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goshdarnspam2012-03-31 12:57 pm
magicalworld) wrote in goshdarnspam2012-03-31 12:57 pm
C&C fic
Remember how I went on a trip the other week? Well, I had a lot of time on my hands on the plane and at the airport, and I ended up writing a C&C story on the way. It's from an NPC cop's point of view, and I decided I ought to share it with the community.
My name’s Anne Murdoch. I’m a beat cop for the City Police Department. People tell me I’m a hero, but never a Hero. That means I’ve got a badge instead of a mask. It’s an important distinction where I live.
I was born and raised in ‘The City with so much game it doesn’t need a name,’ and after twenty-five years I’ve heard all the jokes about it I care to. Yes, we’re just called ‘The City.’ Yes, it’s weird. It’s also distinctive, and you better believe this is a distinctive town. It could be worse: apparently there’s a bunch of alternate universes where this place is called ‘New York, New York.’ I mean, can you believe it?
I should probably explain about the alternate universes. There’s a machine in the City. They call it ‘The Porter.’ It sits in a dead tech company’s skyscraper in Midtown. No one knows how it works or where it came from. It just started up in 2008, after the whole police force vanished and never came back. The Porter likes to kidnap people from other universes. They’re called ImPorts, and they have super powers.
No one can control the Porter, except its messed-up AI, and enough people have gotten zapped trying that these days most of the planet is just resigned to being screwed with by a rogue machine. This includes the ImPorts. They can’t go home until the Porter sends them for whatever reason, so they make the best of it while they’re here. Mainly by saving the world, or ruining it.
If I’m a hero, my origin story is pretty damn simple. Not a lot of people remember what 2008 was like anymore, or at least they don’t want to. The anarchy, the fear. Frustration too: the government was paralyzed by what had happened, and they turned their backs on us. There are still support groups running for people who lost someone during those days, a cop spouse or a murdered friend. Me, I’m lucky. Dad’s store in the West Side was robbed three times in one week by three different gangs, and all he needed were a lot of stitches instead of a casket. While I was helping to pull glass shards from his arm, I promised that if we ever got cops again, I’d be one of them.
A lot of ImPorts deal with being here by putting on masks and fighting crime. I don’t think there’s a police force in the country that tolerates vigilantes as much as the C.P.D., but what are you gonna do? ImPorts saved this City. There were stolen into a world that feared and hated them, and they cleaned up its streets. They reopened prisons, fought the gangs. My Dad never had any trouble again after the Blue Beetle swooped in one night. They even rebuilt the police force eventually. I’d just graduated from criminology, so the timing was perfect. I’m pretty sure I was one of the first applicants through the door. When I made it, I started taking orders from the new Commissioner: Optimus fucking Prime.
That’s another thing, the really weird one. Superpowers and alternate dimensions are one thing, you can wrap your head around that with enough Star Trek. Knowing that Spock used to do tech work for the force, and that there’s no more Star Trek anymore because of it? That’s something else. The Porter brings in fictional characters, then erases the fiction as some balancing of the dimensional scales. It’s caused hell with the entertainment industry. We actually got riots over it last year, fans in costumes attacking the Porter to get their shows back. But eventually, you hear about Han Solo getting a speeding ticket and you just nod and drink your coffee.
My night patrol these days takes me through Times Square, or what’s left of it. I’m supposed to keep an eye out for vandals. There’s been lots of anti-ImPort graffiti popping up here lately. The ImPort population usually hovers around two hundred or so. It’s an unpredictable mix: larger-than-life abilities with personalities to match. Things happen when people like that get tossed together far from home, even without green aliens and monsters involved. The fight in February was the fourth time the Square got wrecked in as many years. A lot of people died, and a lot more got angry. ImPorts don’t stay dead- the Porter likes to bring back her toys after a few days so she can keep playing with them. Those of us ‘native’ to this dimension aren’t so lucky.
