Chapter 11

A Wizard In Alexandria's Court

Chapter Eleven

by Skysaber

OoOoO

Story Day Eleven, April 16th 2011, Saturday - Mid Day

OoOoO

Trigger events were so traumatic that even law, slow to react to societal changes at the best of times, had been quick to recognize and codify into legal practices that new capes on the day of their trigger were legally insane and not responsible for all of the wild lashing out and other stuff they got up to as they vented whatever stresses had caused them to trigger.

To have done otherwise would have left the government practically no heroes, as everyone would have been a villain if they'd been charged for the crimes they'd committed when out of their minds from whatever conditions they'd been under.

Trigger events simply did not happen to happy, well-adjusted people who were having a relaxing evening out with friends while nothing was going wrong. Instead, they occurred on the worst day of your life, when you were at your lowest, most despairing point, feeling overwhelmed and unable to cope with anything. So it was now legally recognized, that a Trigger event was sufficient proof unto itself that whatever person had undergone one had been pushed to their limits until they snapped, and was thereby regarded as temporary insanity.

And the law soon took note of the fact that Second Triggers were even worse.

They were also, thankfully, quite rare.

OoOoO

The Tinker blade went snicker-snack and Lung's two arms went flying back, separating from the rest of him. He could literally feel his attacker's rage, a white-hot fire that made his own flames seem cold, and under that for once he was feeling not like a mighty dragon through his powers, but an insignificant lizard.

One being played with by a cat, at that.

Glory Girl, for her part, was discovering that Armsmaster's halberd was very fun.

It had lots of features. The one she was enjoying most right now was sort of a directional flash-bang grenade, a focused blast of light and sound calculated to disorient and temporarily blind ordinary humans.

This was so much fun because Lung, in his enlarged form, had heightened senses that could not be turned down. So a blast intended for ordinary human senses got multiplied by that extra sensitivity just like a person sensitive to, say pollen, had a major allergic reaction to it where as a normal human might suffer a minor bought of hay fever.

This was that, applied through Lung's eyes and ears directly to his brain.

It basically caused him to freeze up like a crashed computer, going all blue-screen for a while until his power rebuilt those sections of his brain that had crashed and burnt out. It was a stop button that would blow his mind completely, so she could get in some therapeutic whacking on him unresisted for a while.

It was even more fun than the super-taser setting that could almost reset Lung to his not-ramped-up form.

Dropping him from thousands of feet was also a lot of fun. This was easiest when he was dazed and not moving, or really, really small, like human-sized. But it was most rewarding when he was all large and ramped up.

The square-cubed law. "The Bigger They Are, They Harder They Fall" was not just a rumor, it was physics. She could get him to splash like a water balloon on the pavement if she got him real ramped up, all big and winged, then teased him to follow her up into the sky and cut both of his wings off.

Cutting off one wing was not nearly as fun, as that way he just spiralled down like a broken parachute. So she cut both off whenever possible - which was easy given the extreme sharpness of the vibrating blade on the halberd.

Assisted by a couple of her super-powered punches, Vicky could get Lung hitting the ground so hard even water acted like concrete, as even that could just not move out of the way fast enough to avoid the kinetic transfer of energy. She'd been practicing, and she could get Lung's blood and viscera splashing hundreds of feet into the air in some cases as he popped like the bag of blood and bile he was upon impact.

And yet still he regenerated.

But one thing Glory Girl had learned was that his regeneration was not instant. Oh, it was fast, recovering in mere seconds what would take even a salamander weeks to regrow.

What most people failed to realize was that, in combat, seconds were an eternity.

While he was without wings, he could splash on hitting pavement. While he was without arms, he could not hit anybody. When he was without legs he could not run away, and...

... Lung really wanted to run away from her just now.

She was not letting him.

New Wave policy was never to take a life if that could be avoided.

... wasn't it lucky, then, that Lung regenerated?

Oh, his punches (when he had arms) were very powerful. Glory Girl would have been in real trouble without her force field protecting her. But in systematically destroying Lung over and over again as she took out a pound of flesh (actually, by now it was probably several tons of Lung's flesh, taken a bit at a time) over him having killed her sister, Glory Girl had learned a great deal about the racist lizard, and in particular about his regeneration.

