Wearing the Cape 6: Team-Ups and Crossovers

by Marion G. Harmon

  “Yes, I do—and beyond all reason or wish to reason otherwise! I burn for you—do you not feel the same?” Hope lunges again, Kitsune ducks aside.

  “She is enchanted, fox! Tis one of my lord’s old tricks, and now you are your lady’s prey! But why run, if she be your lady?”

  Kitsune skips away from another lunge.

  “Neither of us belongs to the other, yet! Not in her heart, though I grow fond of—hey! Hands!”

  Hope laughs. “Your fondness is enough, whoever you are! Stand still!”

  “Hardly! I can’t believe I say this—you would not respect me in the morning!”

  Exit Kitsune, fleeing.

  “Wait! Come back! Stay and I will give you all!

  There is no sound but crickets. Hope slumps.

  “Isn’t that just—”

  “Like a man?”

  “Yes! But, what are you? And what is he?”

  “I am a humble fairy maid, mistress, lady-in-waiting in my lady’s court. He is not what he seems, which is your fortune, for he wears the face and goatish form of my king’s self-loving clown and jester, Puck.”

  “Well whomever he is, he is mine and I’ll not stay to let him get away!”

  Exit Hope, pursuing Kitsune. Mustardseed watches her go.

  “So the rabbit chases after the fox, the god flees the pursuing nymph! All turns and the hunter becomes the hunted! Well that’s a merry sight—but this trick, even misplayed, will not please my lady when reported.”

  Exit Mustardseed.

  Scene 4: elsewhere in the woods.

  Enter Puck, complaining.

  “Fly here, hobgoblin, and take this unwelcome message! Go there, goblin, and fetch me what I have just now wished for. Keep watch lackey, so that my sport is undisturbed! And so I am Oberon’s fetch-and-carry boy, his mute sentry when I could carry all the jest myself! Was there ever anything so tedious as this pointless standing watch?”

  Enter Hope.

  “I have found you, my love! Why did you fly from me?”

  “Fly from you? I? Why, I have never before seen you but as a snoring lump upon the forest moss!”

  “Not so, for you did wake me—the leaf-green wonder of your eyes the first that my eyes saw! First you run, and now you dissemble? Why, when you are all my world and all my thought?”

  “Woke you— What trick is this?”

  “No trick but love! And now I have my love!” Hope embraces a stunned Puck.

  “Wait— No— Madwoman you are enchanted from your mind and not for me! Gods but your arms are vises, a very serpent’s winding embrace—but I am not your prey! Stop kissing me, woman!”

  “Never!”

  Enter Oberon

  “Foul treason! So the lackey would be the lord and take the prize for himself? Most foul deceit, to warn me away and open her bespelled eyes to look upon you first. Be sure I’ll pay thee back for this—uk!”

  Hope impatiently pushes him back, one arm still around Puck. Oberon flies backward, rebounding from an ancient oak to land in the moss.

  “’Beware, sire! She could teach the martial amazon to strike, and her strength rivals mighty Hercules!”

  “And I will strike again, if you threaten my dearest love again!”

  “I am not— No, sire! I stood faithful watch, and none passed by me while you waited for the maid to wake! She lies to claim I captured her first sight!” Puck wrests his arm away from a shocked and tearful Hope.

  Enter Kitsune, still in form of Puck.

  “My lady would never lie, but surely can be deceived. I shook you from your dreams, Hope, but wore this face to put to flight this quondam king, this petty monarch of whims and fancies.”

  Hope turns about, amazed. “Two? And one who knows me?”

  “Hardly two, for I am very singular. And although my face and form are indeed as changeable as the wind, you know me also. I am your fox.”

  Kitsune transforms.

  “Yoshi! My love is my affianced?” Hope steps forward, Kitsune retreats.

  “Affianced, yes. Love, mayhap—but not by whatever base enchantment holds you! Think, Hope! When did you first love me?”

  “When I awoke to find you!”

  “And did you ever think so fondly of me before waking in these woods?”

