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I don’t know what it is about supervillains and their fixations. There was a paper in a major psychology journal that got forwarded around Champions headquarters about the strange obsessions that seemed to be associated with Malign Hypercognition Disorder. Everyone agreed that it was definitely a thing, but none of us found the paper’s argument—something about “aesthetic self-soothing ritual”—particularly convincing.
But there’s obviously something to it, otherwise why would Sensei have sent robot ninjas to attack a bank in downtown Manhattan when he could’ve just sent plain old robots.
“Ninjas? Really?” I say aloud as my threat-assessment subprocessors begin flagging targets with priority levels.
“Your culture does have a history of being fascinated by the Orient,” notes Elphin as she flits above me, ducking gracefully through the bank’s open front doors. She hurls her spear through a robo-ninja’s torso as it comes somersaulting over the counter toward her. I’m always shocked by how hard she can throw that thing. It doesn’t seem like those thin wrists should be able to transmit that much kinetic energy, but the evidence is right there in twitching-mechanical-carcass form. One less robo-ninja. God, she’s amazing.
I have a new custom-made long-barrel .50 caliber automatic pistol that Blackwolf designed for me. It was a Christmas present. Two rounds turn a robo-ninja’s head into a tangle of expensive-looking scrap. Could Sensei not afford good steel plating? Maybe that’s why he’s robbing a bank. For a moment I feel almost bad about the logistical challenges that tend to plague early-career supervillains, but then I remember, wait, they’re villains.
It’s turned out we work pretty well together, Elphin and I. We fall into classic point and mark roles; she’s on point, going first, and I hang back, either way back with a sniper rifle, or a few meters behind, keeping threats off her back and hitting targets of opportunity as she tears up the front lines. She’s fast, obviously, but Elphin’s fighting style is also weird—aerial, sudden, vicious. It’s not a human martial art. It wouldn’t be, of course. You’d think the last piece of the elflands’ arts left in the human world be, I don’t know, a singing oak tree or something, but no: it’s a stone-cold badass.
Elphin’s fought her way through to the vault, laying waste to a half-dozen robo-ninjas in the process. They have fabric clothes on over their metal bodies; one’s mask is torn, and beneath it I can see a stylized female face, somewhere between a mannequin and a comic book character. Sexy robot ninjas? Jesus. This Sensei guy is a piece of work.
“Fatale!” I hear Elphin’s crystalline voice. The last two ninjas have somehow gotten past her and they’re rushing me, hopping off walls and vaulting office furniture. One has a sack full of something; time literally slows down as my tactical analysis subsystems crank through the decision tree. Infrared and ultrasonic vision combine to give me a look at the contents of the bag. Some jewelry and a stack of large sheets of paper. Probably bearer bonds. This is what they came for.
It’s no trouble at all to mark the bot carrying the loot and take its head off with a couple of rounds, following that with a few more shots to center mass. What I’m not expecting is what happens next: As it falls, it tosses the sack to the other ninja, which leaps up, clasps the sack to its chest, and splits in half. From within the thing springs a quadrotor drone that’s somehow wrapped around the sack, and its rotors buzz to life. It begins to rise into the air with alarming speed. I’m desperate to get the thing, but as I’m drawing a bead on the drone my tactical subprocessor slaps me across the face with a Level 0 Interrupt, which it only does if I’m in immediate mortal peril. That’s when I notice the beeping from the discarded remainder of the ninja torso.
Oops. The tactical subprocessor shrieks at me to assume a semi-fetal curl designed to minimize exposure. I ignore this; the tactical subprocessor is an emotionally stunted solipsist, and never gets invited to parties. Instead, I turn and leap in front of Elphin, hoping to shield her from the worst of the blast. The only question now is how much explosive Sensei was able to pack into the chassis of his robo-ninja. The threat analysis subprocessor, having nothing better to do, goes to work on an estimate of how bad the momentary overpressure is going to be. It seems high, but what do I know? I have just enough time to hope Sensei is a better roboticist than he is a high-energy chemist.
