3.5: This is Halloween

Radiance #3.5: the good witch and company; when ISN'T Metro on fire?; and moral philosophy vs. the weight of living

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.

This story takes place in between #3 and #4—some time after that last conversation between the Lady and Lord Hades, and one week before Marissa and Christa’s night out. This time, we’re hanging out with Christa’s brother Jacob, getting a window into the aspects of her friends’ lives that fly under Lady Radiance’s radar.

Edit: This was originally published after #4, as a kind of prequel. It reveals the answer to one question that had been left open at the end of #4, but otherwise they could be read in any order.

<#3 || Directory || #4>

Jacob checked the time again and decided it wouldn’t hurt anything to call it quits early today. It wasn’t that he had much in mind to do instead, but the cool air circulating in from outside was making it impossible to concentrate on the screen.

Having real seasons was one of the perks of living here. Within just a couple of weeks, the windows would all be shut and the leaves would be falling in earnest. He’d be pulling out his coat, watching the weather forecast to see if they might get snow by Christmas. He just had to get through the rest of today. October 31, the capstone to two long months of watching the rest of the world get excited over what had to be the year’s dumbest holiday. Jacob was pretty sure he was too old for Halloween by now—and, by extension, so was just about everyone else he knew—but did that stop the grotesque yard decorations? The relentless ads? The monster-themed 10Ks? Did that even stop his dear twin sister? Well, of course not. Christabel had finished that race fourth place in her category (purposely, to keep her profile down) while wearing three-foot hair extensions and a Rapunzel dress. Today, she’d taken the whole day off work and spent it knocking around downstairs with spooky music in the background. More costume stuff, he supposed. At least all the sewing kept her out of trouble, which was more than he could say for himself.

Jacob stood at the window quietly for a few minutes, watching the wind ruffle the trees just below the third-floor level and feeling the weight of his phone in his back pocket. Emily would want him to text her back. The talking part of just talking, you know.

He wasn’t in this for the talking. This was an experiment—allegedly a mutual experiment. A very low-profile, part-time, would-we-even-know-how-to-be-normal experiment. Emily wasn’t much for Halloween, either, but her problem was the baggage that piles up after everyone in your fourth-grade class finds out you turn into a swamp creature when exposed to water. She was cute, otherwise, and a surprisingly good kisser. But heartfelt drunk texts before three PM on a Thursday were a little much.

Jacob shut the window and headed down from his office without taking the phone out. Christa must have heard him on the stairs, because she was squeezing through the door to her room and out to the landing by the time he got there. “So! Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?” she demanded, beaming as she swished her enormous skirt back and forth.

Jacob looked her over, thinking back to their childhood Halloweens; there must have been four or five years running that tiny Christabel had gone as Glinda the Good Witch, swamped in layers of spangles and pink tulle. At least some things never change. “That’s, uh…elaborate. I thought you were just handing out candy this year?”

“I am! Mr. Bill’s granddaughter is going to be my Dorothy.” She flung her arms out and spun around a few times. “Are you sure you don’t want to join us? I just have to finish my wand, and then I’ll be done. And the Tin Man’s just posterboard and makeup, really—”

“Hard pass, Chris.” He caught her and shifted her aside so he could get past the dress. “I love you. But, the Tin Man?”

“There’s nothing wrong with that. He had a perfectly soft heart all along.”

Jacob wrinkled his nose. “Yes, that makes the body paint so much better. I spend enough time in Spandex. Anyway, uh—I have a party I’m going to.”

“Like that?” Christa said, aghast.

“No, I’m going to the store for snacks like this,” he said. “Do you need anything?”

“Oh, no. I stocked up days ago, the last-minute rush is going to be crazy. You’d better hurry up.”

There was no party, and he didn’t need any snacks, but it was easy to lie to Christabel and hard not to turn it into the truth once you did. Jacob traipsed down to the first floor and paused in the living room to consider whether it was worth physically going out. He was trying to quit the superpowers thing, wasn’t he? That would never happen if he kept using them out of convenience. Not to mention that they were starting to feel a little wobbly. It was probably better not to push it if he didn’t have to. Besides, if he could keep his attention off the plastic horrors, it would be a nice walk to the station.

🎃🦇👻

Jake texted a few friends on the way, trying to feel out if anyone else was planning a normal evening, but ended up in Virginia by default. It wasn’t five yet; there would be somebody hanging out in the lobby at Dr. Marcos’ place. It hadn’t been like this when they were up in the District, but apparently the new place was a lot easier to just stop by. It was cheap supervillain insurance, so the doctor didn’t care as long as somebody on staff was around; Fatimata had threatened to put out checkerboards if they kept loitering like old men, with the only result that somebody did pick up a stack of mostly-complete board games at Goodwill and leave them off to one side. What they really needed next, he thought, was a spot in one of those buildings with a coffee shop on the first floor. But hopefully he’d have moved on to better things by then. As he’d said: trying to quit the superpowers thing.

