Oh God, no. Not now. She can’t see me like this, half-naked, covered in wounds, my face still wet with tears. But as much as my heart wants to be a wailing drama queen, my feet are much more sensible. I’m up and throwing on the cheap shirt they left me with before I really have time to think about it.
As I come into the light and Calamity sees me clearly, she goes rigid. “Jesus, Danny…”
"For Cris' sake, Stop thrusting your chest out at me, tarnation!"
We’re gettin’ you out of here,” snarls Calamity. Footsteps from up the hall. She whirls and fires in a single smooth motion, the blast of her six-shooter like God’s dynamite in the metal confines of the hallway. A guard in a green polo shirt goes down coughing blood, his larynx shattered by a high velocity jelly round. A submachine gun tumbles out of his hands and he makes a hissing animal noise as he writhes and thrashes on the deck.
Well, he's dead. Don't get me wrong, I think killing a guard while rescuing your friend from being tortured to death (even if that friend is Danny) is perfectly justifiable, just... maybe use bullets that'll kill fast?
“I can’t fight,” I say. My cheeks are red. Fighting is what I’m for. “My powers are gone.”
But you'll give it all up for your tits. I wonder if part of the motivation for writing Danny as such a blood psychopath was Daniels trying to show that, actually, women are just as aggressive as men. Like when TRAs say pregnancy isn't just a "woman thing" because "transmen" get pregnant too.
“We need to get out of here before Thunderbolt gets involved.”
“Kinetiq’s tanglin’ with him outside,” says Calamity. “Don’t know how long they can hold ’em.”
I still want to know what her powers actually are.
A voice blares out over an unseen PA system. “The intruders are under Moldbug Tower and climbing out to the promenade. All tactical teams converge on their location. Continue trying new radio frequencies. If you find a clear channel, let your teammates know immediately.”
Just in case you were starting to wonder if I was misremembering these guys specifically being neoreactionaries and not just generic right wing shitheads. They're found by some goons.
“Dreadnought, let’s go!” Calamity shouts, and I’m so stunned she has to shout again before I get up and dash after her. Behind us, I can hear pounding feet and jostling gear as the other team sprints toward the sound of gunfire. We run past the team she tore up, and it’s hard not to slow down and stare. One part horror, one part awe, three parts insecurity.
Calamity doesn’t need real powers. She’s perched at the very upper bound of human ability.
Right now, so am I. My body is still the way it became in the moments after Dreadnought gave me the mantle. Still as fit and strong and flexible as the entire US Olympic team put together. As bendy as a gymnast, as enduring as a runner, as strong as a heavyweight lifter. There are not enough hours in the day to train a normal body up to the level she and I are at.
Also, I'm pretty sure some of those things are mutually exclusive. Plus, Danny's meant to look like a petite teenage girl. Specifically, a petite, teenage girl who could pass as a literally airbrushed and photoshopped
supermodel. I don't know if any of you have ever seen lady weightlifters, but they don't look like that. Though, trust a troon not to know how athletics and the human body work.
The difference is, she’s a badass on top of it.
But me? I can only lean into my powers. Take those away, and basic rent-a-goons can smoke me every time. No wonder she barely talks to me anymore.
Naturally, nobody has given Danny any actual combat training, despite him regularly fighting foes that approach or match him in strength and durability. Just let him clumsily rip and tear.
Calamity squeezes her throat mic again. “Doc, we’re out of the building, can you come get us at the northern marina?”
A window-shaking detonation erupts in the air above us. I can just make out Kinetiq and Thunderbolt flitting around each other, the air a boil of energy blasts. Thunderbolt throws more lightning; Kinetiq bounces it off their shields and lashes back with an emerald laser.
Again, why is her name Kinetiq when she seems to be a cut-rate Green Lantern or Dazzler? Doc's coming to pick them up in her tilt-engine, so they have to a roof-top
I grab Calamity by the shoulder, a sudden fear crashing through my stupor and bringing me back to the present. “Tell her to watch out for Panzer!”
Calamity’s eyes bug. “They’ve got a tank?”
“No, Princess Panzer, she’s Garrison’s daughter and she’s super dangerous.” In my mind, I can see her summoning a dozen or more heavy gun emplacements and tearing Doc’s jet into shredded aluminum litter.
“Oh, then I think we’d have seen her by now,” says Calamity, turning to run again. I’m right behind her. “She’s probably on the mainland with her father.”
