Interlude Forty-Nine: Agni (Patreon)

Babysitting a fifteen-year-old teenager wasn’t as bad as Agni had feared.

Although they’d been careful to use the word ‘adult supervision’ and ‘local guardian’, Agni knew what it meant to be responsible for a younger girl. Side effect of having two sisters.

Who she’d never see again, of course, but that ship had long since sailed.

She restrained herself from checking on them online. Her few attempts to look up Gita’s and Vasundhara’s social media profiles had been from anonymous searches in throwaway phones, never via a fixed terminal that might - someday - be traced to the notorious supervillain Agni.

Gita Pillai was now twenty-one and in her third year of law college. Vasundhara had just started a course in fashion design. Both of them posted a ‘miss you sis’ message on their profiles every year on 24th March, her ‘death anniversary’. Very pretty with tulips and roses and everything.

The girl who had once been Sunaina Pillai would have preferred a fire emoji, but you can’t have everything.

Some part of Agni understood that the eleven-year-old and nine-year-old who’d followed their big sister around were long gone, replaced by more worldly wise adults, but she still missed them.

Anne wasn’t either of them, of course. Anne was older, sharper, and far more experienced in the ways of ultrahumans - and of the world. She’d seen the darker side of human nature far too closely for a teenager, walked miles through battle and flame, and mourned for friends lost along the way.

Yet there was an endearing vulnerability to the youngster that tugged at something in Agni’s heart.

Like now, when the girl bit her lip in frustration at a computer screen.

“What’s wrong?” Agni asked.

“I can’t get into these files.”

“Where’d you hack them from?”

“They’re not hacked. This is my mother’s - well, grandmother’s - stuff.”

Agni raised an eyebrow. “Explain, please?”

“My grandma was a computer programmer. Sangeetha Quentin. She was obsessed with looking for her dad.”

“The famous Aman Sen your detective traced out.”

“Yeah, the one who looks weirdly like Andrew. She never knew his name, though, so she built a bunch of files and programs to trace him out, and collected tons of photos, videos, evidence of a lot of stuff.”

“That sounds a bit obsessive.”

“It was. Mother had huge fights with her about it. Then she got remarried to one of her colleagues, and Mum ran away. Came to Tanisport, met dad, had me and settled down. When grandma died, her effects were sent to Mum, including a hard drive with all of the files on the search.”

“And you’re trying to unlock those files? Why now?”

“Because with everything Ainsworth told us, they might have a clue.”

“Do your dad and Andrew know what you’re trying to do?”

Anne made a face. “Dad says it’s not worth the effort. Grandma protected her files with NSA-level encryption and then forgot to send us the password, so the only way we’ll get in is if we figure out the one in a hundred billion trillion combinations.”

“Don’t those files have a recovery question for lost passwords?”

“That’s what I’m trying right now, and it’s not working. There’s a secret question to which I don’t know the answer. The irritating part is, it should be easy to look up but we still can’t get it right.”

“What’s the question?”

Anne pointed at the screen.

THE PRINCE WHO DREW THE SWORD FROM THE STONE WAS PLAYED BY ____.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“King Arthur myth, right? There’s probably a dozen actors who’ve played him….”

“Sean Connery. Bradley James. Charlie Hunnan. Richard Harris. Nigel Terry. Jamie Campbell-Bower. Sonninke Huntington. Andrew Cunningham. Leslie Walter-Parks. I even went as far back as 1949 and picked Cedric Hardwicke.”

“Huh, that’s a lot more than I knew of. But why Walter-Parks? Didn’t he play Arthur recently?”

“Yeah, in 2070, after Grandma died. I’ve tried at least forty names, and none work.”

“I see.” Agni frowned. “Wait… it says the prince who drew the sword, right? Arthur was a king, not a prince.”

“So?”

“So, wasn’t your grandmother more into Indian culture than British?”

“Yeah….”

“Try ‘Amitabh’.”

Anne frowned. “Amitabh? Who’s that?”

“One of the greatest actors of all time - Amitabh Bacchan.”