And she had learned that, just like a person on a budget could not buy everything they wanted all at once, his regeneration could only do so much at a time.

It was easiest for his power to recover when she just gave him a blunt impact. In the case of bruises, even broken bones, all of the original material was still present, even in substantially the right places. So his power just had minor corrections to perform to get all of the bits sorted out and working right again.

Cuts and gashes were harder for him, and it had taken her some time and experimenting bashing Lung around the city to work out why, because puncture wounds like bullets or having rebar shoved through his chest healed almost as quickly as the broken bones and bruises. But after much research where, purely for testing purposes, she had stabbed him again and again and again with her favorite halberd's point, she had discovered that it merely disrupted the arrangement of Lung's flesh. Once he was no longer impaled on the rebar, or construction girders, or train tracks, or had a utility pole shoved through him, or had the halberd shoved through his chest, things naturally setting back, much like the bruises, to where everything he had was still present, and in mostly the right places. So his power just had to fix some comparatively minor problems in order to set him right and get him to function again.

But there was that tiny little, added delay when Lung had to fix cuts and slashes. In the end, she had decided that was because there was missing blood he had to replace in those cases.

That had led to the next level of experimentation entirely, where she had deliberately removed something structural of his for the first time, and discovered the effect she had later codified in her mind as the budget thing. Shifting around bits of flesh already present to correct minor positioning and integrity issues? That was cheap, and Lung could do that fairly quickly. Replacing blood and closing gashes took him more time, as it was a little more costly in terms of mass and energy.

Regrowing limbs? Ah! That was expensive, and the delay it caused him was considerable.

Shifting a few cells around was nothing for his power, as fixing a bruise or break in a bone involved a few ounces of matter affected, at most. But replacing limbs that would weigh in at dozens of pounds on an ordinary human, but on him when he was ramped up weighed as much as some cars?

Well, his power could do it. But even fully ramped up it could only replace a couple of pounds per second. So it took him several minutes to fully regrow something that she had cut off, then discarded.

Also, and more importantly, if she cut off two limbs, they each regrew at only half the speed as when she'd cut off only one. And when she cut off four, the regeneration effect got divided among them so they each regrew at only one-quarter speed.

Proof that his power only had so much energy available to spend at a time was the more she forced him to regenerate, the slower he grew, and the weaker his flames were, as his power diverted more and more energy towards recovery.

Vicky had learned, through experimentation, that Lung's regeneration and growth power were really the same thing, or at least they drew on the same supply of mass and energy. So when he was wounded he regrew what was missing instead of added mass overall, and depending upon how critical the damage was, that also drew off some or all of the energy his power would otherwise be using to create fire.

Once discovered, this had to be tested over and over again to confirm the effect, whereupon it was also discovered that the best way to contain Lung, restrict his mobility, and cut off his fire, was simply to cut off all of his limbs.

The stray dogs and cats of the town were going to have a feast tonight, as Brockton Bay was literally littered with parts of Lung.

And those moments when he was regenerating provided golden opportunities for Vicky to experiment with the halberd, for which she did not have a manual, and whose various buttons and switches weren't labeled. Worse, was that they worked in combination, like a flute or other musical instrument, in that pressing any two buttons together produced a different note, or effect, that pushing either one did separately.

This was very efficient for Armsmaster, as that way he did not have to shift his grip much in order to achieve whatever function of the halberd he desired. But it also made the interface practically impossible for others to properly figure out - which was probably not, from Armsmaster's perspective anyway, a downside.

So there had been the time when she had sprayed bystanders with containment foam, or other bystanders with a thin wire mesh net (at least that time she had not hit the red button that electrified it, which she had later discovered on Lung that's what that did). But the worst time, the most dangerous, had been when she'd accidentally gassed everyone, including herself, with laughing gas.

That had given Lung a chance to get up and punch her once or twice, since he'd recovered from that faster than she did.

Probably due to his mass.

Once she'd discovered that combination of buttons, she'd had to experiment with it some more. This had led to her cutting off all of Lung's limbs to reduce his mass, and the laughing gas did, indeed, have a greater effect upon him in those cases.

