The Metahuman Containment Cell is deep in the subbasement of the New Port Police Headquarters building. Down a long, mildew-and-moisture-chic hallway, there’s a vault like you’d find in a large bank.
Cecilia fought tooth and nail to keep me out of this cell. She said it was a deathtrap, said the last person they put in there was murdered, said I had enemies who would come after me and put the lives of officers and civilians at risk. None of those arguments worked.
Are you ready for another long sequence of Danny suffering in captivity? Because April Daniels is. He brought tissues.
They’ve taken my suit and cape. I’ve got to wear jailbird orange until the trial. Or, I suppose, until someone raises ten million dollars for me. Which will happen approximately never. As well paid as I am, Doc and I don’t have even close to that much money between us, and virtually all the money we do have has been sunk into real estate and hypertech supplies. Being an A-level superhero is expensive, so we’ve never had more than a few thousand dollars ready cash between us.
They have set up a couple of GoFundMes, but Kinetiq keeps embezzling the money for her seal-ranch.
With my hands hanging together in front of me in clinking steel bracelets, I am escorted by a phalanx of MRU officers down the hall. They’re going to throw me in another hole, and it takes everything I’ve got not to snap my cuffs and bolt. I’ve got to play along. If I freak out now I’ll play right into Graywytch’s hands. Nobody will ever trust me again if I don’t cooperate.
Danny, in a fit of baseless paranoia, broke into a woman's home and threatened to kill her if he ever decided she was behind any inconvenience he happened to experience. Naturally, this was perfectly justified because she was secretly evil, and was planning to steal Danny's potent seed all along. I'm pretty sure this is the logic of literal witch-hunts.
Detective Phạm is waiting for me near the vault door. She looks haggard, drawn. The phalanx halts while one of their members begins the elaborate unlocking procedure to start opening the door.
“Danielle, I’m sorry it went this way,” she says.
“Me too.”
She pulls a silver cross on a delicate chain out of her pocket and holds it out for me. “Prisoners in solitary are allowed to have a religious token. Here.”
I don’t know how to react politely to that. It’s almost like she’s stuck her foot in the door and asked me if I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior. Detective Phạm doesn’t seem any more comfortable about this either, the barest hint of blush forming at the edge of her cheeks.
Shit, I think Daniels is flash-backing to 2008. I bet Danny and David had a fun little YouTube channel where they read Chick tracts in silly voices. Also, remember this little civil-rights provision for when we get a look at the accommodations.
“Um, thanks, Detective, but I’m an atheist.”
“Really?” she asks. “Your friend Sarah was really insistent that you’d want it. She said she and Charlie worked hard on finding the right one for you.”
If they're gonna be this blatant, while not just bake a ray-gun into a cake for her or something?
That sure has hell catches my attention, and I freeze my face before I give anything away. How much does she know? And then coming directly on the heels of that, the blissful, glorious realization that Sarah escaped from the police. I hold out my cuffed hands and Phạm drops the necklace into my cupped palms. A little bit of work gets the cross settled around my neck, and I get the barest sense of a static charge as it comes to rest under my shirt. When I look at it in the lattice, I see the cross is squirming and alive with magic, and that the spell extends around my whole body, like a plastic bubble shell. It makes me feel a little bit better. At the very least, I’ll be able to keep my powers if Graywytch and Garrison decide to teleport in and try and slit my throat.
Way to kill off any suspense before it starts.
The MRU is all looming black gasmasks and high-powered riot prods. A few have heavy shotguns that are probably loaded with some ungodly expensive discarding sabot depleted uranium slug rounds or something. One of them nudges me into the vault with the butt of his prod, and I think of all the times I showed them up, and start to wonder if rumors about cops tormenting inmates are true. I guess I’ll find out.
I'm kind of surprised we're putting Danny in solitary rather than some kind of super-jail to make a point about "trans-women in prison." Though, that would require Daniels to write more characters, and he hasn't exactly awed me with his efforts so far.
The centerpiece of the cell is a firm pad like a medical bed attached to a big metal X-rack with magnetic-clamp shackles for the ankles and wrists. They push me onto the cross and lock my ankles down with heavy thuds. A metal ring clamps down across my neck. They twist the adjustment knobs to make the thing small enough for me to fit in properly. When they undo my handcuffs, everyone’s ready to jump in and tase, gas, and shoot me. Once, I’d have found that funny, but now everything feels like lead sheets pushing down on me. My chest feels funny and light. I can breathe, but it doesn’t feel like it’s doing any good. The magnetic shackles thunk closed around my wrists, and I screw my eyes shut and try to keep it together.
In real life, they don't even let people in solitary confinement have a blanket or shoelaces in case of suicide attempts, but this fucking oubliette where we strap people down until trial will let Danny have a necklace? You can't even say she can't do anything with it, because Danny can move shit with his mind!
