The sight of the clear, twilit sky bleeding into the burning red sun overhead might well have been the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid eyes on. Unfortunately, I was too preoccupied with my still imminent death by drowning in a car trunk to properly appreciate it.

I distantly heard someone say something—the cape?—but I couldn’t hear them properly. I hacked up salt water, struggled to keep my head above the rising water level, and tried to shimmy my body back and forth to shrug off the jacket holding me down. I had regrettably zipped up the damn thing earlier to ward off the chilly September air coming in from the bay, and with every inch of my jacket forcing itself into the car, I couldn’t move my arms to unzip it. Given enough time I might have been able to gradually work the zipper down by pushing my belly up into it, but time was a resource I didn’t have. The water level rose up to meet my mouth, and I physically couldn’t push my head up any higher.

I started to choke again and was feeling faint. I needed the car to stop sinking, willed it with as much fervor as I could, and all around me, the trunk began to groan. I felt the water level rapidly recede, and if I hadn’t already been crying, then I would have cried for joy. In my mind, I could feel a sort of... a weight was the only way I could think to describe it, and a part of me I’d never felt before was pulling it upwards. It was like I had grown another limb, but it wasn’t connected to me, not physically. It was just... there. All around me in every direction, there were more weights, and I started to reach out to one of them, but when I felt the car’s ascension stall, I hastily abandoned the other weight and threw my full focus into lifting the first weight—the car, I realized—again.

“What the actual fuck?” this time I could definitely tell it was the cape speaking.

The trunk slammed shut, and I immediately panicked at being trapped once more. I groped at the weight in my mind in an effort to break free, but my new limb or whatever it was was unwieldy and fumbled with it. I could tell where I was in relation to it, and the water level began to rise again as something else began to shove the car down, so in desperation, I grabbed at the part of the car I was sure I was in and ripped it away from the rest with a horrendous metallic groan. Whatever the other force that had been acting on the car was, it continued to shove the other half of the car down, but its presence vanished altogether from the chunk of car I had pulled free. I was starting to feel faint again even though the water level began to rapidly recede, and with a final push of effort, I grabbed at the part of the car above me and pulled that away from the bottom I was still stuck to.

Freedom! The entire top of the trunk tore free, the grinding shriek of metal on metal briefly filling my ears, and I could see the sky once more. A fog I’d only just noticed had descended over my thoughts began to retreat at the sight, and a blackness at the edges of my vision that I hadn’t noticed in the darkness of the trunk fled with it. An inarticulate howl of fury reached my ears, and I twisted the portion of metal I was adhered to. The cape was on the ground about fifteen feet away from where the dropoff from concrete into water was, perhaps a bit more than a hundred feet away from where I hung up in the sky.

“You’re a goddamn cape?!”

What? She was talking to me. Calling me a cape? But...

Oh. Oh. I’m a moron.

I still felt all three weights in my mind: The two halves of the trunk, one of which I was being pressed against, and the other portion I’d torn away from the trunk and was warring over with the other force—the cape on the ground, it had to be. The evidence was clear; I had become a cape somewhere in the past few minutes. I vaguely recalled a dream about two... somethings, but the sight of a chunk of concrete flying straight at me after the cape slapped her hand on it dispelled my attempts to remember the dream.

It probably wasn’t important anyway.

I tried to grab hold of the concrete with my power, but I couldn’t feel it at all. What was the difference? I didn’t have time to question it or, at this point, to dodge. I pulled the top half of the trunk in front of me as a makeshift shield before abruptly questioning whether the metal would actually hold up against a large piece of concrete hurtling at it. Shit, what can I do?

Under my power, I felt the weight of that piece of car shift. Not up or down, or side to side—just elsewhere. I heard the concrete slam into my improvised shield and explode into pieces, but the metal not only didn’t give, it didn’t move at all.

“Hell yeah! You’re nothing, you nazi cunt!” I jeered, the adrenaline pumping through me. I’m a cape! I really am!

“Fucking die, you Jap faggot!” the cape screamed back. I couldn’t see her past my shield and tried to move it out of the way, but it stubbornly refused to budge. I focused more acutely on it with my power—My power! Fuck yeah!—and realized it was still stuck elsewhere. I tried to pull it back from there, its weight shifted in response, then I found I could move it once again.

I didn’t have time to focus on that weirdness right then though, since another chunk of concrete was hurtling around my shield and towards me with startling accuracy. I forced the chunk I was on to dodge while quickly shifting my barrier to intercept, and though I got myself out of the line of fire and blocked with the shield, the concrete punched through it this time. The concrete reoriented itself and shot towards me again. I whirled around so my back was facing the concrete and hastily shoved this piece of metal into the elsewhere, and I breathed a sigh of relief when the metal once again held strong against the concrete. I didn’t even feel the force of the impact on my back, which was incredible.

