Heroes Wear Capes

“From the studio that inexplicably sewed his fucking mouth shut the first time comes five-time Academy Award viewer, Ryan Reynolds in an eHarmony date with destiny. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... me! Deadpool.”

~ Wade Wilson (Deadpool)

April took a deep breath as she finally turned on her phone. She’d had it all the way off ever since she arrived in San Francisco. She didn’t want to hear what her parents had to say about her disappearance after their fight, but since the day had finally come when she was appointed to visit Alcatraz, she had no choice but to face what she’d done.

The first messages to show up made April cringe.

Dad – April, where are you?

Dad – If you don’t come home right this instant, you are grounded for life!

Dad – I will have you know that I have advised the warden at the prison not to let you enter the premises.

April groaned. Of course her amazing superhero father had connections at the prison. The warden himself, Storm Chaser, was a retired superhero and was one of her father’s friends. But maybe, just maybe, the warden would realize she was an adult and her father had no power over where she decided to spend her time. She hoped the warden was reasonable.

Mr. Annoying Superhero – Where R U?

Mr. Annoying Superhero – Janus won’t tell me where you are and I’m getting worried.

She felt a bit bad for Brandon in that sense. He just wanted to keep her safe, and she left without telling him. It wasn’t his fault he treated her like a damsel, it was all he had been taught to do. He was just doing his best to help her.

April – Don’t worry, I’m fine. I’ll be back home soon.

The text message back was almost instantaneous.

Mr. Annoying Superhero – I’m coming to find you.

April – Please don’t. I need some space. Maybe you can finally beat Black Knight if he isn’t able to have me hostage. Just promise me you won’t come after me.

There was a longer pause this time before the reply.

Mr. Annoying Superhero – I promise.

Mr. Annoying Superhero – but if I think you’re in trouble, nothing in the world will keep me from you.

April couldn’t help but to smile. Brandon meant well.

The next thing that popped up on her phone was a news update from the Super News Network. It recapped the events of the weekend and Monday night. Apparently a lot had happened in Empire City since she left.

Breaking news!

CEO DEAD AND NEW SUPERHERO IN TOWN?

Written by Meredith Temple

On Friday night CEO of Rossi Corp, Paul Rossi, was reportedly shot by a mugger, though inside sources say that the shooter was hired to take Rossi’s life. While in the hospital, Rossi suffered a mix up with his medication and died. The cause of death has not been publically released, but sources inside the hospital say the mix up in his medication may not have been accidental.

You can come back and check up on updates as the SNN receives more news on the subject. You can post your theories down in the comments.

In other news, a new superhero was spotted in Kingdom City during the night saving woman from five attackers using super speed. It is unknown who this speedster is or how he got his powers, but this red cloaked figure that the SNN has dubbed as Momentum sure seems to be taking the city by storm. Hopefully soon we will get another public sighting of this new hero.

Any ideas about this new vigilante? Who could they be? And do they have any relation to the famed heroine, Sonic (otherwise known as Arabella Jones)?

This has been Meredith Temple.

Of course the article was written by her. Most superheroes were done with Meredith Temple’s antics by now. She was the one who caused all the superheroes in Empire City to get their identities revealed, which spurred the Remedist Party who ran on a campaign of registering all supers so that the government could basically imprison them all. They said that they couldn’t be trusted since all those heroes had been children of super villains, or impoverished, or too rich, or too young for the public’s liking.

Thankfully, they never won.

April was quite annoyed by her superhero family, but she didn’t think they deserved to have their identities known and be thrown in jail. They’d done nothing but good for their patron cities, so why would the public need to know who they were?

But a new hero in Kingdom City? That place was going to get pretty crowded pretty fast. Soon most of the criminals would just stop trying if there were four heroes out to get them. Maybe that meant Brandon would have more time to be a regular kid, to actually try to be anything other than a famous superhero around her.

April had to be honest. Maybe if Brandon wasn’t so consumed by his superheroism, he would actually be a great guy. Maybe if he wasn’t trying so hard to be what everyone wanted him to be, they could actually work. Maybe if she wasn’t his damsel in distress all the time, things would be different.

Yeah, it was a hopeful plea, too hopeful to actually work.

But April had to admit that she wasn’t too upset about Paul Rossi’s death. His company had been known to occasionally make deals that ended up helping the McPhail family tree with their nefarious plans. Maybe without their figure head they’d stop being such an annoyance to superheroes everywhere.

April put down her phone and looked in the mirror one last time. She was wearing her best suit, her heels at a moderate two inches. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun at her neck and her makeup was natural. She had to look professional for the interview. She was the first person ever to talk with X like this, and she was only a sophomore in college. If she wrote a paper or a book about this encounter, she could be famous. Famous for something other than being White Knight’s damsel.

When April walked down to the lobby of the hotel she half expected Janus or one of White Knight’s other friends to be waiting for her, to take her home, but there was no one. At least, that was what she thought until she spotted a familiar figure in the crowd of tourists.

“April Watson, it’s good to see you again.”

April smiled, “Agent Argent, are you my escort?”

