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Haley

40 days after The Swap

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I hated being a hero. That was the thought that struck me as I picked myself out of the rubble that had once been some kind of steel mill in a small town in Kansas. I hated it, if you could even call what I was heroic, after the fight with Aslan. The blood of the men I’d killed was on my hands, and afterwards when my temper had cooled and things had seemed less urgent, I hadn’t found it easy to wash that blood off with piety and self-righteous justification. The metal of the assembly line groaned and snapped as I clawed my way out- I’d hit it hard enough that it had deformed around my body. I’d spent my whole life aspiring to this, wanting to help people, and now I had the power to do so and the first thing I’d done was get a bunch of people killed. It was no wonder the whole world seemed intent on fighting me at every turn. Why couldn’t this have been a utopian story? In that moment I’d have traded all of my magic for a simple night with the cat and some tea and my husband. Screw the world, and all the idiots trying to ruin it.

All of that was what I thought. What I actually said was, “Superman, you’re making a terrible mist-oof” as he streaked back around and slammed me and my bruised dignity into the remains of the factory for the second time in a row. I could only hope that it had been genuinely clear of any people. I was very large these days- it had been a month since the tower, 40 days total since my original transformation, and where before I’d been casting high-level shapeshifts on myself to achieve this kind of size and weight, now it just came naturally. 32 feet long, 16 tons easily. I had never been height conscious- not being able to fit through doors hadn’t bothered me, but now I couldn’t fit in garages and it was starting to get awkward. It didn’t matter to the flying brick- whatever source his power operated on, it allowed him to send me tumbling like a ragdoll. I was sitting around Strength 48 in Pathfinder terms now, which gave me a max press of something like fifty-seven tons, but the ease with which he overmatched me and tossed me around was startling to say the least. But for some reason he couldn’t simply tear me in half- his punches had unstoppable mass but they didn’t transmit most of it. I was relying on a high damage reduction and a lot of stacked regeneration to keep me safe, but still- the impacts were adding up.

I knew from the Contact team that had called me in that Superman’s narrator was around here somewhere. The boy was playing Jimmy Olsen to his favorite hero, and that would have been all good and well except “Superman’s Pal” had been calling the bastard demigod in on anything that so much as looked at him funny. We’d learned a while back that the story characters didn’t have nearly the autonomy that we’d thought- or at least, if their narrator insisted they didn’t, then they didn’t seem inclined to resist, most of the time.

The Contact team leader was a gentleman from the former Colonel’s division, operating as part of my worldwide recovery network. I had pinned Aslan’s remaining force of fanatics up in a pocket prison for the time being, but I’d tried to incorporate as many of the other military units we encountered as I could. He had spotted the town from the air and his team had flown their antigrav craft down to attend to survivors- something we’d gotten down to a bit of a routine, in recent weeks. They’d get names and demographics and distribute Cauldrons of Plenty and Decanters of Endless Water and any other survival tools I could wish up en masse, then install a permanent 20-foot-wide Gate in population centers leading to the transit hub of my parallel dimension for further integration of the populace. We were piecing the world back together pretty quickly- our biggest hurdle was the speed at which we could spin up new Contact cells and send them out to continue the work. Well, that and the parts of the world overrun by narrative-driven disasters. Those tended to require my intervention, or that of Delmutt’s little colony of hyper-advanced robot people, who had managed to get quite busy in the couple hundred years they’d had alone in the ol’ hyperbolic time chamber.

Anyway rather than a routine survey, the flyer crew had found this guy. The kid had turned him on the local infomorphs that first night- and he’d taken half the buildings with them as he swept them all in moments, just blasting from place to place with x-ray and laser vision. After that he’d apparently been keeping charge of a rather bedraggled looking group of humans and the one eight year old who actually held the reins on him. The kid had no family left, and the surveyor said everyone else was living in abject terror of him, though they couldn’t get anyone to tell them why with the hero flitting about. It didn’t seem like it took a great deal of imagination to figure out, if you asked me. I’d teleported in to intervene when he’d tried to prevent the survey team from leaving- I’d done without swapping to a human guise, and that had proved to be a critical mistake. One word from the kid and Superman had pasted me right through the town’s grain elevator, kicking this whole thing off. And now here we were, back in the bullshit.

“You know that this is bullshit, right?” I asked, trying desperately to avoid another lightning-fast punch. It was no good- I could feel bones giving, setting from regeneration, then giving again just as fast under his onslaught. “Nobody here is offering you any kind of fight! Why won’t any of you assholes ever listen to me?!?”

