot and still pulsing, the steaming blood all over my hand. I held half a tank in the other hand. He'd been a butcher of a man, experimenting on para children in Italy, stealing away their parents to see if he could make more to serve the Axis. This was War, right? I was War. I am War. Someone else is Death, but I am War. I will always BE War...

"Jesus God, hurry up!" I shrieked in my own head.

We alllllmost made it to 10 comments, so I'm posting early in the week. If we can actually get 10 comments by Friday, I'll post a second episode. Let me know you're reading!


The Rabble Are Roused

"Oh, my god," Sophie said, staring at her screen. "The fucking Internet is going crazy."

Ivy opened her laptop and flipped through several windows. "My Twitter feed is nuts. People are talking about the broadcast, things that have been happening, the mod squads. Damn, Sophie, you streamed it into the BBC broadcasts too?"

"They're not very secure," Sophie said. Nereid squeezed her shoulders and Sophie looked up at her with a faint smile.

"I'm seeing it on Chinese and Japanese news outlets too," Ivy said.

"Al-Jazeera's got it," Simon said from behind his laptop.

"Okay, okay, we're stars," said Mercury impatiently. "Can we go do something now?"

Vector turned from the local troublespotting monitors with wide eyes. "Um, yeah, I think so."

"What's up?" Wire said, walking over.

"Riot in the business district," Vector said. "Assaults on men in black in the college district. Guys, I'm getting trouble lights all over the city."

"Let's split up and cover more ground," Mercury said, pacing.

"Michael forbade us to split up," Wire said tiredly.

"What's he going to do if we save more lives this way?" Mercury demanded.

"Cut us off without a penny," Wire said. "He'll do it, too."

Sophie said, rising and putting on her glasses, "I've got Cosmic Flyer 1 warming up now. I suggest we head for the riot first. Biggest casualty risk. Well," she said with a twisted smile, "biggest casualties we care about. Men in black? What men in black?"

Citizen Pain walked to the elevator door and said, "I am going out. Indeed, I will go without you if you continue to argue, Mercury. I do not care for your attitude when people are being injured."

Nereid and Sophie walked over to join him. After a moment, so did Vector, saying, "Mercury, you and Gemini can stay here and watch the monitor."

"But Ivy and Simon…" Mercury said, in between gaping at them.

"Aren't members of the Young Cosmics," said Wire, following the rest onto the elevator. "Or we can patch it into the transport. Your choice, Merc."

In the end, of course, the whole team left together, though Mercury didn't shut up with his bitching. Nereid had to wonder what Ivy and Simon were doing. Hopefully having a beer and a pizza.

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."

My schedule has just gone to heck, but here I am, giving you another Wonder City just under the November wire. I hope you enjoy it!


Enter the Dragon

Nereid was surprised and pleased to open the front door of the Young Cosmics' headquarters to find X leaning indolently against the stair rail. X was wearing a hip-length double-breasted black wool coat against the spring chill, and also neatly creased grey trousers over long, slender black-and-white patent leather oxfords. X's hair was a little shorter these days than it had been when X and Nereid were first introduced by Brainchild, with a little more masculinity and a little less androgyny. Still, X was striking, handsome and beautiful at the same time, and always made Nereid's heart do a little pit-a-pat. Just a little.

"Hey," X said in a smoky tenor. "How's it going?"

Nereid smiled and stepped back from the door. "Not bad," she said, lying through her teeth because she was really feeling pretty stir-crazy, trapped in the headquarters.

X strolled into the headquarters and Nereid saw the line of tension across those admirable shoulders relax. There was something, Nereid had noticed, about their headquarters. It was palpably more comfortable, like someone turning off a white noise machine you didn't realize was running. It didn't stop her from hating being cooped up there -- the headquarters was not designed to be some sort of self-contained habitation. Sophie often described it as being built in "Soviet Brutal" style, a bizarre, ill-lit convolution in concrete and other materials designed to resist explosions and similar supervillain assaults.

"So," Nereid said, shutting the door and turning to lead X toward the flat she shared with Sophie, "what brings you to this part of town?"

"I came to ask you all for a favor," X began, but they turned the corner and ran smack into a knot of Cosmics.

Wire, Mercury, and Vector were clustered around a tall, tanned man with longish white hair that sported a heavy lock hanging dramatically over one eye, wearing an exquisitely tailored pale grey suit. Nereid had only seen the man that her team leaders called "Mr. Moneybags" a few times in her tenure with the Cosmics, but she knew him on sight anyway -- who could miss him, really?

