The Spectator
Welcome to Olympus City, where super-powers, physics-defying tech, and unearthly creatures are all possible now. Human nature, however, remains unchanged.
No one is born a perfect superhero, but a few strive to live up to the ideal anyway.
Previously: Miranda failed to apprehend a two-dimensional art thief. The Golden Gladiator succeeded where Ultra Woman did not, but Miranda at least made a new friend afterward.
Warm lights bathed the cast as they took their bows. They had immersed their audience in the timeless tale of Doctor Faustus over the past few hours, and the audience now immersed them in sustained applause.
Miranda was part of the latter group. She, too, sprang to her feet and clapped. The cast had more than earned it. She remembered standing on the floorboards of this thrust stage, under those lights, the cheers flowing from multiple directions as the cozy auditorium of the Aeschylus Theatre enveloped her. It was the comfiest of blankets.
After the applause finally died down and the cast withdrew to their dressing rooms, Miranda glanced at her phone for the first time since intermission. No breaking news updates. No urgent messages from her teammates. The absence of notifications provided some relief.
Stowing the phone, she turned to her friend Charlotte. “Isn’t this such a nice theater? It’s the sort of stage you can wear like a glove.”
“Yeah, I see why you like it.” She gave an appreciative nod while betraying no desire to slip the glove on.
Charlotte looked like she could carry a movie and used to possess such ambitions, but now she was content to blend in with the audience. Not everyone was willing to sell their souls to achieve stardom.
Miranda wasn’t either. She once received an offer to do just that two years ago. Tuck Lewis, an actor she had idolized, had offered to get her a leading role in a new Robin Hood series in exchange for curtailing her Ultra Woman activities. Miranda had declined the Faustian bargain. She also declined to ever watch that Robin Hood show, which had indeed made a star of its leading lady.
As they exited the auditorium, Miranda glanced back at the stage one more time. It beckoned her, offering comfort and refuge, teasing endless opportunities to disappear into various characters and provoke laughter, tears, all sorts of emotions.
She thought she could have pulled off the Good Angel in Faustus, not necessarily any better or worse than the actress in this production, but ideas had come to Miranda as she watched.
Well-wishers lingered in the lobby, waiting for a chance to congratulate the cast after they got out of costume and makeup and purged every last vestige of their respective characters, thus maintaining the integrity of the fourth wall. That barrier remained sturdy indeed as the minutes ticked on, but Miranda knew a few of the actors and wanted to say hello. She had infrequent opportunities to renew her regional theatre ties these days. Even devoting a few hours to watching a play induced some guilt. Someone, somewhere in the city might have needed her, and here she was: taking in a show and hanging out with a new friend.
The nerve of me, she thought, trying to convince herself she was being ridiculous—without much success.
Miranda, semi-consciously, had picked out a waiting spot near a tall, wide window that offered a clear view of the sidewalk outside. The matinee had killed the afternoon, but ample sunshine remained.
Another theater was letting out across the street, and traffic was picking up. Pedestrians, especially the younger ones, glanced at the sky from time to time, then slumped in disappointment when they found no one soaring above the buildings. Miranda wanted to give them a show. Perhaps later.
“You don’t miss it at all?” Miranda asked. “Not even a little?”
“Nope.” Charlotte shook her head. “I am completely done.”
Miranda couldn’t wrap her head around it. It was fascinating. To have committed to a goal for so long, to have invested so much time and energy, to have sacrificed so much in the pursuit, and then to just … walk away. A few years ago, Miranda would have judged her, would have assumed Charlotte simply didn’t have what it takes. But now the choice struck her as brave.
“It’s so nice to watch a play and just enjoy it,” Charlotte added, letting out a small laugh, a release of whatever tension her previous ambitions had introduced.
Miranda’s forehead wrinkled, and her mouth opened slowly. “When did you know you were done?”
Charlotte turned to the window, jaw tightening, lightness departing. The question was more personal than Miranda had expected, and it evidently required a ruling on whether Charlotte knew her well enough yet. All of which intensified Miranda’s curiosity.
Miranda glanced to the side, giving Charlotte space to decide how much to share, and a glance was all it took to establish eye contact with someone else—the play’s director.
Evelyn beamed as she crossed the lobby. Miranda reciprocated, concealing all traces of guilt, because even though Ultra Woman had recently saved Evelyn from a wannabe supervillain, that same wannabe had already transformed Evelyn’s colleague into a jigsaw puzzle and destroyed a handful of the pieces. The scientists at Hephaestus Enterprises still hadn’t figured out a way to restore him. His unfortunate condition wasn’t Miranda’s fault at all, nor did his treatment fall anywhere near her area of expertise.
