Scions of Shadow #001: Origins

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Chapter 1: Mayhem at the Mall part 1

You would think being thrown off an alien ship into the Atlantic would be enough to make someone your eternal enemy. Yet here Luna Hellsing was, having lunch in a mall food court with Pandora “Smith”, even though the last time they’d met, six weeks back, Luna had spent twelve hours treading salt water. She’d been there while each of the decisions that had led to this moment had been made, and had even agreed to the meeting in as many words. Yet Luna couldn’t understand how it had happened.

It didn’t help that Pandora “Smith” couldn’t even bother to pretend to be interested. Thus far, the only complete sentence she’d said to Luna was, “Pick wherever; they all suck.” Everything else got a disinterested grunt at best. Pandora, who was the very dark black of a woman born in Africa, was dressed in an excessively preppy pink outfit. She’d taken exactly two bites of her chicken tikka pasta before apparently deciding Indian fusion wasn’t for her, and retreating entirely into texting on her phone.

In attempt to get something out of this whole ill-conceived scheme, Luna asked, as conversationally as she could, “So who are you texting?”

The eighteen-year-old didn’t bother to look up from her phone, tapping away with both thumbs. “I’m not texting.”

“Are you playing a game then?”

“No.” She gave a little shake of her head without breaking eye contact with the screen.

“Are you… writing? On social media?”

Still showing neither emotion or interest, Pandora just said “No.”

“What are you doing then?”

The preppy girl took a sip of her mango lassi, the perfectly-manicured hand on her phone still typing away. “Nothing.”

Luna stared at the older girl, who looked completely bored despite her thumbs’ speed. More to herself than to her theoretical companion, she muttered, “Why did we think this was a good idea again?”

“I told them it was a bad idea. But Omnimind’s the executor of my trust, so if she wants me to pretend to make nice, that’s what she gets.”

“Wait, they let you keep your father’s money? After he conspired with—” Luna caught herself and lowered her voice. “After he conspired with the alien invaders and sold weapons to terrorists?”

“Yeah. It’s almost like I betrayed him and helped stop that whole mess, and they don’t want to punish me for my father’s sins. But what sort of ‘hero’ would think like that?”

“One who you personally threw into the Atlantic,” Luna muttered.

The lack of motion brought Luna’s attention back to Pandora’s face, where she’d fixed the younger girl with an affronted look. “Oh. Did you want me to apologize for that?”

When no further words were coming, Luna replied, “That would be the nice thing to do, yes.” She put on her best forced smile.

“Too bad.” Pandora went back to rapidly doing nothing on her phone.

“Grandmother Night,” Luna swore, which got Pandora to roll her eyes.

“Give it a break, Hellsing,” Pandora sneered. “You don’t need affect the whole Goth Nightmare thing. You could dress like you aren’t a spoiled tween who just read her first vampire novel.”

Luna couldn’t help but glance down at what she was wearing. Given who her parents were, there hadn’t been much point in bothering with a secret identity, so she was wearing more or less her full cape gear. In her case, this meant an actual hip-length velvet cape, plus as much black ruffle and lace as she could get away with without compromising her mobility (which was much less than she would have preferred). The utility belt was another concession to the job, having several small pouches with little odds and ends to make cape life easier. “What’s wrong with the way I dress?” The fifteen-year-old put as much menace as she could muster into the question, drawing on the fragment of Grandmother Night within her.

Pandora wasn’t impressed. She let out a cruel little giggle, then replied with a deliberately neutral, “Nothing.”

Luna picked at her own half-eaten Indian-fusion pasta, and wished—not for the first time—that being a failed avatar of a goddess of darkness had come with the ability to make people take her seriously.

The clack of Pandora’s phone being placed down on the table made her look back up, but Pandora wasn’t looking at her. Her suddenly serious eyes were darting about the ceiling. “Something just shut off all the mall security cameras.”

“Is this a technopathy thing?” Luna asked.

Crackling of magic from across the food court answered her.

Behind her, just at the edge of the Saturday afternoon crowd, a bone-thin man in what looked like a high-end wizard Halloween costume (complete with fake beard) had a hand raised above his head. Streams of scarlet, magical light flowed up from that hand into three large circles etched in the air just in front of him. The power caused the circles and the runes within them to rotate faster and faster in the air. Whatever he was summoning was already emerging from the ether, which implied an alarming amount of talent.

“If my parents are setting us up with some sort of practice crisis…” Luna began.

“They wouldn’t have turned off the cameras,” Pandora said, face serious. Her phone had disappeared into her monstrously oversized Louis Vuitton purse, and she was drawing out her crown. With her armor folded up inside it, it looked like three different crowns fused together to something unpleasantly bulky, but that would change once it unfolded. “Get ready.”

As Luna pulled out her Justice Union Communicator—an Omnimind special—and slipped it over her ear, the wizard began his villainous monologue. “You Superhero City folk really do have no sense of self preservation. Oh, well. You’ll start properly panicking as soon as my minions lay into you. What do you say boys? Are you ready to unleash bloody terror?”

The triple summoning completed, the circles of swirling scarlet magic fading away behind these new threats. The largest, directly between the crowd and the Halloween store special, was a grey-skinned cyclops. His one eye roved through crowd as he licked his cannibal lips. The one on the wizard’s far left was a sort reddish tiger with entirely too many teeth in its grinning maw.

Closest to the wizard was a minotaur, almost as tall as the cyclops, broad shouldered and covered in sleek black hair. He wore a sort of tartan kilt and nothing more. Incongruously, he held a bouquet of wild flowers that looked tiny in the bull-man’s massive hands. His eyes were shooting this way and that, and his bovine face seemed deeply suspicious of all he saw.

“Go forth, my minions,” the wizard began. “Show these mortals what it is to suffer. Let there be wailing. Let their lamentations be the music by which—”

“Death to tyrants!” His own minotaur wasn’t willing to sit through his big monologue. A backhand sent the skinny wizard flying.

The crowd immediately broke out in a series of chuckles.

“Ugh.” Pandora winced. “He is awful at this.”

“Not a lot of people can manage a triple summon,” Luna began, getting a dismissive hand wave from the older cape.

Chuckles turned to screams when the too-toothy tiger moved, lunging directly towards the crowd.

Luna moved, but the minotaur was faster, diving to catch the tiger by its hind leg, sparing a couple of polo-shirt-wearing men. The tiger coiled back on the minotaur, hissing and sweeping with its claws.

That left the cyclops, who was diving for a group of screaming middle-schoolers. “I’ll handle the one-eyed freak.” Pandora spoke with the confidence you would expect of the daughter of a supervillain. “Secure the wizard before he can make more trouble, and then help the bull.”

Luna nodded, satisfied with the plan, and rolled under the table. She caught a glimpse of Pandora, her armor unfolding around her. The African girl had started to unbutton her blouse, getting it out of the way of the unfolding aetherium. Luna wanted to warn her she really didn’t have time, but didn’t delay longer than it took to say, “Hurry.”

Luna tapped into her own powers, and slid through the shadows under the table, plunging Shadowside. The air was poisonous here, so she held her breath, glancing at the surrounding shimmering points where there was enough darkness for her to slide back to the sunlit world. Picking the one closest to where the wizard might have landed, Luna flew towards it, and then out from under the fancy “win this car” on the floor outside the food court.

A panicking crowd rushed away from the food court, thankfully thin enough that Luna wasn’t immediately worried about crush injuries. During her brief journey, someone had tripped a fire alarm, adding strobing lights and wailing to the fray. There was enough space that the crowd had left a large circle around the wizard, even with a few people rubbernecking.

The villain’s eyes were wide with shock, staring unfocused up at the ceiling. His fake beard had come partially undone, peeling a bit off one cheek. Luna slipped through the crowd to kneel next to him. She extended tendrils of shadows drawn from her utility belt to hold his wrists against the cold tile of the mall floor. He didn’t react.

Carefully reaching out, Luna ran hands over his robes where the minotaur had hit him. He moaned in pain.

“Try to stay still,” she told the supervillain. “I think several of your ribs are broken.”

He let out another whimper mostly drowned out by the alarms. Luna hadn’t exactly completed a paramedic certification, but she was guessing shock rather than a concussion. The blow had landed on his chest.

A decided change in the tenor of the screaming from the food court made Luna look up briefly. She needed to deal with this quickly. She hit the button on her Union Communicator.

“This is Disptach. I have your location. State the nature of the emergency, over.” A calm, steady woman’s voice spoke in Luna’s ear.

“Moonless. I need a police ambulance,” Luna said. “A summoner unleashed several monsters, one of which immediately broke some of his ribs. “

A scream made her look up to see the tiger jumping at a senior citizen not as fast as the rest, only for the minotaur—uninjured, but its kilt a bit worse for the wear—to tackle the striped monster clear over its intended victim. Luna couldn’t be helped but be both alarmed and impressed. “Backup requested, code yellow. Over.”

