Overview:

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The police kept the bystanders away from Northgate Mall, stringing up caution tape to establish a perimeter. Seven heroes arrived at the scene: Rockstar, Spartan, Love Fey, Cerulean, Bee Girl, Ruana, and McKinley. Love Fey, also known as Raptor Pink, unleashed a life-sized spinning top made of heart-shaped energy construct at the gang, knocking members off in a flurry of petals and roses. Oppa Rockstar, also known as Raptor Orange and famed as a K-pop idol, appeared by the fountain. With a swift motion, he hurled glowsticks like daggers. Their paths curved through the air, guided by swirling lucky clover leaves, striking another group of gang members with pinpoint precision.

Mall_arrival.sav

The sun is merciless today.

It sits high and unblinking, hammering the concrete outside Northgate Mall with the kind of heat that makes the air shimmer in visible waves. The parking lot has been cordoned off. Blue-and-red lights strobe from a line of police vehicles parked at angles, and a long stretch of yellow security tape marks the perimeter, cutting the crowd off from the entrance.

There are a lot of bystanders. They push toward the tape anyway, because people always push toward the tape.

Seven figures appear on the horizon.

They come from the direction of the highway, silhouetted at first against the white glare — spaced evenly apart, walking in a loose line. The sim catches them in full resolution as they close the distance. Left to right. I pull the view wide so I can get all of them in frame.

First: a white jacket with gray paneling, abstract cyan lines running across it like a city grid. Orange shirt underneath, a sun graphic on the chest. White spiky hair. Magenta visor glasses catching the light. A butterscotch guitar strapped across his back, apple green fingerless gloves, yellow sneakers. Oppa Rockstar walks with the relaxed confidence of someone who’s used to being looked at. James Pangilinan, stylized winged headset, mild ladies’ man, believes in fairness and compromise. He also, apparently, believes in arriving to crisis situations like he’s stepping onto a stage.

Next to him: maroon-red spandex, sleeveless, no cape. Michael Pangilinan has the build of someone who’s been training for years and the expression of someone who’s already scanned the situation and filed his conclusions. Spartan. Fists loose at his sides.

To Michael’s right, Love Fey is next: Allison Sevilla in a pink dress layered with ribbons and ruffles, her loose waves held back by a small bow accessory, her heart wand at her side. She also looks the most ready of any of them.

Then Topher. Ser Cerulean Arlentis in full silver-and-gold armor, the chest plate catching sunlight at every angle. His white cape moves behind him in the hot air, like it’s been waiting for this. He walks like the armor fits him.

Hovering above the ground. Bee Girl. Sophie Pangilinan is currently wearing a yellow-and-black suit with translucent wings beating fast enough to blur. Her antennae tilt forward as she scans the mall. Bumblebee, her robotic companion, bobs in the air beside her.

Princess Ruana walks next to her, seafoam green and lavender gown trailing at the hem, lunar scepter in hand. Roanne Mallari, seafoam green eyes steady and forward. She moves with the specific calm of someone who’s learned not to waste energy before a fight.

And then Benjamin. Captain McKinley at the right end of the line, cobalt blue space armor trimmed with bare titanium, visor down, boots hitting the concrete with deliberate weight. He checked this situation from the Peregrine Lightyear’s radar before they even left.

Seven of them. Walking forward in loose formation.

RAPTORFORCE: DEFENSE AGAINST ALL VILLAINS & MONSTERS ALIKE (D.A.A.V.A.M.A.)—THE DREAM TEAM. 

I’ve seen teams arrive at scenes before, in every genre conceivable. This never stops being something.

The crowd at the tape notices. The murmuring starts, ripples outward, and people start grabbing their phones. Someone near the back shouts a name and the whole cluster of bystanders shifts to look.

Near the edge of the barrier, an officer holds his position with both arms out. Two people press against him from the crowd side.

The woman dark hair, wearing a pale yellow blouse that’s gotten crumpled from the wait. Her hands grip the security tape so hard the plastic bends. Ellie Agoncillo. Her eyes are red. She’s been crying and stopped crying and started again at least twice in the last hour.

“You don’t understand.” Her voice comes out controlled, tight, each word deliberate. “My parents are inside. Their lives are at risk.”

The officer doesn’t move. “I’m very sorry, ma’am. But you can’t go in. The mall is still dangerous.”

