by Logan Jacobs
“You’ll be fine,” I said with a little roll of my eyes.
“Easy for you to say,” the blonde said. “You’ll probably never have to worry about that since your skin is so perfect! And I bet Miles can come up with some amazing anti-aging creams, too. Hey, do you think--”
“No,” I cut her off.
Although I did think Miles could come up with better methods for staying young than just anti-aging cream, I didn’t want to open up that can of worms again. Besides, Penumbra was a long way off from getting wrinkles.
“I wasn’t going to ask about him like that, don’t worry,” she laughed. “But yeah, alright, we should try to focus on the mission anyway.”
“We’re just a few blocks from the studio, so we should come up with some kind of plan,” I agreed. “Have you dealt with her personally before?”
I already knew the answer to that question, but it was probably enough to get her back on task and to make her stop thinking about Miles.
“Nope, not personally,” she replied. “But I know a little more about her, since I used to be a fan of her dancing when I was little.”
“Alright, tell me everything you know,” I said.
Aileen had used Bayesian probabilities along with the police report data we had to narrow down Pirouette’s most likely whereabouts to this neighborhood. And although this was the only dance studio in the area so it was really the only possible location our target could be, I thought it was a bit of an odd choice. It wasn’t one of the big dance studios of Grayville, and it was in fact a much smaller studio where mostly younger girls started to learn.
And that meant our target was going after little girls who were just getting their start as ballerinas, and that disgusted me.
“She wasn’t born with superpowers like we were,” Penumbra started as she let her long blonde hair levitate around her head. “But she kidnapped some super smart scientist guy and made him run experiments on her so she could be eternally youthful and perfectly balanced, so she could dance forever without getting tired. I guess she thought she could keep her job that way, but the dance agencies were repulsed by her.”
“Repulsed?” I asked, and I was curious about what exactly this woman had done to herself.
“Yeah, repulsed,” Penumbra said with a shudder. “What she did to herself made her like… really, really creepy to look at. She turned into a monster, and that was when she started to maim the other dancers.”
As much as the backstory behind how Pirouette had gotten her powers was interesting, this information wasn’t exactly useful to us right now.
“So what kind of abilities does she have?” I asked to direct Penumbra’s thoughts back on track. “Superspeed, super strength, fast reflexes? What does perfectly balanced mean?”
“Not super strength, but definitely superspeed,” the blonde said. “And her reflexes are top notch. She moves so fast that she can be kinda hard to see, so she evaded the Shadow Knight’s capture for years. He only managed to catch her by chance because she ended up at the same opera he was at. He caught her while she was going after the lead opera singer, and she hadn’t realized that he’d be there.”
“So we’ll need to surprise her,” I guessed.
“Maybe,” Penumbra said. “It’s pretty late, so she could be sleeping.”
“I doubt it,” I replied. “Someone that obsessive wouldn’t sleep so soon after she broke out of prison. She’s probably waiting somewhere to surprise the first class of dancers in the morning.”
“So what do we do?” The blonde rose up to hover in front of me for a moment before she touched back down on the sidewalk.
I thought about what our options were, and I decided we needed a closer look at the studio, so I signaled to my partner and moved down the block. When the studio came into sight across the street, I saw that it was pretty small, and from the blueprints Aileen had sent us, I already knew there weren’t a lot of rooms to hide in. It was mostly a single, large dance room with multiple mirrors set up, and then some smaller rooms off to the side.
I was really going to have to rely on my superhuman powers for this one.
As we studied the villainous ballerina’s hideout, I glanced at my levitating partner, and I realized that Penumbra had about the same supermodel-thin body type that most dancers tended to have. It was a pretty basic plan that I was forming, and I knew Penumbra wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t think we had a lot of other options. Since the superpowered dancer was already lying in wait for someone to enter the studio, she’d be hyper-aware the moment we tried to go in.
So we could either try to lure her outside, and that didn’t seem very likely to work, or…
“Penumbra, you’re going to need to go in as bait,” I announced.
“I have to be bait?” The color drained from the blonde’s face. “I can actually pack a punch now, so I want to do some damage!”
“A different kind of bait,” I explained quickly. “You can go in through the front door and act like you’re there to pick up dance shoes you left behind or something. I’ll go around the side and enter through there, so I can take her by surprise. If she’s as fast as you say, we’ll need to keep her distracted somehow.”
Besides, my partner had made me act as bait the last time with Clyde, and having to deal with that man’s awful flirtation attempts was way worse than this.
“But we could both just run in, and--”
“And she would escape through the back and run off into the night, and then we’d need to track her down again,” I interrupted.
“I know, but I really want to help this time,” Penumbra said with a fierce expression.
“You’ll help by going in through the front to draw her attention.” I was relieved to see that she was more than willing to try out some actual heroism this time, but we couldn’t both just charge in guns blazing. “She won’t be expecting that you have powers, and she won’t be expecting me, either. We have to catch her off guard, or she’ll just escape and run away.”
I really hoped she wouldn’t run away, because I didn’t want to have to track her down again like we’d had to do with the Golem.
