Feel the Fire

An Astra Cosmic Tale

By Nathalie June Hawthorne Hafner

 

 

Xena Noble had made her fame in the 2040’s as a supervillainess, the shape-shifting and pyrokinetic Salamander. She never killed, but she did cause billions of dollars in property damage in Danesville, Wisconsin over the ten years she was active. In the latter years she began to become disillusioned with her chaos and sought desperately for escape. She had gotten her chance in the form of Renegade, a superheroine she had fought many times. One clash, Renegade had gotten too zealous for her own good, and had very nearly killed Xena. Xena had let her think she had. She shapeshifted away from the wreckage of the building the Salamander had died in, and never used that name again. Xena had never been unmasked, and would never be chased after; it was the perfect crime.

She sought normalcy. She applied for a job as a teacher at a superhuman school, the Astra Academy in upstate Wisconsin, so she could put the knowledge that had created the Salamander to good use.

By sheer coincidence, she managed to become close friends with Renegade’s civilian identity, Alice Prince, who had also become a teacher at the same school. In the fifty years since, she had come out as a former villain to the rest of the superhuman staff, and had been forgiven and accepted by the vast majority of them. She had found normalcy.

But now some jackasses were kicking around and causing chaos using her old name.

She had returned to Danesville, her old city of operation, where the new Salamanders had been making a ruckus. She was standing in front of a still smoldering arson site, as snow drifted from the sky onto her voluminous, tightly curled hair, and wind fluttered her coat. Police were still swarming the scene, and she flagged one down, flashing her Astra’s League associate badge. “Morning, officer. I'm Xena Noble, from the Astra Academy. We have reason to believe that two of our graduates did this. What can you tell me?”

The officer seemed out of breath just from jogging over to meet her, despite the apparent lull of action. Some things never changed. “The owner of the building, he said he saw...” The officer hesitated. “Well, he described them as Demons. Big, 7-8 feet tall. Pitch black skin, and glowing mouths and eyes. That ring any bells?”

“Unfortunately, yeah.” They hadn’t just stolen her name, they were stealing her look, too.

“Well thank goodness. I hope you don't mind us pawning this investigation off on you, but we’ve been swamped this week with all of the Harlequin activity

“Today’s your lucky day, then. I’ll take it from here.”

“I’ll go grab some of the files.”

Xena pulled out her phone, dialed it, and held it in front of her. A hologram appeared above it showing Alice Prince's elderly face, her emerald eyes still shining faintly from under her silvered bangs.

“They definitely know my old M.O.,” Xena explained. “They even impersonated my old combat form. If they're both half as good as I was, well, you can do the math.”

“Feel free to call down some help,” Alice pleaded.

“Once I’m actually on their trail, maybe then. Talk to you later.” She hung up. Xena had always been a lone wolf type.

The officer returned with a data card. “This is everything we have on this investigation, and the ones with the same M.O.. Drop by the station if there’s anything else you need.”

“Will do.”

Xena walked off, plugging the card into her phone. She read while she walked, taking in the details the cops had noticed. None of it was particularly helpful, only telling her details she already knew or could have intuited based on her past life.

She eventually stopped in front of an old warehouse. It was a standard, aging model of building, with corrugated walls and roofs, with ventilation fans lining the end and sunroofs lightly dusted with fresh snow.

It obviously wasn’t the same building as the one that she had headquartered in, since Alice and Xena had destroyed it in their last fight, but it was the same address. She didn’t even have any reason to suspect that the new Salamanders would be here, she’d just found herself looking up at the depot once she’d finished reading the investigative notes.

The building was abandoned, as it had when she had first taken up residence, both because of downturned economies. The door was chained shut, so she checked that the coast was clear, grabbed the lock, and turned up the heat in her palm, melting the brass away. She forced open the door and kept the heat in her palm going, redirecting it into a flame to light the warehouse. It almost looked too much like it did when she had lived there. If her eidetic memory wasn’t betraying her, it was identical down to the patches of peeling paint on the walls, and the grease stains on the floor.

She ignited her whole body instinctually, absorbing her clothes and phone into herself to protect them. She turned her skin into diamond-hard black carbon, and turned her eyes and mouth into bright orange embers. This was what she had called the Salamander: A fire elemental with no set form. Her body was a domain which she held full control over, every atom and its energy subject to her will.

Xena cautiously spun on the spot, scanning the now fully illuminated warehouse carefully. As she did so, she spotted two shapes crawling from shadow to shadow. She growled at them, her mouth spitting smoke and fire.

They slunk out of the shadows, like profane serpents, not moving but growing and receding in her direction. They solidified into the forms of two androgynous teenagers, one with pale skin and long black hair, and the other with tan skin and short auburn hair. Xena did, surprisingly, recognise them, they had been enrolled at the Academy. They had also taken a suspiciously high percentage of her classes. She now realized they had probably been studying her the entire time.

