Summus Proelium

What Happened In The Alternate Timeline Where Lightning Bug Was The Only Member Of Her Family Who Touched, Which Was Apparently Bad Enough That The Orb Went Back In Time To Change History In Order To Fix It By Giving Caishen And Skip Powers Too?

Heavy sheets of rain poured down upon the busy streets of Detroit late in the evening on June 15th, 2027. A small, slender figure stood at the edge of a rooftop, clad in a dark raincoat with the hood up. Even in the shadows and obscured by falling water, something seemed off about the figure’s appearance. The distant lights along the street weren’t enough to give detail, but periodic lightning flashes would reveal a face of dark red skin, with eyes that were large and visibly compound, like that of an insect. Those eyes were regarding the passing cars below as people hurried to get home and out of the harsh weather.

Home. They wanted to go home.

A flash of memories shot through the girl’s mind. Memories of a mother and teenage aunt, of laughter, warmth, and the glow of a television in the corner while they ate dinner. And of trust when their soft, tender hands brushed her long white hair.

Memories of explosions. Of the door being kicked in. Of gunshots, screams, pleas, and blood. The pain of her own cries burning her throat, of being yanked up and carried out, the last image of her mother and aunt being their lifeless forms lying on the floor as the front door was kicked shut and she was bustled away to a waiting van before being tossed into the back. Then three more shots, these sending darts full of powerful sedatives into her friends, the insects she had made grow to the size of dogs. The drugs knocked them unconscious before they could rescue her.

Three more thumps as their limp forms were thrown in the back of the second van.

She remembered the cold labs, the bright lights in her face. Only five years old at the time, seven years ago, and she remembered all of it all-too vividly. The pokes of the needles, the terror of being strapped to the table and unable to move, her eyes being held open so they could examine her with bright flashlights and scanners. Which left her unable to escape the curse of her phenomenal peripheral vision forcing her to witness her insect friends being imprisoned and examined as well. Then worse, as they were cut open. Their larger bodies wouldn’t take that much damage, and soon disintegrated, leaving their original smaller forms. Smaller forms which were swiftly captured and put in jars to continue to be examined.

They thought she was an early Abyssal, that she was a monster in its infant form. They weren’t part of the government or any official group, just a rogue bunch of psychotic extremists who thought it was their duty to study her so they could figure out how to kill true Abyssals. All of them had had loved ones die in Collision Points throughout the country over the previous several years, and they were scared that things would only get worse.

She learned all that over the six years that she had been locked up and experimented on. Six years of torture, starting when she was five years old, ending when she was eleven. Ending when her tormentors made the mistake of going after bigger, more dangerous prey. They tried to abduct Cuélebre, believing him to be an early Abyssal as well despite all indications otherwise. He made them pay for it, killing all of them, and rescued her in the process.

He’d asked for her name, but she didn’t want to give it. That person, the girl they had taken, died with her mother and aunt. So, Cuélebre gave her a new name. He called her Libélula, Spanish for Dragonfly. He’d killed all the people who had tortured her for so long. And for a year after that, Cuélebre had taken care of his little Libélula. With a little help from his own daughter, Austen, who was about ten years older than her. Libélula had lost her mother all those years earlier, but she had finally been freed from that hell, and had her new father and an older sister.

Things had been better… for a year.

Of course she knew her new father and sister were criminals. But that had barely registered. What mattered was who they were to her. They saved her. They protected her. They helped her create new insect friends after the old ones had long-since perished in captivity. They were everything, the entire world to her.

Then they died. Both of them, her new father and her sister, were killed during, of all things, a Collision Point that had struck a town about thirty miles north of Detroit. Neither of them needed to go, but Libélula had convinced them to help. She convinced them to go and save people.

And what had happened? They were abandoned. Kasbah, who had taken over for Silversmith after the latter’s disappearance several years earlier, had used the several Fell-Touched who showed up to help as distractions in order to evacuate more of the affected neighborhood. He cut them off from aid and allowed the Abyssal to kill them. He left them to die after they went out of their way to go help. After… after she had convinced them to go.

