Chapter 5
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For the next several days, Shudder found herself with little to do. She had a decent amount of money from previous jobs, so she was more thankful for the reprieve than worried about work drying up. White Tail had grumbled at the report of the botched kidnapping attempt, but hadn’t tried to claim that either of them still owed a debt to Arachne, so Shudder was satisfied that at the very least he wouldn’t be having them assassinated as punishment. Giaour had seemingly disappeared after the failed lab theft, which was a little more concerning, but Shudder didn’t anticipate any trouble from him, either.

This left her time to focus on her investigation. Snapshot wasn’t a supervillain, exactly, though she was one of the most wanted criminals in Fairfield, possibly in the world. She was an information broker. From hidden corporate documents to the secretive world of the mystical and even to historical mysteries, she was said to be able to acquire anything. And sell it to the highest bidder.

She was famously reclusive, however, and very few knew how to contact her. Shudder was fortunate enough to be acquainted with her, and knew of a breaker box outside of a theater in the suburbs where she could hide a message for Snapshot. Two days later, she found a response slipped under her door. It contained nothing but a time and location. That afternoon at a bookstore in a mall. 

A few hours later, Shudder arrived at the store, out of costume. She wandered to the young adult section without bothering to closely examine the other customers or employees. Snapshot would almost certainly recognize her first. She found an interesting-looking fantasy book and spent a few minutes reading the first several pages before she noticed another woman enter the aisle.

She was always a woman, but that was the only thing consistent about her appearance. Snapshot was a shapeshifter. Her hair, skin, size, and age were different every time Shudder saw her. The only way to recognize her was that she always had a camera with her. It was a professional-looking camera, the kind with an oversized lens protruding from the front, and had no screen, leaving Shudder to assume it was an old-fashioned film camera.

Today she was young, possibly even a teenager, and had long brown hair. Her jeans and polo shirt seemed designed to avoid drawing attention. She selected a book as well and looked at the back.

“That’s a good one,” Shudder said. “I read it a few years ago.”

“How are you, Shudder?” Snapshot asked.

“I’m doing alright,” Shudder replied. Talking to Snapshot always made her nervous. She regularly spoke to people with more power than her, but there was always a sense that Snapshot could hurt her in ways she couldn’t even imagine. “You?”

Instead of answering, Snapshot pressed further. “You’re taking care of yourself?”

“As best I can. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I guess we haven’t spoken since…”

“Since Dr. Tlön was captured.”

“Yeah.” Shudder paused. “That’s actually tied in to what I’m here to ask you about.”

Snapshot opened her book, seemingly examining the quotes from authors praising it. “Oh?”

Shudder kept her voice low, but tried to remain conversational. “I was hired to steal a psionic wave detector, but someone else got to it first. And I think the other thief had an Uqbar.”

This seemed to surprise Snapshot, whose hand paused for just a moment before she turned the page. “How sure of this are you?”

“Not very,” Shudder admitted. “I didn’t see the other thief or anything, just what they’d done to the researchers in the lab.” She paused for a moment before remembering another detail. “Oh, Whisper was there, too, and he also thought it was an Uqbar.”

Snapshot considered this. “But as far as you know, there was only one Uqbar.”

“And it was destroyed. Supposedly Doc’s data was, too. So either it wasn’t really destroyed or someone created a new one from scratch or we’re both mistaken and something else had made the researchers act like that.”

Snapshot nodded at her book. “And you want to know which is the truth.”

“Yeah.”

“Dr. Tlön was extremely careful with everything she developed. You know as well as I do that she understood the risks of her technology.”

“Whenever we abandoned a lair, she destroyed everything we didn’t take with us. She certainly didn’t leave a hard drive or even so much as a piece of paper lying around.”

“And Nova Legion destroyed the rest. I don’t believe there’s much reason to fear Dr. Tlön’s technology being reinvented, either. You were key to creating both Uqbar and Orbis Tertius. Without you, there’s no way to trace her path.”

Shudder sighed. It felt as if Snapshot had loosened a vice that had been strangling her.

“However, I will look into this theft, just in case,” Snapshot continued. “To begin, who hired you?”

