Paragon to Pavement (Dispatch/City of Heroes)

PtP: Chapter 0

The connection stabilized with a sound that always managed to set her teeth on edge. That high-pitched, digital mosquito whine that ends in the same click every single time. After nearly a half-decade running the Torrance branch, she still doesn’t understand the need to stick with the retro design for all the computers. Seriously, this company’s been around since the 70s and they can update everything but the look of the hardware.

Not a single laptop in any office for some reason, either.

Not unless it was a personal one.

Makes no sense.

Regardless of whatever sense it made, the pixels scrambled for purchase before snapping into a picture so clear and HD it almost felt like an invasion of privacy.

And in front of her sat a man who made it clear the SDN didn’t care about privacy in the slightest in the first place. 

“Ms. Moore.”

Mandy Moore simply nodded back at her direct superior, the steel-jawed man with a suit as gray as his beard. “Director Roth.”

Director Mason “Iron Eye” Roth.

The first thing she had noticed about him, other than the eyes, was the way he sat. Most people slouch, they adjust, they shift when they settle into a chair. Even powered people like her don’t exactly find it as easy to stay perfectly still when in a chair unlike when you’re just standing.

Roth was different.

The man’s spine was so rigid, shoulders so squared to a mathematical edge, that he pretty much occupied the space like a tactical emplacement.

Like always, the man wasn’t looking at her image on the screen. If anything, he seemed to be locked and targeted onto the camera lens, through the fiber optics, down the cable line, and directly into the center of Mandy’s anxiety.

Or she could just be over-thinking it and he was just staring at her left eyelid.

Because, of course, it was twitching.

Stop it. Just a little twitch, a micro-spasm really.

Stop. Most people wouldn’t notice, probably. It. Unfortunately, most people weren’t the hyper-observant super-mind that was her boss.

Be professional. Be Blonde Blazer. 

Unfortunately, that wasn’t all that helpful right now, because Mandy Moore wasn’t the one worried about the Q3 projection for the villain rehab initiative. That was all Blonde Blazer.

There was no doubt in her mind that Roth knew, of course; the man was quite literally a superhuman spreadsheet of human error. The ex-Marine was all logistics and legalities, the exact kind of man who probably could count every bullet he’d ever fired in his sleep. Without him, the SDN would never have gotten off the ground as more than a local gig company in Chicago for broke heroes that couldn’t afford to keep the cape on.

Unlike the director, Mandy did have to adjust. 

For professionalism, if not comfort.

The blonde hair — thicker and heavier than her real hair — settled against her neck as her shoulders slid back, chin up, and a smile that said ‘I am a competent leader’; her fourth favorite smile.

The man stared back at her with gunmetal gray eyes sharp enough to watch a speedster vibrate  through a bank vault and tell you if they were favoring a pulled hamstring. “Report.”

No hello.

No “How are things, Mandy? How’s sunny Torrance?”

Not that she expected it, either. “Well, the Phoenix Program is tracking well within acceptable variance.” With a tap, she pulled up a spreadsheet on her side monitor, blue light washing out the gold in her costume. “The reintegration of C-Class villains into the Torrance Z-Team is… showing promise.”

Liar.
 

Liar, liar, cape on fire.

The truth is messy, as sticky as SlimeTime; honestly, Blazer was more sure than anything that half the Phoenix Program villains are just biding their time until they can go back to robbing jewelry stores, and the other half are just bored and like the dental plan.

“Stop selling, Blazer.”

Mandy’s mouth snapped shut.

He tapped a pen against the desk, slow and steady, in a perfect rhythm. “I saw the raw data.” 

Tap. Tap. Tap. Metronomic, even.

“You’re bleeding budget on this entire thing, and your ‘success story’ with Flambae?” The man’s pen tapped the file in front of him, not even glancing down at it. “He melted a parking meter yesterday. Because someone took his spot. At a Trader Joe’s.”

“A minor setback, Director.” She nodded slow, trying to push past the obvious fact that it wasn’t as minor as it seemed and it probably wouldn’t be the last time. “Clearly, we still have some work to do with the p-.”

“Theatrics.” Roth interrupted her, the man looking away with a curled lip, the closest he came to a yell.

“I’m…I’m sorry, Director?”

“Not you, Moore,” the man corrected, which was reassuring except for the fact that he clearly wasn’t done. “This entire industry is a circus at this point. Half of them barely more than costumed Kardashians.” Those gunmetal eyes leaned her way for a second. “Present company excluded, of course.”

