Bowsette's Short Stories and Scribblings

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

I've been writing for a while, but the military sucked the energy out of me and killed my drive to write for many months. During the previous semester of college, I enrolled in a fiction writing class. While I didn't learn much (because of my huge ego), I did put together some short stories and prompt responses that I feel a little proud of. I'll post them here in case anyone is interested.

Feedback is appreciated.



This is an extended prompt I wrote during a class when we were asked to put together a scene of any sort. It doesn't have a title, but I've taken to calling it Flight Alpha 38.

Engineering officer Tess Megarith took a deep breath—the first she’d taken in eighty-seven years, four days, and six hours. Her first thoughts were fuzzy; a kind of euphoric massage in the back of her mind. She didn’t notice the microneedles punching her in the shoulders, injecting the chemicals that would bring her heart rate into a stable pattern without sending her into cardiac arrest. She was just conscious enough that she knew she was awake, but not enough to do anything rash.

Her pod—some part of her knew it was a pod—shifted into an upright position, but slowly so as not to jostle her or generate any unnecessary stress.

Please remain still.​

The voice was soft and feminine. No doubt engineered to trigger just the right emotional synapses to ensure a relaxed response.

It worked. Tess remained still.

You have been asleep for eighty-seven years, four days, and six hours. Let me help you.​

Just then, the cocktail of chemicals being fed directly into Tess’s bloodstream reached her heart. Her eyes shot open, and she became dimly aware of her surroundings. Her left arm reached out for something to grab, finding the cold metal cusp of her pod. The residual frost left by the cryofreezing process retreated from her fingers. Her vision remained fuzzy from years spent in a near-death state, her body sluggish and slow to respond.

We are fifteen years, seventeen days, and three hours from our estimated interception with Erebus III. You are scheduled to perform routine maintenance on critical ship systems. Do you understand?​

“Yes,” Tess said.

Okay. Let me help you.​

The last layer of cryogenic permafrost slipped away, leaving Tess marginally warmer. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the computerized female voice designed for maximum comfort and efficiency was somehow watching her. In the formfitting grey bodysuit she’d worn into cryostasis, she felt naked. Warm and regulated, but nude. Even light-years away from Earth and its boundless problems, she still felt the eyes of strangers.

And then her pod opened.

The air around her hissed as the rubberized seal broke. Her view of the world, previously limited to a fogged up porthole built from glass just thick enough to protect the occupant in the event of power loss and depressurization, expanded. With the auto-mechanical groan of a sleeping machine, the top of her pod lifted and retreated overhead, and the innards of the Sagittarius opened up before her. It was not the ship she remembered, the one filled with scientists in grey lab-coats mumbling vague reassurances about the safety of cryogenic freezing, that they’d tested it numerous times and that the failure rate was minimal. So minimal, in fact, that they didn’t feel like disclosing it.

In the old world, there were banners and well-wishers. Family members crowding around to reassure family members that they wouldn’t be forgotten, that they would continue on into a glorious future far beyond the stars. In this quiet new one. In this new world, there was a cold room of steel iron composite. Tess lurched from her pod with the ungainly steps of a toddler stumbling into a walk by accident. She took three steps, tripped, and threw up.

These symptoms should pass shortly. Please let me know if you feel any further discomfort beyond twenty-four hours.​

Tess wiped the vomit from her mouth.

“Noted,” she said between coughs. Then she looked up and felt like throwing up all over again.

Hundreds of other pods; hundreds of crewmembers all part of the same one-way journey. She couldn’t see their faces, but she could feel them. She’d trained with most of them.

“I’m the only one awake?” she said.

Yes. We are still fifteen years, seventeen days, and three hours from our estimated interception with Erebus III. In order to preserve supplies and accommodate for eventual settlement strategies, crewmembers are to be removed from cryostasis only to conduct essential duties.​

She looked at her vomit. “Is—can I clean this up?”

It felt a stupid question.

