The Perils of Hypatia 1-1: Vigilante - Qu'est-ce-que c'est? - Now complete!

[Damselbinder]

Scandal! Corporate tax evasion on an unprecedented scale! Shadowy hedge-funds and offshore accounts; bribery and blackmail and a legion of defrauded investors baying for blood. Behold! A new district attorney in Orange County, where lay the nexus of this web of sin, swearing that this black mark on American capitalism - normally so respectable, so fair, and so morally pure - would not go unavenged.
“Egads, boys,” said the new OC DA to his cringing underlings, in a manner which was not necessarily entirely diegetic, “all this complicated financial stuff is fine and dandy, but that’s not going to hold the attention of the modern American public! I know it’s only 2007 and no-one’s invented TikTok yet, but since the turn of the century attention spans have fallen 46%! If we’re going to maintain public interest, we need… a villain.”


Enter Nigel Rathbone: high-financin’ fat-cat, unabashed bastard and, in his interactions with his fellow man pretty close to a 21st century, pre-ghost Scrooge. The manager of a range of hedge-funds, slush funds, and with more offshore accounts to his name than a thousand David Camerons combined, Rathbone was infamously nasty in financial circles, but wasn’t the sort of person who usually ended up as a household name. His primary vice was avarice, not pride, so he was happy to build up his hoard in secret. Unfortunately for Rathbone his secondary vice was racism, so after one particularly vile outburst he had been sued by an Hispanic employee in the late 90s. This was the only reason that the average joe had heard of him.


For that reason when investigators discovered that he was implicated in the Orange County Hedge Fund Scandal of ‘07 (as it would come to be known), there was a general mood of delight. Of things such as these whole careers were made; and everyone expected Rathbone to have an example made of him. The DA gleefully agreed to prosecute. A crack team of lawyers was assembled to make sure Rathbone wouldn’t have a hope in hell of escaping public wrath. Rathbone himself, allegedly, joked about how long he was likely to last in prison. So quite a few people were miffed when the jurors at Rathbone’s trial returned a unanimous verdict of not-guilty. It had all the makings of a darkly amusing public farce. A major twist took place, however, when Rathbone - having waved to the cameras, and having said something about his (Jewish) lawyer which he, and only he, supposed was terribly funny - died. He had been shot in the back of the head.


It was pretty much at this point that the matter stopped being funny.


A young officer named Sasha had been standing next to Rathbone when he was shot. She was a year out of the academy, and was known to her colleagues as pleasant and competent, but too shy about dispensing violence for their liking. She’d just been trying to keep the media from crowding Rathbone too much, and had turned around to check on his safety at the very moment he’d been killed. Sasha had never seen anyone die before. She had never even seen a dead body before. She was told later that she had frozen for several seconds, but she didn’t remember that. She only remembered someone shoving her over, and almost being trampled by the panicking crowd. She remembered her sergeant’s round, red face as he asked her questions she couldn’t process and she remembered that he called her useless when she stammered over her apology.


By the time she had a clear sense of where she was, Sasha was sitting on the courthouse steps, where some relatively well meaning EMT had draped a blanket over her shoulders. The crowd had been dispersed, there were lines of police tape warding off anyone from approaching. Sasha noticed a few officers through the windows of nearby buildings, hunting for the murderer. She noticed a funny, metallic smell, and realised that some of Rathbone’s blood had spattered into her nostrils. She fainted, but because she was already sitting down it just looked like she was resting her head on her knees, and nobody noticed. She awoke about a minute later, even more disoriented than before. She wanted to cry, or be sick, or something, and wondered what the hell she’d been thinking when she signed up to be a police officer. She heard someone saying her name (“Officer Seyrig”), and she felt her stomach and her bowels constricting inside her, felt a cold wave of cortisol diffusing into her body, because it was - it all was - her fault somehow, if not that Rathbone had been shot, then that his murderer had not already been apprehended, and surely whoever had said her name was explaining this to her superiors. Sasha heard footsteps near her, and she looked up.


It was evening. The sun was low, the sky was a mix of orange and pink; a sweet, rich, soothing melange. The air was cold, but a nice cold; the cold of a clear night unfolding on a summer day, the cold at the end of a long day at the beach. In this light, and in this coolness, and against the richness of this sky, stood a woman. Her name was Cecily, but about seventeen months earlier she had needed an alias. It had been completely off-the-cuff, but had she agonised over the matter for days Cecily would not - she felt - have been able to come up with a better name than ‘Hypatia’.


There was an air of refinement about every aspect of her appearance. She was quite tall, but by no means towering; slender, but by no means waifish; pale, but by no means colourless. Every part of her had been tastefully proportioned, in a fashion that would never be passé. The tapering width of her marble shoulders; the elegance of her swanlike neck; the slim curve of her figure; the silkiness of her long, bronze-red hair. Her features were sophisticated, a little sharp, and a little sweet; with just a touch of an unusual, even elfin quality to her soft smile, and to her wide, bright-blue eyes.


But Sasha could not see Hypatia’s eyes. She wore a black mask over most of the upper half of her face, from the bridge of her nose to her forehead. Over her eyes was a red, one-way gauze that made her expression inscrutable; even fearsome if that was what Hypatia wished. Her trim figure was clad in a leotard, somewhere between the thickness of lycra and of leather, mostly red. From Hypatia’s navel to her neck there was a triangular-ish section, cut across with a red ‘v’ just above her chest, in a glossy black; and emblazoned on that was a single letter in gold: an upsilon, very much like a capital ‘Y’. Hypatia’s tall legs were made to look even taller in a pair of long, heeled, black boots, ending in a slight flaring just above her knees. It left her thighs bare all the way up to her hips, in a tastefully sensuous display of the femininity of her body, the shapeliness of her legs, and the creamy, finespun quality of Hypatia’s skin. Partly inborn; partly accident; partly deliberate; partly earned - such was the beauty of Hypatia’s presence. She was a hero, and Sasha did not feel awed by her presence, as much as she felt comforted.


“Good evening, Officer Seyrig,” Hypatia said. Her voice was a little odd; an accent that was a mix of two very different kinds of high-class American. If one listened very, very carefully, one could detect a distant echo of a childhood speech impediment that Hypatia had trained herself out of: an ever-so-slightly greater sibilance on her ‘s’ sounds; somewhat harder ‘d’ and ‘t’ sounds, too. The way she held herself, the precision she seemed to take with not only her words; but her tone and her cadence, suggested a bright, sharp intelligence. “My name is Hypatia. Your captain was kind enough to allow me to enter the crime scene. May I sit with you?”
“Oh, um… of course.”


Hypatia sat on the step just below the one Sasha was on. She crossed her legs with instinctive elegance, the pressure of one limb against the other showing a subtle hint of definition in her thigh muscles. She rested her hands, clad in long, black gloves, on her lap, tenting her fingers. She didn’t say anything to Sasha. She just waited. A superhero at the scene of a grisly murder, and she seemed to have all the time in the world.


“You want to ask me about the shooting, right?”
“May I? I know it must seem a little odd. With the mask and, uh, the sorority logo on my chest.”
Sasha laughed. It was partly genuine, and partly giggly, shaken nerves.
“It’s alright. I - I just don’t know what to say. I was standing there, trying to hold back the press, I turned around, and then Rathbone had his fucking head blown in.” She covered her mouth. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
“For swearing? No need to apologise.” Hypatia smiled. “Being a ‘cape’ doesn’t mean one expects life to be PG-13 all the time. If ever.”


Sasha laughed again, but this time it was all nerves, and Hypatia waited for her to regather herself.
“Forgive me,” Hypatia said, when she judged enough time to have passed. “I hope this doesn’t come across as pedantic, but I just want to be clear. You turned around - and then this man was shot. You didn’t turn because you heard a gunshot?”
Sasha thought.
“Yeah; definitely.” She made a strange movement with her head; like she was for the first time properly registering Hypatia’s presence. “Wait why do - why are you here? You’re a superhero. What’s this got to do with you?”
“Perhaps nothing,” Hypatia replied. “Certain similarities to another case I was involved in. I wanted to see for myself if there was any connection.”
“Right.” Then, hastily: “Oh, god! I’m sorry - I must have sounded so rude! I was just surprised that you - I mean I’m not one of those cops who - I don’t have a problem with superhumans or anything, it’s just - huh?”


Through her stammering, Sasha had not noticed that the noises around her were dimming: the sounds of sirens, of people shouting, of chattering bystanders. The sounds of the streets beyond; heavy traffic; the sounds of chattering crows in a nearby tree, the sounds of babies crying in apartment buildings. The effect was like a morning after a night of heavy snowfall, when all noise nestled into the snow like sleepy field mice.


“Officer Seyrig.” Hypatia still spoke softly. “I don’t take you for a bigot. On the contrary: people like me are strange. Our relationship with the police is strange. Were I in your position, I might find a cape blundering onto my crime scene to be an impertinence. I am grateful to be permitted to be here at all.”
But, in a state of wonder at the magic Hypatia performed, Sasha had hardly been listening.
“Is it you making it quiet?”
“Mmhmm.”
“How? Do you - can you control sound or something?”
“Oh no, nothing that interesting. I’m telekinetic. All I’m doing is willing the air around us to be still.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“I wouldn’t call it… easy, exactly…” Hypatia’s abilities had come a long way since she had taken that name. There were things she could do now that would have been impossible even two years before. But she could hardly bend reality to her whims: exerting her powers over fluids was still tricky. But the exertion was worth it, for Hypatia had discovered early into her career how much a superhero’s success depended on charisma. Not being a boisterous showman like some of her peers, she had to find quieter solutions to the same problems.


“Now, Officer Seyrig -”
“Please, call me Sasha.”
“Sasha,” Hypatia repeated, with a small, warm smile, “if I have you right, you were facing the victim when he was shot.”
“Mm.”
“And he was shot in the back of the head, wasn’t he?”
“I think so. I mean - he was; that’s definitely what CSI said. I just - I don’t remember too well.”
Hypatia stood up. She looked towards the front steps of the courthouse, where the murder had taken place. It wasn’t a huge building, and the entranceway was quite cramped.
“Then the shooter must have been behind Rathbone. That would put them inside the courthouse itself.”
“I guess so. I didn’t see anyone.”
“But someone ought to have done. The security inside the courthouse, or a bystander - the assassin must have been standing out in the open. But no-one did see the murderer, did they? They got away completely clean.”


Hypatia thought. As her concentration was directed elsewhere, the field of silence she’d conjured dissipated, and the world intruded again. But she was so deeply enmeshed with solving this puzzle that she hardly noticed.
“Sasha,” she said, “how was Rathbone standing when he was shot?”
“I don’t really remember.”
“Try. I know it must be an unpleasant memory, but this is important.”
Sasha did as she was asked. “He wasn’t standing still,” she said. “He was walking forward and then -”
“And then what?”
Sasha snapped her fingers. “He stumbled. He stumbled forward just as I looked back at him. I guess he just tripped on something. When he was shot… when he was shot he was shot in the back of the head, but it wasn’t from behind. He was looking down at his feet. He was -” She stopped abruptly.
“What is it?”
“No, I can’t be right. The way I remember it he must have been shot from above. Like, right above him. But you can see that’s not possible.” She pointed at the front of the courthouse. “There’s a canopy right above where he was killed. There’s nowhere he could have been shot from.”
Yet Hypatia was smiling.
“Sasha,” she said, “you have been extremely helpful.” She took Sasha’s hand, warmly shook it. “May I also say: it’s comforting to meet a police officer who seems to abhor violence as you do. Please excuse me.”


She inclined her head slightly, and moved away, making a mental note to check in on Officer Seyrig, surreptitiously, within the next few days. While Hypatia meant sincerely what she had said, she had noticed a certain fragility in this officer, and wanted to make sure she landed on her feet. People could be funny when they saw real violence for the first time. Hypatia knew that from her own experience.


Hypatia approached the front of the courthouse, the place where Rathbone had been killed. His body had since been moved, and there were still investigators milling about, so Hypatia couldn’t get too close. But she was close enough to look for the signs that she sought. Close enough to see the scratches.


No-one who was not looking for them could possibly have guessed their significance. Eventually, ballistics analysts would come to the same conclusion that Hypatia had; that Rathbone had somehow been shot from above. But they could not guess at how this had been possible, could not have supposed that anyone could pull off the shot that had in fact killed Rathbone, a perfect ricochet off five separate surfaces that ended with the bullet embedded perfectly in the back of Rathbone’s skull; leaving five telltale scratches on the walls and pillars of the courthouse.


A superhuman, then. But of what kind? That ‘previous case’ Hypatia had mentioned had been another apparently inexplicable shooting. The Riverside County police had thought a telekinetic had been involved, which was why Hypatia’s advice had been sought. But the ricocheting didn’t quite make sense for someone with powers like Hypatia’s. It was an unsettling thought, but if Hypatia wanted to kill someone stealthily, she could have done so quite easily, even in plain sight; by messing with their brain stem, or stopping their heart or something. No, this was something else.


“Someone with… heightened senses? Great accuracy? Such powers do exist… but it’s not as if they were assassinating a president. Rathbone was just a financier. They could much more easily have killed him on his way to work. Or in his house.” And what was the motive? One of his alleged victims? A business rival hiring an assassin? “Could be… but again: why do it so publicly? Why draw so much attention?”


Hypatia happened to catch sight of herself, reflected in a window. Not for the first time, it occurred to her that it would have been easy for her to look silly: strutting around a grisly crime scene in a mask; in a leotard and thigh-highs. But she pulled it off. It was all about presenting the right kind of theatricality: that’s how she had been able to keep Sasha calm, and take her into her confidence.
“Theatre…!”


It had been staged. Killing Rathbone right as he came out of the courthouse, with violent and thrilling drama, spilling his blood over the door of the place that had failed to mete out justice. It was a kind of brutal work of symbolism. The assassin was not motivated by money; by a grudge; by revenge - at least not revenge exactly. It was out of an offended sense of justice. They were someone a little more like Hypatia herself.
“A vigilante. A superhuman vigilante…!”


She stepped away from the lights of the police cruisers. She peered out into the darkness, wondering if the organiser of this drama had stayed to watch their production play out. There were still some people at the barriers the police had put up, rubbernecking to see what all the fuss was about, and it even occurred to Hypatia that the assassin was among them. From a distance where she could remain in darkness, she peered at them, but wasn’t close enough to see much; and what she did see wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Just people who, quite understandably, felt they were standing at the edge of something important. Eventually Hypatia stopped scanning the little crowd, and swept away into the night: for if she was to confirm her hypothesis, she had much to do.


She did not see that one in the crowd had observed her watching them. She did not see that they made a point of waiting a good minute or so after Hypatia had left before slinking away themselves.
“Hypatia,” this person thought. “Will she be a problem, I wonder?”
____________________________________________________________________________

[Femina]

A good start! I appreciate how Hypatia seems to be a little more of the 'detective' here. A good bit of mystery to kick things off!

[Damselbinder]

“I have searched police records, superhuman registration records in the tri-state area, and even the voluntary ‘open register’; and I could find only three living persons who possess the abilities necessary to have pulled off Nigel Rathbone’s assassination. Of those: one makes their living as a circus performer; one is nearly ninety years old; and one is registered as a superhero in Humboldt County under the name ‘Pinpoint’. From what I can tell, though, they haven't been active for about ten years. If this is a vigilante killing, as I suspect, Pinpoint is probably the best place to start, but my sense is that our assassin isn’t going to be on any records to which I could gain easy access. I’ll do my due diligence on those three, but it won’t be at the top of my priority list.


“I tried looking for similar crimes, starting with the one I consulted on in Riverside. If you recall, the victim was a local villain, a woman responsible for some truly predatory practices: there was even a case of a child dying from a mould infection as a result of her poor upkeep of her properties - from which she somehow escaped any kind of legal penalty. When she was found shot, I don’t think many people were weeping. Like today’s case, the shot would have been impossibly difficult without a superhuman power. But I have my doubts. Today’s crime was deliberately public. In the Riverside case, the victim was shot in her own home, and wasn’t discovered until halfway through the next day.


“I’ve found other cases which fit the pattern of today’s crime much better. Four assassinations: one in Arizona, one in Nevada, and two more in California. The victims were: a policeman cleared of wrongdoing after shooting another officer under highly suspicious circumstances; the CEO of an energy firm following a major oil spill; a member of Arizona’s state legislature who was effectively using her position for insider trading; and - well the last one I’ll get to in a moment, since it doesn’t quite fit the pattern. All these happened within the last few months; and if they do all have the same perpetrator, then that perpetrator is becoming less patient; the time between the crimes is getting shorter.


“Now as to the fourth of the cases I found. For starters, it was the earliest: nearly two years ago now. Secondly, the other victims have all been high-up in the corporate or political classes, whereas this was a much more common or garden criminal. A low-rent gangster - on reflection, a bit of peanut-circuit Milo Patáky, if you take my meaning. If it hadn’t been the earliest example, I’d have dismissed it. But as it stands, I have a… narrative of sorts.


“Our assassin’s actions are motivated by a sense of righteousness. They are targeting either those whom the justice system cannot touch, will not touch, or those who benefit from the law’s incompetence. They began, perhaps, with this criminal, but I don’t think it satisfied them. They thought ‘it didn’t have to be me who stopped that gangster - I should go after people that no-one but me will punish.’


“Parenthetical point. Punishment. Is that how they think of their actions? Do they see themselves as meting out justice on a personal level - that is, are they interested in their victims being given their just desserts, and paying for the evil that they’ve done? Or is it not about their victim, exactly? Is it about maintaining the health of society in a more abstract sense? Hard to say. We’ll return to this later.


“Going back to the victims. A policeman. Then a CEO. Then a politician. Today, someone from the financial world. Our assassin is setting their sights on people who are more likely to be protected by the law when they do wrong. Ah - but today was different, wasn’t it? Rathbone was being prosecuted. Everyone really did seem to expect him to go down. Yet the jury returned quickly with a vote of not-guilty. Still - that seems more like happenstance than corruption. So does our assassin know something that we don’t? Perhaps they’re just arrogant: they just decided Rathbone was guilty and were enraged when he was let free.


“Either way, this was the most brazen attack. They wanted it to be seen. They wanted it to be noticed. If the police haven’t already taken the steps I have, they will soon. If the assassin has such skill, surely they have the skill to make their murders seem less unusual, to avoid drawing attention to themselves. But to the public, this will seem like an isolated incident. It will be about Rathbone, anyway. It won’t be about the assassin, or their cause. Perhaps they were alright with that before, with the other murders… but now they want people to know. Hence the attack on the courthouse steps. Hence the theatre.


“And they’re not finished. The point hasn’t been well-made enough yet. Yes… there’ll be another assassination… and soon. If I can work out the most likely target, I might be able not only to save that target’s life - I may be able to catch the assassin. I must try - before they become more daring!”
“...While you were saying that, I think you were standing by an open window. I think your hair was billowing in a strong breeze, and the moon lit you up all dramatically.”
“Hm? No, I’m just lying in bed with a notebook on my lap.”
“I like my version more. My version goes in your biography. It’ll…” There was brief silence, and then a yawn. “...It’ll sell better.”


Cecily laughed. Her phone had been hovering by her head until then, but now she took it in her hands, pressed it to her chest.
“You’re supposed to be asleep!” Cecily whispered. “I was wittering at you to help you relax. If I’d thought you were actually listening, I probably wouldn’t have come over quite as Sherlock Holmes-ish as I did.”
“Of course I was listening. A superhuman vigilante… . We really don’t need that kind of thing coming back. I don’t know how I feel about you going after someone like that either.”
“I won’t be cavalier.”
“I know. And I have nothing but faith in what you can do, Cecily, but - couldn’t this be one of those times where we take something on together?”
“Darling, you’re halfway across the country. Your would-be Olympians need their coach.”
“I’ll be back in two weeks!”
“I’m not sure it can wait that long. I’m all but certain there’ll be another assassination before then.”


There was a pause. Then, quietly, the voice returned.
“Then - then forget this stupid coaching gig. I’ll come back.”
“No. Maria, we agreed. We agreed that we wouldn’t let Hypatia and Freebird be all of what we are. We need to have more… normal lives as well. We need jobs and bills and mortgages and annoying bosses; to be real people, so that when we’re fighting for the people around us those people don’t just exist in the abstract.”
“That sounds familiar…”
“As well it should. These are your arguments; the first time we had this discussion it was you convincing me. And you did convince me. So, sometimes our arrangement isn’t completely symmetrical. Right now your focus is on a very Maria-ish thing. My focus is on a very Hypatia-ish thing. Sometimes it’ll be the other way around.”
“That’s fine, Cecily. That’s very wise, and very rational, and very proper.”
“Oh dear,” Cecily replied. “You only say I’m being ‘rational’ when you’re annoyed with me.”
“I’m not annoyed with you - but I want you to understand what my priorities are. See on the one side, there’s the need for our lives not to be too rarefied by the superhero thing, and to have the right balance between being a couple and our careers and whatever, and to make sure we don’t start feeling like we’re above everyone. That’s really, really important. You’re right - I mean… I’m right. Now, on the other side, I have ‘you being alive’. Do you see where I’m coming from?”
“Maria…” Cecily spoke softly. “We don’t go into battle together all that often…”
“I know. I know… we’re both in danger all the time, I get that. It’s just… the word ‘assassin’. We’ve both been doing this long enough that the idea of being killed in battle… in an ugly way it’s become almost normal? Like you accept that any time you go outside you might die in a traffic accident. But the idea of some coward just… killing you without you even getting to look at them… that frightens me. It’d be - beneath you!”
“Oh, Maria…”


Cecily turned over, pressed her phone against her ear. She curled herself up in the covers.
“Maria, Maria,” she whispered. “Our Lady of Worrying.”
“Don’t call me that! It’s - a sin, probably.”
“Worried about going against dogma, I see. Perhaps I should call you ‘Our Lady of Being a Big, Smelly Hypocrite.’”
“Okay, I don’t care if it’s a sin or not; it’s just really gross to be compared to the Virgin Mary by your girlfriend!”
“Our Lady of Virgin-Antipathy,” Cecily mumbled, but barely managed to finish the sentence before collapsing into peals of laughter.
“I will never understand your sense of humour,” Maria sighed, but found that she was smiling from ear to ear. She couldn’t actually hear Cecily laughing, because when Cecily was really laughing she was silent; just hunched over and shaking, maybe letting out a slight wheeze every now and again. There was no middle ground. She was either laughing lightly and gracefully like an heiress at a soirée, or she was in the silent hysterics.


“Ahem, ahem - sorry. Back now.”
“Hi.”
“Hi!” Cecily replied, with such warmth that Maria blushed.
“Listen,” she said. “I… I basically am convinced by everything you said - but… if you really think that you need me, you promise to call - in fact it doesn’t even have to be me. Call someone.”
“Alright. If I think I’m getting out of my depth, I will.”
“Okay. Okay, fine. Oh fuck!”
“What?”
“It’s nearly midnight… I’m meant to be up at 5…”
“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry! I’ll hang up at once.”
“No, no, it’s okay. I’m glad you talked to me about all this. And I missed you today; and I needed to hear your voice.”
“I missed you too. Thank you for listening. And I really won’t be cavalier with my life. I enjoy it far too much for that.”
“Good. Me too.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“Alright, darling, I’m going to hang up now because otherwise this is going to get a little twee.”
“You’re probably right. Goodnight, Cecily. I love you.”
“I love you too. Goodnight. Remember to bully all your trainees just the right amount.”
“I will.”
“Excellent.”
The two hung up. Cecily’s bedroom was silent.


Cecily stared up at the ceiling for a little while, conscious that she was not getting any closer to falling asleep. She missed her partner; missed her routine with her. She hoped these occasional times apart would not become more than occasional. Cecily liked things to be tidy, and when Maria was away for a long period, everything felt disordered.


It was the assassin too. Too much was up in the air. Too much of what Cecily thought was conjecture. Too much - almost all - was assumption. She needed something concrete before she could rest. A plan.


So she went to her desk, switched on her computer, and after a cursory search that neither her nor Maria’s identities had been blown - an operation so reflexive for a 21st century superhero that was genuinely unaware she was doing it - she began to trawl the news for scandals; for political whitewashes; for justice unfulfilled, and good consciences outraged. She tried to put herself in the mind of this phantom-assassin she had conjured up; tried to imagine which face on the screen she would most like to murder.