My metal half takes the brunt of the blast, but as the shockwave ripples through me and hits what flesh remains in my body, I can tell I’m going to be hurting tomorrow. I’m alive, though. That’s something.
I don’t quite black out, but I do collapse over Elphin. Damage reports scroll up across my vision. “Are you okay?” I manage.
“Yes,” she says quietly. “My thanks.”
Even discounting her centuries of ascetic solitude carrying out Titania’s geas, Elphin had had several decades in which to observe the drama of human romantic ritual. She was not, for the most part, impressed.
And not for the obvious reasons. People tended to assume she was chilly, or imperious, or alien. The last one was true, but the first two were misapprehensions on their part. The problem with human romance, so far as Elphin was concerned, was that it was a mess. If there were rules at all, the rules differed from human to human and could change without notice. This was madness. After a few bad experiences—a too-public dalliance with a rock star who tiresomely fancied himself a modern Thomas-the-Rhymer type, and a quiet relationship with Mr. Mystic than went awry after a bitter series of arguments over the true nature of magic—Elphin had not so much sworn off romance as she had moved her standards off the terrestrial plane of existence.
Which was what made it so shocking when Fatale asked her out.
“I beg your pardon?” said Elphin in a calm voice. She was taking her tea in the dining area adjacent to the big workout room in the Champions’ headquarters. It had good light; floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park, and Elphin preferred good, natural light.
“I was, um, wondering if you’d like to get dinner with me.”
“I’ll be happy to join you in the dining hall, yes.”
Fatale frowned. The movements of her face were odd, owing to their dual flesh/metal nature, but not unexpressive. And of course she was enormous, and therefore, it seemed, capable of being enormously awkward.
“No, I mean—would you like to get dinner with me in the city? You know… go out.”
“Ah. Er.” Elphin looked askance. “I suppose dinner with a colleague isn’t such an unusual thing.”
“I’m not—I don’t mean as a—” It was strange to see Fatale flustered. Her mien on the field of combat was always one of cold efficiency, an economy of movement that only Blackwolf even approached. At the moment, she seemed not to know where to put her hands.
Elphin was charmed despite herself. “I know what you meant. Yes. I will go to dinner with you.”
“Oh! Well, um… great! Thanks.” Fatale smiled a big smile—Elphin had never seen that before—and strode out of the dining hall, a jaunty giantess.
Minutes later, Elphin received a text message on her Champions-issue smartphone.
> Forgot to tell you when & where! 7PM Friday, meet in the garage, we’re going to Terroir in Brooklyn.
Elphin had never much understood what it was that triggered humans’ senses of awkwardness or incongruity, but as they rumbled over the Manhattan Bridge in the one of the Champions’ unmarked, heavily-modified Humvees, she could tell something about this particular situation was making Fatale uncomfortable.
“Sorry we have to drive,” Fatale finally said.
“Why would that require an apology?”
“Just because, you know… you could fly.”
“I could, but it seems a strange state of affairs for me to fly and you to drive when our destination is the same. And neither of us would have the pleasure of the other’s company on the way.”
“I just assumed you wouldn’t be comfortable with all the, uh… iron.”
Elphin shrugged, her wings shifting in the fairy wing-shaped cutouts of the custom passenger’s seat. “There is iron everywhere in your world. By now I am used to it.”
“I guess you’d have to be,” Fatale allowed.
The balance of the drive passed in a companionable silence.
They arrived at their destination just as the sun was setting, driving down a quiet street filled with old brownstone houses. Elphin was amused despite herself at the dark threats Fatale muttered during the always-frustrating dance of trying to find street parking in Brooklyn.
“I don’t remember much, but I’m pretty sure I used to fit inside a normal-sized car,” grumbled Fatale as she brought the Humvee to a stop in preparation for what Elphin was fairly sure was called “parallel-parking.” “I bet Blackwolf doesn’t have this problem.” Fatale frowned as she looked back over her shoulder and levered the vehicle into reverse.
“Blackwolf has other problems.”
Fatale grunted, then shook her head, seeming to rid herself of her irritation like a horse shaking off a fly. And despite her complaints, she eased the Humvee back into the barely-large-enough spot with effortless precision.