My partner and I walk through the ruins, checking shadows for people with spray cans and grudges. I tune him out as he talks. His name’s Dan, he’s new, and he’s an idiot. He’s in his early twenties and has this red goatee sticking off his chin that just does not work. He’s going on about how he only joined the force as a springboard into the military. He thinks recruiters will treat C.P.D. experiences as equivalent to a combat tour. He might be right, but it’s still stupid.
I’ve seen things in this place no one but another Cityzen can understand. Outsiders gawk at the news and ask us for stories as though our lives were celebrity gossip. Some of them write fanfiction about it, for fuck’s sake. None of them get it, except maybe for the ones who’ve seen a piece of it: conflicts and disasters spilling out into other places, Washington and Los Angeles and Boston. Living here does things to your alertness, to your nerves. Some people are always keyed up and twitchy because they know frogs could start raining from the sky at any second. Others build up a thick skin as a point of City pride. A brawl between demigods will break out on the street, and they’ll just watch and finish their coffee while updating their insurance policies.
I’ve seen people revert to children or spend days trapped in their worst nightmares because of some magic spell. There’s a fucking Nazi cyborg on the most wanted list, a guy who once hijacked a nuke so he could give World War Two another shot. I once had to call for backup because I was being attacked by a swarm of pigeons and rats. By the time it was safe to leave my car, the vehicle and everything around it was smeared in white shit.
One time the force helped evacuate the entire City because clairvoyants had visions of demons destroying the world on Halloween. The ordinary cops had to run away with everyone else once we were done directing traffic. We watched from a Jersey refugee camp as the fate of the world was decided by people from other dimensions. You could see the flashes of power above Manhattan, flickering for hours.
In the morning we weren’t all dead, so we took that as a sign the good guys won and the City trudged back into their homes. There was a trail of destruction from some Thing the size of a mountain, stretching from Battery Park to Downtown. The Imports helped clean up, of course. They always do. I saw a blind teenager doing the work of two construction crews, moving dirt and rubble with her mind or something. Sometimes they throw charity balls or date auctions for these things, which is nice I guess. At least it wasn’t worse than Godzilla.
We’re leaving the Square now, and Dan’s getting on my last goddamn nerve by telling Moon jokes. You’re not supposed to joke about the Moon. It’s just tasteless. An Import decided it would be fun to put together a private space program and build a rocket ship in a few weeks. Just so she could go to the Moon and turn it into her personal graffiti board. So now there’s a giant cock drawn on the Moon that can be seen from Earth when it’s full. And then she ran for Mayor and almost won, which says something but I’m not sure what. At least one of the saner Imports won, although apparently his Deputy used to be a supervillain. Meanwhile the Moon’s still up there. Humanity just has to look up every night to be reminded of what their world has become.
Dan is trying very badly to fit a Viagra joke in to his Moon puns as we head down Seventh Avenue, and if I don’t chew him out now he’s just not going to have a future with the force. Just as I open my mouth to tell him off, someone lands on a car behind me, a person across the street bursts into motion too fast to be human, and I hear thwips and the beginnings of banter. Brakes screech, cars stop, pedestrians scatter. Reflex takes over and instead of yelling at Dan I tackle him to the pavement before things start to explode. My instincts have identified what’s happening from experience long before my conscious brain catches up and forms the words in my mouth- “meta fight.”
I look up and see Spider-Man somersaulting off the car he’s landed on, joints bending in ways I can’t imagine outside of ImPorts or Olympic gymnasts. Grey sticky stuff is shooting out of his wrists at the woman across the street. I’ve seen it hanging from buildings all over the City- all the Spiders use it to get around, swinging on their threads at night. You get used to it eventually.
I can recognize the person across the street now. She’s not really a person, at least, not a human. Her name is Lust, she was one of the earliest ‘villain’ ImPorts, and she’s a wanted murderer. She looks like an ordinary woman with long dark hair and proportions usually seen in teenaged fantasies, wearing a dress to match. When she’s attacking, the illusion disappears: her hands become freakish rubber things with knifelike fingers. She’s doing it right now, her index finger stretching across the entire street to slash at Spider-Man’s neck.