There were parts of Brockton Bay that had enough blood and limbs scattered about them to look like a major war had been fought there. But those were not the good parts of town, and who cared anyway? This was Lung they were talking about! If he hadn't wanted to star in a major, big budget slasher movie he should NOT have started out by turning all of the high schools to glass!

Victoria Dallon was, herself, one of those blonde white girls that Lung's gang had spent much of the last week targeting, and she had not dealt well with being hunted while Lung's men kept destroying as many young girls' lives as they could.

She had been friends with others counted among that set.

Her FAMILY counted!

What was it Will Smith had told that big bug in the movie Men in Black? "Don't start nothin', won't BE nothin!" Yes, that's right. If Lung hadn't wanted to be treated like a frog in a blender, he should have had that same respect for the lives of other people.

Victoria Dallon was now honoring the memory of her sister by learning open heart surgery the old fashioned way - by slicing open Lung's chest and removing his heart, studying it for a couple of seconds, then casually throwing it away with a toss over her shoulder and repeating by cutting out his new heart.

She had quite a pile forming up behind her.

Idly curiosity had her pulling out his lungs as well. Those were in a separate pile. But once she'd thought about it, you've got to pull out the lungs of a villain named Lung. Like, you had to!

And she had learned another interesting aspect of his powers doing it.

It turned out that the more immediately life-threatening an injury was, the more of his power's budget got spent on it. So cut off a limb, no problem, no worries, it'll be back in a couple of minutes - unless you also cut his heart out. That took priority and all other tasks got put on hold to prioritize it.

So, regeneration held priority over growth or fire production, and heart and lungs got regenerated before arms and legs or anything else. This was handy, because Vicky was now keeping a photo journal starring Lung, as she re-enacted a bunch of those old, tasteless, "What do you call a man with no arms and no legs, that..." jokes.

What do you call a Lung with no arms and no legs who is lying in front of your door?

Matt.

What do you call a Lung with no arms and no legs who is floating in water?

Bob.

What do you call a Lung with no arms and no legs who is stuffed in a mailbox?

Bill.

What do you call a Lung with no arms and no legs who is stuffed in a coffee mug?

A Cup of Joe.

What do you call a Lung with no arms and no legs who is lying in a pile of leaves?

Russell.

What do you call the same Lung six months later?

Pete.

Vicky gave off reviewing her latest photo in the armless, legless Lung series to consider her weapon.

It was not good.

Damage had been accruing to the halberd during this time, through all of the hard use she'd put it through with repeatedly cutting through the tough and resistant Lung. Then, just as she cut off his arms and legs once more, it bent in half and failed in a shower of sparks.

This was bad.

Without its supremely sharp blade, Glory Girl was back down to punching, which she had already learned did not accomplish much. It was the form of damage from which he recovered fastest, and she particularly would miss the halberd's arc welding function, not like that had been particularly more effective than punching, but the noises Lung had made when she'd shoved that up his bottom and turned it on full bore had echoed throughout the entire city.

Vicky gave one more experimental slice with the halberd, only without its functions adding extra sharpness all this did was snap it in half under her strength, various gasses, fluids, and electrical arcs escaping, with small parts spilling out everywhere.

None of the extra functions from the buttons seemed to work anymore either.

Just as Vicky was contemplating what to do now that her favorite weapon had been destroyed, a steel saber sprouted from the ground before her and grew in an instant to full size like some odd blade of grass, handle towards her.

She was enough of a Brocktonite to know what that meant. Vicky looked around and found Kaiser, standing a safe distance off, countless Empire capes deployed around him but none of them actively fighting. He had been watching her, and instantly gave her a salute (the American kind, not the Nazi one - bastard probably knew ahead of time how that would offend her instead), and said, "We are here under truce, just planning to lend you a hand, and incidentally enjoying the show. It looked like you could use a new blade, that's all."

Vicky thought about that for a moment, before deciding that she was okay with it. "Yeah, Truce," she agreed, picking up the sword and beheading Lung with it in a single stroke, which also destroyed the blade. "This bastard's done more harm than anything short of an Endbringer, and he's got more kills to his credit than even Nilbog got by killing everyone in Ellisburg. I've got no problems with declaring a Truce to deal with him."