“Okay,” she finally agreed, and she actually did sound a bit more confident. “But I’m not just playing distraction this time. I want to get a hit in.”
“Of course,” I said with a smile. “If she is as good of a fighter as you say, it will be a team effort.”
I was honestly really glad to see her find some confidence in herself. I knew a lot of it had to do with the fact that Miles and I were helping her to figure out how to use her powers in a more effective way, and that felt pretty good. Penumbra really wasn’t so bad, but she just needed someone to help her believe in herself.
“So I just walk in, act like I’m there to pick up some stuff I left behind or whatever, and draw her out so we can capture her,” she repeated.
“Yup,” I confirmed. “I’ll be right there, even if you don’t see me. Oh, and you’re going to need to take off the gauntlets and your mask.”
“What?” Her blue eyes widened. “Why?”
“It’ll be obvious that you’re not really a dancer,” I explained. “You can’t just walk in there wearing high tech gauntlets, or she’ll know exactly why you’re there.”
“I don’t know about this,” Penumbra replied as she glanced down at her gauntleted hands.
“You’ll be fine,” I tried to reassure her. “You can put them back on when we fight. And you can still use your other abilities, even without the gauntlets.”
“I don’t want to be useless anymore,” Penumbra sighed as she dropped her mask and her gauntlets into her utility bag. “So I’ll do it, and I guess I’ll just have to rely on my own powers for once.”
I felt proud of her for her newfound resolve, so I let the blonde have another moment to work up her nerves before she started off alone for the dance studio. I slipped across the street and into the little alley beside the studio to remain out of sight of the front doo
rs, so I wouldn’t be able to see her and make sure she actually followed through with the plan.
“Let me know when you’re in,” I whispered through our connected earpieces.
There was silence in response.
“Penumbra?” I hissed.
“Oh, yeah, sorry, I nodded, but I forgot you can’t see me anymore, but yes, okay,” she babbled back.
I bit the inside of my cheek to prevent a groan. At least she was making an attempt to be confident, but being on her own still must have made her a bit nervous, or she wouldn’t have been so talkative when we were trying to be stealthy.
“I’ll let you know when I’m in position, too,” I assured her, and then I made my way toward the side entrance to the dance studio.
I crouched down in the shadows of a dumpster next to the door, since I didn’t want to try to enter before Penumbra distracted Pirouette from her likely vigilant watch.
“Alright, I’m in position,” I whispered into my earpiece.
“Me, too,” she replied. “I’m, um… I’m going in now.”
“Act like you’re talking to yourself,” I instructed. “Like just mutter stuff about how you can’t believe you forgot to get your shoes or whatever. Don’t actually say anything to me. Act natural.”
“Okay,” she replied.
As soon as my enhanced hearing heard the glass door entrance to the dance studio open, I snapped open the lock on the side entrance and entered. I held the door so it would shut silently behind me, and then I was inside.
“Wow, um, can’t believe I forgot my shoes,” Penumbra’s muttered voice echoed oddly through my earpiece as well as the dark halls of the dance studio. “I’m just so clumsy sometimes, geez…”
It was honestly terrible acting, but I hoped it would do the job. At the very least, I hoped that it made the blonde woman’s presence in the dance studio obvious enough to draw attention away from me.
Now I just had to figure out how to get to the main practice area from here.
I glanced around my surroundings to get my bearings and mentally connect the hallways together with what I already knew from the blueprints. The hallway stretched forward into darkness, and several wooden doors lined the sides. The entire studio was built out of typical plaster with wooden accents and floors, and even the hallways had mirrors placed intermittently along the walls.
It made the entire hallway seem larger than it really was, and in the dark, it was disorienting.
I kept myself low to the ground and slunk along the hallway. My own dark figure in the mirror was enough to send a jolt of surprise through my heart, but I gradually grew used to my dim reflection.
“Hmm, wherever could my shoes be? I just don’t know,” Penumbra’s terrible acting echoed again.
That surprised me because I thought for sure that she would have encountered Pirouette by now, and I didn’t know what the old woman could be waiting for. There was no way that we had the wrong location, since Aileen had specific, slowed-down footage of the super-enhanced dancer entering the building hours ago, so she had to be here somewhere.
Maybe she was sleeping, after all.
“Wow, um, super weird, I, um, I really don’t, um, know where I put my shoes,” Penumbra stammered.
The echo of her voice this time resounded even louder around me, and I guessed that the main studio must be on the other side of this wall, so now all I needed to do was wait near the right entrance.
Still, something about all this was making me uneasy. It felt as though there were eyes on my back, and I knew that Pirouette must be in here somewhere. It made me want to scrap our entire plan and just start shooting up the place, but I didn’t want to risk the possibility that the dancer might escape.
But where was she?
Suddenly, the floor creaked from somewhere around me, and I noticed one of the doors on the other side of the hallway had been left open.
I couldn’t see anything through the crack in the door, but I did hear a rustle of movement and fabric. I didn’t think there were any windows open, so even if it was a dressing room, there shouldn’t have been anything to make the fabric move on its own.
