Star Harbor Nights

"Are you sure you wanna see it?" Ray asked Perfect, grinning roguishly. "Right here and right now?"

The pair of heroes were walking down a deserted Star Harbor street, ostensibly patrolling the area for crime. It had been a quiet night, though... a quiet week, in fact. The city was asleep, and seemed untroubled by bad dreams.

"I said that I did," Perfect said. "Why won't you show me?"

"It's just, I'm told that it can be a little overwhelming the first time," Ray said. "Scary, even."

"Come on, I'm not some dizzy-headed school girl who's going to faint at the sight," Perfect said. "We've been going together for almost a week now and all I've seen so far is a lot of talk."

"Communication is the basis of any relationship," Ray countered.

"Well, if you'd rather communicate just how you knew to be in the church that night..." Perfect said, knowing Ray was extremely reluctant to discuss his source.

"Okay, fine, I'll show you," Ray said. "But don't say I didn't warn you..."

He arched his back and puffed out his chest as he inhaled deeply, and then tipped his head back as he exhaled an incandescent stream of fire twelve feet long. Perfect gasped, though she had thought she'd known what to expect. This, though... this was impossibly bold and vibrant, shockingly, vividly red and seeming far more substantial than it should have been: the elemental essence of pure fire. It was as if she were looking at a real honest-to-goodness flame for the first time; every thing before that had been a cheap imitation, an idiot's dream of fire.

The flame seemed to go on forever, and then it was an eternity or two longer before Perfect found her voice.

"Is... is that the extent of your range?" she asked, her mind grasping for the firmer footing of facts and figures. "About four yards?"

"No, I can get slightly more range, if I don't go for a long sustained stream like that," Ray said. "I can also go wider or narrower... that's one big advantage the mouth has over a flamethrower: the built in adjustable nozzle."

"Ha... yeah," Perfect said, laughing weakly.

"You look like you need a drink," Ray said.

"Not while I'm working," Perfect said.

"I never see you when you're not working," Ray protested.

"I've got my studies," Perfect said. "And a couple of little projects I'm working on... and I do need to sleep sometime."

"I don't need hardly any sleep, and I still don't know how you manage to find time to do so much in a day," Ray said. "If you keep pushing so hard, something's bound to give."

"I've always worked best this way," Perfect said. "If I keep myself busy, I manage to stay pretty focused... but when I start to relax a little, I end up just slacking off all day, dreaming up new ways to do things instead of actually doing them."

"You could still come to Broker's with me after our patrol," Ray said. "One drink won't kill you."

"You sound like the greasy haired kid representing peer pressure in a bad Public Service Announcement," Perfect said, laughing. "And I'm already going to Broker's tomorrow night."

"Yeah, for the meeting," Ray said. "I want to get to know you... who you are beneath the mask."

"You've seen me without it," Perfect said.

"It's a figure of speech," Ray said. "Anyway, is that so completely horrible?"

"Yes, it's dreadful... absolutely abominable," Perfect said with a stern face that she couldn't hold. "Okay, how's this? If this night stays slow, we'll wrap things up a little early and go to Broker's for a while. Sound good?"

"Sounds like the best offer I'm going to get," Ray said.

"Yeah, well, as long as things stay quiet," Perfect said.

"I'm sure they will," Ray said confidently. "You live in this city long enough, you walk the streets, you start to get a feel for these things. There's a rhythm to it... a pulse, if you will... and right now, it's telling me we're in for a long, slow..."

"Ambush," Perfect said.

"What? No, a... oh," Ray said, seeing what Perfect was talking about. As they came abreast of a dark alley, a half dozen figures strode out from it with the unmistakable swagger of a pack of predators. Only one, the lead figure, had empty hands. The rest carried an assortment of knives and blunt instruments.

"Hey, cueball!" the leader of the group called out with a slight Caribbean accent.

As he came into the amber circle spilled beneath the nearest street light, Perfect saw that he was a big, hulking man with skull beads braided into his hair. The death's head painted over his face stood out quite well in contrast to his dark skin. Two of his cohorts were definitely white, two looked Hispanic, and one appeared to be Asian. They each had a skull pattern painted over their face. Most of them had their hair spiked up with some kind of gunk that made it look white, too.

"I think he's talking to you," Perfect stage whispered, pointing unnecessarily at Ray's smooth shaven pate. "Friends of yours?"

"More like coworkers you try to avoid at the lunch table," Ray said. "The big, dumb one is called Bloodhound. The smaller dumb ones are just flunkies. They're..."

