13: Showtime

Welcome to the world of Edison City, where the never-ending battle against the forces of evil includes everything from the Owl Bandit taking over the subway line downtown to the Antichrist trying to rewrite history aboard the HMS Titanic. Anything and everything is a possibility here, including flying sharks. Especially the sharks.

If you’re new here, catch up with the Edison City Index:

Previously, the Malevolent Med-Student had just defeated Wyatt, who was actually the Department of Engagement with Risk-enhanced Persons’ anti-cape robot gone rogue! Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city…

The Scarlet Shapeshifter was tired. She’d been running, and escaping, and running again for weeks, if not months, holding so many different identities in her head it was hard to remember what she’d originally looked like anymore. When she first started cape work she remembered some other shapeshifters cautioning her to be careful, because if you shifted too much or too long without a rest in your original form every now and again you might damage your basic DNA and never be able to get back to your first self. She had no idea if she was close to that point, or if she’d blown past it like a highway speeder going past a checkpoint. All she knew was that she was tired.

She’d escaped by shifting into ants. She had an idea they might suspect if they saw one lone ant making a break for it, but three? So far as they knew she couldn’t split herself into three separate individuals. She hadn’t known if she could do it either, but needs must. It had turned out more like one ant and two ant-bodies which she controlled through sheer force of will, and then had to steer the whole ungainly arrangement in the wake of a guard’s boot without getting stepped on, through the prison corridors, and out the nearest door she could find.

It had been a terrific strain. Even now, safe in a human form, she felt as if she’d run several marathons. She had pushed her shifting to the limit, and if she were caught now, she didn’t know what she could do to escape after that. She was doing what she knew best, hiding in a crowd in a busy mall, hoping she was far enough from any pictures of her original self that no one would recognize her. She almost made it.

Zack had been having a very rough week. His division’s prize anti-cape robot had been lost, then found again, then lost again. Their boss, Peter Hawkins, had gotten himself killed by said robot. That had hit the whole team hard. Another agent, Ron Gander, had been put in to take his place, but he was no Hawkins and everyone knew it. Not to mention, they’d had the Scarlet Shapeshifter in custody and she’d gotten away, again. Nobody knew how, of course, and rumor went that she had inside help, which hadn’t done wonders for morale.

All this left Zack in a pretty lousy mood as he rattled down the street in his D.E.R.P. issue car on his way to some useless assignment or other tracking down some rogue cape that the heroes would probably have taken care of by the time he got there anyway. “This is why we needed the robot, but nooo,” he groused, “Can’t make a robot without the money, you know, and then they blame us when it goes missing, because of course it goes missing, and-”

A light on his dash lit up. The D.E.R.P. cars weren’t the latest in terms of style, but they did have a few useful gadgets, one of which was a cape detector that actually worked, some of the time. It seemed to be working now. Zach looked around to see who it might’ve picked up; sometimes the thing caught false alarms such as cape-potentials, people who could have powers but didn’t yet, or who had once and lost them. False alarm or not, you could never be too careful.

He saw a woman coming out of a mall and at first he didn’t mark her as suspicious, but then she saw the car and flinched, just slightly. D.E.R.P. cars weren’t marked, exactly, but they tended to have a particular look. If you had been around the Department, you would know. Zack caught the flinch. Ordinary person, normal appearance, scared of Department car? A red flag went off in his brain. He stepped out. “Excuse me!” he called. “Ma’am? I’d like to talk-”

The Scarlet Shapeshifter bolted, because she knew exactly how that conversation would go, and she didn’t see that she had any other way out. As she ran she tried to think of something easy to shift into. Ants were out for sure. Maybe she could duck into a store and do a quick face change, that had worked so often before-

Then a bolt of fire knocked her off her feet and she fell to the ground, momentarily stunned. Ben strolled up, cackling evilly. “Oh, this is beautiful, this is just beautiful.”

Zack saw the newcomer and assumed he was a cape too, not expecting to meet the Antichrist on the streets of Edison City. “Okay, sir, I don’t know who you are, but I’m gonna need you to-”

“Oh, shut up,” Ben said, and raised his hand to toss another fireball at the D.E.R.P. agent, who would've been incinerated immediately. Would’ve been, because in the instant before Ben could do anything he was hit by a sudden volley of wombombs and knocked flat.

“Well, that was easier than I thought it’d be,” said the Wombat, hurrying up to his side. “Okay, Ron, get a message to the angel, tell her we found her guy, and Gaseous Girl, you sit on him, make sure he doesn’t move-”

“Who the heck are you people!” Zack cut in.

“Oh, super,” Gaseous Girl said, rolling her eyes. “The Department’s here and up to speed, as usual. This is gonna be fun.”

“Look,” the Wombat said, turning to Zack, “I’m the Wombat, we’ve got this, everything’s under control, you boys can just go on back to-”

But Zack was by now confused, insulted, irritated, and verging on panicky besides, none of which made for a good state for an agent of the D.E.R.P. to be in. “Everybody, stand down!” he yelled. “Stand down and surrender, right now, or I-”

A noise that sounded like a dozen out-of-tune kazoos split the air. An invisible something seemed to hit Zack, and he twitched and fell over. “What?” said the Wombat.

A motorcycle vroomed in the distance. Down the road, a modified white cape waving in the wind, came the Malevolent Med-Student proudly aboard the Malpracticycle, Candystriper giggling madly at his side. “Ta-da,” he said grandly as he swept up to the astonished heroes. “I’m on your side now, more or less.”

“Really,” the Wombat said flatly. “So what, you’re the Non-Malevolent Med-Student?”

“Not at all!” the new hero retorted. “From this moment on, I will be known as Edison City’s one and only Super Surgeon!”

There was a moment’s pause. Gaseous Girl snort-laughed so hard a spurt of flame shot out her nose. The Wombat had to work very hard to keep his face straight himself. “Well,” he said. “Good…. good for you.”

“Yes,” said the Malevolent Med-Student Super Surgeon awkwardly. “Well then. My work here is done. Candystriper, away!”

As they blazed off down the straight, the Scarlet Shapeshifter took that moment to quietly make herself scarce. The Wombat and his team pretended not to notice. Constance arrived shortly after and carried off Ben, muttering grimly about how a certain someone was going to get himself smitten like all get out for sure. By the time Zack regained consciousness, his backup team was on scene and asking where everyone else had gone.

“How should I know?” he said unhappily. “One of these days, I tell you, one of these days…”

It wouldn’t be that day, however, and alas for Zack, he knew it. And so the D.E.R.P., and Edison City itself, set about its usual Tuesday business, and the world was saved once again.

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