“Me?” Shudder asked. “Some guy named Giaour, but that’s not the person we’re looking for.”

Snapshot cocked her head slightly, as if what she were reading were extremely interesting. “Giaour? I don’t believe I know that name. He must be particularly new or secretive. He might seem irrelevant to you, but I may make him my starting point. Was there any other information you were looking for?”

Shudder felt another question form in her mind. It made her nervous, possibly even more nervous than the possibility of someone else having an Uqbar. When she asked it, she spoke in a halting way, as if the words were being spoken through her.

“Is she okay? Can you see what’s happening in Singularity? Is she alive?”

Snapshot dropped the usual pretense of the two being a pair of unrelated customers sharing the same space and looked at Shudder directly, a sympathetic look in her eyes. “She is alive, yes. And as well as she can be, under the circumstances. In fact, you may be seeing her again soon.”

Hearing that Dr. Tlön was alive was a relief. However, the news that she might find a way out of Singularity didn’t excite Shudder in the way she would have expected. She hated the idea of someone as kind and merciful as her mentor spending her life trapped in a prison, but Shudder had changed a great deal in the last two years. Would Tlön still consider her valuable? Would Tlön still want to save the world? And what did Shudder want the answer to that question to be?

“Oh,” was all she could manage to say.

Snapshot continued to look deeply into her eyes, her expression turning serious. “Listen carefully. If she does reappear, she will be vulnerable. Her mind is a treasure trove of dangerous information and dangerous people will be after it. She will need you to protect her.”

Suddenly the entire situation felt different. Snapshot wasn’t telling her that she might be able to return to her old life. She was warning her that she was needed to help someone she cared about. She’d almost forgotten what that sense of loyalty felt like. She was needed.

“Dr. Tlön used to be a close friend of mine,” Snapshot added. “And because of that, I care about both her and you. That’s why I need to warn you. Avoid Valkyrie.”

“Who’s Valkyrie?” Shudder asked. She’d heard the word, but never as anyone’s codename.

“A superhero of sorts. It may be best to think of her that way. But she doesn’t follow the ordinary rules. She won’t beat you up and chase you away like Whisper, and she won’t take you to the police like Nova Legion. If she captures you, there will be no trial, there will be no reports or records. You will simply be gone. Understand?”

Shudder nodded. There were occasionally unlicensed heroes who, unlike Whisper, preferred to kill criminals, but Snapshot’s tone suggested that Valkyrie was even more dangerous than them. Snapshot was usually all business. Just an exchange of questions and answers without any courtesies. She wasn’t usually one to offer information like this unprompted, and she never said anything about caring for anyone.

“What do I owe you?” Shudder asked.

“A favor, as always,” Snapshot replied, returning to her book.

 


 

Once a week, Lucas Delacroix visited Lady Valpurgia for magical tutoring.

He was fortunate to have met her early in the Outcasts’ career, when an encounter with a demon had demonstrated how ill-prepared he was to handle magical threats. Thankfully, Lady Valpurgia and her allies in Heaven had arrived to provide assistance. While Valpurgia had insisted that Lucas had handled the situation well, he was determined to learn as much about magic as he could, so that he would be ready for whatever the Outcasts might face in the future.

Like Adam, becoming a superhero had not been his ambition. In fact, he had discovered that few who became superheroes actively sought it out. Most were pulled into the life by unexpected circumstances, such as a crisis only they could resolve, or a hated enemy bringing danger to their doorstep, or the efforts of pushy STRIX recruiters eager to ensure they were monitoring as many superhumans as they could.

Until recently, his magical talent for creating portals had simply been a convenient way to get around town or to grab the remote when it was across the room. He’d always assumed it was innate until a strange memory resurfaced of himself in the forest watching his mother perform some sort of ritual. When he’d confronted his father about it, his father had admitted that when Lucas was five, shortly before his mother had disappeared, she had taken him away for a few days and that he’d been covered in tattoos when they’d returned.

