Star Harbor Nights

Crescent Bay was a city of bright lights and big dreams. There were other "cape towns" in the world, other places that welcomed and celebrated the diversity of superbeings, but Crescent Bay was the city of super celebrity and mutant chic. Seemingly immune to the cultural backlash of the eighties and early nineties, the city's de facto nobility included superpowered scientists, reality show stars, musicians, poets, politicians, and even restauranteurs... and of course, superheroes.

Over this city moved a young woman, suspended in the air. She wore a lightly padded navy blue body suit with a black domino mask, as well as black boots and glooves. The waist, neckline, and accessories were trimmed in red fire, the color of her hair.

She was what is commonly called a mutant, though if you left out the costume she didn't look the part. Her powers were mental, and the biological changes which supported them were less obvious  than a thick scaly hide or extra arms would have been. Perhaps her red hair was a bit too intensely red, perhaps her pale blue eyes burned a bit too coldly bright... perhaps there was just a sort of aura about her of otherness, but if so, the differences from the accepted range were subtle and hard to quantify.

Her name was Allison Powers. She had not been born in the city. Like so many others with genetic gifts, she'd come here in pursuit of her dreams. One of these was to be a superhero... a protector of the innocent... a righter of wrongs... a thwarter of evil.

Thus far, she'd been enjoying limited success in this endeavor... or rather, limited opportunities. There just didn't seem to be a whole lot of evil that needed thwarting, at least not from her. To be sure, Allison had seen a few monster attacks and supervillain battles, but from a distance... by the time she got close enough to the fracas to figure out how to best use her powers, things were usually under control. The Pantheon, one of the oldest and most respected superteams in the country--even the world--made its home nearby, and they tended to deal with the most dire threats quickly and efficiently.

Somehow, she knew deep down inside that her luck was about to change. She'd had a feeling about this night... not a good feeling, or a bad felling, either, but a charged-up sort of feeling. Prescience wasn't numbered among her talents, but like all people she had hunches, and she'd had a hunch as she put on her suit that this was The Night. Her night.

A few hours of making low passes over the familiar city streets had done a lot to dull that feeling. At that moment, she would have given anything for a mere mugging... or convenience store robbery... or a jewelry store with the iron grating torn off and plate window smashed open, alarm clanging away as four figures climbed inside... which was exactly what she found herself flying over when she shook away her reverie.

Cursing her inattentiveness, Allison doubled back and went down into a steep decline, putting herself into a hovering position a few feet above the street in front of the Olivia Street Jeweler's. Like most stores, the shop was well-lit even at this hour to discourage stealthy intruders. The quartet who'd invaded it now clearly had no concerns about being seen or recognized, and Allison did in fact recognize them.

Four figures in matching white body armor, with insignia revealing their respective identities: Heart, Spade, Diamond, and Club. They were collectively called the Aces. She knew them a little. They were supposed to be quadruplets, if the stories were true.

The four Aces went about their larcenous business without sparing her a single glance. Allison mentally reviewed what she knew about them.

Spade, the largest of the group, was all muscle. He carried a black shield in the shape of his chosen suit. He'd been known to use it like a ram, but tonight it was slung on his back. He used both black-gloved fists to scoop up ropes of pearls and gold chains from smashed display cases. The rumor among the cape scene was that his bulky white armor was equipped with micro-servos that amplified his strength. In the unearthly stillness of the night, Allison thought she could hear a tiny whine each time he moved, and thought the rumors were probably true.

His brother Club was likewise muscular, though not quite as massive. He held in his hand a long black rod capped with a trefoil head resembling the symbol from which he took his name.. his "club", though it functioned more like a mace. Allison knew it was designed to give off a stunning charge upon impact.

She'd always thought it looked vaguely obscene.

There was Heart, the disciplined one. She was agile and coordinated, a martial artist and gymnast without peer. Her armor was not as heavy or complete as that of her siblings. It was lighter, and the joints were soft and flexible to allow full freedom of movement. From the flexible red sandal-shoes that encased her feet to the padded fingerless gloves that graced her hands, her outfit made it clear that it was her own unenhanced body that was the weapon. The previous times Allison had seen her, she'd moved with a marked and fluid grace, but her movements tonight were jerky, puppet-like. After looking at Heart, Allison realized there was something off about all of them... it was just most pronounced in her case.

Then there was Diamond, the woman whose sparkling intellect had fashioned the quartet's armor and weapons. She kept herself in good shape but lacked the physical gifts of her siblings. It hardly mattered, though, for she was well armed with gimmicks and gadgets. If the four were in possession of their own minds, Allison would probably have most cause to fear Diamond... but that being the case, they probably wouldn't have been robbing a jewelry store.

The quartet were supposed to be heroes.

