"...and here we see the influence of the Heroic Age on contemporary art."

Richie Jones snorted in derision at Professor Calvert's words and the rest of the jock squad followed suit. Valley couldn't blame them. The assortment of plastic, pewter and paper in various configurations of primary colours that filled every shelf, dais, display and wall of the spacious third-floor gallery were many things; toys, satire, propaganda, some gang members getting their hands on spray paint at four in the morning maybe, but calling them 'art' implied levels of quality they lacked.

"Is Principal Hayden nuts?" asked Lindy, the cute brunette's eyes flicking from window to window as her white-knuckled grip tried to crush her purse. "Why did he sent us here after what happened to the Smisthonian?" Everyone knew that supervillains made the worst art critics.

"It was a bargain," Mandy sneered. "The MCA has had free admittance on Tuesdays since forever so why would the school pay to send us elsewhere?" The redhead tossed her mane like a cat would its tail in disapproval, and Valley decided against offering her opinion. Every time the other girl was like that either cheerleading practice devolved into fighting five minutes later or her latest boyfriend magically transformed into an ex.

"It's p-politics," Nick Bowman piped up out of nowhere. "The city council is -"

"Shut up, Nerd Boy," Mandy hissed and Nick stumbled back, comically large glasses almost dropping off his freckled face.

"Yeah, nobody asked for a pocket library," Lindy added, turning away from the exhibit to the more interesting target that had presented itself.

Valley took a look around. Professor Calvert was engaging two other nerds in a trivia battle, the bored jocks were invading drama club country and of the remaining students half were busy texting and the other half were very obviously not paying attention to Nick's latest blunder. Excellent.

"If it's small enough to fit in a pocket, it's small enough to lose," Valley said, grabbing the idiot boy by the shoulders and giving her friends a smirk. "Cover me."

"You sure?" Lindy said dubiously, again trying to look everywhere at once. "This isn't school so-"

"No, it'll be perfect," Mandy countered, green eyes scanning Nick's reddening face with glee. "I can already hear the rumours; 'nerd lost in museum toilets', it'll be hilarious!" Practically dancing on tiptoe, she turned to the trio's blonde leader. "You'll need a distraction, right?"

"Just make sure Calvert is too busy to notice us leaving. He never bothers taking attendance," Valley instructed, frog-marching the smaller boy away. He could have called for help, but didn't. The popular girls of Lincoln Park High had a reputation of getting nasty if you squeaked to the teachers.

The tall blonde and the small, red-faced boy got off the Heroic Age exhibit, passed two galleries of postmodern paintings, then went down the museum's famously weird stairwell. Designed by a German architect with a penchant for 'poetic rationalism' - whatever that was - the stairs formed an assymetrical, wedge-like spiral the better to confuse visitors' sense of balance and send them tumbling to their deaths, as some critics complained. Since the museum got extra visitors from people curious about said stairs, Valley reserved judgement until someone actually fell - for the museum at least. Where some idiots were concerned on the other hand...

"Are you trying to get bullied more?" she demanded of the boy after she made sure no-one familiar was around.

"No..." Nick muttered, face still tomato-red, before continuing with rising conviction. "Mandy's just a bitch. Both of them are."

"Bullshit." Valley crossed her arms under her breasts and glared at the boy. "It's the fourth time you hit on her this week and you knew she's had a bad break-up."

"I didn't hit-"

"Don't give me that." She glared some more, unimpressed. "You tried to show off; you always try to show off. I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times; nobody likes a know-it-all."

"Why?" he demanded mulishly. "Because being an overmuscled freak is so much better?"

"Better stamina is always a plus," she quipped, bursting into giggles as the boy gaped at her half in betrayed outrage, half in scandalized disbelief. "Look, if you keep this up I won't be able to cover for you. Do you want a repeat of freshman year?"

"Easy for you to say tall, blonde and busty. It's not as if you joined the popular clique at the first chance you got, right?" Nick spat, turning around with every intent of stomping off and going to vent somewhere else.

Valerie wanted to blame everything on her old friend's attitude and social awkwardness, she really did, but she had accepted Mandy's invitation back in freshman year. On one hand, Lindy and Mandy were closer to the stereotype of 'bitchy popular girl' than she'd have liked. On the other, there was more to them than that and by basically taking over she'd curbed their worst tendencies, not to mention eased over the worst clashes between them and her other friends... even if she sometimes had to do so covertly. Only Nick was stubbornly refusing to compromise; she suspected he still felt resentful she didn't fall in with the nerds any more.

She was about to follow after him, beat some sense into his thick skull, when the stairwell exploded into a deafening, skin-scouring burst of dust and rubble.

xxxx xxxx

Explosions on TV are lots of red flame, a bit of black smoke, fancy CGI blastwaves or bullet-time and pieces of masonry thrown halfway to the horizon. The reality is uglier, messier, and a hell of a lot louder, Valerie found. No TV set is loud enough to shatter windows or burst people's eardrums, after all.

The tinnitus squeezing her skull like a giant steel vise meant that the last bit hadn't happened to her, at least. The grey-white cloud of dust covering everything and stinging into her eyes like steel nails made things worse by limiting visibility to about a foot, and the shrapnel of aluminum and glass made walking around blindly a dangerous proposition.

Worse still, bright red and yellow flashes cut through the dust every few seconds, and the museum shook. Disoriented or not, Valley scrambled to vacate the premises; she did not feel like getting close to anything that glowed and could drill through buildings. In the new Heroic Age such things actually existed and were not good for people's health.

