“Wait a minute…” Fencer stopped dead in his tracks on the way back through the League exhibit. “You said you told this to ‘Song.’ Who is that?”
Alex groaned. He needed a better filter, especially when he was on a roll with righteous fury.
“She’s just… forget I said that,” he muttered.
“Literally impossible for me to do that, I’m afraid. You’d have a better chance asking the Library to redact something from their records than let a single thing slip from my memory,” Fencer grinned. “So come on, I’m about to pay you more money than I’m sure you’ve ever seen at once. Who is this person you so proudly declared to that you would become ruler of the world, hmm?”
“You’re not usually this nosy…”
“I am always this nosy, I just usually pay someone else to get these questions answered,” Fencer admitted. “I’d just rather no one look too hard at you right now, on account of all the secrets that will spill out if I do that and get you murdered before you’re able to do anything worth putting on display.”
Alex sighed. He’d never had to deal with Fencer’s undivided attention before today. The price of going up in the world. He gazed over the display marking the history of NecrOver, complete with several artifacts that were possibly smuggled out of the stormwalls of Nilea, and it really sunk in how much of an obsessive the villain enthusiast could be. Better to just answer him rather than risk him actually hiring someone to dig through his past any further.
“She’s just my landlady. It was about my lease,” he admitted.
Fencer chuckled, “Oh you’ll have to tell me about this place of yours where lease negotiation apparently involves disclosing your villainous schemes. That sounds like exactly the type of place I’d love to-”
He froze midsentence, a serious expression creeping over his face.
“Leasing… villainous schemes… Song?!” Fencer eyes darted around wildly as he was remembering something.
Alex could see the realization spread across his face with something resembling horror and excitement.
“YOUR LANDLADY IS SERENA SONG?!” he exploded.
Alex shrugged, “I guess? I’m honestly not sure.”
The name sounded familiar, so probably? She didn’t really put a nameplate on her door.
“You’re not sure?!” Fencer rounded on him, getting as close to him as Alex had been minutes ago. “How could you not be sure?! This is Serena Song!”
“It hasn’t really come up. She’s just kind of my landlady. I pay her and she lets me have a room and we both don’t ask questions. Most of the time,” he added after a brief moment.
Fencer’s mouth worked through what felt like a million words in half a second. Alex smiled, an idea hatching.
“Actually, I remember her asking if I knew who she was, now that I think of it. I meant to Saga that,1 but never got around to it. It didn’t seem that important.”
The spectacles on Fencer’s nose almost leapt off his face to the floor as veins bulged across his forehead, “‘DIDN’T SEEM THAT IMPORTANT’?!”
“I mean, if she truly wanted me to know who she was, I think she would’ve told me there, right? Feels like it would be awkward to go look that up and come back later going ‘Woah, I didn’t know that was you!’ Feels like the kind of thing that she’d want to be there for if I were to look it up.”
Alex enjoyed watching the pained journey Fencer’s face went through before deflating. Oh, he wanted so bad to tell Alex, probably even guide him through an exhibit, but he couldn’t. Alex fought to keep himself from laughing, biting the inside of his cheek hard.
“Let’s… let’s just get you your money so you can get your upgrades…” he said, his eyes squeezed tight in agony.
---------------------------------
Alex strolled into his apartment building, finishing up an encrypted call with Starsilk.
It was mostly official now, and despite the fact that he would basically be close to broke again, it felt good to get the ball rolling on this. A new suit, most of it designed by Celestial, with a lot more toys baked in. Granted, he was ditching the gas launchers in the new suit because of that fucking magic, and it would take a lot longer to have the laser emitters covered up by flexible panels when not in use, not to mention getting some of those light shields built in, but oh man, he couldn’t wait.