“Look who finally came crawling back to the cradle,” said the auburn.

“What a pathetic excuse for an Elemental,” the brunet taunted.

“What do you want from me?” Xena shouted at them.

“We want you to suffer,” said the brunet, standing where the auburn had been.

“You’ve abandoned your heritage,” said the auburn, standing where the brunet had been.

“You’ve forgotten who you are.”

“You’ve lost your flame.”

“Why should I care what two punk-ass kids think?” Xena demanded.

The two were gone, as quick as a blink, though Xena could have sworn she hadn’t. She spun around, and was met with two Titans, 30-foot tall lumbering masses of fire, soot, and shadow. “What about what we think?” they asked in unison. One of them grabbed her, and the other surrounded her with its hands, and she felt their heat. She didn’t just feel it, they were burning her, and she screamed, in pain and anger. Just when she thought their fire would consume her...

She snapped out of the lifelike deception, standing in a warehouse that looked no more like the one she had called home than any other would. Her heart was racing. She looked at her hands: Brown skin, not black carbon. She felt her face, and massaged her temples.

“Shit.”

For deception magic as powerful as that, there was only one person capable of studying it and possibly tracing it: Aradia Fürst.

Aradia Johanna Christa Scomparsa-Prince-Fürst was Alice's niece, and though most of their family wasn't on speaking terms with itself, Aradia always kept close tabs on her relatives’ allies. When Xena had come out as a former villain, Aradia had briefly kidnapped Xena to interrogate her for her intentions. Xena had passed earnestly and honestly, and as a reparation Aradia offered her services for any magic-related troubles Xena may encounter.

And Xena figured now was definitely the time to cash that favour. She hurried to the nearest thoroughfare and flagged down a taxi, and was ferried to FürsTech Tower, in the beating heart of the metropolis.

 

 

...

 

 

“If I didn’t know any better, Xena,” Aradia explained after hearing Xena’s recounting of the daydream, “I’d say your mysterious and unexplained backstory was catching up with you. You’ve always said you got your powers in a lab accident, but that doesn’t line up with what I’m hearing from you now.”

Aradia was hovering, Lotus-Position, in the center of her workshop. Her black and gold robes hung to the floor, and they glittered and shone with reflections of the glyphs and holograms that covered the walls. Her long brown hair floated freely, and her golden eyes shone with their own light.

“It was a lab accident. I was doing my work with Thermo-Catalyzed Cellular Regeneration, a bit of the test culture got on my hand, and then the propane tank fueling my bunsen burner backed up and the lab exploded. That’s all that I remember.”

“Hmm.” Aradia reached her feet to the ground, and walked towards her workbench. “A propane tank spontaneously backfiring at such an opportune time sounds like the work of a Metanarrative Tutelar.” With a few flicks of her wrist, Aradia drew a stylized glyph of a spider, and then X’ed it out and drew a stylized salamander in front of it with her finger. “With that kind of force at work it’s a miracle there’s only three of you.”

Xena just stared at Aradia, unused to seeing this less-than-perfectly-sensical version of her.

Aradia sighed. “This reference is wasted on you.” She rubbed her face, whispering “I need to get out more.” Though, she’d had an apparent revelation with that utterance. “There's an idea, take me to the place that it happened. I'll be better able to study the magic if I’m immersed in it. Where was the warehouse?”

“Down by the Pike River outlet.”

Aradia drew a wide circle with her fingers, which then tunneled through the fabric of reality, opening a portal to the Pike River embankment. She stepped through, and beckoned Xena to follow. When she did, Aradia gestured for her to lead the way. Xena led her to the warehouse, and Aradia started casting spells to reveal the magic that had triggered the daydream, summoning illusions and holograms displaying in complicated detail every facet of the space.

“Oh, this is definitely Tutelary in nature. It’s got strong traces of Demonic influence, as well, that’s never a good sign. If the Demons are directly involved I may need to summon divine assistance.”

“ ‘Divine assistance’?” Xena asked.

Aradia ignored her question, deeming her not ready for the answer. “A Demon is a worst case scenario, though. Most likely it’s just magic imitating the Deceiver’s own, and not it actually.” She focused on the glyphs surrounding her as they honed in on the source of the magic. “There we go. Very strong. Ancient. Absolutely Tutelary. But, not Demonic, and therefore in my jurisdiction. Would you mind if I called my sister in to aid us?”

“If you think she’ll be able to help.”

Aradia performed an incantation, and after a moment, she created another portal. Out of it stepped a figure.