“This is Dispatch. Acknowledging request. I’m routing Azurian to your location. Please stand by. Over.”

“Moonless. Standing by. Over.” Luna told the ear piece, before hitting the mute button. “Because super heroes always stand by.” She pulled a few zip cuffs from her utility belt and slipped them onto the wizard’s wrists. She grabbed the pouch hanging from his costume belt for good measure—no telling what more tricks he might have in there. She pulled tendrils of shadow from darkness under the car, which barely held up in the mall’s light. As the tendrils started to fade, she dragged the injured wizard into a sheltered location by the car. This also made it easier for the remaining crowd to flee to safe distance. Darkness forbid they actually vacate the dangerous scene.

Then she was able to turn her full attention to the rolling tumbling mess that was a too-toothy tiger wrestling with a black-furred bull man. “Hey minotaur. Want a hand?”

“No!” he shouted back, teeth gritted against the pain of the tiger biting down hard on his forearm. “I got this.” Luna was a little surprised there was no blood with all those teeth.

From the distance, Pandora’s voice came clear over the screaming of what was left of the crowd. “Keep on the kitty. I have the cyclops under control.”

“I said I got this!” the minotaur shouted, giving the tiger all the time it needed. With a hiss and a twist, it was free, and bounding towards the shadowy heroine.

Luna cocked a smile at the toothy beast, stepping closer to the car. She waited for it to be in the air before pulling herself under the car with tendrils of shadows. For good measure, she slipped through the car’s shadow once more.

From the shadowy other world, she could tell when the cat hit the car when the shadow moved several inches.

With a smirk, she slipped back Sunside, throwing out a few tendrils to try to grab at the beast while it was stunned.

This proved to be a bit overconfident on her part, as the tiger was shaking off its impact, and the bright lights of the mall dispersed the tendrils before they could even get a hold.

Luna’s adrenaline-fueled eyes had just enough time to register just how many extra teeth the creature had before the minotaur hit it, driving it hard into the raffle car.

“I. Said. I. Got. This.” The minotaur punctuated each word with a punched that pushed both the car and the cat further across the mall. By the end of the sentence the car would need significant body work to be road worthy.

Surprisingly, the tiger didn’t look anywhere near as bad for the wear. It rolled to hiss at its attacker, and then disappeared in a rippling shimmer.

“The hells?” the minotaur took one step back.

“That’s a fey step, it can’t have gone far.” Luna than did something truly impulsive. She hopped up onto the minotaur’s back, drawing tendrils from the shadows under her cape to hold her onto his furry, well-muscled back. From this elevated vantage point, she saw where the tiger had reappeared on the mall’s upper level. “There.” She pointed. “Get to some shadows, and I can shadowslide us after it.”

The bull shot her a brief side-eyed glance. “Hold on tight,” he said, and took a running leap up towards where the cat was. He didn’t clear the gap up to the upper level, but he did make it up enough to catch on to the banister—which immediately began to bend under their combined weight.

Luna pulled herself over the struggling mintoaur, putting herself directly in front of the tiger. Only when she got there did she realize: she really didn’t want to go toe-to-toe against something with that many teeth in so brightly lit a space.

Fortunately, the beast didn’t seem eager to do much fighting of its own, after the beating it had gotten from Luna’s new friend. It opened its horrifically toothy maw to hiss at her.

Luna cocked her head at the beast. Something was wrong. Was it… fading away? Its teeth weren’t; solid, deadly, and far, far too many for the cat’s mouth. A second later Luna was blinking as all that was left of the tiger were its angry, golden eyes and its great multitude of teeth. But then even that was gone.

“What in darkness was that?” Luna asked. That was not the tell-tale shimmer of a fey step.

The minotaur fell in beside her with heavy hoof on linoleum. “Huh,” he said, horned head turning one way and then another. “Now where’d it go?”

“I… don’t know,” Luna said, looking around herself. She didn’t see any sign of the tiger. The scattered shoppers foolhardy enough to stay around to watch the brawl were likewise turning this way and that. At least until the giant shimmering blue portal opened up.

Azurian’s portals were well enough know to the population of Tranquility City that none of them reacted with alarm when a blue humanoid alien, a statuesque woman with a bow, and a golden-furred bear stepped out.

The minotaur wasn’t from Tranquility City though, and he reacted by charging the bear.

Chapter 2: Mayhem at the Mall part 2

Pandora “Smith” found it absurd that the Justice Union made her hide her surname. Yes, her father was a particularly notorious supervillain who had been a major player in a recent planetary crisis, but it wasn’t like the gifts he’d given her—the very gifts she’d used to help stop him—were anything resembling inconspicuous or anonymous.

Well, the implants in her brain that gave her command over Earth’s primitive technology only had very subtle tells. Like the fact that she got annoyed the moment the mall’s security cameras went down, or that the fire evacuation alarms all started going off a split second after she wrinkled her nose in concentration. The implants had been the work of some surgeon back in Galan. The armor, on the other hand, had been designed to her father’s full specifications, with all the lack of subtly that implied.

The seven-dimensional tech that went into it allowed it to fold into a crown, just small enough to fit into her oversized purse. Spikes of the crown unfolded, sliding down and flowing piecemeal over her form. The transformation wasn’t triggered by a button or password, but with a simple thought, projected out from the seven-dimensional hacking implants embedded directly in Pandora’s brain.

The chrome-looking aetherium metal, lit up with sleek glowing lines of pink light as it unfolded. Clever design had it sliding her braids back and holding them in place behind her head. She worked quickly, unbuttoning her blouse and slipping out of it just in time for the aetherium flowing over her. She barely had enough time to unzip her skirt and slid it out of the way. She stepped out of her sandals, and placed the heavy greaves of her armor down one after the other.

As the crowd broke out screaming, Princess Aetherium flexed her fists in the bulky gauntlets of her armor. Pandora’s clothes lay in an untidy pile at her feet. Pandora could have moved a moment earlier by more violently shedding her civvies, but she liked this outfit, and wasn’t keen to ruin it in this fight.

With the cameras still down, Pandora was forced to use nothing but her own eyes to watch as the grotesquely obese, one-eyed giant picked out a chubby middle-school girl, a straggler in a group moving without apparent parental supervision. Target in eye, he rushed towards her. He licked his lips hungrily and his fat jiggled as he lumbered over. The girl wailed, but froze long enough for the brute to grab her with his sausage-like fingers and throw her over his shoulder.

“Well. Time to be a hero.” It was why the Union had let her keep a weapon as dangerous as Princess Aetherium’s armor. As armor, it wasn’t that impressive. It wouldn’t stop any but the smallest caliber bullets. But the tractor and repulsor beams built into the gauntlets and greaves let her go mano-a-mano with heroes who were bullet proof.

A burst of repulsion targeting the ground beneath her feet shot Princes Aetherium up nearly to the roof of the food court. From here, she had a clean line on the screaming girl thrown over the giant’s shoulder. Holding out both hands, she locked a tractor beam onto the girl, and cranked the power up dangerously high for a split second.

The girl was yanked from the giant’s grip in the unexpected direction of the mid-air heroine, even as the massive force anchored to every one of Pandora’s atoms hurled her towards the lumbering brute. Pandora let the tractor to the girl drop, and anchored another directly to the giant. Freed from the tractor, the chubby civilian dropped out of Princess Aetherium’s sweeping path, hitting the ground hard enough that Pandora was sure she would get a talking to about it from Ominimind during the inevitable debrief.

The tractor beam pulling the giant’s back had him off-balanced and confused enough that he didn’t manage to defend himself against the young superheroine’s attack, but the creature was bulky enough to keep his feet. She slammed elbow-first into the back of the fat brute’s skull, momentum throwing him to the ground and sending Pandora spinning. She managed a brief tractor beam towards the ceiling so her own impact into the cheap plastic of the food court’s tables was only jarring, rather than injuring. She needed to get better at this sort of fighting when she didn’t have surrounding security cameras to help her line everything up.

Doing her best not to acknowledge the new bruises she’d definitely given herself, Pandora pushed herself up to her feet.

If she’d had the cameras to watch through, she wouldn’t have been surprised that the giant had weathered the devastating blow and managed to get to his own feet. He glared at her through hiss one eye, and pulled a sphere of what looked like black iron from the pouch in its crude, apron-like smock. He spoke in that blasphemous not-actually-words way spellcasters tended to use as he tossed it at her. With a burst of red energy, the sphere accelerated to dangerous speed.

Princess Aetherium didn’t have much time to react, barely getting a repulsor beam up in time, but thankfully hitting the sphere hurtling towards her. The force of her beam knocked her off her feet and back into the plastic ruins of the table. Gravity pulled her down enough that the sphere passed over her, shattering through the high-placed window at the end of the food court and out over the parking lot. Pandora briefly hoped the spell would keep accelerating the thing up into space, but knowing her luck, it was going to come down into somebody’s car in a manner that Omnimind was going to blame her for.