  “I—I—love comes suddenly, between one breath and the next!”

  “Fascination, yes. Enchantment, yes, but not love, which grows upon a thousand thoughts, a myriad of looks, acts, and evidences until it blooms. Love can grow where fascination first draws the eye, if the object of your attention be worthy, but so quickly and untended to? No.”

  “Then I loved you not knowing!”

  “And yet loved not knowing it was me, till now?”

  “I— But I burn! And—know not what to think! If this hot desire is compelled—and I see that it must be—then from whence did it come?”

  Enter Titania and her court upon the end of Hope’s speech.

  “Who lit this fire in your brain? That intelligence I can provide. Who else but my lord and husband, who stands convicted by his wrath at his knave’s perceived betrayal? A pair of clownish jesters, butted by their own jest to make you drunk upon false love. What do you say, husband? Speak.”

  “Be silent, shrew—and do not question your lord’s will!”

  “So this broil is your will, then?” Titania sits, arranging her robes. “I wait to see how you will unwind it. Good fox! What is your claim, here?”

  Kitsune bows.

  “My claim here is but to see that my lady leaves these woods as freely as she entered them, her mind her own again.”

  “A worthy claim, plainly stated. My lord, what would you recommend?”

  “Claim! From a petty fox-spirit who so insults me! I’ll make his pelt my, my…”

  Hope steps in front of Kitsune. Titania rises to take her hand.

  “Some item of apparel? No doubt you could, husband, but then what of his kin? For a fox has many kin, and I am minded to consider that this fox is the sometime-servant of much more powerful spirits besides, the member of another court in a wider realm than ours. And since my summons brought him here, responsibility for what e’re befalls him is surely mine.”

  “Then—to repay the insult, I’ll have whatever claim he holds in the lady!”

  “Fox? Do you relinquish your claim?”

  “I’ll tear his—! Gracious queen, I cannot. My claim is part and parcel with my lady’s claim on me.”

  “And the nature of these claims?”

  “A promised marriage for promised service, majesty.”

  “My Lord Oberon? Would you take the maiden’s claim of service with the fox’s claim upon her? A sovereign spirit in service to a mortal maid?”

  “Sovereign Oberon to serve a mortal? Nay—not before the day’s golden orb shines at midnight and the lunar sphere marks the heated noontime hour!”

  “Then I think that you are quits, his words to you just recompense for the wrenches his lady has been given here, in our woods, our sovereign responsibility. Do you both agree? And I will undo what has been done—I am sure that my lord carries the poison which is its own timely remedy?”

  Titania stands and holds out her hand. Oberon sourly deposits the purple flower in her palm.

  “Come here, child. You can trust me.”

  Kitsune nods, and Hope steps forward. Titania bends, touching the flower to her blinking eyes, and chants.

  “Fancy bound, turned around. Now be free, again see—be as you were wont to be. Well, child? Are you well?”

  “I— Oh, no! No! Did I— Did I really chase—?”

  “Sparing your modesty, yes you did. The juice of love-in-idleness intoxicates as it does deceive, therefor blame it and ease your maiden blushes. And now, fairies! Skip hence! My lord, let us leave these two to find their own ways home. You and I have much to discuss, prively.”

  Exit Titania, Oberon, Puck, and all the fairy court.

  “Well, my dear.” Kitsune takes Hope
’s hand. “Are you going to tell me how you came to be lost in these woods?”

  “Yes, when I do know myself! But how did you come here? And can you take us home?”

  “Alas, you cannot travel the worlds as I do, though now that I know you wander I will certainly seek your friends—who I am certain seek for you.

  “Then do but show me—I mean just show me—where I slept, and I’ll take myself away from—get out of—these woods!”

  Exit Hope and Kitsune together.

  DSA Field Report: Agent Smith.