Kaiser rather obligingly grew her a new sword to replace the one she'd just destroyed beheading Lung.

Glory Girl smiled, pinning Lung to a wall and calling out, "Hey! You guys. What do you call a Lung with no arms and no legs who is hanging on the wall?"

Seeing their looks of confusion, she adopted a wicked grin and answered her own question. "Art!"

Hookwolf unexpectedly broke out into guffaws. Cricket shook with silent laughter, the rest of the Empire barely able to believe she'd said that.

Vicky grinned further, waving her new sword over the piles of arms and legs around her. "What do you call his arms and legs?"

She was stared at for a moment of horrified confusion by all and sundry.

Her grin grew even wider as she declared, "Pieces of Art!"

Hookwolf went from simple guffaws to a belly laugh as the other Empire capes looked on in horror.

Vicky slashed her newest sword across Lung's face, slamming it into his jaw, breaking it off and taking his teeth with it. Then she reached inside, and cut something off with the remnants of her now-broken sword. Turning to face them, she held it up and asked, "What if he also has no tongue?"

Othala just shook her head in helpless confusion. The rest of the Empire stood frozen.

"Tasteless Art!" Vicky declared proudly.

Hookwolf collapsed in helpless laughter. Cricket rocked and howled silently, clutching her gut.

Purity, hanging above them, at last said, "That was bad, and you should feel bad."

"Nope!" Vicky disagreed.

OoOoO

Some brave, and unfortunately stupid, civilians had been livestreaming Vicky's beatdown of Lung all across the town. It had become so popular the local news service started to carry it, then it went national.

The reason for this was very simple.

Lung had scared people.

He had frightened the entire country with his callous destruction of four high schools. The follow up of his gang's bomb attacks pushed that up to an entirely new level. It was national news.

So it was cathartic in the extreme to see him put down, humiliated, and treated very roughly.

Very simply, he had done what he had done in order to make himself seem more powerful, and unopposable. Letting him keep any of that added fear and reputation would have been letting him win. Seeing him beaten like a rented gong, made jokes of, and humiliated as his armless, legless carcass was beaten across town dispelled that terror of him.

He had lost that reputation he had done those horrible things to gain, and he could never go back to being that same scary, undefeated (or rarely defeated) monster.

Instead he was a laughingstock, a joke, and a bad one. Yet somehow him becoming a tasteless mockery of himself just added to the catharsis.

Quite frankly, the owner of the phone company providing Glory Girl service had made an executive decision and downloaded from her phone copies of all of that dreadful series of armless, legless jokes she had been reenacting, and gotten in touch with a major corporation that did silkscreening pictures onto T-shirts, who had leapt at the opportunity, and within hours truckloads of different colored T-shirts, in all different sizes, were going to be arriving at every retail outlet that shirt company either already had, or could arrange for on short notice, distribution contracts with.

It was very rare that any payback this visceral reached the public eye. The PRT and Protectorate both played things too clean, trying hard to look good for the cameras. They would never show something like this.

But sometimes people *needed* to know that they were being protected. Feeling safe required something deep in their hearts to believe they were being protected, and not just lackadaisically, but vigorously, that those who transgressed the law would regret it.

Something that soft, half-hearted slaps on the wrist far too often delivered by the justice system to criminals just did not do. In fact, it gave the opposite feeling, that criminals could do anything and get away with it.

An injustice of the size Lung had committed required a justice of the size Glory Girl was delivering in order to feel adequately paid back for.

The soul cries out for it, and will not be satisfied with less.

The problem with the American government was they no longer viewed the American people as free citizens, nor even as subjects under its crown. No, it had lost all respect and regard for them entirely, and even viewing its people as slaves would be a step up from where it felt its actual relationship to the American people stood - No matter how vile and nasty slavery was, back in the day a slave had value comparable to what a car had today, so only an idiot treated them destructively.

Not that there is, or ever was, a shortage of idiots.