“Okay, you one-eyed witch.” Princess Aetherium pulled herself to her feet with a brief tractor to the ceiling. “You are going to—hey!”

The giant was fleeing, the same chubby middle schooler from before tucked firmly under his arm. Its was a much more secure grip on her this time; something an ugly and unwashed brute shouldn’t have been clever enough to figure out so quickly. Although a small part of Pandora took satisfaction that the giant, spell-slinging monster had taken one swing at her and realized his best option was to flee.

The obese creature wasn’t a particularly fast sprinter, but then again, neither was Princess Aetherium in her armor. Well-placed tractor and repulsor beams could let her basically fly, but in a crowded indoor space, and limited to what she could see with her own eyes, it would be slower, and way more dangerous than it needed to be. Stupid wizard and his stupid camera-disabling spell. Even those foolhardy enough to point their cell phones instead of fleeing were finding nothing but black coming through the lens.

Luna must have had an easy time with the villainous mage, because she was already moving to help the minotaur with the red tiger. Which was when the idiot minotaur shouted that he didn’t need help. “Keep on the kitty. I have the cyclops under control,” Princess Aetherium shouted as she gave chase to the one-eyed brute.

Unable to get a clear shot at the monster as he lumbered away, Princess Aetherium did her best to chase. Anchoring to parts of the building and floor, she started to gain on her target. “Get out of my way,” she shouted at a group of civilians, which had stopped panicking long enough to gawk (despite the blaring fire alarm). They barely managed to scatter in time.

The giant smashed through the glass display wall of one of those clothing stores with pretension to fashion, knocking over racks of cheap knock-offs to try to slow Princess Aetherium down. Pandora grit her teeth. Anchoring to something she outweighed as much as she did broken glass or cheap clothing was great way to mismanage momentum and badly crash. She had to land and rush through the store on foot.

Although the cameras were down, Princess Aetherium felt the pings from a door sensor in a changing room open and close, giving her a target. The girl had stopped screaming, which was definitely a bad sign.

Cheap plywood splintered under an aetherium-booted kick, revealing the one-eyed ogre, one hand clamped over the girl’s mouth, the other forcing one finger on her chubby hand towards his open mouth.

“Hey ugly,” Princess Aetherium shouted. “Fuck you!” She tractored herself forward, aiming a fist towards the brute’s single overly large eye.

The monster caught her by the wrist.

In a heartbeat, Pandora had been spun around and pinned fast by the cyclops’s strong, strong arms.

The good news was that he had to drop the civilian to do so. The bad news was the young cape was firmly in the monster’s grip, and the failsafes on her armor made it… less than ideal at this sort of close quarters fighting.

“I’d have preferred the child,” the cyclops sneered in—of all things—Russian-accented English. “But I’m sure your meat will be just as sweet once I peel you.” One sausage-like finger tried to pull at where her armor left her face exposed.

Pandora struggled briefly against the iron-hard arms holding onto her, just long enough to realize that was pointless. She pulled her face away from the probing finger, which chased its target.

“I said, fuck you!” Princess Aetherium bit onto that probing finger as hard as she could, and fired her boot-based repulsor beam down at the maximum setting.

As securely as the cyclops was holding onto her, he went flying up with her, slamming into the ceiling of the changing room with enough force that the safeguard cut power to the repulsor. The taste of blood filled her mouth as the hand in front of her moved away without all of its meat still attached.

While he was stunned, the armored heroine managed to pull herself free and stagger out of the closet of the changing room. She waited for the beast to focus its eye on her before she spat the bloody chunk of finger meat at him.

One palm towards the creature (which was mostly an empty gesture, the way her armor worked), Princess Aetherium gave an ultimatum: “You get exactly one chance to surrender.”

The one-eyed ogre spat some of his own blood out onto the floor. Then he pulled a dagger from a pouch in its smock, and began some of that spell-caster blasphemy.

Pandora swore and hit him with a repulsor beam, knocking herself back into the wall behind her. The cyclops was heavy and braced enough to barely be pushed back. In retrospect, not the smartest move, but neither was closing on an armed brute that strong. Still speaking its infernal invocation, the cyclops plunged the dagger into his own chest. The flash of red light was so bright, it forced the young heroine to turn aside. When she looked back, the cyclops was gone.

Princess Aetherium stared at the damaged, empty space; the flashing lights and blaring of the evacuation alarm not quite drowning out the sobbing of the middle-schoolgirl that had almost had a finger eaten. She let out another quiet curse.

Turning towards the sobbing girl, Pandora knelt down. “Hey kid. Thanks for the help back there.”

The girl looked up, snot tears doing her no favors in the looks department. “I-is it gone?”

“Thanks to you. You were real brave back there.” It was a completely unbelievable lie, but hopefully one that would help the girl deal with it all.

Chapter 3: Along Comes a Thief

Rorn son of Rore let the little shadow witch talk him out of smashing the bear to bits, but he was grinding his teeth about it. She had been helpful in fighting the tiger monster, and the minotaur had no idea where he was or what the rules were here.

By the time introductions had gone around, the oddly wailing lights had stopped their many-colored blinking. The blue non-human, non-bear was named Azurian. The tall, dark-haired archer woman was Artemis. And the golden bear that had just bitten him was Kalysto—whom Rorn was surprised to learn was actually a human in an animalistic war form. So he had to ask “Does the transformation affect or mind, or is she always that stupid?” which didn’t quite manage to get the fight rolling again.

Luna—the shadow witch girl—was able to intervene by getting everyone focused on the fact that the wizard (or “villain” as the humans and blue man called him) was badly injured and only minimally secured. Kalysto and Rorn managed a growled/grunted agreement that their disagreement could wait.

Unfortunately, the wizard was not where Luna and the minotaur had left him.

His beard was, peeled off as if the coward had used magic to attach it in the first place, but other than that, there was no sign of him. This seemed to agitate Luna, who kept going, “No! No, no, no, no…”

Bear-Kalysto sniffed around the spot where Luna had supposedly last seen him.

“He wasn’t much of a fighter,” the minotaur said. “I wouldn’t worry about him much.”

“Does he not require medical attention?” Azurian asked, getting a disinterested shrug from Rorn.

The blue man and the archer conferred briefly, out of ear shot, the bear lumbering menacingly between them and Rorn to make it clear this was a private conversation. Instead of pursuing it, he put a hand on the shadow witch’s shoulder. Luna jumped at the contact—which was understandable given how tiny and fragile she looked compared to the bull’s massive hand.

“Hey,” Rorn said. “You did good back there. If that coward ever dares show his face around here again, I’m sure you’ll make him regret it.”

“No, no, you don’t understand,” she protested. “I was supposed to secure him. If I had taken eight extra seconds to make sure the bindings were secure, he never would have escaped. This is all my fault.”

“Yeah, but that tiger was ready to rip those townsfolk apart. That makes you a hero in my eyes.” He smiled down at her.

She stared at him for a moment, and then mumbled thanks as she looked away. Rorn nodded, satisfied with himself.

Azurian and Artemis returned, and the woman spoke. “Kalysto, Luna, and I are going to see what happened here. We appreciate your help, Rorn, but we’d like to take you to a secure facility, just until we figure out what’s going on.”

Rorn nodded at that. “Can’t be too safe with weird magics. Whatever spell brought me here… I mean, I’m no expert in magic, but I didn’t think that was possible.” For some reason that made Artemis give a sigh of relief.

Azurian had waved a hand and opened a portal to a small room that was mostly steel, illuminated by a pair of lightly buzzing magic rods set in a recess in the ceiling. There was a padded couch, sized for humans, not minotaurs, as well as an even shorter table that had a few pamphlets and broadsides. But as Rorn couldn’t read and didn’t even recognize the letters used, they were of no use to him.

Boredom set in quickly.

The door was heavy steel, sealed tightly on all sides, and locked. Rorn was pretty sure if he put all of his strength into it, he could force it open. He would, if push really came to shove, but he didn’t want to do that unless he was sure he had to. He wasn’t sure what the rules were here.

Rorn chewed his cud, and worked through his form exercises, and chewed his cud again.

Hour after quiet, boring hour passed.

Pacing back and forth, he had just about talked himself into smashing his way out when the door finally opened with an unnatural beep.

“Hi,” an elf said as she walked in. She was small, almost like a human preteen, and was wearing the first outfit that Rorn recognized: a simple, bright green tunic. She had a matching cap, one of the long ones that came to a point between her shoulder blades. Oddly enough the points of her ears peeking out from between her black hair were noticeably paler than the fair-end-of-brown that the rest of the elf’s skin was. It seemed like the sort of thing Rorn shouldn’t comment on. “I’m Legolas Girl. What’s your name?”