If he wanted answers, he needed to find his mother, and if he wanted to find his mother, he needed to find a way to navigate the world of the supernatural. When his acquaintance, Adam, registered as a superhero, an opportunity had presented itself. The plan had been to set up a superhero team with Adam as the leader. Lucas could surround himself with flashier heroes and blend into the background as he wove himself into the community and investigated his mother. However, Adam had unexpectedly declined the role of leader. With Stray’s criminal record, Synapse’s carefree irresponsibility, and Sila’s unfamiliarity with Earth, the Outcasts were left with only one option to fill out the ‘leader’ space on their registration paperwork, Lucas. Thankfully, Adam still seemed to take center stage in the media’s eye, but Lucas remained far too uncomfortable with the amount of attention that fell on him.

Heaven Tower was warded against magical incursion, so Lucas couldn’t portal directly inside. Instead, he was left to walk through the front door, into the lobby with the strange crystalline art and vaguely Greek statues, and check in with the receptionist.

Heaven was an unusual superhero team. Like Nova Legion, they were registered with STRIX, and like Nova Legion their work extended far beyond Fairfield’s limits, maintaining the balance between dimensions and preventing interdimensional attacks. However, Nova Legion had no publicly-known base, no tacky style-over-substance building marring Fairfield’s skyline. If someone needed to contact Nova Legion, they were either important enough to know how, or they did so through STRIX’s tip hotline.

Heaven, however, was more than just a superhero team. They were, in their own words, an organization that promoted the expansion of the range of human experience. Those vague words left a lot of questions about what went on within Heaven Tower, but the many non-superhero members of Heaven were just as vague as the team’s ads and press releases. This had led many to the conclusion that Heaven was a cult. Lucas considered that assumption a little hasty, but it was his policy to remain suspicious of anyone who kept secrets. Which, of course, included almost everyone.

He swiped his guest pass at the elevator and began the ride up to the thirty-fifth floor. It was one of several floors set aside for Lady Valpurgia’s personal use. When the elevator doors opened, he was greeted with a familiar crimson-carpeted hallway which looked like it was halfway between an apartment and an office. He made his way down the row of doors, pausing briefly to admire a painting of the members of Heaven’s inner circle.

“You like that one, don’t you?”

Lucas momentarily tensed the unexpected voice and turned around to find Lady Valpurgia’s daughter, Krisztina Bataria, or Angelfire. Usually dressed in jeans and a graphic t-shirt of some band or another Lucas had never heard of, she was less flashy than most of Heaven’s inner circle, but her jet black hair, pale skin, and confident smirk made her stand out.

Lucas turned back to the painting. It looked almost candid, as if it had been painted from a photo no one in it had expected. The team was gathered around a table covered in papers, candles, and a small collection of artifacts, but they were looking up as if someone had just unexpectedly interrupted whatever ritual they were performing.

“I guess it’s interesting,” Lucas replied.

“It’s too ‘stuffy rich house’ for me. Like everything around here.” Krisztina leaned against the opposite wall and crossed her arms. “Lesson day, huh?”

Despite the casual, confident way in which she presented herself, Lucas had recently begun to suspect that Krisztina was shyer than she let on. She had a way of asking a nothing-question like ‘Lesson day, huh?’ in a manner that suggested that she was trying to ask something else.

“Hang out after?” Lucas asked.

Krisztina shrugged. “I’m not busy. Got up early, obviously, but now I’m awake so I won’t be able to get to sleep again until the morning.”

“Cool. See you later, Angel,” Lucas replied. Calling her ‘Angel’ was his way of trying to sound suave. He had a hopeless crush on her.

Waving goodbye, he continued down the hall to his lesson room. This was a small room decorated with nothing but a round antique wooden table and a pair of chairs. As opulent as Lady Valpurgia’s tastes were, she clearly understood the importance of this practice room being free from distractions. It was one of the small indicators which proved to Lucas that the Lady was a magical expert, and not someone with small talent who coasted by on charisma.

Lady Valpurgia was already there, sitting at the table. Her long, white hair was so neat and straight that it looked like it had been drawn with a ruler’s assistance. Her lacey black dress was similarly perfect. The romantigoth fashion she preferred was more typical of people in their twenties, but Lucas doubted anyone asked her if she was too old for her style. She had poise that suggested that she was always in charge, and a stern face that invited no challenge. Even though he had been homeschooled, Lucas imagined that the nervousness he felt under her gaze was similar to a child squirming under the scrutiny of a particularly strict teacher.