It’s not a cruel response. It’s just a true one, which in moments like this can feel almost worse.

The man beside her, Ansel, her husband. Broad shoulders, light gray polo shirt, one hand resting at the small of his wife’s back and the other on her arm. His jaw is set. He’s not arguing with the officer. He’s just staying there, which is its own form of holding the line.

He leans slightly toward Ellie. Quiet enough that I almost lose it in the ambient noise. “God is merciful, Mahal.” A pause. “He would never forsake His children.”

Ellie doesn’t answer. But something in her shoulders changes, just slightly.

The sim holds the frame.

Behind the couple, the crowd continues to press forward. Phones raised. Names called out. The strobing police lights reflect off the mall’s glass facade in irregular patterns.

And down the approach, the seven figures keep walking. Closer now. The crowd sees them in full detail. Rockstar’s visor catching the sun. Cerulean’s cape. Bee Girl’s wings. The sounds from the crowd shift from noise into something louder.

I watch Ellie. She hasn’t looked at the approaching heroes yet. Her eyes are still on the entrance doors.

Ansel has, though. His hand stays on her arm.

The line of seven reaches the perimeter.

Love_Shock.sav

The inside of Northgate Mall looks like a heist movie that skipped straight to the part where everything goes wrong.

Display cases cracked open. Jewelry counters stripped bare. The bank branch at the east wing has its vault door hanging at an angle it was never designed to achieve. Glass crunches underfoot with every step the armed men take, and they take a lot of steps — there are maybe thirty of them moving through the ground floor in coordinated groups, which tells me this wasn’t improvised. Someone planned this. Someone with a whiteboard and too much time.

They’re all in black. Gloves, tactical vests. Armed. Moving with the kind of discipline that makes the looting feel almost procedural. 

“Gather all the mall-goers in the center.” The leader’s voice carries from the atrium without effort. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t need to. “Don’t stop until you’ve found every one of them.”

His men fan out.

The atrium is a wide open space under a high glass ceiling, afternoon light pouring in from above. Maybe sixty civilians have already been herded there, seated on the tiled floor in clusters, hands visible, bags piled to one side. Mall employees in their uniforms, shoppers with their paper bags still looped around their wrists, a few kids pressed against their parents.

Among them: an elderly couple near the fountain.

The man is bald, a pale short-sleeved polo. His hands are around his wife’s shoulders, steady, deliberate. She’s in a floral dress, copper dyed hair pinned back, her fingers laced together on her lap. She watches the armed men move through the atrium and doesn’t look away. Grandpa Al and Grandma Emily. Ellie’s parents. The cousins’ grandparents. They’re sitting in the middle of all of this, and neither of them is falling apart, which honestly says something.

Grandma Emily’s jaw is tight. Grandpa Al hasn’t moved his hands from her shoulders since they sat down.

I keep watching.

One of the groups finishes clearing out a jewelry boutique at the corridor’s far end. Four men, bags full, heading back toward the atrium. They’re talking quietly among themselves, relaxed in the way people get when they think the hard part is over.

They haven’t looked behind them.

Love Fey—RAPTOR PINK—is standing maybe four steps back.

Allison in full form: pink dress, ribbons and ruffles, bow in her loose waves. She’s watching them the way a cat watches something it’s already decided about. Her expression is patient and extremely unimpressed. 

The gang leader at the back of the group finally notices the silence behind him and turns around.

He looks at her. She looks at him.

“Stop right there.” Her voice is sharp and carries. “You bullies — repent and retreat. This instant.”

The man stares. Then he does the thing people always do in this situation: he laughs. “Who are you supposed to be? What’s a little girl going to do to us?”

Allison tilts her head slightly. “What can I do?” She raises both her hands. “Something like this.”

She releases a heart construct from her triangular two palms.

It leaves her fingertips as a small light and doesn’t stay small for long. By the time it hits the floor it’s a giant sparkling red heart, easily the width of the corridor, spinning fast and low with pink rose petals trailing off it in a wide spiral. It moves like it has a plan.

The first man goes down before he can step aside. Then the second. The heart doesn’t slow — it angles, adjusts, takes the third man at the knees. The fourth tries to run and makes it approximately two steps.

The leader watches all of this happen. He has time to understand what’s coming. He doesn’t have time to do anything about it.