This area will be sanitized. Do not worry, Lieutenant Megarith. I am here to accommodate all your physical and nutritional needs.​

Finally, Tess stood. She stood up in a room filled with hundreds who she could not touch or speak. In the background, the constant low-pitched hum that indicated that everything was running normally. It meant that life support was firing away in the deep in the throes of the ship. It meant the sub-light fusion engine over which she’d been minimally briefed was continuing along its pre-programmed route with a minimum of fuss.

Tess balled her hands into fists and tried not to think about it. She shoved those anxious thoughts into the back of her mind where they could be decompressed and panicked over later.

Soft green lights flashed slowly across the floor, forming a narrow line that led through a bulkhead and further into the sleeping ship.

Please follow the illuminated path to the dining area.​

She did. Despite reassurances from Mars’ top scientists that the cryostasis process was totally safe and offered no “significant” side effects, Tess’s legs felt like jelly. She hobbled across the cold steel of the crew’s near-permanent sleeping quarters, trying her best not to look around and risk seeing someone she recognized. Despite the persistent and low hum of reactors and engines and dampeners milling about quietly in the distance, there was a distinct silence to the world. She heard each patter of her bare on the floor.

Gentle orange arrows flashed in slow, obvious patterns beneath her, no doubt designed to reduce strain on the eyes following prolonged stasis. Even still, Tess’s eyes watered from the effort. Twenty-four hours of these symptoms sounded nightmarish. The bulkhead—thick and monstrous, designed to act as an airlock in the event of catastrophic decompression of this or other sections of the ship—hissed as rubber seals peeled apart to allow access. Somehow, it was comforting and disquieting for the passageway to lead to something as normal as a hallway.

And a window.

Tess’s eyes widened, and for just a moment her legs worked just as well as they needed to. She straightened up, all the pain and soreness and side-effects suddenly a million miles away. They were the problems of someone with their feet planted squarely in soil, with an atmosphere that existed independents of oxygenators and CO2 scrubbers.

Behind more than a meter of a transparent glass-titanium alloy was space.

Stars.

The void so close that Tess could reach out and touch it—reach out and lay her hand against the glass. Despite all the training and the simulations, it was another thing to feel it. Despite the millions of pinpricks of light reaching out to her, it was another thing to know that each of those lights were probably dead and gone.

Tess stood there more than a minute before the ship’s computer said anything.

Are you alright, Lieutenant Megarith?​

“I’m…” was all she managed at first. Some part of her—a part of her not at all small—wanted to curl up and look away. Although the glass was warm to the touch, she felt cold. “I’ll be okay,” she said. She had to be.

 

[GrooseIsLoose]

I'm new to scifi genre. But I was able to picture the story in my mind. Good job, I liked it!

 

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

This is a response to a simple POV exercise. We were asked to write the same scene from first, second, and third person perspectives. I've always been fascinated with trying to bring superheroes to the written word, so I brought in one of my costumed heroes.

Astro Girl, the strongest woman on Earth, darling of liberal news outlets, and Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, hovered three hundred feet above El Paso, Texas, wondering just how many laws she was about to break. The trial, if they could somehow detain her, would no doubt be a largely political affair fought on the time-tested battlegrounds of Twitter and Facebook, waged by politicians, celebrities, and media influencers, all while the real trial puttered about in some musty courtroom filled with power inhibitors smelling distinctly of copper.

But she was decided. The cages—the ones that others had generously coined holding centers—occupied a small area near the Mexican/American border. From above, they looked like something out of the second World War, the sort of place that a backwards government sent Japanese-Americans under the pretense of safety and winning a war, all while surrounded by guards of a distinctly Caucasian flavor.

The place smelled wrong. It felt wrong. Had she not seen it with her own eyes, Astro Girl would have assumed the razor wire some exaggeration. She wouldn’t have believed that ten families would be made to sleep in rooms designed for two. Even from so many feet in the air, she could smell the urine and the unwashed, and she felt reviled in such a way that even supervillains might raise their noses at.

