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Good Boy #1

He always liked the rain. People always thought the rain washed things away, but he always found the rain had a way of bringing things back—smells, memories, the truth. It must have been a Friday because the smell of fish coming from the old diner across the street hung as heavy in the air as the clouds outside the IPD precinct window. He sighed. Officer Clark ruffled his hair and scritched behind his ears.

Even though he hoped he’d live long enough to forget, the rain always brought him back. It rained the day he found the body. Little Teddy—his Teddy—discarded in a garbage bag with a cinder block in the river. Teddy had been his boy, ever since he was brought home as a puppy. He remembered seeing Teddy’s face light up when he was first brought home and he knew he was home, and he remembered Teddy’s parents’ faces the day they came home without him and he knew that his home had been lost. 

He did what he had to. He ran upstairs to Teddy’s room and sniffed everything he could, took Teddy’s blanket and ran. It wasn’t until the rain that he caught the scent. He dove under the  water and pulled the seven year-old’s body up from the river. He knew he was dead, but he still carried his boy to the hospital and stayed til it was officially declared. The officers tried to pursue the case, but they didn’t know what he knew. He gathered up all the evidence they needed, pointed out the perpetrator, and now that sicko Sid Prescott would be behind bars forever. And now he worked with the officer that gave his best shot at helping him and the only cop that believed in him, Officer James Clark.

The IPD tried to give him different names—but Teddy had only ever called him one thing: Good Boy. He growled every time they tried to give him a new name until they got the message. Even if there were officers who were skeptical of him and tried to treat him like a glorified drug dog, Good Boy had been instrumental in enough cases now that he at least commanded some respect in the IPD.

“You okay, big guy?” Officer Clark said as he petted his head.

Good Boy let out a harrumph as he plopped his head to the ground. Clark chuckled.

And then she walked in. Legs all the way up passed his head, brown hair pulled behind her in a perfectly messy pony, Commissioner Serena Caine. Good Boy perked up and stood almost a salute.

“Clark, Good Boy—my office,” she commanded. Good Boy noticed the slightest pull at the corners of her lips when she said his name. He knew it was because she still thought it was ridiculous talking to a dog in her office like he was a person, but it still felt nice.

“Excited for a new case, boy?” Clark said as he led the way to the Commissioner’s office. She had the files already laid out for them, a set on the floor and a set on the desk.

The case was the murder of a P.I., Mr. Ed Fox, who had a bit of a reputation as a Husband Catcher in Inverness with a good relationship with a lot of the tabloids in the city. He and his partner, Mr. Russell Palmer, were investigating the disappearance of a Ms. Lara Collins on behalf of her sister, Ms. Clare Collins. Both Ms. Collins and Mr. Palmer were at the scene of the crime when police arrived after a neighbor, Mrs. Michelle Gold, called the police when she heard a fight breaking out in Ms. Collins’s apartment. Police had taken Mr. Palmer into custody and were still with Ms. Collins at her apartment.

Once you passed your third crime scene, the mess of it all didn’t register. There was only so much blood you could see before you had to accept that humans were violent creatures capable of the worst sort of acts imaginable. The inhumanity was hardly surprising. Clark talked to Clare while they both examined the room. There clearly had been a fight. The weapon was likely one of Clare’s own kitchen knives. Killer probably didn’t set out to murder Mr. Fox.

From what Ms. Collins said, she hired Mr. Fox and Mr. Palmer after her sister had been spending time with a man that scared her, Mr. Anthony Giannetta, and then she disappeared two days ago. She wasn’t sure what to do. Mr. Fox said that Mr. Giannetta was a dangerous man, so they put her up in a hotel for a couple days and told her not to be alone at her place at night while they investigated. Ms. Collins said she came in to find the body and Mr. Palmer.

Several leads to follow. But one thing that piqued Good Boy more than anything else was her scent. Sure, she carried the smell of the city on her. But he detected three other people who she’d been quite close with for quite some time. One of them was Mr. Fox, and he assumed the other might be Mr. Palmer, but this third scent was of interest. Nowhere in her statement did she mention spending time with a third person.

After they concluded their work at the crime scene, Clark walked Good Boy to the car and asked, “Ready to go to the station to talk to Russell?” Good Boy growled. “What is it?” He pointed back to the apartment and whined. “We checked everything there.” He growled again. The officer thought for a moment and said, “You’re not done here, then?” And Good Boy gave a short bark. “You know your way back to the station?” Another bark. “Be careful out there, Good Boy.” Two quick barks. Officer Clark petted Good Boy and scritched behind his ear before getting into the car.