  Boss, I hope you know what you’re doing. Per your instructions, I allowed the Japanese National who is not a person-of-interest access to the site. He walked off into thin air. The site security detail is reporting hot-spots and isolated breezes all over the warehouse floor at intermittent times. They’ve also found a spot where you get a hell of a fine echo on any loud noise, for no apparent reason. They’re starting to call the site Spook Watch.

  Also, the Young Sentinels team on the other side is sending us back reports once a day, news and library downloads, stuff like that. Boss, SP1 is one freaky place, and since I began working for Uncle Sam before The Event, that’s saying something. I remember what normal was like, and SP1 makes our world normal by comparison. To give you just one example, over there, if you leave out milk and cookies for Santa Claus he’ll show up and leave you a present if you’ve been good or coal if you’ve been bad. He’s far from the only Omega Class-level personification over there, and they recently had a superhero civil-war in which some of the participants displayed Ultra Class-level powers. Boss, I don’t think we should be sending anyone else into that weirdness. I think we should pull everyone back and seal and bury the site before something comes crawling out of it at us.

  Odysseus Case File 1-D265 B.

  Grimworld

  by Marion G. Harmon

  “Once, just once, I’d like to be able to do it the easy way. Would that be cheating or something?”

  Hope Corrigan

  I came out of the whirling flurry of snow high over nighttime Chicago.

  “Shell?” No virtual quantum-ghost popped up to berate me, and my heady excitement chilled. For one wild moment, I’d hoped this was it.

  So we’re not home yet. Pull it together, this is a lot better than it could have been and at least I’m in Chicago again.

  But why Chicago, this time? When I started jumping I’d imagined that even an artifact powered by whimsical Christmas magic would at least have the decency to jump me to the same topographical point in the new reality as in the old, the same latitude and longitude (I’d fully expected to be flying back from the North Pole on my first jump). But no, so far travel by magic snow globe had turned out to be disturbingly intentional. It kept sending me where the action was—rather like a fictional Time Lord’s time-traveling police call box (and if I ever saw that blue box I was absolutely knocking on the door and asking for a ride).

  So until I jumped home, every jump was going to be “interesting.” This time I’d spun the globe to leave a shattered and burned San Francisco and jumped halfway across the country.

  I whispered prayerful thanks that at least this Chicago wasn’t a burned-out ruin. But if I wasn’t home, and my jumps weren’t random, then why was I here?

  And why was I me?

  I’d finished this jump still in costume and carrying my stuff, so I hadn’t “jumped into” a this-reality version of myself again. I didn’t exist here. But far below me the Dome shone pearly white in the middle of its landscaped park—which meant I’d jumped into a close enough parallel that the Sentinels did. And that was…worrying. If the Sentinels were here, some version of me should be too, but if that were true then I wouldn’t be me now.

  Think it through, Hope. That was Blackstone’s voice in my head. No steps until you know what’s under your feet.

  I hung in the sky and reviewed what I knew.

  And I knew a lot more than I had when I’d started jumping. My second snow globe jump had been pretty quiet, at least once I’d finished helping a New York homicide detective and her tag-along writer friend with their investigation (it hadn’t worried me that the writer had figured out I was a superhero—since super-powered types didn’t exist there nobody’d believe him). Before turning the globe again, I’d sat down in a private carrel in the New York Public Library to read everything about extrarealities that Faith had dumped into the epad she’d given me.

  Which had been a lot. Some of it seriously weird.

  Either extrareality science was more advanced in Faith’s reality or I hadn’t been paying enough attention to it in mine, but they’d divided all realities into two classifications: Stage I Realities and Stage II Realities. Stage I Realities were the parallels rising from the original creation of the universe—the ones like Faith’s that were just like mine but with divergent histories in the recent or distant past. Stage II Realities were “contingent realities,” and in theory their existence was dependent on the existence of the Stage I Realities. They got weird.

  Stage II Realities seemed to derive from and get shaped by Stage I Realities, but nobody was willing to bet that it might not be the other way around—their existence might be inspiring their fictionalization by people in Stage I Realities instead. Whichever, the only example I’d known before had been Oz, but now I had personal experience with two—the Santa’s Village at the North Pole and the pocket reality inhabited by the fairy folk of Will Shakespeare’s most popular play. (And the only reason I’d gotten out of that one safely was having a Japanese fairy tale of my own on my side.)