"Bone Lords," Perfect said. "A street gang with a death fetish... or more like a cult. Real gangs aren't so shockingly multi-ethnic. Despite a lot of hysterical news reports, their rituals haven't been positively linked to Satanism, voodoo, or any other known religion or mystical practice."

"Thanks for the history lesson," Ray said. "Too bad knowing's only half the battle, or we'd already have this wrapped up."

"You messed up my crew, freak," the man called Bloodhound said as his men spread out on either side of him. "Now it's time for us to play, and you to pay."

"Me? Messed them up? Never. They were already pseudo-occult posers when I found them, I swear," Ray said.

"Stupid of you to keep walking the same route every night," the big man said. "Made it so easy to find you, get the drop on you."

"Point of interest?" Perfect said, holding up her hands and taking a few steps closer to the approaching combatants. "If you wanted to get the drop on us, you probably should have skipped the whole ominously looming out of the dark thing and just jumped us while we were distracted. I mean, that is pretty much the definition of getting the drop on somebody."

"Also, while we're critiquing strategy," Ray said, "I took out the whole rest of your crew by myself... that was like, eighteen or twenty guys. What are the six of you going to do when I've got a partner?"

"You took out my crew, but you didn't tangle with the Bloodhound," Bloodhound said. "Also, we been watching... your 'partner' is just a girl you picked up somewhere. No powers, no experience. You only beat my crew 'cause you got the powers... you get cut, you heal. You don't have to watch yourself none... but her, you gonna be watching plenty."

He smiled, an obscene leer beneath the skull face.

"You picked the wrong town to play dress up in, little girly," Bloodhound said. "We gonna carve your boyfriend up, and then we gonna take turns with you."

"Turns?" Perfect asked, striding boldly towards him. "So who's first?"

"I am," Bloodhound said, his eyes narrowing to dark little slits as he smiled macabrely down at the petite young woman's approach. "And when I'm done, you won't even..."

He didn't get to finish the thought. Nobody present really followed what happened next... Ray's reflexes were superhuman, and he still got caught off guard. All anybody saw was Perfect step towards the gang leader, and then a blur of motion. The next they knew, Bloodhound was lying on the ground, his hands over his throat and his body curled protectively around his groin.

"So... who's next?" Perfect said.

For a moment, it would have seemed to all but the most skilled of observers like the battle was already over; the troops had been cowed into submission by the defeat of their leader. Then... the moment ended.

"Perfect!" Ray cried.

His long arm shot out piston-like to grab one of the three gang members who threw themselves at Perfect. He caught the man by the back of his dirty white t-shirt, yanking him backwards to the sound of tearing cloth.  The Bone Lord's feet kicked ineffectually as Ray hauled him off the ground.

He looked down to see blood welling up from a line of cold on the side of his other arm. Seeing the wound brought it into focus, made the cold blossom into pain. The one who'd cut him grinned maniacally as he juggled a pair of knives in a stunning-but ultimately pointless--display of ambidexterity.

Ray threw the man he was holding at him, but then a small star seemed to explode at the base of his skull, making the world bright and dark and loud and quiet all at the same time.

He staggered forward, pivoting less than gracefully on one foot so the otherwise involuntary motion would bring him around to face his new attacker. His vision cleared enough to see shapes and motions, and he got an arm up... the wounded one... to clumsily block the next blow from the swinging bludgeon. It was a length of pipe, by the feel of it. He grunted with the impact, but otherwise ignored it.

There was a moment of stunned surprise on the Bone Lord's part when the pipe struck without any appreciable reaction, and in that moment Ray turned his wrist, grabbed the pipe, and wrenched it out of the the surprised man's hand. He winced... he could feel a tiny fissure in his bone, but his body healed itself from the inside out. The damage he'd taken from the pipe would be gone without a trace before the cut from the knife had closed itself.

He threw the pipe aside. His head was still ringing slightly, but his vision was back. His disarmed opponent was backpedaling away from him in horror... there was nothing like a display of seeming invulnerability to put somebody off a fight. Ray fell backwards into a defensive crouch. A mix of instinct and experience told the hero that if he advanced, his opponent would flee and he'd be forced to choose between letting him escape, or chasing him down at the expense of the rest of the fight.

The change in posture relaxed the skull-faced young man somewhat, enough to dull the flight impulse. Ray knew the sort of things that were going through his head: his opponent was hurt, neither of them had a weapon, and his side still had the numbers.