The agent nodded. “Yes, and I’m going to be debriefing you on the way. This may be a college project, but to MASKED this is something way more.”

MASKED (Monitoring of Abnormal, Strange, and Kaleidoscopic Events Department) was a branch of the US government that mostly operated in secret. They monitored most supers around the world, and they knew the identities of most superheroes and a good number of villains. Agent Argent was the reason the League of Legends got together to defeat Nemesis and she was the reason X was eventually put away. And, if you listened to the rumors, she helped stop a woman who was planning to get rid of superpowers altogether.

“I’d imagine,” April responded, walking with Argent out of the hotel and to the waiting car.

She nodded, “This will be the first official interview X has ever agreed to. Even when he was first captured he refused to talk to anyone. He only spoke when necessary and then only to the Alcatraz guards. We’ve tried sending in other psychologists, but the results haven’t been pretty. How your professor was able to get you this interview, I don’t know. His friend in Alcatraz must have enough connections to get X to agree to this.”

April thought of her nerdy professor. Imagining him with real friends was weird.

“Why are you the one assigned to the case anyways?” She asked, taking a seat in the MASKED black, unmarked SUV, “Aren’t you a bit too high ranking to take on any case?”

Argent sighed and placed her hands gently in her lap, always resigned and posed. She seemed to consider her answer for a long moment before answering. “I have a niece who I go and visit every so often. She’s a bit younger than you, still in high school.” April was surprised to hear this. She hadn’t thought of Argent to be the kind of person with close family ties, let alone a niece or siblings. “She lives in Kingdom City and her mom was one of the early victims of ‘The Pill’. X is the reason my sister died and left a child behind. I guess you could say I have a little bit of a personal root in the case of X.”

The Pill was the way X took over the city all those years ago. It was an insanely addictive drug that was very easy to overdose on. It was cheap, so it traveled around the city even faster. Her sister must’ve been one of the first few to overdose on the drug, back before Kingdom City knew what it was. No wonder Argent seemed so detached from everyone.

“Wouldn’t that make MASKED take you off of the case?” April asked, “I mean – isn’t that what they do in the movies when a detective is personally involved?”

Agent Argent chuckled deeply. “Yeah, well MASKED thinks just the opposite. If I’m personally involved, I’ll be more in tuned to finding out the reasons behind X’s evildoings and the people who helped him.”

April frowned. She’d known the agent for a lot of her life. She was always stopping by after one of her father’s big saves when she had been little, and then right after he took Brandon in. How had April not seen this tragedy in Argent’s life?

“You think I’ll learn all of that through a simple case study?”

April had secretly been hoping to learn interesting things like that during the interviews, but to have it confirmed by the agent made it seem more real and tangible for her to reach. Maybe the worst villain in history would spill their deepest darkest secrets to her.

Yeah, it seemed impossible.

“Maybe. We hope at least,” Argent confessed. “We will host your interviews in the neutral ground on Alcatraz, where Merlonium isn’t lining the walls. That way Storm Chaser can observe and butt in if it looks like X is going to get violent. There’s no way otherwise the warden would let the daughter of one of his best friends in the same room as a villain like him.”

Everyone knew X wasn’t a super, just a regular human who had found a way to gather more power over a city than any super ever had, but people still treated him like a dangerously super powered super villain. The Merlonium lining the walls was the main reason Alcatraz was used as the super villain prison. The element removed the powers of supers and had the added benefit of causing a bit of pain as well because superpowers were sort of like an extra limb for supers.

“Will Storm Chaser be in the room?”

Argent furrowed her eyebrows at the question. “Of course. We won’t be leaving you unprotected. Trust me, we aren’t savages.”

April frowned. Argent thought she had been concerned for her own safety, but she really wasn’t. She was more concerned with X not wanting to answer certain questions with a hero like that in the room. Maybe he wouldn’t want to reveal the bad things if a very representation of what took him down was in the room.

“I don’t think he’ll be too dangerous, Argent. He’ll be in chains the entire time anyways,” April argued. “What can X really do to hurt me? Believe me, I’ve been kidnapped by super villains enough times in my life to know how to handle myself around them. If he starts to be aggressive, I’ll know.”

Argent seemed blindsided by April’s confession. She had forgotten that April had been face to face with many more villains than she and in much more antagonistic settings than through one way glass.

“I assume you will.”

The car suddenly lurched to a stop. Argent turned to April and gave her a hopeful smile. “Well, this is it. Are you ready to go in there?”

April thought about it for a moment. This was a place full of people who absolutely hated her father and her mother and her sister and her kind-of boyfriend and basically everyone she grew up with. This was the exact opposite of what her family would want for her. Granted, she’d been probably been in a lot of these villains’ deathtraps before too and now she was willingly putting herself in an environment where they were surrounded by others like them. If these villains still had control of their powers, April doubted she would even consider walking in that place without a superhero vanguard.

But this was a chance to finally make a name for herself and maybe even delve into the mind of one of the most notorious and infamous villains in history. Someone who was almost able to completely fight off her father and Brandon’s combined forces. This was her chance to be free.

“Yeah,” she nodded, “I’m ready.”