So, she went into a nosedive.

For all of three seconds, Astro Girl was a blaze of blue and gold, her cape whipping in behind her as air rushed to fill the void she’d occupied until only a second ago. In the moment before touchdown, she saw men armed with rifles and sunglasses point and shout. Whatever they were saying, whatever their excuses were, they were complicit.

Astro Girl slammed into the ground with a kra-kaoom, smashing into an already decaying layer of concrete. Dust rose up to meet her, briefly obscuring her form from prison—yes, for it was a prison—security. Rifles rose to meet her.

One guard, perhaps acting out of some conditioned reflex, tried to punch her. For the sake of his hand, Astro Girl rolled her neck with the punch. She didn’t need to cause more damage than necessary—at least, not yet.

“Stop!”

“Parada! Parada!”

 

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

The following is a little bit of light science fiction I wrote to flex my superhero itch. There are some areas i would improve, but I think it turned out pretty well. While it doesn't have a real title, I've been referring to it as Test Pilot.

Moira Erikson fired a sizzling bolt of red plasma, blasting a football-sized hole into the plaster ceiling of Olyo City’s most populous bank. Her heart was beating out of her chest and her miniaturized plasma canon was just a little too hot on her wrist, venting a single depleted colion cannister after completing its cooling cycle. It was an acceptable test run. She wasn’t dead and the public was intimidated.

“Everyone on the ground!” she said in the loudest voice she could manage without shouting. Shouting was for cowards in plate-carriers and hockey masks. It indicated weakness. Moira adjusted her aim, pointing her arm in a semi-circle around the bank lobby. Her mechanized armor whirred and hissed, imperfections yet to be worked out of the final product. It augmented her frame, adding four inches to her height and several thousand pounds to her bench-press. Of the three different levels of protection she sported on any given day, it was the one that most indicated that others shouldn’t **** with her.

AmeriCorp Bank was not one of Olyo City’s wealthiest banks, but that didn’t matter.

It was the sort of seven-to-seven bank that catered to graveyard shift employees, tired mothers, and costumed vigilantes. It was covered in logos and marketing, and buried beneath each of those were dozens of cameras. From the front desk to the vault, it was impossible to do anything without being recorded in fuzzy low-resolution video from at least five different angles. It was the sort of bank with voice encoded silent alarms that didn’t need a teller to creep beneath their desk like the subject of a mediocre crime drama.

It was public and it was crowded.

Fourteen different people saw her walk in the front door. Two of them were dressed like rent-a-cops, complete with security badges indicating such. Both went for their sidearms. One of them shouted, “Freeze! Stop right there!”

Moira froze.

She ticked her left thumb. Her plasma canon quickly slotted an electrified slug into its secondary barrel. It was nonlethal in most cases, but felt like taking a baseball to the sternum and a million volts to the nervous system.

“Look,” Moira said. “Everyone here is insured by the bank and won’t lose a thing. If you just lay down and shut up, I can finish this quickly.”

They repeated their ultimatum.

“Fine. I warned you.”

She shot the first one in the stomach; electrified plasma with enough juice to put down an elephant. It would hurt—a lot—but it was nonlethal 97.3% of the time. His face contorted in pain and his handgun fell to the floor with impactful thud. Both his arms and legs locked out, spasming as he collapsed unconscious to the floor.

The second almost-police officer had the good reflexes to pull his trigger twice.

The most external of Moira’s defense systems flared up, its reaction keyed to nanoseconds. A visible blue aura flickered into existence around her exoskeleton, absorbing the kinetic energy of both bullets. Despite numerous field tests, Moira’s heart still skipped a beat. She hoped no one saw her gasp as both rounds rattled to the ground.

She chuckled under her breath—a chuckle that she hoped didn’t sound as unsure as she worried it did, and said, “Good try.”

A twitch of her index finger. High impact rounds.