"Ah, Nereid," he said in a low, faintly British drawl. "How are you, my jewel?"

Wire shot Nereid a frustrated glance that Nereid knew to interpret as, You have derailed him just when I thought we were getting somewhere, and then Wire exhaled hard enough to make her floaty blue forelock flip back across her otherwise closely-shorn head. Nereid smiled quickly and nodded. "Fine, sir," she said quickly, trying to sidle past them. Mercury, resplendently muscular in his tight black spandex outfit, at least, made way for her, and she thought, for a bare second, that she could get away.

"Mr. Moneybags" managed to intercept her, twining his way between Vector and Wire, who half-reached for his sleeve, but wisely withdrew her hand. He leaned against the wall in her path in a slightly predatory way and looked down at her from his always startling height. "Are you really well, though?" he pursued. "You looked a touch pale, my dear."

"I'm fine, sir," she repeated, then said, "Have you met X, sir? X, this is Michael Frost, the Cosmics' backer. Mr. Frost, this is X."

"Ah, yes, I recall you," Mr. Frost said, raising one pale eyebrow. "You have some interesting potential, you know."

"I know," X said with a tight smile. "It's a pleasure meeting you again."

Mr. Frost's attention was not long held by X, though. His icy blue gaze was turned back to Nereid before she could think of another distraction. "I don't want you becoming ill," he said.

"Sir--" Nereid clamped down on a moment of rage, bit down on a demand to be let out of confinement, and swallowed her unhappiness, giving herself quite a stomachache. She was saved from answering by her usual rescuer.

"Hello, Michael," Sophie said, somehow appearing at Nereid's elbow. "I was wondering when you'd turn up."

Mr. Frost straightened up to loom from his full height and turned to face Sophie. His expression didn't change much at all, something that had always creeped Nereid out about him. "Brainchild," he said. "Thank you for pulling them out of an untenable situation. Again." His gaze darted to Mercury in particular, and Nereid had the rare pleasure of seeing their boisterous, cocky leader wilt.

"That's my job," Sophie said, taking Nereid's arm. "Isn't it?"

"I wish you had managed the press as well," he said.

"The press isn't amenable to my style of prediction right now," she said, also taking X's arm. "Logic doesn't work very well in the current climate."

His lips compressed. Sophie's face was her most indestructable mask of cool cynicism, and the extra lenses of her glasses were fanned down over one side of her face, which Nereid always found unsettling.

Mr. Frost turned on Mercury, Wire, and Vector with cool precision. "I will make myself clear now," he said in a low, penetrating voice. "My team will not become involved in any long-term situations that will bring the gaze of the government or media down on it. These short-term emergency actions are quite enough, and I understand that it would be... irresponsible for any hero group to fail to respond to such emergencies. But there will be no pursuit of nemeses, no trips to space, nothing of the sort, and you will always respond to even small emergencies with a full team, unless waiting would endanger lives, you understand?"

Wire and Mercury said, reflexively, "Yes, sir," at the same moment.

Sophie chose this moment to silently draw Nereid and X down the hall and around the next corner into the flat.

They all exhaled simultaneously when the door of the flat was shut.

"That was about the university thing, wasn't it?" X said.

"Yeah," Sophie said, pushing off from the door and moving into the kitchen. "And more, probably, but it's hard to tell with him."

"I can never tell anything with him," Nereid said.

Sophie shrugged and said, "Humans find it hard to read Reptilian-Americans. Want a drink, X?"

"Sure," X said, sitting on an arm of the sofa.

Nereid stopped and stared at Sophie. "He's a Reptilian-American? Why didn't you tell me?"

Sophie gave her a slightly disbelieving look, and Nereid knew instantly she'd said something stupid, and could almost say, word for word, what came out of Sophie's mouth next. "Would it have made a difference in how you interacted with him?"

Nereid sighed explosively and moved around the room, turning on more lights. "No," she said, then added, in a brighter tone to X, "You said you came to ask us a favor?"

X grimaced and glanced toward the door. "I was," X sighed, "but I think that point is moot."

"Oh, was it something Mr. Frost just forbade us to do?" Nereid said, and she could feel a whole vista of hope of getting out of the building opening up before her.

"Probably," X said with an air of gloom.

Sophie brought X a tumbler of tawny liquid and said, "No."

X nodded and sipped the drink.