He grimaced, as he swung in to hammer me again. “What I know is that there is a very scared little boy over there, miss, and he has a pretty solid idea of right and wrong. He tells me what’s bothering him, and I sort it out. Now I can promise you, if you leave here, we won’t come after you. But if you stay here- well, I’ll do what I have to. If you want to talk in the meantime, I’ll listen. But it won’t change my mind.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just go away, I thought, and leave this little pocket of hell to the boy and his monstrous friend. Empathy, empathy, I chided myself silently. I’d been having trouble with that again, without Sean around to ground me. Being a dragon was more than just muscle and scale- it seemed like it was affecting my mind around the edges. But I had debts to pay, and I wouldn’t forget them. I owed it to the rest of the town to get them out, and I couldn’t leave guys like this just roaming the countryside if they had no self control. Easily half of the narrators I’d met had turned out to be pretty non-threatening, in one way or another- tapped into dramas with reasonably sedate powers, or no powers at all. I’d been a particular fan of the lady who’d joined a family of friendly vegetarian vampires that seemed mostly to want to live in the woods and have feelings at one another- they were fairly harmless and super, super killable if they stepped out of line. But just as often you’d find something like this, where a kid’s take on Superman had become a natural disaster for everyone around him. One thing that I had noticed- narrators could often distort a character, but they couldn’t be outright untrue to it. Superman would never be a serial murderer, for example. But he could be a gullible oaf with enough strength to pop the Earth’s crust like a soap bubble. I wondered what happened when a narrator tried to outright force a character into non-canon behavior, and then stopped wondering as Superman punched me again, hard enough that my ribs punctured a lung. I let myself sail through the air while I healed. Is this what life is just like for all of us, from now on? Is this what the rest of the universe deals with all the time? Sean’s first letter had made me wonder. I’d read lots of fiction and it didn’t seem like every corner of the multiverse was just seventeen shades of fucked, but that was certainly our local story.

Superman had knocked me up into the air this time, which was his mistake. One of the nice things about infinite wishes was that it also meant more-or-less infinite access to spells via Pages of Spell Knowledge. I readied one. “Alright, we can talk. I have a joke for you- what’s Superman’s greatest weakness?” He didn’t answer, but that was all right because my timing couldn’t really get any worse. “A bucking horse.” I let fly with the Hideous Laughter spell- he doubled over, wheezing uncontrollably. It’s a damn good thing his reflex actions don’t have super-strength. I continued. “Because of the guy who used to play...? Okay, it was kind of insensitive, sorry. I’m not very good at jokes. The actual answer is magic. You’re really bad at resisting magic. ” Not so bad that his different-story immunities to mind magic wouldn’t kick in within literal seconds, but a few seconds of him not zipping around was all I needed.

He might be able to exert thousands of tons of force, but he still only weighed a couple hundred. As long as he wasn’t trying to hold himself fixed in the air, I could suckerpunch him in whatever direction I chose. As he wheezed and flailed helplessly, a Gate opened to one of the dimensions containing my prepared kinetic impactor sequences. I still didn’t have a good way to create vacuums, so the first couple shots were simply hypervelocity projectiles to shove all of the air out of the way. They impacted his chest without him even registering their existence. The last one in the sequence was a solid tungsten rod weighing about two hundred pounds and traveling at 0.2c, and that finally got his attention. He was knocked sailing through the air at a velocity even he couldn’t react fast enough to cancel, as the rod just annihilated itself in nuclear fire on his body. I intercepted his vector with a second Gate to a pocket dimension I’d been using as a prison for story elements I didn’t really have the capacity to deal with. He wouldn’t starve in there, it was set to timelessness with respect to most biological necessities, and maybe the other… things I’d picked up in the last month would keep him entertained. Maybe he’d find some way to deal with a few of them and reduce my workload. Wouldn’t that be nice, I thought to myself. My more-or-less permanent Contingency spell triggered when the nuclear collision occurred. Since the Tower incident I had it set to intercept any energetic event releasing over 1 kiloton with a Prismatic Sphere. If even 1% of the total energy of that rod had been released when it transferred its momentum to the invincible superhuman, we were looking at something in the 400kt range, probably similar to the warhead I’d detonated at the tower last month. The Sphere had proven quite capable of handling even the worst excesses that I’d thrown at it so far, thankfully. Destroys all objects and effects, indeed. Anything that escaped could be treated with anti-poison spells, because for some reason Pathfinder treated radiation as a poison effect- at least that made it easy for me. And then, finally, blessed silence descended. I surveyed the carnage. “I probably could have just… shoved you in there, couldn’t I.” Oh well, no time for additional self recrimination.