Good Boy disappeared in the  alley behind Ms. Collins’s building, and he only had to wait a couple of hours before she was in her car leaving a trail of  exhaust for Good Boy to follow.

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Astro #1

“The world is divided over superheroes after Astro’s appearance on the late night show—” Matt cut the tv off before the presenter could comment anymore. “How about Astro’s charming appearance—iconic appearance—Astro dazzles thousands of viewers with his wit and his trademark million dollar smile,” Matt grumbled, slowly smiling and laughing  as he spoke.

Matt never much minded the limelight. As a researcher and astronaut, Matt soaked up every chance at the spotlight he had. He was the Face of Space for years, even running an in-space kids’ science tv show for a few years. Until the accident. 

He learned after the fact that he’d been found drifting, still alive in his suit—with no explanation as to how. He had flickers of memories, the flickers of starlight, a burning heat that felt like it was ripping his body apart, staring into the black of the void, the loneliness, the starlight—when he remembered he would find himself drenched in sweat. He had no memory of the space station after he was found or his return to earth. He woke up in a NASA research facility in an explosion of light. He remembered months and months of experiments on him. Mastering his newfound abilities that they still did not fully understand, the making of his suit.

Two years. He’d been gone for two years.

And then the asteroid.

NASA had tracked a large asteroid headed straight for earth. The damage would be catastrophic if not apocalyptic. It was headed straight for Capital City. Though some of the researchers urged Matt not to, he put on the specialized suit they’d made that helped him focus his powers and he flew, trailing refracted light behind him from NASA to the city out of the atmosphere, past the airforce that had been mobilized to protect the earth if possible and into space. The satellite images showed a man glowing in refracted light shooting beams of concentrated light at the astroid, breaking it into smaller pieces and then creating a large wall of light and using that, flying forward to push the dust back into space. And Astro had been born, a name taken from his TV show character.

That was how Brian had learned his assumed dead husband was still alive. And their two foster children, Noah and Jaime, had learned that their father was back from the dead. Brian had just started to move on, and there was no saving their relationship after Brian had felt so lied to (not to mention the added pressure of this new Astro. He’d been awake for two years. Even if for a majority of that time Matt had felt like every molecule in his body was burning and he felt like he would combust at any second, screaming in agony. The divorce was, thankfully, merciful. Both of them still loved one another and wanted what was best for them and their children. In a couple months, everything had been settled, and the two moved into the co-parenting stage of their lives.

But at every step, the media never quit. Just after Public Defender appeared, now there was this other freak. There were already questions of what rights should superheroes have, creating surveillance for superheroes, questions about his family—should a super be allowed to have children, should he have to give everything to Brian in their divorce. But it was a spotlight. And Matt Mitchell never stepped away from a spotlight. He went on a media tour and fielded everything with charm and a smile. The only time he cracked was when someone suggested that “Someone needs to take those kids away from that freak—they’re not even his.” He started crying on camera before his eyes lit up with light that refracted through the tears and turned them into opals. Brian had been there and stepped in and chewed the spectator a new one as Matt fled the scene and flew into space, erupting into a massive sphere of light. He lingered there for a while before heading back to earth.

“Guys! School!” he called up the stairs. He heard the groans in response and chuckled. Matt poured the rest of his coffee into a thermos and waited.

The fifteen-year-old, Jaime came down first and mumbled a quick “Hey,” as he passed clear by Matt toward the door.

“Don’t forget your lunch,” Matt urged. Jaime’s eye roll was audible, but Matt was satisfied when he heard the refrigerator door open. Jaime promptly walked to the car. Jaime had been the harder one to forgive him. He missed a lot in that kid’s life, and the then fourteen-year-old had a hard time just simply accepting his foster father was back. Matt had tried for a year now to forge a new relationship with him. At least eyerolls and grunts were a kind of interaction.

Still no movement from Noah. “Noah! If I have to tell you again,  I’m going to tell Casey that you like her!” he urged more forcefully. 

“Dad! No! I’m coming!” the thirteen-year-old Noah said, racing down the stairs. Matt chuckled at the urgency in his steps and soon they were on their way to school. Usually the car ride was awkward. Jaime riding shotgun giving Matt the coldest of shoulders. But today was different. 

Today, Jaime plugged his phone into the charger and his music started to play. Matt smiled and looked over. “Forgot to charge it last night,” he said flatly. Matt nodded and smiled wider. After a beat Matt started nodding his head to the rhythm, and out of the corner of his eye he could swear he saw Matt shadow dancing too.