“Ooo, thank you! I’ve been trying to scratch that itch for ages!”

“Stop being so goddamn annoying!” she yelled at me as I pulled the metal I was on out of the elsewhere and turned back to face her. She was running past an abandoned pallet, so I tried to grab and throw it at her, but again, my power didn’t take hold. Can I only control metal? The cape turned back to face me as she slapped both of her hands against a nearby metal shipping container. When it started to lift up into the air, I recalled how she had touched that concrete earlier as well and realized that she must need to touch objects first in order to move them. I abandoned fighting over the sunken remnants of the car and the pulverized top of the trunk and focused on trying to hold it down with my power. I successfully held it in place at first, but I immediately lost traction when she ran further down and touched the next one.

My power has limits too? I didn’t have time to figure it out, so I focused all my control except for what was holding me up in the air on the first container and flung it as best as I could in the way of the other container. The second container ran into the first with a horrible screech that I grit my teeth against, unable to bring my hands to my ears. The cape, being closer to the impact, wasn’t so lucky and slapped her hands over her ears with a pained shout. She must’ve lost concentration, since both containers fell to the ground with a clang that echoed a bit in the abandoned dock. But more importantly than that, the feeling of my jacket pressing into the metal stopped, and I started to plummet through the air.

I caught myself by maneuvering the metal to break my momentum then hover beneath me, but I was starting to shiver from the cool air on my wet body and clothes. I had to finish this quickly, before she got a lucky shot in or I lost feeling in my limbs.

Down below, the cape was rushing back over to the crashed shipping containers to touch them again. “Oh, you want those?” I taunted, once again focusing most of my power into the container closest to her. “Here, let me get that for you.” She dodged to the side once she realized what was going to happen, but she was too late to avoid the oncoming battering ram entirely, and it slammed into her hip with a crack. She spun violently through the air and skidded for nearly ten feet, leaving a long, bloody streak along the concrete before finally coming to a stop.

Somehow, against all odds, she was still awake, though it was obvious as I lowered myself down to the dock that she was in agonizing pain. She fumbled with her phone for a moment, likely trying to call for backup, but with a tug of my power, the phone flew from her hand over to me. I snatched it out of the air and almost dropped it to the ground to stomp on it but froze mid-motion when it occurred to me that she knew who I was and could hunt me down again. I needed leverage, and this was my best shot at getting some. Ignoring her distressed shout of outrage, I fiddled with her phone to pull up her contacts. Disappointingly, the ‘My Info’ part of her phone was blank, so I guess she wasn’t a total idiot. Turning my attention back to her, I noticed there was something else made of metal in her robe and tugged it out, drawing a startled gasp.

Personal phone... and no password? Pay dirt. I guess you’re an idiot after all. “Tammi Herren, huh? And how are you today, Tammi?”

“Fuck off, you Jap faggot,” she snarled, her tone wavering with obvious pain.

“That line again? You really should come up with some more comebacks. Otherwise you come across like inbred white gutter trash.”

“You won’t get away with this. The R-Rules...”

Rules? I didn’t know what to make of that, but my expression darkened at the first part. “Now maybe it’s just me, but seeing as you know who I am, I think it’s all too fair that I know who you are, don’t you, Tammi?” She flinched away, and I nodded, satisfied. My shivering was getting worse, and my teeth were threatening to chatter. I needed to get some warm clothes quickly, and I knew just where to get them.

“H-Hey, w-what do you think you’re doing, motherfucker?!” she shouted at me when I marched over and started tugging at her robe. She slapped her hand on it, but behind me, the closest storage container lifted into the air and moved through the air until it was directly over her head.

She froze, watching it warily, and I remarked, “I’m intending to leave you with your life, if not your clothes. Are you really going to push me on the leaving you with your life part?”

The robe tugged itself off, her power clearly at work, and she cried in agony as the fabric pulled itself free from where friction had burned it into her side. Ew. I eyed the bloody ring surrounding the missing patch of her robe with disgust, but I had to work with what I had. I tugged off my jacket and shrugged on the robe. It was warmer for sure, but I really needed to swap out all of my wet clothes. I glanced to the south and smirked a bit as an idea hit me. “Mask too.”