Those Star-Touched allowed her new family to die, after having done nothing to save her from over half a decade of torture and experimentation. They abandoned her new dad and sister, just because they didn’t think anyone cared about them.

Well, they were about to find out just how wrong they were on that point.

It had been one month since that Collision Point, a month since the only people left in the world that she cared about had been abandoned to die. And Libélula had been busy in that time. She had explored new aspects of her power, stretching it far beyond what she had done with it before, even after a year of encouragement from Danilo (Cuélebre) and Austen. In the rage, grief, and loss of one family multiplied by the lingering, still-painful loss of another and years of torment, Libélula had stretched her power to its absolute limits and even beyond.

Now, it was time for these people to find out just what a mistake they had made. It was time for them to learn just how much Danilo and Austen had mattered.

Standing there in the rain, the twelve-year-old girl raised one hand to point off into the sky, while her other hand pointed in the opposite direction, toward the ground. Specifically, she was pointing toward an unassuming-looking garage next to a closed auto shop. With her arms outstretched like that, she looked up to the sky, allowing her hood to fall away so the heavy rain could pelt her face to wash away the endless tears. Her voice was soft and broken. “I’m sorry, Da-Danny.” She wasn’t stuttering, that was the name they had settled on for him. He wasn’t truly her dad, but he was her Da-Da, or Da-Danny. “I’m sorry, Austen. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I shouldn’t’ve asked you to go. I didn’t mean t--I didn’t think… I didn’t…” Her eyes closed, a heavy shudder escaping her that had nothing to do with the cold rain.

Pushing the grief away, she opened her eyes and glowered, anger filling those too-young eyes as she turned that sorrow into a scream that rocked the night air. And in that moment, she unleashed twin blasts of electricity from her hands. The first coursed up through the dark, rain-filled sky like a reverse lightning bolt, while the other struck the door of the garage. Both caught the attention of drivers on the street below, tires and brakes screeching as they came to abrupt halts and stared in confusion at the figure standing on that rooftop.

But they didn’t look at her for long. Not when far more pressing matters presented themselves. First in the form of a monstrous figure that seemed to form directly within the arc of electricity being shot into the sky. It started small, but grew to the size of a small van within seconds. By that point, the thing was recognizable as a hornet. An Asian Giant Hornet, to be exact, and that second word had never been more apt. Normally, the Asian Giant Hornets could already be up to two inches long, with a wingspan of three inches and a stinger about a fourth of an inch long itself, two point five times as long as an average worker bee stinger.

Between its usual size and more potent venom than a normal bee or wasp (including a neurotoxin that could shut down a human’s nervous system), they were already quite dangerous. And this one was quite suddenly so much worse. It had become even larger by that point, reaching the size of a bus before it finally stopped growing. A bus-sized, very dangerous, very angry hornet hovering in the air over the shocked civilians staring that way from their cars.

Or they would have been staring that way, had their attention not been snapped over toward the doors of that garage, which exploded outward as a very different insect came bursting through. At one point, this had been an Australian bulldog ant, with its distinctive reddish-brown thorax and legs, and black head and abdomen. Already the most dangerous ant on the planet with its aggression mixed with a nasty venom and the ability to jump after whatever had annoyed it, the one thing people could say was that at least it was small enough to step on.

There would be no stepping now. This ant had already grown to be almost as large as the hornet, as it barged through the garage and took in its surroundings.

Now people started panicking. The initial shock had given way to terror, as horns were blared, engines roared, and everyone tried to escape. Which shouldn’t have been that difficult. Yes, the hornet and the ant were both enormous, but there were only two of them. And it would have stayed that way, if not for those people who had tried so very hard to learn everything they could about Abyssals by tormenting and experimenting upon one little girl.