Thrúd Fürst was tall, wearing a combination of robes and gold and black metallic body armor. She had long black hair, flowing in the breeze coming from behind her, through the portal. The skin of her face, the only skin of hers exposed, was heavily tanned. Her left eye was replaced with a complicated connector, a port to interface with other magitech. The other, functional eye was a dull blue-green. The skin around the replaced eye looked violently scarred, and more scars peeked around the edges of the bodysuit hiding her neck. Her arms and legs were not organic, but instead gold and black prostheses, designed to look and act like metallic muscle. She was holding in her hands a very ornate gold and obsidian mask, with a jack inside that matched the port in her eye. After stepping through the portal she placed the mask upon her face, and a line of red light glowed across her eyes.

“The hunt is on, sister,” Thrúd said, her voice distorted in an almost robotic manner, summoning a golden sword from the thin air behind her back.

“Indeed it is, sister,” Aradia replied. “Pseudo-Demonic magic, made to mimic the manipulations of New Jerusalem's Deceiver.”

“Nothing we haven’t dealt with before. Where are they?”

Aradia studied her holograms more. “The foundry district. How apropos.” She summoned another portal, straight to the foundries along the border with Chicago at the south end of the city. “I imagine drawing them out will be as simple as you arriving there,” Aradia said. “At least, assuming they do truly wish you dead.”

Despite their reassurances that the enemies were not Demonic in nature, Aradia and Thrúd both made religious-looking hand-signs before stepping through the portal. Xena stepped through without ceremony.

When she arrived at the other end, Aradia and Thrúd were standing back-to-back, watching their surroundings carefully. It was strangely quiet. None of the foundries were being worked, all the workers having gone home after a hard day's toil.

Xena assumed her pure carbon form in preparation for whatever may be coming.

Aradia spoke up. “Do you feel that?” She summoned a circular flat hologram, which rippled like a pool of water, shaken by some subaudible vibration. She pointed the hologram in a number of directions around the trio, until the vibrations spiked. “That way.”

She led them to a FürsTech Foundry, where the vibrations were audible, a series of loud, steady clangs, the sound of metal being worked. “Well, they certainly have a sense for the dramatic,” Thrúd mused.

“They also have a sense of who I’d have gone to for help,” Xena responded. She pushed through the unlocked door to the foundry, and made her way through the offices to the foundry floor, where the two Titans were at work. One of them was holding its hands over a large glowing-orange sword, heating it to be forged upon a large flat slab of steel, and the other was hammering it with a massive golden hammer. As Xena silently approached them, they glanced in her direction, nearly rendering Xena paralyzed with fear. They finished their forging, the one heating the golden sword hoisting it over its shoulder.

“Are you ready to join with us, little Salamander?” they both asked in unison, their hulking forms approaching her.

“I...” Xena stammered. Aradia and Thrúd stepped out of the shadows behind the Titans. Aradia summoned a circle of seven glyphs in front of her, and each of them fired a laser of a different color at the Sword Titan. Thrúd dashed up the Hammer Titan’s leg and back, and planted her golden sword cleanly in the back of its neck, before activating some variety of ice spell. She ripped the now frost-coated blade out messily, jumping away, and landing next to Aradia. The Titans both cried out in anger, making sounds like the roar of a rocket engine.

“Then you’ve come to die,” the Titans both surmised. “Very well.” Their forms changed rapidly, going from soot and shadow, with burning interiors, to pure flame, surrounding a skeleton of ember bones. Their shape was more obvious in this form, showing that they were humanly proportioned, if a bit stocky, and their skulls were now obviously horned, each with two thick bull-horns curving up and slightly forward.

Xena responded by matching their height. She grew her carbon skin thick, and allowed her inner flame to consume the rest of her, becoming an armor shell surrounding a being of fire. She turned her fingers into long obsidian claws and swiped at the Titans’ skulls.

The Titans both parried with their weapons. Xena then drew her attention to the Hammer Titan, and focused as much heat as she could into the weapon, trying to melt it. Aradia and Thrúd, meanwhile, tried to divert the attention of the Sword Titan. Thrúd zipped around its ankles, and Aradia blasted it with various Cold, Light, and Water magics from a distance. After she saw Xena heating the metals glowing hot, Aradia shouted: “It’s Adamantium! Melting it won’t work, you’re just making it more dangerous for us!”

The Sword Titan brought its blade down powerfully on Thrúd, who held her sword up to block and froze her body mechanically, her armor and limbs seizing into a solid interlocked frame. The swords clashed, and Thrúd pushed a crater into the ground instead of being crushed outright. “This is the power of Adamantium,” she proclaimed. She summoned an upwelling of magic strength and pushed back the larger sword. “My body was destroyed by a Demon, but my sister summoned the aid of the angels to gift her the materials to rebuild me. Celestial Adamantium and Uru-mithril make me an unbreakable conduit for magic.”

“Stop monologuing and start fighting!” Xena roared. She attempted to tear the weapon from the Hammer Titan’s hands, but the Titan would not let go. The two quickly transitioned to wrestling, which threw their tangled forms against the walls of the foundry, and they fell through it to the outside.

