1-2: The Babe With The Power

Radiance #1.2: Short and Sweet meets Tall, Dark, and Scary; three microscopes and a box of pizza rolls; and oh, yeah, Lady Radiance is back.

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.

Previously, Lady Radiance and her allies went to check out an alarm and discovered that their favorite scientists are definitely in some kind of trouble—now, the conclusion.

<#1, Part One || Directory || #2 >

The first floor of the lab was where Dr. Marcos kept all the heavy or really sensitive equipment—ultracentrifuges, something he called an electron sequencer, and dozens of other mysterious constructions bolted directly into the subfloor. Lady Radiance’s aura shone bright-white on dusty chips of drywall under their feet and, further back, grey on the jagged edges of the walls they’d been blown out of. None of the interior walls she could see had been left intact, and what equipment hadn’t been smashed in place had been ripped from its foundations and tossed sideways.

Chained Lightning crackled audibly just behind her. “Hey, Doc, you been redecorating?” he called into the void. No answer came back, but something unseen scraped across a floor or ceiling further up in the building. Lady shivered. “Right. I’m headin’ up to find out what that is,” he said. “You see if you can find M&M, and I’ll send Spacewalker down if we run into them first. Holler if you need me.”

The light carried Lady Radiance gracefully through the remains of a decontamination chamber and into the work area. The destruction was recent—she could barely see for the glare of her aura on the dust suspended in the air. Suppressing a series of coughs, she turned it down until some degree of visibility returned. It wasn’t much, and she was further distracted by the smell of burning dust rising off the blazing ropes at her side. Was she a fire hazard in here? Lady dimmed her beams as well, dropping a few inches to the floor as her velocity adjusted in response.

“Dr. Cotlin?” she said loudly, taking a few slow steps into the gloom. Her voice struggled to carry through the thick atmosphere. “Dr. Marcos? Can you hear me? It’s—it’s Lady Radiance. I’m going to get you out of here.”

No voices came back in response. The Lady listened to the distant scraping and thumping, straining after any more localized sound. It seemed foolish, though, to expect anything. At this hour of the morning, why would either of the scientists have been down here? She would expect Dr. Marcos, biologist and physician, to be in his living space on the second floor, and his cyber-biologist assistant—if she were here at all—to be in the break room on floor three, getting coffee and breakfast together like Baz had initially suspected. Lady Radiance realized as she ventured a few more steps that she really had no idea of what she had launched herself into. Despite seeing the damage done down here, she didn’t even know if she should be looking for intruders. Who knew exactly what fell under the scope of Dr. Marcos’ research? Her conversations with Jacob and occasional gossip with Marissa never went much deeper than the basics: ordinary people were developing strange powers, and the U.S. government wanted to know why.

To focus her thoughts as she continued to step through the rubble, she entertained the idea of one or the other secretly being a real-life Incredible Hulk. Not Marissa; she’d heard the woman spiritedly cursing out a shorted circuit more than once, without violent repercussions. Her boss had this unnaturally mild-mannered aspect, though, and with these twitchy eyes…

A metallic clunk rang past her. Lady Radiance’s heart hammered as she tried and failed to triangulate the source. “Hello?” she said, turning up the heat on the coils again as her voice jumped.

Metal shrieked on metal, and this time she recognized the sound of a bent cabinet drawer being forced open—just to her left should be a storage room full of them. Lady summoned her confidence again and strode through the doorway.

A tall man in a form-fitting black suit stood with his back to her, insensible to her entry and apparently indifferent to the darkness he’d been standing in before she arrived. There was nothing notable about his outline; she didn’t recognize him. “What are you doing?” she demanded, the rope of light shifting into her hands.

Even confronted directly, he didn’t reply. Beams of faintly blue light swept across her as the intruder turned toward her, his eyes glowing. The paper he was holding suddenly burst into flames as his hands began to glow as well.

