Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games (7 page)

“I didn’t say that. Losing you into some extrareality realm would have its own repercussions for history. In the end, even with all the future-histories in the Oroboros’ files, I cannot say which outcome would be worse.” Looking up at me, she laughed ruefully and shook her head. “History is an emergent phenomenon, and with all my quantum-brain power I can’t do more than guess. I wouldn’t bet dinner on my conclusions.”

Great. So all the quantum-ghost of a future head of state and librarian could tell me was that my actions were
important
. I sank into the mother-of-pearl chair that appeared for me.

“Do you mind if I whine just a little?”

“Not at all. You were over that habit by the time I knew you, but Jacqueline still teased you about it even then.”

“Jacky?”
That
made me smile. With all the stuff Jacky got into in New Orleans—her twenty-four hour coffee shop, her supernatural detective agency, and keeping Acacia alive and preventing the Master of Ceremonies from going full godfather—I worried. Just a little, and she’d laugh at me if she knew. “What year did you say you’re from?”

“Let us say, awhile from now.”

I took a breath. “And you knew me—know me then?”

“Yes. Very well.”

“Will I still be the same?”

“Yes. No.” Her lips curved up, her thin but unlined skin making her look sixteen and one hundred and sixteen at once. “Your smiles are not as wide, then. But your eyes are as kind.”

She floated her throne over to me, close without touching, and the look she gave me was somehow both stern and so fondly maternal I had to blink suddenly swimming eyes.

“Of course that was a potential Hope, the most
probable
future Hope the last time the Teatime Anarchist made that journey and brought me back with him. Certainly you are being shaped on a different forge of experience now, and the anvil of time will beat you out differently than it would have before. More lightness, less dark I think, although I suspect your heart will stay the same—it did through every possible incarnation that the Oroboros ever saw.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Mistress Jenia was a good hostess; once the sun set, she turned her cloudhome so we could see the blue moon rise. To me, it looked like a promise—just looking at it made me feel better, like whatever happened we’d survive to do
that
. And that beautiful second home for humanity was only going to be the first of many—Jenia told me about the Martian and Venusian terraforming programs and the extra-solar colonization arks that would be planned.

I curled my legs up under me, and as we watched the blue moon she told me more weird stuff about the future—not other things we would do (which might not be true anymore, anyway), but things we’d learn. Like, we’d learn the stars weren’t huge thermonuclear engines like we thought, but nodes of plasma discharge powered by galaxy-threading electrical currents. We’d learn that gravity itself was simply an electrostatic dipolar force (whatever that was), that plasma fields did more to shape planetary orbits and galaxies than gravity, and that the universe was a lot younger than we thought.

More weirdly, gigantic orbiting optical and radio telescope arrays, interstellar probes, and interstellar-range teleporters would tell us that we were alone; against all predictions, in a century of looking, listening, and searching no life would be found anywhere else in the Universe. Future theories would include abiogenesis as a cosmically unique event, colonization from another universe (maybe an extrareality more real than we’d thought), and Intelligent Design.

“Arguments do get rather circular,” she laughed. “Scientists say ‘It happened, and we don’t know how or why.’ Theists say ‘We know how and why.’ Atheists say ‘We know it didn’t happen like that!’ Eventually the scientists walk away and think up more experiments.”

She favored the colonization theory herself (called Hyperion Theory for the name of the hypothetical originating extrareality realm), since it explained both our apparent uniqueness in an otherwise empty universe and the reality-shaping nature of breakthrough powers. According to Hyperion theorists, life itself was a “supernatural” intrusion into a realm whose native natural laws favored unliving physics and chemistry. We were all more than
just
physical, with breakthroughs somehow connecting more strongly with our universal “higher reality.”

Of course there could still be extraterrestrial life out there, halfway across the universe, but real aliens? It looked like the Server of Ganymede came from somewhere as much part of our own universe as John Carter’s Barsoom. Or Littleton. In the physical universe that we knew, there was only us to count the stars.

We tripped from deep topic to deeper topic and it felt almost like a college night in Polevsky Commons with the Bees, staying up with pizza and philosophy and debating the whichness of whatness, of life, the universe, and everything until the small hours of the morning. Without my breakthrough that would have been my whole freshman year, and I’d still managed to get in a few of those unsleep-over nights with Julie, Megan, and Annabeth. Mistress Jenia (who felt in weird ways like Ozma) kept me entertained until Shell whispered
Wakie wakie
… in my ear and the night was over.