No matter how many times I see it, ImPort fights always threaten to paralyze me with shock. An ordinary person’s senses aren’t used to seeing people move that fast or hit that hard. The forces breaking loose are always disproportionate, cosmic power contained in person-sized packages. So much happens in so few seconds that the sensations are overwhelming, even when it’s only two of them going at it. Spider-Man and Lust are probably at the medium range of the power scale around here, and I’m still having trouble keeping track of what’s happening.
He dodges, contorting at an impossible angle, then hits the ground running. He’s talking a mile-a-minute with the glib cracks superheroes spew when they’re facing death. Still, he’s one of the good ones. I start to get up and draw my weapon. It’s a pointless gesture: cops have emptied entire clips at Lust without slowing her down, but being C.P.D. means never worrying about trying to do an impossible job.
I’m on my feet and Dan is actually right beside me, yelling a report into his radio and generally handling himself better than I would ever have expected. Spider-Man whips out those webs and snares Lust’s knife-fingers in sticky grey threads. She makes a ‘hm’ sound and slices her way free with one motion. Nothing that’s happening seems to have phased her at all. I don’t think she even sees me and Dan.
Spider-Man is trying to maneuver past that thicket of long claws to land a punch. Lust is right in my sights, and I’m just now realizing I’ve never fired my weapon at a person before. Or whatever she is. I’ve shot mutant animals and the living dead and rogue fax machines (it’s a long story behind all of them) and it was hard each time. Shooting Lust without a warning, even if it won’t stop her, doesn’t feel right, even though she’s doing her best to julienne Spider-Man right now.
Instead of firing, I yell the first thing that comes into my head. “Police! Stop where you are or I will shoot!”
Spider-Man stops moving for a second just to look at me. His mask has this weird way of conveying his expressions: even though it has no features but big white eyes, I can tell he’s raising an eyebrow at me. Behind me, I hear Dan say “What the hell are you doing, Murdoch?” Then the rookie starts shooting.
Lust makes a dismissive little wave with her hand when the bullets hit her. It looks like she could almost be about to laugh even though Dan just put four pieces of metal through her centre-of-mass. When she waves her hand, her fingers slash out and cut straight through somebody’s abandoned Honda like the whole car is just air. It flies apart into jagged pieces of glass and plastic. Just as I’m starting to realize part of the windshield is headed for me and Dan, something latches on to my arm and yanks me to the ground harder than I’ve ever felt.
Sidewalk dirt grinds itself into my uniform as I skid a bit before looking up for what yanked me. There’s a thin rope of grey webbing stuck to my arm, and another stretching from Dan’s shoulder. Both lead back to Spider-Man.
“Are you two okay? That debris came pretty close to giving you new haircuts.”
“I’m fine. Thanks.” I get up and try to pull the webbing away, but it’s stuck there pretty good. Dan’s sitting up, mouth moving soundlessly. He looks stunned, and he’s dropped his gun. I pick it up and put on the safety for him. Lust is gone.
“Here, let me get that for-“ Spider-Man detaches the webbing from our clothes, then looks past the destroyed car to where Lust was just a few seconds ago. “Crap. And she’ll still have the totem, too.”
“Totem?” I help Dan to his feet and hand his gun back. He holsters it and stares at the remains of the car. At least he’s quiet now.
“Uh... nothing you need to be worried about officer. Thanks for your help, but I can’t stick around. It’s really important I find her.” He leaps straight into the air, splats a webline against the nearest rooftop, and swings away, shooting off more webs as he goes. The ones he leaves behind dangle like snake skins. “Tell one of your bosses to call me, I’ll fill them in!”
Four years after the first force disappeared, a lot of our bosses are still ImPorts. At least the Commissioner these days was born here instead of Cybertron. For me, ‘boss’ mainly means Sergeant Victoria, who has fangs and doesn’t like sunlight. She’s pretty nice.
Now Dan finds his voice. “What the hell just happened?”
“You don’t shoot unless I tell you to,” I inform him. “You could have gotten killed, and you couldn’t have even slowed her down.” I then get on my radio to let the precinct know what just happened here. This section of the street needs to be a cordoned-off crime scene in the next few minutes, before any late-night gawkers come in and start carrying off pieces of the former car as souvenirs.