In their attempts to understand and find ways to combat those monsters, they had injected her with various types of experimental stimulants and other drugs. Whether directly due to that, or simply a natural progression of her powers in response to such terrifying stimuli, Libélula’s original abilities had… expanded in one very simple yet catastrophic way.

When she used her gift on insects that were intended to live as part of a colony… she was able to create the entire colony.

That fact was shown quite quickly, as the single hornet hovering in the air abruptly began to glow before splitting apart into two. Those two suddenly became four, then eight, then sixteen. Sixteen Asian Giant Hornets, each the size of a city bus.

The ants multiplied as well, quickly going from one to thirty-two as they spread out to take up most of the street. Cars that hadn’t already managed to escape were blocked in and trampled, the screams growing louder and more frantic.

Those sixteen giant giant hornets, meanwhile, immediately began to split up and fly around the city even as the multiplication continued. Soon, over a hundred of the massive flying hornets, and an equal-number of their ground-based ant companions, were combating the authorities and Star-Touched who showed up to deal with the situation. Unfortunately, whenever one insect was ‘killed’ it simply respawned out of one of its companions within seconds.

As one small, grieving and thoroughly traumatized young girl stood on the roof of a building directing her troops through the complete destruction of the city that had failed her so terribly, a glowing orb hovered a few feet behind her and observed. The orb had last seen (and been touched by) this child as an infant, when both had been drawn toward inspecting a particularly interesting bug at a playground. Now, the orb had come to this time to see what became of her. It saw no vindictive triumph, heard no gleeful cackling as the city was overrun by the still-multiplying giant insects.

What it saw was one small girl drop to her knees and bow her head away from the devastation, her tears continuing to fall with the rain and blood that swept across the city, apologizing to a father and sister she had inadvertently sent to their deaths, and to a mother and aunt who had been torn away from her so long ago.

Libélula thought she saw something out of the corner of her impressive peripheral vision. But when she turned, the orb was gone. Gone not only from this place, but from this time.

The orb went back, not to the moment it had given the child those powers, but earlier. It went back to a time just shortly after her birth. Her mother and aunt, the two who had been killed when the child was abducted. They needed their own powers, powers to allow them to defend themselves and to create a better environment for the child to be raised in.

Of course, this would also necessitate that the orb carefully manipulate events to ensure the child still ended up at that park to see the insect alongside its earlier-self, despite the change in circumstances. But that was okay.

As long as the girl known as Libélula in one timeline and Lightning Bug in another wasn’t crying anymore.

********

A Look At A Child Superhero Trying To Turn Villain Without Much Luck

Standing on top of a dumpster in an alley behind a bank, eleven-year-old Aspen Hawkins surveyed her troops. “Oak, Willow, Ash, Maple, Cherry, you guys ready?”

The other five members of the squad gave her an assortment of thumbs up. Aspen could see the nervousness in their expressions, and feel how anxious they all were. But they were ready, they could do this. It was time to show the world--or at least the city of Columbus, Ohio--what they were capable of. It was time to stop letting Mister Imens boss them around. It was his fault their parents put them up for adoption, the pressures he put on them to go to more and more Minority-sponsored events. They’d just wanted quiet lives, but it was impossible to blend in with society with Aspen and the others’... condition. Mister Imens made sure they were all super-famous, and their mom and dad didn’t like that level of scrutiny.

Their parents had already thought it was difficult enough raising a daughter who was a Multiple. That’s what they called it anyway, though the term ‘System’ had been thrown around as well. Aspen was the first, the daughter they were born with. But her parents had been so involved with their own lives and had left her by herself for so long even as an infant, Aspen had been lonely.

But not for long. First Oak and Ash had shown up, almost like imaginary friends. But they were more than that. They were her, other… other parts of her. It was hard to explain. They were Aspen, but they thought different thoughts than she did. She could have entire conversations with them, and then with Willow and Maple when they came into their shared mind as well. Cherry, the baby of the group, showed up almost a year later when Aspen was nine. It wasn’t magic, wasn’t the result of any superpower or anything like that. They were simply multiple personalities in a single body. Different aspects of the same person.

