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Chapter 20
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Trash knuckle was on the edge of the neutralizing field when it had formed. By the time his flying powers had come back, the towering man was badly hurt from crashing into the side of Striga Isle and in need of medical help, regardless of his criminal background.
“You want to know why I hate heroes?” asked Trash Knuckle. Jeff only stood and listened with a straight face. “Your need to help people, regardless of where they come from or what they’ve done. It’s the fact that you could have let me die or take my injuries from that fall, but slipped a medport device on my body. Because of you, I was saved before the doctors realized I wasn’t you.”
Jeff said, “So what? You want me to beat the shit out of you now?”
“Tempting, tempting. No, hero, I owe you now. I hate owing people anything, least of all a do-gooder.”
“You’re a villain.”
“Which only means I play by my own rules. You should know that by now. Your heroic stench outlasts the time any current hero has spent being active. What were you before you were a hero? A soldier? A boy scout? Some pipsqueak that liked to go around picking up the trash? Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. My point is that I owe you a favor. You better find something soon, hero. I don’t want any punks to confuse my honor for patience or weakness.”
With another fit of coughed-up laughter, Trash Knuckle flew into the air.
“That’s just what I needed,” said Jeff.
Runes weren’t everything in magic. Far from it, but they did provide a level of convenience on par with flying or arcane portals. Warren especially loved flying around in his hero attire, and testing out new gadgets as long as he could carry them, whether the gadgets were heavier on the technical or scientific side of things, or were infused with magical runes.
However, right now he was in civilian clothing, albeit a little classier than he normally dressed in this sort of attire. Warren, a known magic user, opened a portal on the edge of his buddy’s yard, and passed the threshold.
He lost count of how many times he’d done this over the years, but Warren kicked himself yet again upon seeing that he was outside of a cemetery. The cemetery. Oh, he meant to come here. In the past five years he meant to actually go in there, but he never made it past the front gate after creating one excuse or another.
It was a secure cemetery located well beyond the limits of Paragon City. Grave robberies here were not a thing, unlike other cemeteries around the world, but the security sure was nice to have.
This cemetery was as much home to an old friend as any dead person could call home. So, of course Warren kicked himself. He was a brilliant scientist and magic user who often used his talents against villains, but it baffled him as to why he had never once entered since the service, and even back then never got close to the one grave.
“Excuse me,” said an older woman who rested her hand on Warren’s arm after she had approached from behind. She had seen him outside the cemetery a couple of times out of every year.
Warren nearly freaked out and flew away. His heart was already trying.
The older woman said, “I couldn’t help but notice you out here. Are you lost? Looking for someone?”
Meanwhile, Warren was seeing too much of his old friend in the woman. She had the same dark hair and eyes. They knew of one another, but never really spoke until now.
“What’s the point?” Warren tried to say gently. “Why do I come here thinking I’ll see her? It’s in the past; it’s done and gone.”
“It’s not the past if it’s in front of you,” she said. “It’s not the past if you don’t move forward.”
“Alright then, what would you have me do? Some things hurt more than we dare to imagine.”
“Walk with me. At least as far as my baby girl. Come, come.”
Mai wrapped her arm around his, and, despite her figure inching towards being frail, she led him with remarkable strength onto the cemetery grounds. Warren resisted a snarl with every step. The older woman was right. Lashing out at her was not going to help. But, then her familiarity became ever clearer the closer Warren got to her daughter’s grave. If he had felt any weaker at the knees when they were close enough, Warren would have collapsed.
Yet, somehow, she lent him the strength to go further.
Running away was no longer an option, and Warren gazed upon the stone sticking out of the ground. He was finally here; this was the grave he had avoided for five years. He read the imposed name to himself.
“Judy Tanimoto,” said Mary, “the youngest member of our supergroup. You might have heard of her under another name—Pixeletta.”
“Pixeletta,” Kyra echoed.
Of course she had heard of her. Hearing the name now lifted a fog that was the chaos of Kyra’s adolescence, during which time she remembered going to a different middle school from the young heroine. She recalled the supergroup that Pixeletta was a part of, but the media hardly talked about them as much as they did the one member. So this was them.
Mary said, “There have been other teenage heroes, of course, but very few as successful as she was without the aid of a youth group like META. To us she was like a little sister we all wanted, and to Paragon she was practically a celebrity. Even some of the criminals and villains loved her.”
“I vaguely remember hearing about her. About what happened, I mean,” Kyra said.
“She would be your age now. You both had electric powers, though hers were more offensive in combat, and you each had estranged parents under different circumstances. Yours got back together while hers only tried before her father did the unthinkable.”
“It must have hurt, for everyone.”
“Still does. The longer we dated, the more I saw of her even though you’re clearly two different people. I wasn’t sure I could go on like that.”