“Downstairs is a Halloween-free zone,” Anton (not Antman, despite his super-strength) said as Jacob came in, not looking up from his paper.

“Cool. No complaints here,” he said. “Just downstairs?”

“Downstairs is for sure and upstairs is probably not. Dr. Cotlin has a movie going somewhere—she asked RJ to move some furniture. She said we should be good until eleven or so.”

“All right, thanks.” Jacob swiped a peppermint and waved to Fatimata as he headed up, since she was on the phone. ‘Somewhere’ turned out to be the flatscreen in Results 2 that was usually hooked up to the MRI machine. Marissa had her feet up on the low table, attention half on the laptop balanced across her legs and half on the dark forest the film was slowly panning across. “Boo,” he said, leaning in and knocking on the wall.

“Jake! Hi!” She turned and grinned, showing off an impressive set of fangs. “It’th not Tuethday.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I just thought I’d stop and say hi. What are those?”

“They’re teeth, duh. I have to thtick to the dreth code for thafety, tho the aethetic ith ‘vampire cathual’.”

“…right.” Jacob gestured to the TV, which still hadn’t hit any recognizable scenes. “Just tell me you’re not watching Twilight.”

“Do you even know me? It’th My Bloody Valentine.” Marissa had returned to her typing. “I haven’t theen the original in a while, but it’th the ecthtended cut. There’th thith thene where a thowerhead goeth right through—”

Jacob faked a loud retching. “What is wrong with you?”

“Yeah, normally I marathon the Halloween therieth today, but Thebathtian dared me, tho. I’m making him watch The Thlumber Party Mathacre after thith.”

So they were both psychopaths. Big shock there. Jacob managed to avoid making this observation aloud and instead said, “Oh, is Baz around?”

“Mmhm. He’th thuppothed to be getting popcorn.”

“I'll—” He grimaced and looked away from the screen, seeing the direction this scene was headed in. “I'll check on that for you.”

“Thankth,” Marissa said brightly. “Tell him to hurry up, he’th about to mith a good part.”

🎃🦇👻

“So you can actually understand her around those things?” Baz asked, leaning against the break-room counter. He was microwaving popcorn, but without any apparent sense of urgency about it. “I told Rissa I just wasn’t gonna talk to her until she took ’em out.”

“Heh. What’d she say to that?”

“‘Good’…I think.”

Ah. There it was—the slight awkwardness to the smile that gave away that he wasn’t actually complaining. Jacob had his number. Pretending to complain was the only choice he had; given his long history of antagonizing Marissa and the attitude she’d developed in response, it probably could kill Sebastian to admit to her that he thought the lisping was cute. Jake shook his head as he dug through the fridge for a cold soda, and thanked fate yet again that while he might be bad at dating, at least he wasn't that bad.

“Hey. You got five minutes later?” Baz said, swinging the freezer door open above his head. Jacob stood up with a Dr. Pepper in hand and saw he was nodding toward a bag of Totino’s in the back, and standing at such an awkward angle that he had to be avoiding a security camera somewhere.

Jacob looked at him sideways. “She’d know it was us.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said, pulling it shut again. “I have a plan.”

All right, he’d given polite silence its best shot. Getting blackmailed into helping Baz once with this stupid hobby of his had been bad enough. “I still remember us being even now,” Jake said. “Can’t you just ask her out like a normal person?”

He’d expected some attempt to protest, but Baz just shook his head. “She’d say no.”

“You could try not picking on her for a couple of weeks first,” he pointed out.

“That’s beside the point,” Baz said. “It’s ethics. Professional boundaries, conflict of interest, that kinda thing. She’s really not even supposed to hang out as much as she does with guinea pigs like us.” Jacob watched him roll the thought around in his mouth like he was having more trouble than usual finding an offramp to laughing about it. “Besides, honest, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I’ve been good.”

“You know the innocent eyes don’t work on me, right?” Jake said.

Marissa came in with the door swinging behind her. “You traitor, you left me—oh! Hi, again.”

“Hi, again,” Jacob said. “Ah, right. Baz, Marissa says hurry up or you’ll miss the good part.”

“Well, not now. I pauthed it,” she said.

Baz rolled his eyes and stuck his hand out. “C’mon. What’d I say?”

