Everybody's Fool
An Astra Cosmic Tale
By Nathalie June Hawthorne Hafner
The 200th Annual Danesville Christmas Eve Ball, this year being hosted by Billionaire socialite Johanna Kerr at her mansion at the outskirts of the city. 250 people had been invited, and nearly all of them had made it. Johanna herself was sitting at her table near the stage and podium, looking and acting rather bored, sipping a glass of chardonnay that had been refilled ten times in the three hours since the party had started. No matter how much she drank, though, Johanna had always found it hard to get drunk, thanks to her mysterious biological peculiarities. She set the glass down at the table and stood up, adjusted her glasses, straightened her simple red and white checkered dress and walked towards the entrance to her mansion’s dining hall. She was intercepted by one of the party guests, trillionaire technologist and philanthropist Aradia Fürst.
“Are you having a good evening, Miss Kerr?” Aradia asked. She was dressed in an elegant gold and black dress, with gold and onyx jewelry on her neck and ears.
“Of course I am, Miss Fürst, hosting the Christmas Ball was the least I could do after all of the donations to the city I’ve given.”
“I hope your night continues to be well. I must be leaving now, my family is having a Christmas dinner for the first time in decades, and I obviously can’t miss it.”
“Of course, feel free to go.”
Aradia Fürst, one of the most powerful women on Earth and the only public superhero at the party, cast a spell to summon a portal, and stepped through it. It closed behind her.
It was always a strange thing to see happen, especially if you were standing close by. Johanna grabbed a glass of red wine from a passing server and downed it. She carried the empty glass to the entrance of the dining hall, which opened up to the stairway down to the mansion’s foyer. She looked out over the small crowd of guests milling about, and adjusted her glasses.
The front door of the mansion exploded inwards. Simultaneously, men dressed in red and white body armor and face masks crashed through the windows, guns in hand. Johanna recognised them instantly as goons of the supervillainess the Harlequin.
Johanna hastily ducked back into the dining hall, which thankfully lacked any windows for them to have crashed through. She hunkered down behind the inward-opening door, and watched as the party guests ran for cover. The armed goons marched past the door, and when the last of them had entered she jumped out from her hiding spot. She clocked one of the goons, took his gun, and fired at the rest of them.
Unfortunately, she ran out of ammo long before the goons were all eliminated, and one of them rushed her, ripping the gun out of her hands and hitting her in the face with it. Johanna went down, cradling her nose, and the goon grabbed her arm and pulled her back up.
“Why don’t you join the audience, Miss Kerr. The show’s about to start.” He herded her into the crowd, which was being gathered near the stage at the far end of the dining hall. Johanna adjusted her glasses, and as she did so the projection on the screen behind the podium changed from a generic Christmas slideshow to a video of the Harlequin’s “public persona”, which was just a featureless red and white mask with a pair of red-dyed pigtails poking out from behind it. The video was very distorted, and stuttered and skipped in between sentences and words, and her voice was only barely clear enough to understand and identify as female.
“Hello, everyone. I hope you’ve all had a great Christmas Eve, because it’s about time you received your presents. But first, you need to find them. I have hidden throughout this wonderful mansion a number of ‘gifts’. But, I’m going to be naughty and tell you what’s in them now: Each gift has canisters of thermite and other nasty incendiaries in it, and if you don’t find them all, they’re all going to go off at midnight, in one hour. Also, don’t be getting it in your head to call the police, or even our city’s resident technowitch, because the entire estate has been warded to prevent just that type of thing. And for that, you can thank your ever-paranoid host. You’d better scatter, those gifts are opening Christmas day whether you find them or not.”
The guests all started running around, tearing apart the mansion to find the bombs. Johanna adjusted her glasses, and activated the high-tech scanner in them, searching for traces of thermite, napalm, magnesium, and other volatile chemicals. She found a high concentration of them near the stage, and quickly tore away the bunting around it, revealing a pair of gift wrapped presents. She pulled them out and placed them on the stage.