There shall be no vulgar suspense. Cecily picked exactly right.

[Damselbinder]

Six days later, on a rooftop in downtown Santa Ana, a brunette woman was standing on a rooftop, looking at the time. She was moderately tall, moderately broad, and dressed in a long, black jacket. Her hair was done up in a tight bun. Her jawline was hard, and sharp. Her eyes were wide, slanted slightly upwards at the outer edges. Her nose was a little longer than average, and her skin a little darker than usual for someone of her ancestry. Her face was reasonably attractive, by conventional standards, but it wasn’t the kind of face one would notice in a crowd. This was by design: she had had a series of minor plastic surgeries to make herself just a little more forgettable. Even her hair colour was meant to serve this purpose: she was a natural blonde, but that stood out a little too much for her purposes. The only really notable thing about her appearance was her finely toned, powerful musculature, and this she hid with her long coat.


“Eleven exactly,” she muttered. Not that late. The party happening in the swanky hotel across the street probably wouldn’t be over for another couple of hours. It was a charity ball, not an all-night-rave, but the stuffed-shirts who went to such things normally didn’t get to go out too often. The one she sought was pushing seventy, but her research suggested he was a bit of a boozer. God knew how long he might keep her waiting.


Did she have to wait? Safest to pick her target off as he was coming out of the gala, sure, but she could always pop him through a window. It would be only a little more difficult, and it would take far less time. Not yet deciding either way, she raised a pair of binoculars to her eyes, and looked inside the hotel.


Jewels. The first thing she noticed as she peered within the rarefied little world was an embarrassment of riches on the necks, the ears, the fingers of the people inside. Sapphires were in season at the moment: pretty little blue eyes winking at her. Diamonds in all shapes and sizes, from tasteful embeddings into silver rings; to massive, witheringly ostentatious necklaces that covered their wearers’ whole busts; glittering and gleaming with such shameless brightness. This, surely, was the simplest, basest motivation to become wealthy: to be able to surround oneself with shiny, beautiful things. She wondered how much human misery had paid for those rocks, in one far-flung part of the world or another, and as she wondered this, it occurred to her that every single person in there probably deserved to die.


“Oh, how do you know that?!” she said, out loud. Who the hell was she to say if wealth was evil or not? Who was she to judge the motivations of these people? Just because they were wearing jewels; just because their motivations for being at a charity event might be insincere. No. Even if she was right that they deserved to die, it would be a coincidence. No. She had to remember her limitations. What she was - what she was ordained to be - was never going to overthrow the order of the world with mass slaughter. She was a tool of precision, if she was anything.


Movement at the hotel’s front door: a few people were coming out. All richly dressed, so all guests of the gala. Mostly faces she didn’t recognise; some local celebrities; some city officials and - oh?

Ah! There he was!


His name was Ben Vogler. He was a successful music producer. His parents were both from Florida, but he had spent most of his life in New York. He’d been born with a split lip, and still bore the faint scar from the surgery to correct it. He had a large mole on his neck, and sometimes touched it when he was nervous. He had a problem with migraines, and a large portion of the photographs of him that were publicly available showed him pressing his fingers to his left temple. Because of these migraines, he had become addicted to prescription painkillers. He would occasionally refer to himself as ‘the Vogler’. He was not well-liked. He was very wealthy. Today, he would die.


The assassin put down her binoculars; raised her rifle: a military surplus M1903 Springfield, a weapon that had been relied upon by generation after generation of American sharpshooter. It wasn’t fancy; it wasn’t complicated - it wasn’t even especially powerful, by the standards of modern weaponry. It didn’t come with a scope as standard, and the assassin had made no modifications to it. It was familiar, and comfortable; like old leather. She had taken hundreds of shots with it, and of the people she had killed, about three-quarters had been with her M1903.


She put the butt of the rifle into the crook of her arm, rested the barrel against the low wall at the edge of the roof. There wasn’t the slightest hesitation, not one wasted movement as she prepared her shot. She didn’t take it immediately: while he was still among others there was some, minimal, risk that she might hit someone else as well as Vogler. So she waited for him to climb into the back of the car that was awaiting him. It made her shot substantially more difficult, but that was of no concern to her. She had no concerns at all, in fact; neither technical, nor moral. There wasn’t a single doubt in her mind that Ben Vogler ought to be killed, and that she had the moral authority to kill him. Her senses were heightened, but her heart rate hadn’t increased at all. She felt peaceful: so peaceful that she closed her eyes. She always closed her eyes before taking a shot.


She saw, in her mind’s eye, the path that her bullet would take. The surface of the world peeled away - all unnecessary detail removed, until all of reality was little more than a red wireframe on a black background, save for her bullet, her target, and anything between them that would affect her shot. She saw how the rifling would be affected by small imperfections in her weapon’s barrel. She saw how the bullet would deflect off the domed surface of a streetlight, how it would go through the car’s back window without shattering it completely, and how it would embed itself into the back of Vogler’s neck. The wound would not be immediately fatal: it would take Vogler about a minute to die. That wasn’t ideal, but it was the only path she could visualise. She began to squeeze the trigger.
“Wait!”


She released the trigger, one-one-thousandth of a second before the rifle would have fired. Something had gone wrong. Or, rather, something would have gone wrong: had she taken the shot, she would have missed. She had lost ‘the path’. But how?


She readjusted her aim. Now she would deflect her bullet from the stone wall of the hotel itself, hitting Vogler through the window. For a second, the path re-established, but before it could fully realise, it had gone again.
“So nothing’s wrong with my rifle…” If there would have been a jam, she wouldn’t have been able to visualise a path at all. So something was going to happen. Something was going to get in the way of her shot. A bird? But the chances of it blocking both ‘paths’ was infinitesimal. Something else, then. Something larger. “But if I hadn’t lost ‘the path’, I’d have made my shot fifteen seconds ago. The event which makes me miss should have already happened by now!”


Vogler’s car was beginning to pull away. If she wanted him dead now, she would have to act within the next few seconds. So she vaulted up onto a higher ledge, and aimed her rifle to hit Vogler dead on, with no deflections or banking. Just a simple shot through the front window of the car, hitting Vogler in the chest, rather than trying to aim for his head. She raised her rifle. She shut her eyes. She saw ‘the path’ in her mind, the word collapsing into a skeleton of itself, save for the man she sought to kill. But again, the path vanished at the very last moment - only this time it was too late for the assassin to stop herself. Her rifle fired - and she missed.


Some passersby heard the sound of a shot. One or two even looked roughly in the direction of the assassin. But since the bullet never actually hit anything, no-one paid the noise much mind. The bullet had only emerged about fifteen metres from the assassin’s rifle before coming to a dead stop in mid-air. But it didn’t stay motionless for long. It travelled back, moving at a slight upward angle, then fell into an outstretched hand, clad in a long, black glove.


The assassin swung her rifle around, and saw her foe perched on the ledge of the building next to her, about six metres higher up than the assassin. Her bronze hair looked bright orange in the glow of the streetlights. Her golden sigil stood out starkly against the muted colours of her leotard. The gauze over her eyes, slightly reflective on its outer surface, shone in the darkness. The assassin did not know if there were such a thing as a nocturnal hawk, but that was what Hypatia reminded her of.


“I am Hypatia.”
“I know of you. I saw you looking around when I killed Rathbone. I’m… very impressed that you tracked me here, Hypatia.”
“Is there a name by which I can call you?”
“...Pathfinder.”
“Then, Pathfinder, I must ask you to throw down your weapon.”
“I can’t do that. I have nothing against you, Hypatia, but I won’t allow myself to be captured. Leave me to my work, hero, and I’m happy to leave you to yours.”
“You are a murderer. Whatever the intentions behind those murders, you cannot be allowed to walk free.”


Hypatia had chosen her words deliberately. She wanted to see what Pathfinder’s reaction would be to such a blunt accusation. Anger? Vitriol? Denial? Some kind of petty, adolescent nihilism? But, if anything, she just looked faintly disappointed.
“I take it you worked out whom I was targeting,” Pathfinder said.
“Ben Vogler, the music producer. Yes?”
“Mm. How did you work that out?”
“He fit your pattern. He’s wealthy, powerful, and escaped justice for his malfeasances. He was due to make an appearance at a public event, and I think you want your assassinations to be public.”
“‘Malfeasances’? That’s a hell of a neutral word for what that man got away with!” She looked out over the street, in the direction that Vogler had been driven off.


“Those migraines of his, all that prescription medication he takes: they’ve frayed away his temper to almost nothing. Most of the time he’s a hair’s breadth from going ballistic. But he’s controlled enough that he doesn’t take his anger out on anyone that ‘matters’. Menial staff. Migrant workers. Sometimes he even hires prostitutes just to beat them. And if any of them do try to bring him to justice, he either shackles them with a quick payoff and an NDA, or he has them intimidated into silence.”
“He seems like an evil man.”
“Then you shouldn’t have stopped me from killing him!” Pathfinder turned on Hypatia. “Are you so conventional, Hypatia, so trapped in the usual hypocrisies that you can’t see that I am a force for good?”
“I see that anyone who reduces justice to a bullet-hole is unlikely to stay a force for good for very long.” Behind her mask, Hypatia narrowed her eyes. “If we permit you, we permit every frothing neighbourhood vigilante who finds his darker-skinned neighbours ‘threatening’ when he sees them socialising on street corners.”
“You mock me, Hypatia?!”
“I rebuke you, Pathfinder. I… am willing to believe that you are sincere, that your actions are not guided by malice. But you cannot be permitted to go free. Do you surrender?”
“I do not.”
“Then prepare yourself.”
Pathfinder raised her rifle.
Hypatia gathered her powers.


It began.


Hypatia had no intention of leaving her perch. She carved great chunks from the nearby brickwork, and launched them at high speed towards her foe, fast enough and hard enough to break bone. But with precision that no normal human could possibly have equalled, Pathfinder shot Hypatia’s projectiles out of the air, the hollow-point bullets in her rifle blowing each chunk of brickwork into harmless dust.


“Extraordinary accuracy! Extraordinary speed!” Hypatia was astounded. It was not just her aim. It was her ability to fire, reload, and fire again at such a staggering rate. The speed of her movement was just about human, but she truly needed no time at all to line up her shots. And, in the half-second where Hypatia’s barrage slowed, Pathfinder went on the offensive, firing round after round after round at her enemy. The bullets bounced at strange angles, sometimes two - sometimes three times, making the timing of anyone trying to anticipate her all but impossible.


Yet even as she fired, Pathfinder knew these shots would miss. She did not understand how, but she knew that there was no ‘path’ to hitting Hypatia that she could find. She holstered her rifle, and drew instead two Trejo Modelo machine pistols, the only automatic weapons of which she could wield two at once that would not become impossible to aim. She squeezed the triggers, again using every surface that could conceivably be helpful to attack Hypatia from as many sides as possible. But every bullet went wildly off target, embedding themselves harmlessly in a wall, or just skittering to a halt on the ground.
“She’s telekinetic, obviously… but it’s more than that. She isn’t just throwing up an omni-directional barrier and waiting me out. It’s more active than that. What sort of trickery is this?!”

Hypatia did not have the sheer power that some of her contemporaries did. She could not stand up to this onslaught on strength and grit alone. But her early battles, when she had first taken the name ‘Hypatia’ had primarily been against gunmen, gunmen wielding even more powerful weapons than Pathfinder. She had learned to cast her power out as a kind of ‘net’, insinuating its presence into the air around herself. It was not as simple as creating a ‘shield’ or ‘bubble’ - she had to project her will itself about her, projecting the idea of ‘deflection’. So whenever a bullet entered her sphere of influence, the ‘idea’ that Hypatia had projected took effect, sending the bullet away from her. But it did not make her invincible. There were limits to the amount of force she could exert, the amount of thought she could extend to the air about her.


But Pathfinder had limits too. After only about five seconds, both of her ammunition clips were depleted. She attempted to leap for cover behind an air vent, but she had underestimated the swiftness of Hypatia’s reactions. The instant that Pathfinder’s hail of gunfire let up, there was a volley in return.
“Aughh!!” Her own bullets, shot right back at her! Hitting her in four places: the shoulder, the thigh, the cheek, and her right arm. And yet - the injuries weren’t grievous. Only one of them was a remotely serious wound, and a little patching up would see it right. “Her level of power… each bullet is fired with far less power and speed than even a handgun. And assuming that she was deliberately aiming for where she hit, she’s trying not to kill. I can use that against her.” Pathfinder smiled. “There are disadvantages to your sense of ethics, Hypatia!”


Machine pistols reloaded, Pathfinder pulled a grenade from a clip at her belt, tossed it over the air vent she hid behind. It exploded, releasing a thick cloud of black smoke. This wasn’t much of a barrier for Hypatia, however: she simply used her power to throw the smoke aside like she was pulling open a pair of curtains. But in the second it took her to do this, Pathfinder had burst from cover, and again opened fire with her pistols.


“Ngh!” Pathfinder was closer this time, and Hypatia had to put much more focus and strength into her powers to protect herself. As Pathfinder had been counting on, Hypatia couldn’t both absorb all this punishment and meaningfully counterattack at the same time. She had to put all her concentration into defence.


Again, Hypatia only had to last for a few seconds. Once the clips were expended and the gunfire subsided, she took advantage of the closer distance, and simply willed the pistols to leap from Pathfinder’s hands. Pathfinder had not expected this - but it suited her purposes just fine. As Hypatia discarded the pistols, she again took some of Pathfinder’s deflected bullets, and shot them out at Pathfinder’s limbs just as she had before. But this time, Pathfinder made no attempt to avoid her at all.


Thigh, shoulder, hip. All three bullets struck, all three leaving bloody gashes in Pathfinder’s body. But as Pathfinder had predicted, the return shots just didn’t have the force to do serious injury. It meant that even as Hypatia was attacking, Pathfinder could draw her M1903, and without even raising it to her eye, she saw a ‘path’. Without the slightest hesitation, she fired. And having done so, she could not understand why Hypatia remained unharmed, and why she herself was falling backwards, wracked with pain, with a bullet wound about three inches above her left breast.


“Unghh… aghhh!!” Pathfinder groaned, stunned by the pain and the force of the impact. She pulled off her coat to inspect the wound, finding that the bullet had gone clean through her. “I’ll live, but - how did she do that? I had a path! How did this happen?!” Gritting her teeth, she looked up at Hypatia, saw the stateliness of her appearance, the impassive neutrality of her shielded eyes, the hint of distaste in the curl of her dark-red lips. She didn’t have a hair out of place.


“Yours is a strange ability,” Hypatia said. “At first, I simply thought you had a preternatural sense of spatial awareness, but it’s more than that. When you were attempting to kill Vogler, I was watching. I intended simply to catch your bullet as it emerged from your gun - but every time I reached out with my powers, you would abandon your shot. It was as though you knew I was there - but you only knew if your shot would miss.”
“She intuited the mechanics of my ability in so short a time? From just observing me preparing my shots?”


“The only way to fool your ability,” Hypatia continued, “is to exploit the fact that you use a rifle. There is a small window of time where it’s too late for you to abandon your shot, but a new obstacle can be put in place to foul it. That is how I stopped your attempt to kill Vogler - and your attempt to kill me. I delayed forming the specific intention of how I was going to retaliate until the last possible moment. Your ability could not predict what I was going to do until I had formed the particular plan to do it - the general idea of ‘I will use her attack against her’ isn’t enough. It cannot actually see the future. It gathers information about the present and extrapolates. Or, at least, that is my assessment. Perhaps I’ve got some things slightly wrong.”
“How did you hit me with such force? The power of your return fire before that was much less than a handgun - but I don’t think the rifle bullet lost any of its power when you hit me. Were you just holding back before?”
“No,” Hyptia replied. “I used the momentum of the shot itself. Willed the bullet to curve around me.” She touched her neck. “It isn’t an easy trick…”
“But you couldn’t - you couldn’t have known that the returning shot would be non-fatal.”
“No, I didn’t know that. I don’t know what you think I am, Pathfinder, but I have had many battles against people wielding deadly weaponry. Very occasionally, that has meant inflicting fatal injury.”
“You lecture me on my methods, but you’re a killer too! You -”
“I am not an assassin! I do not murder from a distance before my foes even know that I am there! I do not strike from the darkness and then walk away unharmed, wrapping myself in self-satisfaction at my own righteousness! I offer my foes a chance to surrender, as I did you. If you really cannot see a difference between us, then that is - unacceptably childish.”


Perhaps it was the pain. Perhaps it was the shock of being identified by an enemy, of having her abilities sussed out in such short order. Perhaps it was the beauty and stately authority of her foe. But for the first time, the very first time since she had taken up her mission, Pathfinder felt a twinge of doubt. But only a twinge. Her eyes flickered down - checking that when she had discarded her coat, it had landed closer to Hypatia than it was to herself. She pressed a concealed switch attached to her right wrist - and the explosives with which she had lined her coat went off.


“Nghh!” At once, Hypatia shielded herself, willing the air around her to hold still, to cushion her from any impact. But she’d overcompensated: the explosives in the coat were of pretty low yield, for it would be stupidly dangerous for Pathfinder to walk around clad in bombs otherwise. The point was that they were bright, they sent out great clouds of billowing smoke, and they had been completely unexpected. Hypatia’s mask gave her eyes some protection, but not much. She retreated, lifting herself back to the perch on which she’d started the battle, raising stray bullets, brickwork, bits of glass - anything she could use as a projectile to keep Pathfinder away from her. But when the smoke cleared, Pathfinder was nowhere to be seen.


“Damn!” Hypatia’s eyes darted around, but she couldn’t find her enemy anywhere. She was wounded, yes, but she was still a sniper, and she had a massive advantage if Hypatia didn’t know where she was. Even taking cover was little use - Pathfinder could easily bank a shot around whatever Hypatia hid behind. She would have to rely completely on her powers when the attack came.


But no attack did come. For about thirty seconds Hypatia thought that Pathfinder had already made her escape - but then she heard her voice.
“Hypatia!” Pathfinder shouted, whence Hypatia could not tell. “You are the winner today. I was no match for you. But this is not over! And I swear this - I will not scurry away far from where you can seek me out. I will kill Ben Vogler - unless you stop me.”
“Pathfinder!” Hypatia called out, but by then Pathfinder really was gone. “Damnation!” she shouted, letting her projectiles fall unsupported to the ground, filled with a wrathful frustration. She had won the battle, and she had protected Vogler from being murdered. But her foe had escaped. All Hypatia had done was protect an abuser from the consequences of his actions. And assuming that Pathfinder’s vow could be trusted, which Hypatia was sure it could, the next battle would be much more difficult. It didn’t feel much like victory.


But as she made her escape, with a serious wound, with her left arm going numb, her clothes covered in her own blood, running away with her tail tucked between her legs, and with Hypatia’s authority resounding within her, to Pathfinder it certainly felt like a defeat. But it was a defeat that could not be repeated. Even as the pain wracked her, Pathfinder began to plan. She was not planning how next to try to assassinate Ben Vogler. For the moment, he was entirely absent from her thoughts. She was planning the defeat of Hypatia - and the next time, she could not fail.


There was so little time!

[Damselbinder]

Vogler was big. Pretty tall, heavy around the middle, broad-shouldered, big-armed. He didn’t look like he hit the gym very often, but he was strong. You could see it best in his hands most of all: they were huge, with knuckles that looked like they might burst through his skin when he clenched his fists. If, Hypatia reflected, he was the abuser that Pathfinder said he was, she shuddered to think of the damage he might inflict on his victims.


There were five of them in Vogler’s office, besides the man himself. Vogler’s manager, a bodyguard, two police detectives, and Hypatia, lingering as far back as possible out of politesse.
“I don’t get it,” Vogler said. “What does she have against me?” He had a deep voice, but there was something odd about its quality. Perhaps a bit childish. “I - did someone… hire her?”
“We don’t think the motive is personal to you.” The senior of the two detectives was about forty; prematurely grey. She spoke quickly; directly. “The assassin is a vigilante.”
Vogler swallowed.
“You - you mean one of those people that goes around killing… rapists and murderers and gang bosses? One of them is after me?”
“Sir, let us worry about the motive,” the younger detective said. He was handsome, a bit smooth, a bit flash. “We’re here to let you know that someone’s made an attempt on your life, and that we’re doing everything we can to bring the culprit to justice. That’s all.”
“That’s all?!” the manager shouted. “You’re not going to offer Mr Vogler any protection? What about his family?”
“Of course we’ll have people watching Mr Vogler. And, sir,” the officer said, catching Vogler’s eye again, “we’ve already got officers watching your house. Your family is safe.”
“Monty,” Vogler said, addressing his manager, “give the officers names and faces of our security people. Don’t want them getting mistaken for the - vigilante.” As he said this, his eyes flickered up to the shadowy figure at the back of his office.


“Hypathia? Did I get that right?”
“Hypatia, Mr Vogler. But I appreciate your asking.” She moved just a step toward his desk. “Can I help?”
“You fought this lunatic, right? Did - did she say why she wanted me dead?”
Hypatia glanced at the two officers. The younger one made a little ‘cut’ gesture, obviously not wanting Hypatia to get into the specifics. But the more senior detective shrugged. ‘If he wants to know, fuck him,’ essentially.
“Pathfinder… was motivated by your recent legal difficulties, Mr Vogler. The accusations made by certain associates of yours.”
Vogler went pale. He didn’t seem quite able to meet Hypatia’s eye.
“Hey!” his manager shouted. “You have no right to, uh, defame Mr Vogler’s character!”
“Oh, shut up, Monty!” Vogler’s voice rumbled out of him with startling volume and ferocity, and he slammed his massive fist against his desk. “I asked a question and she answered it!”
Monty fell silent. He looked distressed - but not surprised. Evidently, this happened a lot.


Vogler turned back to Hypatia. Again he couldn’t look her in the eye.
“The assassin.Pathfinder. Is she like you?”
“A superhuman, you mean? Yes, she is. She’s preternaturally accurate.”
“Who’s stronger? Her or you?”
“I’m not sure I could answer that. I fear that I haven’t seen the limits of her abilities. Suffice to say, she is extremely dangerous.”
“But you beat her before, right?”
“I… prevented her from killing her target, and I left her wounded… so I suppose I got the better of her.”
“Do you think she’ll come after me again?”
Hypatia hesitated. “I don’t want to frighten you, Mr Vogler. But, yes, I do think that.”
“Why?”
“She promised that she would.”
“...I see.”
“I will say this, though. If you avoid any public appearances, anything where Pathfinder would have a chance to make a spectacle of your death, that will make it less likely that she will make another attempt. At the very least, it may buy time for me to apprehend her before she tries again.”
“...Right.” Vogler put his right hand to his temple. He was sweating a little, and Hypatia realized why he wasn’t able to look at her. It wasn’t guilt or shame, or anything - it was one of his famous migraines. He wasn’t looking directly at her because the migraine was half-blinding him.


Monty left with the younger detective, to give him the information Vogler had ordered him to. The older detective excused herself as well, and Hypatia meant to follow her out, before Vogler called after her.
“Hypatia - could I have a word in private?”
“Would that be… appropriate?” Hypatia was more addressing the detective than she was Vogler. But the detective shrugged.
“If it’ll set the fucker at ease,” she muttered, just quietly enough that it was likely Vogler hadn’t heard her.


Hypatia didn’t go very far back in. When the door shut behind her, she found that she was glad of the presence of Vogler’s bodyguard. She didn’t want to be alone with this man.
Vogler was squirming in his seat. The ‘half-blind’ part of his migraine had shifted into the ‘hideous agony’ phase, and though he did now look at Hypatia straight on, it was hard for him to bear even the low light of his office.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Protecting me. Why are you protecting me? I know the police have to, but you don’t. You could leave me to this assassin. Why don’t you?”
“...I don’t consider myself to be ‘protecting you’, exactly, sir. I am trying to apprehend this assassin.”
“Aha! I can hear it in your voice. You know what I’m like. What I’ve done. You think I’m scum. You agree with her!”
This was truer than Vogler realised. Between her battle with Pathfinder and this meeting, Hypatia had done a little more investigating. All those non-disclosure agreements that Vogler had his victims sign as part of their settlements kept Hypatia from seeing much - but she had seen a photograph of a former employee after Vogler had ‘lost his temper’ with him. He had a detached retina; a broken jaw; a fracture in his pelvis. His body had looked like one bruise. In all likelihood, this beating had won him about $170,000 in damages - chump change to Vogler. If anything, Hypatia’s investigations had revealed that Pathfinder had underestimated the extent of Vogler’s brutality.