For all its foul practices, and it was without a doubt a foul and evil practice, under slavery a slave had actual value. They could work, they could be resold. That value made them regarded more as an investment by their owners, who faced financial ruin if they mistreated them too badly. Just as a car salesman could not smash to bits every car that came under their control, slaves had to be treated within certain minimal limits or they lost their value.

So for all of its degradations and foulness, slavery had at least some limits.

The problem was the American government had fallen so far it viewed and treated its people as livestock.

They regarded us the same way a farmer does his flock, just like sheep or chickens, owed some protection from weather and hunger, but too dumb to understand the actual relationship, and the only advantage they gave the farmer was in selling them out to the various forces around the world that desired to consume them.

Those who considered themselves elites, brought up among other children of the wealthy political class, educated at private and exclusive schools, gaining Political Science degrees and jumping straight out of college into jobs in government, did not view themselves as the same as the rest of us. The problem was they grew estranged from normal people. For one thing, they'd never met any, only other elite snobs and the functionaries who served them.

They were out of touch with the real world because they'd never lived in it, only in their own elite, private institutions. So they could never understand the common folk, any more than the farmer really understands the minds of his chickens. They lived completely different lives, so why shouldn't they sell us out to the various lobbyists and monied interests? It's not like we understood what they were doing to us, or actually punished them any of those rare few times they did get caught.

So if they could do anything to us, and be protected by their own class of people so nothing bad could happen to them even if they did get caught, why shouldn't they sell out the rest of us to anyone who hands them a bag of money? What's the harm in it? Or so they saw it, anyway.

We've already considered why they don't think of themselves as part of us.

Naturally, the people, who had created government in the first place to protect them, grew dissatisfied with this lack of service, and being sold out to anyone who hands out a bag of cash to the already obscenely overpaid public 'servants' whose names and deeds could go down in history with infamy - that is, if they actually let anyone know who they were.

But regardless, having endured nameless ills and unbeatable crimes for so long, it was a relief that cannot easily be described to have one of those supposedly untouchable villains literally getting his face beaten in repeatedly on camera, streamed over live TV.

So people printed the shirts, and people bought them, too.

OoOoO

The party at Fairhaven was roaring and going on full-bore, until someone at one of the television screens shouted, "Hey! Everyone! Director Poo-get's been shot!"

There was the briefest pause while people processed that, decided that nothing important had been shouted, then got back to partying.

Though one person did shout, "Who cares?"

But a few people near the TV did look up and start paying attention, saw that Director Piggot was still standing there in her news conference, while most everybody near her had hit the dirt and were now getting up again, and wondered what they'd missed.

Upon investigating they found this was one of those TVs that recorded as it played, and so could rewind. On rewinding and playing back, they saw that during some relatively unimportant announcement of some kind, a turd had suddenly appeared in the air in front of Poo-get's face, and her collar had suddenly shot out, with the speed of a vehicle's airbag and the sound of a gunshot, extending a flexible framework supporting a plastic bag under the turd and caught it.

Then, obviously thinking it through, realizing she was on live TV and needed to explain it, Poo-get announced to the audience, "That little event was due to the infantile shenanigans of the nefarious delinquent we have codenamed the Fecophiliac Fraudster. You can rest assured we will catch and punish the [insert several insults here]."

Then she got back to her boring announcement.

Jared looked at the television and frowned. Well, that wouldn't do. How could he thoroughly tease and mock the PRT leadership if they tried to grab control and forced everything their way?

No, that simply would not do at all.

Then someone else shouted, "Hey! Everyone! They are coming out with T-shirts made out of the photos Glory Girl made!"

And for a short time, everything to do with the PRT got forgotten.

OoOoO

They were on the baseball diamond at Brockton Field.

Menja was pitching. Fenja was catching. Both were at their full-size, thirty feet or so, and wearing appropriately sized baseball gear for their positions over or sometimes incorporated into the rest of their costumes.

Vicky was batter, wielding a giant, thirty foot sword that Kaiser had made for her. He kept having to make new ones for her, but that was alright.

They were playing ball with Lung's head.