Goaded by such illusions, he came on again. His first clumsy swing was more bravado than skill, and Ray caught him easily by the wrist and flipped him to the ground, judo-style. Ray had the strength to really hurt somebody that way, but he exercised careful restraint against human opponents. The man was more shaken than injured, and he began scrambling to his feet almost instantly.

"Do us both a favor... and stay," Ray said, staring down at him from his not inconsiderable height. He forced his power upwards, the glow of the flame filling his eyes and its strength spilling out in his voice. It wasn't hypnotism... it was just damned spooky. It was a good trick, especially at night, with the dark of the sky framing his face. The downed man trembled as the strength and will to fight left him.

Ray let the power of the flame continue to build. His red brands glowed brightly, and his skin began to steam in the cool night air. It wasn't just for show... he needed to heal, and stoking his inner fire would fuel that process. In that instant, the thought struck Ray that while he could take blows like these all night, one good hit would take Perfect out of the fight, or worse. He whirled about to see her unhurt, facing off against two opponents. The relief he felt quickly turned to amazement and admiration.

One Bone Lord wielded a length of weighted chain, the other a huge knife... practically a machete. Faced with two armed and aware opponents, Perfect had been forced to abandon the tactics she'd used to take down Bloodhound... but she seemed to be compensating well for that. In fact, despite being out-numbered and out-muscled, Perfect was managing to keep the gang members off-balance and on the defensive as often as they were able to press in against her.

She'd flipped out her batons, and she wielded them now like some kind of mad swordswoman. Her enemies had come at her from opposite sides, but she managed to keep them at bay by whirling like a dervish.... wild and energetic, yet completely in control. Somehow she managed to flip back and forth between them, turning full around without getting dizzy or losing balance... or losing the flow of the fight.

Every time a slash of the blade came in, there was a baton ready to intercept it. Every time the chain came arcing down at her, she stepped aside. For every attack the gang members attempted, there was an answering flurry of her sticks. One good snap of the spring steel poles could have shattered the bones in a hand or wrist, but under the circumstances she couldn't hope for more than a stinging, glancing blow... if she was trying for anything else.

The chain-wielder had begun the fight with a good portion of the chain's length looped around his arm, but as her wild display forced him back again and again, he played out more and more of it, until he was forced to twirl it overhead in order to avoid catching it on the ground. He sent the tip zooming towards her head any time she moved towards him, but by this point he was biding his time, too... even more so than she was, he seemed to be picking his moment.

That moment seemed to come when her attempts to close on him became half-hearted, as if she accepted his ability to keep her at bay... and turned her attention more fully to his friend with the blade. She spent less time turned to fully face the man with the chain, until finally it seemed she'd made up her mind to press her advantage against the less dangerous opponent first.

With her back to him, the man let the chain fly forward in a line with Perfect's head, but she fell away to the side almost as if she knew it was coming. The weighted end of the weapon smashed into the other gang member's chin with a loud crack. No sooner had the chain spent its momentum than Perfect grabbed it with both hands, her batons now hanging loose from her wrists.

With the same graceful twirl that she'd used to confound her opponents, she yanked on the weapon. The dumbstruck ownerhad the presence of mind to hold onto it but not to set his feet properly. He fell forward heavily and gave up his grip on it anyway.

Perfect hopped aside to avoid tripping over him, and immediately set the chain into motion against his partner, who had dropped his long blade when the chain smacked him in the face. He threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender, and Perfect let the swinging chain fly low and long, so that the weighted end missed him and the length wrapped around his calves. A neat jerk had him down... better safe than sorry, she thought to herself. On that same note, she planted her foot firmly on the small of the first man's back as he tried to rise up off the pavement. If his heart had been in it at that point, she would have needed to resort to firmer measures, but he'd seen what she'd done to his leader. He had been brave enough when he was on his feet and had a weapon, but unarmed and in an inferior position, he was content to keep his comparatively minor injuries.

Her situation under control, Perfect finally noticed Ray watching her. For his part, Ray realized sheepishly he'd been too transfixed by the sight of her in motion to even think about coming to her aid... not that she'd needed it. She smiled at him, a joyful and slightly proud smile that he returned... but then her smile disappeared, and she screamed a warning that he didn't quite make out. He turned to see what had caused her smile to vanish.

With the flame flaring up within him, his reactions were far quicker than a normal human's, and he saw the knife coming at him not quite in slow motion, but in something like it... as if it were sailing through clear syrup instead of air. It seemed that the man with the butterfly knives--the one who'd cut him--wasn't out of the fight just yet.