The only pain point of this was that Celestial Scientist refused to even entertain building the gravitor generators into his gauntlets even though he’d sent her over a link to the video explaining how to build them. She said if he wanted them, he’d need to add them himself, once again claiming they didn’t exist, and she’d leave room for his “projectile launcher.” Alex, despite his frustration, had opted to start the new contract off on the right foot by not arguing with his personal mad scientist on her very first job.
Let’s leave the ego trips for when we’re a big name villain, alright. Otherwise, you just look like someone arguing with the cashier at a Omnimart.
He almost skipped as he made his way to the stairs, only to stop abruptly as he almost ran directly into Song.
“You look rather satisfied for someone who botched a job,” she chided him, disappointment and something more dangerous written clearly across her face. “I thought we had an understanding.”
“I-”
“Rule Two?” she jabbed a finger at his chest. “How was that performance any better than what we talked about?”
“I wasn’t-” Alex cut himself off as another neighbor strolled by, lingering a little as they made their way up the stairs. He noted the clear curiosity on their face about this conversation. He began to move towards the common room off to the side and motioned for her to follow him as he whispered, “Okay, so it didn’t go to plan but still-”
“But still you failed and now you have nothing,” she stated flatly. “I saw the footage on the news tonight and I can tell that your bag clearly doesn’t have half of your armor in it. Tell me why I shouldn’t just end you myself right here?”
Alex gulped, fully understanding she might well do just that. He shut the door and made sure no one else was here. It was clear.
For a supposed common room, this feels more like Ms. Song’s personal office, he thought. Shaking that aside in time to see her glare beginning to deepen, he swung his bag around and quickly opened it, revealing the stacks of decks. She looked down at it with a scowl that quickly changed to a look of astonishment.
“That’s… more than I was expecting,” she admitted, her eyes running over the bills.
“I had something Fencer wanted,” Alex bragged. “This is only one bag too. I’ve got three more coming. Most of it’s going towards a new suit, AND I think I’ve got the next job lined up.”
Celestial had mentioned something interesting in the call. Alex hadn’t made any promises but who was he kidding? This would be perfect.
Song was clearly wrong footed by all of this. Alex wanted to keep her that way so she wouldn’t ask too many follow up questions, so he decided to add, “You know, your name came up with Fencer.”
“Oh,” her confusion was replaced with a smug grin. “So that means you finally know who I am then?”
“Nope!” Alex cheerfully informed her.
Another blank expression crossed her face. After a moment, a polite mask formed over what was very clearly intense irritation. She forced a grin as she politely asked, “Oh? May I ask what happened then?”
“Oh we were going through his League displays and your name came up. He didn’t seem to want to steal the reveal though. In fact, he hurried me out of there after paying me.”
“I… see,” Alex was fairly sure he heard her teeth grind as she forced the statement out. “Could you stay there for just one second?”
“Of course.”
Song moved over to the table at the center of the room and picked up her phone. Yep, this place definitely felt like her own personal room. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before rapidly flicking through the small device. A few taps later and she held the phone slightly away from her as she put it on speaker. It let out a dial twice before Alex heard someone pick up on the other end.
“Ah! It’s so lovely to hear from you, Ms. -” Fencer’s voice was jovial and somewhat overly praising.
“Song. As apparently that’s how I’m being addressed,” she cut off the middle man’s words with a cold voice.
Alex heard a swallow from the other side. “I’m… sorry?”
“About the state of your silly collection? Is that why you neglected to show off my exhibit to Mr. Adams despite knowing my connection with him? Or is it that you simply do not have an exhibit of mine prepared?”
She looked over at Alex with a sadistic smile. He was fairly sure he could hear the sound of Fencer sweating from over the phone.
“I- Of course I have one for you prepared! Mr. Adams pointed out that you wished your identity to remain a secret!”
“Oh?” Song turned to look at him. “Alex is that true?”
Alex heard the other line gasp and mutter something.
He shrugged, “I said that if you wanted me to know, you probably would’ve told me.”
Song tapped her chin in thought, “There’s truth to that I guess, but I would’ve expected someone such as Mr. Farrow to offer to show off such a display unprompted should it be ready. Mr. Adams, dear, did he do that?”