“Motherfu—”

“Mask too, Tammi,” I interrupted in a sing-song voice, the container dropping a whole inch, eliciting a startled shriek of terror from her. My smirk grew into a full blown grin when her domino mask slapped into my hand. I tugged it on, the adhesive still working somewhat, even if the fit was awkward. I only needed it for a short bit anyway. “Well, I’m off now. If you try anything funny, then you’ll be a Tammicake, got it?”

“G-Got it.”

I eyed her legs, both of which were bent at unnatural angles, and she was bleeding out a bit. There was no way she could get to help alive if I left her like this, so I sighed and tossed her the first phone she’d pulled out. “I’m guessing that’s your ‘work’ phone? Call for help. But remember, if you sell me out, then I’ll return the favor.”

I didn’t bother waiting for an answer before flying off on my makeshift platform, knowing all too well that mutually assured destruction was the best outcome for both of us. I just didn’t like it. I didn’t know how far her range of control was, or mine for that matter, so I just flew south and, once she was almost out of sight, I flung the container into the Graveyard, splashing her with salt water in a last fit of pique. She deserved that and more for what she’d done to me.

In short order I was flying over the market, and people were shouting and aiming cell phones at me. Perfect. I quickly found the stall with the clothes I’d looked at before and pulled up some clothes by their hangers, including the blouse I’d been looking at earlier. The shopkeeper’s expression was an amusing mish-mash of anger and fear that made him look like he was constipated, and I could help but laugh. Quickly checking that people were still recording, I yelled in my best approximation of Tammi’s voice, “That’s right, pitiful shopkeepers! Your clothes belong to the Empire! Bow down before our superiority complex and despair!”

The look on the shopkeeper’s face? Fucking priceless.

I zoomed off, cackling. Enjoy the bad publicity, Tammi.

So I had a problem. Well, a number of problems, really, but two of them were particularly bad.

Problem the first: I forgot Tammi has to touch things to move them, so my little stunt at the market probably wasn’t as effective as I thought. Disappointing, but there was nothing I could do about it now.

Problem the second: The clothes I stole were my size but a bit too tight, so now I felt like I was fat. I was already eating veggie wraps at lunch—what more did the world want?!

Problem the third: The blouse didn’t flatter my lack of figure well after all, which really sucked. Another injustice by the world at large, clearly.

Problem the fourth, and this was a bad one: Everything that had been in my backpack was a lost cause on account of salt water damage. My textbooks were thankfully still in my locker at Winslow, but my notebooks were a soggy mess. More importantly though, my cell phone was very, very dead.

The last problem tied handily into the final and biggest problem: I didn’t know where I lived.

Now, don’t get me wrong, if I was at the building, I would totally know which floor Masuyo’s apartment was on. The problem was it was long past dark now, and things looked decidedly different when you flew over them from above, so any hope of trying to navigate by memory was a wash. I could have tried to hail a taxi or hunt down the street myself, but I didn’t know the actual address. I’d originally had it written down on a slip of paper in my backpack, and I had copied the info into my phone earlier during lunch. With my papers a jumble of wet, white slime and my phone an expensive paperweight, I had no way to get home.

Right away, I wanted to find some metal to keep close in case the Empire had any more capes to throw around, since I had no idea what the gang’s make up was beyond ‘modern day nazis.’ All I had to defend myself with was the bottom half of the trunk of a car, the hangers the clothes had been on, and my phone, and that all felt woefully inadequate. That being said, I was also wary of flying around closer to the ground and getting spotted, especially by the Empire who were doubtlessly even more pissed off at me by now, so that implied I should stick to flying very high in the air. Unfortunately, that wasn’t doing me any favors in the temperature department. Ill fitting though they were, having dry clothes did help stave off hypothermia, but hanging about up in the air was exposing me to colder air than the ground.

“I just can’t win,” I whined as I turned over each possibility while keeping an eye out over the lip of my flying trunk, just in case the Empire had any other fliers. In theory my address was on file with the school, so I could find out where I lived later at least, but that meant sleeping outside in the cold. Also, I had no idea what Masuyo would do if I didn’t show up tonight. She’d been really worried earlier, so she might call the cops or something, and I definitely didn’t want them involved in anything at all if I could help it.

A gust of wind blew past me, drawing another whine from me as the cold sank in down to my bones. Okay, flying up here isn’t going to work. I better find somewhere to stay the night. Most of the area around the market had settled down by now, though I could still see smatterings of people walking to and fro under the light of street lamps. Not sure what else to do, I settled for following the main road from the market towards downtown. After just a few minutes’ flight, I found a noticeable bubble of light and noise around one building. At a guess, it was a nightclub, though if it was, it was surprisingly busy for a Monday night. Maybe it was a casino? Did they have those in Brockton Bay? If they did, I was pretty sure they stayed open late. Regardless, it was my best guess for a place where I could find warmth, so I flew over, taking care to set down in an alley a bit away from my target.

