Under the midday sun, the city of Bulwark Bay sparkled like sweet tea on a scorching summer day. At its heart stood city hall, a colossal white dome that graced the skyline, surrounded by flagpoles. The work that must’ve gone into building something like that testified to its importance. The pearl of the city.

Or at least, Milly was absolutely sure that was the intention, but the stark whiteness didn’t have the gleam to really resemble a pearl. It looked more like a careless giant once shot his cricket ball into the city and didn’t care to look for it.

“No wonder Stella poked fun at it,” Milly thought aloud as she jogged toward the building and ran up the wall. The start was steep, but not entirely vertical thanks to the shape of the building. Before long, Milly reached the ‘roof’, or whatever she should call the part of a dome that, while angled, was at least level enough to stand on.

Milly must’ve spotted the trouble early because no other heroes were on the scene. The only people were three scared-looking civilians in overalls that bore a large pearl logo with the word ‘Polish’ written across it. No points for figuring out what they were here for. The six tall creatures that surrounded the cleaning crew on the other hand? Those definitely didn’t belong.

They looked bizarre. Walking rainbow lollipops with peppermint candy cane limbs that ended in massive pieces of candy corn that resembled hammers more so than hands. A jagged grin and eyes painted across their big, flat faces. They almost didn’t look real.

“What in the world?” Milly had to take a beat to process. The figures had looked odd from afar, but against the bright white of the dome she’d only been able to make out their silhouettes. “Am I just interrupting a sweets commercial?”

Unlikely, these things were too freaky looking to appeal to anyone. Not to mention there were no cameras to be seen. The real big give away though was that Milly had never in her life seen good acting in a commercial yet the cleaning crew looked believably terrified.

“Okay, in that case… I reckon step one is getting these folks to safety. Easier said than done. I’m not great at moving folks.” She eyed up the nearest person, a man in his early twenties, brandishing a mop at the creatures. Strangely, the head of the mop had twisted into a spear-like tip and stabbed into the leg of the creature. “Hey, nice job! What is that? Some sorta enhancement power? Still, I should probably get you outa here.”

While it wasn’t impossible to move an adult, Milly doubted she could move him all the way down the dome. Heck, even if all three had been her own size, she definitely couldn’t make that trip thrice. “Down is too far. New plan. How did they get up here?”

At the very center of the roof, a segment had lifted up as though someone had cored the building like an apple and pulled it up one floor. One quick search later, Milly found an elevator panel inside.

“That’ll work,” Milly said while she stepped out of the raised elevator and reevaluated the scene. One of the creatures stood between the cleaning crew and the elevator, which explained why they hadn’t run away yet. “These things need a name. What do you think, Theodore?”

While Theodore thought on the question, Milly noticed something off. Only the man with the broom was being directly menaced by one of the creatures. The others weren’t even looking in the direction of the cleaning crew. Instead, they were hitting the dome with the big candy corns. Some were just winding up, others already mid-swing, and one just hit the dome and created a crack.

“Geez. They pack a lot of punch for candy corn on candy canes… Candy Banes?” Milly high-fived Theodore for a job well done. She dragged the people into the elevator and hit the down button. “Something tells me I’ll be done here before it actually gets down.”

From that perspective, had there been a point in moving the cleaning crew in there? Maybe she shouldn’t have bothered.

Milly shook her head, chasing the thought off and choosing instead to focus on the six ‘Candy Banes’.

“Mhm. These guys seem kinda similar to those Flame Sprites, don’t they? There’s a bunch of them, they all look the same, and they seem more interested in the building than the people… and it’s another government building.”

It lined up, but the element was different. Instead of fire creatures, these were candy creatures.

Milly walked a circle around the only Candy Bane that had been aggressive so far. It would take a while before it would notice that its victim was long gone, leaving only a hovering mop. Milly had left that extra baggage behind. “Oh, perfect.”

She grabbed the mop-spear and pulled it free, leaving an open leg wound that let Milly see inside. As Milly suspected, there were no innards, just the same strange solidified fire that she’d seen inside the Flame Sprites and the T-Rex. She could feel the heat radiate from the wound when she moved her hand near it.