“Since the internet is forever, you need to be careful what you say; a minor interview with a fan club spilled my nickname for Artemis and her nickname for me into the world, and now people (the ones who don’t try and ’ship us as a couple) ask how Little Miss Sunshine and a “bloodsucking fiend of the night” can be such super-friends. I tell them Artemis puts up with me. She tells them she’s trying to keep me alive.”

Astra,
Power Week Interview.

The fix was in; somehow during the night Blackstone managed to arrange for Riptide and Grendel to temporarily attach to the LA Guardians, something to do with following up on their Guy’s Night Out. According to Shell, they’d bonded over burritos and bad guy beat-downs (Grendel had come back missing a fang) and it had been
good publicity
. That got them out of Restormel before our stuff from the Dome arrived.

The problem was the stuff arrived with
Jacky
.

“
No
.”

Jacky was unimpressed. “Yes. Of the three of us, who is the least likely to be caught?” She mimed going poof with a flip of her fingers. “And who can ‘adjust’ a memory here or there if we need to make our footprint invisible? You
need
me for this, and we’ve had this argument before. Think you’re going to go supervillain
and
invade Japan without me? Oh, hell no.”

I wanted to scream at her, and bit my lip hard enough to almost draw blood, but she was right; if it all went south then she had a better chance than me or Ozma of getting away clean—and the ability to cover our tracks might make the difference between success and failure.

“Besides.” She rolled her shoulders and gave me a smile with fangs in it. “If you find Kitsune, you may need help persuading him to cooperate. I’m good at that, too.”

I turned to Ozma—we couldn’t have this fight anywhere private inside the lift pod’s cargo space—but the Empress of Oz ignored us in favor of her inventory; Jacky had brought a crate of stuff packed by Nox, and she was examining each item before transferring it into her magic box.

Shell stayed out of it and Shelly wasn’t here (we’d decided that she had to stay out of this, even virtually, in case she was asked questions later).

Snapping open the top case in the stack she’d kept for herself, Jacky handed me a bundle of black cloth.

“Shell needed me to get the designs for these from the Bees and get Vulcan to fabricate them overnight for us. Julie says hi and ‘You’d better come back.’” The bundle turned out to be a new costume. I turned it over, let it slide through my hands to puddle on the folding table.

“Please. Please, please,
please
tell me you’re not serious.”

Virtual-Shell couldn’t stop laughing. “Serious as a subpoena. Oh my
God
, you look— Anyway, you kept talking about going supervillain, so we thought ‘why not?’ Put it
on
.”

“This does meet one of the necessary criteria that you insisted upon, Hope,” Ozma informed me, ceasing her inventory to take the matching bundle Jacky handed her.

I sighed and started stripping.

I’d recognized the outfits instantly from some of Julie’s sketches done during the Bee’s villain-rap phase, and they were the same for all three of us. Black high-necked coats, they fit like tailored gloves from the waist up and flared into loose robes from waist to ankles, buttoning up the front from waist to neck. Beneath them we wore black two-piece bodysuits that covered us from wrists to neck to ankles under the fitted coats. Black boots, of course. Wide black sashes around our waists completed the outfit (and with the high priest-style collars made us look vaguely and sinisterly clerical). My coat came with a sleeveless shoulder-hung scabbard.

“How did you get these so fast?” I asked, twisting to settle the sewn-in harness.

“Andrew has every inch of our measurements,” Jacky explained, tugging to even out my jacket shoulders. “And Vulcan was able to fabricate everything using a reserve barrel of the polymorphic-molecule goo he keeps in the Pit. They come with these.”

The box she handed me held a pair of narrow black shades. Taking them from me, she slipped them on my face. “They’re as nearly indestructible as the rest of the outfit, and Ozma says she’s got a charm she can put on them so that nobody can snatch them off.
And
they’ll stay where they are if someone punches you.”

Tightening her own black sash over her Magic Belt (covering the distinctively brilliant white and gem-studded belt certainly made sense), Ozma nodded. “That will be simple enough, and Jacky insisted that they ‘completed the outfit?’” She laughed gaily. “If we are to adventure incognito, then they do seem appropriate.”

I fidgeted as Jacky turned away to change into her own new villain-wear. Twisting in my coat, I tried to get used to the way the bottom moved almost like long skirts (if you split them up to the waist in front). They belled out when I spun, definitely weren’t designed to break away like my cape would if grabbed, and felt like they might easily get in the way.