But Hypatia had not forgotten why she was here. “Mr Vogler,” she said. “It’s not for me to pass judgements on people. Whatever you have or haven’t done isn’t my concern. You are being pursued by a dangerous murderer, and you are entitled to the protection of the law.”
“You’re not the law.”
“I hardly think the eccentricities of my position entitle me to abandon someone I might dislike to the predations of a murderer. What duty I owe to any citizen, I owe to you.”
“God, you’re serious. From the way you described it, this woman could kill you, right?”
“Mm. She’s quite formidable.”
“And you’re going to go after her. For me?”
“...Not exclusively for you, Mr Vogler. But insofar as I don’t wish for you to be murdered, then… yes.”
Vogler looked at her for a moment, still cringing from the effect of the room’s lights on his migraine. He had a strangely innocent look about him, again putting Hypatia in mind of a child. But then something happened. Perhaps his migraine became even more painful - or perhaps not. Perhaps it was just in his character to respond aggressively to disinterested goodness.
“Fine! Whatever! You can say what you like - you might even believe it - but deep down you have no interest in helping me! You - you think I’m a bad man, and you want me to die! You want the assassin to get me! I bet - I bet you’ve even considered waiting until I’m dead to go after her, right? Right?! Well I’d deserve it! I’d deserve it!” He slammed his fists on his desk so hard that Hypatia heard wood splitting. He clutched his head in his hands, and just sat there, groaning.


Hypatia didn’t know what to make of this man. She could understand fear - terror, even, under the circumstances but this… sullen petulance was unsettling. Even Vogler’s bodyguard looked uncomfortable.
“He does feel guilty,” Hypatia thought, “but it’s not the right kind of guilt. He tortures himself, he convinces himself he’s the scum of the earth - and so he has permission never to improve, or to control himself. If he’s already as bad as he lets himself believe, giving into his impulses can’t make him any worse. His guilt is of a kind that will make him able to do whatever he likes, and then ‘pay’ for it with self-pity. And with all his wealth, he’ll keep on getting away with it, until perhaps he kills someone. Perhaps even then…” He was odious. He was an abuser, and a moral coward, with the affect regulation of a colicky two year old. He not only inflicted suffering on others, but was obviously miserable himself; albeit entirely through his own failings. Pathfinder could hardly have chosen a better candidate.


And yet for all that, Hypatia did pity this man. It was a modest pity, that left plenty of room for distaste and dislike, but she couldn’t see a human being in such a degraded state and simply hate them. When Vogler had existed in the abstract, as a bundle of sins, Hypatia had - as a kind of ethical workout - pondered whether or not Pathfinder had any moral ground to stand on in her pursuit of his death. But seeing Vogler now didn’t just answer the question: it made Hypatia think that even asking the question had been wrong. Whether he deserved it, whether the world was better off without him in it, whatever - for Hypatia those questions were redundant. One just didn’t make such calculations about human lives. One certainly didn’t, having made those calculations, pick up a gun and start shooting people!


Focusing on this resolve, on the resolve to stop Pathfinder before she claimed another victim, to defeat the way of thinking itself which drove her, she approached Vogler. Swallowing down her own feelings of disgust towards this individual, keeping the thought in mind that she did not want Pathfinder to murder him, she touched Vogler on the shoulder, her forefinger on the edge of his neck.
“I will do what I can to protect you,” she said. She closed her eyes. Her jaw stiffened. She shivered, and then withdrew her hand like she’d been shocked. Vogler’s bodyguard looked confused, but Vogler himself - in very real pain - didn’t even really notice that Hypatia had touched him. She turned away, and left him to his pain. She was doing the right thing.


She was doing the right thing.

[Damselbinder]

Obviously Pathfinder couldn’t go to a hospital. She had done the immediate first aid herself so that didn’t bleed to death, and after a day of hiding, she’d risked going to a clinic, run by a doctor that would take a little cash not to ask questions.
“It’s better and worse than it looks,” he’d said. “You should be back on your feet pretty soon; but a few centimetres on either side and you would have bled to death in about two minutes.”


Pumped full of painkillers and antibiotics, Pathfinder slunk back to her hideaway, and spent the next few days convalescing. She felt like a rat during this time, hidden away from prying eyes; waking, eating, relieving herself, sleeping, and then allowing the cycle to repeat. She did not think. She did not contemplate what Hypatia had said to her. She did not re-examine her understanding of justice. She did not wonder if her path was the right one. She did not question herself in any way. She simply waited until she was strong enough to resume. The only thought she had that was complex enough to be distinctly human was a sense of how much time was passing. Every hour spent in bed, she resented. Every hour that she was not pursuing ‘the filth’ was physically painful.


She wasn’t quite fully recovered when she began her preparations to battle Hypatia. First, she needed information. In another life, before her true purpose had been revealed to her, this had been her chiefest skill. So in only a few hours, she had everything that was publicly available on Hypatia, and much that was not. She knew that Hypatia had first emerged in Portland, Maine, and - unsurprisingly - had been associated with Valora, by far Portland’s most famous sire. Hypatia had made history there by starting the first ever trade union for capes, one that was now under the auspices of a hero named Lamia. Since then, she had mostly worked in California, occasionally associated publicly with the hero Freebird.


It was known that Hypatia was telekinetic, but beyond that Pathfinder got no information she didn’t already have. She managed to find a corner of the dark web where people openly speculated - some doing more than that - about Hypatia’s real identity. But Pathfinder was not all too interested in this. Were she trying to assassinate a superhero, then this would be a worthwhile line of inquiry. But she didn’t want that. If it came to it, she’d have willingly killed her in battle - but she wasn’t one of the filth. Pathfinder could not give her an ignominious death.


Her focus was on Hypatia’s career since leaving Maine. The well-known cases she had been associated with and the enemies she had fought. Victories and defeats. These statistics were harder to find than they might have been for most heroes: Hypatia was no glory hound; many of her successes had been quiet, unglamorous. Her most famous success was solving the Pasadena Earthquake Murders, where she was able to prove that a quake which had collapsed two houses and killed three people had not been a natural disaster, but the work of a geokinetic superhuman, trying to kill an unfaithful lover with powers they’d otherwise never had cause to use.


Pathfinder discovered some defeats, but not many. Generally it was against superhumans with ephemeral powers that Hypatia did poorly: the atmosphere-manipulating Blue Marine, for example; or the infamous and apparently invincible Apollyon, the Sun-Man. Generally, one could only beat Hypatia by being much, much more powerful than she was - and any way one sliced it, Pathfinder was much weaker than Hypatia. A plan of sorts began to take shape, but however Pathfinder actually ended up executing it, it would be extremely risky.


It didn’t help that she kept getting distracted. Instead of exploiting the details of her failures, she found herself engrossed by details and video footage of her successes. Instead of sneering at the cartoon-character morality of the superhero, she found herself fascinated by the few public addresses and comments Hypatia had made. She’d once been asked by some pugnacious guerilla-journalist whether she felt she had ‘the right to go around beating up poor people with magical powers’.
“... That people who turn to crime tend to be on the fringes of bourgeois society is, I think, a problem larger than the institution of the superhero. My sense is that I operate with the general consent of those whom I serve. If that consent is withdrawn, I will stop.”
It was a conventional answer, if a sincere one. An off-the-cuff remark made just after a gruelling battle might not have been a totally accurate representation of Hypatia’s philosophy, but it meant something.
“She’s conventional. She may not like the way we organise society, but she doesn’t believe that she can change it.” Was it moral cowardice? No… such an interpretation was incompatible with the woman she had met. From her bearing, her accent, and her manner, Hypatia was clearly highly-educated, probably from a wealthy family. She did not have to do what she did. She had plenty of moral courage - but, Pathfinder suspected, limited moral imagination. The idea that people like her, people with true power could radically alter the world either did not occur to her, or made her think only of lunatics like the Supremacist.


Pathfinder didn’t even notice as her intentions changed. She didn’t notice how every time she found a decent photograph of Hypatia, her eyes lingered on Hypatia’s hips; her neck; her thighs. She didn’t notice as the thought of destroying Hypatia - even in fair battle - became more and more and more distasteful to her. By the time she got to forming a clear plan of action, it was as if her intentions had never been simply to defeat Hypatia, and clear the way for her assassination of Vogler. It seemed now that she had always intended not only to defeat Hypatia, but to capture her. Not only to capture her, but to awaken her. Not only to awaken her, but to free her.


But Pathfinder had not forgotten her purpose. Educating Hypatia was distinctly secondary. Defeating her came first. To do that, she would need three things. First: overwhelming firepower, to close the gap in raw strength between the two of them. Second: a means to subdue Hypatia, and to keep her subdued. She still had plenty of illicit contacts from whom she could acquire such things, though it would cost her plenty of money, and irritating amounts of time. Thankfully, the third thing Pathfinder needed would be supplied by Hypatia herself.


Thankfully, the third thing Pathfinder needed required no investment from her at all. For it was simply Hypatia’s own intellect that Pathfinder needed - the surety that the hawk would always find the rat.

[Damselbinder]

The apartment complex on Locust Street in downtown Riverside was one like thousands all across the western world. Cheaply built and poorly maintained, overfilled with people who could barely afford to live there. It wasn’t hell: there was a pretty bad crime rate in the area, but there was some sense of neighbourliness among its inhabitants. People sharing washing powder, lending each other appliances, or just standing outside when the weather was nice and shooting the breeze. But there was no getting away from the fact that it really was dirt poor, and had Cecily come here dressed as she usually was, expensively and tastefully, she would have stuck out far too much for her purposes.


For someone who so regularly hid her face behind a mask, Cecily was not exactly a master of disguise. She’d tried a few different combinations from the things she’d bought - she’d ended up spending nearly three-hundred dollars in the end - and the ones that most successfully masked her appearance ended up making her look ridiculous. The best she could do was a cheap, ill-fitting pair of jeans, a top with an off-brand ‘Nike’ logo, and a black denim jacket. Her hair she’d first had to tie into quite an elaborate bun, then hide beneath an expensive, brown wig: that was the one part of her disguise that needed to be as convincing as possible. Thus clad, she reached the complex on Locust Street without attracting any attention.


“Hiya!” At the foot of the stairs leading up to the complex’s first floor, a pudgy realtor, in an outfit that managed to look both officious and unprofessional, awaited Cecily. Well - sort of. “You must be Mrs Fairview!” she said.
“That’s right,” ‘Mrs Fairview’ replied, shaking the realtor’s hand. Cecily wasn’t much of an impressionist either. She disguised her voice only in that she spoke more quietly, and as little as possible.
“Great to meetcha. I’m Annie. Let’s go on up, shall we?”


Annie led Cecily up a dirty flight of stairs to a row of small apartments with ceilings low enough to make a reasonably tall man stoop. There were two floors, with a kind of courtyard in the centre that had once rather charitably been described as hosting a ‘garden’. Poor maintenance meant that it now hosted ‘two patches of bare earth’. On the floor above, Cecily noticed a few people milling around. One guy was smoking some weed, sort of vaguely looking at her. Apparently thinking that this man calmly minding his own business would be terribly offensive to her client, Annie whisked Cecily along to the apartment.


“Here we are!” Annie chirped. “It’s a little cozy, but when winter rolls around you’ll be happy for the smaller heating bill!”
“Mmhm.” Cecily went wherever it seemed Annie didn’t want her to go. The bathroom looked basically fine, but the door didn’t close properly. The living room had been recently, cheaply, and badly repainted, and it smelled faintly of mould. The bedroom - well, that was different. The bedroom Cecily could forgive for being in something of a state of disrepair. Not long ago, a bullet had smashed through its window, bounced off about every surface in the place, before embedding itself in the skull of a woman inside.


“Oh gee, ah… you probably know about what happened here, huh?”
“I do,” Cecily replied. “It’s okay. Not like it’s likely to happen again.”
“Oh, haha, yeah, absolutely! Oh yeah, that’s the spirit, eh? Oh, gee… I mean, you know hard to sell a place where someone got their head blown out, eh?”
“Oh, sure. It was, uh… the owner who died, right?”
“Oh yeah, Ava Daniels. She uh - owned a bunch of the apartments in this complex. Sometimes she’d rent this place out, sometimes she’d live here. I think she wanted to keep an eye on things, you know. Liked things just so.”
“Who owns them now?”
“Her sons, I think. They’re selling up all of their mom’s apartments. Nine or ten of them. She was a real - entrepreneur.” She’d been about to say ‘slum-lord’.

Cecily was only half listening. She was looking out of the window, trying to work out from where the fatal shot had come. But if the shooter had been Pathfinder, as Cecily suspected, then there were an infinity of possibilities. If she had access to more powerful weaponry than she’d used in their battle, she could have made the shot from miles away. But Cecily still had doubts. This murder had happened after Pathfinder’s first real assassination, after she’d established her pattern. Why would someone who wanted to plaster her murders all over the news break her pattern for such (“forgive the term”) small fry?


“My guess is you’re buying to rent?” Annie said.
“Um, yes, probably. What did Mrs Daniels charge?”
“Ohh, uh… I think about six-hundred dollars a month.”
“Six-?” Cecily quickly restrained herself, but she couldn’t completely hide how appalled she was. She didn’t pay that much more for her own apartment; which was larger, in a building that was much better maintained, and in a much more affluent neighbourhood.



“You know what, Annie?” Cecily said, if only to remain in character. “I’m seriously considering it.”
“Really? Oh, great! Why don’t we go on back to my office, and we can get the paperwork started, hun?”
“Hm. Not sure I’m completely decided. I think I’d like to look around the neighbourhood some.”
“Oh, huh. Sure thing, Mrs Fairview. Do you want me to show you around, or -”
“No, I’m good.” Cecily smiled at her. “Thank you very much for your time, Annie.” Bad clothes and a wig couldn’t entirely disguise Cecily’s quiet charisma. Annie almost wanted to curtsey.


Cecily hovered around by the door of the apartment until Annie was gone. Now her real task could begin. Seeing where the murder had taken place was faintly interesting, but she knew she wasn’t going to find any real clues there. She made a show of just sort of looking about a bit, and then put herself relatively near to the guy she’d seen before, the one with the joint. It didn’t take long before he took the bait.


“Hey,” he said. “You new around here?”
“Hi there,” Cecily replied. “Not exactly. I’m considering getting a place.”
“Oh, right.” Joint-man laughed, then flicked himself on the forehead. “I, like… totally saw you walking around with a realtor. Well, now that Mrs fuckin’ Daniels in the ground, I might not scream ‘what the hell are you doing; run while you still can’ at you. Oh, uh… I’m Aaron.”
“Jenny,” Cecily replied. “So Mrs Daniels is the woman who got shot? The landlady?”
“Oh, duh, you woulda read about that. Yeah, that’s her.”
“Landladies are never popular, but one doesn’t - er, you don’t often hear about them getting shot with a sniper rifle.”


Aaron took another drag.
“You know, a few months ago I wouldn’t have talked like this about her. She was a lazy, greedy, price-gouging old bitch who couldn’t give less of a fuck if your heating broke or your pipes were leaking or whatever - but if you were one day fuckin’ late with your rent she’d send those shithead sons of hers to ‘remind you’ to cough up. But, like, fuck it, that’s America, right? That’s fuckin’ - Adam Smith and shit. You don’t deserve a bullet to the head for that.”
“What changed your mind?”
“A kid died.” He pointed to a door behind him. “Pipes leaking in the apartment above for weeks, which Mrs Daniels didn’t do shit about. Got fucking mould everywhere, which - guess what - Mrs Daniels didn’t do shit about. Kid living there had some - I don’t remember what it’s called. Not asthma, like - worse than asthma - whatever, something like that. The mould fucked him all up and he died. So - yeah, if you’ve got a kid’s death on your conscience, you absolutely deserve a bullet in the back of the head. Or… wherever it hit her.”


Cecily had been mostly aware of the events Aaron was describing. But hearing it from him - yes, she could understand why some would cheer Daniels’ death, would hail someone like Pathfinder as a hero. That is - if it was Pathfinder, of which Cecily was not yet wholly certain.
“Didn’t the police get involved?” Cecily asked. “It sounds like Daniels could have been charged with manslaughter.”
Aaron shrugged.
“I don’t know. I think I saw a cop talking to her, but the kid’s parents moved away and with nobody making a stink about it, I think the cops just lost interest. I remember somebody trying to persuade the mom to, like, sue and shit, but the parents didn’t speak English too good. Probably just assumed they wouldn’t get nowhere.”
“One of your neighbours tried to persuade them to sue?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Didn’t they ‘raise a stink’ when the family moved away?”
“Oh. Huh. I don’t know. Maybe they did and I just never heard about it.” Aaron took another drag, but it didn’t quite agree with him. “Oh, uh, shit, where are my manners, yo?” He held out the joint to Cecily.
“...That’s very kind, but no thank you.”
“Probably for the best. I know they call it ‘skunk’ but does it have to taste like my grandma’s bedpan?”


Cecily was about to walk off. If she pressed Aaron for any more information he might start wondering why she was asking so many questions. Thankfully, he volunteered what he had left before she was gone.
“Oh hey, I remember now,” he said. “The lady who was trying to get them to sue - she moved out too.”
“Oh,” Cecily said, spotting a new excuse to keep talking. “Does that mean her apartment’s free too? I wasn’t sure about the one I looked at.”
“Uh, I think so? She left a while ago, like… right around the time Mrs Daniels got shot. Like - right around that time.” He grinned. “Makes you wonder, huh? I always thought she was kinda weird. Hot, but… scary, kinda.”
“What was her name?”
Aaron grinned again. “...So you’re just house-hunting, huh?”
Cecily smiled back. “Just curious.”
“Alright,” Aaron replied. “I’ll make a deal with you. 20 bucks for her name; 40 for her name and which apartment she lived in.”
“How’s ‘100 not to mention this to anyone’?”
“I mean, I’ll take it, but you might be wasting your money.” He blew smoke out of his nostrils. “I’m so fucked up on this garbage I’m… like 90% certain I’m not gonna remember this conversation.” Nevertheless, when Cecily handed him the bill, he took it.
“Aaand here’s your change,” he said, handing her a one-dollar bill.
Cecily was puzzled, but took it. Alas for Aaron, Cecily never ended up noticing that he had written his phone number on it.




Finally, Cecily had a name. ‘Lauren’. And when she used her abilities to persuade her way inside Lauren’s apartment, and found some mail still lying by the door, she got a surname, too: ‘Alvarez’. Almost certainly fake, but it was something. As soon as she entered, Cecily raised her defences, for it was very possible that Pathfinder was watching this place, or had booby-trapped it. Carefully, then, she looked around.


There was nothing revealing of Pathfinder’s personality, if she and Lauren Alvarez really were one and the same. The pictures that were hung up were stock photos of flowers and beaches, put up either before or after Lauren Alvarez had lived here. Irritatingly, there were no photographs. Cecily had seen Pathfinder’s face plainly, and it would have been nice to be certain of the identification. What was there was entirely practical. No bookcases. No DVDs. Even the couple of coffee mugs left in the cupboards were just plain white. Either she’d cleaned everything out, or she lived like an ascetic.


Again, Cecily was starting to get a picture of what had happened. Pathfinder had taken this place after beginning her assassinations - somewhere relatively cheap, relatively anonymous. But then the incident with the child dying because of Ava Daniels’ negligence. She’d tried to get the parents to sue, but they hadn’t. Even though Daniels didn’t fit her pattern, she hadn’t been able not to act. She’d murdered Daniels, and then she’d had to leave in case someone like Cecily came calling.


She made as thorough a search as possible without leaving obvious signs of her presence, and was frustrated to find basically nothing. Having got this far, working out where Pathfinder had lived, possibly even her real name, there was nothing that necessarily said she would be able to follow the pursuit any further. Lauren Alvarez - if it was she - might not have left any trace of where she was going. Her next hideout could have been anywhere.


“But would you really just have one? Here was somewhere to lay your head, an address to put on bills and forms - probably you even have a day-job. But this won’t do for your other life, will it? I’m lucky - all I need is my costume. But you? Rifles and pistols and ammunition and god alone knows what else. Got to have somewhere to store them, to maintain them. Now that could be anywhere - but I don’t think it would be. No… no, you’d want to be able to see it from here, and vice versa. You’d want to be able to see if anyone - if anyone were doing what I’m doing.”


Cecily suddenly felt a coldness in the pit of her stomach. A sense of severe, and immediate personal danger. She tightened her defences even more sharply, willed ‘deflection’, ‘absorption of impact’, ‘untwisting’ and ‘outgoing force’ into the air. Somewhere, Pathfinder was looking at her, and she was looking at her down the sight of a gun. There was nothing superhuman about Cecily’s knowledge. It was just instinct.


She moved away from the windows. Indeed, she left the apartment entirely, and did not stop moving, nor relax her abilities for an instant. It did not matter if Pathfinder could not see her. If it was possible for her to visualise a shot, regardless of how many deflections or ludicrous happenstances it would take, then Pathfinder could kill her. Cecily imagined that Pathfinder did not intend to kill her, but she was not so arrogant as to be certain of this assessment. It only occurred to her now how fearful it was to pursue such a target.
“If I were weaker… or - no, even if I simply had different powers - Maria’s or Vanessa’s, say - I’d be all but defenceless at long range.”


And yet it wasn’t just frightening. It was like swooping down on a boar that had just emerged from its den, knowing that your quarry had the strength to kill you if you made a single error - but it was still thrilling to see your prey stick its head out of its hiding place. The long hunt was coming to its end.


Cecily stepped out onto the street. She looked about for a vantage point, somewhere that could see into Lauren Alvarez’ apartment. Alright, Pathfinder could shoot her from just about anywhere, but first she’d have to see her to know she was there to shoot. There were several options. The tallest building with a good line of sight hosted a novelty restaurant, so wasn’t very likely. Another candidate was a high-rise parking lot three streets over, but while it made a good vantage point, it wouldn’t make much of a headquarters.


Another apartment building. Slightly larger than the one that Cecily had just left, it was in an appalling state. Long abandoned, boarded up. Even the vagrants and heroin addicts didn’t go there anymore. It ought to have been condemned long ago. Filthy, abandoned, and ignored by all. The perfect place for a rat to hide.


Cecily entered the shadows as well, but only to shed her disguise. Her hair flowed freely down her back. Dark boots slid up her legs; dark gloves on her slender arms. Her trim body clad in black, in red, and in her golden emblem. Her features were hidden behind her mask - not another disguise, but a second face. Thus clad, Hypatia cloaked herself in power, and strode towards her enemy’s nest.


Above her, Pathfinder watched her enemy’s approach. She saw Hypatia, and shivered.
“Let me see a path,” she thought. “Let me find a way to her fall!”

[Ernie]

What is this?

[Damselbinder]

What is this?

I'm not quite sure I understand. It's a story about an original character of mine, Hypatia.

[Ernie]

Hey, it's your title! (I grew up in Quebec!)

[Damselbinder]

Hey, it's your title! (I grew up in Quebec!)

I see. Have you been enjoying the story or did you just stop to joke?

[Ernie]

Aww, don't be like that. I didn't didn't intend it to be mean. Just having a little fun.

[Damselbinder]

Aww, don't be like that. I didn't didn't intend it to be mean. Just having a little fun.

?

I was actually asking :/

[Ernie]

I read a bunch of it. Your writing is a little more Faulkner, while my tastes are a little more Hemingway.

[Damselbinder]

I read a bunch of it. Your writing is a little more Faulkner, while my tastes are a little more Hemingway.

I'll take that!