“But what was that even about?” Dan’s still talking as I’m trying to arrange firefighters and backup and forensics and all that other stuff it might be nice to have right now. This is what people like me do. We don’t tackle deranged clowns or prevent natural disasters while wearing costumes. We organize what’s left after everything breaks and try to keep society in this place running normally. This place might have killer piranha sometimes, but it also needs to have drunk fights broken up every weekend like any other city. I’m fine with that. I feel better wrestling a bottle out of someone’s hand than stuff like tonight, pointing a gun at something unstoppable from another world.
“He mentioned a totem. It sounded important. It’s probably some big meta mystery that’s going on. Why don’t they tell us about this shit? We could have gotten killed just now!” He just doesn’t stop. I am going to have to really talk to him once we’re done here.
“Above our pay grade, Dan. I’ll tell the Sergeant.”
They say the ImPorts know things we don’t, that they talk about things on their secret communicator Network. Everything from the fate of the world to who’s dating who. There’s plots and conspiracies every week in their world. There’s supposed to be some kind of shadow war on, the ImPorts versus Vulcanus, a big international group that wants to give everybody superpowers. I saw one of their ads online once and rolled my eyes. The world has enough problems with the superpowers it already has.
There are rumours the ImPorts changed the entire universe once, that they’re the only ones who remember a world that never had Isle Francis or Savoletta in it. I remember learning how to find Isle Francis on a map in school. If the rumours are true, those memories used to not be there. There was another Anne Murdoch who never thought about visiting Kunyum. She’s part of some other world now, like the City being ‘New York, New York.’
A few days later I’m walking this street again, without Dan this time. The crime scene has been opened up to traffic and pedestrians again. It’s not like the ruins in Times Square a block away: there’s no sign that two superhumans trashed the place a short time ago.
Almost no sign, at least. On the wall my partner and I were standing in front of when Spider-Man saved us, someone has spray-painted: ‘GIVE US OUR WORLD BACK. IMPORTS GO HOME.’
At least this one is spelled right. I shake my head, note it down, and continue my beat.
My name’s Anne Murdoch. I’m a beat cop for the City Police Department. People tell me I’m a hero, but never a Hero. That means I’ve got a badge instead of a mask. It’s an important distinction where I live.
I was born and raised in ‘The City with so much game it doesn’t need a name,’ and after twenty-five years I’ve heard all the jokes about it I care to. Yes, we’re just called ‘The City.’ Yes, it’s weird. It’s also distinctive, and you better believe this is a distinctive town. It could be worse: apparently there’s a bunch of alternate universes where this place is called ‘New York, New York.’ I mean, can you believe it?
I should probably explain about the alternate universes. There’s a machine in the City. They call it ‘The Porter.’ It sits in a dead tech company’s skyscraper in Midtown. No one knows how it works or where it came from. It just started up in 2008, after the whole police force vanished and never came back. The Porter likes to kidnap people from other universes. They’re called ImPorts, and they have super powers.
No one can control the Porter, except its messed-up AI, and enough people have gotten zapped trying that these days most of the planet is just resigned to being screwed with by a rogue machine. This includes the ImPorts. They can’t go home until the Porter sends them for whatever reason, so they make the best of it while they’re here. Mainly by saving the world, or ruining it.
If I’m a hero, my origin story is pretty damn simple. Not a lot of people remember what 2008 was like anymore, or at least they don’t want to. The anarchy, the fear. Frustration too: the government was paralyzed by what had happened, and they turned their backs on us. There are still support groups running for people who lost someone during those days, a cop spouse or a murdered friend. Me, I’m lucky. Dad’s store in the West Side was robbed three times in one week by three different gangs, and all he needed were a lot of stitches instead of a casket. While I was helping to pull glass shards from his arm, I promised that if we ever got cops again, I’d be one of them.