I should have had Penumbra turn the lights on when she entered through the front door, but I hadn’t expected that Pirouette would be smart enough to continue to lie in wait rather than lunge out immediately.
I kept myself braced and low to the ground as my heart pounded in my chest, but the darkness felt heavy around me, and each time I turned my head, I caught a glimpse of movement in the surrounding mirrors.
Enough was enough. I was only scaring myself.
In a single fluid motion, I sprang toward the door to the dressing room and flung it open. I flicked the lightswitch and winced against the sudden influx of light in the room, but Miles’ contacts adjusted quickly in my eyes so I could see that the rustle of fabric had been nothing but a rack of performance outfits that had been placed in front of the blowing air conditioner.
There was absolutely no sign of anyone else in the room. The only other thing I could see was my stunned reflection in the dressing room’s mirror.
I blinked at the mirror, and the reflection shifted into a strange, human-like shape that loomed up behind me.
I watched as the figure swung a baseball bat through the air toward the back of my head, but I dodged off to the side, rolled back up to my feet further inside the dressing room, and finally met our target face to face.
The skin of Pirouette’s face was pulled disturbingly taut to remove any lines, and it left her eyes and red-stained mouth stretched wide enough for me to see the underside of her eyelids. Her skin was bleached pale and ghostly, like a porcelain doll come to life. The outfit she wore was a typical ballerina tutu, though it had clearly seen better days. The yellowed-pink made it look almost rotted on her skeletal, rail-thin body as she held herself up on the very tips of her toes.
There was a crazed look in her bloodshot eyes, and a shrill giggle escaped her throat as she raised the bat up again.
I scrambled to get out of the way, but she didn’t swing it immediately at me. Instead, her head cocked to the side at an angle that shouldn’t have been possible without breaking her neck. She stared at me like that for a moment, and I was surprised enough that I just stared back at her until suddenly, she just disappeared.
I caught a glimpse of a door opening through one of the mirror reflections in the dressing room, but it had been almost too quick for me to see. I darted into the hallway and thought I saw another door open and shut in the blink of an eye, but the mirrors in the hall were all so disorienting that I wasn’t sure exactly which door our target had gone through.
I picked the one that opened into the main studio and nearly ripped it off its hinges, and as soon as I was inside, I flipped on the light switch by the door. I had just enough time to see Penumbra’s thin frame in the middle of the studio before the lights in the room suddenly went out just as quickly as they’d come on. When I tried the light switch again, nothing happened, so I realized that Pirouette must have gone into the maintenance room to shut off all power to the dance studio.
At least that meant that Pirouette wasn’t planning to run away from us, but instead, she wanted to make us her new victims.
“Penumbra?” I hissed.
There was a shriek right next to me, followed by a stumble of awkward footsteps. I caught her before she could float too far away and held my hand over her mouth to silence her screams.
“It’s me,” I whispered as I let go of her mouth. “Pirouette knows we’re here. You were right-- she’s too fast even for me. We need to stay together.”
“You didn’t have to scare me like that,” she hissed back. “What do we do?”
I didn’t have an answer. The dance studio was dark, and although the open area of the main studio was less claustrophobic than the hallway had been, it was still surrounded by mirrors on three sides, so it was disorienting in its own way.
“Stay close to me,” I said, as
the two of us began to circle the room back-to-back. “Watch the mirrors and watch my back.”
“But I can’t see anything,” she replied.
“Just do your best,” I muttered.
Thanks to Miles’ contact lenses, my vision had already adjusted to the pitch black darkness of the studio, but we would have to get some lenses for Penumbra too so she could see as well as I did on our next mission. Still, even with the specialized lenses, it was difficult to see because of all the mirrors. I flinched at every movement and shadow I saw, but none of them were ever Pirouette.
I wondered if she’d just shut down the power in an attempt to keep us here and had already escaped out the back. I didn’t think she was clever enough for that, and I also didn’t really think that she could resist maiming two beautiful women trapped inside the studio. I hadn’t revealed any of my superpowers beyond basic reflexes, and I’d kept Penumbra from showing off that she could levitate.
We could still keep our advantage of surprise against her, if only she would show herself.
“Oh, you’re both so beautiful,” a soft voice rang out around us. “Such lovely legs. It’d be a terrible shame if something happened to them.”
We circled together around the dance studio, braced and ready for Pirouette to show herself. Each pale flicker of movement within the mirrors made me tense, but I couldn’t figure out where the voice was coming from, so I would just have to be patient.
“Such soft, porcelain skin,” the voice whispered, and this time, it sounded like it came from right beside my ear.
“There she is!” Penumbra screamed.
The blonde superheroine shot herself into the air as I dodged to the side and rolled to keep my balance, just as I heard a crunch of metal on wood from the baseball bat that Pirouette slammed into the studio floor where we had both just been standing.
The villainous ballerina giggled again, and the sound surrounded us on all sides.
Still, she had shown herself, so I knew where she was now. I darted across the floor to strike a punch where I assumed she’d be, but the dancer was too fast for me to catch her. Instead, my fist slammed directly into one of the mirrors, but the shattered glass bounced harmlessly off of my gauntlets.