“Rainbow Triumph said this place was good. I had to look the name up in the dictionary.”
They’d been shown to a cozy dining room in the back of the restaurant. The host didn’t so much as blink at their arrival—hence, perhaps, Rainbow Triumph’s recommendation—but the diners in the main dining room all gawped as a towering cyborg and The Last of the Fair Folk walked past them. Yes, better to have a private room.
“Terroir… it has a gallic ring to it,” said Elphin.
“Yeah, it’s a wine term. It means… how soil and weather factors change the way the wine tastes.”
Elphin couldn’t help but smile. “An apt place for us to dine, then.”
“…I don’t quite follow you,” said Fatale.
“Aren’t we products of our environment?” Elphin held her wine glass up thoughtfully, looking at its dark red color through the room’s ambient light. Their dinner had yet to arrive.
Fatale frowned. “I guess. I don’t know very much about my environment. There’s the obvious, of course, but I’ll probably never know why…”
“Mm. On the other hand…” Elphin sipped the wine. She sensed she’d somehow misspoken. “The wine is what it is. It’s delicious. Perhaps where it came from is not what matters most,” she said, and was surprised to find that she meant it.
At this Fatale smiled, her first genuinely pleased smile of the evening. “I’ll drink to that,” she said, and raised her own glass.
It takes me a week to recover from the blast. The thing about being a cyborg—about being me, anyway—is that I can take a lot of damage before stopping, but when something does stop me, I’m gonna be down for a while.
I’m lucky, though. When I joined the Champions, cobbling together an as-complete-as-possible maintenance and repair bay for me became a medium-level background priority, and over the months it’s actually gotten respectable, an unlikely combination of high-tech machine shop and intensive care unit. There’s no way of knowing whether it’s as good as whatever facilities Dr. Impossible would’ve had, but—who cares?
During my week of cyborg bed-rest, Elphin works with Mr. Mystic and Feral to figure out where the drone went. That kind of thing is normally right in my wheelhouse, but while I’m recovering I’m only good for about three hours of consciousness before I’m incoherent again, so I do what little I can, which mostly amounts to making sure all the forensic telemetry my systems gathered during the fight is properly organized on the Champions’ computers. Mostly, I rest.
I try not to think about how tenuous my health is. Most of the time when I come out of unconsciousness, Elphin’s right there. Our eyes meet, and she gives me that sad, complicated smile of hers. She’s so beautiful. Not in the obvious Tinkerbellish way, either—close up, you can see these tiny complications to her facial expressions that belie her great age, and while they are so frequently tinted with melancholy, every so often her fey nature surfaces, and I can catch a glimpse of the wild thing she is in her core, the raging, delighted warrior.
My heart beats faster. It shows up on the diagnostic equipment, and she wants to know if I’m all right. What am I supposed to say? Yes. No. Yes.
As luck would have it, the Champions’ investigation pays off right around the time I recover.
“He’s in the Bronx,” announces Feral without preamble, padding into the gym. I’m in the middle of a light workout. “Highbridge.”
“Who’s…?”
“Sensei.” Feral rolls his eyes just slightly, like he can’t imagine I’m not thinking about catching criminals at all times. Or maybe it’s just the name.
“Oh. Right.”
Elphin comes in a few seconds later. She gives Feral a look. “You told her already?”
Feral shrugs.
Elphin sniffs in irritation. The idea that she wanted to be the one to tell me flits through my head, and the thought warms me. “Yes, well. We found Sensei. We’re going in tonight. Do you feel well enough to join us?”
That’s Elphin. All business. “Yeah, I can do it.”
Although she had enjoyed the date with Fatale, Elphin was quite sure there would not be a second. She had tried to mitigate what she imagined to be her own chilliness, but perhaps a warrior of the fair folk in Titania’s guard had a certain cool demeanor that no amount of wine could warm. It wasn’t something that gave her pause, normally, but suddenly it seemed to matter.
Yet Elphin had cause to call her self-assessment into question when, wonder of wonders, Fatale asked again. Then a third time. And after a fourth pleasant evening—an after-hours stroll through the Metropolitan Museum of Art—Elphin began to wonder if she ought to take some initiative herself.