They had shared a singular body for another year like that, before the orb came. The orb seemed to want to talk to them, the way it hovered in front of them and danced while making those chiming sounds. Maple, the impulsive one, had made them touch the orb, which was when everything changed.

Now they all had separate bodies… usually. And for a year, they had been part of the Ohio Minority. Within six months, their parents had decided they’d had enough and put them up for adoption. That… that had been sad. They’d cried and tried to make their parents understand that they could stop being a superhero, but they didn’t listen. They didn’t… they didn’t want to be a part of their lives anymore. It was too much pressure.

So, they were left in the care of Mister Imens, who had immediately made them go to even more events, putting them in even more of a spotlight. His career was skyrocketing, and he didn’t care how unhappy it made them.

Well, no more. Today they were going to show how much they had changed. They were going to destroy their reputation and end their career in the Minority.

And they were going to do it by robbing a bank!

Hopping down off the dumpster, Aspen led the way while the rest of the squad followed. They were determined to make this work. No more being used by Mister Imens. After today, he wouldn’t be able to make them the face(s) of the local Minority anymore!

“After this, can we get ice cream?” Cherry piped up hopefully as they made their way through the alley.

“Hell yeah!” Ash, the only member of their group who felt completely comfortable cursing, put in. “I’ve got a hankering for fudge ripple.”

Willow, bringing up the rear, eagerly enthused, “I’m gonna eat so much ice cream I explode again! We’ve gotta go to Mallory’s!”

“Yeah, Mallory’s!” Maple agreed, bouncing up and down a little. “I’m gonna beat that jerk XFF’s Pac-Man score!”

“Technically,” Oak pointed out in that slow, deliberate way he had, “you don’t know that XFF is a jerk. They simply have a higher score than you do on an ancient arcade cabinet. And Mallory’s doesn’t have ice cream, they have custard. The two are very similar, but not quite the same. Really, when you get down to--”

“Game faces, everyone!” Aspen interrupted, not wanting to let everyone get distracted (or bored) by one of Oak’s lectures. “Let’s get this done!”

Together, the six of them marched all the way around to the front of the bank. Aspen jumped up on Oak’s shoulders to reach the handicapped button to make the door open, and then they went right through together.

As soon as they were in, Maple raised her voice. “Excuse me!”

It didn’t work. The voice was too quiet against the loud rumblings of various conversations. So, they all tried together, the six of them shouting, “Excuse us!”

That got some attention. The nearby security guard turned their way, his eyes immediately lighting up. As did those of the customers who heard. Word immediately began to spread, and soon every customer and teller was looking their way. And then it came.

“Ohhh my God, they’re here!”

“They’re so adorable!”

“I didn’t know there was a Minority appearance today!”

“I’ve never seen them in person, they’re even cuter than on TV!”

“Do you see how fluffy they are?! Do you see how fluffy they are?!”

Yes, they were fluffy. When Maple had touched that orb a year earlier, something quite dramatic had happened. Their body, the one they had shared, was…. gone. It disappeared entirely. But Aspen and the others weren’t left bodiless. Not… exactly. Instead, each of their minds had separated and manifested within a few of the toys within their bedroom.

Stuffed animals, to be exact.

Aspen herself had taken over a small blue stuffed rabbit, which wore a levi jacket, shorts, and a baseball cap that her floppy ears stuck up through. She was about a foot tall. Her individual Touched ability allowed her to stick to walls and ceilings, and she was very quick.

Oak was a turtle with glasses and a tweed suit. He stood about two feet in height, twice as tall as Aspen. His power allowed him to create forcefields.

Ash was a red plush dragon with wings. He could even fly, but was also the smallest of them at only ten inches at the shoulder, since he was usually on all fours. Besides flying, he could also breathe and manipulate fire.