[Ernie]

[Damselbinder]

The building had five floors, and a small basement. The elevators were long out of use, and the apartments were empty. Pathfinder could have been anywhere. Every corner, every boarded up door, every stairwell could potentially mean death. Hypatia kept her defences raised, so short of a laser beam or a spectacularly powerful explosion it wasn’t likely that Pathfinder could just kill her in a single hit. But who knew what tricks she had prepared? Who knew what tools she had at her disposal against which Hypatia would have no real defence?


Hypatia reached the first stairwell. If she were Pathfinder, she would have rigged it with explosives - and even if Hypatia could defend herself from being killed or badly hurt, she’d be in a poor position to recover from a follow up.
“But then, I don’t need the stairs, do I?” A moment’s focus, and Hypatia had wrapped her power around her own body. Raising herself from the floor, she floated slowly upward, slipping through a hole in the ceiling above her. Looking around the first floor, she -
KRAKOW!


It didn’t sound like a rifle. It sounded like a bomb going off. The sheer power of the weapon reverberated over and over against the crumbling walls, as though just the sound of the shot would be enough to knock the building down completely. The bullet didn’t kill Hypatia, nor did it even touch her. But it struck her defences with such terrible force that, even though they were designed to twist aside and curve away rather than blocking head on, Hypatia felt the impact resounding through her, taxing her mental energy to such an extent that she could spare no power to float, and crashed against the floor.


“Unghh!” Hypatia forced herself to her feet, restoring the strength of her barrier, and bolstering it as much as she possibly could. But it was painful - she was already taxing herself, and the battle had barely started. “She’s using a far more powerful rifle than the one she had before! The shots could come from anywhere - and I can’t drop my guard for a second. She doesn’t even need to see me. Her powers will just let her know if she’ll score a hit. And with such a powerful rifle, she could be anywhere in this building and fire through as many walls or floors as she likes. She can hit me from anywhere!”
And, as if to congratulate Hypatia on her perspicacity, another shot rang out.


This one came from a completely different angle. Hypatia was better prepared for a shot of such power this time, and it curved relatively harmlessly around her. She had primed her barrier with the concepts of ‘return’ and ‘swing back’, to send the bullet right back wherever it had been fired from, taking advantage of the automation Hypatia had been able to develop in her powers. But the bullet had been far too fast for her powers to get the kind of grip they’d need to do that.

Another shot! This one at a steeper angle, taking more of Hypatia’s energy to deflect, the bullet coming very close to hitting Hypatia’s foot. Then another, from a completely different angle. This one wasn’t so forceful: Pathfinder must have deflected it off another surface, but it caught Hypatia somewhat off-guard, and meant that the next shot, which was another straight-line one, was even harder to stop.


Again, and again, and again the shots rang out, and each time Hypatia deflected them, but each time got more exhausting. Even as she gained a better sense of the spin of the type of bullet Pathfinder was using; even as she realised that, standing in certain places, Pathfinder had to use banking shots, reducing their power; even as her attempts at returning fire got slightly more accurate, she could feel her resilience dwindling. Eventually, her strength would be exhausted, and Pathfinder would be able to kill her. She had no space to counterattack. The same trick that had fooled Pathfinder’s ability before was worthless now. And yet as she weathered the storm, that pain that only a superhuman would recognise growing in the back of her skull, she realised something.


“Pathfinder’s powers are all or nothing. She either knows she will hit her target, or she knows that she won’t. My barriers are already up: if she’s trying to hit me directly, all she’ll see is that she can’t hit me. So her target must be my barrier. She must be assuming that I won’t drop it because - why would I? I’d have lost my mind.” She stood tall, and walked out into the open. “Well, I'll lose my mind, then - if that’s what it takes to defeat you. You have your justice, Pathfinder - and I have mine!” She dropped her guard. She left herself completely defenceless.


Silence. No shots. Nothing. Pathfinder couldn’t see her anymore. She must have been looking around blindly, wondering why the hell no angle would connect anymore. She was still aiming for Hypatia’s barrier - and there was nothing to hit. Now, if she decided to switch targets, if she decided that she was trying to visualise a path to shooting Hypatia, then she’d find it in a second. But it never occurred to her that Hypatia would leave herself unguarded. Even Pathfinder, who had such respect for her enemy, still did not understand her foe’s courage - nor her ingenuity. For, while the sudden savagery of Pathfinder’s attack had made response impossible, Hypatia knew the limits of her powers - knew that she had a severe range disadvantage compared to Pathfinder. But she had prepared a way to mitigate that disadvantage.


Three floors above, Pathfinder was exactly as perplexed as Hypatia had hoped. No path led to her target regardless of where she aimed. She’d swapped out her M1903 for an Accuracy International Arctic Warfare Magnum, the rifle that in 2009 would set the record for the longest confirmed kill by any sniper in the world. If she’d been standing on the building’s roof, she could have killed someone in its basement. What was Hypatia doing, such that Pathfinder couldn’t hit her barrier at all? Was there some spot where there was no way at all for Pathfinder to reach her? She didn’t see how that was possible.
“Could she have dropped her barrier completely?” Pathfinder thought; but thought too late. Hypatia’s counterattack was already in progress.

Pathfinder heard a soft sound at first. It was the sound of insulation being torn through, combined with the puff of aerosolized concrete. It was far enough away from Pathfinder that she didn’t immediately take it for an attack. The second time it happened, Pathfinder noticed, but didn’t understand what she was hearing. It sounded like bullets impacting brickwork. She had little time to ponder the matter, however, before the floor in front of her turned suddenly into swiss cheese.


“What?!” Pathfinder sprang up, firing back down through the floor, not even using her powers. “It must have been Hypatia, but - are her powers so destructive at this range? If it’s that easy for her - I don’t stand a chance!” But in the corner of her eye, she saw movement. She swung her rifle around, engaged her powers, and fired; the bullet tearing through the object she’d seen, reducing it basically to dust. But Pathfinder had acted so quickly that she hadn’t even seen what it was she’d shot. It was only when another such object shot through the floor about 5 metres away from her, and then stopped in mid-air, that she got a decent look at it, and understood what Hypatia was doing. “Ball-bearings…! Steel ball-bearings!”


Up through the floor, ripping through wires and concrete and long-empty pipes. Through the walls, ripping through plaster like it was nothing. Below, Pathfinder could hear the other floors being shot apart as well, and she saw some tearing up through the building’s roof. Hypatia was firing completely blind - but it hardly mattered. She was just firing them in all directions - no not ‘firing’ them, for that implied she was shooting them like Pathfinder’s bullets. Yes, each ball-bearing had far, far less force behind it than even a pistol’s shots; but each of them was much heavier and sturdier than a bullet, too.


“How many does she have - forty? Fifty? More? They’re so light that it’s child’s play for her powers to manipulate them like this. But her powers need concentration… can she both attack me and keep up a barrier?” Guessing roughly at the ‘centre’ of where the ball-bearings were coming from, Pathfinder raised her rifle, and tried aiming at Hypatia herself. For just an instant a path began to form - but she didn’t have time to fire. Three ball-bearings shot through a wall in front of her, one missing, one leaving a painful graze on the back of her head, and one of them smashing directly into her rifle. It didn’t do much damage, but it completely spoiled her aim, and - worse - the impact made the rifle fire. The bullet shot off harmlessly somewhere, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that Hypatia was no longer desperately fending off rifle fire. She was waiting. She was listening. And an Accuracy International Arctic Warfare Magnum had about as loud and brazen a ‘bang’ as the name suggested.


Suddenly the ball-bearings were a lot more accurate. They were still firing only in her general direction, but Hypatia was making sure to attack from multiple angles. She scored only glancing blows, but they were adding up. A wound on the hand, the arm, the thigh. Her chest was protected by a thick, kevlar vest, so blows to the chest and midsection weren’t so bad. But one ball-bearing came frighteningly close to ripping off one of Pathfinder’s ears. Still, slowly, Pathfinder began to realise a problem with Hypatia’s tactic.
“Every time she makes an attack, she loses a few of the ball-bearings. They get lodged somewhere, or they escape her grip - and it must be difficult to control all of these objects at once. Eventually the storm will ease!”


Pathfinder was right. Eventually, Hypatia had expended enough ball-bearings that there were clear holes in the swarm - and Pathfinder had left herself plenty of escape routes. She hurled herself into another empty apartment, and then allowed herself to fall through a hole in the floor. With a better picture of where Hypatia was standing, she left this second apartment, going back into the fourth floor’s hallway. She aimed down, backing away as she searched for a good line of sight. And then - footsteps! In the stairwell in front of her. Hypatia was approaching her! As soon as she came out, Pathfinder would fire. At such a range her barrier would be shattered. Then she’d be the prey!


The footsteps got closer, and closer. Faster and faster. It occurred to Pathfinder that Hypatia might go too far, that she thought Pathfinder was on the upper floor. But as the footsteps reached the fourth floor, they slowed; Hypatia was definitely going to exit there. And yet - there was still no path.
“No path… why? In that stairwell… closed area… hard walls… should be easy to deflect something… she’s dropped her barrier again! No, that’s not it, either. Damn. Damn! Why can’t I -”


Too late, Pathfinder got what was happening. Too late, she understood that she could find no path because Hypatia was not approaching her from the stairwell. Too late, she realised that it would be stupidly easy for a telekinetic to imitate the sound of footsteps.
“AAAGHHHH!!”


Right into her back. Two ball-bearings, slamming into her with furious energy. It was not intended as a killing blow, but it would still have been a crippling one if it hadn’t been for Pathfinder’s vest. Even then it was incredibly painful, and the blow almost sent Pathfinder to her knees. It took immense effort to stay on her feet, but it was imperative that she do so. Those ball-bearings hadn’t come at an angle: they had been straight, full force shots. It could only mean that Hypatia was standing right behind her.


“Nghh!” With all the effort she could muster, Pathfinder spun around. She knew she wouldn’t get the chance to seek a path, so she just fired, for she was a fine shot with or without her abilities. And she’d have killed Hypatia stone-dead if it hadn’t been for her powers. There was real danger here: at such close range it was even harder for Hypatia to deflect the shot. But she did deflect it, and Pathfinder didn’t get a chance for another: Hypatia just ripped the rifle from her hands.


Ten metres separated them. Silently, they glared at each other. Hypatia’s teeth were clenched behind her lips. Pathfinder’s eyes were wide - fearful and furious - and she felt a stab of resentment that Hypatia had the better of her in that respect. Her eyes were covered: any fear she had was concealed. Pathfinder had lost her primary weapon, but at her side was a powerful pistol. Hypatia still had five ball bearings floating around her head, all ready to fire. She even had Pathfinder’s rifle. She let it fall into her hands, as if considering trying to use it herself, before thinking better of it and simply dropping the rifle at her side.


“I’m not a fool,” Hypatia said. “I know this isn’t over yet. But you are at a disadvantage. If you yield, then we can both leave this building with our lives.”
“I will never yield,” Pathfinder replied.
“I meant no disrespect.”
“I know, Hypatia. Thank you.”


Pathfinder took one step back.
Hypatia took one step forward.
Pathfinder’s hand hovered by her pistol.
Hypatia’s energies flowed into the ball-bearings.
Pathfinder drew.
Hypatia fired.
Pathfinder fired, but too late.
Hypatia was faster.
But it didn’t matter.


At the very last moment, Hypatia heard the sound of something whirring, in the apartments both to the left and right of her. She had just enough presence of mind to direct her power to either side of her, just enough that the twin storms of bullets didn’t shred her.
“Automatic gun turrets?!” It had never occurred to her that Pathfinder would have access to such weaponry. She’d hardly heard of such things. But there they were, rigged to fire when someone crossed their path, and Hypatia had blundered right into the crossfire! “But I can still fight!”


With immense effort, Hypatia tried to redirect the flow of bullets against their master, but the turrets were so close, and of such high calibre, that just keeping them from killing her was hard enough. But she did try, implanting ‘deflect’ into the air only limitedly, so that only a stray bullet here or there would be deflected at Pathfinder - after all, she only needed one.


But Pathfinder was running at her. She wasn’t using her pistol. She was holding something in her hands. An odd looking metal band, about sixty centimetres in circumference, with some kind of… embeddings. Hypatia had no idea what it was - but she feared it. More and more she bent bullets at Pathfinder, but they all missed. Pathfinder was well inside the range where Hypatia could have just seized her with her powers, but she couldn’t spare the energy.
“Divided myself up too much… the barrier, curving the bullets - don’t have enough to stop her… I shouldn’t have left so much in… Oh, Cecily, you fool! Why did you think you wouldn’t need every drop of power here?!”


Pathfinder was only five strides away, and whatever she intended to do with the object she was holding, it was going to happen. In fact, in a cold vise of clarity, Hypatia realised that it was certain. With the turrets, Hypatia had been locked into a particular set of actions. Pathfinder’s powers couldn’t predict a person’s choices before their intentions had been set, but if their intentions were immaterial, then it was no different to any other happenstance. “She has her path at last…!”


But just as Pathfinder reached the final step to close the gap between herself and Hypatia, the storm of bullets stopped. Even with a huge magazine, an automatic weapon could fire continuously only for a scant few seconds. Pathfinder sprang forward, clutching this ring in her right hand, actually leaping to close the gap, her hands only a centimetre or two from Hypatia’s head. But Hypatia, released from the burden of the weaponsfire, played in her mind the sharp shriek of a viola, and seized Pathfinder with her powers, holding her stock still in the middle of the air, her face twisted in shock, held in a pose that was almost comical.
“Now it is over!” Hypatia shouted - but it only became true as she was saying it. For as she was speaking, a slight perturbation occurred in the field she’d wrapped around Pathfinder. It wasn’t enough to free her. Not even close. But it was enough for the object she was holding to fall from her hand, and slip neatly around Hypatia’s head.


“Wh-?” Hypatia heard it click, locking into place at her temples. She put a hand to it, trying to prise it off, but couldn’t. Then both hands, but she couldn’t pull it away. So, making sure that Pathfinder was still immobilised, she spared a little more power just to snap the damned thing. But the moment she did this, the moment she gathered more power than she’d already been expending when the circlet had locked into place, all the strange little embellishments fixed into the surface lit up. And then they pulsed.


“Aaaahhhhhhh!!” Hypatia cried, not in pain but in - in - she didn’t know! What was this sensation? This throbbing in her mind? Her own… her own energy but… inwards, and wrong-feeling, and - and - reverberating through her, building up like water behind a dam, with no release, no way to be expended, no way to - to do anything. “Wh-what’s happening? What is th-this thing?”


“It’s called a neural disruptor.” Pathfinder was no longer in Hypatia’s grip. She was on her feet. Her manner suggested she believed herself to be in no danger whatever. “Originally developed to restrain the abilities of telepaths. Turns out it works pretty well on telekinetics too.”
“Unhhh!” Hypatia grunted, trying to find some energy, to direct it against her enemy - but when she stretched out her arm, nothing happened. “M-my… powers…!”
“As long as you’ve got that on you, they’re not going to work,” Pathfinder said. “And if you keep trying to -”
“Aaauuuhhhhhhh!!”


As soon as Hypatia gathered any energy at all it was stolen - worse than stolen, deflected, turned back before she could form it into a note, or a concept, turned back against her and then… and then the pulse. The pulse wasn’t hers. The pulse came from this thing around her head. The pulse which throbbed away her focus.
“Unhh…!” She stumbled forward, feeling dizzy, off-balance. It wasn’t just her powers. It was everything - so hard to think, hard to remember how to - how to move, how to stand, how to do anything.


“Oh!” Hypatia’s coltish legs tangled as she staggered, and she almost fell. But Pathfinder caught her. Strong hands curled around Hypatia’s upper arms, left bare by her leotard and her long gloves. They pulled Hypatia back to her feet, held her in place.
“Unhh…” Hypatia moaned. “Re…lease me…” She could barely get the words out. Everything was… everything was getting jumbled up… mixed and twisted… disordered… Hypatia hated it when things were disordered, hated when she couldn’t find the answer… couldn’t understand… and she couldn’t understand anything… those pulses, thump-thumping through her - making her dizzy… making her confused… making her weak…


“Hey. Hey!” Pathfinder raised her voice, but she wasn’t angry. She wasn’t yelling. Just focusing all of Hypatia’s attention on her, through the buzzing, through the noise. “I’m sorry it has to be this way, but it is this way. I don’t want to kill you Hypatia, and this was the only way I could think of avoiding that. This must be very disorienting, and very unpleasant. So look at me, Hypatia. Focus on me.”
“Don’t… talk that way to me… you’re my enemy… trying to… shoot me to pieces with a rifle! You - oh!”

Pathfinder had pulled Hypatia in close, assassin’s and heroine’s chests pressing together. She held Hypatia’s arms tight, making her shoulders bunch passively inward towards her body. Hypatia was taller, but as her long legs weakly slid and stumbled against each other, they might have been the same height. It occurred to Pathfinder how slender Hypatia was; she was light. Controlling her body was… easy.
“I’m all you have right now, Hypatia,” she said. “So look. Fix those eyes on me. Look!”
And as Pathfinder spoke, another pulse surged from the circlet into Hypatia’s head, so disorienting and dizzying that Hypatia couldn’t help it, couldn’t help needing some anchor for herself. And she found it in Pathfinder’s command. In her eyes. They held her. They fixed her. The severity of Pathfinder’s gaze, the surety, the certainty of her own righteousness. It was… it was evil, in a way - but it was so sincere. It was something. It was a lifeline, and Hypatia took it. She obeyed her enemy.


“Oh… ohhh…” Hypatia whimpered, gazing helplessly into Pathfinder’s eyes. At the lower borders of her mask there was a blush, and in her neck. A bead of sweat ran down her neck too, trickling into her leotard. Even with the mask covering her eyes, Pathfinder could see a meekness entering her countenance, not just weakness but - but reliance. “Oohhhhh…!” Hypatia moaned, as another pulse surged through her, paralysing her powers, draining her strength, giving Hypatia a sudden and humiliating sense of her own weakness. “I was so close… I’d almost… oh, I’d almost won but she… ohh… oh no she… tricked me… outwitted me… defeated me so completely… !” And still she stared. Still she was held captive by that gaze. It made the humiliation burn all the hotter - but the confusion… the jumble… yes… just as Pathfinder had said… it was better.


“That’s it, Hypatia,” Pathfinder said, almost whispering. “That’s it. Just look at me. Let it happen. Let it take you. There’s nothing you can do about it now. You’re powerless. But no need for it to hurt. Just focus on me, Hypatia.”
“I - I can’t… can’t think… my head, it’s…”
“Shhh. Shhhh, now. Don’t try to think.” Without thinking, she touched Hypatia’s temple, gently stroking it with her thumb. “You don’t need any thoughts. Just let the feeling take you. I’ve got you.”
“Unhhh… no… thoughts…”
“That’s right. Go blank. It’ll be easier that way.”
“Go… blank…” She did. She obeyed. She went blank, as Pathfinder wanted her to. When the next pulse came, it made her vision grow dark, made her shoulders sink, made her legs go limp, but it wasn’t as distressing. “Blank…” she repeated. And then one more pulse - and for a moment she went stiff.


There was an instant of clarity. She saw Pathfinder. She felt herself in her clutches. She felt her own powerlessness. She felt herself relying for comfort on her victorious enemy.
“I’ve lost… I’ve utterly lost…” And then all that stiffness flowed from her like water. Her body went limp, and limber, and the darkness began to take her in earnest. “Oooooooooooooooohhhhhh-h-h-h-h…” she moaned, in a long, ratcheting sigh, falling back in Pathfinder’s grip. Held by the upper arms, she slumped backward, her back and her swanlike neck arching, her throat exposed, her long, red hair flowing down towards the floor. Beneath her mask, her eyes rolled back, eyelids fluttering over them, until there was not a trace of consciousness left in her and, with the merest of whimpers, she swooned. To Pathfinder, she was unutterably vulnerable, and incredibly beautiful.


“And I beat her,” she thought. “I actually beat her. I won! She’s mine!” And had she had one whit less self-control, she would have pulled Hypatia up into her embrace and kissed her. As it was, she just stared at her, at her suspended fall, at the trim contours of her body. She gulped. Aware of how close she was to the limits of her self-control, she began letting Hypatia down.


She eased her onto the floor. Hypatia’s head was still tilted back, her hands folded just under her chest. Her breaths were slow, and heavy, her high, modest, and shapely bosom pressing into the constriction of her leotard, slightly distorting the upsilon sigil every time Hypatia breathed. Her tall, slender legs lay side by side, calves turned slightly inward. As she looked her over, Pathfinder noticed the softness and suppleness of Hypatia’s naked thighs, the elegant sensuality of how she exposed them. Oh, even her unconsciousness was elegant! Soft, and defenceless but… artful. Even her moans of weakness, even her surrender had been like that. And it was all because of Pathfinder. She had brought this hero down. Had defeated her. And she hadn’t had to destroy her! That was the best thing of all. Now she had all the time in the world. Hypatia’s power and her body were conquered; next, Pathfinder would conquer her justice, her ideals. Such a noble soul - but yielding to superior strength. Her justice would be the same. Noble, worthy of respect - but it, too, would yield and surrender to Pathfinder.


She could not stay here. She would have to take Hypatia to a more secure location. It would be impossible to clear up all the evidence of their battle, what with all the bullets and ball-bearings and so on, but she’d need to clear up anything distinctive. The turrets, her rifle, the spare weapons she’d stashed about the building, the turrets she’d set up on the second floor as well; she’d need to bring it all with her. Hypatia would stay unconscious for many hours, but if she had an ally waiting, or if someone had seen something - she needed to hurry.


First, she retrieved her Arctic Warfare Magnum. It had been a very expensive purchase, and she was pleased that it had survived the fight. She took it by the underside of the barrel, and -
“AGHH!!”
The barrel - the barrel twisted around her hand! Out of nowhere it just bent itself backwards, almost enough to crush her fingers - if she hadn’t withdrawn her hand so fast, it would have crushed them; for when she dropped her weapon it kept bending, until it was twisted like a pretzel.
“But she’s unconscious! And the neural disruptor… that’s completely impossible!” She spun on Hypatia, utterly baffled, fearing that somehow she’d been tricked and that Hypatia wasn’t beaten after all. But… no. No, she was unconscious. Pathfinder lifted one of her arms high, then dropped it. Completely limp. She did it again - the same. If Hypatia were awake, and capable of attack - she would attack. So - how -? “Can she leave… traps? No… I’ve never heard of a telekinetic doing that… not in any of her records - I don’t understand this!”


Damn her! She was beaten. She was helpless. And this… insignificant little trick, one that hadn’t even really worked, had put the fear of her right back into Pathfinder’s mind. No. No, that was not acceptable. She had earned her victory. She was not going to be tricked into feeling that it was incomplete. She was not the rat this time!


She slipped an arm beneath Hypatia’s neck. Another beneath her thighs. With her coiled strength, she hauled the defeated beauty up into her arms, her head swaying, her thighs sinking against Pathfinder’s hand. She held her like a bride, like a fallen princess, pressing Hypatia’s tall, trim frame against her. Those long, long legs looking even longer like this, dangling in the air, her calves bouncing limply. Completely helpless. Pathfinder had beaten her. She had beaten her. Seeing her stillness, feeling her softness… it was impossible to deny that she was totally powerless.
“Now, don’t you scare me like that again,” Pathfinder muttered, halfway actually to finding it amusing. Yes, all was well. Hypatia was hers.


And as she carried her valiant, vanquished prize away, she glanced only once at the twisted up remains of her rifle. That didn’t matter.


Definitely not.

[DrDominator9]

I've read through Part 3 so far. Sorry I'm so far behind but I did want to say I liked the battle between Pathfinder and Hypatia very much. The description of their powers was quite intriguing. And the intelligence of the characters' dialogue and monologues is also quite evident. I will comment again soon. Nice work, db!!

[Damselbinder]

I've read through Part 3 so far. Sorry I'm so far behind but I did want to say I liked the battle between Pathfinder and Hypatia very much. The description of their powers was quite intriguing. And the intelligence of the characters' dialogue and monologues is also quite evident. I will comment again soon. Nice work, db!!

Thanks much!