“But they’re thcary,” Marissa said. “Jake, tell Thebathtian the fangth are thcary.”

Jacob smirked at the flush creeping up his friend’s neck and raised his drink with an air of solemn confidence. “You two can work that out. Like I said, I was just stopping in.”

“What’d you pause it for, anyway?” Baz asked behind him as he stepped out. “I mean, if you need me there to hold your hand, I guess I don’t mind, but—ow.”

🎃🦇👻

Dr. Marcos was being sensible today. That wasn’t as guaranteed as Jacob would’ve liked it to be, given the amount of responsibility he had, but thank goodness somebody was.

“Is it already? I suppose I should call my grandmother this weekend,” he mused when Jacob brought up the date. “Día de Muertos, you know. But, no, that’s not what I wanted. Marissa finally got our grant approved to cover another intern. Her old position has been open since she finished her degree, but we didn’t have the funding.”

“That’s good!”

“Yes…well, the problem is that I recruited her mostly by accident. I really don’t know where to begin with this kind of thing,” the doctor said. “Don’t you work with the internet?”

Jake did the best job he could of not visibly cringing. “Uh—sort of, but not like that.” He mentally flipped through his various job-hunting attempts, looking for some kind of advice. “I think you want to start with writing out a job description, though. Then you can consider your target applicants and whether you’re restricted on where you can advertise. You don’t have to get approval from OPM or anything, right?”

Dr. Marcos paled a little at the mention of the Office of Personnel Management. “I don’t think so…well, I hope not.”

“Yeah, that would make a difference. Just get Marissa to read the grant again first,” Jacob said. “What are you looking for, another biologist? That shouldn’t be too hard.”

“No, but you know how it is. In the ideal world, we would get a neuro-parapsychological specialist with statistics training. At the end of this I suspect I’ll have to get a student economist and teach him to deal with psychics,” Dr. Marcos said as they walked back into the lobby. “Unless you know someone who’s interested?”

“Maybe. I can ask around.”

Anton was still here, now deep into a card game with RJ (matter-phasing) and Oliver (chameleon skin.) “Hey, if you’re going, don’t get on the Metro,” RJ said, holding his phone up.

“Why? Is it on fire again?” Jacob asked.

“Probably. But mainly, some dude calling himself Jack-o’-Lantern is wrecking Falls Church and ripped up a couple sections of track between us and DC.”

“Oh, that sucks,” he said, because that seemed slightly more appropriate than cool even though the video on the news report was—objectively speaking—very cool. “Deal me in?”

Anton nodded. “Next round.”

🎃🦇👻

iMessage: Emily K

Emily: anywy its all. Its all shht

Emily: an d i dont Know what I would do wihtout uo.

Emily: tha n k you.

Jacob: all i really do is show up once a week and not tell anybody, but if that helps, you’re welcome, i guess.

Jacob: are you okay?

Emily: no. ❤ Sry i sent all that.

Emily: i promise im not catchin g feelings lol. its just so nice tht u roll w/ it n dont ask wierd questions. i liek not bein a monster some times. 🙂

Jacob: it’s all good. And i feel that, haha.

Emily: awww bby no. 😙 see u tuesday rite?

Jacob: you bet.

🎃🦇👻

It had been an interesting night, with acquaintances drifting in and out while #beltwaycapewatch Twitter lost its mind over the rash of Halloween-themed villain attacks across the metro area. This was real life in the nation’s capital? Maybe that Mayan calendar thing hadn’t been nonsense, after all. Christabel texted Jacob intermittently throughout the evening, assuring him that she was staying put just in case something happened in their neighborhood (and, thankfully, it didn’t.) When he was the only person left in the lobby, and it seemed likely from the time that Christa had turned off It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and gone to bed, he got up with a long, slow stretch and decided he’d better let Marissa know that he was leaving.

Whatever movie was on had reached the stage of scrolling through the end credits at increasing speed, such an obvious missed cue to eject the DVD that, at first, Jacob thought he might regret opening the door to let in some light from the hallway. A second glance reassured him that they’d both just fallen asleep sitting up. In am unwonted fit of generosity (see: preexisting history of blackmail), he decided not only to not take pictures, but to leave Marissa sleeping and shake Baz awake.

It seemed to take him a minute to fully process the situation. Unless Jake had missed some kind of complete turnaround in their relationship, Marissa had probably been leaning back against his shoulder when Baz passed out, but at some point she’d gotten under his arm and was hugging it tightly. He tried to at least shift his hand from its protective grasp on her hip, but she mumbled something into his shirt and moved her elbow just far enough to pin it down.

“Have fun with that,” Jacob said without bothering to hide his amusement. “Everybody else is gone, so I’m going home too.”