Mandy carefully avoided looking down at her own costume as she nodded back. “Of course.”

Now, that was surprising.

Not the unintentional insult, no. It was just the very fact that lazer doubted she would have ever believed the man even knew what a Kardashian was before this very moment honestly. Even still, she couldn’t deny the man had a good point because she knew exactly who he was talking about.

The “viral vigilantes.” 

The SDN heroes who always made sure to have a camera ready during a job. Not to say that they still didn’t handle their work, but it was more than clear that their career came a firm second place to their clout. 

“That reminds me.”

Mandy blinked a pair of big blue eyes, mouth almost falling open. Nothing just reminded this man; she had a pretty good idea of how his power worked and those eyes came with a mind like a steel trap. 

“I need you to take another one.”

She couldn’t help but blink again. “Another what?”

“Another one of your negligent little ne’er do wells in Z-Team.” 

Another rehab case? Mandy set her jaw, entirely unsure how the Director thought this was a good idea. “Director, with Z-Team, we’re already… I mean, our caseload is at capacity. We still haven’t brought in any behavioral therapists that I’ve been reccomen-” Blonde Blazer shook her head, one hand coming to rest on her mask-covered forehead. “I mean… I don’t think Torrance can handle another villain right now.”

“Not a villain.”

A third blink doesn’t do much, but it gives her a second to think as her jaw snaps shut. “I’m sorry?”

Roth doesn’t reply, but the man doesn’t need to as a notification pinged up on her screen; a digital file passing through the SDN encrypted network.

LM-03687-SDN-5980.

LM. Liability Management was the official name for the Hero Intake department of the Superhero Dispatch Network. No matter how you wanted to put it, it couldn’t be denied that powered people, hero or villain, were inherently liabilities to a corporation.

Even still… no name?

 “June 2022,” Roth finally speaks up as Mandy raises her head. “Analysts said we had a minor dimensional displacement event above the city. More like a dimensional hiccup. The atmosphere burped, and it spit him out.”

Blonde Blazer nodded along even without having to open the file, not that it stopped her from doing so anyway. “The gas station incident in LA.”

She remembered that.

Phenomaman had handled it. Well… he’d cleaned it up.

Apparently, there wasn’t much left to handle.

Blazer stared at the scarred face of a young black man, hair almost entirely burned off in the image of his mugshot.

Sky.

No full name, nothing else.

Just ‘Sky’.

Another one of those, huh? The heroine clicked her tongue, expression tightening as she read down the list of what they knew about him.

“The state doesn’t know what to do with him,” Roth went on, voice hard and flat as a road made of cast-iron. “Especially since he leveled the whole lot of the Circle K when he crash landed and only made it worse he woke up swinging. Been in holding ever since.”

What? “A year in state holding? Without trial?” 

Blazer couldn’t help the frown on her face, none of that making sense to her. “Director, if he’s that dangerous, why isn’t he in the Vault? Or a federal black site?”

“Because he’s not dangerous anymore. Not really.” Roth stopped tapping the pen. “Spent his first four months in a prison hospital and woke up burnt out. Analysts say his power levels dropped by a good eighty percent the moment the distortion closed behind him.”

The director shook his head. “A walking liability but interestingly enough, less so than the normal crop of capes we hire since TikTok became a thing. Analysts say his combat data was consistent with high-level tactical training, even while largely insensate.”

Mandy’s eyes widened. “You’re saying he’s saying he’s a soldier.”

If she didn’t know any better, she could have sworn Roth was smiling at her. “I’m saying he’s a hero.”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

THREE DAYS LATER

It took her almost a full five minutes before Blonde Blazer realized she’d been staring, the cold blue of the cheap hanging TV staring right back at her as the KTLA anchor’s voice carried.

“… six LAPD officers hospitalized with an estimated twenty civilians injured in the final explosion…”

Cement walls and bolted-down plastic chairs enclosed her from all sides as she stood in the room, the smell of floor wax and stale air no different from another corrections lobby. 

Blue eyes stayed on the screen, drone footage replaying again; steel frames and welders balancing like birds on half-born scaffolding. The gas station’s footprint was still a rough wound, an ugly scar on the whole block, even one year out and nothing close to normal yet.

“That Circle K been around for the last two *** decades, man,” a man appeared on screen as the image shifted, the chyron beneath him identifying the balding figure as a ‘Local Businessman’.