Alex noted both that she wasn’t using her powers to force an answer and that her eyes were glued to the phone in front of her. Sorry, Fencer, looks like you’re the punching bag for whatever she’s got going on right now, not me.
A ding interrupted that thought. He dug his phone out of his pocket and saw an alert for his bank account. A size-able deposit.
“Yeah,” Alex lied. “He really wanted to show off that display.”
“Hm… Then Mr. Farrow, my interest is piqued. I would love to see how you have arranged a display of my legacy.”
“Of course!” Fencer happily cried. “I shall make arrangements for you to see it whenever-”
“Tomorrow morning,” Song said flatly.
“Tomorrow morning it is!” there was a tinge of worry in Fencer’s voice. “I’ll arrange transportation and everything.”
“Perfect,” Song cooed. “Oh, and Fencer...”
“...Yes?”
“You don’t happen to have my first costume on display, would you?” she asked sweetly.
Alex could tell this was a trap, but Fencer apparently was all too eager to brag about his collection.
“Of course!” he happily told her. “It’s perfectly preserved and-”
“I believe I destroyed that.”
There was a long pause.
“I- You see, the thing is-”
“I would like that removed before I get there. Please put it into storage,” she relaxed into a chair, satisfaction radiating off her.
“B-but the collection is incomplete without it! The carefully arranged-!” Alex heard the despair in Farrow’s whine.
“Fencer,” was all Song said, making a motion for Alex to leave.
“F-fine…” Alex left as he heard the man cry, knowing full well that this was probably the first of many demands.
He got the feeling as he went upstairs that the power play on display there had been meant to show him how a villain should act, but also that it was just as much his landlady redirecting her urge to kill him from earlier into a different target. It wasn’t him though so who cares? Still, he made a mental note to really not test those rules of hers that she laid out. The next identity he picked better be the winner.
He glanced down at his own phone and shot off a few more messages. Then he remembered the deal he’d made with Ice Hawk.
Right… need to go talk to Vandal Eyes in a bit… he thought. Even if I’m retiring Tech Crash, I want to make sure I don’t need to look over my shoulder for a pissed off hero that’s clearly not playing by the rules.
He pushed those thoughts away as he stowed away the sack of cash in a hiding spot. For now, he could ride high on salvaging this night. And hey, it sounded like he wouldn’t the be having the worst night of everyone tonight.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
---------------------------------
Lyn tapped her foot impatiently, causing a few of the cans on the floor to rattle. A few that had managed to tilt over rolled around slightly. She didn’t pay them any attention as she stared daggers at the mirror.
Come on you, son of a bitch.
“Hey… uh… just checking if you’re still alive,” Celeste’s voice came over the walkie talkie.
Her roommate had agreed to avoid the area for a bit, sequestering herself on the other side of their shared space, and even let Lyn set up entirely in the smaller bathroom entirely for this. The lab was big enough for that without it being too much of an issue. Lyn fumbled for the device, not taking her eyes off the mirror.
“I’m fine…” she muttered, slightly slipping over the words as her mouth felt like it was rusty at speaking.
“Okay… I have to ask, uh, how many energy drinks have you drunk by now? Because the fridge is a little… empty.”
“...A few,” Lyn couldn’t count which of the cans on the floor were open. That would mean breaking eye contact.
“Yeah, so… I just got a call back from our spooky friend and got some more information, kinda important. You mind if I swing on by?”
Lyn really didn’t want that but relented, “Sure, just knock.”
“Okay…” Celeste trailed off and the line went dead.
A few minutes later, a knock on the door alerted her that her solitude was up and that her friend was here. Lyn rubbed her eyes and stretched, wincing as the stiffness caught up to her.
“Alright, so- Oh holy shit. T!” her roommate almost jumped backwards as the door creaked open.