“Honestly, that just gave me more questions than it answered. Just how versatile is this power?” Milly scratched her head and twirled the mop while weighing her options. It would be best to take out the Candy Banes first. If they were anything like the Flame Spirits, one solid hit down the middle ought to take them out. She conveniently had a good weapon at hand; the tip of the mop felt hot, but it had obviously taken no damage despite direct contact with the heat. “Good thing there’s nothing to burn up here either.”

Milly wasn’t sure how long the enhancement effect on the mop would last now that the wielder wasn’t holding it anymore, so she quickly went around and jabbed each Candy Bane twice, once in the chest and once through the big lollipop heads. It felt as though she was poking holes in cardboard cutouts. “Here’s hoping it actually stops them… and that they don’t explode.”

She was at least reasonably certain that explosions were not involved. Nobody had mentioned any of the other creatures exploding at the police station. Too bad that she’d knocked herself out or she could have watched what happened exactly.

“I guess I could try watching now but…” She pulled out her looking glass again and scanned her surroundings. “I didn’t get a chance to do this last time. Maybe whoever controls this needs to see what’s happening. If so, I should be able to see them, right?”

There were only so many spots that offered a good vantage point to the city hall roof, but none of them yielded any results. Nor did Milly’s next step of rapidly searching the building for a drawing. Nor her attempt to see if she recognized the face of literally anyone in the vicinity.

Some of her other attempts hadn’t borne fruit yet due to time. Like the pictures she took of the scene and sent Niki along with an explanation. Or the update she texted the ACE group chat. While she was at it, she also included the question about how other parts of the city were patrolled.

Waiting was the worst.

On the bright side, she occasionally interrupted her search to check in on the roof and saw both the Candy Banes and elevator going down little by little each time. Eventually, all that was left were piles of hot goo where the Candy Banes used to be. They’d lost their cohesion entirely.

“Good thing this dome isn’t flammable, but I’m still no closer to figuring any of this out.” Milly grumbled while she navigated her way out of city hall through the maze of corridors and offices. On her way, she stumbled upon a rounded gentleman wearing the mayoral chain giving a speech. The mayor was either cool as a polar bear in shades or hadn’t heard of the attack on the building yet.

Either way, Milly had enough of downtown for one day. She left a note warning people not to touch the hot goo then made her way back to school.

By this point, the various cute animals along her route were becoming more familiar than the people she’d gone to school with for the past weeks. The bulldog slobbering outside a kebab store. The Persian cat snoozing on a hot car. A wiener dog leaning out a second-story window and barking at the window next door was new.

That last one turned out to be because of a burglar. Milly left that good boi a hotdog as a treat.

It wasn’t the only incident she aided with, but it was easily the most memorable.

Once she made it back to the school grounds, Milly skipped the stairs in her dorm and just walked right up the wall to her window and came in that way. A nice little shortcut that conveniently cut down on having to hear her footsteps on a lag timer in the stairway.

Niki wasn’t in the dorm, which made sense upon reflection. School was still in session and they’d only skipped one period for the TRACE meeting. Right now, Niki was probably on her way to Math class.

“Darn.” Milly sighed and fell into bed. She shrugged her backpack off, then rolled onto her back while holding Theodore above her. “Is it wrong that I kinda wish she’d skip school so we can hang out?”

Come to think of it, the frequency Niki responded to texts had to mean she barely let go of her phone.

Theodore was left to hover while Milly grabbed her phone and checked if she had any new messages. There had to be someone who’d gotten back to her by now. No such luck, so she picked up a comic from the pile beside her bed and flicked through the pages.

A nice thing about her power was that she rarely needed to hold anything. She just let the comic float above her while she rested one arm behind her head and occasionally turned a page.

After a while, she noticed a new text.

@Dad (Holden A. Second)

: Dad

I’m sorry that I didn’t notice that the Holden Room backfired sooner. That must’ve been awful, but I’ve seen you fall off a horse often enough to know it won’t keep you down. You’ll dust yourself off, saddle up, and try again.

There’s more to learn from failure than success. The room might’ve sped up your mind, but I saw you move. As long as I’m in the room and you aren’t, you’ll only appear four times as fast. I ain’t exactly sure where to go from there, but that’s progress, right?

We’ll figure it out. I'm mighty proud of you.

“Aww.” Milly hugged her phone to her chest and smiled. “Dad’s worried. I guess I did kinda storm out after that whole nightmare. He knows I’m not blaming him, right?”

