Likely to Reoffend (Patreon)

Two years, four months, and six days after having first set foot in the Saint Dymphna’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane, I was unceremoniously shoved back out onto the cracked pavement outside with a release certificate, thirty bucks, and no shoes. 

All told, it was sort of like the first five minutes of Ocean’s Eleven only I was wearing prison scrubs and I had no plan.

It was October, but beyond that I didn’t know much else about what had been going on in the outside world. I’d spent most of the second half of my incarceration in solitary confinement. Dymphna’s might have had ‘hospital’ written on the building, but in reality it was a privately-run prison.

Dymphna’s was located in one of the seedier districts of Megapolis –although honestly I wasn’t sure which one. There’d been a big move about halfway through my sentence. The prisoners had been relocated in security transports without windows so no one really knew where we’d been moved to aside from ‘somewhere vaguely urban’ going by the occasional street noise from outside. Before that, Dymphna’s had been a cushy minimum security facility with big green lawns and a lot of talk therapy. Afterwards, there was less therapy and more illegal drug trials. 

I could sort of see a few towering spires of the industrial sector off in the distance to the east belching smoke and occasionally fire into the reddening sky. That meant I was somewhere around Greenfield or the Cuts. Neither was a good place to be after dark.

I picked a direction and started walking. Eventually something would look familiar and maybe then I’d come up with a plan. So far I hadn’t felt much inspiration. I hadn’t felt anything really since I’d been entered into that last series of shots, no matter what happened to me. The orderlies had given me a different shot before they needed me up and moving for whatever, but it had been a long time since I’d gotten one.

Two blocks later and I still didn’t have any good ideas, but I did have a tail.

A nondescript sedan had started following me at a discreet distance. It could’ve been a cop or an old enemy or someone trolling for a hooker. I wasn’t interested in finding out which so I veered off the sidewalk and into the labyrinthine network of alleys that connected the buildings in the big city blocks. In a better part of town these would be full of little patios, mom-and-pop shops, and casual evening get togethers. Here it was a dark and dirty warren and entering it was probably more dangerous than sticking around to see what the car wanted.

Unfortunately, I heard the squeak of tires and a car door slam behind me. I should have been concerned, but picking my way through a field of broken glass was taking up all the focus I could muster.

My tail didn’t rush me, but they did maintain a following distance. They weren’t being at all subtle about it. Either they knew about the state I was in or they were waiting for something.  

I kept going, but my reserves of motivation were flagging. I couldn’t remember why I’d started walking and just wanted to lay down somewhere, anywhere until I felt better. I didn’t do that yet because of the person behind me, but it was getting hard to remember why that was a problem. 

I was tired and I was sure I’d cared about my own safety once, but I couldn’t remember when or why. 

My feet began to drag. Even my body was disinclined to keep this up forever. What was I even doing?

I slowed to a stop and slumped against a grimy wall. My knees folded under me and I slid down into a half-slump. The inside of my head felt like a heart monitor as its patient flat-lined. 

The footsteps behind me picked up, but something else flickered overhead. 

A caped figure landed on the pavement between me and the person following me. I recognized the silhouette of her tattered cape and broad-brimmed hat. It was Witch, one of the few independent Supers in Megapolis. She’d participate in teamwork every so often, but generally she did her own thing. The super towers had all tried recruiting her at some point, but it never panned out. 

“Walk away,” she told my follower. “Or I break both your legs.”

I was in an even shittier part of town than I’d realized. Witch hunted the slums and undercity. I’d clashed with her a couple of times early on in my career before I’d been able to move into a richer territory, but not in a serious way. Witch didn’t really give a shit about villains who didn’t prey on the poor and I never did like to punch down. They didn’t have anything to take anyway.

My follower left at a run and Witch turned her attention to me. Up close, I realized her costume under that distinctive cloak and hat was just a set of black BDUs with a heavy belt and harness. 

“What do we have here?” she murmured and pushed my hair back from my face. Her expression flickered, although I had no sense of what it might be under all the urban camo face paint. “Starling?”

She knew my street name. That was… that was probably bad.

Witch peeled my eyelids back, checking my pupils. She picked up one of my hands and then dropped it. She did it again, letting it hit my face. I blinked once or twice, but couldn’t find the wherewithal to do anything else. 

That was probably even worse than being on Witch’s radar.

Witch produced a small radio from her harness and held it up to her mouth. “Hey, guys. I might have an escapee from Dymphna’s on my hands.”

