The plan had been to evacuate people, knowing they’d go back. I’d come to terms with that. But the hope, the focus, was that we’d deal with the leaders. If we could deal with the Fallen capes and the lieutenants who were willing to go to war, maybe we could break the back of the larger group, leaving them aimless. Maybe some of those aimless people would find their way back to society.

Twenty of them, and if there were unpowered in there, they were gussied up like the ones with powers, confusing things sufficiently that we couldn’t discount them at all.

Fuck me if this wasn’t about to be one heck of an uphill battle.

Shadow 5.10

“Valefor,” I said, just loud enough for the others, Damsel included, to hear. “Hypnotist master. I wrote about him in the document. Don’t look him in the eyes.”

Chris was in his bird-spiral Dark Introspection form, and he curled up further, eyes nestling in deep, so his eye only barely peered out.

We backed up as the Fallen advanced as a crowd. Chris prowled around behind us on long, black, bird limbs, his eye peering over our heads. The pupil resembled a human face in shape, but more a cross-section of the middle of the face.

I wished I’d asked for more details on just how his forms functioned. He might not have answered me, but on the off chance that he did, I’d have some sense of what we could do to defend ourselves. I just knew it was maybe a solution of sorts in the face of Mama Mathers, the anti-thinker measure, her family, or some combination thereof.

Crises tended to highlight things. They brought out the best and worst of us, whether it was courage in the face of danger to our loved ones or craven behavior in the midst of desperation. They showed us who our friends were and how much they cared. I was getting a sense of things I really needed and wanted to work on with these guys, and where our strengths as a team were. Case in point: I needed to figure things out with Chris.

I’d never really had to think about it. I’d grown up with my first team, and I’d known them intimately by default. They had been there by default, up until a crisis bad enough it had broken us.

“You wanna piece of me!?” Sidepiece screamed out the words. She put too much pitch in the higher sounds, and managed to get some vocal fry in the mix.

“You’ve got to stop saying that,” Disjoint said.

Love Lost wasn’t screaming, and the others in her group weren’t attacking. Cleat, Etna, they only retreated in our general direction.

“You want some of this!?” Sidepiece screeched.