“Are you gassing the room already?” I ask them between deep breaths.
Two of the cops look at each other. “You’ll know it if we gas you,” one of them says.
“Are these shackles really necessary? I’ve been cooperative.” My lips are beginning to buzz faintly. My skin feels cold.
The MRU cops don’t reply. One of them pulls a cord down from the ceiling and strips the sterile wrapping off an IV needle that he attaches to the thin tube. The needle bends against my skin, and the cop pulls it off and tosses it to the floor. “You’re going to be fed intravenously, or not at all,” she says. “We know you can take blood tests, so let this needle through your skin or starve.”
As someone else pointed out, the fact that supers who haven't even been found guilty of any crimes can be held in these sort of conditions is actually pretty unsettling. Normally, this sort of heavy-handed cruelty would be a sign of something deeply wrong with the establishment, especially when one of your side-characters is a literal anarchist. But here... not really. The story treats the cell's existence like the fucking DMV or something. The only reason it's bad is because
Danny is the one here, for the victimless crime of... well, breaking and entering followed by death threats. But she was evil all along, so that makes it okay!
Once they’ve got the feeding line hooked up, there’s a really embarrassing moment involving a catheter that was inserted earlier by the jail medics upstairs. As it was explained to me, once a prisoner goes in the stocks, she doesn’t come out again for any reason except a court date, a transfer to Yucca Mountain, or a judge’s order.
This really feels legally dubious. Also, again, they think a tray-slot is too much of a risk, but they'll let a prisoner have a
chain. This is like if you had Magneto's plastic-prison from
X2, but they also give him some baoding balls.
I'm guessing Yucca Mountain is some kind of super-prison, so wouldn't it be more humane (and probably more cost-effective) to hold Danny there? I mean, assuming it isn't just a vast, horrifying warehouse of drugged up supervillains. Also, this unit seemingly only has one cell, and apparently other towns and cities pay them to hold supervillains in it. What the fuck do they do when there's more than one superhuman being detained?
I can’t breathe. Like, at all. My lungs pump and air moves, but I can’t get any use out of it. I yank at the shackles in desperation, and they hum and groan as the magnetic field fights back. My still-fragile bones groan in complaint, and I can’t go at it as hard as I’d like. In the shape I’m in, I don’t think I can break this steel, not spread-eagled without any leverage.
Of course she's spread-eagled. I'm shocked the cell doesn't require you to be nude.
“I can’t breathe,” I tell them. “Please let me out.”
I move on to less polite requests. It does nothing. They can’t hear, or don’t care. My heart is going like a rabbit. My head is swimming. Eventually, a little voice in the back of my head tells me to remember that first aid merit badge I got, the only one I earned before dropping out of Boy Scouts. I’m hyperventilating. With an effort of will I take a big, deep breath and hold it. Hold it. Let it go slowly.
Aside from drawing, superhero exposition, and violence, the only interests or pastimes he's bought up are shit he implicitly hated.
That helps, so I do it again. Again. By the tenth breath, my heart has slowed and my lips aren’t numb anymore.
But I’m still in a hole.
If I was a less honest man, I'd told you all this book had a very funny typo there.
I turn around.
And they recoil.
I turn around…
…and they recoil.
They’re scared of me. Over and over in my head, I relive the moment when I realize that they’re all scared of me. The people I fight for. New Port is my home. These are my people, and I’d die for any one of them.
You know, when Batman and Superman say this kind of thing about Gotham or Metropolis, it's usually at least a bit poignant, because both those characters have deep connections to their cities, Batman especially. Danny meanwhile has displayed no particular attachment to Newport or its people. Newport itself is a super thinly sketched setting, which doesn't help. As far as I can tell, it's basically just Seattle but technically fictional so I can't give Daniels shit for messing up details.
But it’s completely fair. Idiot. You let them see too much. What did you think was going to happen? Of course they were always going to hate you. You can’t do anything right.
The morphix has faded. Aside from slow, even breaths, I hold very still. As long as I don’t move, the tears in the muscles and the cracks in my bones won’t hurt. Not too much, anyway. With only dim light to see by, I focus entirely on the lattice and examine my own injuries in sick fascination. It’s kind of amazing I could even stand upright long enough to get in this cell.
But of course, I deserve it. Dreadnought gave me his powers, said the world needed me, and I became this. I became something that scares people. How did that happen? It seemed like that’s what I was supposed to do. Like it was right. Like it was necessary.
But it wasn’t, was it?
This might hit harder if Daniels hadn't done everything he could to make Danny look like the victim in this scenario:
"He's only a violent sadist because of his mean dad!"
"She was a mean TERF!"
"It was all a set up to make him look bad!"
