Act One, Scene Nine
Tenth District
Luminosa caught up to the man in the hooded sweatshirt as he dropped the trays down onto the ground in front of the hostel, and caught his wrist before he could descend himself.
“You never appear yourself.”
The man in the hooded sweatshirt turned to stare at her. “Luminosa!” He got his expression back under control. “They’re my people, I grew up with them. I can make sure it goes to the right places.”
“And receive their praise?” she asked drily. “No. We don’t do what we do for a reward. And we don’t risk lives. Anyone who gets a good look at you is going to be dragged into Pyre’s bunker or the Tyrant’s palace for interrogation. The best thing you can do for them is stay in the shadows. Now - follow me.”
She lifted off into the air, and he followed, lifting himself up by his undershirt and following her.
A few minutes later, they stood in an abandoned apartment building in an abandoned apartment complex; too structurally unsound to live in, too expensive to tear down, stinking of mildew, rot and rust.
“I didn’t expect to meet you,” said the man in the hooded sweatshirt.
“Why not?” Luminosa asked. “You moved into my city. Or were born in it, by the accent.”
“Thought you’d have something better to do, being a legend.”
“I’m immortal,” she corrected. “When you’re immortal people are going to make up stories about you.”
“You never gave up,” he said. “Greenrose switched sides and the other two died, but you kept fighting. You never stopped fighting.”
“I had a unique advantage in not being able to die. Trust me, if I could, I would have.” She smiled. “I liked your attack, by the way. Very clever choice of targets. He needs MREs to feed his army and so this weakens his military powers, but you’re also stealing food from a tyrant to give to the people he oppresses - and I don’t think CBS or the BBC cares that the people his neighbor oppresses are the ones who got it.”
He shrugged sheepishly. “It was undefended.”
“It was defended by two supervillains,” she said. “So, I assume you’re a Survivor?”
“What?”
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“A Survivor-type power.” He looked blank. “You got your powers under threat, to help you survive that threat. Like Heavyhand or Pyre.”
He nodded. “Or Bloody Lizzy?”
“Exactly,” said Luminosa. “Not like idealists or warpers the way I used to be.”
“Warper means tinker?”
“Or Steelmind. Tinkers are warpers, but not all warpers are tinkers. There’s plenty of healers who got their powers because they needed to save one person dying in front of them and reality broke instead of them.”
“Like the Tyrant?”
“We don’t know if he’s a warper or a survivor or an idealist or what other than Too Smart For Me. Not a tinker, though, he just employs them.“
“You’re telling me this because the kinds all have different weaknesses?”
She nodded. “Warper powers aren’t combat-optimized, Survivor powers are. A warper power might let you hit someone with a lightning bolt with good enough aim and two seconds to guide it. A survivor power - have you seen Ilderia fight?”
He nodded. “And does that mean Warpers don’t have defensive powers?”
“They can wear armor and maybe they can get tinkers to tweak them, but when you try to add a new power onto what you’ve already got the odds of an unexpected interaction killing you start at thirty percent and only go up from there.”
“The last kind?”
She paused. “Idealists. They’d rather not be who they were, so they become someone else and stay that way forever. Livia’s almost certainly an Idealist - you can tell because it’s been eighty years and she’s still wearing Mussolini’s uniform.”
He thought of the Seventh District, the only walled district, which anyone could enter but only soldiers left. “That’s every option?”
“Every option but second-order powers, that someone with first-order powers gave them.”
“Like Livia’s army. Like Greenrose.” He gritted his teeth.
“Greenrose… isn’t entirely to blame,” said Luminosa. She shook her head. “Tinker-granted powers are chaotic. Uncontrollable. They don’t have the defensive safeguards that Survivor powers provide. There’s reasons Greenrose betrayed me.”
“She didn’t betray you,” he said flatly. “She betrayed Saint-Andrews.”
“Yeah, well. If you weren’t a survivor, the odds are that you’d either be building gadgets or not sweating,” she said firmly. “Good. You ought to have simple powers which have an extremely obvious basic use but really interesting and useful side benefits from exactly how they function, which you should start trying to figure out. Now, your height, your waist, your pants size?”
“Er. Why?”
“I told you. You’re sweating.”
He looked blank.
“You’re wearing a ski mask and a hooded sweatshirt over regular clothes - and a magnetic undershirt - in the Caribbean, in May.” He looked at himself, frozen in the moment of realization, but she continued anyway, just to hammer in the point. “Do you think a forensics team can’t track you that way? If Pyre bothered with a forensics team, that is. If he really wanted to kill you he could get Prudence to build a plague that would kill you and nobody else.”
He grasped for relevance. “Yes, but why do you need my waist size? And all the rest of it?”
“So I can buy you a costume. There’s a tailor I know who can make you lightweight fabrics that’ll stop small-arms fire, can be changed into in under thirty seconds - with some practice, of course - hidden under normal clothes in the winter, et cetera, et cetera. I can get him to make you some with magnetic plates sewn in so you can still bootstrap yourself into the air.”
“Uh… thanks,” he said, scratching down some numbers on a piece of paper and handing it to her. “Iron plates. Not just magnetic.”
She nodded, once. “Meet back here tomorrow. Until then - try not to get killed? That is, no fighting supervillains?”
“Sure,” he said, and she took off.
He shrugged.
Then he stared.
Then he wondered what to do.
Then he decided that robots didn’t count as supervillains.