I am really looking forward to seeing Danny try to justify venting his blood-rage on a twelve year old girl.
“How’d you know he would be gone?”
“Simple! I burned his biggest house down so he’d go inspect the damage.” She cranes her neck to look up at the towers looming above us. “Well. Second biggest, anyhow.”
Calamity is one of the only bright spots in these books. Do hope nobody was in there, rich people tend to have staff.
Bullets start to snap past us. Calamity reaches into her coat and tosses a grenade high in the air; it bursts into a cloud of purple smoke that covers us until we get into the base of the next tower over.
Something is confusing me. After a few dozen yards it hits me. If Garrison isn’t here, how come I don’t have my powers back? My fingers start playing over the steel collar around my neck, not for the first time. Maybe there’s something in this that’s still muting me.
Or his powers take a while to wear off? Also, as Kosher pointed out, it's weird Garrison can negate the part of Danny's powers that let him fly and shit, but not the part that pummels his flesh girl-shaped. You'd think that'd make for better misery porn, too, or is Daniels' coom-brain take priority there? Danny and Calamity get caught in a elevator, but manage to get up on top of it before the goons reach them.
The elevator doors beneath us open with a ding, and a burst of automatic fire rakes the back wall of the empty car. Calamity pulls the pin on a silver canister with a white stripe painted around the base.
“Heads up for Willy Pete!” she calls before she tosses it through the hatch. The canister bounces off the back wall and rolls out of the car and into the hallway. There’s a flat bang, and then some white smoke pours up out of the hatch.
“You—you didn’t just drop white phosphorous on those guys, did you?” I ask, aghast. White phosphorus is evil, evil stuff. Sticks to flesh, burns down to the bone, and dousing it with water only makes it worse. I knew she was hardcore, but damn.
You turned a guy into the dumbass Stephen Hawking. Danny, I don't think you're in any position to lecture people about brutality. Not that it matters anyway, because...
Calamity is stepping away from the hatch and laughing. “Hell no, it’s just a glue grenade. Betcha they shit their pants, though.” From the amount of dejected profanity wafting up with the last of the detonation fumes, that’s probably a good guess.
Why isn't she our hero? To make a long story short, they make it to the roof and Doc extracts them.
People ask me questions, and I barely hear them, barely want to hear them. Shake my head no to everything, hunch down into my arms crossed over my stomach. At some point, Calamity takes her jacket off and lays it across me, and I almost start weeping. With my forehead against the bulkhead, I bury my face in my hands and try to forget I exist.
Please, Sarah, just ignore me. Just pretend I’m not here. You’re better than me and you always have been and you don’t need to pretend I’m not pathetic because I’m pretty sure we all just proved that I couldn’t pull my weight when it really counted.
I begged her. I looked Graywytch in the eyes and I begged her.
You ever notice Danny still judges himself by very macho standards?
"I begged for my life while being horrifically tortured! I'm a wimpy, no good pussy!"
The ground comes up, up, up and then past as we’re touching down inside a deep pit. Above us, the roof winches close, and when the massive doors meet, a hologram will flicker to life and make this all seem like an empty gravel field in one of the disused industrial parks at the outskirts of the New Port metropolitan area.
This used to be a facility owned and operated by a hypertech merchant called The Artificer. Since he’s dead and nobody was using the place, Doc moved in and set it up as a safehouse/airfield.
Looting appears to be a recurring theme this book. Though, since the Artificer was a man, we at least waited until he was dead.
When Utopia killed The Artificer, she used her inversion beam, which mangles the underlying structure of reality. I had to spend weeks tying up the frayed strings of the lattice one by one before any of the equipment in here would work properly for any length of time. Once I was so proud of it, but now I couldn’t care less. My fingers won’t stay away from my collar for long. I need to get this thing off, and then hope my powers come back.
So, complicated machinery couldn't function, but human bodies managed just fine? I'm not really sure what "mangling reality" means, really. Shouldn't this place be a soup of elementary particles or something?
Then the world can breathe much easier. I normally find power loss storylines really tedious, but I'm perfectly willing to endure it for Danny.
“Danny, I’m so sorry.”
“It was my fault,” I mumble into her shoulder.
Doc takes me by the shoulders and looks me dead in the eye. “Don’t you ever start thinking that way.
"Lest introspection set in."
What they did is not your fault. In any way.”
I can’t maintain eye contact.
“Danielle, I mean it. They chose to hurt you. That’s on them.” Her voice gets hard. “And we’re going to make them pay.
