Act One, Scene Twelve
“Kid. Do you actually want to work with me?”
The man in the hood started. The room contained no windows, just a bed that swung out of the wall with a vigilante lying on it, arms folded behind his head, and a single door, which was closed and bolted, and now, apparently, Luminosa, raising a luminous eyebrow as she continued.
“I asked you to keep a low profile, and you responded by wrecking one of the Tyrant’s guard posts. His personal guard posts, where his serious ‘bots are. You know, the ones that he uses to shoot superheroes.”
“I followed your advice. I didn’t fight any supervillains.”
Luminosa sighed. She was hovering in midair, looking down at him.
“I have your new outfit, kid.” She shook her head. “You’re really lucky that the Tyrant’s never switched to brass jackets.”
The man in the hood smirked before his expression straightened. “Where is it?”
“Outside,” she said. “I can phase through matter, I can’t make anything else do it.”
He slid the bolt back, opened the door. It was a plain suitcase, slightly dented.
“Also,” she added as he picked the suitcase up, “you need a terrifying superhero name. I can’t just go on calling you ‘kid’ forever.”
“I need a name,” he said, catching the metal handle in his ferrokinetic grip and springing the clasp open in the same moment. “I don’t care if it’s scary. They’ll fear me whatever my name is.”
“What does it cost you?” she asked. “Your reputation is a weapon. Do you think the Tyrant could ever have been a king if the world didn’t call him ‘the Monarch of Crime?’ Luminosa is a nice, friendly name; it tells me who to stay, and lets my enemies try to guess my powers, and it makes people think of me - of a woman made out of light.”
The suit was thick, tough cloth. Sturdy boots, tough gloves, long pants and sleeves, each part connected, linked together to share blows. Kevlar over the chest. A mask, part of the cowl hanging down. It was very heavy in his hands.
“Lodestone would be good. It brings your powers to mind, but it’s also old-fashioned, suggesting that you rest on a sound basis of tradition, reminding them of how it was back before the war started. It means ‘leading stone’, suggesting both steadiness and leadership. You could probably come up with some pun on Magnetite, if you wanted to sound educated, or on one of the places where magnetic ores are found.”
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She smiled as he picked up the costume, ran his hand over it, soft and cold and hard. Lethal.
“Yeah,” she said.
The colors were muted grey and black. “There’s a switch under the collar,” she said. “It’s programmed with about fifty different colorsets. You can go camo or you can stand out.”
“Luminosa…”
“Yep?”
“What’s the plan?”
She blinked to the other side of him. “Plan?”
“Which Count do we kill first?” His face was grim but his eyes were bright. “This is a war. What’s the strategy?”
She raised an eyebrow. “So, you’re saying I’m the general and you’ll listen to my orders?”
He said nothing.
“The plan is that you choose a name,” she said. “Then we go back to raiding his stashes for food and other gear - communications, weapons, ammunition - until the time’s right. Without killing anyone whatever color his hat is.”
“You think guns will do to stop the Tyrant, Luminosa?” His power sucked a thin metal sheet out from under the bed to wrap itself around his hand. “I have all the weapons I need here.”
She sighed. “How did I end up like this? The cynic?”
She blinked again, now floating up in the air to look down at him. “Wars aren’t a matter of killing people until the other side runs out of bodies. They’re about strategy. You need a plan, something where you know how to respond to whatever moves the other side make so you can win tomorrow even if you can’t win today. The first part of the plan is, we don’t make noise - we don’t attract fire - we don’t let people know there is a war - until we’re ready to win. You killed a knight. Pyre won’t let this slide, and maybe you can kill Pyre, but what will killing Pyre get you?”
“Now,” she continued, “the bigger point. We have two of us, people who can fight supervillains. There are thirteen Counts, who have an average of… call it five knights each, plus an heir or two or three, all of whom have the superpower gene and so any one of them who doesn’t have powers will, if his powers trigger, get ‘the power to beat you’ whatever form that takes. They’ve also got guys with guns, and some of them will try brass bullets eventually. Then there’s the Royal Knights, that’s another two dozen, and Steelmind’s robots and the Palace Guard and the Civil Guard if you want to count everyone who can kill you with a lucky shot while you aren’t looking. That’s a hundred twenty capes out to get you. Leaving aside their children who will power up if you make them collateral damage, we are outnumbered sixty to one.”
“I’d better get started, then,” he said. “Luminosa. I don’t look special. There’s a million other kids in the city with my face and my hair and my hood. This -” he lifted the superhero suit “- will help me, sure, but I don’t need it. You’ve got your toughness, you’ve got your teleportation, you’ve got a dozen powers to protect you - my defense is my face, because it’s just like any other.”
He met his hero’s eyes.
“My name is not Lodestone. I’m not a magnet. I’m not a superhero. I’m here to kill every supervillain in this city.”
“Ah. The Jacobin spirit.”
She blinked again, a foot further away, to his eye level. “There’s a party tonight at the traitor’s mansion. I’m spying on it invisibly, which means I cannot bail you out, and if you operate near there you’ll be fighting all hundred of them at once. If you’ll give me a couple days, I’d like your help springing political prisoners from Countess Whisper’s jail. Until then, don’t do stupid things.”
She vanished. The young man stared for a while, then nodded.