“Did he ever play King Arthur?”

“Just type it.”

Anne entered the word.

ACCESS GRANTED. WELCOME.

“Oh my God,” muttered Anne. “You actually figured it out. How?”

“Amitabh Bacchan,” chuckled Agni. “Best Hindi film actor of all time. Starred in a King Arthur-cum-Aladdin-cum-Ali Baba knockoff called Ajooba in 1991. Plays a long lost prince of a magic kingdom and pulls a sword from a stone…. One hundred per cent derivative, cheesy special effects, terrible writing, but certainly memorable.”

“I’ll have to remember that. Wow, there’s nearly five thousand files in here….”

“Is one of them titled ajooba.avi?”

“... yeah, the very first one. Hey, maybe I should watch it!”

“Wait a few years.”

Anne scrunched up her nose. “Why?”

“You’ll need to be a bit tipsy to really enjoy it.”

The teenager snorted. “Thanks for the warning.”

The next hour was quiet, with the teenager scanning through documents and the Elemental reading through a novel.

“Say, Agni,” asked Anne suddenly, “what do you think about the new articles?”

How cute, the kid was trying to act casual. “Which ones?”

“The recent stuff. Caroline Thorn, the whole shebang. They’re really going after Belessar.”

“You have read what they write about me, right? Claiming that I’ve been Mastered and am drooling after your brother like a lovesick puppy?”

Anne blushed. “That’s not what I meant. Do you think Andrew needs to do something to undo these rumours?”

“Which rumours?”

“Um. The one about him and Phoenix Company.”

“You mean the one that he’s sleeping with half of them?”

There it was, that blush again. “It’s not fair of them to say things like that. The girls have been through a bad enough time as it is.”

“And they’re not too worked up about it, last I checked. Daisy told me the writers needed an education in how the world actually works.” She grinned evilly. “Donna said the insinuations gave her a few ideas.”

“Oh. Oh! … Oh. It doesn’t, um, bother you that she….”

“Has the hots for Belessar?”

“... yeah.”

Agni chuckled. “Life is more complicated than that. Donna knows her feelings for Belessar aren’t serious. She’s also not the type to interfere in a budding relationship.”

“So, are you and Andrew in a relationship? Officially?”

“Like I said, it’s complicated. Andrew and I are still trying to work out our feelings for each other. Sometimes we have moments of clarity, sometimes we’re dancing around each other.”

“But do you love each other? I mean, like, long-term?”

“Love isn’t a word to throw around casually, Anne. What do we have in common? He’s a rising superhero, I’m one of the most feared terrorists in the world. Thousands of people owe him their lives, thousands of people lost their lives to me. In all likelihood, I’ll be called up to Skyguard in less than a year, and Andrew possibly a year or more later. If we get there at the same time, we may have some time together - until luck runs out for one or the other of us. So no, I don’t think that we can really talk about love.”

“Do you think Andrew’s going to be called up?”

No point sugar-coating it. “In a year or two. He’s an idealist, a protector; he’ll go for sure. He won’t resist when they pull him up there, even though it’s a one-way ticket.”

“We can never come back once we go up, can we?”

“Whoa there. Andrew and I are likely to go. You, Miss Nanocloud, are not even in the top thousand.” Agni shook her finger sternly. “That burden is something you don’t have to carry.”

“I feel like… I should be there with you.”

“You will be, in spirit. You’ll also be able to reach Andrew with Mindspeech. And I’m sure he’ll feel better knowing you’re safe.”

“Andrew will need me.”

“So will your father. Who has no powers and no protection, in case Grumman decides to show up and get revenge.”

“He’ll have the Secret Service.”

“Who will be about as useful as freshly pressed daisies in front of an armoured battlesuit. Not to mention that they might literally not see him coming. An ultra with scanning abilities, though, and nanobots that can track where invisible enemies might be? Best you stay close to him.”

The teenager bit her lip. “You will stay safe up there, won’t you? You and Andrew both?”

“I intend to. Bastion’s survived nineteen years of alien attacks, after all; no reason I can’t beat his record.”