Something large, glowing and wearing spander flew through a gap in the wall and landed amid the broken protective cases of several exhibits. It was definitely something and not someone; the tiny size, black fur and monkey-like features were kind of a giveway. Valley resisted the urge to groan in favor of scrambling away; the villain known as the Wicked Witch was always in a foul mood and had a lot more than one monkey.

Case in point, three more flew through the broken wall, ignoring the slowly recovering museum visitors to fire yellow beams at a blur in red that dodged their shots with absurd ease, moving so fast the eye could barely follow. The blur collided with the flying monkey things, knocking them out of the air and probably the fight, before resolving into the figure of a slim, twenty-something woman in a form-fitting bodysuit of some glittering crimson material.

"A museum, Barty?" the strangely familiar heroine shouted. "This is low, even for you!" Valerie was sure she'd read about her somewhere, she was just too busy feeling like her head was getting hit by a jackhammer to remember specifics.

"I'll stop when people stop using that ridiculous nickname!" a bear of a man in white biker leathers, boots, gloves and helmet flew in on top of a much larger floating, glowing monkey. Unlike his heroic enemy, the villain was instantly recognizable... unfortunately; things were about to get worse.

"It doesn't work like that, Barty," the woman in red told him, her tone full of sympathy. "More crimes won't change that!"

"Then I'll commit even more until it does!" he roared and urged his steed forward, yellow beams clashing against the heroine's red blur. The hits only staggered her but misses hit with concrete-breaking force or turned various exhibits into sawdust, sheet metal, stuffed animals, even piles of bricks.

Valley hid behind one of the metal-transmuted exhibits as best she could before things could turn ugly. The Wicked Witch had originally been a hero from Iowa whose ability to summon large numbers of animals with powers of their own had been very effective in both search-and-rescue as well as fighting small crime. Unfortunately, his powers had for some reason affected his appearance horribly, earning him a not-so-funny nickname and making him a laughingstock in social media. And then legal measures had failed to do anything about it, with predictable results.

The building shook again, sending visitors running. Even small-time capes could bring down buildings if they really tried, and nobody wanted to be there if the fight got to that. Valley tried to follow everyone else but the dizziness from falling down the stairs and the aftereffects of the explosion were not cooperating. A few seconds later she stumbled on a piece of broken plaster, toppled and fell face-first on one of the exhibits turned into bricks - loudly. Biting her tongue hard enough to taste blood, she swore never to wear more than two-inch heels again.

Then something large, loud, smelly, hairy and very strong grabbed her right leg and snatched her off the ground.

"Let the girl go, Bart! You don't want to do this!"

"Shut up, Rosie!" the supervillain roared, convincing Valley that he very much did, whatever 'it' was. "I'm done being the laughingstock of the net! If I can't be a hero they respect, then I'll FORCE them to fear me!"

That last bit he said so loudly it seemed to reverberate in the blonde girl's bruised ears like the vibrations of an earthquake coming from deep beneath the earth. For a split second everyone stood still; the civilians turned around to look at the source of that cry, caught like deers in headlights. The heroine - Rosie? - hesitated now that her foe had a hostage. And the villain himself seemed to gather and steel himself for one final act...

...then with a cacophony of screeches dozens upon dozens of monkeys flew through the hole in the wall, the broken windows, the entrance, everywhere. Glowing yellow bolts flew indiscriminately, people screamed and ran. And Valley hung off a floating monkey's fist upside down, feeling nauseous.

The heroine was fast, but the monkeys were many and coordinated. Slowly but steadily they pushed her back, away from Wicked Witch and any potential hostages. Seeing that she was losing, she made one last valiant charge and somehow, whether by taking the villain by surprise or due to sheer luck she managed to land a singe super-speed punch.

For a moment the monkeys recoiled and Wicked Witch fell back, but a split second later they dogpiled the heroine from all sides. They clawed, they bit, they grappled, they pulled her hair, until they finally wrestled her to the ground and held her with sheer weight.

"Don't do this Barty! You were a hero!" came a shout almost drowned out by the growls and roars and blasts of two dozen powered animals.

"Yes, I was a hero! And THIS is all I got for it!" And with that, the Wicked Witch pulled his white motorcycle helmet off and threw it to the ground. He was a pretty good looking fellow underneath; wide brow, strong features, large eyes, cleft chin, thick black hair. He also had green skin, and not 'sickly green' but more like the Hulk... or a goblin. "All the rescues, all the long hours doing good work, and everyone laughed at me because some stupid kid uploaded an image and gave it a dumb name. But nobody is laughing now!"

"The State Guard can't be far," the captive heroine tried one last time to talk him down. "Whatever you do here you can't escape them, don't you see?"

Valley, on the other hand, had heard enough. Words weren't going to change the guy's mind, not if he'd gone crazy over just a nickname. Plus with all the blood going to her head it was becoming hard to think straight, so she did the first thing that came to mind; she threw her smartphone at the bad guy as hard as she could.

She was either very very lucky or the guy had the worst luck in the world, because the half-pound of plastic, aluminum and electronics hit him in the eye. He screamed; the monkeys screamed; the crowd screamed. Valley was finally overcome by nausea as the giant monkey holding her flailed about, and barfed.

Then she got a direct hit from a blindingly bright blast of yellow light.