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.
Returning to the main timeline, where The Matrix (Nick Harper) has moved on to trying to plan his strategy while Marissa continues to try to get straight answers about the alternate futures: Titan Beetle has just explained that in his timeline she joined forces with Sonic Vorpal, the atypical-rights terrorist group that in most timelines takes her hostage and nearly kills her…
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“The Revolution?” Marissa said, feeling the disbelief in the stretch through her eyebrows. “What…no, you know what, no. I don’t want to know right now.”
Sebastian was smirking. “‘Tell me everything’, you said.”
“Shut up. That was before I knew I was involved in any of this. I mean, how could I be that important to the future? And apparently I have powers that I just never noticed? I still don’t think I believe it.” Beetle bots etc, she wrote in another corner of the notepad. “You’ll have to let me look at how those nanites work, so we can talk more about it then. But for my own sanity, just…give me a minute.”
Jonathan looked about as thrilled as his aunt Christa ever did at the thought of letting Marissa and Dr. Marcos poke and prod him for science, but he didn’t say no. She looked down at her notes, stepping backwards through her thoughts. “Did we cover everybody?” she said. “No, wait. What about Ignis?”
“What about me?” Ignis said, his tone a good deal more defensive than Marissa thought necessary.
She pointed to Nick, standing at the front of the room. “He’s Clare’s son, from the timeline where we have a civil war, and he has a 10,000 IQ, or something; Jonathan is Jake’s, from what I can only assume is the completely upside-down timeline, and he’s a nano-cyborg; Makaria is Christa’s—uh, it’s like 5 AM and I don’t remember much about where she’s from, but from what I heard she can shoot portals and set things on fire. So what about you?”
He didn’t soften. “I’m from the Rigelian invasion timeline, if you want a label, and I can superheat inorganic materials. Also brought atomic disintegration tech.”
“So that’s, what, essentially lava powers?” She tilted her head. “And you went with ‘Ignis’?”
“Yes’m. We had a local nuisance already called Magmite, and a licensed hero using Thermite Man, and The Matrix is basically a Vulcan in my timeline, too—” Nick half laughed, half choked at that. “—so I was low on options. Ignis was a…an inside joke, that stuck.”
“I see.” This was the point at which Marissa would’ve liked to guess his identity and amaze everybody, but he’d been awfully quiet until now, maybe on purpose. “And who are you under the mask?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Despite Ignis’ insouciant tone, he couldn’t disguise a certain tension in his limbs. “This is very entertaining, but none of you are the people I knew back in my timeline. Certainly not my family. I’m here to do a job and, hopefully, leave. None of that requires telling you anything more.”
“Ignis,” Nick said, turning hesitantly from his writing at the whiteboard.
“Matrix. Do you really want to deal with this right now?” he said. “Really? After all that getting onto her about calculation drift and the integrity of this timeline’s future?”
A shadow settled across Nick’s face. “No.”
“A’right, then,” the masked man said. “Just Ignis. Ma’am.”
Marissa couldn’t identify it yet, but something about Ignis was dragging out the control issues that she would have sworn she didn’t have, in the same way as when Sebastian chose for unknowable reasons to pretend that he hadn’t, say, torn a muscle falling off the fire escape. She glanced over to Baz and flushed in surprise to find he was already looking at her. Weird. Rather than meet his eyes for too long, she turned a scowl on the other man instead. “See, when people compartmentalize things that strongly, that’s concerning to me. Who hurt you?”
He sucked a breath through his teeth. “Have you met the Rigelians?”
“The aliens? Not personally. Uh, I think our governments are doing long-distance negotiations.”
“That’s for the best.” Ignis’ mouth tightened to a thin line before he spoke again. “They’re silicon-based lifeforms—shapeshifters. On my Earth, years ago, we went to war and they invaded. I had to get very good at melting things that looked like people I would rather not have hurt.”
If her jaw could have physically been on the floor, it would have been. Her stomach certainly felt like it was. “Okay, that…” She took a slow breath. “That is horrifying. I’m giving you a hug.”
Ignis had jumped up and started backing away as soon as she cleared the chair. “Please don’t.”
“Don’t fight me on this, I wasn’t asking.”
He didn’t fight. Instead he stood completely still, his muscles so tight and breath so shallow it felt like wrapping her arms around a very warm statue. When Marissa let go, he bolted for the door and disappeared through it.
Nick hadn’t looked away from his writing, though she doubted he needed to devote even half his processing power to the probability trees he seemed to be transcribing from memory. She watched him for a moment, disappointed that most of it was in a shorthand she couldn’t read, and just noticed Jonathan slipping past her into the hall too. That left only the three of them, the room falling silent except for the squeak and tap of the whiteboard marker. Marissa could feel Sebastian watching her, waiting for her to say something pointless, she was sure; she knew that was her job in situations like this, to break the ice and jump in so everyone else could get on with it. At the moment, however, she didn’t have any words.
“Good job,” Sebastian said. Marissa picked up the empty energy drink bottle on her desk and threw it at him, not at all satisfied by the sound it made bouncing off his chest when he didn’t get out of the way.
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Thanks for reading! For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory.
I’ll see you again on Wednesday and Thursday for my regularly scheduled “out-of-character” updates. Next week, Mirai, Mirai continues with #15,
I WANTED A REVEAL WHY WOULD YOU DENY ME THIS WHY?!
I wonder if Ignis ever accidentally scorched the wrong people, also
Shapeshifting aliens that get personal. Yowch. That's not fun.