Rent-a-cop didn’t react in time. Moira watched his eyes go wide in the microcosm of a moment between the concussive plasma met his sternum, searing the outermost fibers of his uniform and sending him flying with excessive force towards the front desk. His spine met the hard wood material with a crack, before the remaining inertia sent him careening into a wall.

He wasn’t dead.

Well, he probably wasn’t dead.

Moira’s domino mask itched. Sweat pooled around the edges where she’s used costume glue to adhere it to her face. Why couldn’t she have worn something more intimidating, something high class? She resisted the urge to run her finger along the outside to scratch it as best she could. She had to look good for the cameras.

She looked to the teller closest to her.

The teller in question, a young blonde woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty, probably holding down the job while she worked her way through something more important, whimpered. To her credit, her reaction was immediate. The moment a supervillain made eye contact, she threw her hands up in the universal gesture for please-don’t-shoot-I-won’t-tell-anyone-I-swear-oh-god-oh-god. She closed her eyes, shook her head, and started whispering, “I don’t even care about this place I just work here please don’t kill me.” The last two-thirds or so of her mumbling sort of blurred together, and she was crying.

Moira approached. Her exoskeleton whirred and hissed with each step, and suddenly it didn’t feel like a technical flaw to be ironed out, but intimidation; a notice that everyone else should be on notice.

“What’s your name?” Moira said.

The teller looked surprised not to be shot. “I’m… Catherine.”

“Cath—”

“But with a ‘K’!”

Moira blinked.

“I just… please don’t kill me. They don’t even pay me that much. I just work here. I just—”

Moira ignored the plea and gestured vaguely to the almost-officer who had suffered a concussive blow to both his dignity and his spine. “Fine, Catherine with a ‘K’. Is that man still breathing?”

Catherine with a ‘K’ didn’t seem quite sure how to respond. Her mouth opened and closed several times in slow succession and her surrendering hands seemed on the verge of dropping out of sheer panic. “I don’t... I don’t know.”

“I’m asking you to check on him.”

Katherine seemed trapped between her fear of death and her fear of inaction, ultimately deciding inaction was something she couldn’t afford and that death was still terrifying. She stepped backwards without lowering her hands, stumbling over her too-high heels in the process. Her intention was fine, but she was too slow. She wasn’t taking the situation seriously.

Moira raised her gauntlet. Her index finger twitched, and a precision round slotted into place with a barely audible click.

It wasn’t personal, what happened next. She didn’t have anything against the sheep going about their days, ignorant of the things that could change their lives. When Moira whirled around, the tails of her coat trailing behind her in suitably dramatic fashion, she killed a man.

He was on his knees, trying to reach for the cellphone protruding from his coat pocket when a bolt of plasma tore through his chest, leaving a burning hole where his ribcage should be. Burned lashes of flash crumbled away from the wound. The plasma was superheated and self-cauterizing; a clean way to deal with such an unclean task. He tried to breathe but couldn’t. He grabbed at his throat, then his chest, his hand recoiling from the wound out of some involuntary reflex. There was a hole in him.

A piece of him was missing.

And then he collapsed,

The girl behind the counter screamed. The other hostages didn’t seem to believe it at first. For a few moments, there was a poignant silence. Moira could hear her heart beating. She could feel her eyes dilate as dopamine coursed through her system. The traffic outside seemed like a distant memory, muffled so deeply in the background that she could hear the gentle hum of her suit’s reactor.

“One more time,” Moira said, turning back to the teller. “Tell me if he’s breathing.”

“You’re—you—”

Moira leaned forward. Her exoskeleton whirred with each degree. “I’m what?” she said.

Katherine recoiled, preemptively raising her arms to protect her head. Her face was pale, her eyes wide. She was shivering in the middle of summer.

The girl was going into shock.

In a softer voice, Moira said, “Check on him or I’ll kill you.”