Rorn tossed his head, brandishing his horns. “Took you long enough. I’m the undefeatable Rorn, son of Rore.”

“Woah.” Legolas Girl looked suitably impressed. “That’s a really cool name.”

A smile played on the minotaur’s lips. “That’s the famous war-trainer Rore son of Roak. You may have heard of him.”

“Oh, um. I’m sorry. I’ve only heard of one minotaur, and that one was called, y’ know the Minotaur. Shall we sit?”

“Sure.” The couch protested as Rorn plopped down on it. “What do you need to know?”

“Oh, just so much.” Legolas Girl perched by Rorn’s hooves, pulling out a notebook and the most compact pen he’d ever seen. “Like, where’d you come from? Do you know how you got here?”

“Well, I’m from the Alpos Mountains, like all minotaurs, but I have no idea how I got here. One minute I was gathering flowers for, um, well, for a girl; the next there was this purple light and I was in that crowd. I mean, I’ve seen warlocks summon, like, demons and stuff before, but nothing with a physical body. Certainly not a demigod like me.”

“Oh, you’re the son of a god?” Her eyes widen with an exciting gleam.

“I mean, kinda?” Rorn scratched his chin. His experiences talking to elves about gods had not usually been particularly temperate. “We’re all descendants of the children of Minos and Taura, seventeen generations of mortals descended from a pair of gods. It’s why we’re stronger, faster, and tougher than we look.”

Legolas Girl perked up to look at Rorn’s bare chest, and the very generous helping of muscles. “Wow. You must be really strong.”

Rorn gave her a smirk, and casually flexed for effect.

“Changing topics a bit, what do you eat?”

Rorn sat up at that. “Yeah, that can be a problem sometimes. We can’t eat meat, and while we can do a bit of bread and stuff like that. Milk and cheese are very important, though. Cows are a gift from the gods.”

“Hmm.” Legolas Girl tapped her tiny, tiny pen on her chin a few times. “To be perfectly clear—and I only ask this because the Minotaur I’ve heard of was infamous for his diet—you never, ever eat people, right?”

“What? No! What? What kinda of crazy story is that? If it eats people it’s a monster and must be killed. That’s, like, Minos’s first commandment.”

“You have a sacred obligation to kill monsters?” If anything the look in her eyes had gotten more excited.

“Technically, it’s ‘Suffer them not to prey upon cattle or clan,’ so, like, we don’t have to fight other cultures that do the monster worship thing, unless they try to come into the Alpos. Then they’re fucked. Excuse my language.”

“So cool,” the girl said.

She had dozens of other questions, about language, and the human, elven, and other kingdoms he’d visited with his father, teaching fighting techniques, and seemed impressed with every answer. He wasn’t sure why an elf working for a government that employed someone with as much magic as Azurian would find all this impressive, but Rorn couldn’t help but feel himself warming up to her.

But it was when she asked, “Are you hungry?” that Rorn decided that he was going to start calling her his friend.

“I haven’t eaten anything but cud since I got here. I’d eat brambles at this point.”

“What? No food! That’s cruel. Here, I brought an apple.” She rummaged around in on of the four large bags she wore about her waist. The fruit was larger than most he’d seen, if a bit bruised.

He still managed to fit the whole thing in his mouth, where it was bursting with juice. His eyes bugged at the sweetness of the thing. As soon as he’d chewed his way through enough to be sure he wasn’t going to spill anything, he said, “Wow. This is really good.”

Legolas Girl seemed surprised. “You ate the core. And the stem.” It was a bit of an odd thing for an elf to say.

“I usually eat grass,” he pointed out.

“I… hadn’t thought about that.” She blinked. “Let’s talk about happened at the mall.”

“What’s a mall?”

“The shopping center where you fought alongside Moonless and Princess Aetherium. I heard you tried to, um… kill… a wizard because he was a tyrant?”

“Hey,” Rorn snapped. “I was trying not to kill him! Wizards usually have better protection magic than that.”

“Oh.” The elf looked pleasantly surprised. “Why not? Did he not meet the criteria for ‘monster’?”

“I mean, not really. He wasn’t threatening any of my people or our cattle, or anything like that. And my dad always says to never do anything you can’t undo until you you’re sure you want to do it. Killing people especially. There are always consequences for killing people.”

“That’s really, really nice to hear!” Legolas Girl said, scribbling furiously, a big smile on her face, right until she froze. “But then why did you yell, ‘Kill all tyrants’ before hitting him?”

“It’s ‘Death to Tyrants’. It’s the Minotaur war cry. Taura said, in her last song, that we should shout that before crushing anyone who would make themselves king over us. So would-be minotaur kings know better.”

“So you’re not like, opposed to governments in general?”

“Governments are fine. Even if we don’t like what they do, unless it’s like, really vile or a threat, it’s not our place to tear them down.”

“Interesting… interesting…” The small woman continued to make notes, before turning up to send a really big smile his way. “It sounds like you’re a superhero.”

Rorn stared at her very enthusiastic face for several seconds. “A what now?”

“A superhero! They’re the coolest, using their special powers and skills to fight for truth and justice, and defend the innocent, and save the planet.”

“I guess that kinda sounds—” Rorn was interrupted by the door opening with another unnatural beep.

“Sorry to keep you waiting. We just have—” the person said as she pushed passed the heavy door, only to freeze and stare at Legolas Girl. The newcomer was a human woman, approaching middle age. She wore a whip at her belt but no other weapon. She was dressed a thick-looking checked shirt and wide-brimmed hat that suggested she might work with animals. But she had a yellow notebook very similar to the one Legolas Girl was using in her hands. Behind her was a human man dressed very similar, down to having a very similar checked pattern on his shirt.

“You!” the woman shouted, a finger pointed at Legolas Girl.

The elf’s face flashed very guilty for a moment, before putting on a big (and still guilty-looking) smile. “Doctors Hellsing, it’s so good to see you again.”

“How do you keep getting in here?” the larger woman yelled.

Rorn didn’t like the way the humans—both of them—moved aggressively towards the tiny elf. So he stood up, and stepped between them, raising his horns as high as they would go. “Do you have a problem with my friend?” He didn’t bellow, but he pitched his voice low, and it reverberated with menace in the steel chamber.

“Friend?” the man said, glancing rapidly between him and the small elf. She’d slid behind him, peering out from behind his rock-hard abs. “You know her?”

“Well enough,” the minotaur said. “I am the undefeatable Rorn, son of Rore, proud heir to Minos and Taura.”

To his surprise, Legolas Girl peeked out to say, a bit nervously, “Those are the gods of minotaurs of his world.”

The two humans’ eyes met briefly, and the woman stepped forward. “Hello, Rorn. I’m Dr Charlotte Hellsing, this is my husband, Quincy. We’re Professors with the Supernatural Studies department of Transaconic University, and we’re going to try to get you home.” She extended a hand towards him.

Rorn narrowed his eyes, but, detecting no sign that this was a trick, he took her hand in his, enveloping the tiny appendage. “Thanks, but I don’t want the help of anyone who wants to hurt my friends.”

“You’ve known him how long?” Dr. Quincy Hellsing asked the girl hiding behind Rorn.

Legolas Girl poked her head out from behind Rorn long enough to say “Twenty-six minutes” before ducking back behind him.

The man than turned his eyes back up to the towering minotaur. “You’ve known this person less than half an hour and you’re ready to fight capes for her?”

In answer, Rorn crossed his arms and loomed. To his credit, Dr. Hellsing didn’t flinch back.

“Yeah, he’s basically a superhero. See, it’s in my notes.” She held out the yellow notepad from her hiding place.

Rorn’s eyes followed his hand closely as he reached out and took the notepad. His wife repeated, “But seriously though, how did you get in here?”

Growing slightly bolder, Legolas Girl stepped part of the way out from behind Rorn. She was still far enough back that even minotaur-enhanced speed wouldn’t let the Hellsings reach her before Rorn could intervene. “The garbage chute opens directly to the dumpster, and it’s just big enough for me wedge myself on opposite sides to slide up, and the animal flaps are super easy to jimmy, and the doors from block C into this area don’t auto lock because it’s on the fire evac path, which was all was pretty easy. The hard part was doing it all in a heavy coat and anti-odor spray to not stink to high hell.”

Rorn did his best to avoid shifting his facial expression given how little of that sentence he was able to follow. Judging by the doctors’ reaction, he had probably nailed it. The woman said, “You shimmied up the garbage chute in a parka?”

Her husband added, “The anti-animal flaps were easy to jimmy?”

“Compared to the fire escape doors, really, really easy. I guess raccoons aren’t good with prybars.” She sounded like she might be smiling. “So third time I break in means I get to be in the Union, right?”