I landed in front of the little boy as the echoes of our fight which couldn’t have lasted more than a minute in total continued to roll and reverberate between cloud and hill and floodplain. I didn’t bother to change shape. My manners had gotten a little bit rough, in the course of a month of nearly non-stop combat and emergencies. Not to mention… the home front, which I was definitely not thinking about right now. He actually didn’t react to a flying dinosaur crashing to earth in front of him. Interesting- the boy was… narrating?

“Superman was in a dark scary place and there were monsters but he knew how to get back so he took the one with horns and threw it at the other and they went ‘Oh no it’s Supermaaan’ and they were real scared then he flew back up and-”

The crowd around the survey helicopter, on the other hand, cried out in terror as the enormous, scaled, horned, bat-winged golden monster came crashing down right in front of them. My Contact team tried to comfort them. Their captain glared at me reproachfully, and it snapped me out of my funk. Sorry, sorry I mouthed at him abashedly, finally downshifting back to human, stamping down on the fear aura that I emanated naturally these days and allowing the crowd to settle. The little boy was staring at me in defiance as I walked up to him and knelt. It was interesting to watch the kid- we weren’t really sure how narrators worked, or interacted, and we’d rarely seen them in action. I hadn’t even begun to tell my story, though I still felt the power residing within me. Was the fact that the kid was telling Superman’s story even as we spoke going to make him more dangerous, or less? After a moment I realized that I was being the detached observer and not Haley, Hero Of Earth again.

“Superman knew he had to get back but he wasn’t scared, he always got out of no matter how big the bad guys were-”

I nodded. “Well yeah, he’s Superman. But he doesn’t need to fight me. He can just be your friend.” I looked up at the rest of the crowd, who were giving us a respectful (terrified) distance. “We’re here to help. We have food and shelter for all of you, and a transport link to our network, and then we’ll see about getting you involved in the recovery efforts if you want to help, or just getting some rebuilding teams out here if you want to stay, and-” the kid cut me off.

“Christopher wasn’t going to go with the scary lizard woman. Nobody was! Nobody kept him safe when it mattered. Mom and Dad just ran away when the bug monsters came, so he called Superman and he came and now he helps me. Superman wouldn’t let anyone leave! Christopher was good enough! They don’t need to go anywhere!”

He was having some trouble with tense changes, I thought detachedly. My surveyors were watching all of this. I didn’t need to strain my ears to hear them when they asked one of the crowd, “How many dead?”

The person answering, an old mill worker by the look of him, shook his head. “Half the town, maybe five thousand, the night of. A couple dozen more when his friend went nuts on the bugs. Since then, only two tried to get away. He caught both of them. Broken bones, no deaths. He just flies around and, and watches. Day and night.” I winced, reminded once again of my own casualty count. When you get past a certain point it gets very hard to get energetic around people and not leave a trail of bodies in your wake.

I transitioned from kneeling to sitting down in front of the boy while I listened to the voices in my head. On the back end, one of my simulacra was relaying these conversations to a team I’d set up, crisis managers and emergency operators working at a moderate 2-to-1 time-shift back in Volo Ingenium. They had a little more time to assess, and a lot more expertise at a safe distance, back in the situation room. Their response via my simulacra’s link was immediate- “Kitchener here. Team says he’s got abandonment trauma and PTSD, possibly from before the Swap, but if both of his parents were taken that might have been the trigger. He’ll be experiencing feelings of helplessness and inadequacy, fear that everyone is going to leave him, a desire for total control. Best response is validation and sympathy. Demonstrate ownership of the situation and long term stability- he’s going to be a problem for a while, especially if he can call on anything else from DC comics. I have a child psychologist and a care team ready, if you can bring him in.”

We needed to pull the teeth on this one. But my self-imposed rule about killing still stood- especially not children. I didn’t disagree with the assessment, though. I looked the kid in the eye. “What’s your name?” He was still staring at me angrily.

“Christopher told her his name was Christopher and that she needed to leave here, and go away. If she didn’t Superman was going to get out and beat her up!”