[Damselbinder]

The dark sleep into which Hypatia tumbled was not sleep as you or I would understand it. The subtlety of her mind, the fine-tuned complexity of her powers; these were affected in ways a normal human’s brain could not be by the device that Pathfinder had clamped around her forehead. So Hypatia’s brain, in all its intricacies, responded differently to how it would have if Pathfinder had drugged her, or hit her over the head. She was unconscious, but… just a little of her was still ticking. Something in her was aware, even if Hypatia herself wasn’t.


Hypatia felt, therefore, when she was put into the trunk of a car. Registered some data: something metal was underneath her left thigh, the carpeting in the car’s trunk made the back of her neck itch. Registered the feeling of a gloved hand lingering on her face; being moved about so that she was lying straight - something cushioning the back of her neck; supporting it. Rumbling of the car’s engine. Coldness. Then nothingness again.


A little more, later. More sensations of being moved. Darkness - not the oblivious nothingness, but darkness in the mundane sense. Darkness and then… coldness. Wind or an industrial ventilator or something. Then -
warmth?


The warmth of a body against hers. Holding her. Shielding her from the cold. A strong grip, lifting her, carrying her - cradling her. Even in this state, where only the faintest glimmers of Hypatia’s mind remained, she was… No. This isn’t the right way to put it. There was no ‘she’. ‘She’ had been sent tumbling into helpless oblivion by all those insidious pulses. ‘She’ was buried under layer after layer of buzzing, scrambling static; ‘she’ was smothered in the lowest fuzzy frequency of white noise.


Better, then, to say ‘there was a feeling’ of being held close, of a head resting against a chest. There was touch on exposed skin - thighs and upper arms - and that skin was, and had always been, very sensitive to touch. There was a shiver - there was even a quiet, soft vocalisation. There was a sense of fragility, and there was an acknowledgement of strong arms bearing her. A disconnected, primaeval, entirely bodily gratitude.


These sensations remained, hovering like water boatmen, on the edge of Hypatia’s consciousness. So when intellect eventually returned, breaking the surface tension that kept those sensations suspended, they all sank at once into Hypatia’s mind, and made her slow awakening even more disorienting.


“Unnhhh…” It was not a passive waking. It took effort not to be lost in the static, effort for Hypatia to collect herself together enough to have a thought, effort for Hypatia even to gather up enough of herself to know something - to know, in this case, that she felt deeply, and shamefully weak. It was painful knowledge - but it was something, and Hypatia used it as an anchor. It was tied to so much - to her personal dignity; to her martial pride; to her sense of her duty - that it pulled other parts of herself up to the surface.


Because Hypatia was forcing herself awake, she was shivering and twitching as her eyes fluttered half-open. Her body and her brain were still renegotiating their relationship, and the process was unpleasant.
“Hey, hey, hey. Don’t force it. You’re gonna hurt yourself.”
The voice was right in Hypatia’s ear. Hushed, but confident. Quite gentle. Those scattered sensations from before she’d woken affected Hypatia without her realising it; so she trusted the voice. She trusted the arms that had slipped around her lovely, powerless body.
“It’s… hard to think…” Hypatia mumbled.
“I know. It’ll get easier, though. Let your brain sort itself out.”
“There’s… something on my head…” What had Pathfinder called it? A ‘neural disruptor’, or something like that. “I can’t get it off…”
“I know. That’s got to stay there, I’m afraid.”
“No, I can break it, if - unh!”


She’d tried to use her powers, but there was instant, jagged feedback, an ear-splitting note of discord, that in the musical logic of her powers screeched ‘cancellation!’, ‘suppression!’, ‘nothingness!’. The feedback was so disturbing that Hypatia’s body spasmed, her back arching, her legs going stiff and her feet pointing. But those strong arms wrapped around her, pulled her in, held her and stopped her from hurting herself.
“You can’t use your powers, Hypatia. The feedback will only get worse the more of your strength you try to use.”
“Aunnhhhh…!” Hypatia cried, even though her spasm had eased. “I hate this… hate feeling so… unhh… weak…”
“I know. I know, Hypatia. Just try to relax, okay? And please try not to use your ability. If you push, the neural disruptor will knock you out again.”
“A…alright…”


The arms around her, that voice in her ear, the feeling of those strong hands… they were comfort that Hypatia dearly needed. She did as she was told, didn’t try to use her powers again, let her body relax. It helped. She felt more herself; felt a bit more human. Behind her mask, her eyes opened more fully, and she got more of a sense of where she was. A small, boxy room. Low-ish, fluorescent lighting. Some natural light came in from a window behind her, and she was sitting on a thin, wooden bench. She knew there was still something wrong with her, though, knew that she was missing much that was important. She just - couldn’t quite get it all straight - all that buzzing… all the static…!
“You look like you’re doing a little better.”
“Yes… I think so. I’m still disoriented, but… things are getting clearer.”
“That’s good.” They sighed. “Hypatia… you’re not going to like what I’m about to do, okay?”
“Okay,” Hypatia replied, only half-aware of what she was responding to. “I just… I can’t quite remember how I got here,” she said, just as Pathfinder looped a coil of thick, heavy brown rope around her chest. Then it clicked.


“Wh-what? What?! No! No - I - oh - oh!!” One, two, three circuits around her chest, pinning her upper arms, Pathfinder - of course it was Pathfinder! - pinning them behind her back, whipping the ropes around and around, creaking and groaning as Pathfinder manipulated them around Hypatia’s body, leaving her forearms and her hands twisting and flapping - useless! Hypatia tried to rise, to escape Pathfinder’s grip, but as her feet scrabbled clumsily against the floor, Pathfinder just hooked her ankles with one calf, and tripped her.


“Unh!” Hypatia slipped, fell, and landed on her front, but Pathfinder was on her before she could even register the impact. Both wrists grabbed; turned so her palms were facing outward, the back of her hands pressing into each other. Rope whipped over each shoulder, crossed between Hypatia’s breasts, hitched to the ropes binding her upper arms, pulled tight into a firm harness, keeping her shoulders pulled back, pinching above and beneath and between her bosoms, making moving her arms - impossible! The rough segmentation of the rope rubbed hard against the leathery texture of Hypatia’s leotard, making a growling, rattling sound as Pathfinder pulled it across the fabric, from every conceivable angle, trussing her, bundling her up as she writhed on the cold, concrete floor.


“Stop…!” Hypatia protested. “You have to - aaunnhhh!!” Without even thinking she’d tried to use her powers, but the disruptor clamped around her head made this worse than useless. It just scrambled her up again, made her weaker again. Made the feeling of being bound so… jagged - having her body all restricted and hemmed in, so fast and overwhelming, all that cord capturing her limbs, drawing her further and further into Hypatia’s power. “What do I do? What do I do?! There has to be - but… without my powers… what do I have left…!”


She tried to kick at Pathfinder, but even this seemed to serve her enemy’s purposes. As the heel of Hypatia’s boot thrust into empty air, a flick of Pathfinder’s wrist slung a length of cord around her ankle, drawn down across to the other, curled around it and pulled - hard - snapping Hypatia’s calves together.
“Ah!” Straining to look over her shoulder, Hypatia watched Pathfinder binding up her legs, the cord slipping from her hands and around her captive’s shapely calves like water, weaving an intricate web with a scarcely believable paucity of motion, as if she had not just stripped Hypatia of her powers, but had robbed her of them, and she was tying up her captive simply by willing it. But she did make one dramatic, decisive movement: she yanked the end of the rope, cinching the mesh she’d weaved against Hypatia’s boots, the rope and the leather of the boots creaking against each other. It was woven from Hypatia’s ankles up to the flaring of her boots, lashing together Hypatia’s coltish, graceful legs, locking her feet, her calves and her knees so securely together that she couldn’t part her thighs either, though they remained untouched by cord.


Bound! Bound hand and foot; her slender body captive in yards and yards of thick, heavy ropes, every attempt at movement locked down, met with an angry growl of creaking cord. She’d been defeated before, captured before - but even foes far stronger than her couldn’t just tie her up and call it a day. She was a superhuman - a telekinetic, and keeping a telekinetic prisoner was a perilous prospect. At the very least, a captor would have to drug her to keep her restrained. But it didn’t feel like that now. She was completely awake; completely alert.
“And yet I’m helpless…”


Hypatia - Cecily, rather - had never thought of herself as ontologically all that different from normal humans - she just had a special talent. She wasn’t like Maria, who could cloak herself in wrath and fire, who seemed to soar far above even other superhumans. And yet Cecily had had her powers all her life, assumed their presence as you or I might assume the presence of our fingers. To her, the idea of being restrained with nothing more than rope was as alien as the idea of being restrained with a heavy blanket. Yes there was the disruptor, but the disruptor didn’t make her drowsy, or dizzy. It wasn’t like being drugged. It had just… reduced her.


“Ah!” Seized by the waist, flipped onto her front. Hypatia felt her bound hands pushing into the small of her back, arching it; felt every movement she ought to have been able to make suppressed; felt the pinching of the disruptor around her forehead, sensed its angry, hornet’s-buzzing in her brain, the threat against resistance, keeping all of Hypatia’s strength cowering meekly in its prison, even if it could not do the same to Hypatia herself. “Unghh! UNNNNHHHH!!” Hypatia grunted, a sound of dismay that could not quite ignite into wrath, a sound that thrummed through her from her diaphragm up into her throat, making her body ripple as it passed from her core to her mouth. “Release me…! Release me! Y-you can’t… do this! You - mmmmhhhfff?!”


Somehow she hadn’t quite been looking at Pathfinder. Not ignoring her; not cowering from her, but with everything else whirling about her, with the shock of her captivity as a thing in itself, that she was the prisoner of a lethal, blood-soaked assassin was not something she’d been able to process. But now she was forced to, because now Pathfinder’s knees were straddling her waist, and Pathfinder’s hand was covering her mouth.


Striking! She’d seen Pathfinder’s face before, but not like this - not this close. These hard, dramatic lines in her cheekbones and her jaw, like they’d been etched with charcoal; this furious intensity in her countenance; cold fire in her eyes. Yes, there was something of flame about her. Something hot, gnawing and impatient. She had a powerful, and really quite intimidating presence.
“Stop resisting me,” Pathfinder said. “Hypatia, stop it!” But her command only made Hypatia more defiant, and she began struggling again in earnest.
“Mhhff! Mhhh! Ummhhhff-MHHH-NHHHHMMFFF!!” Hypatia twisted; shook under the vise of Pathfinder’s hand, all that lethal strength muffling and stifling her voice, pressing down over Hypatia’s lips, keeping them sealed; Pathfinder’s fingers and the heel of her palm pushing into Hypatia’s cheeks, locking her jaw shut. “Mhhff! MMMHHHFFFF!!” Hypatia moaned, throwing her head this way and that to escape the muzzle of Pathfinder’s hand, her long, silky, red hair swishing against the floor. She felt the texture of Pathfinder’s palm pushing against her mouth, warm and rough, hot from Hypatia’s rapid breaths, so strong and - and tight - couldn’t… couldn’t get away… trapped!


But Pathfinder was trapped as well. Trapped by the sight of Hypatia, bound and muzzled, wriggling beneath her. There was such… symmetry in it, such helpless grace. The rolling of her shoulders, all pinched back and rigid from the ropes hitched around them; her upper body twisting, pulling on the harness crossed over the ‘upsilon’ on her leotard, pinching her pretty chest; those quick, deep breaths making her bosoms strain against the ropes crossing them. Her slim, slinky hips bucking and straining against her bondage, thrusting upwards and falling back again as Hypatia struggled, so trim and elegant; making her whole body undulate in a sensuous, pulsing rhythm. The creaking of her boots as she wriggled those tall, shapely legs; all trim slenderness and elegant contours. The way her sleek, bare thighs slipped against each other; the ropes around her calves and her knees giving them just enough give to rub and squirm, the subtle groove along the outside of each thigh showing the trim, slender definition of her muscles; her porcelain skin so smooth, so soft, glistening with a thin veneer of sweat, warm and silky and naked all the way up to those vigorously gyrating hips; mmh, and even where she was covered her leotard was so - so tight and form fitting against that body…
“Mmhhh… mmhhhfff?”


At this chirping, quivering mew, Pathfinder’s eyes flicked up. She saw that Hypatia was staring at her, straight into her eyes. But it was not the same cool, hidden, red judgement that Pathfinder had become familiar with. For, in the vim of Hypatia’s struggles, especially her desperate shaking to free her mouth from Pathfinder’s hand, she had partly dislodged her mask. The stretchy, black fabric had been pinched upward by the neural disruptor around Hypatia’s forehead, and slipped up far enough to reveal, mostly, one of Hypatia’s eyes.


It was like being shocked. Hypatia’s eyes, masked and unmasked, widened. She saw the intensity of Pathfinder’s stare, saw this quality in her expression - this strangely innocent surprise.
“I didn’t think she’d have blue eyes,” Pathfinder thought. She imagined something more severe: grey-green; or pale brown; some superhumans even had red eyes, or yellow. This soft, bright blue, these elegant, feminine lashes - she’d known Hypatia was beautiful. She hadn’t thought to find that she was so… pretty.


The thought made Pathfinder blush a little, and when Hypatia saw this, she blushed in turn, only much more brightly, and much more hotly. She was suddenly very aware of her body. Very aware of Pathfinder’s body. Aware that she was a very beautiful young woman, that she was tied up, stripped of her powers, and that for the past few minutes she had been writhing in bondage, squirming helplessly between her captor’s thighs, with her captor’s hand pressed down over her mouth. She was… defenceless.


There was a moment of silence. Hypatia and Pathfinder were both waiting for something to happen. Hypatia was still. She had no idea what Pathfinder intended for her. Less than that when Pathfinder took her hand from Hypatia’s mouth. But Hypatia didn’t make a sound. She saw that Pathfinder’s hand was reaching upward toward her mask. Only when Pathfinder’s fingertips reached the bottommost edges of it did Hypatia think to speak.
“...Why have you kidnapped me?”


Pathfinder paused, but she didn’t answer. Her hand still lingered on Hypatia’s face.
“Let me ask the question another way, then. Why am I still alive?”
Pathfinder’s fingers curled the fabric of Hypatia’s mask. She took a breath, collected herself - and tugged the mask back down into place.
“You’re alive,” Pathfinder said, “because you don’t deserve to die.” With all the coiled strength lurking in her muscles, she lifted Hypatia, eliciting a little gasp as she picked her halfway off the ground, and sat her back on the bench she’d woken up on.


“I captured you,” Pathfinder said, “because now the only person who could have stopped me killing Ben Vogler can’t stop me. I will kill him in four hours, near enough. Until then - it’s just the two of us.” A little smile flickered across her face; a little sarcastic, sarcasm directed mostly at herself. “...You thrashed me in the first round. I got the best of you in the second. Now - I’m going to try to persuade you that what I do is right. You’ve got the chance to convince me of the opposite. The final round of our game, Hypatia.”

[Damselbinder]

Hypatia took a moment to consider her answer. With her mask back in place, her expression had regained its cool dispassion. Yet now that Pathfinder had seen one of her eyes, it was easier for her to imagine the expression she hid. It had also altered, subtly, Pathfinder’s sense of Hypatia as a person. There was passion in her, as well as the unyielding hardness of her justice.


“...Forgive me, but I’m finding this a little difficult to understand,” Hypatia said. “You allowed me to catch up to you; you use this - thing to rob me of my powers and knock me unconscious; you carry me off to your lair and - and… tie me up… because you’d like to have a debate with me?”
“Would you prefer I’d killed you?”
“I’d prefer you realised how insane this is. You… talk so coolly, but you’re behaving like a madwoman!”


Pathfinder laughed. She drew up a small, plastic chair - the kind of thing you’d see in a schoolroom - and sat down. It was only now that Hypatia saw Pathfinder had a pistol tucked into her long, grey jacket.
“It’s not insane to think evil needs to be punished. It’s not insane to take that duty on yourself if nobody else will. You should know that better than most.” She pointed at Hypatia’s chest, at the upsilon embroidered onto it. “You took up that symbol because there was something only you could do, or something only you were willing to do, which still had to be done.”
“That doesn’t make me unique. You might be describing anyone who feels themselves to have a vocation. It doesn’t make me particularly like you, if that’s what you’re trying to imply.”


Pathfinder made a little ‘tsk’ sound. Her eyes narrowed.
“That’s false modesty. You know that you’re not like other people, that even most other superhumans couldn’t do what you do. No, you’re not unique - there are other capes - but you, all of you, are still in a class of your own. Anyone who takes up a career that puts their life in danger is admirable, but people like you are different. You take a huge amount of danger, a huge amount of personal responsibility onto your shoulders.”
“Ah, now I understand. You do the same thing. You’re equally admirable. ‘Oh, Mr Bond, we’re not so different, you and I’.”
“Don’t be so facetious! You -” She clenched both fists. “You fight evil, Hypatia! It sounds childish when you put it like that, but you really do it. You don’t rely on institutions, or political authority, or… debase yourself by hitching your ethics to someone else’s banner. You take what providence has granted you and you use it to grapple with the filth of this world! I have nothing but respect for you, and for those in your line of work. You are heroes - almost all of you. You get the occasional swindler or hypocrite, but by and large you serve justice. People forget that so easily! They seem to have this… this need to act as though they’re not impressed by you anymore - even I do it! I find the word ‘superhero’ sticking in my throat as though it were something shameful. Well it isn’t. It’s something magnificent, and it puts you firmly against the grain of the rest of the world! With all its concessions and compromises and… and mud, you plant your feet and say no. You mark yourselves with - with emblems and bright colours, so gloriously unashamed - unsullied and valiant. You wear masks, but you don’t hide. You immerse yourself in the grime and the filth but you come out unstained!”


How nice for Hypatia to hear herself and her comrades described in such glowing terms. How pleasant to know that this assassin saw them all as such bright and shining lights. Now, it was not as though Hypatia saw herself and other superheroes cynically: she believed in what she did, and she did believe that her kind were a unique institution, with unique virtues. Glory, even, very rarely. In the right people, in very particular situations. But she had seen the other side of it as well. The hard graft of the duller sides of things; the stress of balancing two or more lives; the agony of failure; the strain of living day after day facing mortal danger. And worse things too. Hypocrisy and manipulation. Horror. Proud hearts screaming in wrathful agony. Betrayal. Humiliation. Death.


“I… wouldn’t have expected you of all people to have this hagiographic image of us. Aren’t you supposed to call superheroes ‘at best naive’? Aren’t you supposed to say that I make no difference, and that yours are the only real ways of dealing with evil? Three parts pragmatism, four parts realpolitik - perhaps a quick reference to Nietzsche if you’re feeling literary. That’s the vigilante’s way, no? Oh, it’s cliché, but it’s necessary cliché. It’s cliché without which I’m finding it difficult to understand your actions; why you’ve chosen to turn your talents, first to murder, and now to kidnapping.”


Pathfinder narrowed her eyes.
“Are you trying to embarrass me? Do you think I imagine myself to be the first superhuman vigilante ever to exist? The first person ever to think that evil needs to be fought with extreme measures? The first person to take it upon themselves to kill people they think deserve it? Of course not. All my reasons, all my justifications, are old ones. You’ve heard them in films, in pulp fiction, in… high-school debate club. But the fact that they’re old arguments doesn’t make them any less right!”


She stood up. She wasn’t especially tall, but the room’s only light source was immediately behind her, and it meant that she cast a long, and heavy shadow across her captive’s body.
“Why did superheroes go from being occasionally-tolerated eccentrics to an institution? Why, in the 90s, did it suddenly become acceptable for superheroes to start brutalising and openly slaughtering their enemies - but then somewhere around 2002 people wouldn’t tolerate it anymore?” She took a step forward, and pointed at Hypatia in a manner she didn’t consciously intend to be threatening. “Fashion. Things become fashionable, and things become unfashionable. It’s like… oh, I don’t know. Cubism. Did cubism fall out of favour because it was a style in which all that could be done had been done? Was it artistically problematic in some way? I mean… maybe? But I think people just moved onto other things. It’s the same in politics. It’s the same in military doctrine. It’s the same in academia - even in the sciences, which masquerade as being so objective. Most of the time old ideas don’t get proved wrong in conclusive arguments; most of the time the zeitgeist just shifts. For all of humanity’s glories and virtues, we have a bad habit of getting bored with our old toys. So,” she said, taking another step forward, “don’t try to breeze past what I’m saying by going ‘oh, I’ve heard it all before.’ No-one ever actually proved me wrong. People just got bored with having the argument!


“So why do I think Ben Vogler has to die? Because he’s powerful. Because he’s wealthy. Because he’s not the sort of person the law is likely ever to touch. Because he’s a repulsive, evil man, and the world will be better once he’s dead. Him and a thousand others! I have the power to destroy them, and to keep destroying them without anyone stopping me. People like you, good people who hate bloodshed and violence, will find it detestable - but their world will improve.”
“Is that really the only way you think a world can be improved? Through the extermination of the wicked?”
“Obviously not!” She came forward. The shadow deepened. It was no longer possible to see the upsilon on Hypatia’s chest. “Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot, like I’m some edgy teenager who’s seen Taxi Driver one too many times! Yes, of course people improve the world peacefully. Most of the improvement in the world happens like that. If I - if I thought everyone was scum or human beings were essentially evil or any of that crap why would I bother doing what I’m doing? But I’m never going to be a great scholar, Hypatia; I’m never going to be a president or diplomat; I’m never going to move the hearts of men with beautiful words. I am an assassin. I am incapable of being anything else. The power that I have has purpose only for an assassin. And since I have that power, I have a duty to use it.”


Without really meaning to, Pathfinder had been getting closer and closer to Hypatia.
“Who are the people who have affected the world’s history more than any other entirely under their own power? Not by simply taking the credit for the actions of multitudes, but through nothing but their own effort? Assassins. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand started World War 1. The assassination of Yang Sui altered the course of Chinese history. The assassination of Ronald Reagan made the American political landscape of the 1980s unrecognisable from what it had been before. I’m not saying those were all - good, but they mattered. They did something.”
“You’re not assassinating emperors or presidents. You’re assassinating financiers and music producers.”
“I’m limited. If I started going around assassinating dictators or… politicians that I dislike, how would I possibly be able to predict what the consequences would be? There’d be far too much chance of just making things worse. I have to stay in my lane. I have to keep it… small scale enough that I’m not going to start a war, but not just go after petty criminals - even organised criminals I can leave to the police, to people like you. I only go after people that couldn’t be punished any other way. People who can do anything, can get away with anything, the kind of people that make regular folk think that justice in its pure form doesn’t, and can never, exist. It’s not just about killing those individual people. It’s about letting that class of people know that they’re not invulnerable! To teach them some humility!”
“Is that why you captured me, Pathfinder? Did you want to teach me humility? I’m powerless. I’m bound hand and foot. I’m sure you could make me as humble as you’d like.”
“Enough!!”


Pathfinder was shouting right in Hypatia’s face. A little fleck of spittle landed on Hypatia’s right cheek.
“Stop it! These sniping, condescending little ‘gotchas’ - you are not going to embarrass me into giving up, Hypatia, so stop trying! It’s pathetic! When we fought - even the first time when you beat the hell out of me - you were respectful, even to your enemy. Where’s that gone now? Where’s your decency?!”
“Forgive me,” Hypatia said, in a small voice. “I have fought some truly venal people in the past, but I don’t think you’re one of them. In fact I’ve little doubt that you’re the noblest person that I’ve ever considered a real enemy. I appreciate that you’ve worked out a meaningful moral code. It’s obvious that you’re trying to avoid the worst excesses of other vigilantes. I believe that your wish to be a force for good is genuine. But you also killed that landlady, didn’t you? What was her name?”
Pathfinder’s right eye twitched.
“...Ava Daniels.”
“Thank you. One of your neighbours told me about her neglect; about that boy who died. He seemed to approve of what you did. Daniels was obviously an appalling person. Perhaps she was just as deserving of death as any of the rest of your targets. But Ava Daniels doesn’t fit your pattern. And it’s not like that gangster you shot a couple of years ago; he didn’t fit the pattern, but that’s when you were still working out what your pattern was. Daniels was recent. You killed her because you couldn’t help herself. So being here, at your mercy, where you can do to me anything you want, knowing that you can’t always control your impulses is a little frightening. So I apologise for the sniping. You’re quite right. That was small of me. I’ll try to find some other way to keep up my courage.”