I see we've reached the tranny struggle session portion of our program. Obviously, what Garrison and Graywytch did to Danny was beyond the pale, but remember, Daniels wants trans-identified kids reading this to that's basically the same as their parents not cutting their tits off or putting them on drugs for not being manly enough.
She puts an arm around my shoulder and helps me limp to the section of cots and dressers we have set up for overnight stays. Every step twists pebbles of broken glass in my feet. When Doc sees my bloody footprints, she cries out, “Why didn’t you tell me your feet were cut?”
“I didn’t want to be any more trouble,” I mumble, mortified.
We've also reverted to the first book's "Danny's main flaw is that he's too meek," framing.
Footsteps behind me, and then another Doc Impossible is there, identical in every way to the first, and they each get an arm under my shoulder and a hand under my thigh and carry me the rest of the way. I can’t stop looking between them, surprised. Doc never uses more than one body at a time. It’s against her android rules, the self-imposed rules she follows to act more human.
Like her rule about play-acting a life-destroying addiction to alcohol while responsible for an emotionally unstable minor.
“Okay. Don’t freak out, but you’ve been shot in the head. Just a graze, but there’s the chance of a concussion.” She holds up her hand, and the skin on her palm slides open, a lens peeking out. It lights up and she shines bright light into both my eyes, asks me to track it up and down and side to side. “I want to do some tests with you, okay?”
“Sure,” I say, a little stunned. A third Doc Impossible has arrived now, this one forgoing her traditional lab coat for a full-body ensemble of carapace armor and an automatic shotgun. She paces restlessly around the perimeter of the living area.
You'd think she'd just sleeve into a proper battle-chassis for that. It'd probably be more durable and hit harder than something designed to emulate a human body down to the digestive system. In general, Doc's status as an AI really doesn't matter much. Her alcoholism for example is written exactly like it would be for a human woman, except it's a completely different matter when not only did Doc design her body to be able to metabolize alcohol, she also deliberately gave herself addictive tendencies. She might as well be Utopia's actual daughter. I'm guessing it's part of the whole trans allegory thing. Doc is literally trans-human, so we can't acknowledge that she's different from a flesh and blood woman except when it's convenient.
The Doc with me sees this, and the one who has her back to me says, “I think Danielle needs to be alone for a little bit. We’ll call if there’s anything else.”
“I…okay. Sure. Yeah. Sure,” says Calamity. I hear her boots clicking and hang my head. She’ll never talk to me again, obviously.
“Sarah,” calls out one of the Docs. “Thank you. Really.”
After a long moment, Calamity replies, “Anytime.”
The door to the stairs open and then shut again.
“She thinks I’m a total loser,” I say.
She would be correct.
“I can pretty much guarantee you you’re wrong about that, kiddo,” mutters the Doc picking broken glass out of my feet.
“I am a loser. I don’t even have my powers anymore.”
The Doc doing the scalp wound leans down, tilts my chin toward her with a finger. “Danny, nobody who matters only cared about your powers.”
"They care about your tits, the only parts of you that
do matter. Without them, you'd just be Daniel Tozer, that wretched, walking dead excuse for little boy. The only worth he ever had was as construction material for the flawless fuck-object you are today."
"Jesus, doc!"
"Look, if I say anything else, you could have me done for conversion therapy."
One of them is writing this down on a clipboard. “He didn’t touch you or shoot you with anything?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Okay, so he’s not a drainer. This collar they put on you, could that have something to do with it?”
Nah, it's purely for aesthetics. Garrison knew how much trans girls liked their chokers.
“Maybe. I’m…I’m kind of scared to find out.” Graywytch’s torture brought the lattice into sharp relief in my head, but I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t engage with it. What if I’m broken? Part of me wants this collar off yesterday. But a bigger part was hoping I could avoid the issue for a while. Luckily, I grew up in a house full of shouting, so if there’s anything I know how to do right, it’s avoid the issue.
It helped that Daniels could never be fucked to actually write any yelling, I imagine.
“Um, if you don’t mind me asking, why are there three of you?”
They don’t answer for a while. The one next to me sprays my scalp with something cold, and the pain in my scalp recedes into a chilly numbness. As the silence curdles, the one with the clipboard says, “I got tired of people I care about getting hurt because I was too scared to stop pretending I’m human. I’m not. It’s time to stop playing.”
“Oh.” I reach out and take one of her hands. “Thank you.”
I love that Daniels wrote this without a trace of irony. "Pretending to be something you're not is bad."
