Excerpt from Jane’s Secret Radio Broadcast 11/05/0089:

  “Thank you for finding time for us Ms. Quick.”

  “Welcome. What’s up?”

  “You seem antsy.”

  “No, it’s fine. Interview. Right. I think this stuff is important. I just like to get to the point. What do you want to know?”

  “Well, as the world’s only out Superhero, you have a lot of weight on your shoulders. And you have this new Archsupervillian in Whitehot.”

  “I mean, she’s tough, yeah, but I’m not sure about Archsupervillian.”

  “Well, you’ve fought her three times to no avail. That has to mean something. What makes her so difficult to put down?”

  “‘Archsupervillain’ means it takes two superheroes to bring her down. If Captain Iron or Gem Girl were still around, they’d be able to handle her, no problem. I just have the unfortunate limitation of staying grounded. I can jump high, but I can’t use my super speed unless I have something to push off of. I’m stuck on the ground. Her energy projection is, well, it’s strong, but she can’t really hit me if I’m on the ground. I’ve been using the proprietary Quick Team pistols, but she seems like she can tank them.”

  “So, it’s a compatibility issue?”

  “Yeah, mostly. And I still have my day job of helping those that need it. Can’t spend my whole day just trying to stop her. Wouldn’t be fair to a family stuck on their roof during a flood, or an injured mother who needs to be taken to the hospital. People deserve to have a hero that takes their hand, who helps them with real stuff.”

  “Some would say stopping a madwoman from burning their apartments down, is ‘real stuff.’”

  “Ugh. Not you too. I’m doing my best, okay?”

  “I believe you. And we thank you for it. Let’s pivot.”

  ”No, let’s not. As you said, I’m the only ‘out’ Superhero right now. The Quick Corporation isn't perfect, but it has a mission to protect people on top of supervillain fighting. And our operating budget is directly tied to grants from city governments. I’m just one person. I can’t do it all by myself. Where’s Gem Girl? Where’s Bronze Boy? Why am I the only one out here?”

  “Well we can’t answer that, we can only speculate.”

  “I’d love to hear it. People don’t tell me nothing, and I hardly read the news.”

  “Well, we can’t know for sure, but Gem Girl, now going by the name Gem Blade, has been around since the 70s. She’s an interstellar hero, and most believe that she has to fly off to fight interstellar threats.

  “I forgot about that. She must be old.”

  “Relativistic flight likely keeps her young. And Bronze Boy, for some reason, seems to only operate in the midwest, north of the Indian Territories. Could be they just can’t reach the East Coast?”

  “I can run from the East Coast to Garden City in less than 30 minutes. Shorter, if I don’t care about property damage. If an interstellar hero wanted to help us, she’d be here. And I know Bronze Boy can fly. So where are they?”

  “Good question, Ms. Quick. Good Question. Oh, and lastly, Whitehot says that she doesn’t have nefarious intentions, and that she is willing to put your fight to bed if you talked to her. What do you say to that?”

  “I’d say that it's not a serious offer.”

  “How so? If there is even remotely a chance that her Supervillain status was misapplied, that you could limit future suffering, why not take it?”

  “She killed other heroes for her vanity, and hurt someone I care about deeply. Talking isn’t how this ends.”

  “Well said. Thank you for your time.”

  Red Fox Action Log 44:

  Healing is not a quick and easy process. Especially wounds of the heart. I’d come to Kit City to join what I thought was a fraternity of like minded heroes, to become stronger together. What had happened instead, was betrayal, heartbreak, death, and an injury so severe I didn’t think I could heal from it.

  But then I did begin to heal.

  Sniffer Sleuth and Gunny returned.

  Gunnar walked up to me, made as if to punch me, then broke down crying. I learned later that Parvati hadn’t made it. Neither had Brain. While I was asleep, White Rabbit, and her newfound powers, visited the comic shop. She set fire to the top and bottom, while shadowbats assaulted it from the windows.

  Parvati loaded a shotgun with less than lethal rounds and stayed behind, shooting any bat that got close. Sleuth threw Gunn out a window. Luckily, they were able to make it out with minimal injuries. Through a neighbor at the government, Sleuth got Betamind into protective custody.

  “You said we’d make it out of this,” Gunn accused.

  “I said I’d try.”

  “Yeah, well, you should have tried harder.”

  “I lost an arm, Gunny.”