Faster than thought, Lady Radiance flicked her arms out in a stunt she’d practiced thousands of times. “Oh, no, you don’t,” she said as he staggered forward, securely lassoed by the light. The once-complex process of bringing down the temperature of the ropes while ratcheting up her own strength was muscle memory, and Lady couldn’t help but smile. She still had it. “Well? Are you going to explain yourself, or do I have to do everything around here?”

The man coughed.

“Nice try, but they’re not that tight.”

He coughed again, more deeply, and this time a thin, ink-black liquid dribbled onto his chin, pocked with tiny air bubbles.

Lady Radiance slackened her grasp slightly. “Hey—”

He fell to his knees and then sideways, stiff as a corpse, as liquid darkness began pouring from his mouth, joined by thickening rivulets from eyes and ears. Lady Radiance released his bonds and rose into the air to avoid the spreading pool, the fumes dizzying where it met the now-sputtering paper he’d dropped. There was a final gurgle as an abortive breath forced the rest of the liquid through his nose, and then nothing more.

For a moment, it was hard for Lady to catch her own breath. Then a ceiling tile was pulled away above her, and a woman’s voice came from inside the recess. “Christa! Did you get hi—ooooohh, gross.”

“That wasn’t me,” Lady Radiance said, rising a few more feet to poke her head into the drop ceiling. The light she shed illuminated the two scientists camped out on a solid area next door, apparently unharmed. At least one thing was going right. “Doctor, Marissa—I’m glad to see you. Are you all right?”

“I can’t complain,” Dr. Marcos said as he turned off their flashlight and pushed it into a backpack. “I think forty might be pushing it for crawling around in the ceilings, but that’s not your fault.”

“No, it’s your own fault,” Marissa said, though her tone wasn’t too far off from fond. Christabel still hadn’t been able to pin down the relationship between them; her best guess was that Rissa, much closer to her own age than to his, had yet to figure out that her boss would never be interested in anything he couldn’t slice up for analysis. “I’ve been saying for months that we needed a panic room, ever since Dr. Proud’s place got blown up. Lady Radiance didn’t even know where to look for us.”

“Well, I’ll think about it.” He got up rather stiffly and gestured for Marissa to go ahead. “You said you were going to get us out of here?”

It took a few minutes for Lady Radiance to fly them both down to a clear area, one at a time, avoiding the slick black liquid that seemed to be soaking into the concrete. Just as she got Dr. Marcos safely on the floor, an enormous crash from upstairs shook the remaining walls around them. Reflexively, Lady lassoed the scientists and pulled them out of the way as the ceiling collapsed under a hunk of metal that sent chips of concrete flying as it hit the floor. Then, slowly, the shape began to pick itself up. As its arachnid legs and arms curled out from under it, joints clicking ominously, she could see another black-clad stranger hooked into the center.

Dr. Marissa gasped, indignant. “They stole Scorpius!”

“That’s yours?” Lady Radiance said, focused on weaving a cage of light to protect the two behind her.

“Yeah! He’s a cybernetic exoskeleton. My old thesis project. Go easy on him, okay?”

Before she had to figure out how to politely respond to that, Chained Lighting appeared at the edge of the gaping hole above them. “Lady, hold him for me!”

“You got it,” she called. This was a thousand miles from throwing light for a camera or pulling on her old costume to sit on the roof when supervillains were in town, just in case. This was better. As one of the arms swung out toward her, Lady Radiance ducked under it and ran, pulling her light with her. Scorpius and its pilot stumbled on the tripwire and pivoted, but she jumped this time and pulled the line taut around its body so it wouldn’t snag as she wove between the arms again, flying circles around the claws as they tried to snatch her. The giant tottered, and then finally fell. Chained Lightning immediately shot enough voltage through it to cause a flashover that set the pilot’s hair and clothes on fire.

The light returned to the Lady’s body in a blaze, and she ignored Marissa’s protests as she turned back to them. “Let’s go,” she said firmly. “Come on, outside. It’s not safe in here.”