“Dakota, you are still fourteen.” Dr. Hellsing’s statement made Rorn raise an eyebrow. He was pretty sure a fourteen-year-old elf would look even younger than Legolas Girl did.

“I told you, my superhero name is Legolas Girl.”

Both Hellsings pinched the bridge of their noses and made identical annoyed “eugh” sounds. Then the woman added, “You cannot use a name that trademarked, Dakota. Especially not if you want to join the Justice Union.”

“Which you obviously do,” her husband added, flipping through Legolas Girl’s notepad, “given that you properly used Union Standard 17e for your input notes.”

“You mean I can join the Union?” There was palpable joy in her voice.

“My husband means that we’re going to have to talk to the rest of Union about what we’re going to do about you.”

“Yes!”

“Now,” the male Dr. Hellsing said, “if you’ll excuse us, we really need to ask Rorn some questions.”

“Aww…”

Rorn glanced down at the diminutive elf still halfway hiding behind him. “I’m not saying anything unless Legolas Girl gets to stay.”

“Please don’t call her that. Her name is Dakota Lyon.”

“Really?” Legolas Girl asked. When Rorn shot her a smile, she said, “Thank you so much.” Her arms didn’t quite reach all the way around Rorn’s waist as she tried to give him a hug. Rorn put one hand on her back, which was large enough to not really leave room for the second arm.

The Hellsings looked at each other for a moment and sighed.

Chapter 4: Agree to be Enemies

Luna Hellsing usually understood why her parents were so demanding of her. Cape work was dangerous. People—especially young, inexperienced people like her—died trying to do it. It was important to avoid mistakes.

But they’d been riding her for three days about how things had gone down at the mall. Nitpicking every decision to here and back, constantly asking what she could have done differently, and why she was so quick to trust Rorn. They never came out and said she’d failed. No, that would be too easy, since the most important things were that she stepped up when she was needed and no one had gotten seriously hurt. They just implied she wasn’t up to the task of being a superhero.

The worst part was that any time Luna tried to defend herself, they’d backpedal and say stuff like, “Acting decisively and trusting your gut was important, but…” before undermining everything they’ve ever taught or personally stood for.

Infuriating, that’s what it was.

Then, Wednesday afternoon, they’d texted her from their shared phone number informing her that she needed to head to the Justice Union Offices for Important Business as soon as school let out.

Luna seriously considered blowing them off. It would be really nice not to have to deal with them for an afternoon.

Only, that’s wasn’t what blowing off the Professors Hellsing would get their daughter. There’d be worried calls, and even more long lectures about Union Protocols and the importance of following directions. Nothing but more headaches.

So as soon as the school bell rang, Luna ducked under her desk to slip Shadowside, and rushed to her locker, dropping her books into the dark box directly from the shadow world. She then furiously pedaled her bike the two miles from Ensburg High School to the University Metro Station. The exertion didn’t do anything to take the edge off her mood.

While locking up her bike, her day went from bad to worse. Dakota Lyon, or as Luna thought of her, Freshman Fangirl, rolled her own bike into the lock next to hers and said, “Hi.”

Luna took a deep breath.

Her parents had drilled her in the importance of public relations. Not lashing out at fans, even when they were annoying, was part of the deal for capes. So she did her best to put on a smile and turned to the younger girl. The freshman was wearing a shirt with the Professors Hellsing’s ankh and magnifying glass icon.  “Hello Dakota, I’m kinda busy right now, is this an emergency?”

Dakota blinked, and then glanced around the metro station. “Are you not going to just wait for the train?”

“I’ve got to listen to an important mission briefing from my parents.” It was the second time she’d used this lie to avoid talking to Dakota, and she felt even less guilty about using it this time.

“Really?” Dakota asked with grating enthusiasm. “What’s the mission?”

“I don’t know.” Luna popped the first civilian-grade Bluetooth earbud into one ear. “I haven’t heard the briefing yet.”

“Okay, but—” Whatever else Dakota had to say vanished into the sweet, heavily noise-canceled music of Yo-Yo Ma.

Luna had almost enough time to get through one of the slightly mystical yogi breathing exercises her parents had taught her before the train arrived. She’d walked to one end of the platform only to have Dakota follow her like a lost kitten. Doing her best to keep to the breathing pattern, she moved back towards the other end of the platform. This time, if Dakota followed her, she gave enough space for Luna to be able to not notice.

When the train pulled in and Luna plopped into one of the seats, Dakota dropped into the seat across the aisle from her and said something that was mercifully drowned out by Yo-Yo Ma. Luna got up and found a new seat at the far end of the car, just as the train doors closed. When she glanced back towards the front of the car, Dakota was there, shoulders slumped forward. Although Luna was relieved to finally, finally have some peace, she couldn’t help but feel a little bad for treating the younger girl so rudely.

That was the danger of girls like Dakota, though. Their good intentions didn’t overrule the fact that Luna needed some Grandmother Night-damned space.

For the next two stops, Luna faded into the sounds of her favorite cellist. She fingered an imaginary violin, playing along with the soundtrack. It was going to be the closest she was going to get to actually practicing tonight.

And it did help her mood. She was much calmer when there was a heavy clunk in the seat next to her.

Luna looked from the seriously oversized Luis Vuitton bag, up to where Pandora was checking her makeup in a small compact. She looked extremely preppy in a white blouse and open pink blazer, despite the fact that she was wearing her hair in thick, very African braids. She didn’t look at Luna and didn’t say anything.

One deep, not-as-calming-as-it-was-supposed-to-be breath later, Luna popped one earbud out and said, “Don’t you have a fancy sports car?”

“I do.” Pandora snapped her compact shut and started packing it back into her bag.

“Any particular reason you’re slumming it on the train with the rest of us losers, then?”

“I promised Omnimind I’d stop driving and texting at the same time.” She held up a custom purple smartphone, screen towards Luna. It unblocked and opened up a texting app, showing a single text from a contact just labeled “The Professors” that contained the exact same “Report to the Justice Union Office Building for Important Business as soon as school lets out” text that had put Luna onto this train. Pandora had replied “Why?” but only gotten back a repeat of the phrase “Important Business.”

Luna glanced up at the disinterested-looking Pandora, and back to the phone. An alert popped up from a contact labeled “Chad 💜” that said “Babe. What’s going on?” The phone very briefly flicked over to that conversation, entered the text, “I said later,” before swiping back to the text from Luna’s parents. Pandora had not moved, not even blinked, which was supposed to be how her “Seven-Dimensional Technology Control” implants worked, but it was still weird seeing it in action.

Returning her eyes to the former supervillain, Luna asked, “How much do you want to bet that this ‘Important Business’ is more trying to force us to be friends?”

Pandora rolled her eyes. “They’re your parents, Hellsing. You tell me.” She didn’t even bother looking at Luna.

“Ugh. Why are they so obsessed with how I get along with someone who threw me into the Atlantic?”

“I don’t know; why are you so obsessed with that one fight you lost?” Pandora still didn’t bother to turn to look at Luna, instead looking with disinterest at her own phone.

Luna slumped back in her seat. She pulled out her phone and silenced Yo-Yo Ma before putting away her other earbud. “It’s literally the only thing I know about you.”

“Oh, Hellsing.” Pandora finally turned to look at her. “That’s just not true. You know I’m way richer than you, go to a way nicer school, drive a sports car, and am even less interested in spending time with you than you are with me.”

It took a deep breath, but Luna managed not to curse the older girl out. “What do you want, ‘Smith’?”

“The same thing you want, Hellsing. But, like I said earlier. They’re not my parents.” Pandora gave her a meaningful side eye.

Luna shot her a glare back, but couldn’t really say anything. It’s not like getting the Professors Hellsing to drop a cause they believed in was easy—even a cause as stupid as “our daughter should be friends with that former supervillain.” Luna really should have spent more time considering the question of how to get them to stop, instead of the more obvious, “Why do they want me to be friends with her?” Not that she had a ready answer for either.

After the next stop, Luna finally said, “It will probably be easier to just not do any of the teamwork activities and lie about it.”

That got an unimpressed snort from Pandora. “Besides being a stupid idea in general, Ominimind has constant tracking on my location. It’s not even viable short-term solution.”

“Ominimind is tracking you?”

“It’s like I used to be a supervillain, or something.” Pandora’s air of disaffected boredom never changed.

“Ouch.” Despite herself, Luna couldn’t help feeling a little sympathy for former villain. But getting back to the matter at hand, “I already tried the simply be honest and ask nicely route. Repeatedly.”

“I’m betting getting into a fight in front of them wouldn’t help.”

“No. The whole Union is big on de-escalation and conflict resolution. Too many villains have gotten too close to winning because of our side going at one another’s throats.”

“I meant I could throw you out a window.”