A lot of ImPorts deal with being here by putting on masks and fighting crime. I don’t think there’s a police force in the country that tolerates vigilantes as much as the C.P.D., but what are you gonna do? ImPorts saved this City. There were stolen into a world that feared and hated them, and they cleaned up its streets. They reopened prisons, fought the gangs. My Dad never had any trouble again after the Blue Beetle swooped in one night. They even rebuilt the police force eventually. I’d just graduated from criminology, so the timing was perfect. I’m pretty sure I was one of the first applicants through the door. When I made it, I started taking orders from the new Commissioner: Optimus fucking Prime.
That’s another thing, the really weird one. Superpowers and alternate dimensions are one thing, you can wrap your head around that with enough Star Trek. Knowing that Spock used to do tech work for the force, and that there’s no more Star Trek anymore because of it? That’s something else. The Porter brings in fictional characters, then erases the fiction as some balancing of the dimensional scales. It’s caused hell with the entertainment industry. We actually got riots over it last year, fans in costumes attacking the Porter to get their shows back. But eventually, you hear about Han Solo getting a speeding ticket and you just nod and drink your coffee.
My night patrol these days takes me through Times Square, or what’s left of it. I’m supposed to keep an eye out for vandals. There’s been lots of anti-ImPort graffiti popping up here lately. The ImPort population usually hovers around two hundred or so. It’s an unpredictable mix: larger-than-life abilities with personalities to match. Things happen when people like that get tossed together far from home, even without green aliens and monsters involved. The fight in February was the fourth time the Square got wrecked in as many years. A lot of people died, and a lot more got angry. ImPorts don’t stay dead- the Porter likes to bring back her toys after a few days so she can keep playing with them. Those of us ‘native’ to this dimension aren’t so lucky.
My partner and I walk through the ruins, checking shadows for people with spray cans and grudges. I tune him out as he talks. His name’s Dan, he’s new, and he’s an idiot. He’s in his early twenties and has this red goatee sticking off his chin that just does not work. He’s going on about how he only joined the force as a springboard into the military. He thinks recruiters will treat C.P.D. experiences as equivalent to a combat tour. He might be right, but it’s still stupid.
I’ve seen things in this place no one but another Cityzen can understand. Outsiders gawk at the news and ask us for stories as though our lives were celebrity gossip. Some of them write fanfiction about it, for fuck’s sake. None of them get it, except maybe for the ones who’ve seen a piece of it: conflicts and disasters spilling out into other places, Washington and Los Angeles and Boston. Living here does things to your alertness, to your nerves. Some people are always keyed up and twitchy because they know frogs could start raining from the sky at any second. Others build up a thick skin as a point of City pride. A brawl between demigods will break out on the street, and they’ll just watch and finish their coffee while updating their insurance policies.
I’ve seen people revert to children or spend days trapped in their worst nightmares because of some magic spell. There’s a fucking Nazi cyborg on the most wanted list, a guy who once hijacked a nuke so he could give World War Two another shot. I once had to call for backup because I was being attacked by a swarm of pigeons and rats. By the time it was safe to leave my car, the vehicle and everything around it was smeared in white shit.
One time the force helped evacuate the entire City because clairvoyants had visions of demons destroying the world on Halloween. The ordinary cops had to run away with everyone else once we were done directing traffic. We watched from a Jersey refugee camp as the fate of the world was decided by people from other dimensions. You could see the flashes of power above Manhattan, flickering for hours.
In the morning we weren’t all dead, so we took that as a sign the good guys won and the City trudged back into their homes. There was a trail of destruction from some Thing the size of a mountain, stretching from Battery Park to Downtown. The Imports helped clean up, of course. They always do. I saw a blind teenager doing the work of two construction crews, moving dirt and rubble with her mind or something. Sometimes they throw charity balls or date auctions for these things, which is nice I guess. At least it wasn’t worse than Godzilla.
We’re leaving the Square now, and Dan’s getting on my last goddamn nerve by telling Moon jokes. You’re not supposed to joke about the Moon. It’s just tasteless. An Import decided it would be fun to put together a private space program and build a rocket ship in a few weeks. Just so she could go to the Moon and turn it into her personal graffiti board. So now there’s a giant cock drawn on the Moon that can be seen from Earth when it’s full. And then she ran for Mayor and almost won, which says something but I’m not sure what. At least one of the saner Imports won, although apparently his Deputy used to be a supervillain. Meanwhile the Moon’s still up there. Humanity just has to look up every night to be reminded of what their world has become.