The sun was visible at the end of the street now; Lady knew they were running on borrowed time before bystanders gathered and somebody more official showed up to investigate. She hadn’t really considered before that anyone besides her brother and his friends might see her like this, and she suddenly had mixed feelings about the thought. Even though it had been years since Lady Radiance showed up in public, she had been pretty well-known. Was Lady Radiance really the way that she wanted to be known again?

Christabel’s spine tingled suddenly, as if someone was watching her. As she looked up and down the street, there was still nobody in sight, but her instinct insisted. She catalogued a predator’s options: the windows above them all appeared empty, but someone might be on a roof—or in an alley. Just behind her was a narrow, shadowy passage between their building and the next, and she left Dr. Marcos and Marissa tsking and sighing on the sidewalk to check it first. Her light found nothing, and she sighed as she turned back to the street. With the scientists out of immediate danger and her adrenaline ebbing, Christa no longer particularly wanted to do the right thing. The part of her that had never been comfortable under the spotlight felt safe here, and would have been much happier to stay than to go off and look for trouble.

That sense of security vanished all at once at a hot breath across the back of her neck.

Lady Radiance spun on her toes, her aura flaring up in the darkness. The shadows fled again, except for one: a fluttering figure cloaked in darkness that her light couldn’t dispel. Contradictory images shimmered through her mind as she tried and failed to fix on a description of it. Seemingly by itself, then, the darkness lifted just enough to show her the outline of a man. “You vere not expected,” he said, in a voice that had to be called a murmur even though it was loud enough to clearly hear. It was soft, but grave, and it reminded her of a stage Dracula who was taking the seduction scenes a little too seriously.

Lady unclenched her core and poked her chin in the air. “I’m new in town.”

“Vhat a coincidence. So am I.” Two points of red light appeared in the shadows, and then expanded into flame-tinged red eyes in a deathly pale face that came further into focus even as the rest of him receded into that liquid blackness. “Tell me, who are you?”

“I’m Lady Radiance,” she said, more boldly than she felt. The courage to back it up would follow. “I don’t know what you did expect, but these are my people, and from now on, anything you want to do to them is going to have to go through me.”

“Hmm. Is that so?” He smiled with a thin and crooked mouth and raised a leather-gloved hand from his shadows, reaching toward her face. The Lady batted it away, but he only smiled more darkly. “I think ve have vhat ve came for…but I vill remember that, next time.”

“There will be no next time.”

“Ah, dear Lady, I believe that is my decision to make—not yours.”

“Wait,” she called, stepping forward as he began to recede into darkness. “Who are you?”

“Next time, Lady Radiance.”

The shining coils flew true, but collapsed in on themselves as her unnamed adversary vanished into the shadows along the walls. The atmosphere lifted so suddenly as he left that Lady gasped as she tightened her fists in frustration.

At the other end of the alley, Spacewalker stood at the back door, frowning. “What was that?” he said.

Lady sighed as she tucked her hair back, trying to calm down a little. She could still feel her heart thudding against the thin fabric of her dress. “That was the bad guy…I think. He didn’t exactly stop and explain.”

“So I saw.” He pushed up his goggles to wipe sweat from his face, showing her a look of suspicion before he replaced them. “Well, I’m not going to say it’s cleaned up, but we got all the bodies out of the way. You can bring them back in now.”

“Okay. Are you…”

“Fine,” her brother said. “Come on. Work now, worry later.”

“I’m going, I’m going.” Christabel shook her head as she went. Everything they had been through together, and Jacob still talked to her like she was a child! He was only five minutes older. To her, that had never seemed to be enough to count, but she knew he considered himself responsible for her anyway. Smiling tightly, she swallowed the bitterness of that thought and turned her focus back to the task at hand. Lady Radiance was still needed here.

✨✨✨

The scene inside the building was no less chaotic for having all the attackers cleared out. Lady Radiance decided to camp out in front of one of the least structurally sound sections and wait for some further decision to be made, rebuffing Dr. Marissa every time she tried to head that way.