Suddenly motivated, Katherine fell into a kneeling position next to the unconscious almost-officer and lowered a tentative hand to his mouth. The rise and fall of his chest were too faint to make out from beneath the layers of his uniform, but katherine started nodding and said, “Y-Yeah. He’s breathing, I think.”

“Good.” Moira brought her leg back and kicked straight through what must have been a thousand-dollar desk filled with the sort of currency, computers, and calculation software that swindled the people out of their money a penny at a time. It shattered, sharp wooden fragments flying in a dozen different directions, while the force of the blow sent the larger pieces careening backwards. If not for all the people so politely laying on the ground with their hands on their heads, someone else might have been hurt.

Moira nodded at the teller. “His health insurance should cover it.”

Police sirens wailed near the entrance, echoing in the streets till they felt like a physical force, but they didn’t matter. She knew where the vault was. It wasn’t a particularly large bank. Just a popular one. A popular bank in the middle of a crowded city during a workday. No doors forged from depleted uranium, or complex mechanisms housing vast riches. Nothing but a glass door and a digital password. Beyond, the meager valuables of a middle-class society languishing in safety deposit boxes.

The teller—Catherine with a ‘K’—she knew what came next. Maybe she’d stayed home one too many times and watched one to many bad heist movies. Maybe she could feel the thrill in the air or see the grin on Moira’s face as she lifted her gauntlet one last time and pointed it directly at the door. She toggled her ammunition one last time, one last burst of plasma. She didn’t need to, but she needed to.

“Bang,” she said.

The cannister cycled.

The meager glass didn’t survive; nor did the wall behind it or the wall behind that. Moira’s reactive barrier flickered back into existence to deflect any fast-moving debris. She watched bits of rubble bounce harmlessly off her chest, their inertia absorbed and redirected to the cold fusion reactor powering her equipment. The room smelled of ash and chemical burns, and when the smoke cleared, AmeriCorp was down one vault. A hole was left in its wake, sizzling and crumbling hole into the back alley where the other residents of the neighborhood left their trash. And then she grinned.

The colion cylinder ejected itself from her gauntlet with a ch-ink, reloading a second round in anticipation of another bout. Moira grinned. She was high on life and on fumes. It was just what she needed—a booster shot of adrenaline when lab work just wasn’t enough.

But she needed one more thing.

One last high.

She knew all the cameras were on. She knew that not one person in the lobby was capable of staying away from their phones if she had her back turned, and she knew that at least one of them was smart enough to dial nine-one-one and whisper all the details to the emergency operator on the other end. And she knew that at least one person with a cape was listening. They were always listening. Always wired to some sort of police scanner or private security system like an ambulance hoping for their chance at glory.

She waited.

And then a cape dropped out of the sky. Clad in some tacky blue and gold spandex that curved around her breasts just enough to sell pictures, the sort that superheroes in the 1970s wouldn’t have touched. The cape landed with all the dramatic sense of a trained thespian. The perfect three-point landing: cape fluttering in the wind, one knee on the ground, one knee bent, and a fist driven hard into the cement.

And one smoldering look upward at the source of her discomfort.

Moira grinned.

One more high.

 

[Chevywolf30]

These are.... Really good.

 

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

This isn't any focused narrative so much as it just experimenting with a scene. I've been playing around with the idea of a story where a lone cosmonaut has to wake up in the middle of a long sublight trip and whose only source of interaction is an AI. It hasn't formed into anything cohesive, but I'm still trying it out.

Lieutenant Tess Cresham woke up on an operating table missing her left arm.

As the anesthesia wore off and she regained control of her motor functions enough to stop drooling on herself, she scrunched her fingers into a fist. The feeling was ghostly, something that she could almost recognize. Against the cold metal of the operating table, it was barely more than a flicker of pretend.

Operating lights clicked off and withdrew from overhead, retracting into the ceiling and leaving Tess with the cold sterile hum of an operating room without an operator. She sat up, careful to avoid turning her head, lest she vomit all over her pants.