The heart catches him square in the chest. He folds and hits the tile.

Silence.

The corridor is quiet except for the faint rustle of rose petals settling. All five men are on the ground, unconscious, buried in varying degrees of pink. A few fully formed roses have materialized near the leader’s shoulder, which feels like a signature.

Love Fey lowers both her hands. She looks at the scene with the calm satisfaction of someone who knew exactly how that was going to go.

Lady_luck_takes_aim.sav

There’s a smaller decorative fountain in the mall’s east wing, tiled in white and blue, water still running like nothing’s wrong. Oppa Rockstar—RAPTOR ORANGE—is leaning against the rim with both arms crossed, one ankle over the other, watching a gang ransacks the currency exchange kiosk across the corridor.

Rockstar. White spiky hair. Magenta visor glasses. Butterscotch guitar on his back. He looks like he wandered in from a concert and decided to stay.

The gang leader clocks him first. He’s a broad guy, tactical vest. He stops what he’s doing and stares.

Rockstar tilts his head. “Hey. Any spare dimes on you?” He glances at the fountain behind him. “You might need one. Wish for a chance against me.”

A beat of complete silence.

“Are you mocking us?!” The leader’s voice goes up fast.

Rockstar’s expression doesn’t change. “Little bit, yeah.”

The gun comes up and fires before he finishes the sentence. Three shots, rapid, loud in the enclosed corridor. The fountain rim where James was sitting takes two of them. The third skips off the tile.

Rockstar is already gone. He’s in the air, rolling sideways over the nearest kiosk counter in a single fluid motion, landing in a low crouch on the other side. The guitar shifts on his back but doesn’t fall.

He straightens up and adjusts his visor. “Hothead,” he says, mostly to himself. “Classic.”

He reaches into his jacket with his right hand. What comes out looks like a standard concert glowstick — except it’s glowing in three distinct colors, cyan and magenta and yellow, and there are a lot of them between his fingers. They hum faintly at a frequency I can actually feel through the sim.

“Lady Luck.” He pulls his left hand back, and the apple green fingerless glove catches the corridor light. Clover leaves spin off it, bright and trailing, scattering into the air above him. “Make sure they all hit.”

He throws.

The glowsticks leave his hand in a wide fan pattern and immediately stop behaving like objects thrown by a person. The clover leaves swirl around them, adjusting, banking, and each glowstick finds a new angle. They don’t fly straight. They curve. One takes a hard right around a display pillar. Another drops low and comes back up. The trajectories look predetermined, like someone already calculated where every person in this corridor was going to be standing and worked backward from there.

Cyan hits the first man in the shoulder. The contact produces a sharp crack of energy and a burst of color — his jacket sleeve goes vivid cyan from collar to cuff, his mask takes the edge of it and streaks bright. He goes down.

Magenta catches the second man mid-step. Full chest hit. The energy discharge lights him up in pink-red across his vest and gloves, and he folds sideways into a rack of discounted luggage.

Yellow finds the third before he gets the gun off his hip. The glowstick clips his wrist and the burst travels up his arm in a branching pattern, like someone drew on him in highlighter. He sits down hard and doesn’t get up.

The remaining two men in the group make the decision to run in opposite directions, which doesn’t help either of them. The clover leaves are still in the air. Two glowsticks that haven’t connected yet redirect without being told. One chases a man around the corner and gets him at the ankle; the other banks off the corridor ceiling, drops, and finds the last man three steps from the stairwell exit.

The leader went for cover behind the currency exchange counter. He’s crouched there now, gun still in his hand, breathing hard.

A glowstick drifts through the gap at counter height. Unhurried. Like it’s taking its time.

He sees it. He tries to move. It catches him square in the chest.

The discharge is bigger than the others — cyan, magenta, and yellow simultaneously, a full-spectrum burst that paints him in all three colors at once. His vest, his hands. He slumps against the back of the counter and stays there, staring at his own technicolor reflection in the polished kiosk surface. 

The clover leaves settle.

Corridor quiet again, except for the fountain still running behind me and six men on the floor in various states of colorful unconsciousness. The currency kiosk is a mess but structurally intact. No civilians in this wing — the gangs cleared them out early, which accidentally made this Rockstar’s problem to solve solo.

He rolls one shoulder and looks at the result.

“Not bad,” he says to no one in particular.

I don’t disagree.