“But I have to account for everything that got smashed up,” Marissa insisted, running a hand through her slightly frizzy brown hair and leaving it frizzier.

“Well, not over here, or you’ll fall through the floor. Why don’t you sit down? There’s every chance you might be in shock."

She scoffed. “Shock? Come on, this is nothing. You know I was working for NIH when the Sonic Vorpal thing went down.”

“No, you never told me about that,” Lady said, jumping on the chance to distract her.

“Really? So, this was back when I was just an intern—”

“’Scuse me, ladies.” Chained Lightning was just exiting the stairwell next to them. “High voltage, don’t touch, you know the drill. Rissa, is the ground still intact?”

“What?—oh, yeah, it’s fine,” she said. “I checked that first. Talk to Lautaro, though, he wanted to do as much of the usual panel of tests as possible.”

“Way ahead of you. He’s the one what sent me to dump this so he could get a blood draw.”

“Well, I hope he’s planning to freeze the sample, since we have no spectrometers left!” Marissa yelled after him.

Lady Radiance set a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t blame him for that. Those were torn up when we got here.”

“Well, Scorpius wasn’t,” she said, eyes narrowing. “Seriously, Christa, look at this list. Three microscopes, one mass spectrometer, five liters of Wilkinson’s catalyst, six soldering irons—I didn’t realize we had six soldering irons…”

Unable to keep her focus, Lady watched as Chained Lightning opened a panel in the wall and peeled off his gloves before pressing his bare hands to the metal plates. There was a series of loud bangs, and then he pulled back and waved the smoke away, smirking at the number on the built-in voltmeter. A new personal record, probably. She wondered how much gel he had in his hair to keep it from sticking straight up.

Most people surviving a sustained run-in with 400 kilovolts of alternating current would have found religion and never worked on an electrical system again. Most people were not Special Forces Engineer Sgt. Sebastian Grimes. Since leaving the Army he'd become one of Dr. Marcos’ longest-running study subjects, and had been the one to recruit Jacob shortly after he and Christabel moved to DC a year ago. Jacob and Baz had grown to be good friends, and Christa liked him well enough. She'd seen that he could be counted on to get his act together when necessary. Still, it seemed like somewhere along the way he'd lost the ability to be serious about anything short of imminent death—if that…and she understood very well how that might get under somebody's skin. 

“... and an entire box of pepperoni pizza rolls,” Marissa said.

Christabel turned back to her slowly. “Is this the part where I say, ‘wow, that's terrible,’ and you say, ‘aha, I knew you weren't listening’?”

“No, I mean it. Yesterday I bought five boxes of pizza rolls for the lab kitchenette, and when I went to look just now, there were only four.”

“Don't tell me you're reportin’ that,” Baz said as he strolled back towards them. “I mean, what, did the destruction drones take fifteen in the middle of terrorizin’ you to split a box of Totino's? Dr. M probably ate them last night and forgot about it.”

“If five were missing, sure, but a whole box—no way. The man just picks at food. I know you've seen me trying to…oh, this again!”

Baz chuckled and popped one of his peanut M&Ms into his mouth. “It's too easy, Rissa-Rae. Too damn easy.” 

“Sure. Real easy to crack a joke,” she snapped. “It's controlling all that current you're not so good at.”

He crumpled the wrapper in his hand. “Hey, no problem. If me savin’ your bacon bothers you that much, next time I just won't show up.”

“I think,” Christabel said hastily, “that we all did the best job we could today, considering that we've been awake since before the sun was up and, you know, none of us have trained to work together at all. And I'm proud of us. We stopped the bad guys, and nobody got hurt except Scorpius, yes, but he had a good run, Marissa. He took the enemy down with him, and we'll always remember his valiant sacrifice to protect you. Right?”

“Be surprised if she lets me forget it,” Baz muttered. 