It was like a phantasm, cold and metallic. She could see the arm, curl the dull silver fingers and twist the fresh joint that could bend to levels that would have snapped something frail and fleshy, but she couldn’t feel it. Even though the arm obeyed her commands, there were no sensations.

“Thank you, AVNA,” she said.

It was my pleasure, Lieutenant Cresham.

The disembodied female voice crept out of the room’s every orifice. Decades earlier on a distant Earth, a group of electrical engineers no doubt high-fived over the idea of a simulated intelligence that could speak to its wards from everywhere. No doubt they weren’t the people who would have to live with the idea that a computer would be observing them wherever they went.

Tess picked at the battered cloth of her space suit. It did its job, protecting her vital organs from the impact. She felt cold and angry and hurt, but she had nowhere to lash out. The engineer who designed the suits was no doubt some corpse on Earth, buried beneath some sentimental headstone. The crew of the Sagittarius were still secure in the cryostasis deck where they would remain for the next five years. AVNA, as gentle and motherly as her voice was designed to sound, was operating the ship within the parameters given to her.

So, Tess gripped the operating table until her remaining fingers turned white from the effort and the soft metal of the table’s underside caved. She pushed until she felt her fingers bleed. The surrogate arm was dead weight against her.

Lieutenant Gresham. Please do not damage my instruments. I understand your anger, but—

Tess screamed. “****!”

She scratched at her chest, trying to tear the space suit off. The suit, a material designed to endure the cold of space, endured.

“****! ****! ****!”

She wanted to tear her new mechanical surrogate off and throw it, but the small, rational part of her brain persisted in spite of the growing tunnel vision in the primitive, animalistic half of her mind. She grabbed the arm just below the shoulder and held it, trying with every facet of her strength not to tear it off. It was a cold, unfeeling machine that had hijacked her body. No matter what the medical treatments said, she couldn’t shut that sensation away.

Tess seethed, trembling as her heart conked away in her chest. It was Mars One all over again, strapped to her bed in the middle of the night as the leering shadows of the other cadets beat her until it hurt to move, telling her that this was her fault for talking out of turn.

She had to calm down. She had to stabilize.

On Mars, her pre-flight therapist taught her breathing exercises she could use in the event that life got to be just a little bit too much.

Tess inhaled and held it.

Pause.

Exhale.

Pause.

Inhale.

Release.

The logical part of her knew that it couldn’t have been more than a minute, but it felt like hours. Tess felt her heart wind down, exiting its panic mode and dialing back to what was almost her resting heart rate. The blood flowed back to her hand as she loosened her grip on the mechanical surrogate. All the anger and adrenaline left her body in a huff, leaving a dull void that her mind couldn’t quite figure out.

“Okay,” Tess said out loud. “I’m okay.”

She left the surrogate alone. It felt heavy.

Tess?

At the sound of her first name, Tess felt aware for the first time since going under. “I’m okay, AVNA. Thanks.” She tried to casually pat the exposed shoulder of this new carbon replacement to show that she was totally okay, but even that felt wrong. She managed only a half-hearted touch before pausing to adjust her posture for this new center of gravity.

I have prepared the dining area. Would you like something to eat?

She didn’t, but she should. “Yeah. Sure."

 

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

This piece of a short story focusing on my comfort genre: superheroes. It's a bit heavier than other stuff I've written, but it's also a piece I came back two last weekend after a burst of inspiration. It doesn't have a cool title yet, but I'm calling it Crisis Mode. Hope you guys enjoy it.

As protestors marched their way through Minneapolis, the superpowered world quietly went into a panic.

We’re not a social bunch. Team-ups are the stuff of post-war serials and comic books. In the real world, trying to work around the realities of maintaining a dual identity consumes more time than is available in a week. Convincing two of us to linger in costume in the wake of tragedy is difficult, let alone a group. At last count, more than sixty capes operated in and around western Texas.

Four of them showed up.

It felt like a parody. Four people, three capes, and too much bright spandex, leather, and impact foam sitting around a folding table while trying not to be the first person to say something. The temperature lingered near triple digits and only two of us thought to bring water.