The light revealed a minefield of discarded cans and more than a few crumpled bags of snacks and wrappers.
“I’ll clean this up in a sec,” Lyn promised.
“Have you been in here the past two days?!” Celeste exclaimed.
Huh… that explained a few things.
“Kind of…?”
“Okay, so let’s start with the most important thing, Spooky confirmed that you do share whatever goes in your mouth, you just feel it differently depending on your current body so please don’t shift to spider right now,” Celeste gestured at the carpet of energy drinks. “Apparently you should be able to feel the hangover that’s gonna cause since that’s ‘damage’, but getting drunk is different for some reason. I don’t have a biology degree and I still think that’s wrong. Whatever, I do not want to have to get the power lifter though so please don’t turn into the drunkest and largest roommate I’ve ever had, okay?”
Lyn nodded. Well that also explained a fuzzy feeling floating just out of reach. She had thought it was just a missing night of sleep (or apparently two), but apparently her spider half was currently seeing stars right now. Wasn’t it supposed to not exist? Stupid Scarlet told her wrong...
“Okay, we’re gonna get you in a bed in a sec,” Celeste eyed the mess.
“I need to clean this first,” Lyn protested, not wanting to leave a mess this large.
“You absolutely do not need to be awake another minute longer, so come on, let’s go, and I’ll give you the rest of the news along the way,” the scientist grabbed her arm and, with surprising force for her small frame, managed to actually lift her away from the bathroom.
Lyn stumbled through the pins and needles as Celeste lead her away.
“Alright so our witchy friend also said that per the contract, the thing that made you into an Underrealm Princess2 shouldn’t be bothering you, so they’re looking into that. They emailed me a sigil to print out and stick on our mirrors for the next couple days,” Celeste rattled off. “Magic’s so fucking weird these days, by the way. Apparently it’ll trip something to let them figure out who is bothering you. They did say that they triple checked everything and you’re not about to be body jacked because of the spell but that you really shouldn’t be staring too hard at weird mirror wigglies in the first place. Also they called them ‘wigglies’ too so the name stuck.”
Lyn groaned but found she couldn’t put up too much of a fight over that at the moment. A few strands of hair kept floating in front of her face and she was fighting a losing battle against keeping them out of her eyes as she pawed at them.
“I gave them your number so I’m not acting as the middle man anymore,” Celeste informed her as the two arrived at her bedroom, the scientist slapping her hand away before she could try to disable the traps.
Celeste leaned over and her hands danced through the procedures to disarm her roommate’s defenses, “Also, we’re rich, again. Tech Crash is actually locking in a contract with us and dropped a hell of a first order. After you wake up, I’d like you to go pick up a package he’s dropping off which should have some cash and some things I need to start a new costume for him. Apparently he’s swapping names again too. He apparently has no idea what that’s gonna be yet, but it can’t be any worse than the last two.”
“Wha’ happen…?” Lyn yawned, suddenly feeling the two missing nights of sleep now that her bed was so close.
“Apparently he had to make a heist go bad to cover up for something,” Celeste shrugged. “Walked away with a better payday but it meant ‘Tech Crash’s’ rep is in the shitter. Oh, I told him about your job and it sounds like he might be in. Should have him all kitted out in time, minus his stupid orb guns, which I’m not even going to entertain installing myself as long as he insists on calling them that.”
Right, Celeste had something against Tech Crash’s guns. Lyn struggled to remember but things were getting fuzzy. She yawned again.
“Okay, sleepyhead. Let’s get you to bed,” Celeste thumbed off the last trap and opened the door, revealing the only slightly cluttered room within.
A freshly obtained mattress and box spring sat on a half finished frame that was directly on the floor in one corner of the room, sheets barely hanging onto it. In another sat the mountain of pillows and blankets she’d been using for over ten years. She still used those, having been a little more used to sleeping in her spider form. She began to head that way.
“Nope, we’re sticking to elf princess tonight,” Celeste chided and redirected her towards the floor bed.