This would be much more impactful if Graywytch had actually only decided to work for the baddies after that little stunt. Aside from that being way too morally grey for Daniels, I think the other reason he didn't go for it is that it would mean this story couldn't all take place over the course of like, a week. Still not sure why it does.
Is there something in the IV? My head feels thick, drowsy. I ask if I’m being sedated, and I get no reply. Sleep comes with strange, twisting dreams that evaporate when I’m awake. Dreams where I’m alone, on the outside. Where people are scared of me and want me to leave. Where everything hurts, and everything is cold.
• • •
Someone is in the room with me. They stand behind me where I can’t get a good look at them. In the lattice, they’re only a shimmery smear that sets a glass pendant on my chest and runs a knife across my throat. Graywytch hisses with frustration and steps back into the portal she entered through and disappears.
I'm going to give the story the benefit of the doubt and assume the necklace has an enchantment that keeps Myra from just taking it off and using Garrison's channeled power to stab the little shit.
With the intravenous drip in my arm, I don’t get hungry. It’s hard to tell when I’m awake. When the door hisses steam and begins to open I am startled out of a stupor. The X-rack cranks back to a vertical position as some MRU cops troop in. It’s hard to tell if they’re the same ones, since they’re all wearing bulky tactical gear and gas masks.
Is that how that works? I know you can keep someone alive by feeding them intravenously pretty much indefinitely, but given how important the physical act of eating is (it's part of why food-pills are such a silly concept) I imagine someone who's not brain dead would still sometimes get the urge to eat. The input of medical-minded Kiwis would be very welcome here.
Two of the cops begin unhooking the tubes and unlatching my shackles.
“You made bail. You’ll need to reclaim your belongings before you leave,” one of them says. For a dizzy moment I wonder if this is a dream. It’s only been a couple hours. There’s no way we could get ten million dollars that fast.
Well, that's another indi troon visual novel that's never going to be made. Also, only a couple of hours? Why does everything in this book have to be so
compressed? Seriously, Danny got rescued from Garrison, fought Red Steel, was sent to super-jail, and made bail in less than twenty-four hours!
With my suit back on, I check the clock and see it’s only been about fourteen hours since I was arraigned. Then I see a calendar and realize, no, it’s been two days, which explains why I can walk without limping. I’m probably not up to full strength yet, but I’m battle ready, and that’s what really matters.
Oh, that's little better, I guess. Though, given we're about 80% through with the novel, I'm guessing the main narrative utility Danny's stint in the cell was letting him heal-up for the climax. See, I'd have just have had him... go to bed? But then this story might occupy a whole calander month of in-universe time, and we can't have that, apparently.
Another tedious police escort brings me to the front of the station, the publicly accessible area. As we’re coming around a corner I hear raised voices.
“That’s your plan?” It’s Magma. He sounds at the edge of shouting. “You’re taking children into combat now?”
“They’re capes.” That’s Doc, with a hard defiance in her voice I haven’t heard before. “They know the risks.”
Did Magma not raise this issue the entire fucking year Danny's been maiming people for the state of Washington?
“They know the—this isn’t going up against some two-bit diamond heist crew, Doc! What happened to your impassioned opposition to minors in the field, huh?”
“You think I like stealing her childhood? She’s who we have, that’s all there is to it.”
Magma lets go of a full-throated roar: “Whose fault is that?”
Based Magma.
The cops and I come around the corner and see Magma and all three Docs squaring off in the waiting room. A bunch of uniforms stand around wide-eyed and mute, unsure about what they can do to stop the developing superhero screaming match. But Magma’s reformed supervillain girlfriend, Aloe, is on the ball and puts a hand on his arm as soon as I step into view.
He bites down on a further explosion, but Doc is already rolling with her counter-attack: “I am done letting you use my rape against me, you oversized hunk of shit!”
Magma snaps his attention back to Doc, reels back like he’s been physically slapped. “Doc…I didn’t…”
Oh, fuck off Doc. Look, I feel terrible for what happened to Doc. Absolutely horrible violation, no doubt about that. But when a human woman is raped, it usually doesn't result in a pile of superhero corpses. If Doc had had a generic mind-control spell or something cast on her, I wouldn't blame her at all. But Doc knew she was specifically vulnerable to being hacked, and that Utopia was somewhere out there. By not disclosing this, she prioritised her secret above the safety of her teammates, and by extension, that of the city and world they protected.
Even saying all that, that doesn't mean I want Doc to suffer for the rest of her runtime. In a mature story, Doc would likely just have to accept her old friends will likely never be in a place where they could forgive her, let alone
like her, and find some other path to inner-peace. But no, because this is Oppression Olympics and rape is the Worst Thing Possible (unless done by troons) Doc claims the gold, and Magma is the bad guy for not having having a
Steven Universe cry with her about their shared trauma.