And as she’d heard Feral say a few times, go big or go home.
She found Fatale in the workout room, throwing punches into a colossal punching bag. The sound of her fists hitting the bag echoed in the room, shockingly loud. Each of those blows could probably kill a man.
“Fatale,” said Elphin, her tone rising slight on the second syllable of the name in what she hoped implied a casually friendly greeting. The tongue of the fair folk had a specific name-suffix for this, and not for the first time she found herself annoyed at English’s insufficiency.
“Oh, hey, El. Elphin. Sorry, I don’t mean to like, nickname you.”
Elphin held up a reassuring hand. “It’s fine. Am I interrupting your training?”
“What? No. I mean—you’re a good interruption.”
Elphin smiled faintly. “I’m pleased to hear that.” She looked aside for a moment, wondering why this was so awkward, before continuing. “I… I have noticed that you have been taking the lead in our… relationship, so far. I was thinking that perhaps I should bear some of that burden.”
Burden? Elphin inwardly swore by the lords and ladies of the fair lands at her stumbling tongue.
“Uh, s-sure,” said Fatale. She turned away from the punching bag and squared herself with Elphin.
“When I first joined the Champions, I lost myself in the work for many months. Eventually, though, the exhaustion of this world caught up with me, and I needed a place to retreat. Blackwolf happened to just then be arranging series of way-stations all over the world—’bolt-holes,’ he called them—where Champions could retreat if necessary, and… well, I’ve found one of those bolt-holes very useful over the years.”
Fatale nodded slowly. “I see,” she said. It didn’t seem to Elphin that she did, in fact see.
“What I mean is, I thought we could go there. Together. For a night or two, perhaps.”
“Oh!”
Fatale’s pleasure never failed to charm Elphin. The woman’s sincerity and decency was so incongruous coming from that huge, martial frame, and somehow all the more powerful for it. Looking at her, no one would expect her to be warm, or kind, but she so frequently was.
“Yes. So, if you’d like, we can leave on the jumpjet tomorrow morning.”
Fatal’s eyebrows rose. “The jumpjet?”
Elphin felt a playful anticipation color her tone. “It’s the only way to get there,” she said.
Fatale seemed not to have taken Elphin at her word, but when she saw the GPS coordinates displayed on the navigation system of the Champions’ VTOL jet, she understood. The closest part of Alaska was still Alaska.
Misty Fjords National Monument was accessible only by sea or air, and the bolt-hole was even more remote. Though Fatale had been checked out on the jumpjet for non-combat operations some weeks earlier, it flew almost entirely autonomously, leaving the two women to their own devices during most of the half-day of the flight.
The bulk of this time was passed quietly, but as the jumpjet made its final descent, flying mere hundreds of feet off the surface of the water, Fatale got her first real look at their surrounding. The aircraft speared through the low, foggy clouds and into clear air, and there they were, cruising up an inlet that wended its way several miles up between steep-sided mountains with sides rising three thousand feet straight out of the sea. Shafts of sunlight terminated in glittering mirror-bright patches on the water, stands of hemlock, cedar, and spruce sewn through the substance of the mist that lingered in caressing tendrils everywhere.
Elphin heard Fatale’s breath catch in her throat. Neither of them said anything as the jumpjet slowed and hovered over the bolthole’s landing pad, then descended.
“Wow…” said Fatale finally, her voice breathy despite its ever-so-slightly metallic timbre, and Elphin smiled.
I’d hoped Sensei was still an early-stage villain; that he’d gotten lucky enough with his first few scores to build the robo-ninjas, but was basically still in the mom’s-basement phase of his career. Intelligence thus far seemed to suggest as much, which is why all the Champions’ heavy-hitters are dealing with some kind of trouble on Mars instead of here.
As the threat-assessment subprocessor frantically tries to make sense of the two towering chrome samurai in front of me, I finally admit that my hopes were in vain. Early-stage supervillains do not build armored robotic assault units with giant monomolecular-edged blades.