  “She called me that,” he said. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Okay, Gunnar.”

  “I’m still staying.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It’s not for you. We have to stop her.”

  He left me with my thoughts.

  I got a text from Carla Quick, the real one it seemed — Jill was in recovery. She would probably be okay.

  I still felt the arm sometimes, the whole thing. I didn’t even have much of a shoulder on my left side. It would have been easier had I lost my arm at the elbow. Hook prosthetics are still a pretty good option. Losing an arm at the shoulder meant that prosthetics would be more complex, if I hoped to regain functionality on that side.

  My right arm ached with needing to pick up the slack. I also was sleeping poorly at night. They’d given me a room to sleep in, but I didn’t hardly use it. I worked myself to exhaustion, then I fell asleep on the couch, waking in the morning to go at it again.

  I tried to put together a plan from Nora’s notebook, and the hard drives Gunnar had brought back from the comic shop but it was slow going. It gave me something to do, though.

  “You can’t stay here anymore,” Nora told Sleuth from the other room. “I can’t have my mom’s house be your new base. It’s too dangerous. She didn’t sign up for this.”

  “I know,” he said, frustration shredding his voice. “But I don’t know where else to go.”

  “I have an idea,” I said, walking in.

  “Hey,” Nora said, eyes full of some emotion I couldn’t place.

  “Glad you’re walking around,” Sleuth said.

  “Nora, thank you for putting us up,” I said.

  “You’re welcome. I wish I could do more, but I can’t expose my family to the kind of heat you guys bring. They’re calling her Whitehot by the way. She was an annoying bitch, but she’s,” words failed her for a second. “She’s a monster now. She’s hitting labs, and banks, and anything she can get her hands on. So many people hurt.”

  “She’s still White Rabbit to me,” I said. She didn’t get to use a cool new name. “And I haven’t figured out her plan yet. But I know what we gotta do. I think I can get us a van.”

  “And do what with it?” Sleuth asked.

  I grabbed a dry erase pen, and moved to the kitchen, pointing to the dry erase shopping list on the fridge. Nora nodded, and I started writing.

  “Bunny’s a Supervillain now, the worst we’ve seen in modern memory. And not only did she do her own mini ‘culling of heroes’ she’s planning for something big. She’s got an army of mooks on her side,” my dry erase marker squeaked as I wrote. “And nearly infinite shadowbats.”

  “Yeah, I follow,” Sleuth said.

  “So. She’s got her Syndicate of Supervillains: Atlas, and —”

  “Atlas is back?” Nora asked.

  “Yeah, he’s a chump,” I said. “But there’s him, a woman I assume is still alive, Amulet, and the one that started all this, Lady Lovely.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “If only we had some way to stop her,” Sleuth said. “Her ability to recruit help is a key way she’s been accruing resources.”

  “I think I know how to get around that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Pretty sure they’re spores,” I said.

  “Huh. Okay.”

  “She has all of this help. But that’s okay, because we have the one thing she isn’t expecting us to have.”

  “What’s that?” Sleuth asked.

  “A plan.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “New Linden,” I said, writing it on the board, “has John Sulivan. He destroyed an entire parking lot full of cars in a superpowered rage. It took a .50 caliber bullet to the back of the neck to knock him out.”

  Nora smiled, knowing what was next, appreciative of her own hard work. Sniffer Sleuth leaned forward on the kitchen island, stroking his stubbled chin.

  “Next,” I said, “Garden City Museum. There is the Bronze Boy armor on display for the first time in five years. If Bronze Boy IV is actually active like they say, he’s likely keeping a close eye on it.”

  “I think I see where you’re going,” Sleuth said.

  “Gem Blade,” I said, barreling through, “is the new code name of Gem Girl. She was last seen in Japan, over the South China sea, and in Indonesia. If we go to Tokyo, maybe we can ask around if anyone has seen her.

  And lastly,” I said, trying not to run out of breath. “There is Carla Quick in Barcelona, me, who can turn invisible now, and you, who, well, you’re a tough bastard to make it this far.”

  “You want to reform the Kit City Care Team?” Sniffer Sleuth asked.

  “Sorta. But it’ll be stronger than ever. And well…”

  “What?” Nora asked.

  “I think we’ll need a new name,” I said.

  I wrote on the last free space of the dry erase board, and circled it: The Bay Area Superhero Alliance — BASA.