I put my hands out to my sides as I sat- open, non threatening. I was leaning hard on the Diplomacy checks to radiate a calm that I was long past able to feel naturally. Luckily for me, I had Diplomacy skills that would have put Eleanor Roosevelt to shame. “My name is Haley, Christopher. Aren’t you tired? Of being the only one you can count on?” My skill told me to cock my head just so, quirk my eyebrow like this. Inquisitive without being judgemental. He stamped his foot- I could see tears in his eyes.

“The lady was being weird, she was acting nice and that wasn’t how bad guys did at all, but she was trying to get him to calm down and he was scared and Momma had warned him about strangers and Superman hadn’t escaped yet! He punched really hard at the walls of the place he was in. Nobody else could protect Christopher!”

I nodded and smiled. “You did a good job, Christopher. Really! A whole month, and I’ve seen the kind of things out there in the world now, and you kept these people safe. But it’s okay now. It’s okay! We’re putting the world back together.” Something was happening, behind me, high in the sky. There was a cracking sound, like distant thunder. The spot where I put my Gate. That absurdity is going to punch his way out of my prison dimension isn’t he. I think we were rapidly settling the question of whether or not an active narrator was more powerful. But maybe it was a trade-off? One who was actively narrating didn’t have a passive guarantee of survival, once they’d caught up. I could kill this kid now and it wouldn’t violate his narrative causality because he’s already told his story. I shook my head, dismissing the dark impulse. Human thoughts, Haley.

“The lady heard Superman punching out of her trap and she was real scared and knew she should run.”

I sighed. “I’m not going to run, Christopher. I’m not scared. I have my own story.”

“She… wasn’t going to run?”

I pointedly did not glance behind me at whatever the thing that was not the least little bit human was doing to the sky. “No. I’m here to help you, I can’t do that if I run. You have to stop the story some time, Christopher.” He looked really uncertain, but curious.

“She didn’t do anything scary or try to eat him like the other monsters Superman had fought but what if it was a trick?”

He was listening, and I couldn’t let the opportunity pass me by. I spoke a bit faster, held my hand out. “Christopher, Superman has so many other people he needs to save, and we can take care of you now. I bet there are things you miss. Have you had him tuck you in, or make you breakfast?” He shook his head sadly and I continued. “It’s hard to go through life being strong all the time. You know that. You can relax now, if you want, and we’ll be strong for you.”

“Christopher was scared though. Without Superman who’s left that even knows me? Everyone else is d- gone.”

“I’ve got someone you’re really going to want to meet. His name’s Dog and he’s great with kids.” Well, these days, anyway. “And I can take you home, introduce you to some other brave girls and boys who have had a rough time too, this last month. You can call Superman back any time you like, if it isn’t working out for you.” I heard something in the sky shatter and felt the wind of Superman’s sudden arrival at my back like a hurricane. But he didn’t smash me flat. I didn’t know if that was his impulse of Christopher’s but I held still, hand still out. “I’m not going to fight him, or you. The most important part about being a hero is knowing when it’s time to stop fighting and help each other.” Take your own damn advice there, girl.

“Superman said that was right. He had other people he needed to help, and he thought Christopher would be okay if the lady took care of him. But he left his secret signal watch just in case. He gave Christopher a hug and then he left.”

I watched it happen, just as Christopher said. All of us stood by as the Man of Steel flew into the sky and that presence faded from the world, like a comic half-remembered. Not gone, but… dormant. The kid was eight, in the end. He just needed someone to look at him without fear in their eyes. He took my hand, burst into tears, and ran close for another hug. And I inherit another lost soul. As I held him and the crowd visibly sagged with relief, I considered. Most of the time these days, I hated being a hero. But… it had some good moments.

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An hour later, we walked through the new gate from the kid’s town into Volo Ingenium. There was a special “transit” subsection of the world-spanning city that I’d cordoned off entirely for this world network. Pre-Swap there were something like 4,000 cities on Earth and maybe ten times that in towns and houses. I’d asked Delmutt’s unbelievably efficient construction drones to build me a space that could helpfully link 50,000 or so stops together while maintaining security at some boundary with the rest of my dimension. Appropriately enough, they’d chosen to construct a forest. An enormous forest half the size of Manhattan, with trees larger than the empire state building, but still. Each node branch terminated in a 20-foot gate, or a podium where one could be installed. Each tree itself could hold several hundred, and the trunks themselves were connected through the roots via some form of subway-esque antigrav system. All told you could get from any one population center on Earth to another in under half an hour. Emergency flyers could take you from one branch to the other side of the world in minutes. And the edges of the vast forest were cordoned by rivers on all sides, and electronic monitoring beyond that, restricting any trickle of refugees into the areas that the infomorphs now considered home territory. It was all still under construction but it was really helping with our response times.