When he was at the White House later to discuss the possibility of using U.S. supers to intervene in the Serdova-Provo crisis, Matt couldn’t stop grinning over six words.

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Nightingale #1

Jane had been used to the shadows. Perched atop one of the skyscrapers in her suit, gripping the edge of the building with the bird-like talons of her prostheses that were central to her moonlighting as Inverness’ Nightingale. She remembered being confused why her parents kept her out of the limelight and away from their celebrity until she was about eight and saw the headlines “Johnny Snow, Snow Heir,  Born Wrong” or “Johnny the Freak.” Her legs had been formed wrong and bent backwards and necrotized before she was born. When her parents took their child out, it was as one of  their charity cases or to explain their lavish donations. Even her transition had all been optics to them. Look, the perfect Snows were perfect parents for supporting their daughter.

Behind closed doors had been different. And they weren’t happy when Jane had started getting politically active, especially not when she called her parents out for hypocritical practices, exploiting laborers, contributing to the extreme inequality of Inverness that allowed them to live their lavish lifestyles while so many were trapped in dire poverty in the city. They weren’t on speaking terms when a radical outside of one of the Inverness SnowTech manufacturing plants shot her parents.

As the heir of the SnowTech empire, she vowed to make changes: ethical treatment for workers, carbon neutral productions within five years funded by her parents’ estates, an end to the company’s participation in military-drone production and the end of all weapons trading by SnowTech, among others. And this declaration upset the board. She found herself pinned, powerless, despite her position within the company: be complicit in the ongoing production of weapons as Logan Exeter bought more and more of her company, or walk away. She walked away. She used the money from the sales to make investments in ethical tech companies and started her work as the Nightingale to undermine SnowTech being a puppet company for Exeter Industries’ continued expansion into the weapons market.

But the more she worked in the shadows, the more work she learned there was to do.

A scream came from the streets below. Go time.

She leapt off the art-deco building, a memorial to Inverness’s glory days, as her cape detected the wind resistance and her hands on the edge and firmed into her glider, allowing her to sail down to the earth harmlessly  to the bank below. She could already see the chaos inside.

Six walking skeletons, bursting with flowers in  their pelvises, rib cages, and spines, with vines wrapped around their legs and arms, held guns shooting by the security guard below.

Jane had been dealing with these for weeks. She burst inside and threw two smoke grenades into the room, firing off three sets of titanium rope  to wrap three of the skeletons up, preventing them from doing any more harm. “Rip the flowers out,” she barked to the security guard through the voice modulator, before she leapt through the smoke and utilize her immense martial arts training to quickly dispatch of the remaining three. It took several minutes and she had to dodge quickly out of the way of the hail of bullets from one of their automatic weapons, but she downed them fast enough.

But her focus had been pulled to the combat. It wasn’t until she heard the guard choking that she realized that something else was happening. And then she saw the smoke had a slight greenish hue through it with a swirl of glittery articles in it. Fuck. She knew what that meant before the woman’s figure walked through the smoke. She was here. Annabel.

“Dryad,” Nightingale spat.

A wry smile crossed her lips. “You keep flying back to me, little songbird.”

Jane didn’t know if Annabel knew who she was, but she knew her. After her exile from her family’s company, Jane found herself working with other organizations to try to make a difference in the world. One of them being Annabel’s lab. The two fell in love. And it took Jane way too long to realize the underside of Annabel’s lab’s intentions and work in ecoterrorism. Or that Annabel had… abilities. One of them was the use of her pheromones, which made Annabel wonder if she ever loved Annabel of her own free-will.

And it was enough to make her feel weak in front of her now. 

“Poor Songbird… lost your voice?” she teased.

Jane grunted and hurled herself at Annabel. She was just as capable a fighter, but she didn’t need to work as hard as Jane did as she just simply emitted more nerve gas. Even her air filtration couldn’t filter out all of it this close to the source, and it slowed her down.

Dryad just simply wore her down until she was on the ground, struggling to breathe, before she walked effortlessly into the bank to steal all she wanted to fund all her efforts. Nightingale had to make a decision: risk her life further, or save the guard’s and return the bones to their graves. She chose the latter. She brought them to a safe place, to a coroner friend of hers, Conroy Weskil, who was as distrusting of the Inverness PD as she was. He was able to treat the guard and her, and promised he would ID the bodies and return them to their homes. Jane would catch the Dryad one day, once she figured out how.

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Public Defender #1

The 5:45am alarm kicked off Ana’s morning routine without fail. Shower, skin care, sunscreen—everyday or her abuela’s spirit would never forgive her—a light breakfast, a cup of black coffee, and the paper that she read while news podcasts streamed through her phone.