But guilt didn’t care. Someone had transformed a man into a jigsaw puzzle while Ultra Woman was elsewhere.
“Hey, great show,” Miranda said. “I’d say it’s the best Faustus I’ve ever seen, but it is the only one I’ve seen. Still excellent, though.”
“I’ll take it,” Evelyn said, cheekbones rising higher. “Thank you so much for coming.”
Miranda wondered if any other wannabe villains struck while she was watching the play.
“Of course. Oh, this is my friend Charlotte. Charlotte, meet the director.”
Evelyn and Charlotte exchanged friendly hellos and shook hands.
“Really enjoyed the show,” Charlotte said. “The cast nailed it. Your Mephistopheles especially. Very convincing portrayal of evil.”
Miranda disagreed. She had witnessed murder and fought destructive sociopaths. She had gazed into the eyes of people whose souls had sunk to oppressive depths. The actor could command a stage and enthrall an audience, but he knew nothing of evil.
She kept these opinions to herself, her gaze drifting toward the window.
A second too late.
An earthquake rocked the lobby. It alarmed everyone but injured no one. The odds of it being a natural earthquake were too slim to even consider. Miranda thought it might be that guy Ken and Alyssa had fought last week—the Terran, they had called him. He had gotten away and laid low since, and Miranda castigated herself for not doing more to track him down.
It wasn’t the Terran. The culprit rampaged out the window, the window Miranda had taken her eyes off of. Clodhopper Lummox, the media called him—a seven-foot-tall brute with immense strength, mostly in his giant feet, the result of having stepped in electrified hair-thickening shampoo. Miranda had tangled with him before. She had looked into his eyes and observed a depravity that unsettled her own soul.
Clodhopper Lummox stomped his massive boot down in the middle of traffic. Cars jumped from their parking spots, and pedestrians stumbled. The brute lifted his knee for another stomp, and Miranda noticed the cracks spreading across the window.
“Get back!” she said, pulling Charlotte away with just below super-strength.
The glass shattered and clinked along the floor. A breeze blew through the lobby.
Lummox roared with laughter as people shrank from his might. As far as Miranda could tell, that’s all this ever was to him—a laugh. He delighted in feeling superior to people who had never stepped in electrified hair-thickening shampoo, and Miranda had delighted in humbling him on previous occasions. She would delight in it again momentarily. She thought of a few quick excuses and selected one.
Right before she could deploy the excuse, an emerald laser shot down from the sky and pounded Lummox in the chest.
Ultra Woman wasn’t needed after all. The professional had arrived.
The Golden Gladiator dove to the street, maneuvering with the surreal elegance of an armored acrobat. Jet boots connected gracefully with the pavement, and Carey met his opponent with a lopsided grin.
“Hey there. You’re a big one, aren’t you?”
Lummox raised his knee and launched his boot at the gleaming target.
Carey caught the boot, digging his gauntlet into the heel. “What’ve we got this time? Selective giantism producing superior strength in the lowest extremities? That’s certainly different. But the bullying looks the same to me. Take a load off, big fella.”
The gauntlet crackled with emerald energy. Sparks ran up Lummox, knocking him out and frying his bushy hair.
Applause erupted from both sides of the street. Carey waved, reassuring everyone that Olympus City was safe on his watch.
Miranda, remembering that she was standing on the sidelines and not in the middle of the action, joined the applause. It was a strange out-of-body experience. She thought about how she might have taken down Lummox. Not as quickly as Carey did, that much was certain.
“Are you okay?”
Charlotte directed the question at Evelyn, who had withdrawn from the window even before it shattered, her eyes wide and haunted. Miranda understood what memories this was dredging up. Ultra Woman had shown up only at the end of that incident, in time but not fast enough.
Evelyn firmed up a smile. “Yes, of course. Just thinking about the insurance headaches that window will cause. Excuse me.”
She went to check on the other people in the lobby. No one was harmed, just a mix of rattled and excited.
Charlotte was neither. If the incident had fazed her at all, she hid it well. “So, which show was better?” she asked.
An answer immediately sprang to mind, but Miranda shifted so her toes were no longer pointing at the street.
“I’ll take theatre any day,” she lied.
Next: The Pestilential Prison