"You don't even know what it is yet!" Nereid protested.

"I'm not going to buck Michael on anything he just said," Sophie said, handing Nereid a similar glass of alcohol, "because he's right. Completely. Fucking. Right. This team mostly needs its nuts pulled out of the fire, and mostly by thee and me, sweetheart."

"There's something really wrong out there and I'm sick of doing nothing," Nereid started.

"Nereid, it's fine," X said mildly. "Sophie knows her stuff here."

Nereid caught some sort of look between X and Sophie, something sharp from X and something almost... guilty? from Sophie. Looking back and forth between them, she said, "What?"

X looked at her, one elegant eyebrow raised. "She knows something she isn't telling us, isn't she?"

Nereid blinked. She'd thought it was all in her own head, but if X had seen it too... "I've... thought so," Nereid said slowly.

Sophie raised her chin in a defiant look.

X considered her gravely, then shrugged. "I know you too well to try to press you. You'd rather make something up than tell us if we do."

Nereid looked down into her glass, then looked back up and said, "I trust you, Sophie."

The defiant look shattered with sudden violence and a cry that sent Sophie fleeing to the bathroom. Nereid looked at X, alarmed.

X nodded and shrugged. "She'll tell us when she can." One corner of X's rather perfect mouth curled up in a wry smile. "Or when we can squeeze it out of her."

They Tell Me That I'll Move Forward for the Good of Us All

Nereid crept guiltily into Sophie's laboratory at the heart of the Young Cosmics' headquarters. She knew Sophie was going to be upset. She knew she shouldn't have done it. She knew, she knew, she knew.

"Hey, you," Sophie said, glancing up from the tiny mechanism she was working on today. Then she paused and flipped the microscopic-view lens out from in front of her glasses so she could see Nereid more clearly. "What's wrong, Pacifica?"

"Nothing," Nereid lied. She knew she lied badly, especially to Sophie.

"You went out," Sophie said, her voice flattening and her face locking down over any expression.

"I just needed a new hairbrush," Nereid said defensively. She wilted under Sophie's silent scrutiny after only a few seconds. "I'm going stir-crazy in here, all day every day, Sophie!"

Sophie sighed and put her tools down. After a moment of staring at the desktop, she rose and put her arms around Nereid. "I'm sorry. I know you're going stir-crazy. Everyone is, but particularly you."

"Because you let them go out," Nereid said, the sulkiness slipping out before she could stop it. She saw that she'd hit Sophie where it hurt and immediately regretted it. "I'm sorry, I know you've said that it's extra dangerous for me, but I just don't understand. I mean, I'm a Class 10 para..."

"Class 10 paras can be taken by surprise and clubbed down," Sophie said. "But it's not that kind of danger I'm worried about though."

"The riot last month really shook you up," Nereid said, frowning. "That's when you said I couldn't go out at all."

"Yeah," Sophie said in a tone that Nereid knew meant she wasn't going to explain. Sophie leaned her forehead against Nereid's and closed her eyes.

"I wish you would tell me why," Nereid said, and it came out more pathetic than she'd meant.

"It's a feeling," Sophie said, as she had before. "I don't have any data to back it up."

Nereid didn't believe her -- there was something a little too polished about the lines. Sophie was too good at lying sometimes. But she didn't say that, just bit her lip.

Sophie said, after a moment, "Did the Men in Black find you again?"

Nereid gave her a worried look and said, "You shouldn't call them that, it's disrespectful."

"You didn't like my other nickname for them either." Sophie sighed and opened her eyes. "What did they give you?"

"They didn't...!" Nereid clenched her hand to try to hide the pretty little steel promise ring. "They just... talked. And read to me."

Sophie stepped back after feeling around Nereid's neck for a chain, and gently took each of her hands. Nereid relented and let her take the ring, though she felt a sharp pang of regret as it left her finger.

Sophie didn't even examine it, she just threw it into what Nereid knew was a small disposal unit. Nereid winced at the sound of something grinding up the metal of the ring.

"Come on," Sophie said, her eyes terribly sad in a way that made Nereid want to apologize repeatedly. "Come on, it's late, let's go to bed." She took Nereid's hand and drew her out of the laboratory.

A terrible stab of guilt flashed through Nereid, but she didn’t say anything.

---

Author's Note:

Oh, Nereid. Oh, Sophie.

Thanks for the linking and such to Madame's readings offer! I've got a full reading and 5-card reading to do up for folks. :)

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

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")

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