“I'm a very forgiving person, Sparky,” Marissa said grandly, apparently satisfied with having knocked the grin off his face. “Consider it forgotten.”

Christa smiled in relief. “Great.”

“But you have to smile for this,” she added as she pulled her phone out. “Both of you. C'mon, you owe me that much.”

Marissa moved quickly, but she only got in a few snaps before the stairwell door opened again and Jacob and Dr. Marcos came through. “Christa, would you consider letting me look you over?” the doctor asked.

“No, thank you,” she said, letting Marissa get one more picture before she turned her head.

“I had to ask,” he said. “You two will want to get going, then, Jacob. I was able to get the city first response called off, but the superhumans department will have a team here in fifteen minutes or so. I know you’d rather not be here.”

“No, that’s not a shortlist I’d like Chris and me to be on.” Jacob shook his head. “Do you think they’ll believe Baz handled it by himself?” 

“And why wouldn’t they?” Baz asked, already pulling off the rest of his gear. Chained Lightning wasn’t registered, either.

Marissa laughed. “Oh, were you serious—”

“I’ll call you later, Jacob,” Dr. Marcos said. “Let’s plan to meet up and finish the debrief.” 

“All right.” He wrapped his arms tightly around his sister, pulling her in close to the cold, slick silver fabric stretched across his chest and the smell of ozone and melted plastic trapped in the weave. And then—pop—

“I wouldn’t have minded staying,” Christabel said as she stepped out of his arms and sat down gingerly on the living room couch.

Jacob walked away as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’m gonna go shower.”

✨✨✨

When Dr. Marcos called that afternoon, he directed them to a coffee shop downtown that Christabel guessed was close to the offices they’d finally been released from. She ordered an iced s’mores soy latte to go with some colorful, hypercaffeinated monstrosity for her brother, and easily found the others under a shady tree at the far edge of the patio. Dr. Marcos and Marissa were going over a thick packet of paperwork together. Baz had his phone out and was showing the screen to Jacob. 

“Here, you should see this too,” he said as she took her seat. “Every one of ’em had it.”

Christa looked down at a picture of a man’s bare left shoulder. Imprinted on it was a black tattoo, more vivid than any ink she’d ever seen through skin: a single wing, like an angel’s. “That’s so strange,” she said. A thought occurred to her as she handed the phone back. “The one that I found going through the files…I didn’t really fight him. It was like a poison or an auto-destruct switch kicked in. Did any of the others do that?”

Jacob nodded. “Most of them did. I take it that made the post-action report go down a lot easier, though.”

“Yeah, the superhumans department takes a pretty dim view of anythin’ that their lawyers might have to spend more than five minutes defendin’,” Baz said. “There's one or two iffy ones, but they didn't tell me not to leave town or anythin’ this time, so I think we should be good.”

“Thank you,” Christa said warmly. “I really appreciate you taking that for us.”

He shrugged into his cup of coffee. “Least I could do, since you helped out. Plus, Jake's face and all.”

“What happened to your face?” she said sharply, turning to Jacob.

“It's fine, look.” He gestured to a faintly pink mark near his lip. “Some of that black stuff just splashed on me—the suit blocked most of it and my medical screen was clear. I felt weird for a few hours, but not anymore, promise.”

A wave of guilt crashed over Christabel at the thought of her bitterness towards him. “All right,” she said, squeezing his arm softly. “So that's why you were so…cold, earlier.”

“Was I?” He shook his head. “I'm sorry. I thought I was pretty reasonably concerned. You've been through too much to get caught up in my problems too, Chris.”

“I want to help,” she insisted.

“Yeah, well, that doesn't mean…” Jacob’s face had turned dark again, and he paused to look across at Baz and Dr. Marcos. “You still need to tell them what happened in the alley.”

Christa took an uncomfortable sip of her drink to stall for time, both disconcerted and reassured by the sincere concern on the others’ faces. “Something…or more likely someone appeared to me,” she said. “I only saw a face in the shadows. He was surprised to see me, and he said that they had what they came for, but he would take me into account next time.”

