Mage Among Superheroes

I found myself once more laying on an angled couch. Doctor Patenaude was there ready to take notes, of course. “So, Turlough. You don’t get angry. But I’m sure you’ve seen some people when they were angry. What did it look like to you? How did they react?”

“Usually people get violent and attack someone,” I said. “Seriously, I mean. Sometimes people will react similarly when they aren’t actually that angry, like many of the villagers in Mossley. The ones who were actually angry didn’t calm down after, so I learned to avoid them.”

“People in your village attacked you?”

“Not seriously. It was all in good fun, due to the pranks I pulled on them.” They wouldn’t have let me back in town otherwise. “Any actual fights would have gotten me in hot water.”

“I see. But you saw others actually angry sometimes? Did it always end in physical violence?”

“Not always. Sometimes people would yell and scream at each other, or stomp away.”

“That sounds about right. So, tell me about your childhood. What about your parents?”

“Don’t know much about them,” I said. “They were orcs, obviously,” I gestured to myself. “I don’t remember them though.”

“Did you grow up among other orcs?”

“Thankfully not. Mostly humans, elves, halflings. That sort of thing. I wouldn’t have been able to learn magic otherwise.”

“Tell me about orcs,” he said.

So I did. He had a lot of questions, and though I wasn’t sure what the point was, answering them was part of this whole ‘process’.

-----

I kept Scrying on various members of Handface’s gang he’d gathered together, including those we’d seen casually. We kept ending up in flooded areas, but Calculator had determined that they weren’t the same point. Whatever was causing my Scrying to be off, it was in multiple places.

“I’m getting closer to triangulating a position,” Calculator said. “If we can just catch another glimpse of signage for those old subway tunnels.”

“What happened to this ‘subway’ anyway? Why is it all flooded?”

He gestured vaguely. “The bay. All it took was a couple supers misusing their powers and the system cracked open, then an earthquake.”

“So this is a supervillain thing?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Calculator shook his head. “They need transportation too. The project was just too ambitious and poorly managed, and nobody was ready for what happened. By the time clean up elsewhere was done, there were so many holes that it was impossible to drain the system. And nobody wanted to spend money to rebuild it.”

“Seems like they got the hard part done,” I said. “Tunnels don’t come easy. They should have rebuilt.”

“Powers help, but ultimately I’m not trying to argue that the subway wasn’t useful, just that it no longer functions. We’re lucky it was constructed sturdily enough that the earthquake didn’t collapse anything above.”

“So there are just water filled tunnels beneath the whole city and everyone ignores them?”

“Pretty much,” Calculator said. “Though supers like to make lairs down there. Maybe at some point they’ll have drained enough of it out that the city will look to reclaim it all. Ooh,” Calculator said as something formed in the mirror. “It’s actually working?”

In front of us appeared the image of the brawny guy, Boyan Dimov. He was carrying two large crates in his arms, grunting with exertion, as he walked down a relatively dry tunnel. I turned the image to try to catch glimpses of the walls so we could find those markings Calculator needed, while he recorded everything. We only got twenty seconds before suddenly the image was torn away to one of the decoys.

“They’re not perfect, I guess,” I rubbed my chin. “I wonder who put that stuff together?”

“Could be many people. Rodentia may still be working with Deimos, though we haven’t seen any markings to indicate her work.”

“Like what?”

“Cheese and rat traps.”

“Doesn’t she like rats?” I asked. “Why would she make use of rat traps?”

“Tech supers aren’t the most stable bunch. Brain altering powers give them more visible quirks than other supers. Or perhaps it’s some sort of ironic revenge to trap people in giant rat traps.”

“Does that work?” I said.

“More often than you’d think. Some are quite cleverly disguised.”

“Did you find what you need?” I asked.

“I’ll have to review the footage, but I think there’s a good chance.”

“Great! Let us know what you find.”

-----

“It feels weird, seeing you like that,” Maks said.

“Without my uniform?” I asked.

“Without your… regular features.” My companion usually known as Shockfire gestured to his face, around the mouth and the hair. “It feels kind of uncomfortable making you have to look like something else.”

For my disguise, I had concealed my tusks, changed the color of my hair to a consistent dark brown, and changed my skin tone to a ruddy brown. “It’s inefficient to spend mana disguising my appearance when I’m active. And my appearance stands out too much to not weaken your identities.”

Midnight looked down at his paws, “It feels weird,” he said. Right now he was a tabby cat. Going for the complete opposite and turning him white had been appealing, but might also be an additional clue if someone picked up on something else. And some people had reasonable private identities. It was already too late for me as I’d been going out of Power Brigade HQ in my orcish form since I joined up, and even with jamming devices to prevent recording it had to be assumed that it was constantly monitored somehow.

At the moment, Team C-4 was on a ‘camaraderie building exercise’, which kind of just meant hanging out together on company budget. Rasmus was here too, along with Captain Senan, officially known as ‘Ice Guy’. We’d been training with Rocker too, and though our mission had been delayed he was going to need more community service than just one mission to begin with. He wasn’t here with us though because we couldn’t really trust our civilian identities with a criminal. Not yet, at least.

Flashing lights around us indicated an ‘arcade’. This was apparently one of the fancy ones aimed at adults, which mostly meant there was a bar and things were more expensive. Though apparently the game machines were also fancier. As for the bar… since we were on company time we couldn’t drink alcohol, though it was discouraged in general practice regardless. Mercenaries might need to be called upon at any time. And of course Midnight was way too small to drink alcohol in any quantity regardless.