“The hell you are,” he hissed. “You know if she wakes up like this she’nt ever talkin’ to me again.”

“And what am I supposed to do about that?”

Baz looked around before settling on a hoodie poking out from behind Marissa’s legs. “Get her sweatshirt, I can’t reach it.”

Jacob leaned in to gently tug it free. “Here. By the way, did you still need me for five minutes?”

“What?—oh. That thing.” Baz took the sweatshirt from him and loosely rolled it up with one hand. “...no. It’s not important.”

“Oh, really? It seemed pretty important before.” He watched, curious to see if this would work, as Sebastian pried Marissa’s fingers up and pushed the warm fabric into the gap. Reaching for it, she let go just long enough for him to pull his arm away and drape it across the back of the couch again. “Nice. That should buy you a couple of weeks before she figures out she wants you.”

Baz raised a hand and shot a spark at him, popping it against the wall just past his head. “You shut up.”

Jake snickered and strolled off down the hall again with the joy of a man who only rarely got to be the most functional person in a room. To be sure, Christa thought better of him than that…well, she would, wouldn’t she? She thought the best of everyone. She couldn’t see the darkness behind the cracks, even when it was him. He’d always thought that Christabel was made to be somebody’s cheerleader.

For example, had his sister known that he was currently standing in front of the break room door, considering some kind of meddling provocation, she would certainly have told him that he was better than this—even though he certainly was not.

Reaching out through his surroundings to finalize the route, he slipped into interspace and emerged again about six inches above the top of the fridge. It rocked under his weight when he fell onto it, but settled quickly. From there, it was a moment’s work to slide down to the counter and hide himself in the blind spot while he popped the freezer open, grabbed the pizza rolls, and split. This time he took the shortcut straight back home, which would have been a long run even a few months ago. Aiming high to compensate got him a four-foot tumble through a particularly twiggy chokecherry out back, but fortunately no serious injuries.

Seriously, man. Just quit the superpowers thing.

He wanted to, and he knew he needed to. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too long before Lady Radiance didn’t need him anymore; then he could start nudging Christa out of the nest, too. Once Jacob’s powers were finally under the classification threshold, he could start over with a life that was really his own. His life had always been about Christabel. And—he loved her. Of course he loved her. But it was past time for them both to have figured out what they were really doing with their lives now.

He texted Baz (you’re welcome for the alibi. also, ethics?? lol.) and put all that out of his mind; a slight glow from the front of the house as he came in told him that Christa was still up talking to her boyfriend. Or Lady Radiance’s boyfriend, anyway. Chris liked to draw a bright line between the two of them, but Jake suspected it was far dimmer in reality. He threw the pizza rolls into the back of the kitchen freezer for lunch tomorrow, then paused in the hall to listen for a minute, just to satisfy himself that Hades wasn’t seizing the opportunity to seduce her into some kind of villainy.

…he was, actually, but it was just laughing at some hero-type who’d tried to break them up the last time they fought. Christa seemed to still be offended that he’d thought she couldn’t handle herself. Jacob was surprised that anybody still considered Lord Hades to be a threat. Despite his original misgivings, he’d quickly come to realize that the guy was after Lady Radiance’s attention, and knew playing the heel was the best way to get it. He made her work hard to keep everyone else safe, for sure, but nothing he did ever threatened her personally. He hadn’t even gone after Dr. Marcos’ research again. Mid-stakes sparring and gossipy hell-portal calls were the kind of nemesis relationship Jake was all right with, whatever morbid aesthetic Hades wanted to cloak himself in.

Probably he should care more about the dubious morality involved, but he was honestly tired of the big good-and-evil questions that so enamored his sister. Really, shouldn’t they just try to be happy? Nobody was perfect. Life was going to be messy and difficult, no matter what. Trying to be anyone’s hero on top of that was beyond what a normal person should have to bear.

“Hey, you kids don’t stay up too late,” he called from the stairs as he started up.

Chris squeaked in surprise, and he could hear her scrambling to sit up like he cared whether she was behaving with any of Lady Radiance’s usual dignity. “Oh! Good—goodnight! I won’t! —nothing, I wasn’t talking to you. It’s not all about you, you know…”

<#3 || Directory || #4>

Thanks so much for reading! Next week—September 5—will be the first episode of Science! Girl & Chained Lightning, our Baz/Marissa spinoff. After that, Radiance will be back in October, kicking off #5 with a close and personal encounter between the Lady and her Lord…In the meantime, follow me on Notes for progress updates, sketches, teasers, and whatever else my last two brain cells consider interesting.

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