Scene 10 - October 20th

Exterior City, Continuous

Quinn Kaufman

“Can you tell me a little about Legion?” I asked as we began moving. “I find myself kind of curious about the villain I nearly ran into.”

“Sure, what do you want to know?”

“She’s high threat level, I’m guessing?” Canaveral nods. “What’s the usual response to people like that?”

“At high threat level, we stop ignoring identities, for one thing,” he said. “Unfortunately it doesn’t much matter, in this case - Legion’s real name is Penelope Page, but we can’t exactly track her out of costume when she’s such a powerful shapeshifter.”

“I see the problem.”

“We try to only send in people that are immune to their most dangerous abilities,” he continued. “Aegis is the ideal, of course, but he’s not available right now - in New Venice, the closest we get is Vulcan.”

“She absorbs organic matter, right?” I ask. “He turns into metal, she can’t do anything to him.”

“She can’t devour him, no. Although to be honest...” he sighed. “Alright, this is a complicated thing and I have to back up a moment. Remember how she can recreate biological structures?”

“Yeah?”

“There are a lot of really scary possibilities with that. See, brains are also biological structures...”

I went pale. “Are you saying that she can read people’s minds after eating them?”

“No, reading information out of a brain isn’t so simple. But she can recreate a person’s head later, and interrogate them as much as she likes.”

“That’s somehow even worse,” I decided. “Being devoured and just dying forever is one thing, even if she knows everything you did. But if she can bring you back only to torture you?”

“Yeah, it’s not pretty to think about,” he agreed with a wince. “On the other hand, it also means that the people she eats aren’t necessarily gone forever. After one of Legion’s bodies is captured, she’s usually willing to bring back one or more of her victims in exchange for something.”

I considered this. “What kinds of things?”

“It varies a lot,” the hero told me. “Sometimes she wants to talk to someone in particular and deliver a message, other times she wants to have another prisoner released. It’s hard to predict. But that’s what we’re hoping for every time she shows up.” He sighed. “There are always more victims, unfortunately.”

“How can you know that it’s the person she brought back, and not just a sleeper agent?”

“Brain scans, like I said, and power testing. If it’s Legion’s brain - and we do have scans of her - then it’s her, and will have her shapeshifting power. If it’s not, then it’s the actual person, and they’ll be able to use their own power.”

“Is there a procedure for that?” I couldn’t help but ask. “People coming back from the dead?”

“For Legion in particular, you’re listed as missing-in-action rather than deceased, so you get back pay for the time you were taken,” he said. “If you’re a hero, at least - civilians have to make their own arrangements. People have come back from other things on occasion, but as far as I know she’s the only one that’s regular enough for a specific rule to have been made.”

“So she’s beatable then,” I optimistically said. “If people capture her and bring back her victims so regularly.”

“I wonder, sometimes,” Canaveral mused. “Her patterns since she first appeared around five years ago have been so irregular, no one really knows what she’s after. It feels like she’s playing a different game than the rest of us are. I’ve fought her three times - not here, this was before I was transferred to New Venice - and I can’t help but think that she let us win the one time we captured her.”

We fell silent until we reached my home.