“Fuck you, Magma,” spits Doc, red and wet in the face. “It’s not always about your—”
One of her bodies sees me, and they all shut up and go stiff. That’s about the time everyone else notices me walking in on the loud family fight as well. Magma, Doc, Aloe, and a few dozen cops all stare at me, and it’s quickly apparent Doc and Magma are both charting new maps for previously unexplored realms of mortification.
Doc's right. It's not always about Magma. Sometimes, it's about Chlorophyll, who'll die with the mind of a child. Other times, it's about Val, whose death means that her daughter will literally lose her mind at the age of fifteen. Or it can be about Carapace, who'll never pick a better name!
“Danny, are you okay?” asks the Doc who has kept herself together the best. The other two are hastily wiping their eyes and trying not to melt through the floor with embarrassment.
“No.” Whoops, that wasn’t what I meant to say. “I mean, it’s been a bad week.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” says Magma, turning away from Doc. “I want you to know that the community is behind you, 100%.”
"They didn't care at all about you threatening another member of the community on-camera. The cops aren't the only one with a thin blue line!"
“Or at least the parts of it that matter,” says Aloe with a smile. “We didn’t have much trouble raising your bail money.” And there’s a twinkle in her eye that makes me think that most of the money they ‘raised’ was simply cash that the Federal prosecutors hadn’t managed to recover when they convicted her. Not that I’m in any position to be picky right now.
And then the IRS got her.
“Thanks,” I say to Aloe. “But, uh, I think maybe you’re looking at the wrong girl right now. I’m not really sure I should be a superhero anymore.”
“What?” yelps Magma. I swear to God. He yelps. “Why? You’re a natural. How about you just take some time off, let us figure this one out? You don’t need to be hasty. About anything.”
Weren't you just going on about how kids shouldn't be in this game? Or is it okay when it's just beating up squishy normals?
The feel of Graywytch’s neck under my hands comes back to me, how soft it was, how I could make out her sliding muscles and tendons beneath the skin. (Did she try to kill me last night, or was that a dream? My guilty conscience trying to make it better?) Sharp on its heels, the image of the courtroom, and how scared they were of me. “I’m not sure I’m doing it for the right reasons anymore. Kinetiq is who you should talk to. Or hell, call in Northern Union.”
Man, imagine having to pick between a troon and an enby to save the world.
“Danny, if you want to retire I will respect that,” says Doc softly. “But we should get out of this fight before you make those kinds of decisions. I tried calling the Union, but Graywytch got to them and they’re refusing to budge without more evidence.
It's almost as though they have video evidence of Danny threatening to kill her because his parents... had legal representation.
It’ll be too late before they move on this. And if you back down now, blackcapes will be gunning for you for the rest of your life.”
Why? If he's retired, what reason would supervillains have to go after Danny? By the sounds of it, most of the guys he's fought aren't in any condition to seek revenge. I imagine the supervillain community will just be happy they don't have to worry about the Beast of Newport anymore. Do they just want that sweet XP? Again, cops fight crime too, and they retire all the time.
“There are ways to hide her, Doc,” says Magma. “And she’s right, even if the Union won’t budge, there are other capes.”
“Who are you kidding?” says Doc. “Short-notice ad hocs are almost impossible these days, and you know it. Especially with Graywytch poisoning the well.”
Maybe suffocating superheroes in bureaucracy was a mistake!
Also, it's interesting that Magma has already accepted that Graywytch--a long time colleague--is evil, apparently purely on the word of the drunken robot who killed his friends and shot him in the spine. He doesn't even seem surprised. What did this team even look like before the first book?
“We failed Danielle before,” Magma says to Doc, and he even manages not to snarl. “Don’t let that happen again.”
“Danielle is right here, and she can make her own decisions,” I say. “My record is fourteen and one. If a blackcape is stupid enough come after me, I’ll put as many of them in hospital beds as I need to make my point. But I don’t think—maybe looking for trouble isn’t something I should do anymore.”
Doc and Magma both look unhappy. Aloe seems quietly impressed. Then, a moment later, she seems like she’s uncomfortable. It starts slowly at first, a confused crinkle in her brow, and then widening eyes and labored breathing. She’s suffocating.
“Honey, wh—what’s…” Then Magma is feeling it too. His hand goes to his collar, tears off the top button, and the huge man begins to sway.
Doc and I trade looks. We’re both reaching the same conclusions, and we’re both horrified. One of her bodies begins twitching, seems to spasm and reboot.
That's right, Garrison's activated his satellites. Not sure why he bothered framing Danny when he was this close. Also, we have official confirmation that mad-scientists aren't granted enhanced intelligence that lets them build cool shit by Nemesis, their cool shit is just junk Nemesis makes work by space-rock-fiat.