Though not as well-developed as her other gifts, Allison was something of a mind reader. Determined to find the cause behind their strange behavior and avoid any unnecessary violence, she reached out with her nascent telepathy. She felt... something. It was hard to quantify. It was almost, but not quite, nothing. When she "looked" carefully, she "saw" the dimly glowing embers of a sleeping mind, but without even the normal sparks of dreaming. She reached out with a mental prod, trying to stir the embers of the nearest Ace, the athletic Heart. For the briefest sliver of time, Allison felt success as the woman's powerful spirit rallied... but whatever force had enslaved these four heroes responded quickly by locking down Heart's mind even tighter, shutting Allison out.

At the same moment, Heart looked up and her empty, unblinking eyes locked with Allison's. There was no recognition in them.

Certain now that a fight was coming, she touched down on the concrete; she couldn't lift her own weight and do much else at the same time. With a deep calming breath, Allison keyed up her psychic powers to aid her in combat. The telekinetic power suffused her body like an invisible aura, making her stronger and faster as her mind amplified the force of her muscles. It would also help cushion any blows.

She had her field centered and grounded just in time. Heart vaulted the broken window quickly and came at her with mechanical swiftness and precision. The kick she aimed at Allison's skull was expertly performed, but with none of the spirit, none of the... well... heart that she normally would have put into it. Even as Allison ducked and twisted aside, the martial artist folllowed with a pair of rapid palm strikes, but there was no feeling of flow to the maneuvers. Allison could have simply avoided them as well, but instead she countered with a blow of her own, lashing out with an unfocused wave of psychic force that knocked Heart's arms wide and made her stagger back.

Now that Allison had a little breathing space, she was able to concentrate enough to put together a more solid blast, channeling her psychokinetic abilities into a single lance-like thrust in the center of the disoriented Ace's chestplate. The woman went flying like a cue ball back into the store.

Spade and Club looked up from their pillaging simultaneously, robotic-like. The Aces were said to share a unique rapport that allowed them to coordinate their actions on an almost superhuman level, but this was something else again. They were not moving as individuals at all. Even their legs pumped and pounded the ground in unison as they stepped through the smashed window, lowered their shoulders, and charged at her. This actually made their attack slightly clumsy, as Spade had a naturally longer stride. Whoever was pulling their strings was not being terribly sophisticated about it.

That wouldn't stop the pair of them from pounding her into a pulp, of course, if she just stood there thinking about it.

Allison waited until the last moment, when the two heroes (and who--or what--ever was controlling them) were fully committed to the charge. She bunched her legs up beneath her, kicking off from the ground as the same time that she pushed down with her mind. It wasn't flight, but a fantastic leap that turned into a back flip, her trailing feet catching the charging pair in their faces. The projected psychokinetic field kept her from feeling the impact even as her feet hit the stampeding crime fighters like a ton of bricks.

She didn't have time to appreciate the full effect on her opponents, though, for midway through her flip a red-sheathed foot struck her in the back. She heard bones crack, but she knew they belonged to Heart, who had lashed out with more force than her body could withstand. If not for her suit's padding and the bolstering field of psychic energy, Allison knew she'd have been crippled or worse.

Allison allowed herself to move with the force of the kick, putting some space between her and the other combatants before she caught herself in mid-tumble--the advantages of psychokinesis, again--and set herself gently down on her feet. Heart was standing, clearly favoring her left foot. Her brothers flanked her, both looking slightly dazed but still physically functional. Their faces were bloody.

The fight was getting serious. Like horror movie zombies, the heroes would keep fighting until they were too damaged to move. The controller was evidently willing to sacrifice a few pawns. Presumably, at least one brainwashed hero would be needed to carry away the loot, but that meant that he or she still had three fully functioning fighters who could be made to break themselves upon Allison in order to bring her down.

"Sorry, guys," Allison said ruefully, concentrating to build up her power. "I can't beat the three of you in a fair fight, so..."

The three of them charged. Allison reached out with her mind and with a great mental flick, she threw Heart high into the air. There was no way Allison could consciously levitate the fully grown armored woman while simultaneously fighting off the others, but a single powerful upward thrust would get her out of the fight (and keep her from permanently injuring her leg), allowing Allison a small span of time to deal with the boys.

"...let's forget about fairness," she finished, just as Spade and Club came upon her.

What followed was a dizzying exchange of blows. In less time than it takes to tell it, Allison ducked under Club's energy mace, turned aside a punch from Spade, then aimed a knife-like two-finger strike at the shoulder joint of his armor before whirling away just in time to avoid another club-swipe. She was rewarded with an oddly flat howl of pain. She'd put all of her strength--mental as well as physical--behind the strike, and when she turned back to face Spade she could see his right arm was limp.