The radio hissed and the Road Ranger’s gravelly voice emerged from it. “Dump ‘em back at the hospital. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“Not sure we do.” Witch had been gently patting me down as she spoke and had just turned up my release paperwork, which I’d crumpled up and stuck in a pocket at some point during my short walk. She smoothed it out with more care than I would have and hissed as she read it. “It’s Starling and she’s nearly catatonic. She’s got official release paperwork too. Looks like they kicked her out the back door.”

Ranger’s only reply was incensed swearing. The connection cut and another voice I knew interjected. 

“Get her to the rooftops,” Paragon ordered. “We’ll home in on your tracker. This is probably what has Chessmaster so agitated. He was trying to distract us from her release. Be careful, he’s sure to have had eyes on her since she stepped outside.”

“With no fucking shoes on. There’s glass in her soles,” Witch muttered, having just noticed. “Why are we still endorsing that place again?”

“Witch, please. We can’t have this argument again.” Paragon’s voice sounded pained, but it was the embarrassed pain of someone who was forced to argue a corner they didn’t like. 

“We never had it in the first place. You keep telling me I’m making a scene and get out of actually talking about it,” Witch growled right back, but she was working and talking at the same time, putting me into a very careful fireman’s carry. “That’s going to change once we’re back at base and you aren’t going to weasel out of it this time or else I walk.”

“Fine,” Paragon sighed. “Get Starling off the ground before Chessmaster finds you.”

Witch wasn’t one of the powered Supers. She used a grappling hook to get us up the side of the convenience store I’d picked to wipe out next to. The harness, I discovered, could be turned into a sort of Bjorn thing for adults. Made sense. It was a good thing I didn’t really care about anything though or else I’d have died. 

The store had a flat gravel-lined roof with a bit of a lip around the edges. She laid me down near the edge where the lip could shield me from the wind, took her cape off, and used it to wrap my feet. 

Oh.

She was nice. Somehow I’d never realized.

If I’d been capable of feeling anything I might have felt bad about that time I set her motorcycle on fire. 

Road Ranger was the first to arrive. I’d never seen him get around, but it turned out he had some kind of hoverbike thing capable of VTOL. He stopped it directly overhead and settled straight down onto the roof near Witch. I realized there was a reason no one ever saw his ride as it got closer. Every square inch of it was covered in paid endorsements, mostly for energy drinks. I’d have been embarrassed of it too. 

I’d fought every established Hero in Megapolis at least once, but Ranger wasn’t one I saw too often. He’d hooked up with the Paragon League long before I’d clawed my way out of the slum I’d been raised in and, while I was absolutely a bad ass bitch, I was still below their sight line. The League was formed to deal with planetary level threats and since I liked not being blown up by stray asteroids or fighting off alien invaders, both of which had happened in my lifetime, I and other like minded villains tended to leave them the hell alone. 

Road Ranger was a big guy who had stopped aging somewhere around forty. Ranger was one of the first recorded Supers and a regenerator of the type that made him fundamentally immortal. No one was sure how old he was. He ever gave anyone a straight answer on the subject, but the earliest confirmed Ranger sighting was back in 1940. His name came from a long period of homelessness where he traveled the country on an antique motorcycle as an urban legend that fought crime and vanished before anyone could figure out there was anything weird about him. 

The internet and an increased state of domestic security had put a stop to that journey. By then, though, there were more Supers and he’d became less of a terrifying anomaly and more of a precious fragment of living history. 

Ranger came over, crouched down, looked me over, and muttered a heartfelt little “Fuck” to himself. “Chessmaster’s going to burn down the city over this,” he said, louder, then he rubbed the back of his big bald head and added, “...not sure I blame him. What is this?”

“Bad.” Witch was watching the sky for Paragon, who was taking his time showing up. It was an unattractive decision from a person capable of breaking the sound barrier. 

As it turned out, villains showed up long before Paragon did. They weren’t, however, any of Chessmaster’s Pawns.

The first warning was a creepy little artificial giggle right before a small squadron of patchwork babydolls with hinged jaws and jagged glass teeth started swarming over the edges of the rooftop. They were coming from every direction and Witch only just barely hauled my limp carcass out from under the leading edge of the enemy wave. 

I say ‘enemy’, but they were only really after Witch and Ranger. One of them got close enough to me to take a sizable chunk out of my leg and just detoured around me to get at Witch.

“It’s fucking Toysaurus,” Ranger bellowed as he flung one Dolly clinging to his arm off and started stomping the other ones converging on him. “Girly, I am NOT in the mood!” 

“Aww, I’m hurt,” a melodious coo came from above underscored by the sound of leathery wings. “I thought everyone was a Toysaurus kid at heart.”