Dan is trying very badly to fit a Viagra joke in to his Moon puns as we head down Seventh Avenue, and if I don’t chew him out now he’s just not going to have a future with the force. Just as I open my mouth to tell him off, someone lands on a car behind me, a person across the street bursts into motion too fast to be human, and I hear thwips and the beginnings of banter. Brakes screech, cars stop, pedestrians scatter. Reflex takes over and instead of yelling at Dan I tackle him to the pavement before things start to explode. My instincts have identified what’s happening from experience long before my conscious brain catches up and forms the words in my mouth- “meta fight.”
I look up and see Spider-Man somersaulting off the car he’s landed on, joints bending in ways I can’t imagine outside of ImPorts or Olympic gymnasts. Grey sticky stuff is shooting out of his wrists at the woman across the street. I’ve seen it hanging from buildings all over the City- all the Spiders use it to get around, swinging on their threads at night. You get used to it eventually.
I can recognize the person across the street now. She’s not really a person, at least, not a human. Her name is Lust, she was one of the earliest ‘villain’ ImPorts, and she’s a wanted murderer. She looks like an ordinary woman with long dark hair and proportions usually seen in teenaged fantasies, wearing a dress to match. When she’s attacking, the illusion disappears: her hands become freakish rubber things with knifelike fingers. She’s doing it right now, her index finger stretching across the entire street to slash at Spider-Man’s neck.
No matter how many times I see it, ImPort fights always threaten to paralyze me with shock. An ordinary person’s senses aren’t used to seeing people move that fast or hit that hard. The forces breaking loose are always disproportionate, cosmic power contained in person-sized packages. So much happens in so few seconds that the sensations are overwhelming, even when it’s only two of them going at it. Spider-Man and Lust are probably at the medium range of the power scale around here, and I’m still having trouble keeping track of what’s happening.
He dodges, contorting at an impossible angle, then hits the ground running. He’s talking a mile-a-minute with the glib cracks superheroes spew when they’re facing death. Still, he’s one of the good ones. I start to get up and draw my weapon. It’s a pointless gesture: cops have emptied entire clips at Lust without slowing her down, but being C.P.D. means never worrying about trying to do an impossible job.
I’m on my feet and Dan is actually right beside me, yelling a report into his radio and generally handling himself better than I would ever have expected. Spider-Man whips out those webs and snares Lust’s knife-fingers in sticky grey threads. She makes a ‘hm’ sound and slices her way free with one motion. Nothing that’s happening seems to have phased her at all. I don’t think she even sees me and Dan.
Spider-Man is trying to maneuver past that thicket of long claws to land a punch. Lust is right in my sights, and I’m just now realizing I’ve never fired my weapon at a person before. Or whatever she is. I’ve shot mutant animals and the living dead and rogue fax machines (it’s a long story behind all of them) and it was hard each time. Shooting Lust without a warning, even if it won’t stop her, doesn’t feel right, even though she’s doing her best to julienne Spider-Man right now.
Instead of firing, I yell the first thing that comes into my head. “Police! Stop where you are or I will shoot!”
Spider-Man stops moving for a second just to look at me. His mask has this weird way of conveying his expressions: even though it has no features but big white eyes, I can tell he’s raising an eyebrow at me. Behind me, I hear Dan say “What the hell are you doing, Murdoch?” Then the rookie starts shooting.
Lust makes a dismissive little wave with her hand when the bullets hit her. It looks like she could almost be about to laugh even though Dan just put four pieces of metal through her centre-of-mass. When she waves her hand, her fingers slash out and cut straight through somebody’s abandoned Honda like the whole car is just air. It flies apart into jagged pieces of glass and plastic. Just as I’m starting to realize part of the windshield is headed for me and Dan, something latches on to my arm and yanks me to the ground harder than I’ve ever felt.