That damned mask. Even having seen underneath it once, Pathfinder kept seeing the mask as Hypatia’s face. So severe; so reserved; so easy for Pathfinder to see her as impenetrably hardy. It hadn’t even occurred to Pathfinder that Hypatia would be scared. She was helpless. She was tied up. And Pathfinder, justly or otherwise, was a murderer. Hypatia couldn’t know her mind, could she? How was she to know that Pathfinder wouldn’t decide she needed to die too? That glorious image Pathfinder had of Hypatia, a superhero par excellence, had made her forget that she was human.


All these thoughts passed through Pathfinder’s mind in about a second and a half. She whipped her hands back into her hair: a personal mannerism that she did without thinking when she was embarrassed or felt stupid. But because of her severe expression, and because she moved her hands so quickly, Hypatia thought Pathfinder was about to slap her, and without thinking she tried to defend herself.


“Aaaahahhhhhhhhh-aaunnhhhh!!”
The punishment from the inhibitor was swift, and cruel. The neutralising pulses burst into her mind, blotting out her thoughts, gripping her power by its throat and muffling it into helpless silence. It thrummed up and down her body like an electric current, making her tighten, seize up. The muscles in her back, and in the backs of her thighs tensed hard in protest at these incomprehensible, unfamiliar signals coming from Hypatia’s brain. And with her slender body trussed up tight in all those ropes, winding around her limbs, trapping and trammeling so much of her, all she could do was arch, her body becoming one sharp, graceful crescent, forcing her up; forcing her forward; forcing her to throw back her long red hair in a fiery wave; forcing her to cry out, to cry out with such anguish.
“UUNNHHH!!” Her voice was full of such desperation; a sudden, passionate lament at her defeat, at her sealed powers, at her overpowering bondage. She couldn’t articulate any thoughts; had nothing left to her but the fear of her captor, the humiliation of her bondage, the shame of her loss. But even that could only last for a moment. Even her anguish faded. Even her passion submitted.


The painful tightness eased. The pulses settled into a slower rhythm, and Hypatia found herself fading. Found herself falling back into Pathfinder’s arms. As her mind was wrapped up in a thick, dark blanket, Hypatia felt herself collapsing again into her captor’s embrace.
“N… nooooo…” she sighed, seized again in powerful arms, held against a muscular chest. Her head dipped back, falling to the side, looking away from Pathfinder. So she did not see Pathfinder gulping, did not see her breathing grow quicker; the assassin’s pulse stirred by the soft whimper; by Hypatia’s quiet, helpless protest - vulnerable; feminine; sweet. Falling and flopping limply into Pathfinder’s embrace. She hadn’t lost any of her dignity; she didn’t seem pathetic to Pathfinder. But defenceless. In need of protection. In need of comfort.


“I’m sorry,” Pathfinder said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I really didn’t. I was - I was just frustrated. But it’s alright. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
“Unhh…” It was perversely reassuring. At this moment, anyway, Hypatia believed that Pathfinder wished her no real harm. Pathfinder was the one who’d depowered her. Pathfinder was the one who’d kidnapped her, bound her. Assassin. Murderer!


But - but the pulses…


The pulses… that heavy beat…

The thumping inside her… erasing her music.


Wiping it like an old cassette tape and recording over it with nothing…


Making her so fragile… oh, and with all those ropes… so strong and - and tight… bundling her up like a china vase wrapped in a parcel, ready to shatter if it were dropped.


But Pathfinder held her.


Held her while she was frightened.


Held her while she was weak.


And with all the buzzing… that awful sensation… that helplessness… it was difficult to resent those arms. Difficult for Hypatia to resist her impulse toward gratitude. Even more difficult when she heard Pathfinder’s voice.
“I don’t think it was as hard a reaction this time. Try to hold on, and I don’t think you’ll pass out. Just look at me and you’ll be able to ride it out.”
Hypatia did as she was told. And as Pathfinder had promised, the buzzing eased and, eventually, faded. She still felt disturbed, weak, and quite faint - but she was herself again.


Oh - oh damn it! Instantly, it all came back - Pathfinder screaming at her; the fear of her; the distaste for her ‘opening arguments’, and now just - real anger that Pathfinder had distracted her; mollified her with soft tone and with a little… touch. That Pathfinder could, as though flipping a switch, reduce Hypatia in an instant to this swooning bundle of meekness, falling prettily into her arms. It satisfied her. Allowed her a little moral relief. And Hypatia had just - she’d let her do it! She hadn’t been able to help herself… damn this - this whole situation! Damn these ropes, this incomprehensible woman, that thing on her head!


And - and there was that other element too, wasn’t there?


As Pathfinder eased her captive back onto the bench, Hypatia noticed the positioning of her hands much more. She wasn’t trying to touch Hypatia’s shoulders, or hips, or legs, but there was a reaction when she did. She wasn’t trying to have her eyes linger on Hypatia’s bare thighs, but there was a reaction to that too.
“She… wants me.” Was that it, perhaps? Was that why she’d taken Hypatia captive? Was she, after all, as venal as someone like Shatterqueen, or Lupus? Just with a thicker veneer of honour? To try to find out, she looked deeply into Pathfinder’s eyes. Her mask let her do this without Pathfinder noticing - another of its many advantages. It was a little like taking a candid photograph.


What did she see? Creases in her forehead. Tension like she’d been frowning her whole life. Faint marks at her nose, her cheeks. Scars? Odd scars. Small. From cosmetic surgery, perhaps. Lust? …Maybe.
“No. Not exactly. She is attracted to me… but she’s ashamed of it. She’s not like Vogler either: her shame actually restrains her. She won’t… do anything to me. She’s - oh. Oh, I really might have thought of that earlier.”


This mad road she’d decided to take - she’d committed herself to it utterly. Hypatia remembered that off-handed remark Pathfinder’s neighbour had made, that he’d found her ‘hot, but kinda scary.’ He’d been joking, but there was reality in it. People did not get close to Pathfinder. She did not allow it. She was completely alone, and it caused her pain. Having an enemy, especially one who spoke to her with respect, was a bit like having a friend.
“I wonder what excuses she made to herself,” Hypatia thought. “This ridiculous ‘debate’. Perhaps even her attraction to me is something she’d rather let herself be aware of than the truth. She’s just… desperately lonely, and wants someone to talk to.” It was rare indeed when human suffering failed to move Hypatia’s heart, and here too she was moved to pity, even genuine sympathy. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Hypatia had identified a weakness, and since she intended to stop this assassin not one iota less than when she had confronted her on that rooftop, it was a weakness that she was willing to exploit...

[Mikeunmaskem]

Will she be unmasked and exposed?? Debooted?? Her toes exposed?? Is she compromised and has to be just lovely, Cecily?? Lots of what if’s? Expose Cecily. Make her be an ally to pathfinder……. Suggestion.

[Damselbinder]

Will she be unmasked and exposed?? Debooted?? Her toes exposed?? Is she compromised and has to be just lovely, Cecily?? Lots of what if’s? Expose Cecily. Make her be an ally to pathfinder……. Suggestion.

While I'm certainly not going to spoil what I actually intend, what I will say is that part of my design philosophy behind Hypatia was to make unmaskings especially spicy; where masked she has this severe sternness because of the red 'eyes' of her mask and its austere blackness, but when you peel the mask off she has rather gentle features and soft blue eyes, so there's a strong contrast.


That said, you can reasonably expect that - while ladies may be in various states of disrobement during my stories - I'm never particularly going to focus on feet and toes and stuff like that.

[Damselbinder]

“Lauren,” Hypatia said. “Your name is Lauren Alvarez, isn’t it?”
Pathfinder was silent for a good few seconds. It seemed less as though she were being calculating, though, and more like she really didn’t know how to respond.
“Yes,” Pathfinder replied, quietly. “Kind of, anyway. I choose my pseudonyms at random. I’ve used so many that when I drew ‘Lauren Alvarez’ I put it on the rental agreement for that apartment without thinking. Only remembered ‘Lauren’ is my real name a day later. ‘Alvarez’ is fake, though.”
“You think of ‘Pathfinder’ as your real name?”
“No, if I’m honest. It’s… I s’pose you could call it an old nickname. You asked me for a name back when we first fought, and ‘Pathfinder’ was the only thing I had that fit the bill.” For a moment, her voice sounded different - faint traces of an accent slipping in. Southern. Maybe Georgian? Hypatia didn’t know if Pathfinder was trying to disguise her voice or if she really did have only a very faint accent; either way, it felt like an unguarded moment.


“I feel as though I have you at a disadvantage,” Hypatia said. “Knowing your name, that is. If I had only myself to consider, I’d tell you my name, but… I hope you understand.”
“My slip-up shouldn’t compel you to do anything,” Pathfinder replied. “But I wouldn’t ever go after your family, or anything like that. I wouldn’t even do that to my targets.”
Hypatia had no trouble whatever believing this. Such behaviour would have been entirely inconsistent with her observations of Pathfinder’s character. But she made a show of it taking thought, and effort, to reach this conclusion. “Yes, I… I believe you,” she said, softly. “I can’t imagine you indulging in that kind of cruelty.”


For a moment she actually considered revealing her name, but decided against it. She was sure of her estimations of Pathfinder’s character, but not arrogant enough to bet that surety against the safety of Maria, or her parents. She considered giving a fake name, but in the unlikely event that Pathfinder already knew who she was, getting caught out in a lie would have blown Hypatia’s whole strategy. She needed to find a different way.


“I can’t understand you,” Hypatia said. She added a little impassioned breathiness to the ‘a’-sound in ‘can’t’, just enough not to have overdone it. “You commit acts of terrible cruelty - but there’s kindness in you. I find it hard to reconcile the woman who killed Nigel Rathbone, and the woman who… held me close when I was in pain.”
Ooo, was that pushing it? ‘The woman who held me close when I was in pain’? Ugh. Like a line from the trailer of a 1960s weepy or something. Were the situation the other way around, surely Hypatia would have twigged that someone was trying to manipulate her.
“But she wouldn’t… she’s not stupid, so I mustn’t push too hard - but she is naive.


“Compare someone like me: a relatively conventional superhero, to someone like her: a blood-soaked vigilante. I clad myself in emblems and bright colours; she in simple black. I shy away from extreme violence; she lives by it. You’d think me the starry-eyed simpleton, and Pathfinder the cynic, but it’s the opposite. She’s more thoughtful than most, but she wouldn’t be a vigilante at all if she didn’t share at least some of the qualities that define them: a capacity for hatred; a profound sensitivity to disgust; and a wish for ‘simplicity’. In her, that last quality is the most pronounced. She wants things to be simple, comprehensible, to fit into the blinkered world she has created for herself. I am the ‘noble opponent’ - I represent for her the world of convention that she hates. She’s not insane, not really… so she can’t help wanting others to agree with her, however independently minded she is. She won’t go back into the world of conventional morality - so I’m the mountain being moved to Mohammad.”


“I… wouldn’t be so deluded as to say I act out of kindness,” Pathfinder said. She seemed to have taken what Hypatia said entirely at face value. “But I don’t do what I do out of a wish to torture. Whether my targets are in pain or not doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that they deserve to be removed. My methods are violent and bloody, but the people I kill die instantly. They have no fear, or dread.” She whipped her hands through her hair. “Except for Vogler. He knows I’m after him now, doesn’t he? The police will have spoken to him. He must be terrified that I’ll come for him at any moment. He must be struggling to sleep. Waking in cold sweats. He might even take his rage out on some new victim, some poor, hapless underling, or sex worker. That,” she added, “will be on my conscience, if it happens, not on yours. I failed to kill him. You were just… doing what superheroes do.”
“But that’s contingent, isn’t it? Contingent on my ethics being justifiable. Contingent on my side of the debate. If you’re right, and I’m wrong, and I stopped you giving him a merciful death, then his suffering is on my conscience, not yours.


“And I will say this. I don’t… I could never agree with what you do - and I don’t know about all of your targets… but I investigated Ben Vogler as well.”
“Did you actually meet him?”
“...Yes.” Hypatia would have liked to have lied, but it was too risky. Pathfinder might well have been watching when Hypatia went to see him with those detectives. If she knew Hypatia was lying, she might well have wondered why, and that wasn’t something Hypatia wanted her to be thinking about.
“What did you think of him? Is he worth protecting?”
“I…” Hypatia made it seem like she was searching for the right words, even though she already knew just what she wanted to say. “I found him utterly repellent. He is everything you say he is - worse, even. He has this awful, self-pitying self-loathing that’s as ugly as it is childish. I don’t think he’ll ever be capable of controlling his impulses. If anyone deserved to die, he - ” She cut herself off, jerking her head to the side, looking away from Pathfinder. Or, rather, making a show of not being able to. For, under her mask, she moved her eyes just enough to see Pathfinder’s face, and saw a distinct look of satisfaction on it.
“I’m surprised to hear you say that.”
“I’m not saying I think he should be assassinated! But - of course I see where you’re coming from to some extent. This man has used his position to evade justice for his crimes, paying settlements that don’t put the slightest dent in his fortune. The man should be in prison, there’s no question of that.”
“Why? Wouldn’t that be more cruel?”
“Wouldn’t -?” Hypatia blinked. For once, Pathfinder genuinely had the better of her.


“I was in jail, once. However bad you think it is, it’s worse. Those places don’t serve justice. They don’t punish anyone. They just do their level best to make the people inside them as inhuman as possible. The inmates, obviously, but the guards, the doctors, the wardens - everyone. I know things are better in other parts of the world - but our system really is horrendous. You must know that! I’m not saying I’d rather have died than gone to jail - I was only locked up for five months - but if you had it your way, you’d want Ben Vogler in prison, right? For a long time.”
“...Yes. I suppose I’d want the key to be thrown away.”
“That is cruel. What would that do to the world except add more misery to it? Why not just kill people like Vogler? Not with the noose. Not with the electric chair. Not with months of fear and pleading as he waits for his time to come. Just - instantly. In the middle of his day. With no dread. It’d be better that way!”
To Pathfinder, Hypatia looked troubled. This time it was no performance. For, this time, she could not immediately say why - or if - Pathfinder was wrong.


“When I was trying to find out more about you,” Pathfinder said, “that was the one thing I realised I didn’t like: you’re far too conventional. People… I mean of course you can’t just let criminals get away with anything, or society would fall apart, but that system… that system is evil. Justice happens in it, I guess. Sometimes. But it might as well be random. When I kill my targets, justice is done. The evil are destroyed, the filth is wiped clean. But then that’s it. The suffering that they cause is over. And the suffering that they experience is over! You can’t know, Hypatia. You’re… so far from the people you fight that you might as well be a different species. You don’t know the suffering that comes from being a bad person! It’s not to be pitied, it’s not to be sympathised with: the suffering is completely deserved - but why let it continue if it doesn’t have to?! There isn’t a single truly evil person in the world who is anything less than miserable!”


Hypatia had underestimated Pathfinder again. She hadn’t expected this side of her enemy’s logic. It was - it was sincere, wasn’t it? What she said about people being put in jail… she really meant it. And Hypatia didn’t even really disagree. It was just something she didn’t give all that much thought to. Her enemies were… you know, organised criminals: gangsters, and hard-nosed villains. ‘Supervillains’, too - people that had to be stopped for the sake of public safety, if nothing else. She wasn’t picking off desperate drug addicts and people drowning in poverty. One didn’t… you know, you blame an arresting officer if they brutalise a suspect, you don’t blame them if that suspect ends up being given a harsh prison sentence. But she was part of it all, wasn’t she? Another brick in the wall.


“I… I see what you’re saying,” Hypatia said, quietly. “I… know the criminal justice system is - a hideous, unjust mess. But it’s… it’s the closest system we have to something with general consensus, we can’t just -” She stopped herself. The argument she was about to make - was fine, as these things went? Maybe even correct, broadly. But first, Hypatia’s heart wasn’t in it; second, it would never convince Pathfinder; and third, it wouldn’t serve her stratagem. Hypatia needed something that would not seem like capitulation - which Pathfinder wouldn’t believe - and which wasn’t just more argumentation, something that would make Pathfinder feel closer to her. She needed something real. She needed something that came from a place of genuine pain.


She thought of Valora.

[Damselbinder]

“I have killed two people in my career,” Hypatia said. “It wasn’t premeditated either time. I had offered to accept my enemies’ surrender. I never specifically intended to do lethal damage. But their deaths are on my hands. Had I been better prepared, better trained, cleverer, more decisive, they might both still be alive. That weighs on me, from time to time, but I accept it. It is part of the duty that I have taken on.



“However. A couple of years ago, not long after the very first time I put on this costume, I was collaborating with some other heroes. We conspired to defeat a powerful mob boss, and we were eventually successful. He was arrested, imprisoned. I… think he ended up being committed. Now - if ever someone deserved the perpetual misery of being put in prison, it would be him, but that’s not my point. My point is… any of us, at any time, could have killed him, and have put an end to it immediately. With my abilities I almost certainly could have done it without ever being suspected.



“Now, the decision - not that we ever explicitly considered the possibility - was no more mine than any of my comrades’. But because we didn’t kill him, when we could have, he… was able to do a great injury to one of my friends.” Her voice wavered. “Forgive me for being opaque, I’m trying to preserve my comrades’ identities.”
“I understand.”
“Thank you. My friend… and she was - is - a very dear friend, bore this injury with all manner of bravery. But one might say she was - maimed. And I know that I could have spared her this injury if I’d just killed the man who’d inflicted it, instead of trying to arrest him. She, too, had ample opportunity to kill him, and could certainly have got away with it had she done so. That is part of the injury our enemy dealt, and I’m quite sure it was intentional.



“I was talking with my friend, once. I said something stupid - I asked her - oh you know, the ‘would you time travel to kill Hitler’ question, or some version of it or other. I hadn’t realised I was talking about our enemy, but I was, and she realised it immediately. And she told me something I would never forget.”
Hypatia rendered Valora’s words, which I give below, mostly accurately to Pathfinder, but she couldn’t quite imitate her friend’s lyrical bluntness. Valora had said:

“That’s a stupid god damn question. Like - yeah, sure, I’d kill time-Hitler or whatever. But that’s because I know exactly how evil he is, and I know in advance what’s gonna happen if I don’t kill him. But in real life you don’t know shit. You’re just… some jackoff, right? However smart you think you are, you don’t know shit. And more than that - you’re human. If we were something else - maybe something better - we could be cold like that when we need to. But we can’t. We break.” She’d gone on, but the conversation became a lot more personal, and its content was none of Pathfinder’s business.



“My friend was right. There is a tendency in all human beings against death. We violate our nature when we kill. I don’t know if you’re religious - I suspect not; neither am I. But I think there is such a thing as ‘the sacred’. One of those things is human life. This is not a very original conclusion, but people keep forgetting it. When you violate the sacred - you break.



“I’ve been listening to you, Pathfinder. Not just the justifications you’ve given, but the kind of language you use. You keep using words like ‘filth’ to describe your targets, and when I first noticed that tendency it made me put the cart before the horse. I thought that, whatever your virtues, you had a fascistic quality to you. Like Dirty Harry. Your targets are just scum to be wiped out: subhuman. I thought that this was the motivation for your actions. But it isn’t. This ugliness in your language is cement you’ve poured into the cracks that have developed. Your motivation is… what you said it was. And I will confess that some of the things you’ve said have troubled me. Maybe - maybe you are even right. But even if you are right, you must still stop! I can’t imagine how someone as… sane as you are could take the path that you have taken. I don’t understand you, but I know that you are gouged every time you take a life. Stop. Please, stop! In your way you even have mercy for your targets - won’t you spare any for yourself?”



Hypatia saw Pathfinder’s expression. She was moved. She had been hanging onto Hypatia’s every word. She wasn’t on the point of tears, but she wasn’t a hundred miles from them either. Oh, it had been a long time since she’d had real human contact, hadn’t it?
“It is an ugly thing I am doing,” Hypatia thought. “I am lying with the truth.”



“Oh, god, Hypatia…” Pathfinder sat down. Just, slumped. “I don’t know what the hell to say to all of that. I’m sorry about your friend. I don’t -” She was panting. She was close to hyperventilating. Hypatia had hoped for a strong reaction - but had not expected anything like this. “I already knew! I already knew I was - damaging myself; but it doesn’t matter! Mercy… humanity… the sacred - those concepts… those concepts don’t mean anything to me. You’re thinking… you’re thinking like you’re going to live forever!”
“I… beg your pardon?”



Pathfinder had a manic look. She pulled her hair back so tightly that you could see that her roots were blonde. She was pulling on the skin around her eyes.
“Everyone… every single person acts like they’re going to live forever. Even if they don’t think they are acting like that. Even if they’re talking about death, they can’t understand that it’s actually going to happen to them.” She stood up, paced around for a bit, and then looked back at Hypatia, jabbing her right index finger at her. “In this world, there are two things that matter. ‘Plus’ and ‘minus’. Do you add to the world? Or do you subtract? ‘Plus’ can be… being creative, giving the world something new… or it can just be being, you know, nice to people. ‘Minus’ is everything you’d think it is. Murder, war, unpleasantness - you know, it’s obvious. But there isn’t anything outside of that which persists after you. Your conscience, your ‘sense of the sacred’ - they don’t exist outside of your life, and your life is temporary! The only thing that carries over is ‘plus’ and ‘minus’. All human beings need to ‘add’ in the limited time they have! I have to add. And I can do that by eliminating the ‘minus’ of those pieces of shit that you don’t want me to kill! I might even get other people to see! I might even get other people to realise that even the people above them in society will actually face justice - but I have so little time!”



There it was. There was the heart of Pathfinder’s madness - or her despair. But seeing it did not mean understanding it. Hypatia was mystified. She was frightened.
“I didn’t mean to upset you like this. I -”

“You… damn you!” Pathfinder snarled. “You haven’t… convinced me of anything. You’re still conventional. You still think you’re immortal. In substance it’s nothing I couldn’t hear from anyone else… but you really mean it, don’t you? You believe that life is sacred. You really believe it. Sorry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t keep calling you conventional - the really conventional people are hypocrites. You’re sincere. You’re wrong, but you’re sincere. You said you wanted to save me and you actually meant it. But I’m already saving myself, that’s what you don’t get. You’d only be ‘saving me’ from things that won’t be there anymore once I’m dead.”
“Pathfinder,” Hypatia said, “you know what I want to save you from. But - why do you think you need to be saved?”
But Pathfinder was past hearing her. She strode over to Hypatia, and hauled her up to her feet, grasping her by her slim, white shoulders.



“What a fool I am in your presence! Trying to convince you - even if I did convince you, you’d still try to stop me if you could. You’re too committed to that” - she pointed at the upsilon on Hypatia’s chest - “really to change your mind. Why couldn’t you be more smug? Why couldn’t you be more insulting? Why couldn’t you speak over me and assume your own righteousness and be too bullheaded to listen to a word I say? Why couldn’t you be a hypocrite? Why did you have to be so beautiful? Why the hell did I bring you here?!”
“Lauren,” Hypatia whispered. “Isn’t it because you’re alone?”
Pathfinder glanced at Hypatia’s lips. She didn’t mean to. She couldn’t help it. She felt Hypatia stiffen in her grip.
“I didn’t - I promise I didn’t bring you here for - because I had any -”
“I know. I know you didn’t.”



Two warm bodies, close. They could smell each other. They could feel each other’s breath. Pathfinder’s advantage was that Hypatia was tied up, and was, ultimately, helpless before her. Hypatia’s advantage was smaller, and simpler. Her eyes were covered. So when she tilted her head back a little, it was easy for Pathfinder to imagine that Hypatia’s eyes were closed. When she leaned in to kiss Hypatia, she did what she thought Hypatia had done. She shut her eyes.
“Now.”
She slammed her forehead as hard as she could into Pathfinder’s.



“UNHHH!” Pathfinder was so startled that she didn’t even open her eyes immediately. It was enough time for Hypatia to headbutt her again, and this time Pathfinder felt the metal of the neural inhibitor binding Hypatia’s powers cutting into her, leaving blood trickling down her eyebrow. She stumbled backwards, but was not at this point all that badly hurt. “Hy-” she began to say, but was cut off when Hypatia hurled her telekinetically across the room.
“AUUUNNHHH!!” Hypatia cried out, as the inhibitor wrapped around her forehead shot back in furious revenge - but revenge wasn’t good enough. Hypatia’s scheme had worked - the impact of her headbutt had disrupted the inhibitor’s functions, and it hadn’t been able to kick in quickly enough.