Once Jacky was ready, Ozma pushed us all together and had us take hands. Raising her royal scepter in her free hand, she waved it over us and chanted.

“Eri emi ipso!” Her magic belt flared bright under the edges of her sash and then she wasn’t Ozma anymore.

Well, she
was
…but not. Her golden hair had gone black as night to make her alabaster skin even more striking, and when she lowered her shades to wink at me over them I could see her eyes had gone black and almond-shaped. All her features softly changed, she remained as stunningly perfect as ever. Jacky’s transformation was less startling, but only because her hair had already been dark. Weirdly, Jacky was staring at
me
. I tugged a lock of my hair forward where I could see it, sucked in a breath.

“Shell?”

“On it!” Shell waved her own hands dramatically (and needlessly), and a virtual mirror popped up in front of me. I took my new shades off to look at my virtual image. Oh
. Oh.

“Hope? Hope? Earth to Hope?” Shell was giggling and I didn’t care.

The angles of my face were smoother, rounder. My nose had never been a big feature and now it was even less prominent, especially across the bridge where it was a gentle hill between my eyes instead of a ridge. My wide eyes were now almond shaped of course, but I hadn’t been prepared for the
color
. My friend’s assurances aside, I’d always thought my grey-blue eyes and platinum blonde hair made me look colorless (and deeply envied Jacky her dramatic midnight eyes and locks); but now my eyes were a deep hazel and my
hair
, my bob-cut hair, was a rich dark brown with red highlights, like aged and polished redwood. I was…

“I’m beautiful,” I breathed.

“You’re different, that’s for sure,” Shell laughed, and beneath my wonder I felt a spark of optimism.
Nobody
was going to recognize us like this. Maybe, just maybe, we could get this done without disaster.

That was hardly the last piece of magic, or the last surprise.

Ozma passed Jacky and me tiny magic rings that looked like they’d been cut from single pieces of emerald. How did I know they were magic? She actually she picked them up from the table where they’d been sitting unnoticed in plain sight—which shouldn’t have been possible since they were
glowing
. We put them on and then twisted them as per her instructions, and in a flash of light we all found ourselves naked. I squeaked and covered myself by sheer reflex.

“Well, that would be fun at some parties.” Obviously forewarned, Jacky handed out neatly folded changes of casual civilian clothes. Once we’d all restored ourselves to modesty Ozma had us twist the rings again and, in another flash of light, we were back in our supervillain costumes.

We’d become
magical girls
. Magical Girls in Black. Could it
get
any weirder?

Yes, yes it could. Next Shell showed me The Sword; as big as me, it deserved capital letters. I’d thought the scabbard might hold more than one weapon, but no, it had been made for a blade at least as heavy as my titanium maul. Crossing down behind my back, it bumped my calves if I wasn’t careful and the hilt stood out above my head. She had to show me how to sheath and draw it.

“Vulcan originally made it for Grendel,” she explained. “All I had to do was modify the hilt.”

I swung it and held it out straight, eyeing it along its edge. “But I don’t swordfight!”

“So who expects you to
fence
with it? Swing it like you would Malleus—its edge can cut battle armor, but even if you use the flat anyone trying to parry or block your hit is going to really wish he hadn’t!”

While I was considering her point, she pulled out her last surprise. A cat. A coffee-and-cream colored cat with darker booties, tail, and ears that hummed almost subliminally to my super-duper hearing.

“Neat, huh?” She did something and the cat turned into a hovering sphere the size of a baseball. “It’s a drone Vulcan came up with. He can’t make it completely stealthy, so he built in a projection field. It’s got a satellite uplink so it’ll be off the local grid, and you never know when you might need a scout or lookout. I call it Snoop.”

Back in cat form, ‘Snoop’ regarded us all with regal disinterest and turned to washing himself.

“A.I.?” I asked weakly while Jacky snickered. Shell looked unhappy.

“Emulation A.I. only. It’s pretty dumb.”

“Anything else?”

Ozma softly chanted to herself. Transforming her royal scepter into a something like a drum-major’s long baton, she smiled triumphantly.

Shell shrugged. “Nope, that covers it. Your passports, visas, credit cards and other papers are in your coat pockets. You and Jacky are traveling as Japanese-American cousins in Japan to visit Ozma. FYI, Jacky’s the only one of you over sixteen.”

They all looked at me expectantly.

They’d met every condition. We were going.