Their faces get troubled. “Danielle, I am so sorry.”
“For what?”
The tactical Doc has her back turned, but she’s gone very still. The one running the scanner across my scalp stops working. “They had you for days,” says clipboard Doc. “It should never have taken me so long to realize something had happened. I…” Doc’s face cracks into tears. “I’m sorry. I was drunk. Even after Charlie came to tell me something was wrong, it took me hours to sober up. And…and look what they did to you.” She’s not working on my wound anymore. Doc sets the scanner aside, folds her arms around my shoulders, hugs me. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
In other words, Doc was so dedicated to her drunk LARP, she prioritized it over Danny's safety. Say what you want about Bender, he's meant to be a dickhead, and he actually needs alcohol to function.
“It’s okay,” I say softly.
“It’s not!” snaps Doc. “You deserved a better friend than me.”
“You got me out. That’s what matters. It’s not like I’ve never dropped the ball before.”
Doc’s mouth twists up in a bittersweet smile. “You’re really something else, kid.”
“Yeah, well. Nobody’s perfect. I’m sorry for that crack about you helping me find something at the bottom of a bottle.”
Doc wipes her eyes. “I’m sorry for being a drunk.”
Remember, Roger is a irredeemable abusive parent for yelling and not stunting Danny's growth.
Whenever I look at her in the lattice, it’s obvious she’s not human. Her bones are basically fancy plastic. Her brain is synthetic gel. She’s got a power cell next to her heart, which is itself made of a weird mix of hypertech materials I can’t identify. Doctor Impossible is emphatically not human. There’s a contradiction here. One I’ve mulled over sullenly a few times in the past months as her addictions got the better of her and made life difficult time and again. Finally, I work up the courage to ask.
“Doc, do you mind if I ask why you’re an alcoholic?”
She shrugs. “It’s bad form for a psychologist to self-diagnose, but I’d have to say that it’s a coping mechanism for my inability to process the guilt from having murdered some of my friends. And from—” She stops for a moment. “From other frustrations.”
Someone enfeebling themselves in pursuit of a mad, intangible goal is a pretty good metaphor for trans identity, I will admit.
“Danny, would you think less of me if I told you I was scared?”
“No, no of course not.”
“Good, because I’m fucking terrified,” she says. “At least once a week, I sit down with my configuration files to write a patch, and every time, I say today’s the day. I’m gonna get better. And then I see that they go all the way down, and I freeze up again. I could make myself an entirely different person. Mom had a backdoor into me once before. My neural net is modeled after hers—it’s not just a metaphor when I say I’m her daughter. I think like her, and sometimes the things I think scare me. How do I know that I can trust myself to make more changes? How do I know that in editing my code, I won’t make myself more like her, and say I’m doing it to become better?”
A reminder that the only reason this Doc isn't doing her mother's bidding is because she patched herself.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I say.
Doc pushes back from the computer to swivel on her chair and face me. “Yeah?”
“We get my powers back, and when you’re ready to patch yourself, I’ll sit with you, and if it looks like you’re turning evil, I’ll totally kick your ass for you.”
And she'd enjoy it, too.
Anyway, they take the collar off, and Danny's powers return.
“That’s nice to hear,” says Kinetiq as they enter the living area. They’ve got a sheen of sweat on their face from the long flight. A few shining burns on their bare arms have gone an angry red, but they don’t seem to notice or care.
I flit over to them and give them a hug. “Thank you,” I say.
Kinetiq smiles and runs a thumb across the staples in my scalp. “Nice train tracks. You want to shave the rest off and get a mane like mine? You’d look super badass with these in.”
I wouldn't tempt him, Kinetiq, shitty hairstyles are the only way your kind can distinguish itself.
I laugh, and now I’m not sure why I was scared that everyone would suddenly hate me. Fast rebounds are something I’m good at. Something I’ve needed to practice a lot. As much as I hate my parents for what they did to me, I don’t mind knowing how to compartmentalize and move on. “Maybe later.”
What they did was not surgically altering you so you'd be more appealing for straight dudes to fuck, while unable to get any pleasure out of it. Anyway, Charlie shows up, and it's time for a debriefing:
“Did he say anything about will to power, or anything related to an ethnic or cultural purity?”
“Uh, no, I don’t think so.”
“Anything about the leader principle, or a great rebirth of some bygone era? Maybe a golden age, either in the past or promised in the future?”