But it had kicked in. The pulses surged back through her, threatening to send her reeling and swooning. But Hypatia held out. She even managed to remain standing, despite her legs being forced so tightly together. She waited for the pulses to fade, for the inhibitor’s revenge to cease, then slammed her head into the nearest wall - as hard as she dared. “UNHH!” she grunted, this time from sheer pain, but she didn’t stop. She had only seconds, if that. So this time she reached down to her legs, trying to snap the ropes binding them. She got some of them, freeing her ankles and her calves most of the way up to her knees but - she felt - felt a tingling building… building up in the back of her head…!
“Oh no… oh no, it’s - it’s - AAAAUUGGHHHHH!!”



Dizzying, blanking, blotting - delayed, but no less powerful! It reverberated through Hypatia’s body, almost as badly as the first time, as when Pathfinder had first captured her. Everything was so confused… she couldn’t remember which… part of the plan she was on…
“Get… Pathfinder off guard… make her think you’re giving in to her… wait for the - the psychological moment… help her… help her find some peace… even if - wait… where was I?” She looked down. Her legs… her legs weren’t bound. “I can walk… I can…” No! Not quite. Almost tripped. Her knees were still tied. She was still… hobbled.
“Urrghhh…”
Pathfinder! She was lying on the floor, hurt; stunned, but not unconscious. Hypatia hadn’t… hadn’t quite had enough power to knock her out completely.
“Not enough… power…!” If she tried to use her abilities again, even if the inhibitor’s response was delayed, it would knock her out. She was on the precipice already.



“Walk… just have to walk…!” With stumbling, hobbled, clumsy steps, Hypatia moved towards the door. So many times she almost tripped. So many times she almost fainted. But she kept going. She had to find… some way of getting this thing off… then she could turn back. Then she could defeat Pathfinder for real. “She can’t be right… I won’t let her be right… because… Oh, Maria… I think I’ve been rather cruel to this woman - am I - I hope you don’t think I’m… sullied…”



The door opened outward. She entered a narrow corridor. Pipes on the walls - lots of pipes. But they were cold. No condensation. Not used in a while. Not important! Which way -?
“Left…?” Hadn’t Pathfinder brought her in from that direction? “Just go!” She pushed herself forward, knees pressed together, arms pulled behind her, barely able to walk - but still determined. Moreso as the shock faded. Faster as she regained her senses, and her balance. Faster as the movement of her lower legs began to shake and loosen the cords still wound around her knees. If she kept going, she might be able to shake them off completely. She’d be able to run!



The hope lasted just long enough for Hypatia’s heart to sink when she heard Pathfinder’s footsteps.



She wasn’t even going that fast. Wasn’t even what you’d call a jog. But they were hard steps, and loud, and they were getting closer. Ahead, Hypatia saw a faint glow that might have been reflected daylight, and wondered if there might still have been a chance, for her legs’ bonds were loose enough for her almost to move with real speed. Perhaps she could even try another blow against the inhibitor.
“No,” Hypatia thought, “she’s just about to recapture me.”



Quite in the fashion of a pro football player, Pathfinder speared Hypatia from behind, and knocked her down, wrapping her arms around her captive’s chest, and forcing her against the hard, cold, concrete.
“Unghhh!” Hypatia cried, feeling the hard pressure of the concrete from beneath, and the unyielding strength of her kidnapper from above. She fought against Pathfinder’s body, her mostly-unbound legs kicking and squirming uselessly behind her, hips shifting and rolling as she bucked - but she was nowhere near strong enough. Even these struggles were mostly suppressed, when Pathfinder thrust her hand into Hypatia’s hair, took her by the back of the head, and forced the left side of her face down against the floor.



“I have no right to be angry,” Pathfinder said. “I am your enemy. I kidnapped you. I bound you. I took away your power. I have no right to feel this indignation. I have no right to anything. But I am beginning to wonder if anything you told me about yourself was true.”
But a black pitch rose up in Hypatia’s throat in return.
“You think for one moment I forgot what you are? You think I let myself forget the nature of my captor? You chose the path of the assassin! So whatever justification you whip up for yourself is immaterial! As far as I knew you might have snapped at any moment and slit my throat. You might still - so any anger you feel right now is not righteous, Pathfinder! It’s just ego!”
“...I think I’ve let you talk too much.”



The hand holding down Hypatia’s head eased off the pressure, but the fingers twisted themselves deeper into her thick, red hair, pulling it upward, raising Hypatia’s head from the floor as well.
“Ngghh!” Hypatia fought back, but the grip was tight, and any movement was painful. “What are you doing?!”
Pathfinder didn’t answer. Hypatia felt her reaching for something, fiddling with it. She heard a tearing sound.
“No more lies, Hypatia,” Pathfinder said, and slapped a strip of thick, silver duct tape over Hypatia’s lips.



“MHHHH!!!” The material clung instantly to Hypatia’s mouth, the sticky fibres of the adhesive sealing it shut in half a second. Already, Hypatia was quite securely gag - but Pathfinder was nowhere close to satisfied.
TRRRP! went the tape, torn from its roll, still attached to the strip over Hypatia’s mouth, and then wound around, forming a clean, silver circuit around the lower part of Hypatia’s head.
“Mhhh! MHHH-MMMHPPHHH!! MHHHHH!!” Hypatia cried, as the tape went around again, and again, not just muffling her mouth, but pressing into her jaw, pushing it inward, holding it shut, tighter and tighter, silencing the writhing heroine more and more with every circuit.
TRRRP!

“Mhhhhh!!”
TRRR-RRR-RRRP!
“Mhhh-mhhhh-mmhhhhh!!”
TRR-RRR-RRR-RRRRP!
“Mhhh-MHHHH-MHHHPHHHH!! NNNNMHHHHHHHPHHHH!!! …Mhhhphh…”



Pathfinder snapped the tape off the roll at last, leaving Hypatia completely muzzled, her voice buried under layer after layer of tape. But just as Hypatia thought Pathfinder was finished with her, she felt those lethal hands around her ankles.
“Oh, yes,” Hypatia thought. “She needs to bind my legs again…”



It was just so. More rope. More rope twisted about her ankles, forming an ‘X’ shape over her calves, front and back, a fiendish mesh that pressed hard into the leather of her long, black boots, drawing Hypatia’s coltish legs together again, stealing the power of movement from her. It was embarrassing - but Hypatia had been expecting it.
“Oh no,” Pathfinder said, “that’s not going to cut it this time.”



“Mmhh?!” Hypatia felt Pathfinder’s hands closing around her ankles again, looking over her shoulder just in time to see Pathfinder bending her calves up against the backs of her thighs. “MMHHH!!” Hypatia protested, not understanding what Pathfinder was doing by testing her flexibility like this. But there was more rope, and all too soon Hypatia grasped Pathfinder’s intentions.



“Mmmmphhh!” Hypatia gasped, as she felt her lower body being lashed up; as heavy ropes bound and pressed into the finespun silkiness of her thighs, binding her ankles against them, making the leather of her boots creak as more and more rope was drawn around them, completely immobilising Hypatia’s legs, taking the graceful tallness of her body and bundling it, packaging it up like a parcel. She couldn’t look. She just stared forward, eyes wide, moaning as she felt herself being tied tighter and tighter.



And not only that. With deft ropework, Pathfinder slipped a new cord around her ankles, anchoring it and tying it off around the heels of Hypatia’s boots, before drawing it up to her elbows, binding it to the rope already binding Hypatia’s arms, and then - pulling.
“MMMPHHH!!” Hypatia felt herself drawn as tight as a bowstring, her arms drawn straight, her legs pulled upward toward the small of her back. If she moved her arms, she pulled at her ankles, if she moved her legs, she tugged at her elbows. She was… hogtied. “Subdued… I’m completely subdued!!”



Sweat had mixed with the blood coming from the cut on Pathfinder’s eyebrow. She smeared them both together with the heel of her palm, and stood in front of Hypatia, breathing hard. She looked down; saw just how securely she’d hemmed in her captive’s body; how tight that ropework was, how completely incapable of moving she was, and she pictured Hypatia’s expression under the mask. As it happens, she pictured it exactly right.



“No more talking. No more debating. We’ve each said what we had to say, and it didn’t mean a god damned thing. So instead of talking, you can watch. You can watch as I kill Ben Vogler, Hypatia - knowing that there’s absolutely nothing you can do.”

[Mikeunmaskem]

All!! Being said!! Great story, thus far!! Expose Cecily!! First and foremost!! Unmask and make her, give up, her secret identity.!! Make pathfinder a necessary exposure of identity and subsequent ally!!

[Mikeunmaskem]

Now???!!! Big question???!!! In your plans, is, Cecily, being, unmasked, and , giving up secret identity, being exposed bunches, part of the plan, or, making compromise, of her Superheroine identity, part of the major equation??!!

[Damselbinder]

Now???!!! Big question???!!! In your plans, is, Cecily, being, unmasked, and , giving up secret identity, being exposed bunches, part of the plan, or, making compromise, of her Superheroine identity, part of the major equation??!!

No.

[Damselbinder]

“Mphh! MHHhhhhh-MMMPHHH!! MMMPHHHH! MMMMMMHHHHPPPPHHHH!!”


Again, and again, and again did Hypatia’s voice ring out in the cold and empty lair of her abductor. It carried well, bouncing off concrete walls and steel pipes. From one end of the building to the other you could hear her. And who, on hearing the desperation and distress in Hypatia’s voice, so cruelly stifled and sealed in all those layers of tape, would not have felt a stab in their heart; a deep and desperate wish to leap to the aid of a maiden in such distress? Even her captor felt it.


Oh… those sounds she made…! Grunts and groans and moans - little growls sometimes that fluttered back into whimpers, pitch shifting up and down the scales, from contralto outrage at her offended dignity to a helpless, kittenish soprano. Passion… femininity… virtue… elegance… humiliation… weakness…
“Beautiful Hypatia… treacherous Hypatia!”


Pathfinder’s head still stung where Hypatia’s inhibitor had bashed into it. She could feel her blood crisping and curdling in her left eyebrow. It made her angry. On one level: inevitable; she’d been injured unexpectedly by an enemy. Not interesting. Basic psychology. Universal. On another level: unjustified. Hypatia was innocent. Defending herself from an enemy. Kidnapped and trying to escape - a moral act. Just violence, the kind you could put in a children’s cartoon without anyone really complaining. Not murderous, or cruel. Unproblematic. On another level - SEETHING!!
“Deceiver. Deceiver deceiver deceiver deceiver deceiver deceiver deceiver deceiver deceiver deceiver deceiver. D-e-c-e-i-v-e-r.”


Liar. Maybe. Probably not. The story she’d told was probably true - in Hypatia’s position, Pathfinder would have used a true story as well. Much easier that way. You don’t have to worry about keeping the details straight. But still. Trickery. But still. Deceit. But still - but still - but still -
“Saw through me. Knew how I’d react. Knew that I admired her. Knew I’d - saw I’d been looking. She’s so pretty. She’s so clever. She’s so good. She has red hair. She has blue eyes. She has nice skin. Knew I couldn’t resist. Don’t even remember if… did I like women before?”


This wasn’t good. This wasn’t pure. This was dirt.


No, no, not that kind of dirt. Not like the others. Not like Vogler or Rathbone. This was okay dirt. Everyday dirt. Temptation. That was universal too. Pathfinder wouldn’t ever kill someone for this kind of dirt. But that didn’t make it good. Because - you get it, right? It was bodily. She was holding Hypatia but it wasn’t like an equation or something, wasn’t like a sentence in a textbook, like “Pathfinder, elle porte l’heroine qui s’appelle Hypatia”, because Pathfinder’s body was carrying Hypatia’s body.


She’d wrestled her down and tied her up. She’d tied her up so tightly - hogtied her! A superhero, and Pathfinder had captured her, defeated her, taken her body and folded it up and bound her! Picked her up because she was so light and she could barely move with all that rope wrapped around her body. Couldn’t fight. Gagged with all that tape so she couldn’t talk. Couldn’t argue or lie. Thrown over Pathfinder’s shoulder while she wiggled and squirmed; but they were such pretty struggles, so useless, so -
“Cute. Not the right word for her. Not a proper way to describe someone true and good and beautiful like Hypatia, but that’s what I’ve pulled her down to, isn’t it? She lost, and I caught her, so if she wriggles against me like that, then she’s cute, isn’t she? But, what do I know?”


Aware of every detail of what the ropes did to Hypatia’s body. Feeling how she didn’t sit flat or flop over Pathfinder’s shoulder as she was taken away. Saw how the rope connecting her feet to her arms kept her so tense and tight; keeping her arms immobilised, keeping her slim shoulders pulled back all passive and feminine. Her back curved a little, enough give in her bonds that it wasn’t rigid, but she couldn’t fully relax it while Pathfinder carried her. Her thighs, such porcelain-white thighs, of such a smooth and pleasing shape, uncovered and silky, right there by Pathfinder’s face, warm, warm and soft, and tense from the pull of the ropes binding them together and pulling her tall legs in a curve back toward her arms. So tense that Pathfinder could see the fine, subtle conditioning of them, so tense that her hand - because her hand was right there grasping Hypatia’s legs, holding them in place, touching them with dominating intimacy because that’s what being her captor meant - didn’t make much impression into her thighs’ softness because they were so tight because of the ropes; and Hypatia kept wriggling, kept rolling those slim and slinky hips because that was where her body was least restrained, so sometimes her left thigh would brush against Pathfinder’s face and that was so tempting [Pathfinder was tempted to untie Hypatia, hug her, and apologise for kidnapping her, but she didn’t understand that and assumed the temptation was to something evil] that it made Pathfinder’s cheeks burn with blood, wet and filthy under her skin.


“MMPHHH!! Mhhh-NMMHH-MMMHHHPPPHHHH!!”
More wriggling and yelling as Pathfinder took Hypatia off her shoulder, manoeuvred her so that she fell gently-ish into the boot of an unassuming car; packaged up by her bonds so that she fit snugly inside.
“Mmhh-mmphhhh!!” Hypatia twisted her body, trying to find some give somewhere in the ropes, but found none. All she managed to do was turn onto her side, facing outwards. Still struggling, still twisting, her mask meant that Pathfinder couldn’t tell if Hypatia was looking at her or not. It was easy to imagine that Hypatia didn’t even know she was there; like - like she was so helpless that she was reduced down to merely ‘captive’, and wasn’t anything more than that, just a damsel in distress playing that role, wriggling not to escape, making those muffled cries not to attract attention - but just because that’s what a beautiful captive was supposed to do, for the enjoyment of anyone who wished to gawk at her.


Pathfinder’s eyes were wide, taking in every detail her sight could encompass. She noticed the way the tape she’d wrapped around Hypatia’s head had caught her hair, compressing it against the back and sides of her head. She noticed how the way she’d bound Hypatia - hogtying her, bundling her up so tight, packaging her and folding her in on herself, capturing her body in yards and yards and yards of rope all wrapped around and turning her body against itself - it all seemed to blunt the edges of her. The way her shoulders were positioned; her folded calves; her thighs; the curve of her hips; her small, shapely breasts - like an artist putting together the basics of a sketch, Pathfinder saw Hypatia’s frame as composed only of soft, gentle ovals. All the hardness, such as it had been, had been worn away like the edges of a pebble in a riverbed. It gave Pathfinder a sick pleasure to see Hypatia, her deadly enemy, reduced like this [She was hurt by Hypatia’s deception, on a personal level, and knew how ridiculous that was, but she’d so badly wanted their connection to be real, and so the feeling of betrayal was being channelled into something for which Pathfinder could feel a more comprehensible guilt]. Then, Hypatia stopped struggling, going almost completely still. Pathfinder did not know why.


“Mmhh…mmhhhhppphhh!!”
Buzzing and weak, wrapped in defeated anguish, moaning and aghast at being so humiliatingly bound and bundled, muzzled in all that tape layered all around her head, over and over and over her lips - grabbed and touched and carried; naked against her captor’s strength with her powers stolen away from her - it had all been so immediate, such a humiliating maelstrom after she’d come so close to escaping. It had been such a shock, left her so dazed and disbelieving, that she’d forgotten Pathfinder as an individual. But when she’d turned herself over, and seen those eyes… big and black… staring… so wide… inhuman…!
“Mhhhh! Mhhh-mhhhhh! MMMMMPHHH!!” Hypatia was shivering. She didn’t know what was going to happen. She didn’t know anymore if Pathfinder was going to kill her. Did even Pathfinder herself know? Hypatia had faced death plenty of times before - been more afraid, even, in certain situations. But this was a different kind of fear. This was more like being in front of a judge and waiting to see if they put on the black cap or not.


“I think you’re afraid,” Pathfinder said. “I’m not certain anymore. Not because of your mask, though. I can see through that. I just don’t know if I can trust what’s underneath it. Fuck!” she growled, and Hypatia flinched like a startled rabbit. “What? No I wasn’t yelling at you. It’s my head. That hurt. When you threw me across the room that hurt a lot - I know you’re strong; I just keep forgetting how strong. It’s weird to think that if you didn’t have that thing around your head you could snap my neck with a thought. We’re both superhumans, but I still need weapons. You’re powerful. I don’t want you to think you aren’t. But I notice you haven’t tried to attack me or untie yourself again: you didn’t damage the inhibitor that badly. It’s working normally again, isn’t it?”
“Mmph…” Pathfinder was right. Whenever Hypatia tried to access her abilities, she felt the buzzing from the inhibitor shutting them right back down, and she didn’t dare push hard enough for it to knock her out again.
“I… think you won’t give me trouble. There’s not much you could do even if you wanted to. I wonder, though: are you the kind of person who’s pragmatic when there’s nothing they can do, or would you fight just for the sake of fighting - out of pride, or because you think it’s wrong to yield to someone evil on principle. If it were only your own life at stake I mean. Either fit what I’ve seen of your personality. Maybe it would depend on how evil your enemy is. I’m genuinely interested in your answer but I can’t take off your gag. I don’t want you to scream. I don’t want you to speak to me again. I -” She touched her chin. “You win. Our debate: since I’ve had to resort just to gagging you, I guess you win. So there’s that. I don’t think that’ll actually make you feel better - Jesus, I’m rambling like a madwoman!” She covered her eyes. “Sorry. Sorry, I know I’m angry with you, but that’s no excuse for me to get all… weird.”


Pathfinder took her hand away from her eyes, and she did, at least, look a little more settled. Her blown-out pupils which had made her eyes look so frighteningly black had shifted back to a more human level of dilation.
“Okay.” She took something out of her pocket. “Sorry if I frightened you. And sorry about this.” The thing in her hand looked kind of like an electronic car key. “I just… really need to make sure you don’t do anything.”
“Mhh? Mpphhhh!!” Hypatia realised what it was. “Something like an override for the inhibitor. But why? You don’t need to! You said it yourself, I’m not going to… I can’t resist…! I’m powerless and… and hogtied, you don’t - MMMPPPHHHHH!!!”


Bursting! Shooting through Hypatia’s mind and body, this coursing river of pulses jamming her powers and stealing away what little strength she still possessed. But it felt different this time - harder. Crueller. More brutish. It didn’t speak her powers’ language as it had before, however domineeringly. It just shouted her down; screaming artlessly over any music her powers could have made. It just buzzed its way through her mind, forcing her down, down, down… but her mind… she was almost used to that… it was what it did to her body…!


“MMMMMMMHHHHPHHHH!! MMHHHH-MHHH!! NNNHHHMMPPHHH!!” Down her neck - down her spine - through the taut curve of her bound legs; the sensation buzzed up and down, bouncing from one end of her body to another; taking hold of every nerve, and twisting, making every muscle tighten and stiffen, making Hypatia’s limbs go so tight that it seemed as though her bonds might snap. They creaked under the strain as Hypatia’s calves pulled against her hands, her shoulders pulled against her ankles, her back and her neck arched like she was a mermaid sweeping above the surface of the sea. And then -


“Mmmmmhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…” Oh… that was better… it was almost… nice. Everything eased. Everything relaxed. Her legs and arms went as slack as they could while still tied to each other. Her back uncurled. This… this didn’t feel so bad, did it? Not… not so much like a punishment. Just… just making her… blank… relaxed… making it all fade into a dark whiteness. It made her weak -
“But that’s alright… I’m already weak…”
It made her powerless.
“But that’s alright… I’m already powerless…”
It made her sleep.
“...No… that’s not… I don’t want to sleep… I don’t want to be… with her… unconscious… don’t know what she’ll do to… to me…



…please take off my gag… please let me talk to you again… I have to stop you… but I want to help… I do…


…I think my… eyes have already closed… I think she’s closed the trunk… I think she’s already driving… taking me away… I can’t move… I might already be knocked out… I… can’t… th…ink… I can’t… I can’t… I can’t… I’m… so…



…tired…”


Her eyes were closed behind her mask. Her body was still, head lifted a little higher than normal for someone who was asleep, on account of the tension her bonds put on her shoulders. She did not stir but for the bumps of the road jostling her body around. Next to her in the trunk was a large rifle, that Pathfinder had packed so that she could shoot Ben Vogler.

[Damselbinder]

Vogler’s aide, Monty Carlo (“Get it?”) used to be genuinely ignorant. The first time he’d been around for one of Ben’s outbursts, in Nevada back in ‘94 he hadn’t recognised it for what it was. Ben had tried to vent his anger on a fae, wannabe-star who, surely, wouldn’t dare to raise the hue and cry against an influential record producer. But the kid had turned out to be, like, a black belt in judo or something, and when Monty had heard the commotion in Ben’s hotel room he’d walked into a fight. Monty had got the wrong end of the stick and leapt heroically into the fray, though he hadn’t made much difference to anything. He couldn’t understand why Ben had told him not to call the police. He understood even less when, the next day, Ben had fired him - only to rehire him a week later with a grovelling apology.


By now, Monty understood quite well what was going on. His boss was sick, and it was his job to keep that sickness contained. To provide him with outlets, and to ensure that those outlets didn’t… give trouble. Whether that meant threats or bribery depended on the situation. Monty had had to become a kind of amateur psychologist to figure this out; to know whom to cow, and whom to comfort; whom to offer money, whom to press into a quick settlement, whom to threaten with further injury.


The man coming out of Ben’s bedroom was difficult to gauge, though. He was older than the men who typically called on Monty’s boss, maybe as old as thirty-five, and that made things more complicated. If he was getting on a bit, he might think he had less to lose from going public or something. He was bruised. His right eye was swollen shut. He was limping. If 1 was the lightest that Ben’s victims got, and 10 was the worst… this guy was about a 4, maybe 5 depending on what was hidden under his clothes.


“Hey,” Monty called out. He’d learned just the pitch and volume to use in such an introduction to allow Ben’s victim to interpret him as being either assertive, sympathetic, or threatening depending on their character. This man didn’t flinch when he heard Monty’s voice, though. He turned around, and he smirked.
“Three grand.”
“Excuse me?”
“Three grand. Right now. In cash. Do that and if anyone asks I’ll say I owed the wrong people money or somethin’.” He had affected a Brooklyn accent, obviously fake.
The sensible thing to do was just to say ‘okay, whatever’ and give in, and normally Monty would have done just that. But all this business with the assassin, and the strain of allowing himself to become so wantonly immoral, made him overreact.
“Do you know who you’re dealing with?” he said. “If Mr Vogler doesn’t want you walking out of here, you won’t walk out.”
“Oh please. You think people ‘round here don’t know about your big Mr Vogler? You think when I walked in here I didn’t know I was gonna end up like this? Motherfucker I’ve taken a lot less than what I’m asking to let fat fucks like your boss beat the shit out of me. So three grand, bitch. Or maybe I start feeling litigious.”
Scowling, Monty signalled to one of his people. They already had a duffel bag filled with notes, and they handed it over. There was a bit more than three grand inside, but that didn’t matter.