A flowing roundhouse kick knocked the knife away. He let the power spill out of him, exhaling a long gout of flame in the direction of his attacker, much as he'd done for Perfect's amusement earlier in the night. Fire wasn't a weapon for disabling or disarming, though, and Ray was not a killer. With the rush of heat and light still a foot away from the knife-thrower's face, Ray suddenly pulled back and drew the power back, sucking the flame back into his body. From his point of view, the processes seemed completely distinct... exhale and inhale, but all the unfortunate Bone Lord saw was the flame breath speeding towards him and suddenly stop.

Ray had hoped the sight would be enough to prompt a surrender, but he was hardly disappointed when instead, the man wobbled slightly on his feet and then fell over in a dead faint. The one that Ray had thrown at him, who had shown no particular inclination to fight after being picked up and hurled so effortlessly by a large, tattoed man with glowing eyes, held up his hands meekly.

Ray fixed his burning eyes directly upon that man, the last Bone Lord standing, to make sure his surrender was genuine, then swept his gaze around the urban battlefield to make sure everybody who had been downed was still down, the old adage about "fool me once" running through his head.

Perfect had produced flexicuffs from somewhere and was binding her two fallen foes with them. The man he'd told to stay down had stayed, another was still standing dumbly, his arms held high, and a fifth was out cold. Perfect bound the conscious men together in two back-to-back pairs. She stopped when she got to the fifth, and gave a small gasp. It took Ray a moment further to figure out what she'd realized.

"Where'd... Bloodhound go?" she asked.

"Just... gettin'... ready," the Bone Lord captain said. He'd got to his feet and staggered a short distance away at some point in the fight. His breathing was unusually labored and raspy, but he seemed to have recovered from Perfect's twin strikes."I didn't want to have to do this..."

"You think I wanted to be a superhero?" Ray responded as Bloodhound raised his hands and began a loud, guttural recitation, waving his arms. "I wanted to be a lumberjack, leaping from tree to... uh, should we be letting him just chant away like that that?"

"What's he going to do?" Perfect replied. "I've studied this. The Bone Lord's 'religion' has never been linked to any actual mystical tradition, and no verifiable supernatural phenomenon have ever been attributed to their rituals. We could let him stand there reciting his little curse or whatever all night and no harm would come to us."

"Okay, but how about to them?" Ray yelled, waving his hand at the bound gang members. They'd begun to writhe, their faces contorting in silent screams as their skin seemed to wither, tearing like parchment and falling away into dust.

"Oh, my God..." Perfect said, clasping her hand to her mouth. "What's happening to them?"

"He cast a death spell and missed?" Ray guessed.

"You're killing them!" Perfect shrieked. "Your own men..."

"I've surpassed the need of any human help," Bloodhound said in a strangel deep and resonant voice. The mummified bodies of his cohorts were quickly crumbling away, leaving behind only skeletons. "I've perfected the Rites of Bone on my own... and now the flamer there's not the only one with powers."

He raised his clenched fists as if he were going to make a rude gesture. His face screwed up as if in intense pain or concentration. An animalistic cry tore itself from his mouth, accompanied by a sound like heavy canvas being torn as sets of three spear-like projections of bone ripped out of the back of both of his hands.

"Oh, God," Ray said. "Oh, my God. That is..."

Bloodhound stood, the bone skewers gleaming like ivory in the darkness. His own blood glistened on them in streaks, wet and black. He seemed pleased with the effect his appearance was having on his hated enemy. He smiled cruelly, almost snarling.

"...the most horribly derivative thing I've ever seen," Ray finished. "Seriously. I hope you've got a good lawyer, becasue you're going to get a cease and desist order any time now."

"Derivative of what?" Perfect said, for her encyclopediac knowledge of known and registered extranormal abilities didn't include anybody with bone skewers jutting from their arms. "Sued by whom?"

Bloodhound's sick, lip-curling smile faded a bit, but a moment later his body shuddered. He gave a long, hoarse cry as more bony spikes ripped out of his arms, shins, elbows, and knees.

"This original enough for you?" he wheezed. His eyes blazed red.

"Well, the bone things are good," Ray said, his eyes flaring as his own power rose again. "But my lawyer will be contacting you about the eyes."

"Update your will while you're at it," Bloodhound said.

"Can we wrap up the banter here? This is actually kind of a big day for me," Perfect said. "See, I've never beaten a supervillain before."