Luna sneered. “Let’s try to figure out a plan that won’t get you kicked out of the Union.” Silently, she added, Or get your ass kicked.

Pandora took a deep breath and let her unnatural gold eyes get lost in the distance. “I guess we have to get into a fight in the field such that things go a bit wrong.”

“I’m not letting anyone get hurt!” Luna snapped.

“Princess Aetherium would never.” Pandora fixed Luna with a deeply menacing glare. “But we could let some idiot get away, or cut things closer than they need to be. Make the fact that we’re being forced to be together everyone’s problem.”

“Hmm.” Luna rubbed her chin thoughtfully. That wasn’t a bad idea, per se. The Union did try to put people with better synergy together. But it had the potential to go horribly, horribly wrong.

But before Luna could articulate a response, a very annoying voice interjected, “Wait! Are you really Princess Aetherium?” Dakota practically buzzed with excitement.

Pandora turned her head once to take in the freshman, and then turned back to Luna. “Hellsing, what creature is this?”

“Dakota.” Luna pinched the bridge of her nose tightly. “Can you please just let us discuss our important hero business?”

“But that wasn’t what you were doing.” Dakota was still buzzing, a stupid smile on her face. Somehow, she’d managed to affix those stupid latex elf ears made for a much whiter girl while the train was in motion. “I was eavesdropping.”

“Introductions, Hellsing,” Pandora demanded.

After a groan of annoyance, Luna said. “Pandora, this is my school’s superhero fangirl freshman, Dakota Lyon. Dakota, this is Pandora, uh, Smith.” She barely managed to use the obvious pseudonym in time.

“Thank you, Hellsing.” Pandora sounded far from grateful, but when she turned back to the freshman, she said, “Lyon, fuck off.”

Dakota was, as usual, undeterred. “Is your father really the for-reals king of Galan? Are you really a princess? Uh, I mean are you really a princess, your highness?”

Pandora narrowed her eyes. “Only legitimate children get to be princesses. Bastards get hidden on the opposite sides of the world so they don’t get assassinated. Now, Lyon, fuck off before I show you why people rarely make me repeat myself.”

The younger girl in the absurd cosplay elf ears flinched, but didn’t leave. “But I need your help!”

“I don’t save people from the danger I put them in, Lyon.”

“But the Professors Hellsing texted me that I had to meet them at the Justice Union Office building—” Dakota brandished her phone, open to a text messaging app, “—but I don’t have card access to the building, so I need an escort.”

“Let me see that.” Luna tried to snatch the phone with a tendril of shadow drawn from under her cape, but it dissolved in the heavy illumination of the train. She still was able to grab Dakota’s wrist the old fashion way. The cracked, several-years-out-of-date phone showed a contact labeled “Really for Reals Professors Hellsing,” which displayed the exact same text message that had summoned Luna to the Justice Union Offices. Word for word.

Unlike Luna, Dakota had replied at least six times. The first several were variations on “Wow, really?” The fourth-ish one was a paragraph that at a quick skim boiled down to, “I super-pinky-promise, won’t let you down.” But the last message was “Wait, but how am I supposed to get into the Union Offices?” Luna’s parents had not replied.

It was almost exactly how Luna had always imagined that giving Dakota her parents’ number would have gone down. Worse, when Luna clicked on the contact info, it was her parents’ actual number. “What in Darkness?” Luna whispered under her breath.

“That’s legitimate.” Pandora spoke as if her gut was just as roiled by confusion and revulsion by the implications as Luna’s own. “Hellsing, how is that legitimate?”

“I don’t know!” Luna snapped. She pulled out her own phone and angrily typed out, “Why does Dakota Lyon have your number”

The response was uncharacteristically fast from the Professors Hellsing. Most troubling, it just said, “We’ll tell you when you get here.”

“What the hell does that mean, Hellsing?” Pandora demanded.

Luna put her face in her hands. “It means my parents are about to indulge their love of dramatic reveals.” “That’s good, right?” Dakota asked. “They wouldn’t do a dramatic reveal to you if there was something bad, right? Right? Right, Luna?”

Chapter 5: Involuntary Teamwork

Luna Hellsing was, on some level, aware she was playing right into her parents’ hands. On the other hand, she was pissed, and she knew exactly where they were.

“What the hell?” she shouted, as shadow tendrils slammed open the door to conference room C.

Her parents barely looked up from the conversation they were having with Artemis. Her dad actually went far enough to give a half-hearted wave and say “Hi sweetie” before returning to the conversation.

Luna balled her hands into fists, but had the presence of mind to not shout “Don’t ignore me.” That never went well.

Her parents were dressed in the flannels and fedoras that functioned as both civilian and cape garb for them. Diana Spanos, aka Artemis III, had her bow and quiver with her, but was in her civies: a white shirt with her bow and crescent moon arrow over her chest. Also present was Diana’s girlfriend Kalypso (which was her full, legal name), in human form: a burly blonde lesbian, whose tattered hippie shirt showed off the woman’s impressive muscles. She at least was paying attention to Luna, even if she mostly looked amused. Rounding out that side of the table was Jaswiinder Aulak, better known by her cape name Omnimind. Omnimind was using a gigantic pair of scientific-looking googles to monitor some soldering work she was doing on a second goggle gizmo and didn’t so much as look up at Luna’s outburst.

Luna almost didn’t notice the last occupant of the room until Dakota shouted “Rorn!” and ran to the corner where the minotaur was lurking. The mammoth of bovine muscle caught the tiny girl in arms. She looked like a middle-schooler next to him. “Legolas Girl!” he cried with a smile.

“Legolas Girl?” Pandora, now in full Princess Aetherium armor, said with the disdain only teenagers with trust funds could manage.

“She’s not called that.” Omnimind didn’t look up from her project.

No one had looked up. Luna grit her teeth and avoided screaming. Instead, she pulled herself up onto the table with a pair of shadow tendrils and then used them to snatch her mother’s cell phone from her hand. “I said, ‘What the hell?’”

Her mother looked up, her expression not angry but very disappointed. “The thing about a meeting, sweetie, is once everyone sits down we can start explaining what it’s about.”

“Sit down, Moonless.” Pandora used Luna’s cape name. “Because I would really like to know, ‘What the hell?’”

“Ugh!” Luna shouted. She thrust her mother’s cell phone back at her rudely with a shadow tendril as she stepped back off the table into her seat. A small part of her wished she had the courage to drop it on the table hard enough to crack its screen.

“Before we begin.” Diana/Artemis looked at Dakota. “How did you get into the building today.”

“What?” both Pandora and Luna said together.

“Oh, um,” Dakota began. Rorn had sat down in a protesting chair with the tiny, bespectacled girl in his lap. “I saw Moonless was running after school right after I got the Professors Hellsings’ text, and I kinda followed them, and asked them to let me in.”

“Hmph.” Kalypso snorted. “And I was told you were impressive at getting in.”

“Hey!” Dakota sat up straighter. “The Dove always said not to avoid doing things the easy way just because it was easy.”

“She does have you there, darling,” Diana said, getting another snort from her girlfriend.

“Anyway.” Both of Luna’s parents got up together but only her mother was speaking. “Let’s get this started.”

“There are currently two problems facing us,” Luna’s father continued. “Firstly, there’s the question of what to do about Dakota Lyon. For the benefit of our daughter and Princess Aetherium, Ms. Lyon has successfully breached this building’s security three times, and in each instance used that opportunity for havoc to conduct necessary Justice Union business with enviable efficiency.”

“Secondly,” the woman Dr. Hellsing continued, “the minotaur Rorn son of Rore has been summoned to this world from one we cannot identify, via a means that all available knowledge suggests shouldn’t work on his kind.”

“We have no idea where he’s from or how he got here,” Luna’s father clarified unnecessarily.

“These incidents are related, as one of the things Ms. Lyon did for us was earn Rorn’s trust, and then help establish these facts.”

“Since, at this point, we can be confident Ms. Lyon will continue to break into our facility to attempt to aid us, it’s clear that it’s in both our and Ms. Lyon’s interests to harness that skill and enthusiasm properly.”

“You mean I get to be a for real superhero!?” Dakota squealed, completely drowning out the curse Luna whispered.

“It means you get to be a junior member of the Justice Union,” Omnimind chipped in without looking up from whatever she was soldering together. “Not everyone who does ends up as a hero.”

“Or living,” Kalypso sneered. Her disagreement with the decision to admit Dakota to the Union was palpable.

“Or super,” Diana added. “But then again, my grandmother, my mother and I never had any meta abilities. Just the intuition and gumption to build something special.” She placed a quiver of arrows on the table.

“Are those…?” Dakota’s eyes had gotten even wider.

“Your archery skills are impressive for a girl your age, but they won’t be enough to pull your weight in a superhero team,” Diana smiled. “Which is why I made you these.”