“Not a princess…” she protested with the last of her strength.
“Whatever, just go to bed. I need a well rested spider henchman to go do my chores so I can build a villain a supersuit.”
Lyn flipped her off as she collapsed on the bed, one of her chitinous legs uncoiling from her to snatch a few of her favorite pillows and blankets from her pile. Lazily she mentally ticked off a checkbox in her plan.
“Need it done by this week,” she called out to her roommate. “Gonna… rob…”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it,” Celeste assured her as she closed the door, letting the darkness consume the room.
Lyn wrapped herself up, curling into a ball as the legs on her back settled in snug against herself, drifting off to dreams of a job well done and her enemies, especially that hateful mirror wiggly, crushed beneath her.
---------------------------------
“Seriously, if you try to sneak out again, I will beat you with a newspaper, spider boy,” Carrie glowered at him.
Ned put his hands up in acquiescence as he hovered in the pod, somewhat shocked to see this side of the healer hero. In her defense, the last attempt to slip out had knocked over a table that was covered with some very expensive looking shiny things. Also he hurt his ribs again. AnomaloCarrie had fixed those up and had been lecturing him for the past ten minutes, laying into him quite fiercely for someone who seemed to bow to the slightest bit of pressure.
She huffed and spun around, leaving him alone in the room, staring at a TV to drive away the madness of his isolation.
The pod was made up of floating slabs of metal that curved to form a vaguely egg shape around an almost vertical bed which he couldn’t tell if he was leaning against or laying down on. Maybe it was more of a chair? It conformed to his shape and slightly lifted his legs and had arm rests on it. The gaps between the odd metal were filled by a soft glow of some healing energy that let him view the world around him in a slight bluish tinge. Despite the intent to feel relaxing and avoid the claustrophobic feeling of being stuck in a tube, the medpod always made Ned feel like he was in a cage.
They’d given him a privacy mask to cover his face, but heroes with secret identities always got put into their own room in a restricted section of the hospital, only allowed a few vetted visitors. So far, outside of the obvious ones, no one had really swung by. He did get a fruit basket delivered with an apology note from Ice Hawk, which… Ned was trying really hard not to take personally.
It’s crazy out there right now, I can’t blame him for not stopping by, and yet… Ned brushed the thought out of his head and thumbed a remote that Carrie had left in the pod with him, flicking on the TV. He flipped past the football game. He was already in the hospital, no need to feel worse by watching the Victory Hawks ruin another perfectly good 8 point lead.3 He lingered a little too long on the local news. The museum heist was already downgraded to the ticker below while the hosts were chatting about a new improvement to CreateCo’s latest building material, guaranteed to cut repair times from super fights in half!
His mind was pulled in two directions. The first wanted to be grumpy about just how quickly everyone forgot about the dangers of villains. It wasn’t just the museum attack, but the fact was that it was starting to get close to two weeks since Maniacal had been killed and the League’s silence was deafening. No angry retort by Draven, no shouts from Arex about how no one messed with the League, not even mutters from some of the villains on the street about new faces on the street that usually preempted them moving in people. And no one seemed concerned by that!
The other half of him was stuck on CreateCo, who had been revealed to be funding experiments in super strength serum awhile back. Even though it hit the same issue that most super serums ran into in terms of actually managing to work on more than a tiny fraction of the population, CreateCo hadn’t let that stop them, hoping to pump out a new wave of super powered workers. Of course the knock on effect of it hitting the street would mean a large amount of bruisers who were fixated on the superpowered world and wanted to wear a cape or get hired on as muscle. It was exactly the kind of escalation that Ned feared, and now they were up on TV bragging about fixing the messes that superpowered fights left. It felt… gross.
Ned flipped the channel, searching for a distraction. Wrestling, soap operas, trash TV, and some poorly made documentary on Junea’s fourth era dynasty all flitted by. He was about to settle for watching some cartoons when there was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” he called out as he shut down the television.