“No. They were pretty down on equality, and said they wanted to create a hereditary dictatorship—”
“One dictatorship? Worldwide? Or multiple smaller dictatorships, with Cynosure acting as the model?”
“Uh, they weren’t clear on that.” I sift through my memories, try to squeeze out more detail. “Maybe the multiple dictatorships? They said they were going to build more islands. And it didn’t sound like they wanted to rule the world directly, just that they wanted all the world governments to be obedient and give them special rights and pay them extortion money.”
Um... they were pretty clear about wanting to rule the world as a hereditary aristocracy. What Danny's describing sounds more like North Korea sable-rattling whenever they want grain. See, this is what happens when you mix neoreactionaries with seasteaders. Seasteaders don't want to rule the world, though they might entertain fantasies of expanding their influence once the old system falls apart. They want to succeed from the rest of the world, which is pretty much the opposite of Garrison's stated goals. Who the fuck edited this book?
“What about a cathedral?”
I blink, surprised. “Well, he didn’t, but a rich guy with powers I busted a few days ago wouldn’t shut up about it, and I’m pretty sure Garrison had Graywytch kill him in his cell so he couldn’t talk.”
“Likely not a true fascist, then. Probably a neoreactionary.” They shrug. “It’s a different flavor of shit, is all. They’re both authoritarian ideologies, but their emphasis is different. Fascists are a populist movement, deeply wrapped up in racism and misogyny and other forms of bigotry—essentially, it’s about hating anyone who’s different and enforcing a right-wing style of conformity on everyone.
I mean, that's often true, but a decent number of actual fascist regimes have been South American, in countries where the population is too ethnically mixed to really create stratified racial classes.
Neoreactionaries, on the other hand, are elitists who are all about bringing back the age of kings, and think that ‘common people’ should know their place and let themselves be ruled. They’ll use fascists as foot soldiers, but they don’t really care about things like ethnic purity among the labor classes, except as a bargaining chip to keep their toadies happy. They’re still super racist, though.
"Foot-solders"? "Toadies"? They're neo-reactionaries! The most influential things they do is write fucking substacks!
“Naturally, the neoreactionaries see themselves as the ruling class that everyone should kiss up to. ‘The Cathedral’ is the weaksauce conspiracy theory they use to explain why their incredibly stupid ideas aren’t more popular.”
Ah yes, because there's definitely not a concerted effort by special interest groups and the media to translate wildly unpopular, fringe views into public policy. Conversely, trannies would never resort to conspiratorial thinking to explain why parents don't want their kids mutilated, or why lesbians don't want to fuck Jim Sterling.
Doc looks sideways at them. “You spend a lot of time parsing their buzzwords, do you?”
“Gotta know the enemy,” says Kinetiq.
Translation: she read
Neoreaction is a Basilisk, and now thinks Scott Alexander is a Nazi because a pretentious Doctor Who reviewer said so. Sidenote, you don't know how hard it is for me not to list all the ways Philip Sandifer is a shithead.
They tap the circle-A button pinned to the shoulder strap of their body armor.
That's right, Kinetiq's an anarchist. Anarchism is a very old and diverse political philosophy, but in my experience, it basically all boils down to persnickity arseholes who hate law, but love rules for other people. It's rule by Homeowner Association. Instead of police forces you have lynchmobs. Feudalism, but your landlord is a fat guy with ravaged genitals.
“It ain’t just the gentrification of the Bay that makes me hate Silicon Valley, you know. Lots of neoreactionaries and fascists are mixed up with the big money boys.”
You know, I regret that Calamity isn't the protagonist, but I'm grateful it isn't Kinetiq.
“I don’t think Graywytch is one of them,” I say. “Not politically, anyhow.”
Doc nods. “Yeah, Myra’s basically a communist.
That's... interesting. Care to elaborate, Doc? No? Okay, moving on.
I can’t imagine how much they had to offer to get her to agree to work for a bunch of right-wing STEMlords.”
Especially since right-wing STEMlords are what troons lay their eggs inside.
“Maybe she’s getting something else out of it,” says Charlie.
“Like what?” I ask.
“I dunno. But payment in kind or through favors is a common way to do business among practitioners. Can you tell me more about how they’re trying to lock down who gets superpowers?” I give him details, and describe what I can remember of the satellite constellation. His eyebrows go up, and then go up further. “You’re serious? She’s mixing magic with hypertech?”
“Yeah. Is that unusual?”