"You wanna beat on me?" Bloodhound asked. Even as he spoke, tiny pyramidal protrusions erupted all over his body, with deadly barbed tips. His face was now framed by a pair of curving ivory horns, like a ram's. With each passing second, the title "Bone Lord" seemed to be growing more and more apt. "Go ahead, take your best sh--oof...!"

"Christ, Perfect, do you always have to go for the stones?" Ray asked, wincing as Bloodhound doubled over in pain. "That's just not very... heroic."

"There wasn't any spikes there," Perfect said. "Anyways, the idea is to end the fight quickly, and it wor..."

It was Perfect's turn to be interrupted, by a forearm swipe from the rapidly recovering Bloodhound. Her batons were out and up just in time to catch the bony spikes and turn the strike away, though she stumbled backwards with the force of it.

"I've grown stronger than you can imagine," he said, lunging forward in an attempt to impale her.

"I've got a pretty good imagination," she said, pivoting back like a matador evading a bull. Ray waded in swinging, so that Bloodhound crashed face-first into his fist. The Bone Lord reeled with the impact, but showed no sign of pain. Ray, on the other hand, yelled and grabbed at his hand, which felt like it had been crushed.

"Shit!" he yelled, trying to leap away as Bloodhound's fury turned on him. He avoided the skewers but caught a glancing blow from the smaller spikes on the forearm, which tore long gouges out of his own arm.

"We need to end this," Perfect said, whacking Bloodhound ineffectually on the base of his skull with her baton. A normal human would have been seeing stars, if not darkness, but he showed no sign he even felt the blow.

"I'm open to suggestions," Ray said, catching Bloodhound's arm in his left hand on the next swing. The bone spikes tore at his flesh, and Ray's mystically enhanced strength was pushed to the limit by Bloodhound's similar physical might.

"You said you don't use your flame against normal opponents..." Perfect said.

"I don't," Ray said. Bloodhound lashed out with his free hand, a straight forward punch.

Ray was able to twist mostly out of the way without releasing his death grip on the Bone Lord's other arm, though he gained a bloody track across his shoulder. Worse, the spikes on Bloodhound's arm and wrist were still growing, working their way into--and through--Ray's hand, sprouting cruel barbed extensions. He could ignore the pain, but sooner or later he'd lose his grip. "For good reasons."

"This isn't a normal opponent," Perfect said.

"But..."

Abandoning all semblance of caution, the still-metamorphosing Bloodhound threw himself forward, hoping to impale him on the many spikes that covered the front of his body. Ray gave a very manly yelp and let go. He felt his bones and tendons in his own hand coming apart as he ripped it free from the entangling projections on Bloodhound's spikes. Ray went into a series of high, body-twisting kicks which connected with a brutal, sickening, thudding sound... to Ray's detriment rather than his opponents. Though he could feel the flesh and bone knitting back together, he knew that would be his last such display for a while.

"That all you got?" Bloodhound growled.

"You know it isn't," Perfect said, to Ray. "You've got to do it."

"I can't," Ray said raggedly. He limped backwards as Bloodhound advanced on him. "Not yet."

"When, then?" Perfect said. "He's already killed five men tonight like they were nothing... what do you think he'll do to me if you go down?"

"Alright!" Ray screamed. "Alright."

He forced himself to stand tall. He puffed out his chest and spat a gout of fire right in Bloodhound's face. The Bone Lord instinctively raised his arms to protect himself, but straightened himself and began to laugh, waving his arms to put out the smouldering flames.

"You think you can hurt me?" he mocked. "You think you can burn me? You..."

He stopped boasting, and stared instead in wide-eyed horror as ugly blue flames began to run along his arms. He began to scream... a high-pitched inarticulate scream. The fire raced everywhere, until he was enveloped in a deadly blue corona of it.

Perfect and Ray watched, dumbstruck, as his flesh blackened and peeled off the misshapen, spiky skeletal structure beneath... a skeleton that was still screaming. Despite the inherent horror of the situation, Perfect noted how twisted and oversized the bones had become, even ignoring the thorny protrusions. There was nothing human in their shape or arrangement. Nothing natural had ever grown, or could ever grow, that resembled the thing at the heart of the blue blaze.. and that was more frightening to Perfect than anything else about what she'd witnessed.

Then the bones, too, were consumed by the fire and the thing that had been Bloodhound collapsed into a heap of black ash. The screaming stopped, as abruptly as a dropped call.

"Does that... usually... do that?" Perfect asked.

"No," Ray said. "What the hell was that? What happened?"

"I don't know," Perfect said. "But... I think we won."