After decapitating him the first time, Glory Girl had discovered another aspect to Lung's power. Apparently, it originated in Lung's head, because when she'd cut that off all of his other bits and pieces stopped regenerating. Even his chest had stopped regrowing his heart and lungs - which had previously been his power's highest priority. Everything else got abandoned by Lung's power in favor of trying to regrow it all from his head, starting from his neck stump.

This had been very interesting.

Cutting off Lung's arms and legs had delayed him nicely. But it was even better once that regeneration had to sink all of its energy into first building Lung a new body before it could even consider new arms or legs.

Forget wings, a tail, or any of that. He did not have the time.

By now Lung was nicely ramped up, which meant that his neck (when he had one) was nice and long, all sinewy and snakelike - which made it very easy to cut. The neck on a human sized and proportioned person was a small and awkward target, very difficult to strike. With his serpentine neck being something like eight feet long when they let it grow that far? It was difficult to miss.

Menja threw Lung's head in a blistering fastball. Vicky swung and missed, the head slapping into Fenja's oversize catcher's mitt. The giantess catching paused a moment, using an oversized axe to chop off the horns that had formed, along with the neck, snout, lower jaw and teeth of Lung. Then she tossed those onto the pile with the rest of the pieces and gave the newly trimmed head a toss up and catch before tossing it back to the pitcher in a nice, soft underhand.

Menja caught it and ground Lung's face into her glove, getting a nice grip on it as she wound up for another pitch.

It would have been very difficult to play batter between them, except that Vicky was able to fly at an appropriate height. Glory Girl had two strikes against her now, yet a gleam appeared in her eyes and she shifted her grip on the sword.

Another blistering fastball came in, literally screaming (except for the fact that, you know, Lung had no lungs to scream with), and Vicky swung with the flat of her blade this time instead of the edge. Cutting his head in half was fun, and all, but her competitive instinct would not allow her another strike, not against the Empire!

So she swung with the flat side of the sword, which had a much larger striking surface, smacking Lung upside the head with enough force to splatter a lesser man. He still left all of his teeth behind as he went rocketing towards the fences.

Vicky quickly flew around the diamond, tagging the bases. When she got back to home plate she raised an arm to shield her eyes and look at the still-rising head of Lung.

Smiling, she called out, "Hey! Everyone! What do you call a Lung with no arms and no legs flying over the fence of a ballpark?"

There came a horrible, ghastly silence over the field.

"Homer!" Vicky called.

And America laughed with her.

OoOoO

"You ready for this?" Jared asked Taylor. They were both in full costumes, complete with giant, powdered wigs and feathered face masks over a frankly ridiculous amount of makeup.

It did feel a little freakish, but now that she'd had a download of acting skill, Taylor could recognize the ridiculous parts of her costume for what they were - armor.

Jared had even explained it when they'd first applied them, her first time out in costume, oh, nearly a week ago now; only she hadn't gotten it back then. Now she did, and it was simple. Basically, the funky and weird parts of her costume did what she had long sought from the baggy clothes she'd worn to school - they hid her, the real Taylor underneath.

Only unlike her baggy costume, where she always got recognized, this new costume did so effectively. It was not invisibility, nor was it supposed to be. The fact that *a* person was present where she stood was undeniable. However, there was no practical method to determine who that person was.

Taylor Hebert was safe, cocooned deep inside this shell where she could be anyone.

That was liberating.

She was protected, not bound by any of the limits the Bitch Trio had tried to layer on Taylor Hebert. So she could go out and be whoever she wanted to be.

She chose to be a heroine.

No, more than that, in moments she would be a symbol of hope and triumph for Brockton Bay.

She could hardly wait.

Taylor lunged up on tiptoes and gave Jared a kiss on the lips. "I'm ready," she said breathily, excited and thrilled for a dozen reasons, only some of which she could pin down.

Seeing her eyes shine, Jared smiled, feeling warm inside. He leaned forward and gave her a more lasting kiss on her lips. "I'm more proud of you than I can say," he whispered once he broke the kiss, then quickly fixed their makeup with a wave on an already-active Prestidigitation.

"Ready on Three," Lisa said over their headsets. "Two, One, Mark!"

Jared, now immersed in the persona of the cape Cyrano, with Taylor as Roxanne in his arms, teleported them both in mid-dance step from out of the back of their team van and into the halls of Arcadia High School...