In walked Reflecta, her reflective mask held under an arm while the other one had a bag of snacks clearly picked up from a nearby convenience store. He spotted chips, candy, and what looked like something fried, processed to hell and back, fried again, and then packed into powdery orbs. He swallowed his drool and looked up at her, pleadingly.
She rolled her prismatic eyes and dropped them on the table nearest the door, away from his grasping hands.
“These are for later,” she quickly informed him. “You can thank Wavelength for half of it. Commander Cosmic wanted to only get you a couple protein bars but she knew about your addiction to junk food and insisted.”
Ned chuckled, and winced as that caused the bruising to act up, “And here I thought she hated me.”
Reflecta flipped her hair away from her face to shoot him a look, causing the pearlescent bob to shimmer through a rainbow of colors in the bright light. Ned had sometimes wondered why she wore a costume that seemed so dedicated to concealing her identity when it was pretty obvious out of costume that she had superpowers. Granted, that assumed she was human and not Junean. Most tended to look a little more “jelly” in their humanoid form, but there were members of the species like June Moon who had remarkably human looking forms.4
“Wavelength doesn’t hate you,” she told him. “She’s infuriated by you for a number of reasons.”
She turned and grabbed something off the wall and read aloud, “‘Ned Nubidi?’ Really? That’s not on the nose enough?”
“Hey!” he protested. “Those are private!”
She rolled her eyes again and replaced the chart before strolling over to a chair beside him, grabbing his fruit basket along the way. She collapsed into the seat, depositing her mask on the floor next to her, and made a motion with her hand, causing shards of glass to break away from the right arm of her costume. Selecting an orange from the basket, she held it up in the middle of a rotating circle of mirrored shards as they floated in the air. Her free hand pointed to the fragments and a beam of light shot from her fingertip. In less than a second, the orange was eviscerated into slices by the small laser and she passed a handful to Ned through the gaps in the pod, taking a few for herself.
He quickly snapped them up and devoured them greedily. There was a slightly “cooked” taste to them, but they were absolutely divine compared to the lunch he’d been forced to stomach earlier.
“You’re sitting down here in the middle of a secret wing of a hospital, using a fake name, and wearing a mask just in case anyone comes in, and you wonder why a telepath might not like you…” she muttered.
“I don’t really wonder about that at all,” he happily informed her.
Reflecta sighed, “I think the true wonder is why she has a crush on you.”
It was a good thing Reflecta hadn’t handed him any more fruit slices or he might’ve choked on that revelation. He shot a bewildered look down towards the mirror heroine who nodded that he’d heard her correctly.
“Really?! Huh, why does that keep happening?” he wondered.
“Your costume accents your butt too much,” Reflecta shrugged and cut apart an apple this time.
“Oh, I know that ArachNed is for the people,” he wiggled his eyebrows, only to remember that the hospital supplied mask didn’t have his built in tech so it just kind of rose up and down for a second. “I was talking more about being a tsundere magnet.”
“I don’t know what that is,” she said unconvincingly
Ned fixed her with a stare, “I have seen your moves. You can’t tell me that you’re doing those charge up beam attacks or teleporting behind people with your mirrors like you do and that you don’t watch anime.”
Reflecta huffed, “Okay fine, I know what a tsundere is. But you’re the one in trouble when she reads my mind and you put that in my head.”
Ned let out another pain tinged chuckle. The two of them sat in a silence that began out comfortably for a bit after that.
“So, did you just come to visit or is this about to be a lecture?” he asked.
“No lecture,” she told him. “Sun Light wanted to check in on Blazeshot and I offered to tag along to let Commander Cosmic and her get some time apart. I’ll let Azure be the one to give the speech on how this all could’ve been avoided if we all work together later.”
Ned rolled his eyes, “But you do agree with him on that.”
“Yes.”