Toy lit down on a burnt out neon sign that had once been a Vegas-style advertisement for a strip club, clinging to a neon woman’s extended leg with her taloned theropod feet. She had changed up her look a little since I’d been locked up. Last I saw she’d worn her hair in bantu knots of neon colors. Since then she’d apparently decided to switch over to colorful faux locs pulled away from her face in two buns. Her face and wing arms were splattered with luminous flecks of rainbow paint. She glowed in the dark like a deranged rainbow.   

Toy was a rare multi-powered Super with both shapeshifting and manipulator abilities. The capes didn’t know about her shapeshifting. They thought she looked like a black anthropomorphic pterodactyl all the time, which was just how Toy liked it. 

“That was terrible and you should feel bad.” Ranger threw one of Toy’s Dollies back at her. It spat out a long elastic tongue tipped in sticky slime, snagged itself on a random bit of radio antenna, and swung away from its mistress. 

“Less banter, please,” Witch snapped. She was flagging. I didn’t weigh much after my stay at Dymphna’s and Witch was strong, but she couldn’t carry me and avoid the Dollies forever. They didn’t tire and they never got distracted from their orders. Too bad Witch did.

It wasn’t really even her fault. The loose gravel on the roof made for bad footing. Witch slid while dodging a coordinated attack from the Dollies and went down to one knee. My bottom half slid to the ground.  

Toy must have been waiting for that moment of inattention. 

Two Armstrongs dropped down from where they’d probably been beetled up against the wall of one of the taller buildings surrounding the convenience store. One whalloped Witch across the head and shoulders with its enormous muscular arm hard enough for her to both drop me and go flying. The other one picked me up and took off running.

Fabric flapping around my legs reminded me that I still had Witch’s cape and I can’t say why it mattered to me at that moment when I couldn’t even manage to lift my head by myself, but I kicked it off before we cleared the roof. 

Our eyes met briefly as she staggered to her feet. Her hand went to the grappling gun holstered at her waist and then paused. The Armstrong carrying me had four arms and massive legs, which allowed it to both carry me and scale the wall. They usually only had the normal number of limbs and were lighter on the bottom. 

Toy had planned for me to be incapacitated. Armstrongs took months to manufacture so she’d planned this for a long time. Did that mean she knew what had been going on inside? I hoped not. I didn’t want any of my friends knowing what had happened to me. They’d do something stupid.

...even stupider than usual.

Witch slowly removed her hand from the grappler gun and nodded in my direction once before wading in to help Ranger. She looked relieved.

Witch thought I was safer with Toy than with her. That couldn’t be good.

The Armstrong hauled ass away from the fight first over the rooftops and then, once we were far enough away, it dropped down to street level barrelled through dank alley ways, scaring the shit out of at least one homeless encampment. It kept going until we ran into the loading area of an abandoned BigBoxMart. Despite the fact that the chain had been bankrupt for years, there was a sprinter van parked in the loading bay. The Armstrong made a beeline for it.

Inside the van was a small, low budget ambulance set up attended by probably the last person I would have expected or even wanted to see given the circumstances.

She was out of costume and dressed down about as far as she could. Chrysopoeia’s costumes were usually something out of a gaslight fantasy; leather coats, brass goggles, jodhpurs, tall hunting boots, with a belt loaded down with glass vials and mini chemical grenades. She was a steampunk alchemist, basically.

Out of costume she looked like a frumpy librarian.

Like Toysaurus, Chrys was a powerful super and an old friend. Unfortunately, she was also out of her goddamn mind. The main issue was the way her powers manifested. Alchemy was fantasy so far as most people were concerned, but not for her. She’d gotten her official supervillain designation by deliberately fucking over the gold market with an illegal lead-to-gold operation.

She was fine to hang around so long as you weren’t having health problems. She didn’t believe in or understand modern medicine, mostly because it didn’t work for her. Unlike regular people, her body really did operate on the four humors principle and as long as she was in balance she was pretty much impervious to disease or lasting injury.  

“Well, thank fuck.” Chrys pointed at an anchored gurney. “Lay her down there.”

The Armstrong obeyed, which only confirmed for me that Toy had planned this. I couldn’t even blame her. There weren’t many doctors who’d work with villains; even fewer who could be trusted. Chrys was probably her only option.

Chrys repeated some of the tests that Witch had put me through, including making me hit myself. Then she shone a penlight in both my eyes. “Melancholic,” she muttered to herself. “Maybe phlegmatic. Either way, much too cold.” She turned to the Armstrong. “Move to phase two; distract and divert.” She smoothed the hair out of my face as it lumbered off. “You’re safe now, honey. I’m gonna warm you up and then we’ll get going.”

‘Warming me up’ thankfully meant that she tucked me into a foil blanket rather than any of the weirder things I’d seen her do.