Scientific Phenomena Verging on Magic

Radiance #1.1: Lady Radiance does her makeup and answers a distress call.

Radiance is a lighthearted fiction serial about one of Earth's darker timelines. It takes place around 2013 in a world where atypical abilities have become increasingly common, with the storyline following a group of minor-league superheroes based in Washington, DC. Our protagonist is Lady Radiance, former teen sensation, aka Christabel Jones, professional ray of sunshine—or, at least, she's trying her best.

Can Christabel and her friends handle their new double lives as celebrity vigilantes? Will they be able to track down and defeat the mysterious villain behind the One-Winged Army? Who keeps taking Dr. Marissa’s pizza rolls? And how can you find your place in the world when you're no longer even sure what it means to be human?

Timeline-wise, this occurs well before my previous Radiance piece about Lord Hades. We’ll catch up with our favorite brainwashed emo kid later.

I have no particular posting schedule in mind for Radiance. Character sheets and a proper landing page will be showing up in the near-ish future.

< Directory || #1, Part Two >

© E.B. Howard 2024.

“This is not a gift for an ordinary girl who takes care of a screaming baby.”

Christabel Jones came to consciousness slowly, then all at once, squinting in confusion at the TV that sat on her dresser. Labyrinth was back at the beginning, but the DVD looped indefinitely if left to its own devices, so it was impossible to tell just from that how long she had been sleeping. She pushed back her fluffy blonde hair with a numb hand and rolled over in her bed to pull back the curtain. DC’s 8th Street was lined with old, heavy-canopied trees that made it difficult to find the sky, but it appeared to be just before dawn now. Maybe five o’clock. It was Saturday, and for once she had nowhere to be, so she let it fall and rolled back towards the small, square screen.

“It isn’t that I don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do for me, but I want my brother back.”

Labyrinth always went on when Christabel had trouble sleeping. The movie was an old familiar friend, the dialog long since memorized, fading easily into the background. She supposed it was because something like that had happened to her once. Not exactly like that—it wasn’t a literal Underground she’d tumbled into, nor were goblins involved as far as she could tell. No babies, either. There had, though, been illusions, scientific phenomena verging on magic, a lot of glitter, and one frightened, overconfident, and naïve sixteen-year-old girl who didn’t see why she should have to choose between power and a full life.

SPVM. Scientific Phenomena Verging on Magic. That was what her twin brother Jacob called the wild array of superhuman abilities that his lab-rat friends couldn’t quite pin down the cause of. While human variability had been expanding for some time now, as any middle-school teacher would tell you, this went way beyond hyperfocus and early growth spurts. Superpowers used to be so uncommon that they were literally the stuff of legends. Now that humanity was talking to aliens and building neural nets that passed the Turing Test, whatever that meant anymore, maybe a new type of human being was just to be expected. Or maybe, as Jacob believed, there was a clear-cut and understandable reason for this to have happened to them.

Christabel preferred simply to think of it as magic. Why did Jacob feel such a need to take the world apart and watch the gears turning? Did he really think that it would change anything? Maybe he did. She suspected increasingly often now that what he really wanted, no matter what he said, was a way out. She had made a bargain, though, eight years ago this October. Thinking herself clever and grown-up, she had accepted the terms. There was nothing she could imagine wanting more in life than to make a positive difference in the world, and magic allowed her to do that. 

If she hadn’t been quite mature enough to foresee its true price, to understand what it would be like to be twenty-four and watching the paths she couldn’t choose between rapidly diverge, then surely that was no one’s burden to bear but her own.

“Turn back, Sarah. Turn back before it’s too late.”

“I can’t. Don’t you understand that I can’t?”

Christabel reached up and hit the power button on the front of the TV. She didn’t think she would fall back asleep now, and ruminating did no good for anyone. 

