8: Investigation

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.

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Previously, Professor Cthulhu had been defeated by angelic intervention, which finally convinced the Malevolent Med-Student to change his evil ways! Meanwhile, across the city and around that same time…

Agent Peter Hawkins of the Department for Engagement with Risk-Enhanced Persons (D.E.R.P) was running on little sleep, as usual, and the coffee was bad, as usual, and he faced the task of sorting out fifty different civilian accounts of a supervillain bank robbery that had gone squirrelly although no one could quite explain why, as per the ever stinkin’ usual. It made for one mess of a Monday.

At least they had someone in custody. For now, he thought sourly. Shapeshifters were insanely difficult to keep locked up, especially if they were really good and could recreate another cape’s powers and not just their looks. All she had to do was change herself into the Wombat and she could burrow right on out of there, and there wasn’t thing one he could do about that except pray she couldn’t become the Wombat. That wasn’t even counting some of the weirder ones like the Green Moth, who could jump dimensions or whatever she could do. The Green Moth was missing, at present, but suppose the Scarlet Shapeshifter escaped and the Moth turned up: how could they know which was the right one?

Even if she could only mimic normal human people, that was hard enough all by itself. He had to check all the guards constantly, and then check them again to make sure she hadn’t broken out and swapped with one of them. He had to check their files to make sure she hadn’t had a prior interaction with them, so she couldn’t mimic an old girlfriend, or boyfriend, or any loved one at all. If you walked by one afternoon and saw your poor old elderly grandmother in a maximum-security cell, well, your head might tell you that it had to be a trick but your heart would probably go with getting your grandma out of there and asking questions later, and then it’d be too late.

Even worse, since he didn’t really know the limits on her abilities, Hawkins had to check anything that went in or out of her cell from guard uniforms to the plate on the lunch tray to make sure she hadn’t changed herself into that. Paranoia ran rampant. Suppose she’d turned herself into an ant, or a microbe, or-

By mid-morning, Hawkins gave up and ordered her sedated via knock-out gas pumped in through a ceiling vent. It was easier anyway. Besides, he had another problem. He couldn’t figure out exactly how she’d been captured in the first place.

The witnesses all said it looked like she’d been hit by some sort of electric bolt and then fallen over. Problem: none of the bank guards on duty then had stunners, or tasers, or anything in the electric variety, just plan ordinary guns. “So,” Hawkins muttered as he looked through the files, “Who zapped the girl?”

An unknown cape maybe? He knew of a few in the electric business: Lucy of the Phenomenal Four was handy with a lightning bolt, for one. But he had a video showing Lucy fighting Screaming Banshee halfway across the city at the same time. She couldn’t be in two places at once. Unless…he sighed. Aubrey, also on the Phenomenal Four, could teleport. So maybe she could’ve jumped Lucy to the bank, zapped the Scarlett Shapeshifter, then teleported her back to rejoin the Banshee fight. Unlikely, but possible. He had to run it down.

Hawkins sent in a request for the video footage from the bank’s cameras, which was when he discovered that they didn’t have anything from the robbery. “How is that possible?” he demanded. “We’re not in VCR days anymore, you should have this stuff saved and backed up to the cloud now, right?”

“I can’t explain it, sir,” the bank manager said apologetically. “It appears a cyber attack of some sort, possibly a virus. We’re still trying to figure it out ourselves-”

Agent Hawkins hung up. Okay, so the bank cams were out. That was fine. Everybody and their brother had a smartphone these days, right? He’d get video from there. No problem. The D.E.R.P. had a few backchannel arrangements with certain other government agencies. It didn’t take that long.

It was when Hawkins’s query turned up nothing on anyone’s phone or cloud that showed any video of the incident anywhere that he began to get alarmed. This wasn’t just your ordinary clean-up job. This was good. This was too good. This was… “This is us good,” he said to himself. “Damn.” He hadn’t even thought to consider that.

Hawkins reached for his phone and tapped a number. “Zack here,” came a harried voice over the speaker.

“Zack,” Hawkins said grimly, “You remember that anti-cape robot you had go missing a little while back? I think I just found it.”

“Yeah? You sure? Where? When?”

Hawkins was about to tell him when an alert went off on his computer. He had a sinking feeling he knew who’d escaped, but he checked anyway. Sure enough. “I’ll send over a memo with all the details. Sorry, we just lost the Scarlet Shapeshifter again, and now I’ve got to figure out how.”

Zack almost laughed. “It’s been that kind of a week, hasn’t it.”

“Zack, it’s Monday.”

“Isn’t it just. I’ll look out for that report and start up a team ASAP.”

“Do that.”

Hawkins sank back into his office chair and sighed. It was going to be, once again, a very long day.

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