Theodore floated above her, holding her comic book open.

“I should tell him, anyway?” Milly tilted her head quizzically, then picked her phone up. “Good idea. He’d probably like to hear about what I learned in the subway too. I guess that was kinda like saddling up again after that big fall.”

Milly thrummed with giddy energy while she sent a long series of texts back. She could hardly wait to hear his reaction to her newfound ability to scale dangerously tall buildings. She was all but sure he’d slide in some dumb dad joke about being grounded from now.

“Oh…” Her smile faltered as she recalled just how long it would take to hear from him again. “Right.”

She pushed her phone up and left it hanging in the air where she could see the screen in case any other messages came in, then returned to her comic book with a sullen sigh. “At least it was kinda interesting to hear he could see me move. Maybe next time I should try talking to him in person. Not that he’d hear me but… What about sign language?”

Her dad probably didn’t know sign language, but he could bring Niki into the Holden Room and they could experiment whether it was a good way to communicate. Of course, Dad had forbidden her from telling Niki about his power for the time being, so that was a moot point.

“Ugh, what’s the big secret, anyway?” Milly grumbled. “It’s not like he has the power to create cold fusion. That’s something to keep hush-hush if you don’t wanna get kidnapped, but the Holden Room? That’s barely a power. At most, it looks like you’ve got enhanced reactions or something.”

“Actually…” Milly snatched her phone out of the air and opened up the Span-Dex. A quick search yielded more than a few entries for heroes, villains, and publicly powered civilians with enhanced reactions, but she could narrow it down by region, and age, and filter out common extra powers.

Predictably, there were almost no known civilians on the list and a significant number of the ‘supervillains’ were more accurately classified as petty criminals with an edge. As far as heroes went, most of them were vigilantes with martial arts who focused on street crimes. That all seemed about the right level. Only a few ended up punching significantly above their weight class and joining the high-profile super teams.

It wasn’t until Milly thought of searching for ‘room’ as well that she finally hit gold.

“The superhero Hold-On entered the public eye twenty-three years ago. Known primarily for his ability ‘the holding room’ that granted him uncanny reflexes, quick wit, and incredible patience.” Milly already didn’t need to read on to know she’d found what she was after. “Dad really was a hero? A week ago this would’ve blown me away, but now I’m just embarrassed I never put it together before.”

Inwardly, Milly breathed a mental sigh of relief he wasn’t listed as a supervillain.

That still didn’t explain why he was hiding now, though. The rest of the article described his power in broad strokes, none of which was news to Milly by this point. Like most superheroes with his type of power, he started off as a vigilante, though his identity remained unknown. He later joined a small-time team whose coordination skyrocketed after his arrival.

“Makes sense. Dad could call a one-sided time-out in the middle of a fight.” Milly reasoned while she reached up nonchalantly with one hand to push Theodore and her comic back up, counteracting gravity for a little longer. “...Wait, this is odd.”

Like most superheroes, there was a section dedicated to the various villains they encountered and how their battles ended. An overly simplified statistic that was primarily used for Fantasy-Superbrawl-Teams. The most common options were: ‘Captured’ and ‘Escaped’. Sometimes both at once. With the occasional ‘Fatality’ in either direction.

Roughly half of Hold-On’s villain encounters over his eight-year run were marked as a series of ‘Escaped’ followed by ‘Missing’. Especially toward the end. Most of the villains were unremarkable, falling in that aforementioned class of ‘crooks with an edge’, but one definitely came in at a weight class or three above.

Catapult, the last foe faced by Hold-On and his team, was a bona fide supervillain who terrorized a neighborhood in Houston for two years. Her entry on the Span-Dex read like a bad Saturday morning cartoon. Milly actually had to check if the page had been vandalized because no one could be so insane as to steal the giant plastic donut from the Donut Shop and demand a million dollars ransom. Or a scheme to claim ownership of the neighborhood by painting over all the street signs and renaming them things like “Her Highness Catapult Lane” and “Catapult’s Majestic Drive”. Each plot was bigger and crazier than the last.

“How did nobody capture her? There’s like a billion ‘Escaped’ results on here!” Milly scrolled back up to the top of the page to see if there was anything she’d missed, but Catapult’s power was as straightforward as her name.