“Good afternoon, Lucas,” Lady Valpurgia said. She gestured to the other chair.

“Hey,” Lucas said, taking his seat.

“Shall we continue our lesson on protection spells?”

They had been practicing enchantments as part of an effort to create rings of protection for the Outcasts. However, Lucas had another idea today. “Actually, I was wondering if you could teach me scrying.”

Lady Valpurgia smiled, displaying her fangs. A combination of that smile, her Hungarian accent, and her dramatic way of speaking made her seem somewhat sinister. “That is powerful magic. Not particularly difficult to perform, but more enemies fall to it than to fireballs and lightning bolts. What brought about this interest?”

“Some mercenaries are after Sila,” Lucas explained. “We fought them once, but we barely beat them, and Sila says they’ll be back with reinforcements.”

“Mercenaries,” the Lady said, tasting the word. “Aliens, I imagine?”

“Yeah. We need to figure out how to get them to give up, but I can’t do that unless I know more about them. And I want to know if anyone else is going to come after Sila, too. Apparently a bunch of people want to capture them.”

“Then scrying is a good idea. Do you have something which belongs to these mercenaries?”

“No.” That was going to be a snag, wasn’t it? Magic depended on invisible threads woven throughout the world. Seeing a location created a strong enough thread for Lucas to form a portal, but magic that wasn’t innate usually required something stronger.

“Unfortunate. Perhaps you have a photo?”

Synapse was the first person to jump to mind. She insisted on photographing everything she did and posting it online. Of course she hadn’t taken any photos the one time it would have been helpful. He thought carefully, imagined hacking into the city cameras or requesting assistance from STRIX. Who else would have photos of an alien mercenary group?

Ah, of course.

“They’re a known group. The database on Sila’s ship might have some images.”

Lady Valpurgia nodded. “Good. Then once you know how, you’ll be able to find them. But that doesn’t help us now. Is there anyone else you’d like to spy on?” She gave a small chuckle at Lucas’ surprised expression. “For practice, of course.”

Was that a mischievous tone? Lucas tried to resist blushing as he searched for an answer. Krisztina came to mind first. Of course, he would never spy on her, but with the ability to do so at his fingertips it was impossible not to at least think of it. The private lives of his teammates didn’t particularly interest him. He saw quite enough of Synapse and Stray already.

Then it hit him. His mother. Scrying could be the way to get the answers he was looking for. He tucked that away in his mind before he could dwell on it too much. He didn’t trust Lady Valpurgia enough to tell her about his search just yet so he resolved to attempt to scry her alone, after he’d had some practice.

This brought him back around to the mercenaries. If he couldn’t scry them, maybe he could scry the humans who had assisted them. Quetzal and Shudder. It would be easy enough to find photos of them. However, they were only freelancers, according to Stray. The night of the attack, after he told Sila enough jokes to get them to smile again, the cat-eared Outcast had explained that Quetzal and Shudder had probably been hired by a terrestrial organization working with the mercenaries. Most likely Arachne.

“Could we scry Arachne?”

Lady Valpurgia smiled again. A little wider this time, as if Lucas had impressed her. “You are no doubt thinking that STRIX and Nova Legion must be fools if they can’t capture Arachne when magic like this exists.”

“Not exactly, but since you mention it I assume there’s some reason scrying won’t make it easy to catch them.”

“There are two reasons. First, the results of scrying will be unpredictable. You can control them somewhat if you have the right object, but what you see might be past, present, or future. It may not be useful at all, you may find the experience unpleasant, and the spell will likely fail if you attempt it repeatedly.”

That made sense. Still, it was at least worth a try. Lucas needed to be able to pursue any means of getting information as he could. “What’s the second reason?”

“Arachne is spread throughout this city. While a significant object would help, we do not need one to pick up one of their threads. However, they have magical wards which protect them from things like scrying. Even if you successfully penetrated them, their agents would instantly know. You must understand that scrying is not a one-way vision. You must use it with caution. Otherwise magic users and even some psychics will be able to see you with even greater clarity.”