... and into a moment worthy of a Disney film.

Delay Spell was normally quite a useless bit of metamagic, not worth getting at all. However, it had certain use as stage magic to prepare the scene, dropping a whole bunch of effects all at once, at the precise moment the dancing duo appeared.

The pair of costumed capes appeared in mid-spin, dancing with an ease and elegance that made it look effortless. And, thanks to Delay Spell, lights, music and other effects popping in simultaneously all around them.

Music was simple. There were half a dozen illusions that could grant them 90 decibels, should they want it. Lisa had chosen the playlist, and would be acting as DJ while she controlled the cameras.

The lights were special, as Arcadia was closed now and sealed off by police tape, pending an investigation that would probably never happen. So Jared had conjured via Dancing Lights a dozen lanterns in many shifting colors, which slowly circled around the dancing pair.

Prestidigitation gave them gently drifting clouds of multicolored confetti sprinkling down over the scene, intermixed with colored streamers and sparkles. All of which would vanish at the end of an hour; but as far as Jared was concerned that was a benefit, as it assisted cleanup and limited the amount of evidence the PRT would have to pour over.

All of which Lisa was carefully monitoring over cameras, and broadcasting live over public TV.

Very few of the cameras they had used in the Undersiders' Last Stand against Lung had been destroyed in the fighting that night. Jared had used his homunculi to gather them up afterwards, just on the general principles of: never leave more evidence lying around than you have to, and what was useful once could be useful again.

Proving that second point, here they were just as useful as in that fight back more than a week ago.

His homunculi had gone about invisibly placing them around Arcadia High School, both inside and out, at strategic locations chosen mostly by Lisa, who'd consulted maps while leaning heavily into their recent download of skills as visual artists. The cameras themselves were under a nifty little spell called Object Invisibility, which was permanent until the object was used to physically attack someone - something he had no intention of doing with a camera. So there was no risk of the cameras catching each other in their shots.

A fact which greatly simplified filming.

Lisa controlled pan, zoom and tilt on all of the cameras, so was able to get a very good close up, one second into broadcasting, as Jared-in-costume as Cyrano brushed up against one of the glass students, a male basketball player frozen in mid-stride while walking down the hall, and that boy came back to life mid-step.

The boy dropped his ball and goggled, staring in a growing panic around at the other students - all glass, until Cyrano brushed up against a second one mid-dance and that one, a short, fat girl, also resumed life among the living, restored from glass to her previous state.

That was enough for the basketball player to get a clue, and thanks to the male protective instinct he instantly started trying to calm the girl down, which worked just well enough that she caught the next person being released from her glass state, a student newspaper type, and from that gained her own clue as to what was going on.

Cyrano and Roxanne studiously ignored what was going on around them, carefully pretending not to notice the steadily growing crowd that had begun to follow them as they went down the hall, clearing it of statues and leaving living people behind.

They came to the first classroom door and Cyrano swept Roxanne inside, guiding her through long, flowing motions up and down each seating isle, getting all of the students on each side, up and down, back and forth, until that classroom was filled with living people once again.

Then it was out into the hall and on to the next classroom, carefully ignoring all of the calls, requests and demands for information coming from those they had restored, as if they could not hear them, and dancing around those who made themselves obstacles where it became necessary.

Their idea was not to interact with anybody, as it would be hours or days of explanation before any one of the victims was satisfied things had been explained properly - a series of explanations that would have to be made again to each new victim in turn, a near infinite waste of time.

Acting under strict time constraints, as they were, Skysaber's Sirens had decided not to explain anything to anybody, and thus spend all of the time available restoring the most people possible.

They'd let their parents explain what had happened to them.

Cyrano tagged a teacher as they danced by, restoring the man before sweeping in another swooping twirl into, and then through, his classroom, leaving the man gaping at them while nerveless fingers spilled his cup of coffee upon the ground.

Cyrano gave his partner a lift and toss across the forming puddle and they went on their way, Roxanne beaming back upon him.

She was having the time of the life.

She was also their eyes and ears. Whatever their cameras did not cover, she was aware of, which was vital for their escape plan.

