Overview:

---

McKinley, clad in futuristic space armor and armed with advanced weaponry, battles the gang members during a violent mall looting. Hovering above the chaos, Bee Girl is shot by the gang leader and goes down to the floor. Elsewhere in the mall, Ruana is branded a demon by the superstitious leader of another gang. In response, the mermaid princess unleashes seafoam bubbles, putting the gang members off their feet and sending them floating helplessly out of the establishment.

McKinley_fires_sophie_falls.sav

The sim drops me into the mall mid-fight, and for a second the transition is jarring the way a jump cut is jarring: one moment white walls, next moment fluorescent lighting and the echo of a running brawl across polished tiles.

Captain McKinley—RAPTOR BLUE— is not interested in talking to the twelve men between him and the corridor exit. Both gauntlets are active: thin cyan blades projected from the backs of his wrists, each roughly the length of a ruler, edges vibrating at a pitch that makes the air around them shimmer. He moves through the front of the group the way a solution moves through a math problem. Efficiently. In order.

The first man swings a bat. McKinley tilts his wrist and the blade takes the bat at the handle, clean. The follow-through is a palm strike with the gravity amplifier behind it, and the man gets introduced to the closed gate of a shuttered clothing store at a velocity that leaves a dent. A crowbar and a second bat follow. Neither survives the exchange. The men holding them don’t either, in the sense that they are no longer upright.

Three more at the middle range figure out the front line is gone and close in. McKinley shifts modes. The blaster materializes in his right hand from nano-molecule compression — two seconds from stored to solid, the mechanism pulling form out of concentrated matter — and he raises it just as the armed men at the back open fire. Deflection: his beams crossing their bullets mid-air, each intercept a small white flare. Three return shots. Three men sitting down. The exchange takes six seconds. The corridor smells like ozone and disrupted air conditioning.

Above the atrium, Bee Girl—RAPTOR YELLOW—is a yellow blur working the edges.

Sophie in alter-ego looks exactly like a cartoon character who forgot to tone it down when she crossed into the real world. Yellow-and-black bodysuit, antennae, four wings beating fast enough that the individual motions blur together into one continuous low hum. She hits from height and from the sides: both palms forward, green electric charge crackling at her fingertips, amplified negative current that cancels coordination and drops gangsters mid-step. Her expression is focused in a way that suggests she has a method. 

Bumblebee contributes. He retracts his arms and spheres up, then rolls forward at full acceleration across the tiled floor, leaving scuff marks on the decorative grouting. Three men in sequence absorb direct impact and end up flat on their backs, staring at the skylight.

The gang leader is at the back of the group.

He has been there the whole time, watching. He does the math. The gun comes up — past McKinley, past the tile, up — tracking to where Sophie hovers at roughly fifteen feet above the floor.

The shot is louder than everything else in the corridor.

Bee Girl’s hand drops to her side, pressing flat against her abdomen. The wing-beat stops. She doesn’t call out. The physics don’t ask for her opinion.

McKinley fires once.

The gang leader goes down and stays there.

By the time McKinley reaches her, Bee Girl has already landed: knees first, then sideways, one arm folded underneath her and one hand still pressing her side. Her wings lie flat against her back. The green charge in both palms has gone out. The antennae have slipped to an angle.

“Sophie,” McKinley says.

Just the name. No command in it, no question. The kind of thing you say when language hasn’t caught up to what you’re seeing yet.

Bumblebee reaches her first. He exits sphere form mid-approach, arms snapping back into place, lights blinking in a fast and unsteady pattern that has nothing to do with standard diagnostic cycles. He settles close to her face, close enough that his glow reaches her cheek.

“My muse,” he says quietly.

McKinley stops walking.

He stands in full armor in the middle of the corridor — blaster still in his right hand, gauntlets still running, eleven unconscious men distributed across thirty meters of mall behind him — and looks at her on the floor.

His face does something I haven’t seen it do before.

The sim doesn’t cut. It doesn’t shift. It holds the scene exactly as it is.

I hold with it.

Ruana_shields_blows_bubbles.sav 

The sim shifts to the east wing and Princess Ruana—RAPTOR GREEN—is already there.

Roanne in alter-ego is a hard image to process the first time and somehow harder the hundredth. The seafoam green gown moves like it has its own weather system, floor-length skirt trailing across mall tile with no particular concern for physics. Lavender corset, water lily embroidery, pearl earrings catching the overhead fluorescents. Her seafoam green eyes scan the cluster of people pressed against the shuttered storefronts ahead of her.

Twenty-odd mall-goers. Backs against a wall. Not sure which direction danger is coming from anymore.

“Don’t be afraid,” Ruana says. “I’m here to protect you all.”

She reaches for her lunar scepter and lifts the top free. The moon sphere sits inside it: nestled within a bell-shaped cascade of water, resting on a base of two carved fish intertwined at the tail. It looks like something out of a museum display and it absolutely is not.

The moon bell rises.

It climbs above the crowd on its own, trailing a stream of periwinkle water that catches light the way a prism does — aquamarine flickers running through it in slow pulses. The water spreads outward at the peak, then curves down on all sides, and a dome closes around the twenty-odd people with a soft sound like a tide pulling back from shore. Shimmering. Solid. The people inside look out through it with wide eyes. One kid presses a hand against the inner surface, then pulls it back.

The gangsters arrive from the north corridor.

There are eight of them, and they stop walking when they see the dome. The leader is in front. He reads the gown, the scepter, the glow in the water, and arrives at the only conclusion his particular worldview allows.

“Are you an engkanto?” He takes one step back. “You’re demonic!”

Ruana turns to face him. Her expression does not shift into offense. It doesn’t shift at all.

She exhales.

Seafoam leaves her lips — not breath, seafoam, actual foam carrying a faint trace of seafoam green and lavender — and it crosses the distance between her and the gang in a slow rolling wave. It finds the first man and the bubble forms around him: clear, shot through with color, large enough that he has room to stand and also room to be very confused about standing. He floats upward. Then the second. Then all eight, one after another, lifting off the tile in their respective bubbles and drifting in a loose cluster toward the open ceiling of the atrium.

They clear the upper level. Then the roofline.

Then they’re outside.

Through the dome, the twenty-odd mall-goers watch them go.