Catapult possessed a telekinetic power capable of

firing any touched object/person up to:

5kg, 50kg, 500kg,1000kg, >5000kg (Cargo Van)

Each previously set record was later exceeded.

The top speed is estimated to be at least Mach 1.

The mass of the object and acceleration had no correlation.

“No correlation?” Milly felt a cold shiver as she pictured a truck going from 0 to Mach 1 with a slap on the hood. “I’m seeing the issue. Good thing Catapult was pretty much nuts by the sound of it. I hate to think what damage she could’ve done with an actually effective plan… It’s a miracle nobody died.”

Noone on Hold-on’s team even came close to feats like that.

Then, fifteen years ago, Catapult’s final scheme centered on sending an entire newly built shopping center into space so Catapult could be the first to open trade relations with extraterrestrials.

The details were fuzzy as even the team on the scene wasn’t clear on what happened, but the shopping center remained, sustaining only immense damage to the roof while Hold-On and Catapult both gained the “Missing” status by the end. They were presumed to have been shot into space.

“Well, that obviously didn’t happen. Unless Catapult wasn’t that crazy after all and those Extraterrestrials gave dad a lift back home.”

Theodore drifted slowly down as though he were in space himself.

“You think they just eloped? Pfff, as if Dad would hook up with an insane supervillain! What? Just because they both vanished fifteen years ago? And Dad doesn’t want anyone to know he used to be Hold-On? And Dad mentioned once that Mom had the power to launch objects? And… and I’m fourteen…which… kinda lines up…”

Milly quieted down, going over all the pieces again. The possibility was frighteningly real. Even her hometown, Magnolia, was only an hour away from Houston where Hold-On was active. Dad grew up there too, but Milly knew he’d lived in the city for a few years before moving back to Magnolia with Mom to start a family. About a year before Milly was born.

Not for the first time, Milly wished she knew more about her mom. If only six-year-old Milly had been a little more inquisitive and actually asked her questions before she suddenly left. Or maybe Milly had and she just didn’t recall the answers anymore.

Maybe this could help Milly figure out where her mom went, but it also presented a troubling thought.

“Theodore… Do you suppose insane supervillainy is hereditary?”

Theodore didn’t know.

An hour later, Milly was outside taking a literal walk around the school along the outer wall.

She’d hoped the fresh air would help clear her head, but all she’d managed to do was oscillate between denial, elaborate alternate theories, and tentative acceptance. There was only one thing she could think of that would give her a straight answer. “I should ask Dad directly. I mean, that’s the only reasonable choice, right?”

The draft for the text had already undergone half a dozen revisions. Nothing felt right, so she settled for the simplest question she could think of.

“Mom = Catapult?”

She squeezed her phone while hovering her thumb over the ‘send’ button. “Maybe it’d be better to add more context after all? No! Quit being a coward.” She firmly pressed down until the message was sent.

To her surprise, she immediately got a text back.

@Niki

Niki:

Since you were a good girl~

Have a look at this:

Enclosed were two images. The first was a children’s book titled “Big Rex Tries Chili!” with a picture of a distressed T-Rex on the cover, spitting out flames while a half-empty bowl rolled away on the ground. The second was a thumbnail for a video about brushing. It showed a colorful illustration of a tooth under attack by creatures that looked a lot like the Candy Banes from earlier.

Niki:

Your encounter today confirms there is a connection. Whoever is doing this can summon creatures in different shapes, but they cannot change the internal composition, otherwise, the Candy Banes would have been sugar.

It appears as though they are taking inspiration from children’s media to decide on the shape. I have done some checking and found other incidents where people spotted friendly cartoon characters in real life. However, there is an immense difference in size and hostility with these last two incidents.

Included are the locations of the sightings. Perhaps you can find something?

That’s all for now!

ILU <3

(For clarity: I am only kidding about the good girl part. Not that you are not one! But I would have shared the information as soon as I had data to support the hypothesis, which you provided.)

Milly snickered as she read the clarification at the end. “Give me a little credit, geez.”

Leave it to Niki to unwittingly save the day. This was just the distraction Milly needed right now.

She was about to put her phone away but lingered just a moment to read the most important bit three more times. The smile it conjured on her face hurt her cheeks, courtesy of those sunburns on her face.

@Niki

Milly:

ILU2 <3