Cyrano was their payload. Jared had applied sufficient tweaks to an Alter Self spell in order to become a very specific monstrous humanoid called a Maedar - the male form of the much more common and better known monster: the Medusae. But instead of her petrifying gaze and snake tentacles for hair, a Maedar was bald (something concealed by his current wig), and had a touch that reversed petrification.

A Maedar's usual gig was to smash apart the statues that his mate petrified, then restore them from stone to flesh, thus feeding both himself and his mate upon the chunks of meat.

But it was also Jared's current work-around for the problem of how to depetrify thousands of students and high school staff. As the regular option was a Stone to Flesh spell, which was currently far outside of his reach, at his level of mastery. So much so that not even via ritual in a church with an artifact present could he cast it.

So he became a creature that could do it instead.

It did not hurt that it was one that, thankfully, would be undetectable as nonhuman under his costume, either, as dozens of students had started filming them on their cellphones while they danced through and restored crowds from glass to normal. There were also countless other phone conversations going on, many tearful reunions as children called to parents who'd been told they'd never see those same children alive again.

In some notable cases the children called their parents who were just returning from having attended that child's funeral. After the first few got rejected as prank calls, other students advised their peers to tell their grieving parents to tune into a particular channel number on the TV and *see* the miracle as other kids kept being recovered all of the time.

An almost forgotten feeling of joy, relief and gladness began to replace some of the misery of Brockton Bay; and Taylor, under her makeup, reveled in every moment of it, seeming to absorb the feeling directly through the pores of her covered skin.

But all good things must come to an end, and they tend to die quicker in Brockton Bay. The pair of capes had completed their tour of about one-quarter of the school when Roxanne squeezed his arm in a particular and unmistakable way, that would nonetheless be undetectable to anyone watching, and their eyes met, knowing their time of dancing there was almost over.

Less than one minute later, boots pounding upon staircases presaged the PRT's arrival Taylor had detected four blocks away. Hundreds of cameras watching, the dancing pair still pretended not to hear as they moved on towards the next classroom to be cured, when the door to the stairwell burst open revealing a score of PRT troopers with leveled weapons and shouting.

"FREEZE!"

But the pair were gone, having vanished mid-step amidst a cloud of sparkles.

Calls from outraged parents overwhelmed all PRT phone lines within moments, starting with all of those who did NOT get their children back, thanks to the PRT's intervention.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

I fear many of the reviewers are forgetting what genre this is posted under. I am doing my best to write a comedy here, not a drama. Spending lots of time emoting over trauma is not comedy, and certainly going out of my way to assume blame for enemy actions I in no way encouraged or supported, but in fact opposed, is not funny.

That is Dark Drama, which is the opposite of comedy.

I am not interested in debating the details of each individual situation where we might have been more dramatic. If you want a more dramatic story, feel free to go write one. Your keyboard lies before you.

What I am attempting here is comedy.

And thanks to the reviews that have indicated that at least some times to some degree, I have succeeded.

It has been said that the art of comedy is lost. A couple of professional comedians were recently involved in a discussion where it got asked "What was the last really good comedy movie?" and found they could not answer, at least at first. It used to be you could just snap them off. You knew what they were. Every year, several times a year, Hollywood would churn out some good to decent comedies, with some portion being exceptional and memorable. There used to be entire categories of celebrities who did very little but star in comedies - and that field produced enough it was able to support them entirely on its own.

Going back to the original question - What was the last huge (grownup) comedy movie everyone had to see? - they came up with the answer: The Hangover all the way back in 2009, 13 whole years ago.

I note this was *their* pick. I, personally, had never heard of it. Which shows how "everybody had to see it" it was. When I think of comedies, I think of Splash, and Joe vs the Volcano, and things like that. I can't even come up with a title made since 2000.

It's like people as a whole have lost their sense of humor. They do not write comedies, and when they do see one they have forgotten how to laugh.

Or maybe they have not forgotten how to laugh. Perhaps they are afraid to. They keep acting like they are scared, like they are waiting for the Fun Police to emerge from hiding and scold them if they react to anything funny.

And if so that would be the saddest thing of all.

Beta work by Dogbertcarroll