01: The Fork

Mirai, Mirai #01. Serial fiction: multiverse family drama.

Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own. While it shares a setting and characters with Radiance, and reading that story first will make this one funnier, it’s intended as a separate starting point for my capepunk superverse. Feel free to pick up wherever you’d like.

Six weeks from now, Lady Radiance will get a wake-up call that permanently alters the course of her life. But that hasn’t happened yet.

Of course, a lot can happen in six weeks. Perhaps it never will.

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May 2013
Silver Spring, MD¹

The night hours around the District could still be cold at this time of year, but Lady Radiance was quite comfortable. A soft golden light surrounded her and warmed her through her thin made-for-TV costume as she balanced like a ballerina on the edge of the building’s flat roof—the white and gold satin fluttered around her as one leg stretched out behind, while the other flexed to allow her to sway playfully back and forth, leaning from the safety of the roof to the air thirty feet above the empty parking lot.

“Don’t, Christa,” her twin brother said gently.

Lady drew the other leg down gracefully and straightened up, turning on her toes to face him. Spacewalker was lounging in the shadow of two large HVAC units, the combined light of her aura and his phone screen glinting off his goggles and tight silver suit. “How did you know I was going to dive?” she asked.

“Were you? I figured you’d fall. I was about to jump down there and try to catch you.”

“It hasn’t been that long since we did this. I remember how to fly.” To prove it, Lady Radiance created a platform of solid light under her heels and made a slow, experimental effort at levitating a few inches. “You know you shouldn’t call me by my secret identity when we’re working.”

Spacewalker grunted in a way that suggested he was rolling his eyes at her. “We’re the only people within a quarter mile. I told you, nothing ever happens when I cover surveillance at the lab. If Baz thought for five seconds that it would, he’d be here himself. Not that anything ever happens when he’s here, either…”

“Well, thank you anyway for letting me come along,” she said. Mild-mannered Christabel Jones had behaved herself perfectly since leaving LA, using her power to control light only in private and trying not to let on to her brother Jacob how much she missed the spotlight. Their fights in Hollywood had been mostly for show—promotional material for her tween super-sitcom—and she appreciated getting even this stale taste of real heroics. “Chained Lightning deserves some time off. Did he say where he was going this weekend?”

“Probably a river in Egypt.”

“Jake! You’re so mean sometimes,” she said, dropping abruptly out of character as she flounced back down.

“Me?” He shook his head with a slight, drained smile, and then pushed back the goggles to rub his eyes. “Sorry…I didn’t mean that. It’s such a pain getting back into Spacewalker mode just to sit still all night—” He cut himself off, frowning down at his phone as something caught his eye. “That’s weird.”

“What is?”

“The security system notifications are going crazy, but I don’t actually hear any alarms.” Jacob walked past her and crouched at the edge of the roof. “The front door doesn’t look like it’s been breached.”

Lady Radiance drew herself up straight again, pushing her hair back. “That could be illusion magic.”

“Why, though?” He answered his phone without looking up. “Hey. …No, I don’t know what’s going on. I’m literally on the roof right now and there’s nothing happening. Maybe a software glitch? …Yeah, just to make sure. You’re still in town? …I’ll pick you up in a minute.”

“That was Baz?” she asked, trying not to betray her excitement.

“Yeah. We’ll give it a walkthrough and then go wake up one of the docs to get the alarms turned off.” Spacewalker shot her a serious look as he fitted his goggles back on. “You should stay up here, just in case. Keep a shield up.”

With a flick of her wrist, Lady Radiance hardened her aura into a semi-permeable protective shell. “I’ll be fine.”

She heard a pop as Spacewalker shrunk down between the molecules around him so he could take off at super-speed. Then, only the shivering near-silence of suburbia after midnight, nearly lost under the strengthening buzz of the parking-lot floodlight as it began to flicker.

Lady crept to the edge of the roof to look down for herself, closing her hands into fists and letting threads of light begin to spin into ropes wrapped around her wrists. With the floodlight at full strength, the lot was clearly empty—but in the microseconds of darkness, she thought she could see ghostly outlines frozen in time below.

Before she could get a good look at them, the light stabilized and the buzzing receded, and she wondered if she’d been imagining things.

Then there was a R-RR-RIP like an enormous sheet of fabric being torn apart, and the soundwave, or something like it, knocked her onto her back. A thin black line zigzagged its way up the sky above, surrounded by a green halo and fizzing with green and blue sparks. As Lady Radiance got back to her feet, adrenaline sparkling across her skin, she saw that the force had also blown out the floodlight and one of the doors, triggering the alarms her brother had already left to investigate. The figures she had glimpsed before were there in the flesh now. So too, pouring from the cleft in her reality, were a mass of glinting crab-like little robots.

One of the figures hefted a futuristic-looking weapon. “Or, you know, the Mhekanites might find us!”

“Just start disintegrating, Ignis! I can’t contain them and mend the rift at the same time!”

The decision required no thought: here was her chance to help. Lady Radiance set a foot on the roof’s edge and pushed off in a long, graceful leap towards the battle below.

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Thanks for reading! For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory.

1. The location is a slight retcon from the serialized version of Radiance. The beginning of this chapter still takes place in the same timeline as Radiance does.