The threat-assessment subprocessor suggests in its terse numeric way that I stay the fuck away from those blades.
“Well, Champions. I see you’ve discovered my home. And you didn’t even remove your shoes before entering. Such unmannerly conduct is shameful.”
Sensei looks to be in his thirties. He’s a white guy with the beginnings of male pattern baldness, and is notably, obviously, not Japanese. He is sitting on his knees on a raised platform in the center of the warehouse, on the kind of woven straw mats you see in nicer sushi places, flanked by his two chrome samurai. He has clearly been expecting us.
“At least Elphin-san has the decency to fly rather than track filth from outside into my o-uchi,” he continues.
He seems to have a monologue prepared, but Feral has no patience for this kind of thing, and charges. He leaps straight for Sensei with a roar, and is immediately Aikidoed into a submission hold by the samurai on the right. Feral snarls his frustration; Sensei closes his eyes serenely. “Ah.”
“Just do it!” screams Feral—though what he wants done, by whom, is not entirely clear. I hear Elphin sigh a long-suffering sigh.
Just as I’m starting to wonder if Feral’s blundered his way into a hostage situation, Sensei speaks. “Do it? What, kill you? Iie, no, Feral. I am a Sensei. This is a lesson that I am teaching, and it is your place to learn it.” Sensei makes a dismissive gesture with his hand, and the samurai shoves Feral back toward us.
“You are under arrest. Deactivate your weapons and place your hands over your head,” I say. Might as well try.
Sensei is still kneeling, but now he leads forward and stands with surprising grace. His arms remain folded the entire time. “So. Come.”
Elphin narrows her eyes and spins her spear around. “Very well.”
Sensei’s setup is, I have to admit, impressive. There are three of us versus his two robotic samurai, but it turns out they’re not fully autonomous. Holographic projectors display the layout of the room in perhaps 1:3 scale miniature on the straw mat platform in the center. Sensei assumes a ready stance, and as soon as the fight is joined, it becomes clear that he’s controlling the samurai. Not directly, though—it’s as though he’s created a language of stances and motions that he uses to direct the tactics the robots then deploy. It seems like a roundabout way to fight, but we’re getting our asses kicked, so what do I know?
It seems fair to let Feral and Elphin take on one while I go solo against the other. I can barely tell how they’re doing, though, because I’m too busy trying to stay alive myself.
For starters, the thing is just plain fast. Its sheer speed forces me into what amounts to a constant retreat. Thank god my rear-facing obstacle imaging lets me avoid tripping over anything. My .50 cal autopistol makes a mess of the shiny chrome finish of the samurai’s armor plating, but that’s all it does.
It lunges closer than I expect and I bring my left arm up to block; the monomolecular sword shaves right through the metal-composite-weave skin, flaying it right off and exposing the actuators within. The threat assessment subprocessor confers with the tactical analysis database, runs through damage mitigation heuristics, and comes back with a conclusion that amounts to “I told you so.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see Sensei pause in his motions, and the robotic samurai takes a step back as though waiting for me to come at it again. He really isn’t trying to kill us, or that sword would’ve taken my arm clean off. He wants to force us to retreat, to limp home, beaten. This is about proving how much better he is, how much we underestimated him.
I hear the hummingbird-whir of Elphin in flight, and a pastel blur rushes past my head. The whir is followed by an increasingly loud series of metallic, percussive impacts—the feet of the other robot as it sprints toward us.
Elphin’s tiny hand clasps mine. “Throw me!” she shouts. Stupid idea, but there’s no time to tell her so. I spin around once like I’m winding up for an Olympic hammer throw, then let her fly. She’s light, but still heavy enough to put my strength behind. She ends up moving very, very quickly. I watch her execute a wing-assisted acrobatic flip mid-trajectory to correct her course, then—
These robot guys. They always forget about magic. And my girlfriend is the last fairy warrior.
Elphin’s spear arcs straight through the chrome samurai’s midsection. The armor that shrugged off my gun’s high-powered rounds now parts like tissue paper.