“So I guess Arachne’s out of the question for now.”

“If you were attempting this alone, perhaps, but today you have me assisting you.” Lady Valpurgia smirked. This time, Lucas was sure she was being mischievous.

Using a piece of chalk, she drew a magical circle on the table. In the center was a spider, Arachne’s symbol, and all around it a variety of other symbols. Lucas watched carefully, though he knew he could easily look up the correct symbols in one of his books later. Drawing the circle was the easy part, after all.

When she was completed, she gave Lucas a serious look. “Your wrist, please.”

Lucas rolled up his left sleeve to his elbow and offered his wrist to Lady Valpurgia, who took it lightly in one hand. For a moment she held it in her cold hand, seeming to savor his warmth, then in a smooth motion she bit it.

Lucas gritted his teeth against the sharp pain. As always, it was only momentary, and after a second or two he felt only the strange flowing sensation of his blood leaving his body.

Lady Valpurgia and Krisztina were both vampires. Lucas wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, which of the stories about vampiric powers and weaknesses were true and which were false, but they had fangs and drank blood, at least. And in Lady Valpurgia’s case, the connection produced as she drank someone’s blood allowed her to do certain tricks.

Normally, learning a new magical skill could take days, even weeks. Learning how a particular spell felt was the key. It was like discovering a new limb. Moving his two arms was easy enough, but if he suddenly sprouted a third, he wouldn’t know how to manipulate it with anywhere approaching the same degree of coordination. However, as she drank his blood, Lady Valpurgia could transfer that sensation to his mind, guide him directly into activating the circle and scrying Arachne.

It didn’t happen instantly, but nor was it gradual. Like entering a dream, it did not even occur to Lucas to imagine how much time passed between Lady Valpurgia biting him and the vision’s start. Nothing seemed unnatural about the scene unfolding before him. There was an office. The details were blurry, or perhaps unimportant. It didn’t occur to Lucas to wonder about them.

There was a man standing in the office. He was middle aged and had a bald spot.

“...probably stole it to sell it,” he was saying. “If I could have a few of my agents back, I could put out some feelers and ensure it makes its way to us.”

There was a woman standing in the office, too. She was dressed all in black and wore a blue mask which Lucas thought might be Japanese. However, the exact details seemed to escape him. Or perhaps they were less important than the words, which seemed to dominate his attention

“Even if I could spare them, we can’t be sure the Seraphinite will make its way to the market. We will have to make use of one of your other contacts.”

The man shook his head. “Anyone who is capable of hunting down a thief is too ambitious to be trusted with this job. The rest are nothing but cannons to be pointed at a target.”

“In that case, you’ll have to investigate this matter yourself. Until you know enough to point one of your cannons. Between the Mindbreaker disaster, the Yamosian mess, and Strix’s latest campaign we are stretched to our limits.”

“How’s the Mindbreaker search going?” the man asked quietly, as if afraid that whatever this Mindbreaker was would leap out and attack him.

“The search is progressing.”

“But, if I’m going out there, I need to know whether—”

“The search is progressing,” the woman said more sternly. The man thought better than to press the issue.

“Understand,” the woman continued, “that if current circumstances are proof of anything, it’s that Arachne has become bloated. Should you fail to secure the Seraphinite, then it will become all the easier for us to decide where to make cuts.”

The man gulped as he looked down at a sword the woman wore at her hip.

Then Lucas was back in the training room at Heaven Tower.

Lady Valpurgia was still holding his wrist, but had leaned back, no longer biting it. There was no blood, and the wounds had already closed to the size of small pinpricks.

“It worked!” he said, a little more excited than he meant to. “I saw two people with Arachne.”

“Did you learn anything?” Lady Valpurgia asked.

Lucas shrugged. “Just that they really are working with the mercenaries, and they’re stretched really thin right now. It sounded like some rivals are giving them trouble. Not the most useful information right now, but maybe it will be later.”

“Then our lesson for the day is complete.”

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