“Next time,” Dr. Marcos said, frowning gravely. 

“Yes. What is it they came for?”

The dregs of Marissa's iced triple mocha rattled in the bottom of her straw, and she set it aside. “I might have figured that out,” she said. “Your file guy was reading my transcripts from Dr. Marcos’ Serum 85 experiments—the paper copies GAO makes us keep, I mean. If he somehow managed to dial out to Dark and Scary before going all Exorcist on you, well, that's probably the most valuable thing in the building.”

“Serum 85?” Christa said. 

“84 failures and one partial success,” Dr. Marcos said quietly. “It doesn't quite work, not yet, but…it's getting there.”

Marissa nodded. “With 85, we can suppress certain types of SPVM—superpowers, to the layman—for up to ten minutes at a time. The grant we got is to find a way to remove them completely.”

Christa flicked her gaze towards Jacob, who was avoiding it. So there it was. She couldn't say that she was surprised. 

“Sure, I can think of plenty of people that I wouldn't want gettin’ their hands on that,” Baz said, waving a hand. “But that's out of our court now. It's this ‘next time’ thing that bugs me. Was your agent just as squirrelly about whether they'd be able to get you some real security?”

Dr. Marcos chuckled drily. “No, mine was quite clear about it. We're contractors, and it's our own responsibility.”

“Well then, if you'll pardon the technical language—” Christabel sipped her coffee while he continued with a technical and thoroughly explicit explanation of exactly who was doing what to which regions of whom, and in which creek. “—so I guess it's on us anyway, right?”

“Jacob doesn't have to be involved,” she said, putting her hand on her twin’s arm again. “The government knows you are, Baz, and the bad guys know I am, but nobody knows about him.”

Jacob frowned deeply at her. “Don't go crowding me out. If anybody should sit this out, it's you. Besides, we're freelance, but you've got regular work hours to keep.”

“So I'll take nights,” Christa said coolly. 

His expression didn't lighten. “We’ll see.”

Dr. Marcos turned the conversation to a backup laboratory site he'd been looking at, and Jacob and Baz went around to see the map. Christabel finished her coffee without tasting it and allowed Marissa to wave her into the now-empty chair on her other side. “What’cha got?”

“Which do you like better?” Marissa asked, flipping between two of the images in her camera roll. “This one…or this one?”

Christa reached over and flipped back to the first, considering the choice. Both of the photos had all three heroes and just Marissa's shoulder in them. The first was a slightly more flattering angle for Lady Radiance, the residual glow on her skin hiding the imperfections that came from getting comfortable outside the public eye. In the second, though, Spacewalker was smiling more broadly, and—despite the welding glasses—you could see the thought of mischief flickering across Chained Lightning's face. She wondered what the next picture would have looked like if Dr. Marcos hadn't interrupted. “Number two, definitely,” Christabel said. “What're you going to do with it?”

“Get it printed and put it over my desk,” Marissa said. “Why?”

She glanced across the table at Jacob, who was ignoring her, and nodded slowly. “Your desk’s a nice place, too,” Christa said. “But I think you should post it.”

“What, like…”

“Yeah. Why not? Show everybody. They should know.” Christabel laced her fingers together under her pointed chin, smiling at the thought of the stir this was about to kick up. “Lady Radiance is back.”

#details or ur dead to me claire (© E.B. Howard 2024.)

<#1, Part One || Directory || #2 >

Thanks so much for reading! I’m planning to publish each issue as a single post going forward. It will spread out my posting schedule even further, but this cuts way down on my organizational overhead and allows me more time between posts to get the art done, as well as making it easier to keep track of. Follow me on Notes for progress updates, sketches, teasers, and occasional pizza recipes.

If you enjoyed this installment of Radiance, you can show it by leaving a like or comment, sharing this post, or just continuing to read. :) Everyone’s welcome in the fan club!