I’m not the youngest of the bunch, but seeing so many stars and stripes in one room made me feel the youngest. Twenty years ago, before planes knocked down the World Trade Center and changed how so many of us looked at the world, it would have excited me. Five people in masks and two of them with capes sitting around a dimly lit table during the wee hours of the morning. It seemed like the beginning of something contrarian and powerful. For a few moments, I was just Astro Girl, the star-spangled jewel.

That is until someone asked the question we’d all been thinking: “What are we going to do about the riots?”

Jack Liberty, the oldest of us, leaned forward in his chair. The plastic table, flimsy as it already seemed room of impossible people, groaned beneath the artificial density of his muscle.

He was the first superhero, if he was to be believed. The All-American Everyman with an emblazoned red shirt wrapped around an aging Olympic physique. If he was to be believed, he was a time traveler, the result of two Jewish scientists looking back at the second World War with the hindsight of the 1970s deciding that allowing things to carry on, that the world could not tolerate such a catastrophe. He was sent back to 1943—back to the German front—where he started killing Nazis and didn’t stop until the siege of Berlin in 1947. Chronologically, he should be at least a century old. At a glance, he doesn’t look older than fifty.

He was also infamous for some of the attitudes he brought with him from the 1970s, and was the sort of person to say “colored folks” in the twenty-first century without a lick of self-awareness. His past was an enigma wrapped in unverifiable rumors. Despite his colourful backstory and his proclivity towards an idealized 1940s, it was equally possible that he was a racist dressed up in patriotic colors.

“Why are we calling them riots?” I said.

A long, pregnant pause.

Jack Liberty cleared his throat. He was the proverbial boomer of the room, a man out of time. “Folks on the news fighting the police for no good reason. I dunno about now, but in my day they put people in jail for that.”

My mask doesn’t convey it properly, but I narrow my eyes. The plastic chair is hard and uncomfortable and my butt is slowly going numb. I don’t like this. I don’t like being here and just sitting.

“Why would we do anything?” Jack Liberty said. “Local cops have it well in hand. Put ‘em in jail and let the courts sort them out.” He nods, perhaps hoping the conversation will die there.

We’d all seen the news coming out of Minneapolis.

I hated it. Minnesota felt like the other side of the world and it left me feeling like the dumb foreigner pretending to know more than I did. I’d spent the past few hours monitoring a radio feed in one ear while I tried to pretend that it was too far away and that I should focus on local problems.

Gemini stood up, slamming her palms on the table. Her mask, a swirling grey vortex that exposed nothing of her face but left her brown hair exposed, shifted as she tried to form words. I knew Jack Liberty by reputation, but Gemini and I had worked together on and off, kicking down doors and wading through gunfire. I knew her well enough to know that, beneath Gemini’s mask, she was the only person of color at the table. In the wake of everything that had happened, it made me feel like a hateful *****.

“Of course we’re gonna do something,” she said. She didn’t raise her voice, at least not more than she needed to, but I could hear the cheap metal table groan as Gemini applied a little too much force. “Have you seen what they’re doing down there? They’re throwing kids into vans and just—” She made a vague, angry gesture. “They’re just holding signs. They’re just walking. Ain’t nothing wrong with doing that.”

“We shouldn’t be hasty about this—”

“The **** do you mean don’t be hasty?” Gemini’s palms started to glow bright blue. The plastic table sizzles beneath her palms. “I don’t see anyone stepping on your neck.”

I placed a hand on her arm. She tensed up. For several long moments, I thought she’d push me away and storm off. I can’t say I’d blame her. Instead she took a seat, the legs of her chair screeching as she shifted closer to the table and crossed her legs.

At least she was still here.

“You’re talking about fighting cops,” Jack Liberty said. It was quiet, almost a whisper. He seemed embarrassed by the suggestion.

“It doesn’t have to mean fighting. We just get between them and the people,” I say.

