2103:09:16:00:30:00

  At exactly half past midnight, I rose from my bed. Mom should be asleep by now, and Crowsong had set our meeting time at between one and one-thirty a.m.

  I stuffed my bed to make it look someone was lying in it, then changed into my Jester costume. I grabbed the ‘hero phone’ Crowsong had given me and, after looking in the mirror to see if everything was in place, transformed into a cat. I squeezed myself through the gap at the top of my window. Once I was in the backyard, I transformed back into myself and then into crow form.

  I headed west toward The Hub, though my final destination was technically still in Northside. Crowsong had sent me the address of a – presumably abandoned – furniture warehouse of the defunct Intra-Cascadian Logging and Furniture Company there. There, she’d said in a message, we would meet and discuss training.

  And it was there I would ask for her to be my mentor.

  I was excited and nervous about it. It seemed like Crowsong had already more or less decided to take me under her wing – pun intended – but I could be wrong. Maybe she just wished to bring me up to speed about how heroics worked, or point out the path I should tread without teaching me how to walk it.

  Either way, I would find out soon enough.

  It took me half an hour of flight to reach our meeting place, and I entered the building through one of the warehouse’s many broken windows. The inside of it was in as bad a state as I expected – broken windows, peeling paint and rusting beams – but it wasn’t empty. Inside the building was an entire gym and training room, with boxing bags, training weights, a workstation with a wall full of knives and everything needed to maintain them, along with dozens of targets hanging, sitting or nailed to the wall. There was even something like a lounge area with a couch and coffee table, a flatscreen, fridge, kitchen, and a dining table complete with chairs. Somewhere in the corner, silently buzzing, was a generator to fuel it all.

  Crowsong was standing in the middle of the room, waiting with her arms crossed. She’d apparently predicted I would arrive sooner rather than later.

  I aimed a few meters away and transformed back into myself right before I hit the ground.

  “Welcome Jester,” she said, her voice sounding as rough and tough as the day we met. “I was glad to hear you still wanted to be a hero even after your first day out. How’s your nose doing, by the way?”

  My hand reached out to feel it, only to end up touching my smiling silver mask. “It’s fine. It’s already healed by now.” As the doctor had said, it only took three days for the pain to stop, and four days for the shell to completely fade away, returning my nose back to pristine condition.

  “Good to hear,” Crowsong said sincerely. “Then let’s immediately get to the question at hand: what kind of training are you looking for?” she said as she started pacing around. “Do you want to know about the masked and the masquerade, and learn how to be a hero? Practical information on the masked scene in Northside or Charm as a whole? Simple training? Real world experience? Cooperation? A safe haven?”

  I smiled at what she said. That she was offering the help with all of that… it seemed I hadn’t misjudged her intention.

  So, filled with renewed confidence, I took a step closer and declared, “I want you to be my mentor.”

  Crowsong remained silent for a moment. “You-” her voice shot up a pitch toward the end, and Crowsong scraped her throat. “You want me to be your mentor?” She asked, sounding both serious and… something else. It wasn’t surprise, but it was also more than making sure I meant what I said.

  Repressing the urge to fidget, I said, “Yes.”

  She stared at me, assessing me before giving me a single nod. “That’s good-!” Crowsong said excitedly, then cut off and scraped her throat.

  “That’s good,” she reiterated, sounding much more stoic. I didn’t know why she forced away her excitement. Why wouldn’t I want her to be excited at having me as a trainee? Or maybe, was it that she thought it made her look childish? That seemed to be a thing people my alleged age were often concerned about. “Then, let’s start with lesson one: the Treaty.”

  I repressed the urge to clap, afraid it would come across as mocking instead of celebratory, but I did sit down to listen to the lesson. Crowsong looked at me in silence – confusion? I needed to get better at reading body language, if only for masked – for a second, before joining me on the ground.

  “Okay, lesson one. The Treaty,” she reiterated. “You probably already know that the Treaty has a number of rules that masked have to follow. But even if you technically already know what I’m going to tell you, I need, need to be sure you understand and follow not just the letter, but the spirit of them. Because if you don’t, and you cross the line somewhere, not only will it be the last mistake you’ll make, but as your mentor, it might be mine too.”

  I nodded gravely at her statement, but remained silent.

  “The first and second rule are by far the most important,” Crowsong said. “Which one’s first or second doesn’t really matter; violate either of them and someone can kill you with basically no repercussion. Violate either of them openly or repeatedly, and one of the Triumphant Twelve will come down not just on your head, but on the heads of all who refused to hold you to account.

  “The first rule is easy: the mask is sacrosanct. This isn’t just about trying to find out someone’s government identity, or threatening another masked with threats to their family or anything like that. It’s also about villains not exploiting the dual identity system to avoid getting caught by unmasking and vanishing into a crowd. The exact details are vague, probably even vague on purpose, so just treat it as both identities as being different people and you’ll be fine.”

  I had read about a case of that happening, where a shifter villain repeatedly escaped into the crowd by cancelling his transformation. The heroes failed to stop him and the villains refused to try. Some even began emulating him when the consequences of breaking the Treaty remained out. That is, until one day Sunsunsun of the Triumphant Twelve descended and incinerated all villains – not just the one that started it and those that emulated him, all villains – in the city of Caracas within minutes, then left without saying a word.