“Tensions Build Across Europe as More Provoan Migrants Flee,” “Nuclear Arms Negotiations Continue with Serdova,” “Exeter Industries Lauded After New Tech Leads to More Criminal Arrests at US-Mexico Border,” “More Teens Missing from Capitol City—Where is So-Called ‘Public Defender’.” It was a morning tradition she learned from her father. One she especially clung to on hearing days.

“Where’s Public Defender? She’s… running late for work,” she said with a chuckle tossing the paper to the side. She grabbed her blazer and her case files and headed toward the office. She was late—but only by her father’s standards. Thirty minutes early was possibly on time if he was in a good mood.

Her father immigrated to the US from Mexico and worked hard to provide for her, running a bodega on the southeast side of the city. He raised her to respect her powers, ever since she started flying around their apartment just after she’d learned to walk. “Mija, you are destined for great things.” He said her powers were evidence of that destiny, but not a way out of working to make that destiny real.

Ana always wondered what her destiny would be. At first it seemed like her destiny was college—at least in her father’s mind. But she was never sure what would come after. And when she got there, and was surrounded by white kids who never understood her, questioned her admission, made her feel like an exotic trinket to add to their collection of friends, thought she was hypersexual or only good for sex… she nearaly dropped out. That was until her best friend, Daniela, learned she was undocumented, and Ana saw how the system was stacked against her. She went to law school to become an immigration lawyer.

But that wasn’t enough. She learned almost immediately that it’s not just that the system was stacked against the people she wanted to help. The system was impossible. Her father always taught her not to use her powers because everyone deserved a fair playing field. But the playing field had to be fair first. 

Like today’s hearing. She had to watch her client lose his case to be removed. All because Exeter Industries’ surveillance programs: the satellite monitoring, drone surveillance, using large data tracing to target potential undocumented folks through their conglomorate of companies like DNA testing companies, just to name a few. Despite any statements of her high school clients’ merits, Exeter’s overwhelming data on him, his family, and their predictive models based on her clients’ behavior were all already waiting for her. Removal.

It was enough cases like this that Public Defender was born. At first it was just a couple small things: some drones going missing, things like that. But then she intervened in an incident where the police were violently attacking members of her own community that the press caught wind of this masked hero. Ever since then, she was the Public Defender. At first there was a crisis: superheroes were real? What did this mean? But enough bank robberies thwarted and criminals caught and the chaos died down—especially after what Astro did last year to steal the limelight.

Dejected from her loss in the courtroom, Ana went home and threw back a beer. She had to do something. “The opinion editor is wondering where I am? Fine.” She got dressed in her tight suit and threw a trench coat over it before leaving her apartment, ditching the coat in a back alley, putting the mask on and flying above the city.

It didn’t take long for her to find the traffickers. To be honest, she’d been monitoring the situation for a long time. They started abducting people from her native southeast side. And after being in this game for a while now, she new how they worked. 

It was almost cliche. She landed on an electricity pole by the docks and saw them… dressed in all black, all guarding a couple of steel shipyard boxes. Looked like about a dozen of them. That wouldn’t be an issue.

She swooped down and clotheslined two of them, slamming them into the ground, knocking them immediately unconscious. Two nearby drew their guns, and she dodged out of the way, picked up one of the steel boxes and flew toward them, shielding herself with the crate as she pressed them back against another row of boxes, though she was careful not to crush them too hard. 

She saw another talking into his earpiece and ripped the door off the crate she just carried and hurled it at him so he couldn’t finish  his thought. But that took enough time that she wasn’t watching her flank. And then she felt it. A warm nudge at her back, and she turned and saw four,  one carrying a rocket launcher that fired at her.  Her eyes widened and she grabbed the projectile and flew it straight up in the air, letting  go as it continued to hurl up while she dove down, landing between the group of four, knocking the closest two down, a kick and a punch to the jaw of the other two downed them quickly.

The remaining three fled. That was fine by her. She gathered up the nine that she knocked unconscious and bent a metal bar around them. But that’s when she saw just how well outfitted they were. Their weapons and protections were military, not what she’d dealt with before. She made a point of breaking every weapon, flattening every bullet, leaving them with nothing.

She went to the unit they were guarding and ripped off that door. Inside, dozens of teens gasped and started murmuring. After a moment, she realized they were speaking Serdovan and she spoke what little she knew, learning they were Provoan migrants. She spent the rest of the night getting the kids to safety and fielding the mounting media attention to their return.