Then—there’s a polite beep in my head, and my cyberwarfare suite quietly informs me that it’s finished crafting an exploit for Sensei’s communications protocol. I’d honestly forgotten all about the cyberwarfare suite. Why can’t the threat assessment subprocessor be this polite?
Sensei’s good, but it turns out he’s no Dr. Impossible.
I point my autopistol at the remaining samurai. “Bang,” I say, miming the recoil of an imaginary shot as I trigger the exploit. The robot collapses instantly, and Sensei’s holographic display goes dark.
Shortly after they arrived at the bolt-hole’s cozy, well-appointed cabin, a message came in from CoreFire about possible trouble in New York City. Something about a Japan-obsessed roboticist that the heavy hitters were leaving Fatale and Elphin to take care of while Corefire et al were attending some kind of pan-dimensional diplomatic summit on Mars. But it could wait a day or two, so Elphin’s plans were safe.
They left their things—spear, guns, Fatale’s medication—in the cabin and went for a walk. Elphin mostly hovered, which allowed Fatale to hike at the relatively brisk pace her stride allowed.
And as they made their way through the misty evergreen forest, Elphin talked.
“After I joined the Champions,” Elphin said, “I found purpose but no solace. The forests of Britain were gone, domesticated for centuries. I had work to do, good, honorable work, but as weeks and months passed, the city air began to feel poisonous. Sleep was rare and fitful.”
Fatale nodded silently. It occurred to Elphin that Fatale probably knew something about rare, fitful sleep herself.
“It took longer than it should have to realize what the problem was. When I did, I started searching for wild places. There are a few, still, although some of them still have spirits or presences that I found… unwelcoming.” Elphin smirked at the memory before continuing. “But eventually I came here.”
“I can see why you like it,” said Fatale.
They made their way up through the narrow, damp trail, Elphin occasionally pausing to point out a favorite tree or stone, and Fatale seemingly happy to be guided through this, her chilly, piney sanctuary. After a time, though, Elphin felt suddenly self-conscious. What was this? What was she supposed to be doing? She had no idea.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” she finally said. They had come to a tiny rill that flowed musically between the ancient stones of the valley. Elphin perched atop a boulder as Fatale crouched down to examine the stream more closely.
“Huh?” said Fatale, looking over her shoulder in confusion.
“I have no idea what is… expected of me. I thought I would bring you someplace special to me, but now I feel foolish.”
“Don’t feel foolish, this is amazing.”
“I suppose I’m simply unaccustomed to modern human romance rituals.” The words sounded colder and more impersonal than she meant them.
Fatale stood, her brow furrowed. “I don’t care about ‘human romance rituals.’ All that crap is useless for people like us.”
“Maybe that’s why superhero romances never seem to go well,” said Elphin quietly.
“Yeah, well, the hell with precedent,” said Fatale, almost belligerent. “How did your people do it?”
It had been a very long time since the Elphin had last revisited the memory. When she thought of the elflands it was so frequently of her duties to Titania, to the geas laid upon her, to the Honor of the Fey. Not of her family, and the politics.
“Romance is… was… complicated. It was deeply intertwined with our glamor—our magical arts.” Elphin stood, then hovered, proceeding further up along the rill. Fatale followed behind. “We saw the world as a system of interlocking promises, contracts between earth and sky and tree and stag, each simultaneously beholden and holding sway… and as there are many kinds of promises, there were many kinds of love. Each was formalized with its own contracts and conventions, along with the consequences for breaking them…” She trailed off. It had been a very long time.
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It could be. But also freeing, in a way. One nearly always knew what was expected. Through the ages I had a comrade-lover. A dalliance, later. And finally a betrothed, even, before Titania chose me for her guard.” She smiled wistfully. “All those little intrigues seemed so desperately important at the time.”
Fatale laughed, a nervous self-consciousness creeping into her tone. “Now I feel sort of silly for wanting to ask you to be my girlfriend.”
Elphin turned and hovered at eye-level with Fatale. “You shouldn’t,” she said. She smiled, and put her small hand on Fatale’s cheek, feeling the warmth of her skin. “I think I would like being your girlfriend.”
They kissed.
It occurred to Elphin that not all iron was of necessity cold.