“Bring any bombs you find to the stage!” Johanna yelled to the panicked civilians. Once all the tables in the dining hall had been flipped and searched under, 5 more bombs had been brought to the stage. She gave her glasses to another woman. “These glasses, they can find the bombs. Don't ask how they work or why I have them, if we live you'll have time to ask then. Find the bombs.” The other woman ran off, holding the glasses tightly against her face.
Johanna knelt over a bomb, and carefully lifted the top off. Inside it was a bundle of canisters of various chemicals, and a circuit board with a switch and a timer counting down to midnight.
“What are you doing?!” yelled a guest. “You're going to set it off!”
“Don't worry, I have bomb defusal training,” Johanna explained. “I'm not just a billionaire playgirl philanthropist, you know.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“Find the bombs and maybe I'll have time to explain,” Johanna said as she examined the wiring. She studied the wiring on the bomb, and felt reasonably certain that flipping the switch back to the “Off” position would disconnect the timer from the detonator. She did so, and the timer display went blank.
“That was suspiciously easy...” Johanna remarked. She repeated the process on every bomb that was found, and with just five minutes left until midnight they had found and defused every bomb in the mansion. Johanna took her glasses back and adjusted them on her face. Shortly after she did so the Harlequin herself appeared, walking through the front door, up the stairs, and into the dining room. She was a very tall woman, in a red and white sundress, with her red pigtails, wearing her red and white mask, and carrying a machine gun.
“Congratulations!” She called out, her voice still distorted. “You found all the bombs! But, you’ve been naughty and opened them before Christmas, Miss Kerr. And for that, you need to be punished.” The Harlequin lifted the machine gun and opened fire at Johanna.
Johanna covered her eyes with her arm, and the bullets ricocheted off of her, tearing holes in her dress and hitting the goons and civilians around her. The Harlequin only stopped firing when she ran out of ammo, killing 18 people around Johanna. Johanna ran forward, and punched the Harlequin in the center of the mask, knocked her over, and pummelled her chest. The mask grew a large crack which twistedly mimicked a smile. Every following punch made sickening crunching noises, which sounded less like breaking bones and more like breaking metal.
Johanna beat the Harlequin, until the Harlequin’s skin started breaking and it became clear that Johanna was not attacking anything human. Metal and wires poked through the skin, and when Johanna pried the cracked mask off of the Harlequin's face, there was mechanical parts, a large speaker and a cylinder with a button on it.
The clock struck midnight, and the crowd waited tensely for the bells to stop chiming to see if their death was still imminent. Meanwhile, Johanna Kerr dragged her hand through the blood of the people who had been killed by the ricochets, chuckling under her breath. She did her hair, staining it red with the blood, putting it up in pigtails. The glasses, which had been controlling the Harlebot and giving orders to the goons, she pulled off her face, and crushed in her hand. She picked up the cracked mask, laughing louder, until she was cackling as she placed it upon her face.
Johanna pulled the detonator out of the Harlebot’s head, stood up, and told the terrified crowd “Merry Christmas, everyone!”, before pressing the button
The thermobaric bomb that Johanna had placed in the cellar under the dining room detonated, incinerating the normal humans instantly and spreading what remained far and wide.
The Harlequin crawled from the wreckage, feeling far more pain than she had expected. The crack in the mask had widened enough that the mask was now two separate pieces, but neither had fallen off, and she reckoned that the searing pain in her face had something to do with it. The plastic that lined the inside of the mask had fused chemically to her otherwise invulnerable skin, the top piece to her forehead and cheekbones and the bottom piece to her jaw. The pieces clicked as they struck against one another, becoming her new teeth and mouth. Her dress had also melted to her skin, making her nearly unrecognisable as human, giving her the appearance of checkered scales. It was ambiguous if Johanna had even been human before, but now there was no doubt that the Harlequin was a monster.
The Harlequin watched as a number of the city’s most active heroes arrived on the scene. She ran from the crater, towards the city, trading the forest for the concrete jungle, slinking through alleys and across rooftops.
Johanna Kerr was dead, as far as the world was aware, and now the Harlequin was free to do as she pleased.