“No evidence links the incident to known gangs, augment groups, or Red Ring activity…”

Of course not. If there had been, they’d have plastered the suspect’s face everywhere. But even then, there hadn’t exactly been a suspect—not one they had any proper images of, not till months later. Can’t exactly show a burn victim.

The door behind her buzzed as the electronic lock disengaged, Blazer turning around just in time to see a man step through. It took a good deal of effort not to raise an eyebrow at the sight of a short, stout man wearing a stiff suit and a stiffer frown, clipboard tucked under one arm, and sweating up a storm.

…it’s 11 AM. Blonde Blazer 

“Blonde Blazer.” The man cleared his throat like he was working on a jawbreaker. “The prisoner’s waiting.”

SoCal SuperMax was the kind of place that wasn’t designed to be broken out of. After all, it was the kind of place that liked to call itself a holding facility for “High-Risk Powered Threats.” It staked its reputation on it, after all.

Given that all its money went right to security, it made sense that there wasn’t much thrown at anything else. Like the air conditioning.

Blonde Blazer walked down the hall behind the warden, doing her best to keep her eyes off his massive bald spot. Yet, also, at the same time, trying her hardest to ignore the constant grinding industrial hum of the air conditioning.

Her boots—thigh-high, navy blue, and part of the ridiculous impractical superhero gear that came custom with her magical transformation—clacked against the linoleum, the boots themselves not adding much to her height that said transformation didn’t already give. 

A whole two inches.

It wasn’t much. Well…

Depending on who you asked, it wasn’t much, but in this situation, right now, it was enough that all she could see was the massive spot of scalp on the man in front of her as he “garrumphed” again.

Why is he shaped like a… A thumb. She was thinking it, as much as she didn’t want to admit it, but he was a thumb in a suit grunting and grumbling with every single sweaty step. Maybe he has, like, a gland thing or something. 

 “I’m just saying,” his hands went up, the man almost karate chopping the air as Mandy blinked as he realized he was actually talking now. “In my day, we didn’t do nonsense like this. We didn’t make deals. You blew up a gas station? You went away. Key thrown. Poof.” The warden scoffed, the man shaking his head with the sound. “I’ve seen the footage. Screaming. Attacking civilians. Almost set the damn block on fire.”

Mandy didn’t bother slowing down, her pace bringing her right even to the side of the man in charge of the SuperMax. “Warden, he was disoriented. From the reports, he thought he was in a combat zone.”

“He made it a combat zone!” Spittle flew from the man’s mouth, Blazer’s jaw pulling tight as she saw it hit the floor. “At least villains just steal or whatever. He’s a goddamn terrorist. Damn near a cop-killer, too.”

“He is not a terrorist.” Her voice is calm. Corporate. The voice of SDN. 

More than anything, it did a very very good job at hiding irritation or anger, something she had the pleasure of finding out pretty often. “The classification is ‘Dimensional Refugee.’ We have a legal distinction here.”

The man to her left scoffed again, wiping his big forehead with a handkerchief that’s clearly seen better days. “Refugee. Riiiight. Aliens, dimension hoppers… what is the world coming to? We used to have bank robbers. Honest crooks. Guys who wanted money. Now?” The warden clicked his tongue. “Now we got… whatever this is.”

The handkerchief flicked to his left, the man gesturing to the far end of the hall.

Blonde Blazer followed the direction of the soggy piece of cloth, her eyes landing on what looked like the door to a vault; at least four inches of steel on the outside separating it from the rest of the world.

“He’s in there. Good luck. He doesn’t talk much. Just stares, kid’s like a shark.”

Mandy lets her face work on autopilot, offering the stout corrections handler a smile he definitely doesn’t deserve. “Thank you, Warden. I’ll take it from here.”

He didn’t say anything, the man lingering as if…

Oh no. She almost shook her head. You don’t get to make my job harder.

“Thank you, Warden.” She tops it off with the look, the glare worthy of A-Class. The glance that stops just short of her eyes going full glow. The “I can throw a bus almost three football fields and you are annoying me” stare.
.

It only took a full two seconds before the man grumbled and turned around, soles clacking on the tile as he waddled down the hall.

 Mandy stares at his back, waiting for him to turn a corner, before she finally takes a breath to center herself. You are the Blonde Blazer. You are confident. You are reliable. You are not a fraud.

She steps closer and the door hisses with a release of air, slowly swinging open for her.