Maple was a green monkey in a cowboy outfit complete with lasso. She was taller than Aspen but shorter than Oak at about a foot and a half. She could stretch, flatten, and reshape her body in incredible ways.

Willow was a penguin with a snowboard that could strap to her back or feet, which functioned as a hoverboard allowing her to fly around like Ash did. She could also make freezing cold wind as well as summon and manipulate snow.

Finally, there was Cherry, the youngest of the group. She was in the body of a small yellow duckling of appropriate size. Despite her diminutive form, she was the strong one, capable of lifting several hundred pounds in her tiny wings.

Even with their gifts, most would have said that sending the six of them out to do any superhero stuff was idiotic. But they had another gift: immortality. Whenever one of them was ‘killed,’ their body destroyed, it simply poofed out of existence with an explosion of fluff, and an identical body appeared. They could even will themselves into new (though still identical) bodies at any point if one was damaged.

Needless to say, they’d been pretty useful for the local heroes, especially when villains refused to take them seriously. Or, later on, when those same villains surrendered immediately rather than admit they were beaten up by a collective of foot-high stuffed animals.

But that was over now. They weren’t superheroes anymore. And it was time to show everyone that.

“Everybody put your hands up!” Maple ordered, demonstrating by raising her own monkey arms and extending them to several times their normal length.

“This is a robbery!” That was Cherry, the tiny duckling girl barging out in front of the others with that high-pitched announcement.

“We want all your money and valuables,” Oak the turtle chimed in, holding out a hand to create a large bowl-shaped forcefield in the middle of the room. “You can put them right there.”

Ash flew up and did a quick loop around the room, spraying a bit of fire and smoke. “Don’t make us get nasty!” he squeaked, sending another shower of sparks through the open space above the tellers.

Willow, meanwhile, flew off on her board and did a circuit in the other direction, sending a wide shower of snow over the faces of those staring at them. “Yeah! We’ve got places to go and more people to rob!”

Aspen took a running start, dashing from the entrance of the bank all the way to the central teller’s counter in an instant. She held both hands out, cupping them together. “Fork over the valuables, see?!” It was her best gangster voice. That should make a good impression.

For a moment, the elderly teller stared at her, mouth opening and shutting. Then, without warning, she suddenly reached out, grabbed Aspen, and pulled her into a tight hug. “Ohhhh that’s adorable! Can we get a photo with all of you, my grandson will just love it!”

All around the bank, other customers and employees were simply hugging or patting the other members of their troop (collectively they were known as the Cuddle Corps, a fact that really wasn’t helping their current endeavor). There was so much cooing and awwing that it was impossible to get a word in edgewise.

Oh well, they’d just have to play rough. Exchanging an assortment of looks and nods, all six living stuffed animals vanished from where they were, transforming into beams of light. Those lights shot into the middle of the bank lobby before merging together. Once it faded, a single, larger form was left behind. This gestalt figure was a combination of all six of them. The somewhat pudgy main body was a much larger version of Willow’s penguin form. They had a big shell on their back from Oak’s turtle body. Maple’s monkey had contributed long arms and a tail that stuck out from near the bottom of the shell. Their head came from Cherry’s duck. Aspen’s rabbit made up their legs and feet. Finally, Ash’s dragon wings were capable of extending from the sides of the shell and could lift them into the air. Altogether, they were about five feet tall in this form, the individual parts of their bodies growing when they were combined like this.

Unfortunately, shifting into this larger form only accomplished one thing. Now everyone wanted to hug them. A line immediately formed, photographs were taken, and customers and employees alike kept asking for autographs. They all thought this was some sort of publicity stunt. The bank manager even offered to help them set up new accounts.

This… villain thing might be harder than they thought. Maybe they needed to run away from home and try a new place, somewhere they weren’t quite so well known. Somewhere they could actually make up new lives for themselves, where Mister Imens couldn’t easily bring them back.

Somewhere… that was currently quarantined from the rest of the world.