On the ground once more, I hemmed and hawed over what to do with my sodden clothes and backpack and what I had of Tammi’s costume. I didn’t want to lose my clothes, since I was pretty sure they were still salvageable, especially the jacket which I quite liked. That meant keeping them close, even if it was uncomfortable, so I dumped the white mess of paper out of the backpack and shoved the rest in before pulling it on. My back was wet with the damp bag strapped there, but I would live. I also didn’t want to leave the trunk or the hangers, but if my guess that this was a nightclub was right, then I couldn’t think of any way to keep them close at hand. With a mournful sigh, I left them behind, and a short walk later, I found the source of the light and noise was, in fact, a nightclub after all. The ‘Palanquin,’ specifically, according to the plain glowing letters of their sign.

There was a bouncer outside and a line that stretched around the building, and I groaned at my oversight. There was no way in hell I would be let into a nightclub. I was clearly underage, I was oddly dressed (at best), and I was carrying a soggy backpack containing, among other things, the outfit of a (known?) supervillain. I almost turned to go back to the alley where I’d abandoned the trunk and hangers, but I didn’t want to give up too quickly, so I skulked around the building as unobtrusively as possible. Around the back I found a loading dock with a huge metal door for deliveries, which was promising, but were there people inside? My power showed there were certainly lots of things I could affect moving around.

Which on that note, I tried to lift a multitude of things in rapid succession with my power, just to make sure I was on the right track with how it worked: Backpack? Couldn’t lift it. Window on an upper floor of the club? Couldn’t lift it. The rat that just scurried by with what looked like a hunk of pizza in its mouth? Couldn’t lift it.The nearby dumpster, though—that I could lift.

I looked at tons of items nearby that my power could affect, and I only ever saw things that were obviously metal or probably had metal in them.

Well that settles it. I can only affect metal. Good to know.

Turning back to the matter of getting warm, I examined the inside of the club again and took note of all the metal moving around. I hadn’t ever really considered it before, but I supposed it was true that most people had something metal on them, like a phone, some change, or even the button to their jeans. I focused more closely on the area just past the dock door and didn’t feel any metal moving, so if there was a guard, they either had no metal on them or were very, very still. I pulled my bag around, retrieved Tammi’s domino mask, and slipped it back on. If there’s anybody waiting to ninja me, then I’ll just book it.

I grabbed hold of the door with my power, lifted it enough to create a gap, then ducked under it and let it slide back into place. I might have been worried someone would overhear the clanky noise of the door opening, but the loud thumping of the music pervaded the air even more now that I was in the building, so I felt pretty secure. The loading dock was only a bit warmer than outside however, which made sense in hindsight, so I regrettably needed to sneak deeper into Palanquin. I crept over to the only door leading further into the club and checked with my power. There was movement not that far away in the grand scheme of things, but it was a large mass of moving metal that had to be the people on the dance floor. I could sense regular spots of metal in the walls, but I didn’t know enough about buildings to figure out what that was. Either way, judging by the distance, I guessed I was only a hallway away or so from the dance floor.

I tried to open the door and found it was locked. There was a keypad next to the door, and, judging by the feel of it with my power, another one on the other side as well. Thankfully, the lock itself seemed to be the sort of weight and size I would expect of a normal lock, so I just pulled the lock into the door. Or I tried to, anyway.

“Whoops,” I muttered with a wince, as I examined the wood that had shattered when I’d pulled back the lock and then inadvertently continued to pull the whole mechanism further into the door itself. Was I not gentle enough? I started to step past, since there was nothing I could do about it, but then I glanced at the busted lock wedged in the door. It was small and unobtrusive enough, so I pulled it from the wood with my power and tucked it in my bag just in case.

After that, I moved out into the hall, which was thankfully as empty as I expected and also much warmer than the loading dock. The door at the far end of the hallway on my left seemed to be the direction the ever louder thumping music was coming from, so I initially turned right, hoping to find an out of the way supply closet I could hole up in. I paused though when a thought hit me: What would I do if I got found and had no metal around to use? All I had was my phone and the busted lock. Sure, I could always grab more when the need arose, but timing had been critical earlier when I fought Tammi. I didn’t want to be caught off guard again! If... If I snuck out into the room with the dancing, then I could get metal there... There was so much—surely no one would notice some of it missing?

Before I knew it, I was walking in the other direction and slipping through the door into the club proper.