That didn't stop him from swinging it at her... it just made the attempt laughable. Feeling a serious need to wrap things up, Allison caught the wildly-swinging limb and rocked her weight backwards on her heels. Digging deep into her psychic energy reserves, she lifted the injured Ace off the ground with her mind, and swung him around by the arm with her purely physical strength. He struck Club with all of his weight, sending him sprawling before he rebounded away. Allison was knocked off balance by the force of the impact, so she let go of the Ace's now badly over-extended arm and allowed him to drift, still held aloft by her mind, a few feet away... right beneath the plummeting Heart. His mentally-buoyed body broke her fall, and they fell together in a messy heap.

Club was up and on her in a flash, though. Free to give him her full attention, if even for just a few seconds, she darted aside from his staggering charge and wrenched his favored weapon out of his hands with her mind then walloped him with it. Outside his gloved hands the stunner didn't function, but it was still an effective bludgeon. It would have been more useful, though, if he took any action to defend himself... if he'd try to block or catch the swinging club instead of wading through its blows. She had no interest in beating him into submission.

With a sudden inspiration, she shot out her hand and struck the hero's chestplate with her open palm. He stopped moving, or rather, his armor did. Her psychokinetic power coursed through it, locking down the joints. She couldn't afford to hold him like that, not when his teammates were doubtless moments away from throwing their battered bodies back into the fight, so she squeezed and wrenched the flexible plating into less flexible shapes, trapping him in position. She had no doubt that he'd keep struggling against the impromptu bonds until either they gave or he did, but she couldn't help that. She could only try to win this fight quickly. She could possibly use the same trick on Spade... if she blew out his motors, it would even be easier... and then she could hold Heart safely aloft until she found something to bind her with.

She spun about to face the remaining two combatants, who had gotten shakily to their feet. She meant to smack them back down with a broad kinetic wave, but a sudden burning pain in her shoulder told her she'd forgotten something. Lost in the moment and fighting three potentially deadly opponents, she'd overlooked the fourth.

Whoever was calling the shots had finally brought Diamond into play. The inventor's ruby red laser beam, which was generated from a cluster of five emitters in a diamond-shaped stud on her glove, had caught Allison off guard. Her kinetic field had dampened the energy somewhat, but it still burned through the layers of her costume to sear her skin. Allison's attempted attack on the other two Aces came off as a feeble shadow of what it should have been, barely shaking them.

Before she could react further, a sustained red beam shot out of the emitters on Diamond's glove and struck Allison on the chest, burning another diamond-shaped hole in her suit. She bit back a scream of pain and focused on the five overlapping beams, on the point at which they struck her body. The same psychokinetic power that could throw a grown man like a ragdoll could be used to excite and manipulate streams of particles, as well. The scarlet threads of light seemed to buckle like physical things under the pressure of Allison's mind, an undulating wave rolling back up their length towards Diamond's glove, and then they collapsed into nothingness. Sparks flew from the emitter on Diamond's glove from the feedback.

Undaunted, the young gadgeteer steadied her arm and attempted to activate the beam again. A brilliant shower of sparks flew up the length of her arm towards her shoulder, and then she gave out a very human scream and fell over. In that moment, Allison felt the heroine's mind awaken to pain and the humiliation of bondage. In her now true state of unconsciousness, she had more force of personality than any of the four had yet displayed.

Finally, Allison knew she had a weapon she could use to end the fight decisively.

It was no use trying to ignore the searing pain in her shoulder and chest. Finding she couldn't, she decided instead to use it. She focused her mind on the sensation until it filled her perception. Then spreading her arms out wide, palms up, she pushed the pain from its seat in the center of her being outwards. She visualized it as tiny electrochemical signals, leaping from nerve ending to nerve ending, growing like an avalanche all the time. Then with a primal scream, the energy burst forth from her hands and from her head in three simultaneous bolts of electrical energy. The blasts arced out into the remaining Aces' protective suits, which took the brunt of the assault.

Though none of the other suits had as extensive gadgetry as Diamond's, still Allison saw, heard, and felt circuits melt and fuse as the energy coursed through them. Undirected, the energy would have blasted and scorched its way through the feeble flesh inside the armor, but a part of Allison rode along the front line of each wave, directing it to seek out pathways of metal even where such was not necessarily the path of least resistance.

Finally, from each of the stricken heroes, she heard a resounding pop inside her head as something small and metal burnt itself out at the base of their skulls and each of them fell in turn.

Heart collapsed limply in place.

Spade tumbled over weirdly, his burnt out power armor slowing his fall

Club toppled over backwards, his damaged armor still holding him stiffly in place.

Allison was the last to fall, completely and utterly spent.