Kyra kissed Mary gently. “Then let’s make sure, damn sure, together. I doubt she’d want you giving up a good thing on her account. Call it intuition.”
“I’m so glad you never gave up on me.”
“Never give up on yourself, Mary. I'll never forgive you if you do.”
Warren found the strength to rest a hand on the grave marker, which read in its epitaph, “A sister to heroes everywhere.”
“I’ve been such a fool,” he said. “Five years of denial, thinking that she would be standing right there when I turned around. Mrs. Tanimoto, can you ever forgive me?”
Judy’s mother Mai said, “This may sound trite, but I have no right to forgive you. That lies in you alone. I have seen a few of the others who visit, and every one of them feels some amount of blame for what happened to her. It was nothing any of you did or didn’t do. If anything, you carry this weight around you when you’re off to save countless lives or change the world for the better. What you need to do is ask yourself how you can do the world any good carrying this great rock on your shoulders. What you need to do is ask how she would react if my baby girl saw you. You’re heroes; save her memory, not her tragedy.”
She cried again. She always cried when she thought about losing Judy and being on the other side of the country when it had happened. Warren saw this, and bowed a few inches to comfort her with a hug.
Mai said, “I’ll be fine. But, you,” she broke away and put her hands on Warren’s shoulders, “talk to her. Do it before you go. I’ll be right back.”
For the first time ever, Warren was alone with Judy’s grave. Talking to the dead sounded odd, even to Warren, but he was at least familiar with the idea. With a sigh and a heavy heart, he smiled and turned to the stone and sat cross-legged. He spent an innumerable amount of prolonged seconds, stretched beyond the imagination, trying to find something to say. Some way to break the awkward silence.
“Hello,” said Warren. “I’ve taken too long, I know. If you can hear me, all I want to say is, I miss having you there to tell me when I’m wrong, even when I know I’m not. I miss having you there to challenge me to use my science and magic to greater heights because of that wonder in your eyes. I miss trying to lecturing you on morals and ethics and realizing that I needed someone to say the same stupid things to me during half my experiments.
“Judy, thank you for being the only sister I had. Well, there’s Mary now, but you were the one and only back when it was us and David. I have to wonder what you’d make of her transformation. I can still hear your laugh and your cheer. We can all use it right about now. This new girl, Kyra, she’s similar in age and abilities, but she isn’t you. You’ll always have a place in our family, even the way things are. Yeah, I think that’s what we need, to be a family again.” Warren stood up with a start. “You’ve given me an idea. Maybe twenty. I have to go.”
He ran past Judy’s mother on the way out of the cemetery, saying “Thank you!” as he did so.
Mai Tanimoto merely smiled back at him, then returned to her daughter’s grave with lilies in hand.
Warren’s girlfriend dwelled “on the edge of everything.” He ran in, hurrying through a few pieces of equipment. Tawnya wouldn’t mind, she never did. Warren laughed like an excited schoolboy as he collected what he needed.
“Sorry I can’t stay,” he said aloud, hoping his girlfriend would hear him. “I’m inspired with nowhere to run but forward.”
He passed the chamber on his way out. There were four perfect androids that remained in suspended animation. Warren had nothing to do with how or why they were built, but plenty to do with why they slumbered. Only one truly interested him.
There was only one female among them. The plaque above her originally read “TOY SOLDIER MODEL 0107. CODENAME: TOYENNA,” but the name Tawnya had been written over it diagonally with a florescent blue marker.
Warren had many promises to keep, including one to himself that he would wake her without ending the world. But, he had a lot of work to do yet.
“I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.” He ran past the chamber to the exit.
Tatiana got intimately close to the mirror in her living room, and applied the last of her mascara as well as another bandage for her forehead. Damn civilian appearances.
Wyatt was on the couch—the television was on mute and set to a random channel neither of them watched—looking through a few DVDs.
“Are you sure you can’t stay home tonight?” he asked.
She responded, “I’m sorry, but my brother Cisco filled in for me, so I agreed to take his Saturday shift this week.”
“I really wanted to spend time with you. Especially after that fight you got in with Mary.”
“We both need time. You go ahead and enjoy the cheesiest 80’s action flick you can find. Make it a marathon and order a pizza if you like. You know I’ll be home late.”
“Maybe I’ll find something more suitable for our guests.”
"What guests?” asked Tatiana.
“The two coming up the driveway now. One of them feels really nervous, though I can’t exactly say why.” Wyatt’s wife sped off toward the front door, but he stayed where he was and muttered, “Because you’ve already figured it out.”
Tatiana opened the front door a split second before the bell rang. Then she saw her two visitors, and couldn’t decide if the bell bothered her more or if she simply didn’t want to see them right now.
Maryann and Kyra both stood there. The former raised a hand as if to wave, but it was pathetic and she felt the urge to run.
Instead, Mary said, “Uh, hi.”