“It’s illegal,” he says emphatically. “If Graywytch is seriously doing this she’s…well, the term ‘death wish’ comes to mind.”
Why? It's all quantum-rock gobbledygook anyway, which, by the way, is a fact Charlie and Doc--a wizard and a super-scientist--apparently have no reaction to.
“You mentioned Phase One?” prompts Doc.
“Yeah. That’s what they’ve already got in place. It lets them pick and choose who gets superpowers, or decide if anyone gets them at all. From what they showed me, it sounded like with more time to develop their techniques, they could start mass producing supervillains.”
“What’s Phase Two, then?” asks Kinetiq.
“That’s what Graywytch was testing out on me,” I say with a suppressed shiver. I explain the details of the experiments, and how she’d almost managed to pull the mantle out of my chest before I was rescued. “I think Phase Two is being able to depower people who stand up to them, and then turn around and sell the stolen powersets to their cronies. Or hell, they might just start kidnapping metahumans and draining them for profit.”
Why the fuck do they need to drain and sell powersets when they can make new ones all they want? That's like if they started stealing seawater!
“That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to,” says Doc Impossible. “Capturing a superhero is hard. Unless Garrison wants to be personally involved in every op, that doesn’t seem like a viable plan.”
“There’s still Phase Three,” I say quietly. “They didn’t explain it, but I’ve been thinking about it. They’ve already got satellites that can project a spell across the whole planet. And that collar let Garrison’s power keep my abilities suppressed even when he wasn’t there.”
Doc and Charlie get there at the same time. “He’s going to turn off everyone’s powers,” says Charlie.
“Maybe magic and hypertech too,” I say. “He seems like the meticulous type, I don’t think he’d leave any way to fight back unaccounted for.”
Again, Charlie has no reaction to the fact he's essentially just a crazy super? Doc's not even an AI! More like a tulpa or imaginary friend Utopia willed into existence. This is a big deal!
“Once the Council hears about this, they’ll look into it, and it won’t be long before they figure out Graywytch is breaking their laws. They’ll come after her and Garrison hard. I mean spinning hurricanes out of the clear blue sky hard. She has really screwed herself.”
Is the Council meant to be ancient? If so, how did it cope with magic basically not existing for thousands of years?
“If Garrison’s powers work on magic, she won’t have to worry about the Council,” says Doc.
Again,
magic isn't real. It's just superpowers!
Have a reaction to this! This is like if a bunch of Catholic priests found out Jesus Christ was an alien, and none of them cared.
He finishes scribbling a last note in his notebook. “All right, I think that’s enough for now. I might have more questions—actually, here’s one, where’s Calamity?”
My stomach flops over. Right. “Uh, she stepped out,” I say.
“Let’s get her back here; she needs to hear this.”
Doc and Kinetiq trade a look I only see out of the corner of my eye. Without saying anything, they both stand and leave. “I, uh, don’t think she’d be interested. She wasn’t impressed that I got captured, and team jobs aren’t really her thing.”
A supervillain is about to conquer the fucking world and steal all your powers! She is a superhero! Don't talk about this like it's a fucking concert!
Is Danny retarded? Like, seriously, at this point, I have to wonder.
“You’re sure? We could really use her help.”
“Look, Charlie, she was embarrassed for me,” I say, blushing. “I was pretty pathetic back there, and she probably thinks I’m a loser now.”
“I can pretty much guarantee you you’re wrong about that,” he says. He closes his notebook and sets it aside. “Danny, you realize how incredibly weird Sarah is, right?”
If he's not, he's at least so spectrum that he's ultraviolet.
She’s not—”
“To you. She’s not weird, to you. Because you can fly and go on talk shows. But to the rest of us, yeah, it’s a little strange that her hobby is beating up drug dealers.”
Everyone in this room is a fucking superhero. Why is this odd to you?
So she’s…different. So what?”
“So she’s not really good at normal people things.”
“Yeah, well, that’s no crime,” I mutter at my chest. “Neither am I.”
You're not good at anything except brutal violence and whining.
“I noticed,” says Charlie, making a heroic effort not to roll his eyes that nonetheless falls short. “Danny, when she and I were together, we never went out on a date. She doesn’t do dates.”
Blood is thundering in my ears. My heart rate has gone from 60 to 100 in a second and a half. “So?” I hear myself ask.
“So when she likes someone, she asks them to go caping with her.”
“…oh.”
About thirty seconds later, I’m hitting the sound barrier.
Because that's what fucking matters right now!