“That still means fighting—getting in the middle of their business, I mean.” He cradles his fist, his knuckles swollen from decades of fighting. “I don’t like it. It’s not right. Cops are the good guys.”

“To you,” Gemini said. “You don’t have to worry about getting shot every time you’re pulled over.”

“Then maybe they shouldn’t be setting places on fire.”

Gemini’s chair slides back. The glow isn’t a tease anymore.

“I’ll ****ing go right now, you ****ing prick,” Gemini said. Despite the profanity, it feels like a whisper. Her voice warbles.

Doctor Prophecy, the straight man of our little circus, tugged at his collar and said, “Folks, there’s no reason for us to argue. We all fight the same noble battles.” He looked like an out of work circus performer, all tuxedos and all black hats and. As he lifted his sleeve, I could see the end of what looked like a cheap dollar-store wand. His cape, more dashing than the riveted one I was sporting, wadded up against the back of his chair.

I’d laugh if I hadn’t seen him hovering at almost seventy thousand feet, casting magic in thick arcs of fluorescent energy at creatures with too many heads trying to poke their way into our reality. He felt like an artifact from an age I was just too late to witness, a baby boomer in a room full of millennials.

“There are lives in danger, as there always are,” Doctor Prophecy said, doing his best to give his words a bit of flourish in spite of the thin layer of oozy sweat no doubt coalescing beneath the three different layers he was wearing. “It’s not our role to sit idly by.”

They were bold words from someone on a plastic chair.

Gemini crossed her arms and mumbled something.

“We can’t fight cops,” Jack Liberty said quietly.

Everyone looked at me. I knew in a moment that I’d made a mistake. Being the first in the room to speak is horrifying, but worse yet is being the last.

I squirmed. My mask, a cowl that wrapped around my head but left my mouth exposed, felt suffocating. “I… don’t really know what to do,” I said as I tried to figure out where I was supposed to look. I settled on looking somewhere between Gemini and Jack Liberty, hoping the lack of focus would keep me sane. “I know it’s stupid, but I’m… just from Wisconsin. I just worry about Badger games and making sure people get home from bars okay. I’ve only fought three guys with superpowers.”

I swallow the lump in my throat.

“I, um…” My arm twists. “My mom is a cop. Was. Um…”

I stand up. My heart is racing.

“I shouldn’t be here. I’m… I’m stupid and new and… you’re probably better off without me here. I’m just good at punching through walls.”

I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t think of how I could do it without making a scene. Would flying out be too much? Am I allowed to fly through the bay windows? Should I walk? Do I have to push the chair in when I leave? All the while I’m standing in front of three people who have done a lot more and a lot better stuff than me and feeling like a fool. My cape feels stupid and I know I’ll have to wash the costume tonight.

“Astro Girl,” Gemini said. For a moment, I swear I can make out the eyes behind the mask. They look wide and scared. “They killed him for nothing.”

I rest my head in my hands. It should be an easy decision. Protect the people who need protecting and punch the ones who don’t. Action Comics used to make it look easy. When Archangel jumps into a mob of criminals and racketeers and starts throwing punches, the criminals are obvious. They were monocolor hats and carry submachine guns. They keep little black books with the crimes they’ve committed. It should be easy.

But I know Gemini is right. I’m stupid and young. I’ve spent too much time on the internet.

I saw the footage.

I know.

My fists tighten. My fingernails dig into the softer flesh of my palms.

I don’t want to hit cops. I’ve worked with the police. I’ve dangled petty criminals on traffic lights and delivered rapists to police stations under the cover of night. I’ve seen good people wear the uniform.

I sit back down.

I know.

“Then we have to do something. We have to stop this,” I say.

I think of the burning buildings. People thrown into unmarked vans. My fingers dig into the table, driven there by frustration and naivety. Standing by feels stupid, an impossible task. All the eyes in the room are on me for one reason or another. “We’ll save them,” I said.