Honestly, the way things were going, if Azure could convince enough of the other teams around Victory to formally join together, there was a good chance Reflecta was probably going to become the de facto second-in-command of the whole union, despite not being on Azure’s team and not even being the team leader of the Starlight Squad. It was the fact that she put so much work into trying to get everyone to get along that made her the perfect fit for that role, and it was what Green Guardian and Commander Cosmic lacked. And she wasn’t doing this just to get that position, she seemed to sincerely want the reform that would make Amberheart into a real organization, not just a place that the city tossed a few funds at to let the various organizations it housed prop up the teams that called it home.
“Do you want to know why I’m so against this whole thing?” Ned decided to ask, deciding to cut right to the heart of all this.
Reflecta didn’t answer. Not out loud. She just looked up at him, concern and curiosity written plainly on her face.
“Orion’s system works,” he admitted. “But it works for Orion. They have the resources there to process the villains they capture. Not just to imprison them, but to actually help the ones that are misguided or the ones that need a better outlet.”
Reflecta protested, “We can do that too!”
“But no one’s talking about trying to get that set up, it’s all about the teams and coordinating fights,” Ned pointed out. “There’s more to being a hero than just fighting villains and tossing them back out there to fight them again, or worse. I agree that we need to work together better. However, all I hear about is how we need to get together to be better about beating people up.”
“I-”
“You’re fine,” Ned reassured her. “In fact, if it were you leading all of this, I’d come to you and list off all the things that I think we should be focusing on for me to vote on this, but it’s Azure. This entire thing, and the way he’s pushing for it feels like he’ll stop at nothing for this reform and all he’s talked about is making sure that we’re all ready for the next fight. Not coordinating during the next disaster or helping out people, it’s about the next fight. Letting villains go because they’re good punching bags or not enough of a threat, not because they can change.”
Reflecta sighed, clearly trying to work through her response to that.
Ned continued while she figured out her words, “Having us all get together just so we can be tough enough, powerful enough to feel safe and to hurt anyone who would hurt us? That just feels like a gang, not a group of heroes. It feels like it brings together people who want to wear masks to hurt certain people that we’re allowed to not feel guilty for beating up, not to help those out there who need it. And at the heart of all of this is Azure, who has this… drive to him that feels like he’s chasing a shadow. I don’t think Azure is a bad person, I just feel like he’s so fixated on this goal in this way that he’s building something that could hurt people and he just can’t see it. Or worse, that he wants to hurt someone but hopes that something good can come out of it too.”
Reflecta mouthed a few words before chuckling. Ned arched an eyebrow.
“Sorry, it’s just, both of you actually care. And not just that, it’s like… you two should actually hate each other but you just don’t,” she smiled and retrieved her mask. “I feel like I see why Azure cuts you so much slack.”
“It’s my butt,” Ned asserted.
She rolled her eyes, “Anyways, I’m going to go make sure Blazeshot hasn’t taught my girl anything else that the Starlight Squad is going to have to apologize to the mayor over. Rest up, Ned.”
He smiled as she left, only realizing as the door closed that she didn’t call him “Rac”. It was a small win.
1. Saga is the most popular search engine in the Amera Union, leading to the colloquialism. Zoot and Baboo tend to be more popular oversees.
2. A reference to a very popular Dravah character, Underrealm Princess Silvara Silversilk, who is often the character most people are familiar with when it comes to Dravah in Swordworld.
3. A frustratingly common occurrence this season. There have been several online discussions on whether or not the team is being sabotaged by villains. This rumor has been investigated by several hero groups.
4. Juneans apparently worked to perfect bipedal forms for centuries, having learned of life on our planet before humans or Atlantheans were aware of their existence. This led to a subrace of Juneans which could imitate human and more human-like Atlanthean forms. One of the first Juneans to make the trip across space took the name June Moon and became a hero as part of the earliest iteration of the Protectors of the Globe. Currently, she’s back on Junea, attempting to help raise the next generation of hero candidates that wish to cross the void.