At the mention of ‘team,” Luna knew where this was headed. “No,” she said softly in disbelief.

No one heard her. Dakota had taken in a deep breath and let out a long, loud, high pitched “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” that should have gotten her ejected from the Union then and there.

“But,” Luna’s mother said, forcibly enough to get Dakota to calm down, “it would be beyond irresponsible to send you into danger without strong back up.”

“That’s where the rest of you come in.” Her father added.

“No.” Everyone continued to ignore Luna.

“During the attack on the Ensburg Mall, the three of you demonstrated a tremendous capacity to keep people safe. We expect the four of you would be able to face the sort of dangers we expect from the Union’s Junior Teams without major incident.”

Luna ground her teeth. Pointing a finger at her parents, she shouted, “You’ve done literally nothing since the mall but tell me all the ways I could have done it better! Since when do you think we didn’t botch that?”

That finally got a reaction from people. Diana and Kalypso, glanced at Luna’s parents with raised eyebrows, and Omnimind glanced up briefly from the device she was working on. Even Rorn muttered, “That’s some piss-poor parenting.”

“Sweetie,” Luna’s mom began, “Just because you could have done better doesn’t mean you didn’t do a good job.”

Her father added, “We thought you understood that.”

After Luna’s loud “Ugh!” there was a brief silence.

Then Pandora stood up. “Ahem.” She extended a hand, and the device Omnimind was tinkering with flew across the table, suffused with the slight pink glow of her armor’s tractor beams. “I want to be completely and perfectly clear: under no circumstances will Princess Aetherium be joining a team with Moonless.”

The adults seemed taken aback, once again leaving the room in silence as Pandora moved her intense, golden-eyed gaze from one to the other.

“The illiterate minotaur and the literal child are fine, but you object being on a team with me?”

“Hey!” Rorn bellowed, Dakota looking heartbroken in his lap. “Legolas Girl isn’t a child! She’s fourteen!”

“First off, son-of-Rore.” Pandora kept her eyes on Omnimind, but held a finger towards the minotaur. “No one is going to call Lyon that. Secondly, Moonless, those two can go ten minutes without chastising me over something I’ve already apologized for.”

“When did you ever apologize for throwing me into the Atlantic!?”

A shrill whistle had everyone holding their ears. “Girls!” Kalysto sounded as agitated as Luna felt. “I think this is just as stupid an idea as you do. But the full Justice Union voted on this, so you either pretend to play along to the next quarterly meeting, or you resign from the Union in protest. So, if you want to stay in good standing, which for love of money I know you do, Ms. ‘Smith’, give the idiotic plan a shot.”

Luna and Pandora seethed, briefly looking at each other before turning aside.

“Please…” Dakota’s voice was small. “Pretty please. I-I know I won’t be able to make it without help. Help me?” Her eyes were fixed on the ground.

Someone quietly coughed. Rorn cleared his throat. “For what it’s worth, I’d be honored to fight alongside either of you again. Even if I can’t read.” The look he fixed Luna with was more accusatory than angry.

“Pandora,” Omnimind had lifted her googles off. There was something oddly maternal in the look she was fixing on the supervillain’s daughter, much like the look Luna’s own mother gave her when breaking up a fight with her brother.

Pandora seethed quietly for a moment. “Fine. I’ll work with Moonless. But this is a mistake.”

“Oh, it absolutely is,” Kalypso smirked.

“Hush.” Diana waved a hand at her.

“Great!” Luna’s father rubbed his hands together. “Now that that’s settled—”

“Wait!” Luna interrupted. “I said I wasn’t doing this.”

They had the audacity to be stunned by this. She’d literally been shouting about this since she opened the door. “Yes, sweetie.” Luna’s mother put on a very patient, explaining things to the slow child face. “But everyone here knows you’d never quit the Union over it.”

“I—” Luna actually gagged before she could get farther than that. Her parents were the unofficial spokesheros for the Union. She’d been training for and working with the Justice Union since virtually the day her parents had rescued her from the shadow cult that birthed her.

Literally what did she do with her life if she wasn’t in the Union?

“Fuck!” She stormed out of the conference room.

Chapter 6: Crowns Earned

Princess Aetherium (also known by her civilian identity Pandora ‘Smith’) watch her newly involuntarily appointed teammate Moonless (a.k.a. Luna Hellsing) storm from the conference room. On some level it was nice that she’d finally caught up to the rest of the room on what was happening here.

But mostly, the Union was throwing around clumsy strong-arm tactics. Yes, these were the tools its founders had built into the system to help deal with the massive egos that came with being a cape (or a teenager). She would make them regret using them against Princess Aetherium.

“Is she going to be okay?” Dakota—whom Princess Aetherium would never call Legolas Girl—asked.

“She’ll be fine. Luna’s been through worse.” Kalypso fixed Princess Aetherium with a sharp gaze.

“Still,” Dr. Charlotte Hellsing said, “we do need her for the next part.”

Her husband was coming to his feet. “I’ll go talk to her.”

Princess Aetherium cleared her throat as loudly as she could. “With all due respect, Doctors Hellsing, your daughter is mad at you specifically right now. I’ll handle it.”

While the married couple blinked, Artemis leaned forward. “Are you sure you should be doing this? I mean, it didn’t seem like she… liked you very much.”

“Oh, she absolutely hates me, Artemis. But I’m the only person in this room who seems to care about what she wants.”

Omnimind gave a satisfied nod, before lowering her ocular apparatus. Rorn blithered, “Hey. What’d I do?”

“Not everything’s about you, Son-of-Rore.” Princess Aetherium rolled her eyes. On the way out of the room, she sent Omnimind’s current project back to her with a small burst of her armor’s repulsor. The supergenius caught it easily.

…

Princess Aetherium found Luna Hellsing in the first place she thought to look—down a flight of stairs in the large gym for an office building. The hardened security system Omnimind had installed in the building were more than the teen hero’s hacking implants could handle, so she was forced to resort to her cell phone’s camera to peek around the corner.

Moonless was (attempting) to beat up one of the punching bags on the far wall. She was making surprisingly little noise, possible due to the shadow magic that birthed her, but the fact that she didn’t seem very strong definitely was a factor.

There were tears on her cheeks, because of course there were.

The supervillain’s daughter sighed. This was a civilian problem, not a superhero one. Given the history between Princess Aetherium and Moonless, showing up in full armor would probably be a mistake. Pandora reached up even as her armor started folding up from her feet. A moment later, she tucked the once again overly large crown into the massive purse she was required to lug everywhere to keep track of the thing.

After a moment’s contemplation, she peeled off her tights and tucked them into the purse too. This left her in the unattractive sports bra she had to wear everywhere in case of incidents like the one in the mall, and a much better-looking pair of panties that—while proud of the way she looked in them—she would have preferred Luna not get to see.

Shoulders back, and nosed turned haughtily up, Pandora strode into the gym and announced, “Your form is terrible, Hellsing.”

Luna jumped, whipped a couple of shadow tendrils towards her face (which a less observant person might not realize was to wipe her tears), and then whirled furiously towards Pandora. When the scrawny girl saw how little the newcomer was wearing, she almost immediately spun so her back was towards the older teen. “What the hell are you doing here, Pandora?”

For her part, Pandora did her best to ignore her unwilling team mate while advancing on the next punching bag. Her stance when her knuckles hit the bag would have done her boxing coach proud. “I’m here” smack “because I hate” thu-thunk “being treated” wunk “like a child.” Tha-thunk. Pandora finally raised her eyes to Luna. “And hitting the people who deserve it won’t make them think more of me.”

Understanding briefly flickered across Luna’s face. “I meant, why are you in your underwear?”

“Do you have any idea what my civilian outfit costs, Hellsing?” A series of blows strained the chain. “I’m not ruining it with sweat.” She followed up with another series of jabs. The violence felt quite satisfying after being so ignored by all the adults. “Now, hit the bags, properly, Hellsing. It will feel much better.”

Still unable to tap into the security camera’s feed, she was forced to watch her unwilling teammate out of the corner of her eye. Pandora gave the bag a  more serious of pounding, while Luna observed. With neither saying a word, the smaller girl stepped forward with a greatly improved form. Her stance was still too narrow, but at least it was better. “It works better if you yell, Hellsing,” Pandora added.

She almost met Luna’s eyes for a moment before the smaller girl flung herself at the punching bag. Her form was noticeably worse, but she was hitting much harder, even if the wordless, surprisingly shrill shriek drowned out the actual impacts. Pandora allowed her control to slip enough to join in.

It was dangerous to hit things like this; it felt entirely too good.

Luna stopped first, a few minutes after she started according to Pandora’s cell phone. Pandora was breathing heavily when she turned back to the younger girl. “Now,” she panted, “listen carefully, Hellsing. Your parents have us outmaneuvered for now. We’ve lost this battle, but no war is over until the side I’m on has won. We’re going to go back into that conference room, smile and agree to their bullshit. And then we’re going to stick to the plan, and let this insane scheme go as wrong as it can, and show them. We’ll show them all.”