  “The second rule boils down to ‘don’t kill or maim non-masked’, meaning both the unpowered and openly-identifying powered professionals. I mean, killing anyone is bad to do for everyone, even villains against heroes, but killing non-masked actually comes with Treaty repercussions rather than just legal or reputational ones.

  "This also counts for masked healers by the way, like reanimators or resurrectors, so long as they aren’t, like, involved involved in the operations of wherever they work. They can work with villains, even be part of their teams, but so long as they don’t actually participate in their criminal activities, you basically cannot harm them besides capturing them. Again, details are left vague. You can still harm bystanders, or a masked robbing a normal would’ve been enough to set off a kill-on-sight manhunt, but if they go out of their way to kill them it’s game over. Also, accidents or collateral damage is- well, I wouldn’t say accepted, but tolerated to some extent.”

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  In this case, the example that came to mind was that of my namesake, the real Samantha Pearsson. It hadn’t been clear at first that Chronomaniak wasn’t killing random people with his powers, so Peakstar had been authorized to go in for the kill. Only in hindsight did it become clear that Chronomaniak’s victims survived being time-stopped like that. There’d been something of a kerfuffle about that – especially since it made Peakstar technically responsible for killing my namesake and her dad – but in the end there was ‘no wrongdoing’ found on the hero’s end.

  As always, it was uncomfortable being reminded about my background. I briefly wondered how Peakstar felt about my return? Had they even been informed? One part of me hoped so, while another part wished to avoid the burden of another person emotionally buoyed by what was essentially a lie.

  “Not that it matters too much for us heroes, but it's important to understand when it comes the level of force acceptable against villains and their henchies. Basically, don’t kill villains unless forced to, and absolutely don’t kill henchies or unpowered criminals unless they’re, like, planning to blow up a school or hospital or something.

  “Anyway, rule number three is basically an addendum for whenever people violate the first two or something else happens that requires masked of different stripes to band together, like another hell-invasion or something. Just band together, fight the threat, don’t fight each other, stuff like that. Basically, it’s an automatic ceasefire when things go south on a wide scale.

  “The fourth rule is maybe the vaguest one of all, and somewhat important for us to know. Basically, adults should treat minors like ourselves with kid gloves, unless they themselves go off the reservation. There’s no real line in the sand, only the judgement of their peers. For us, all we need to know is that we’ll be treated gently by villains, so no kidnapping or forced recruitments or torture, maiming or anything like that. At least, that’s the idea. The rule doesn’t apply to fights between minors, and since that means adults are at a severe disadvantage when fighting minors, it usually means that minors end up fighting minors while adults stick to fighting adults.

  “And that’s basically it. Thoughts?” Crowsong asked.

  My thoughts were many, but above all, “this seems a bit…” I hesitated on the word. “Arbitrary? I expected the Treaty to be more rigorous. Better defined.”

  Crowsong nodded twice at that, seemingly anticipating the question. “Yes, that was exactly what I thought when my mentor first explained it to me. But let me tell you an important secret that even most masked don’t know about.”

  Crowsong breathed in deep, while I leaned forward in anticipation.

  “The Treaty does not exist,” Crowsong declared. Seeing my confusion, she continued. “It is not a law that governs the masquerade. It is not a common understanding between masked. It is not written down or publicized, nor is it some kind of unwritten law. Yet simultaneously, there is a Treaty out there, written in full, signed, and enforced on masked like the sword of Damocles. It has shaped every aspect of masked culture as we know it, and is depended upon by both heroes, villains, rogues, professionals, civilians and the government of the Unified State itself. Confused yet?”

  I nodded. In my research – which was searching up things online, until today at least – the supposed articles of all variants of the Treaty out there overlapped in meaning, yet could differ heavily in how it was laid out. Sometimes it was formal in language and looked like a constitution in shape and appearance, sometimes it was an informal list of do’s and don’ts, while other times it was just people telling about cases where it had been broken and inferring the rules from that. Even the number of rules changed – going from three, to seven, to nine and some even higher – although the four Crowsong had said seemed to encapsulate most of them pretty well.

  I’d thought that speaking to an experienced masked would dispel my doubts, but found they had grown instead.

  “Do you know how the Treaty came about?” Crowsong asked.

  I nodded. This was something most people agreed on. “A group of the world’s greatest and strongest masked came together after Malcator declared the Unified State in the second year of his conquest, forming an informal alliance in an effort to resist the villain. After the Unification of Language in 2057, fear among people grew and the resistance to his rule grew along with it. Something like a civil war started, which Malcator seemed to be winning until the masked later known as the Triumphant Twelve managed to infiltrate his palace in Cameroon and kill him. They wrote down and signed the Treaty of Triumph there, then got other prominent masked to sign it. This started the masquerade and brought about some measure of governance to the superpowered, thus ending the Dark Age of Superhumanity,” I recited the most common version of events.