Sidewalk dirt grinds itself into my uniform as I skid a bit before looking up for what yanked me. There’s a thin rope of grey webbing stuck to my arm, and another stretching from Dan’s shoulder. Both lead back to Spider-Man.
“Are you two okay? That debris came pretty close to giving you new haircuts.”
“I’m fine. Thanks.” I get up and try to pull the webbing away, but it’s stuck there pretty good. Dan’s sitting up, mouth moving soundlessly. He looks stunned, and he’s dropped his gun. I pick it up and put on the safety for him. Lust is gone.
“Here, let me get that for-“ Spider-Man detaches the webbing from our clothes, then looks past the destroyed car to where Lust was just a few seconds ago. “Crap. And she’ll still have the totem, too.”
“Totem?” I help Dan to his feet and hand his gun back. He holsters it and stares at the remains of the car. At least he’s quiet now.
“Uh... nothing you need to be worried about officer. Thanks for your help, but I can’t stick around. It’s really important I find her.” He leaps straight into the air, splats a webline against the nearest rooftop, and swings away, shooting off more webs as he goes. The ones he leaves behind dangle like snake skins. “Tell one of your bosses to call me, I’ll fill them in!”
Four years after the first force disappeared, a lot of our bosses are still ImPorts. At least the Commissioner these days was born here instead of Cybertron. For me, ‘boss’ mainly means Sergeant Victoria, who has fangs and doesn’t like sunlight. She’s pretty nice.
Now Dan finds his voice. “What the hell just happened?”
“You don’t shoot unless I tell you to,” I inform him. “You could have gotten killed, and you couldn’t have even slowed her down.” I then get on my radio to let the precinct know what just happened here. This section of the street needs to be a cordoned-off crime scene in the next few minutes, before any late-night gawkers come in and start carrying off pieces of the former car as souvenirs.
“But what was that even about?” Dan’s still talking as I’m trying to arrange firefighters and backup and forensics and all that other stuff it might be nice to have right now. This is what people like me do. We don’t tackle deranged clowns or prevent natural disasters while wearing costumes. We organize what’s left after everything breaks and try to keep society in this place running normally. This place might have killer piranha sometimes, but it also needs to have drunk fights broken up every weekend like any other city. I’m fine with that. I feel better wrestling a bottle out of someone’s hand than stuff like tonight, pointing a gun at something unstoppable from another world.
“He mentioned a totem. It sounded important. It’s probably some big meta mystery that’s going on. Why don’t they tell us about this shit? We could have gotten killed just now!” He just doesn’t stop. I am going to have to really talk to him once we’re done here.
“Above our pay grade, Dan. I’ll tell the Sergeant.”
They say the ImPorts know things we don’t, that they talk about things on their secret communicator Network. Everything from the fate of the world to who’s dating who. There’s plots and conspiracies every week in their world. There’s supposed to be some kind of shadow war on, the ImPorts versus Vulcanus, a big international group that wants to give everybody superpowers. I saw one of their ads online once and rolled my eyes. The world has enough problems with the superpowers it already has.
There are rumours the ImPorts changed the entire universe once, that they’re the only ones who remember a world that never had Isle Francis or Savoletta in it. I remember learning how to find Isle Francis on a map in school. If the rumours are true, those memories used to not be there. There was another Anne Murdoch who never thought about visiting Kunyum. She’s part of some other world now, like the City being ‘New York, New York.’
A few days later I’m walking this street again, without Dan this time. The crime scene has been opened up to traffic and pedestrians again. It’s not like the ruins in Times Square a block away: there’s no sign that two superhumans trashed the place a short time ago.
Almost no sign, at least. On the wall my partner and I were standing in front of when Spider-Man saved us, someone has spray-painted: ‘GIVE US OUR WORLD BACK. IMPORTS GO HOME.’
At least this one is spelled right. I shake my head, note it down, and continue my beat.
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also pfffft those damn spiders thwipping at all hours of the days, how inconsiderate
no subject
(And thank you!)
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(You're welcome!)