We were here to have fun, and while I did find the various things amusing, it was after I learned how to operate the unfamiliar machines. Some required skills I did not have, like driving, while others simply require operating levers and pressing buttons in arrangements I was unfamiliar with. I was quite capable of navigating my way around a phone and had some familiarity with a normal computer, but the methods of input were quite different.

Interestingly enough, some of the setups were easier for Midnight to operate. They mostly required hands, after all. With me holding him and making it seem plausible that I was operating a machine, he was able to make use of many devices. Though he seemed to think they were ‘primitive’.

“The company won’t pay for the top of the line stuff,” our captain pointed out. “Extraterrestrial technology is slowly being integrated, but super tech isn’t reliable enough in terms of safety for public use. We can use some previous generation VR tech, but it’d have to be on our own dime. And some of it requires body scanning which isn’t optimal for those lacking humanoid shapes.” He looked at midnight, but my tusks would also be an issue. It would just be more information out there for someone to find if they were looking for me, which apparently some people were. We were working on plans to deal with Stargirl’s fans, but getting into a public fight with them and having them arrested was apparently still ‘bad PR’. Jim had offered to help, but while scaring them away might work, it might also cause them to report a monster and make his life more difficult than it needed to be.

It was too bad violence wasn’t the answer, because that worked often enough in this world and was quite convenient for me. But for the moment I would continue avoiding people looking for me.

-----

“Yep, it’s another one,” I confirmed. I was now being brought around to various places around the city where strange incidents had happened post-portal. There were enough causes of supernatural crap that maybe one in ten were connected, even after filtering for known factors, but I’d still come upon a dozen tiny portals strewn seemingly randomly throughout the city. Just like the one in that basement, they all were sized only large enough for mana to come through, but it raised the local mana significantly and the ambient mana of the city… by slightly more than one part in ten. It didn’t seem to be increasing at a noticeable rate, by how fast I regenerated, but rather had basically jumped up all at once.

Calculator was working with me on several projects now, Scrying and portal hunting and of course talking about the ‘portal supers’. The general public didn’t know that people were getting class powers from my world, but out of millions, there had already been at least a hundred confirmed cases of people who had been near the portals that gained powers, so that name fit.

“Alright,” he nodded. “We’ll mark this one down as well.”

“Can anyone else sense these?” I asked. “There should be someone.”

“Doctor Martinez can now, but he’s not really meant for field work.”

“And you are?” I tilted my head, looking at the guy in his very much non-combat suit.”

“I am. Try to hit me… without magic.”

“Here?”

“It’s as good as anywhere else,” he said.

So I socked him in the jaw. Or at least, that was the intention. He didn’t move far, but I missed. I tried jabs, leg sweeps, elbows, kicks, and a full tackle- but I never got even close. The frustrating part was I was certain was faster than him. I had to try something else. So I pulled back for a straight punch to his face. My fist stopped an inch from his nose. “Why didn’t you dodge?”

“Because you weren’t going to hit me.”

“Are you some kind of diviner?”

“Nothing so fanciful. I’m just good at predicting actions.”

“Can you teach me?” I asked.

“It’s part of my power so…”

“So maybe, then,” I said.

“You’re intelligent, but still restricted to a normal processing speed,” he said.

“Tch. What a time to have no points left.”

“Is there magic for that?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” I nodded.

“Interesting. Well, we should get back to the office. On the way, I have another video to show you.”

As we rode in the car he showed me the video in question. It opened up with a fancy animation sequence for some reason. The final splash of it had the title ‘Ceira Plays’. After that intro it was just an image of someone standing there. No, sitting in a chair with the camera pointed at them. A dark skinned woman, maybe about my age but clearly much more in tune with the fashion of Earth.

“What’s up C-crew! Ceira here. Normally I’d be here with a fire new review, but as you probably saw from the thumbnail and the title well… we’ll talk about it after a word from our sponsor!” She paused, “I’m kidding, this time. No sponsor because uh, I got super powers!” She reached out towards the screen and the image shifted, then waggled around for a bit as it tried to focus on a tray of little plant sprouts in front of her. “Check this!” her hand came into frame. She pointed her finger at one of the sprouts and it grew into a small bean stalk within thirty seconds. Then she did it again, and again. “No editing tricks, I swear!” She tilted the camera back to her face, “Freaking tiring though. I can only do that like, a few times before I feel tired. But it’s a power! It’s so cool. I’m pretty sure I got it a few weeks ago, during the portal thing. Portal powers! Yeah!”

“So?” Calculator asked as he stopped the video.

“She seems wildly incautious,” I said, “Given this world’s standards, at least.”

“Maybe,” Calculator said. “But she’s clearly not a combat factor, or really much of anything at this point. And enough people have seen this that if she disappeared it’s much more risky than someone looking for one of the other portal supers to experiment on.”

“You think they might?” I asked.

“Someone will. Maybe they already have and it was just lost in the normal disappearances,” Calculator shook his head. “But anyway, about that…”

“Should be a druid,” I said. “They can do a lot of cool things, and also be much more efficient at growing plants as well. Though it’s kinda… less useful in the city. Until they start reshaping stone, I guess.”

“I- what are the chances this power develops that far?”

“No idea,” I said. “This version is all new to me, but it should take years even with intentional practice.”

“Not enough information, then. Very well, I’ll keep you posted on what I know. This one happens to be rather easy to keep tabs on, obviously.”

With all these people getting new class-based powers, I was beginning to feel rather unspecial. And that annoyed me. Recognizing that, I took a note of it to talk about later. Normal people felt annoyed and I did too. Obviously. But I was still supposed to keep track of it anyway.