It was the right decision. Jacob knocked on her door as she was opening the closet. “Christa, you awake? Somebody just tripped the third-floor alarms at Dr. Marcos’. Baz says he’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“I’ll be out in eight,” she said, reaching past long cardigans and floral sundresses to pull Lady Radiance’s outfit from the very back. Since she’d learned to use strands of light to brush and braid her hair while her hands were on makeup duty, Christabel could really have finished her routine in five. The extra three minutes were because she’d been trying a new eyeliner look. Even Lady Radiance couldn’t stay sixteen forever.

She heard the pop of her brother shifting to hyperspeed, and then, a short time later, another as he reappeared in the hallway. Footsteps on the stairs indicated somebody else taking the slow way up. Jacob shifted impatiently on the one creaky board. “You don’t have to look pretty, Chris.”

“Do too.” She was already rolling on shimmery pink lip gloss and wondering if her next tube should go a shade darker. Next to the exaggerated cat-eye, it looked a little childish. “It’s kind of my thing.”

“I mean, it’s just me and Baz.”

“And whoever tripped the alarms,” she said through a cloud of hairspray. “And Dr. Marcos, probably. And Marissa. And, by extension, everybody who follows Marissa on Tumblr.”

“You know Rissa-Rae probably set ’em off herself microwavin’ breakfast,” a third voice drawled. “I told her not to loop the smoke alarms into the main system, but that girl don’t listen.”

“To you,” Jacob said. “She doesn’t listen to you, Baz.”

“Why should I care if she listens to anybody else? I’m the one who knows what he’s talkin’ about.”

Lady Radiance opened Christabel’s bedroom door to see Spacewalker and Chained Lightning standing in the hall. Her brother’s silvery spandex suit covered everything except a slim strip of skin where the mask didn’t quite meet his goggles. Their friend Baz had both of his overclocked Tasers charged and holstered, and had fully suited up too in black tacticals and trademark chainmail gloves and gear. Despite his casual tone, his normally tidy brick-red beard was scrabbly enough to make it clear he’d prioritized getting here over cleaning up. Christabel glanced down at her twirly white and gold dress and custom over-the-knee boots, and suddenly felt even more out of place with them than usual. “It doesn't sound like you really need my help, then,” she said.

“Course we do. Infiltration, offense, defense,” Baz said, pointing at each of them in turn and ending with her. “I’m not sayin’ there is a problem, but if there is, somebody’s gotta look out for M&M while Jake and I deal with it.”

“Remind me, do they know you call them M&M?” Jacob asked, his mask twitching up like he was smiling.

Baz found a bag of peanut M&Ms in one of the five thousand pockets on his tac pants and put it in his shirt pocket instead, grinning. “Oh, yeah. And they hate it.”

Christabel shook away her doubts and tripped along after them, reassured enough to smile. Her smile became a little strained as Jacob squeezed them all into the linen closet that matched his safe carrying capacity, requiring her to hop up into his arms so that Baz could hang onto his back. Then there was a pop and she was squeezed even more tightly, flesh to bone and bone to marrow, whisking around protons and electrons through the empty spaces in between. 

When the world returned to a normal scale somewhere in Northeast Washington, Christabel landed gracefully on the pavement and looked up in shades of sunrise at the anonymous industrial building that housed Dr. Lautaro Marcos’ and Dr. Marissa Cotlin’s laboratories. Several of the third-floor windows were smashed in, and the lights were flickering in time with an alarm that was drowned out by a mechanical whine like an angle grinder turned up to eleven.

“Might still’a been the microwave,” Baz muttered as he audibly powered up the mini-generator on his belt, sending electric arcs crackling along the surface of his chainmail. His body could absorb the shocks easily, but his opponents were rarely so gifted.

Pop! Jacob was gone again, Christabel’s hair fluttering in his wake. 

Baz was strolling up to the doors now. “Ready, Lady R?”

“You know I am,” she said, turning up her aura as bright as it would go. Her feet slowly drifted up from the ground; the air around her vibrated slowly and discordantly at first, then suddenly harmonized as the beams pouring from her hands solidified into coils of braided light. “Let’s go save our favorite scientists.”

< Directory || #1, Part Two >