  Crowsong nodded at my explanation, then said, “Exactly what most people, even most masked think. But it’s false. The Treaty was there only for the Triumphant Twelve themselves to set rules on how they should interact with each other. Let alone signed, it was never even revealed to anyone else. It was never meant to bring about this globe-spanning system we now call the masquerade. It was only there to establish some kind of truce between the twelve strongest powered and their organizations in the aftermath of Malcator’s reign. They hadn’t even thought it would become the end of Dark Ages.

  “But in the end, their intent for the Treaty didn’t matter. When they began enforcing its principles within their own and against other organizations, the ball was sent rolling and there was no stopping its momentum. And after the Guardians became the global government’s heroic enforcement agency, and one of the Twelve turned out to be Fulminante, the head-honcho of the Guardians International himself, it became law in all but writing for the heroes. And when Eskaton Geranos started popping the heads of villains all over the world, it became the standard in the underworld too.”

  I took a moment to digest the information. It was a lot to take in and seemed absurd on the face of it. How could such a strict law that governs the lives – literally, as a Treaty violation was always a death sentence – of masked be implemented almost by accident?

  “But why?” I asked the most important question. “Why would the Triumphant Twelve enforce it so strictly? And why aren’t other powerful masked banding together to fight them like they did Malcator?”

  It seemed absurd that so many villains would be cowed under the threat of so few masked, even if they were the most powerful among them. If the threat of dying hadn’t stopped villains from fighting Malcator in his prime, or stop their life-and-death battles with the heroes and other villains for money and power, why would they cow underneath the Triumphant Twelve and their Treaty?

  “This might be difficult for you to understand, being achronically displaced and all – hell, it’s difficult for anyone who hasn’t lived during the Dark Ages to understand,” Crowsong said, leaning in and her voice sounding even graver than before. “But the Dark Ages? It was bad. Like, apocalyptically bad. The eighty-percent-of-the-world-dying kind of bad. Billions, actual billions of people died when masked threw off their uniforms and became politicians, idealogues, dictators and warlords.

  “People who know or remember this are willing to do a lot for that never to happen again. And in the fifty years since the Treaty? People have been thriving; travelling, trading, moving and loving freely. Although the world’s still at a fraction of the population it had in the early 2000s, it has finally started growing again for the first time in nearly a century. People don’t fear their children dying in something like Tyrannicus’ meteor anymore, or of another Europe sinking because neo-Nazi tried to summon Atlantis, or of superpowered people pretending to be the Four Horsemen and start the apocalypse. We’ve gone and taken to the stars again, finding ways to secure our future in the great beyond. And it’s our duty as masked, as heroes, to make sure this trend continues. Even if sometimes it means doing horrible things.”

  She paused, head tilting in consideration. “In fact, if it weren’t for Malcator going too far with his plans to commit genocide on a global scale by unifying cultures, thoughts, minds and whatever other half-cocked plan he had in that demented brain of his, he’d have been proclaimed the greatest goddamn hero the world had ever seen. Hell, people did that while he was still alive, doing the things that the Triumphant Twelve eventually stopped him for. That’s how far people were willing to go to bring about an end to that misery. The measures they- that we now take is peanuts compared to that.”

  That… was a lot to process. And a lot more telling about heroics and the masquerade than I’d expected to learn today. Was this what my creator had intended with the Heroic Impulse, with implanting the idea of making the world a better place?

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “My mentor gave me the exact spiel I’m giving you now. He was a former Guardian. Used to be pretty high up even,” she confided. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call it common knowledge there, but most team captains and up know about the story behind the Treaty. I suspect the same is true for any large enough organization, and those that aren’t large enough to know about it are too unimportant to even think about not following it.”

  The room became silent, the both of us looking down at the ground as we were mired in melancholy thought. I foresaw myself going over the memcordings of this again and again, trying to eke out even the tiniest bit of extra substance from this conversation. But for now, it was just too much. Too much information, too much surprise, too much dark thought and emotion.

  This wasn’t how I’d thought the day would be.

  “I’m sorry,” Crowsong said suddenly. “I didn’t plan for today to be like… well, like this.” There was a sadness to her words undisguised by the harshness of her voice. “It’s just- there are still many masked, many heroes that don’t really know this, or don’t even care to understand why we do what it is we do. They label me vigilante and try to get me to join, threaten to bring me in for breaking the law, excessive force or whatever, but...” She trailed off. “My mentor made sure I understood, and now that I’m your mentor, I needed to make sure you did as well.”

  I nodded at that and opened my mouth to respond, but couldn’t find the words to express myself. It felt like there was something building in my gut waiting to be given form, but I was unable to find a way to let it out.

  “I understand,” I said instead, putting the formless feeling into the insufficient words as best I could. “And if I don’t right now, I promise I will understand.”

  Crowsong nodded at that, then rose from the ground. She stretched, limbs popping and cracking while making exaggerated moan-like noises. “Well, with the heavy stuff out of the way,” she began. She turned sideways and motioned to the sandbags and targets. “How about we do some actual training and work off some of that baggage, hm?”

  Eager for a distraction, I nodded rapidly and repeatedly, and joined her at the punching bags.