Pandora realized what she’d said as soon as the words were out of her mouth, but she did her best to keep her face frozen. Luna either missed the villainous cliché, or had a better poker face than the older girl had thought and was letting it slide. Either way, Luna nodded with determination.

…

Princess Aetherium and Moonless hesitated outside the conference room, listening to the voices within. It felt good to have her armor back on.

Rorn’s deep base was easy to make out. “So, you’re not related to him?”

Dr. Quincy Hellsing was a bit harder, but Pandora had time to adjust up the sensitivity on her cell phone’s mic. “He was a fictional character. My grandfather just wanted people to think he was that sort of hero.”

A woman—Princess Aetherium wasn’t sure which—said something including the word “dramatic” that got a lot of laughs. That seemed like a good enough time for them to make their entrance. She nodded to her bitter teammate, who returned the gesture.

Moonless resisted somewhat more than was, strictly speaking, required as Princess Aetherium dragged her into the room by the shoulder of the shorter heroine’s cape. “Mission complete.” Princess Aetherium shoved Moonless into a conference chair with more force than was, strictly speaking, required. “Alright, heroes, what other idiocy do we need to attend to?”

That got a chuckle out of Kalypso, but damning looks from every other adult in the room. Princess Aetherium was again frustrated by how she could see the cameras in the room with her human eyes, but not tap into their stream to watch everyone at once.

Dr. Charlotte Hellsing cleared her throat. “We have three things to address before we break.”

Her husband continued the thought, as if it had been his own. “Firstly, because it usually requires the most thought, your team needs a name.” “All official Justice Union teams do.”

“Super friends!” Dakota Lyon practically shouted. She did, literally, jump up to her feet, only to immediately (figuratively) wither back into Rorn’s shadow when everyone in the room turned a judgmental look towards her. “Because we’re friends who are super…”

“I’m going to assign you some reading on how trademarks work,” Dr. Charlotte Hellsing said.

“We aren’t friends,” Moonless muttered, which got Rorn to object loudly. The shadow heroine did her best to ignore him.

Pandora glanced at her teammates. One was a literal child of darkness brought into this world by the Cult of Grandmother Night, infused with Her power before she’d spoken her first word. Only her rescue and adoption by the Professors Hellsing had brought her onto the side of the angels. Then there was Rorn, Son of Rore: a literal monster summoned into this world solely to cause destruction and mayhem, only to turn on his master. And then there was herself: made and molded deliberately in the image of her supervillain father.

“Scions of Shadow,” Princess Aetherium didn’t shout, but she spoke with enough force to cut through the petty bickering she’d been ignoring.

“What?” Dr. Hellsing asked.

“It applies somewhat less to Lyon,” Princess Aetherium went on, “but the rest of us either only have powers or are only in Tranquility City—or both—as a direct result of villainous schemes.”

“Oh, oh!” Dakota was back on her feet. “My parents were members of the Black Cats. They were almost a darkness-themed crime ring.”

Princess Aetherium briefly raised an eyebrow. “Do you expect me to know who that is, Lyon?”

“They were a burglary ring we broke up two, three years back,” Dr. Hellsing said.

Her husband further clarified, “They were relatively small time, and only tangentially related to Justice Union business.”

“Just barely related enough to be serving their sentence in the Spike, which, given their demonstrated ability to get into and out of places that they shouldn’t, might be for the best.”

“Fine. Villains made all of us,” Princess Aetherium continued. “Whatever villainous scheme we foiled at the mall on Sunday is what brought us together. Moonless even wields the power of Grandmother Night, Lyon brings a thief’s talents to the team, Rorn and I, and even the other girls to a lesser extent, are even the color of darkness.” She gestured to her team, all of whom had black hair, and half of whom had black skin underneath.

“Can we just… not equate African heritage with the forces of darkness?” Kalpso asked.

“You don’t get to tell me how to be Black, blondie.”

“What’s Africian?” Rorn asked, but was ignored.

“There is absolutely no reason to speak of that connection beyond this room,” Omnimind stepped in. “Pandora has outlined more than enough reasons why ‘Scions of Shadow’ applies to all of them both individually and collectively.”

“We shouldn’t be referring to my daughter as a child of darkness,” Dr. Quincy Hellsing began.

Said daughter cut him off with a laugh. “Why not? I love the name.”

The adult heroes glanced at one another nervously.

“Uh, question?” Rore raised his hand. “Does ‘scion’ not mean, like, a younger member of a noble clan in this world?”

“It just means ‘heir’, although families of wealth and status were the sort where being an heir mattered more,” Omnimind explained almost dismissively.

“Scions of Shadow.” Dakota tasted the name. “I kinda like it. I’ll need a new costume though.”

“That brings us to the next point.” Artemis III sat up with a smile. “Obviously, Dakota cannot continue to go by Legolas Girl.”

“What’s wrong with Legolas Girl?” Rorn demanded.

“Many, many things,” Pandora spoke softly, but Dakota flinched anyway.

“So, for now, we’re recording you as Fletching,” Artemis III continued as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “It’s a placeholder name, so if you think of something better, you can change it. But if you put the arrows I gave you to good use…” she smiled across at the young girl. Next to her, her burly, blonde girlfriend rolled her eyes.

“Fletching,” Dakota glanced around nervously. “I mean, it’s not as nice as Artemis, but it’s kinda cool. I guess.” She tried to smile back.

“Moving on,” Omnimind said without looking up from her tinkering. “Since you’ll very soon be plunging into crisis, you’ll need to elect a leader. The single voice that will win when there are conflicting paths and no time to debate.”

“Okay, obviously that has to be Legolas Girl,” Rorn said.

“Fletching,” Kalypso said. “We just went over this.”

“What? Why me?” Dakota seemed more than a little nervous to be put into that position.

“You’re the one who knows the protocols.” The massive minotaur glared down the table at Princess Aetherium. “And I’m not sure how much I trust the rest of these ladies.”

The armored cape sneered, but the suggestion that Dakota was the one best suited for leadership was so absurd that she didn’t have a retort ready.

“I mean, I really appreciate the thought, but you should really be the leader, Rorn.” Dakota smiled up at the giant minotaur.

“Please,” Princess Aetherium scoffed. “Son-of-Rore has no idea how this world works, and can’t even read dispatch. And you’re a child who’s scared of her own shadow, do you really think you’ll keep a clear head when a mistake will get people killed, Lyon?”

“No,” Dakota whispered looking down.

Rorn squared his shoulders and looked down at Princess Aetherium. He really was unnecessarily tall. “I do,” his voice was almost a growl.

“Then I guess it’s up to you, Moonless. I vote for myself, and give each of us one vote.” Princess Aetherium didn’t turn her head to look at the girl. But, by tapping into the un-hardened camera Omnimind was tinkering with, the technopath was able to watch Luna’s gaze move from Princess Aetherium to her parents and back.

It took a few moments of thought before Luna finally said, “I don’t see any way for this to work if Pandora isn’t calling the shots.”

“Princess Aetherium,” the technically-not-a-princess corrected.

“Oh come on,” Rorn didn’t quite yell.

“Rorn,” Luna interjected, jerking a thumb at Princess Aetherium, “can you picture her taking orders from anyone, let alone Dakota?”

The way Rorn snorted was uncomfortably like the way fiction always showed bulls snorting before a charge. “I have complete confidence in Legolas Girl—”

“Seriously, stop calling her that.”

“—but, no. I can’t see her grace being a team player.”

“Being team captain doesn’t mean she’s your boss, in general,” Dr. Quincy Hellsing said. “The Union’s not a military operation. Whenever you have time, plan things out as a team. Debate the best strategy and find consensus.”

“But if there’s not time,” his wife continued, “if there’s an emergency, you need to work together. That’s when a Team Captain comes into play.”

“Thank you, Dr. Hellsing. But I know a thing or two about making split-second decisions.” Princess Aetherium met Omnimind’s eyes across the table, and the two shared a very small set of nod. She’d had to move very quickly to ensure her father had been defeated, those few weeks ago.

“One last thing, and then we can get you home,” Dr. Charlotte Hellsing said. “Scions of Shadow’s first mission.”

“There’s only so many places around Tranquility City where a wild beast like the fey tiger can hide,” Kalypso said, “and I’ve spoken to the woodlands. It’s hiding in the Aslton Woods State Forest.”

Dakota let out a gasp. “I go hunting there every summer!” Princess Aetherium couldn’t help raise an eyebrow at that. She didn’t exactly look like the hunting type, bow not withstanding. “I mean, I did before my dad went to prision.”

“Exactly,” Artemis said. “Which makes your team the perfect choice for this mission.”