Christopher didn’t care about any of that, of course. He was enchanted by the giant trees, and the world-sized bubble made out of cities. “What is this place? Can I fly here?” He jumped off the ground and stretched his hands out- I caught him, lifted him up.

“Nope, gravity’s a bit too high for that, but the Wiltshire Dog might have a solution for you. Say hello, Dog.” I knew that mutt had to be lurking around here somewhere. He was always just inside the gates these days, waiting to needle me. I spun around searching and Christopher laughed, in my arms.

“Another stray?” came the languorous voice, as the canine snout materialized out of thin air. Luckily the kid wasn’t the sort to start at that- he laughed and stretched out from my arms to pet the Dog, who drifted slightly out of reach. “For a childless couple, you have the strangest way of accumulating children.”

“As opposed to yours, luring them down rabbit holes into opium dens?” I taunted. My bravado didn’t last very long. I sighed, seeing two other people already waiting patiently for us. My next appointment. “Honestly, Dog, you’re one to talk. We’re all kind of broken here, can’t you just… help me take care of them, without making it a big issue? Also, please don’t do that.”

The Dog’s head turned upside down. His body was still not in evidence. “Do what? ”

“That- couple thing. Sean’s gone and who knows when he’ll be back and I’m trying to deal with it. I don’t need constant reminders of what-”

The Dog vanished from the air and appeared at my legs. I released Christopher and he jumped on the beast, laughing- they wrestled and honestly it looked to me like the Dog was enjoying it, but he still managed to fix me with his stare and continue our argument. “What you’ve lost? A most appropriate adjective. Something taken away, unable to be recovered. But also to be unable to find one’s way- not knowing one’s whereabouts. So which is it, with you and him? Gone forever, or simply- misplaced ? You haven’t been looking very hard.”

God, I did not need this. “You’re a real shit, Dog, and the wordplay doesn’t help. Yes, I’m angry with him for up and running off while I have to stay here and save the world, and I’m trying real hard not to examine that feeling. Happy now?”

The Dog simply looked quizzical. “Should I be? Forgive me, I haven’t read many comics, so I’m uncertain- does the superhero who keeps running into the burning building usually blame the mortal outside, who runs off to call the fire department?”

I grimaced and turned to walk away from this conversation. “She does if he’s the one that doused her with super-serum in the first place! He could have-”

The Dog got up from his pile with Christopher and kept pace, the boy holding onto his tail and trailing along. “Could have what? Taken the thing he thought you wanted most for himself?”

That touched a nerve, and I wasn’t about to admit it was because I was swiftly learning how much I didn’t want to be a hero. I whirled so fast it scared the boy, and pointed a finger at the Dog. “Don’t you dare argue for him by- by proxy. He should have asked. He should have stayed. If he wants to make amends he can damn well send me a fucking owl from Hogwarts and apologize.” I knew I was being irrational. So what! My anger was righteous. Fuck him and fuck the Dog.

The Dog was silent, for a time. “You love him. But you don’t trust him. That’s why it hurts.” What? I rolled my eyes, but there was a seed of truth in what he was saying, and I kept my ears open. Rule one of being a rational person in love- know the source of your feelings. “Deep down you think he’d rather be where he is, than here with you.”

I sniffed. “Wouldn’t he?”

The Dog shook his great shaggy head. “When we parted, if I’d told him that all he had to do to see you again was cut his own throat a second time, he’d have asked to borrow my butter-knife. And here you are- you know this is the first time I’ve seen you stay human in form for more than ten minutes, since the day he died?” That can’t be true- I thought back. I really couldn’t come up with a counter-example, which disturbed me. “You two are miserable without each other, no matter your universe. Don’t make the mistake of blaming the other for the pain of separation.”

Alright fine, he had a point. I shifted back to dragon-scale as we approached the pair at the end of the branch. A simulacrum-me smiled at Christopher and took him in one hand, while he asked a million questions. “Yes, I’m her too, no, we aren’t all sisters, yes, we can go flying later, no it’s more like I have a copy of her mind but she’s the only one with a will that keeps us all moving-” I tuned them out. I had a far more dangerous enemy waiting ahead of me now. All my scale armor and magically-enhanced muscle wouldn’t help me now.

“Hi, Mom.”