  Red Fox Action Log 45:

  It is a particular pleasure to see someone at their utmost ease, at their most comfortable in their own home. It doesn’t have to be someone you’re attracted to — though I do admit to finding Nora quite attractive — but it could be any treasured person. Seeing her in her hooded sweatshirt, hair down and curly, dabbing at a coffee stain on her pants… it warmed the heart.

  The sun had finally heated the backyard enough to be tolerable, and she’d made our second coffee pot of the day. She wasn’t reluctant to do things like that, but seemed embarrassed by it. We thanked her for it; didn’t make too big a deal about it.

  She’d just painted her toenails, and had the little spacers in them. Her feet seemed so small, dainty, compared to the rest of her.

  Right. Action report.

  Not a lot of action yet. Today, we had to make our decision as to who we should recruit next.

  “Gem girl for sure,” Gunnar said, bouncing his leg with impatience, warming his hands with his mug. “She’s the most powerful hero on the list for sure. Maybe the strongest ever. Next to the Captain of course.”

  “Sure,” Sleuth admitted, sitting in a wooden bench swing with his hands leisurely behind his head. “But we’ve precious few leads, and the travel time to Japan is not insignificant. I also don’t like the idea of being in an airplane with, well, with our enemy being so adept in the sky.”

  “It also isn’t my order,” Nora said.

  “Right,” I added. “Nora’s order is how we’ll be safe.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Gunnar said. “You’ve never been wrong before. But this seems so…” he searched for a word other than the one he seemed reluctant to say.

  “Mystical?” Sleuth offered.

  “My powers aren’t any different than yours,” she said. “They’re real. They just don’t look as cool.”

  Gunnar grumbled. Sleuth shrugged.

  I was really the only one with a cool power. Invisibility was incredibly strong, but I struggled to get it to work in a way that was as beneficial as I knew it could be.

  It had somehow gotten mixed up in the Fox Instinct. So, when I was in danger, I could activate it, and run away. If I wanted to attack, I stopped being in alignment with the Fox, and so stopped being invisible.

  I could reposition and surprise with it, but I couldn’t fight while invisible.

  Still valuable. But I'd taken my fair share of foam darts to the face when trying it on Gunnar. With Sleuth, it was functionally useless. Even with unscented soaps, I always smelled like something.

  “I believe in you,” I said, setting my coffee down, so I could gesture with my remaining hand. “But I haven’t been able to really be sure who is who. I don’t know my tarot stuff. Like, which one is The Fool?”

  Nora gave a sullen smile.

  “You’re the Fool.”

  “That tracks,” I said.

  Gunnar laughed.

  “No, really,” she said. “We are all the Fool at some point in our lives. The Fool is the protagonist. They’re the one that goes on the journey.”

  “Why wouldn’t Sniffer Sleuth be the Fool?” I asked. “They’re the one that started all this. They are the one who brought us all together.”

  “My journey is over,” he said, eyes hard, “I had my shot. I missed. Kit City paid for it.”

  “Hey,” Gunnar spoke up. “We’re still here. We can still do this. We have to.”

  “Right. I’ll support you,” he said. “But I’m not the protagonist.”

  “It’s me, huh?” I asked.

  “It’s you,” Nora said. “And we have our Temperant,” she continued, pointing to Sleuth. “We’re on our way.”

  “What’s the order again?” I asked, fishing my dry-erase marker out of my pocket, and erasing the previous scribblings on the dry-erase easel we’d dragged out here.

  Gunnar opened Nora’s notebook, and read from it. I jotted them down.

  “The Fool.

  The Temperant.

  The Juggler.

  The Devil.

  The Strong.

  The Just.

  The World.”

  I thought for a second.

  “Why don’t you have names here already?” I asked.

  “I have ideas — you’ve seen them in the book. But I wanted to run them by someone first. I only got the first two figured out.”

  “Me and Sleuth.”

  “The Devil is also clear,” she said.

  “John Sullivan," I said, writing it on the board.

  “Why John Sulivan?” Sleuth asked.

  “He’d already said he was possessed by the Devil,” I stated matter of factly.

  “He’s bound by the fear of his own power,” Nora said. “He sees it as a fatal temptation. The Devil is all about managing your own desires and impulses. It’s clearly John Sullivan."

  “Right,” Sleuth said. “The tarot is all archetypes. I was never very into my English studies. Biology was my interest.”

  “Who is the Juggler?” Gunnar asked.

