A California University
Act One, Scene Two
Catherine stared into the rain and tried to pretend it wasn’t a metaphor. It would have been easier if thunder had rolled like the dice of God; it would have been easier if lightning had flashed across the sky like Helen’s warwing, but instead the rain just poured down more and more, harder and harder, until it seemed a vertical ocean that would drown anyone who dared venture out of the safety of the bus stop.
She checked her watch again. Her bodyguard wasn’t here, the student at the other end of the bus stop was smiling at her. She didn’t know him - she mostly tried not to know people, it saved on explanations - but this time when he smiled at her she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t seen. Brownish skin, dark hair, a sort of vague mixed ethnicity that could be from anywhere or everywhere.
“Barry,” he said. “We were in EuroCiv together.”
“Catherine,” she said, pronouncing it with three syllables. “Like ‘the Great’. Where are you going?”
“Headed to the airport,” he said. “Waiting for the bus. You?”
“My driver’s on the way. Heading home.”
“So, where’s home for you?” he asked cheerfully.
“Novapest,” she said, with the slow, heavy voice of someone who knows - knows - that she is going to be the victim of one of approximately two stock lines that the speaker thinks are brilliant and that she has heard a thousand times. A mental coin was flipped.
“The place with all the supervillains?”
Tails. “Yes.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Why? It isn’t as though I mind.”
He looked at her oddly. Her face was stone. “It’s not safe -”
“The war’s over,” she said tiredly. (No need to keep secrets now.) “Dad won.” And then he had Helen killed.
He opened his mouth, listened, considered, said, “I should go,” and left to take his chances with the weather. A few moments later there came the sound of a car arriving at the bus stop. It wasn’t the shuttle-bus, huge and heavy with a dozen wheels, and it wasn’t her bodyguard’s car, which was made of aluminum and plexiglass and ran grave-silent. There was an optimistic interpretation in which the person driving up to her in one of her few moments alone was here for an innocent purpose, but -
- Catherine Balog twitched her hand and a pen slipped down from her sleeve. A twist of its head and it extended. When you’re the Tyrant’s daughter you pick up some assumptions about innocence.
The car doors swinging open were audible through the storm. When the men became visible they were all middle-aged, all wearing ordinary black clothes, black hair, in some cases dyed, and -
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
Wearing black sunglasses? In a rainstorm? You’ve got to be kidding me.
The first one walked into the bus stop as though it were a perfectly normal thing for a soldier in a suit to drive up to a bus stop, get out of the car, and walk up to a college student. She stabbed him in the chest with the electric pen; the charge was released and he screamed loudly enough to draw the attention of every superhero in a ten-block radius before collapsing.
Ah, a situation she’d trained for. The other electric pen dropped into her left hand; a twist and she was doubly armed.
Two more moved for her together, illuminated by flashes of lightning as they approached her. They were almost identical to the first man she’d dropped; purposeful, fast, professional. Equally plain. Rent two, get one free!
They were only armed with batons, and Catherine smiled. She’d had to put up with people asking her why she wore rubber-soled boots for months. The two moving directly towards her splashed through a puddle, and she tossed the right-hand pen into it, switched the left over. Three down.
If it had just been three she could have handled it. There were another three behind them, slower to arrive, and she ducked the first blow - brought the electric pen up to deflect the second coming up from the side - and the third slugged her with the baton, straight in the gut.
Even with her special shirt it hurt. Her head swimming, gasping for breath, she wished she had superpowers, or at least that someone who did was around, as one of the remaining ones punched her. Aimed for the neck and she turned and caught it on the shoulder -
A sonic boom shattered the air. “Back away from the girl!” The man was young and his voice carried behind the sound of his jetpack. A costume she’d seen in pictures, not reality; a flight harness - lightly armored - with a fins-and-lights-covered jetpack, goggles and spandex covering his face, a light cannon (sleek and oval) on the left hand and a dozen smaller nozzles on his right, with a dozen other gadgets clipped to his belt. Smithson the second, third in the family line, and if he had no public powers everyone knew his father had made his gear.
He raised the cannon hand and opened fire, the shells bursting into bolas as they left the barrel. The first one wrapped around one of the rent-a-thugs, the second collided with the back of the bus stop, and the third managed to hit a lamppost.
Two left. One hesitated and the other flat-out ran, and the first followed. Back to their car, Catherine thought, gasping for breath -
- And then they stopped, because their car was missing.
Look both ways, she thought, almost cheering despite her desperate need to gasp for air as her bodyguard’s car rode over, and possibly through, the second-to-last thug. Out of the front door leaped a whirlwind of blades, and the last of them went down in a spray of blood.
“Princess? Are you unhurt?” The face was eternally-young and smiling and only visible through a translucent mesh beneath a metal coif; the hair and chainmail and swords were silver, and not an inch of his skin was exposed from head to toe. She twitched her head towards Smithson.
“Elgolian?”
He smiled a shark’s smile, and the blood soaked into his armor, quickly fading. He was energetic, twitchy, cheerful as always.
“Don’t hurt him.”
He nodded, once, but kept his right-hand sword pointed at Smithson, who, hovering on his jetpack’s plume, turned to look at Catherine. Her hand twitched, and then she walked towards him slowly, raising her empty hands. “There’s no reason to fight. Elgolian was just picking me up.”
Smithson looked at her, face impassive behind his mask. “The police are still going to want to ask you some questions.”
“No doubt they speak of the soldiers I so well slew,” Elgolian said. He licked his lips, and Smithson turned back to him.
Catherine’s hand twitched again, and she lightly tapped Smithson on the back with an electric pen.
The thunder sounded like divine laughter as she ran past the spasming superhero. “Drive, Elgolian!”
He spun into the driver’s seat half a second before she reached the car, and she threw herself into the back seat. “Your Highness, we do have diplomatic immunity.”
“I don’t want to cause Dad diplomatic problems.” She smiled softly to herself. “Besides, we’d miss our flight.”
He saluted with his left hand, steering with his right as the acceleration pushed them both back.
“And anyway,” she added, “he’ll live. They don’t have that much of a charge.”
“And why should your Highness care?”
The only response was the rain on the car’s roof.