  Don’t think about Yoshi—Kitsune— Whatever. Don’t!

  If all that wasn’t weird enough, the truly weird part was the most accepted explanation of why I couldn’t jump physically into realities where I had analogues of myself already. Where I merged.

  The theory was that I wasn’t just me, the pale blonde pixie I saw in the mirror every morning when I brushed my teeth. Nope, I was an iteration of an omnisoul, co-existent across who knew how many realities, brushing my teeth in lots of places. The bit that I thought of as me was just one “instantiation of awareness” in the bigger Me.

  All Hopes were Hope, separate in thought and action, one in existence—like the Holy Trinity but without the absolute awareness and omnipresence, and two instantiations of the same omnisoul couldn’t exist coequally in the same reality. So when I jumped into a reality that I already existed in my resident instantiation went to sleep while we “overlapped.” If I’d stayed long enough in Faith’s reality, maybe the me there would have “woken up” and we’d have merged into one Hope that had both sets of memories.

  Maybe.

  It all felt vaguely blasphemous; it was pretty easy to wrap my mind around the idea of many Hopes, but the idea that all of us were one big HOPE was just bizarre. I also didn’t understand why we had to merge—I personally knew breakthroughs that had one mind and am overabundance of bodies—but apparently it explained the observed phenomena better than any other theory.

  So let’s find out what that means for me here.

  Staying up in the sky thinking about it wasn’t going to tell me anything I needed to know. I’d popped in below the thin cloud layer, and since the moonlit night showed no capes in the sky to explain myself to, I just dropped. There were plenty of dark rooftops to land and change on.

  Super-duper hearing saved my life—the rocket that rose to meet me wasn’t supersonic and its climbing roar gave me enough warning to go into twisting evasion even before I spotted its flaring burn below and behind me. It followed as I punched into a hard spiral climb, which meant that it had to be laser guided from a launcher. Radio controlled? Or wire? Flipping over into an arcing dive showed me where the rocket’s initial back-blast had cooked a few feet of rooftop into glowing visibility in my infrared sight, and two body temperature human lightbulbs told me it was a two-man fire team.

  Cutting the angle, I put the rocket behind me and dropped hard for their r
oof as I counted.

  One…two…three— The rocket detonated harmlessly thirty feet behind my boots—they weren’t going to let it follow me back to them—and I cut away and down to drop below my shooter’s rooftop level. Leveling off, I turned hard and punched the speed to race through Chicago’s canyons to put four blocks of taller buildings between me and them.

  What the heck?

  Really—what the heck was that? I ignored my hammering heartbeat, tried to tune out the traffic below as I searched for a lower and overshadowed building to drop my bag on. Finding one, an older brownstone between two newer and much higher business towers, I dropped into the deeper shadows of the building’s big air conditioning units. Under the cover of the heat-exhausts, I’d be invisible even to another Atlas-Type.

  So, what was that? Catching movement, I looked up in time to see Watchman cutting fast across the sky towards the tower from which I’d been shot at, Variforce tethered to him by his glowing fields. Okay, it looked like my Sentinels were here. Had that been Paladins on the roof? Had they been lying in wait for just any unsuspecting flyer?

  The beating of helicopter props split the night as a CPD bird followed in Watchman and Variforce’ wake, and then another. I had to move; they might be prepping to cast a wide search net over Chicago’s rooftops, and while I felt better that my team was here I still had way too many questions to pop up and say hi yet.

  I changed fast. The skirted body of my costume, rolled tightly and wrapped in my cape, fit snuggly into my bag with my mask, gloves, and boots. My white costume tights worked with the fashionable black and white skirt and button-down top that Faith had picked for me. Slipping on the matching street loafers, I was ready to walk down Michigan Avenue without attracting friendly or hostile attention.