  “That’s the most important one, sure,” I said. “But let’s see if we can’t figure out the rest.”

  “Captain Iron is the World,” Sleuth said.

  “I thought you didn’t like this stuff?” Nora prodded.

  “That’s the end of our journey. Who else could it be, but Captain Iron?”

  “If he was out there,” Gunnar said. “Why wouldn’t he have returned already? No. He has to be depowered, or dead, or something.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Nora said.

  I shrugged and wrote his name down at the end of the list. Here is what we had so far:

  The Fool — Red Fox

  The Temperant — Sniffer Sleuth

  The Juggler

  The Devil — John Sulivan

  The Strong

  The Just

  The World — Captain Iron

  “The Strong and The Just,” I said. “You just said the strongest option here is Gem Girl. Or Gem Blade. What do y'all think?”

  Gunnar and Sleuth shrugged.

  Gem Girl had been a particular childhood favorite of mine. I’d always thought Captain Iron was a little overrated. A magical girl that survived the destruction of her cohorts, and came back to become the most powerful Superhero ever?

  It was a cool story. What could be cooler? Though with what had just happened to me, I realized the story probably was less cool for her.

  She could project constructs from the sapphire in her chest. She could fly. As long as the gem was projecting a field around her, she was pretty much indestructible. Her fight with Shadegem was legendary. He threw a building at her, and she cut in it half with giant blue scissors!

  I wrote her down for Strong.

  “Strength isn’t literal,” Nora said, putting a picture frame facedown on the table, then spreading out the Tarot Cards next to it. They were the ones we needed. “It’s about force of will and action.”

  My eyes skimmed over the ones we’d already assigned to the three left. The Magician, I guessed as a stand-in for the Juggler, wore a red and white robe, and stood in front of a table with a sword, a cup, a pentagram, and some kind of staff. Magician. Interesting. Why had she called it the Juggler?

  Nora began placing them on the whiteboard next to the names, and pinning them with a magnet.

  Last to go up were Strength, and Justice. Strength was of a woman forcing the jaws of a lion closed, and Justice was a crowned woman in blue robes with a sword in hand.

  “Force of action?” I asked. “So someone that doesn’t think, but just goes out there and does it, yeah?”

  “Carla Quick,” Sleuth said. “She’s constantly acting.”

  I put the tarot card on the board.

  “I mean, this is a little silly,” I said, “but that just leaves The Juggler and the Just. And the Justice card has a woman in blue with a sword. What if Justice is Gem Blade?”

  “Justice is about discernment, rightness, and the correct action. Gem Girl was known for her kindness and her willingness to go to great lengths to do the right thing.”

  “And Carla Quick just does the right thing, now,” Sleuth said.

  “I’m not sure that’s fair,” I said.

  “She waited until Kit City was in danger to help. She didn’t seek the right path,” Sleuth countered, “she just arrived to clean it up. Justice is taking care of the community.”

  “What if she sees the world as her community?” I prodded.

  “I’d rather be the perfect hero for a small community, than a poor one for everyone.”

  “And yet,” I said, “here you are helping us save the world.”

  Sleuth shrugged sheepishly.

  “Do we really know the world is in danger?” Gunnar asked. “I mean I want to stop her as much as the next guy, but we don’t really know her plan do we?”

  Nora nodded her head.

  “Nora thinks the world is in danger. And we know Bunny has big plans. And anyone willing to kill their fellow heroes to get it done, is clearly gunning for Supervillian.”

  “Right,” Gunnar admitted.

  I put Strength next to its spot on the board, and wrote down the name Carla Quick. Next I put Justice next to its spot, and wrote down Gem Girl.

  “That just leaves Juggler, or the Magician. Has to be Bronze Boy, right?” I posed to the group. They all nodded.

  This was our final list.

  The Fool — Red Fox

  The Temperant — Sniffer Sleuth

  The Juggler — Bronze Boy

  The Devil — John Sulivan

  The Strong — Carla Quick

  The Just — Gem Blade

  The World — Captain Iron

  “I’m still not so sure about Captain Iron,” Gunnar said.

  “Let me help with that,” Nora said, flipping her picture frame over, and revealing the photo within. It was Nora as a teenager, eyes tearstained, mascara smeared, next to a distinguished Black man with salt and pepper hair. He wasn’t wearing the cape, but it was unmistakable who he was.

  Nora had a photo with Captain Iron.