The beaten man checked the bags’ contents over, and gave another vicious smirk once he was satisfied.
“Pleasure doin’ business with you, bitch. Call me again next time Bennie wants some more boxing practice.”
“Just get out,” Monty said.
Ben’s victim considered making another remark, but saw the men behind Monty with even bigger fists than his client, and thought better of it. He turned, and limped away with as much scornful dignity as he could muster.


“You,” Monty said, snapping his fingers at one of Ben’s toughs. “Follow him for a while. Be subtle about it. It’s not to scare him - I just want to make sure he doesn’t change his mind. Mr Vogler doesn’t need that shit right now.”
“What if I find that he has changed his mind?” the tough asked.
“Oh, Jesus… just… just tell me. Don’t do nothing.”
“A’ight.”
Now came the hard part. Now it was time to check on Ben himself.


On entering his employer’s bedroom, it became immediately clear why Ben had been, by his standards, quite restrained with his night’s entertainment: his violence had been directed at everything around him. The sex worker had been little more than collateral damage.
“Ben… are… are you okay?”
“...Yeah.” He was naked. The way he was slumped, the sulky look on his face, and the general, rotund-ish shape of him make him look disturbingly babyish. His hands were covered in blood - mostly his own. It was bad enough that Monty wanted to get him some bandages or something, but he had long since learned that it was best not to approach Ben after one of his ‘moments’.


“That superhero. Hypatia. She fucked up, didn’t she?”
“Sorry, sir?”
“She fucked up. She shouldn’t have stopped that assassin. She should have let them kill me. It’d make things easier for everyone. Bet you think so too.” He turned to Monty, grinning freakishly at him. “Bet you wish she’d let the assassin do it. Bet you wish I was dead! Everybody wishes I was dead!!”
“Come on, Ben, don’t say that. Ol’ Monty Carlo’s stuck with you this long, huh?”
“I’m bad, Monty. And I’ve made you bad. You were okay before you met me. A little sleazy, maybe, but you were okay. I always liked how you were with my mother. She liked you a lot and, you know, you can’t fake that. You can’t pretend to be patient with an old lady with dementia. You either are or you aren’t. But over the years I’ve ground it all out of you. Made you do all kinds of greasy shit. Made you stupider, too. You used to be pretty sharp, but you can’t let yourself be sharp anymore. Can’t let yourself have too many thoughts. So you just get stupid. Sorry, Monty. Sorry I ruined your life.”
“...You want some iodine for your hands, or something?”
“No, I’m okay.”
“Cool.” He shut the door behind him.


Vogler sat on the floor for a few more minutes. His bedroom had big, wide windows, and he’d left the blinds open. That was as far as he could go. That was the best he could do. Controlling himself? No, no, he couldn’t do that. For him that was impossible. He was bad. But he could leave his blinds open.


His neck felt funny. It had felt funny for a couple of days. It didn’t hurt - well actually it did hurt, but that was normal and this was new - but it felt odd. Wobbly. He fancied that it was because he was secretly a superhuman, and he could sense when someone was pointing a gun at him. Naturally, he was talking shit. He wasn’t a superhuman, and couldn’t sense anything. But, wouldn’t you know it, someone was pointing a gun at him.

[Damselbinder]

“Mhh… mhhphh…”
TRRRR-TRRR-RRRRRRR
“Mphh…?”
TRRRRR-RRRR-RRRR-RRRRR-RRRRRRR
“Mphh…. MMHPPHH!!”


No time to think! No time to take stock of where she was, or to gather her wits or anything before the ordeal of her captivity renewed, having found novel ways to shame her. There was a pole at her back, keeping it straight, keeping her legs straight too. There was no rope around her body anymore: Pathfinder had untied her. But she’d done it only to bind her up in a different way.


Thick, strong, shiny black tape wrapped around her, binding her svelte, light body against this pole. Pathfinder had bound her midsection, pressing Hypatia’s soft arms against her sides, her palms flat against her pretty hips; then sealed over with more tape to fix that whole portion of her body against the ramrod behind her. Tape around Hypatia’s breasts, covering them, their shapely circumference hidden and suppressed under the pressure of the tape binding her to the pole, covering most of her upsilon, too. Burying it.


It was the sound of Pathfinder rebinding her legs that had woken Hypatia up. Tape around her knees, locking them together and locking them against the pole and locking Hypatia’s lower body into place. As Hypatia looked down, she saw Pathfinder putting on the finishing touches. Tape growling contentedly as it went around her ankles, increasing the pressure of Hypatia’s long, lithe legs against each other; the tape folded around, curled back again to bind her feet and calves against the pole.


“Mhhhhhh…” Hypatia mewed, bound up tight in metres and metres of cruel, black tape, bound fast and locked down, so tight - could hardly move - all her struggles stifled and choked down into pretty, useless wiggling. And being tied to a pole like this - Hypatia couldn’t help thinking of the maiden in Millais’ The Knight Errant, a figure not only sympathetic, but - in fact, principally - deeply erotic. She had seen that painting, once, on a trip to London with Maria. She had never found bondage especially titillating but once she had… well, she had been alone, and missing Maria, and that painting had come into her mind, and she had… she’d touched herself while thinking about it. She’d remembered some of her own experiences, other times when she’d been overpowered and captured and it had been - well, it had been sort of therapeutic for her to see something a little bit sexy about being a damsel in distress. It helped her with some difficult memories. But this… this was too close to that fantasy, to the idealised artistry of helpless, feminine sexuality; like Pathfinder had pulled a fantasy out of Hypatia’s head and grafted it like a tree branch onto one of her own. Hypatia didn’t want there to be anything… sensuous about what Pathfinder had done to her. Certainly, she did not want Pathfinder having such thoughts.


“Mhhhphhh!” Fingers dancing against her bare thighs, not-quite-caressing as Pathfinder’s hands pushed Hypatia’s legs even closer together, wrapping one more band around them, pressing them firm and taut into each other, feeling the sticky underside of the tape against her. Against her boots and much of her leotard the black plastic blended in, but it stood out so starkly against her creamy, silky white skin. Pathfinder’s imprint on her. Pathfinder’s hands lingered on her thighs. The pole she’d tied them to felt cold; her hands felt hot.


“I’ve got some things wrong. My emotions keep getting the best of me. I want to stay cold; dispassionate. That’s the only way to be fair… but it’s difficult. That landlady… I shouldn’t have killed her. Maybe she deserved it and maybe she didn’t, but I did it out of personal hatred. It led you to me, as well. And right now. Right now I’ve still got my hands on your legs. I don’t need to. But you’re warm… and I’m not going to lie to you: I find you… very attractive, Hypatia. I shouldn’t. Even if I wasn’t your captor it would be dirty.” She took her hands away. “Alright… no more getting things wrong. You’re not here for any reason other than to see.”
“Mmhphh?”


Pathfinder stepped back, letting Hypatia see where she was. Another rooftop: not very high up this time. Only about three storeys tall. The pole she was tied to was for some expensive satellite television system. They were overlooking another building, and Hypatia recognised it.
“Vogler’s house… Oh god, she really does want me to see her do this!”


“I can’t… fully articulate why I want you to see this. I know that I want you here. Maybe it’s like you said. Maybe it’s because I’m lonely, and I want to share this with someone. That would be another mistake. Maybe… maybe it is still about convincing you. Maybe when you see me kill him, it’ll get rid of any squeamishness you still have about what I do.”


She stepped towards the edge of the building. Her M1903 awaited her, and when she took into her arms it was as though she was attaching an orphaned body part. She raised her rifle, but before she could start to work out how to approach the situation, she noticed someone leaving Vogler’s house.
“Hm?” She raised a pair of spotter’s binoculars, and from the man’s clothes immediately deduced his profession, his purpose for being there. She saw the bruises on his face, saw how he limped. Saw the shivering and the tears, tears that he had just about managed to suppress while he was still inside. “Can you see him, Hypatia?” Pathfinder called out. “That man leaving Vogler’s house. It’s another victim. I knew it. I said, didn’t I, that this might be the result?! Not your fault - I said that too. And… yes, I still think that, in fact. But I’m still pretty pissed off, Hypatia. I could have prevented this. There’s more ‘minus’ in the world now because I failed to protect him.”


She lowered her weapon, turned back to her captive.
“Isn’t that the point of all of this? Isn’t that why you do what you do? You’re trying to protect the innocent from the predations of the evil! That’s all I’m trying to do!”
“Mmmhhphh… mhhh-mmphhh!!” Hypatia shook her head from side to side, straining not so much to free herself from bondage as to free her mouth. “Mmmphh! MMHHHPHHH!!”
“What? Want to say something? Well, why not?” Pathfinder reached to her mouth, but hesitated at the last second. “...We’re not that far from the house. If you screamed, someone in there might notice. His security. I think I saw his P.A. inside, too. Will you scream?”
Hypatia shook her head.
“...I believe you, okay? Even now… which is really stupid of me, but… fine.” She put down her rifle, put both hands around Hypatia’s head, one holding her by the chin, the other by the back of the head, searching for the end of the tape so she could start unpeeling it. It took a moment to find it, and took quite a lot of tugging and straining to really start unwinding it: she’d forgotten just how tightly she’d gagged her.


“Mmh… mhh…” Hypatia mewed softly as Pathfinder ungagged her. Their faces were close. Pathfinder was being very careful with her; but having both of her hands on her face was… it felt a bit oppressive. Again, she was being made to feel dependent on her captor, and it embarrassed her. “Mhhh… ahhhh!” she gasped, wincing as the last layer of tape was pulled directly away from her skin. A faint, red mark had been left around her mouth, and her lips stung.
“Sorry,” Pathfinder muttered.
“It’s okay,” Hypatia mumbled. “It doesn’t hurt that much.”
“No, I mean - I messed up your hair.”
“Oh.” Indeed, ripping the tape away from it had made it a little less faultlessly straight than usual. Keeping it from frizzing was one of the chiefest banes of Hypatia’s civilian life. “Never mind.”


Pathfinder moved back, picking up her rifle, pulling it across her chest, almost defensively.
“Alright, Hypatia. What was it that you wanted to say? Please make it quick,” she added, with perhaps the merest hint of impatience.
Hypatia licked her lips, tasting the unpleasant, tarry taste of the sealant from the back of the duct tape.


“I don’t know if it’s wrong to kill Ben Vogler. I don’t know if, had I the power, it would actually be right to stop you from killing him. It’s impossible for me to work up any particular sense of his humanity either. I don’t know him. I spoke to him, briefly, but he basically just exists in the abstract. Everything I know about him makes him come across as a complete degenerate.


“But you should still walk away. If you kill him, it will only make things worse for you. You have this obsessive paranoia about your own mortality - well then why spend that limited time doing things that will make you miserable, and will accomplish nothing?! Just leave! Just leave, now, and - and go and live in Brazil or something. Anywhere. Have a life. Who cares whether you leave something that will last beyond your lifetime or not? It doesn’t matter! The authorities know about you, now - if you keep assassinating people they will know it is you and eventually you will get caught. You will make a mistake, and rot in prison for the rest of your life and that will be useless!”
“I don’t make those kinds of mistakes! Emotional mistakes… yes. Killing Ava Daniels - I shouldn’t have done that. But practical errors - errors that will get me caught? No.”
It was not, Hypatia sensed, something that Pathfinder would have said before. She had not seemed that arrogant - but now she was feeling exposed, and she was trying to comfort herself.


“Was that all?” Pathfinder asked.
“...Pathfinder. I’m telling you: walk away.”
“No.” She picked up her rifle. “I’ve drawn this out long enough.”


She approached the rooftop’s ledge, hitched up her M1930, and rested the butt of the rifle against her chest. She raised it, and closed her eyes. The path began to form.
“There is one more thing!”
The path vanished. Pathfinder’s powers knew before she did that she would turn around, however grudgingly, to see what it was that Hypatia had to say. She scowled, the hard lines of her face sharpening to points, the corner of her right eye twitching.
“What?!” she barked. “What can it be now?! I’ve heard it all, Hypatia! Killing will destroy my humanity; I’ll end up in prison; life is sacred; criminal justice musn’t be arbitrary; I don’t have the right to decide who lives and who dies; I’ll inspire other vigilantes - yes, yes, yes, it’s all very civilised and reasonable but I don’t care about any of that! ‘Plus’ and ‘minus’! That’s it!”
“What if you just get it wrong, Pathfinder? What if you pick a target that doesn’t deserve it?”
“Doesn’t - how the hell can you be saying that now?! You said yourself Vogler was a degenerate! You’ve seen he’ll never control himself. You’ve seen what he does to his victims.”
“Agreed. But I’m not talking about Vogler. I’m talking about the man you shot at the courthouse: Nigel Rathbone.”


Rathbone? What? The… the financier? Guilty of industrial-scale fraud with his hedge fund. Everyone had thought he was guilty. Even though he was high up in the financial world, he was just outside of political circles enough that the authorities wanted to crucify him. Everyone agreed he was guilty - but he’d found a way to slither out of it.
“What about him?”
“He was actually put on trial. The jury delivered a verdict of not-guilty. Why wasn’t that good enough for you?”
“Because his lawyer was bribing two of the jurors. That lawyer was my target, originally, but I decided Rathbone deserved it more than she did. A lot of decent people are a lot fucking poorer because of him. He -”
“- was innocent.”


Pathfinder went very still. She felt very cold.
“...No he wasn’t. He was guilty. I observed the trial. He was guilty. His defence was a joke.”
“I don’t agree with you. I was given access to the court transcripts, and I think his defence was reasonable. He was a fairly old man, and he’d given more and more control of his affairs to one of his undermanagers, and it was they that performed the fraud, not him. When I saw Rathbone’s arrest in the news I suppose I more or less assumed he was guilty, though I didn’t give it much thought. But when you drew my attention to it by killing him, the whole affair began to seem strange. Rathbone was very, very wealthy, and he was already in his late 60s. That seems a strange time to start involving oneself in a criminal fraud. One ought never to underestimate the greed of an industrialist, I grant you, but Rathbone had easier ways of doing that. The prosecution argued very charismatically and persuasively… but they never, in my opinion, really proved that his - prima facie plausible - defence was false. I think he was guilty of criminal negligence, but not personally of fraud. I think you killed an odious man - but not an evil one.”


Twitches. Shaking. Several faulty attempts at starting a sentence.
“The - no, see, you - you’re trying to trick me! You just want me to hesitate!”
“You’re welcome to check the facts yourself.”
“No! I know that his lawyer tampered with the jury.”
“A crime, to be sure. But it doesn’t actually prove Rathbone was guilty of fraud.”
“Well why wouldn’t you mention this before?! Hm?! When we were debating, why wouldn’t you open with this? If you thought I was just wrong, that I was just incompetent, why wouldn’t you start with that?!”
“In principle I don’t think it does prove you wrong. The criminal justice system convicts innocent people all the time. Why should a vigilante be immune to error? Besides,” Hypatia added, “I only wanted to use this as a last resort. I was concerned about how you might react to such a direct, personal challenge.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I don’t think you’re completely sane, Lauren.”


Pathfinder flinched. That she might have killed someone undeserving was a disturbing, and painful thought. But that wasn’t what made her so upset. What upset her was that Hypatia thought she was mad, and had put it with such gentle coldness.
“It doesn’t make a difference,” she said. “That just means… that just means I have to keep doing it. I have to balance it out.” She raised her rifle.
“Pathfinder - don’t do this.”
“Shh. I’m trying to concentrate.” She closed her eyes. The path began to form. She was aiming for the back of Vogler’s neck, putting the bullet through his bedroom window, bouncing it off three walls, and then burying it at the top of his spine.
“Walk away, Pathfinder!”
“SHUT UP!” Pathfinder bellowed. “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP [she fired] SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!”


She struck exactly where she’d been aiming for. She sent Vogler sprawling face first onto the floor. Once she hit her target ‘the path’ would linger in her mind for a moment or two, so she could see him lying on the floor of his bedroom, and at the sight of his body, she did not feel dehumanised. She did not feel broken. She felt calm, and satisfied, like she had eaten a good meal. That is, she felt like that for a moment, because at the very last instant of her farsight lingering in her mind’s eye, she saw Vogler move.


It occurred to her to reflect on Hypatia’s words. How her persuasions had altered in character. Telling Pathfinder to ‘walk away’ - it was no longer a moral appeal. Hypatia had been warning her. Warning her of what, Pathfinder could not in that moment say; but something else flashed in her mind’s eye now: her Accuracy International Arctic Warfare Magnum, that Hypatia had somehow twisted into a pretzel while she was unconscious.
“Vogler… she said she met with him… she met with him… a trap! She turned him into a trap!” She had this realisation about a tenth of a second before the bullet she’d fired at Vogler whipped past her face. Thankfully, it was not aimed at her. It was aimed at Hypatia - or rather, at the inhibitor clamped around her forehead.


“My power seems a very conventional one, doesn’t it? Telekinesis, I mean.” She tore the remnants of the inhibitor from herself. “But mine has some curious features. I have discovered the ability to ‘invest’ a portion of my power into an object or surface, where it will await whatever trigger I implant in it - usually proximity or impact.” She ripped the tape from her body. “When I met Ben Vogler, I implanted a portion of my strength into his shoulders, neck and head, with the idea of ‘absorb; cushion; soften’ - so you did actually wound Vogler; but not life-threateningly. You see, for the trap to work, I had to make it seem to your powers as though you had scored a successful hit, otherwise you’d have smelled a rat.” She took Pathfinder’s rifle from her, and tore it apart.


“But there are disadvantages. When I ‘invest’ my power into an object, it depletes my strength. To make sure the trap could withstand a direct impact from a powerful rifle, I had to pool about half of my power into it. So when I faced you the second time, I was weakened to the point where you were able to defeat me. I can’t just deactivate a trap at will, either. I have to be present to ‘retrieve’ it, or the trap must be triggered. The inhibitor activated when I expended my energies, and counteracted them. But the trap I placed had already been expended. When your bullet was affected by my trap, I was able to take control of it without using any more of my power.”

Pathfinder had hardly been listening. She was frozen. Frozen not with fear, or shock. Frozen not with anguish, with incomprehension at her failure. Frozen not even because Hypatia, a powerful superhuman, was bearing down on her, and was certainly more than a match for her. She was frozen because when Hypatia had torn off the inhibitor, she had been a little too violent. She had torn off her mask, as well.


What a difference it made! In a way she looked even more fearsome, for her irises were a deep and brilliant blue, a dramatic contrast to the colour of her hair, both intensifying the other; and her expression was one of fierce decisiveness. But any notion that Hypatia was mendacious or had spoken to her insincerely was instantly and obviously cant. Seeing her whole face made Pathfinder realise that her compassion was completely genuine, for there was no lie in the openness of her expression, her anguish on Pathfinder’s behalf, her wish that there was some way out of this besides brutalising Pathfinder into submission. She did not hide, and there was no hiding from her.


It was over, and Pathfinder knew that. Hypatia was free, restored to full power. Her rifle was destroyed. Her holstered pistol would do her no good - she could not even visualise a path for her hand to reach it, for Hypatia would, with absolute certainty, stop her.
“...I never had a chance, did I? I only beat you because you were weakened… and I never even could have killed him because of your trap. I never had a chance!”
“No,” Hypatia said. “If you hadn’t brought me here, you could simply have reloaded and fired again when your first shot failed. If you hadn’t sworn that you’d kill Vogler, and focused on him and no-one but him, I’d never have been able to track you down. If you hadn’t been so eager for people to see that it was you doing these crimes, I’d never even have suspected you. If you hadn’t been so honourable, you would simply have killed me, and my trap - I imagine - would have disintegrated.” She took a single step forward. “But we are where we are, Pathfinder. And everything I have said, I still believe. I will not let you go.”
“I’m not finished. I won’t let you capture me. I’ll fight you.”
“At this range, with no gun in your hand?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t win.”
“I know.”
She reached for her pistol. She’d underestimated herself a little: she did actually manage to get her fingers around its grip before Hypatia stopped her. But it did her no good: it just meant that Hypatia had to break a couple of the bones in her hand.

[Damselbinder]

Pathfinder offered no resistance as she was bundled into the back of a police cruiser, hands and feet in the heavy-duty shackles reserved exclusively for superhuman prisoners. She looked and acted like a machine, as if all feeling inside her had gone entirely blank. The officers didn’t know much about what was going on: they had been called to Vogler’s residence after the bullet had hit him, and had been surprised to find Hypatia there, with the would-be assassin already defeated, and their job ostensibly done for them.


“Okay, I think that’s everything I’ll need for now,” said a certain sergeant to Hypatia, after taking a short statement from her. “My captain’s prolly gonna want you to come down to the station to fill this out a bit.”
“Of course,” Hypatia said, distantly. She had put her mask back, but she had to use her powers to keep the torn fabric in place. “She suffered some injuries in our last battle,” she said. “Please make sure they’re attended to.”
“Uh, yeah, sure.”
Hypatia looked through the window of the cruiser. She saw Pathfinder sitting, slumped, making no resistance against her shackles. She saw those eyes, that had been full of this wild indignation, blank.
“...And…” Hypatia began, but the words caught in her throat.
“Hm?”
“...I think it would be prudent to put her on suicide-watch.”
But before the officer could ask her why, Hypatia caught sight of Ben Vogler, lingering by his door.


“Haha!” Vogler cheered, clapping Monty on the back. “Whoo! Another close one, huh? Man, I thought that was it for me this time, but there ain’t no stopping the Vogler!”
“You said it,” replied Monty, almost succeeding in sounding cheerful.
“Thought you could kill me, huh?” Vogler shouted. “Many have tried, bitch, many have tried! Yahahaha!”
To Monty and the rest of the entourage, this sudden turn in Vogler’s manner was no surprise. When things were going against him, he was miserable, self-effacing, self-loathing to a morbid extreme. When things were in his favour - especially if he’d glugged down a few of his migraine pills - he was on top of the world.


“Uh, Mr Vogler,” one of his bodyguards said, “do you maybe want to get that looked at again?” The man was talking about the wound on the back of Vogler’s neck. Hypatia’s trap had saved his life, and rendered the injury a minor one, but not that minor. Blood was seeping from underneath the bandage an EMT had placed on it.
“‘Do you want to get that looked at?’” Vogler mimicked in a goofy, childish voice. “Do you want to get your face caved in?! The Vogler’s untouchable! What do I care about some scratch? I barely feel it! I don’t feel it!” He clapped his massive hands together, and laughed raucously, before a jolt of pain cut him off. He clasped his hands to his head, wincing.


“Mr Vogler!” Monty cried.
“Don’t be a mother hen,” Vogler snapped. “It’s just - ow! It’s not even my neck, it’s another god-damned migraine!”
“Boss, are you sure? I don’t think migraines hit that fast…”
“Shut up, Monty! It’s obviously - AGHH!” He fell to his knees, sweating and grinding his teeth. “Ah, Jesus! Haha, this is a real big one, I - AGGHHH!” His momentary attempt at good humour collapsed underneath him, and he just started groaning in pain. “Ughhh… ughhh it’s like my skull’s splitting open!”
The ambulance that had arrived with the cops was still around, and Monty saw one of the EMTs rushing over. But a few metres away, he saw someone else looking too.
“It’s that superheroine… Hypatia. She must have been the one who stopped the assassin.”
She was standing perfectly still. It was hard to tell with the mask, but it seemed as though she were looking right through him, at Vogler. Her right fist was clenched. Her finely shaped, pretty mouth was firmly shut, and her jaw was tightened. There was - there was something about her… something strange… something scary… couldn’t see her eyes… but something was happening in them…
“Could… could she be trying to…?!!”


“Ahhhh… ahhh… shit… oh, I think I’m okay now,” Vogler said. He let his guards help him up, then immediately barked at them for doing their jobs. “Shit! That was weird.”
“Sir!” the EMT called out. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah yeah, I’m fine!” Vogler shouted. “Just a migraine. I get them all the time. I’m fine, okay? Thanks a million.”
“Uh…” The EMT was going to insist, but the surly glances from Vogler’s heavies made them think better of it. They bumped Monty slightly as they moved away, making him momentarily turn in their direction.
“Watch it!” Monty grumbled, instantly turning his head back to Hypatia - but by the time he looked again, she was gone.