The Sword Titan made to follow, but Aradia threw up a barrier preventing it from escaping from the magitech assault. It raged at the barrier, striking it with the sword ineffectually. Thrúd climbed the wall nearest to it and leapt to try and stab at the burning skull, but as she did the Titan swung its sword directly at her. Thrúd was sent flying through the foundry, crashing into the far wall. Aradia dropped the shield as she tried to cushion Thrúd’s impact, allowing the Titan to join its other outside.

Xena had been dealing with the Hammer Titan, throwing it at the surrounding buildings, trying to entangle it in debris so she could try and wrest the Hammer from it. The Sword Titan rushed behind her, and cleaved a wide slash in her back. Xena roared and slashed back, allowing the Hammer Titan to gather itself and lift its hammer.

Aradia, rushing out of the Foundry, hit the Hammer Titan with a frost beam, blasting its hands and making it drop the hammer. Xena, turning and seeing the Hammer now free, quickly grabbed it, and tried to smash the Hammer Titan’s skull. The Hammer Titan rolled out of the way, but not fast enough that Xena would completely miss it, smashing its collarbone.

The Hammer Titan howled, crawling towards the other, and the other met it halfway, grabbing its hand. Their bones began to melt together, and they flowed into one another, becoming a blob of flame surrounding a swirling mass of bones. The bones melded together, and the new Titan started taking form, not quite twice as tall as the two had been separately, but lanky and slim in comparison.

“YOU WILL BURN!” they cried. Almost effortlessly, they bent down and grabbed Xena in both hands, and overpowered her flame with their own. Xena resisted at first, hammering away at them, but quickly the pain became too much, causing her form to start to lose cohesion and be drawn into the Titan.

She screamed, refusing to surrender.

“SUBMIT TO OUR WILL, OR DIE!”

Far below, Aradia continued blasting with ice and water, and Thrúd leapt up the sides of the buildings to try and reach weak areas of the Titan.

Xena seethed for a moment, and then relaxed, allowing herself to be drawn into the Titan peacefully. Once her mind had been completely welcomed by the Titan’s two others, then she started fighting again.

“I submit to no-one. You submit to me!”

The Titan’s twin minds, not expecting to be turned against, were quickly restrained by Xena’s will, and fought her as she bottled them into a dark recess of her psyche, where once long ago the Salamander had resided. As she gained more and more control of her new body, she started dousing the flames, and condensing back to a normal human size. The Titans’ powers, instead of being bottled with the minds, were added to Xena’s own, giving her an immense rush as she accepted the quadruple in strength and control they offered.

The Hammer and Sword fell to the ground as the form grew too small to hold them, causing Aradia and Thrúd to back away. They watched as the Titan shrunk to human size, flame swirling around it as it went out, and the form itself solidified. They approached cautiously, spell and sword at the ready, watching Xena wrestle the last bastions of the Titans into the pit in her mind.

Xena, kneeling on the concrete amidst the destroyed foundries, opened her eyes. She looked at her hands, seeing them the shade of brown that she had been born with. Her clothes wrapped snugly around her body, and everything she’d had in her pockets was accounted for again. She noticed that there was suddenly an ice-cold sword pressed against her throat.

“Are you in control?” Thrúd demanded from her.

“Why would I tell you if I wasn’t?” Xena answered.

“That sounds like her,” Aradia noted. She finished casting a spell, showing her the landscape of Xena’s mind: The roaring flame of Xena in control, and the two smoldering embers of the Titans wrapped in chains. She motioned to Thrúd, and Thrúd reluctantly removed the blade from Xena’s throat, sheathing it in the space behind her back.

“How do you feel?” Aradia asked.

Xena introspected for a moment. “Stronger than ever,” she eventually answered. “What was that you were saying about Adamantium earlier?” she asked, slowly formulating an idea.

“Why?”

“What kind of power would be required to incorporate it into my shifting?”

“Immense.”

“I’ll give it a go then.” Xena stood up, walked over to the still-hot giant Adamantium sword, and pressed her hands against it. She utilized all her newfound power and poured as much heat as she could into the metal, scorching and cracking the ground around her before finally the metal succumbed and started flowing freely from the puddles under her hands. She quickly scooped it up, and absorbed it into her skin. Keeping it heated within herself, she used her shapeshifting to create a mold inside her, directed the Adamantium into the mold, and then sucked the heat from it.

When she was done, she carefully pushed the molded Adamantium out through the skin between her knuckles, in three long blades.

“How original,” Aradia dryly noted.

Xena absorbed another thick glob of Adamantium, and reincorporated the stock she’d already collected. She moved it throughout her whole body, storing it in her bones, having just enough of it to fill the multitude of custom, disencumbering hollows in her skeleton. “I’ll keep working on the possible applications of this metal. But for now, Thank you, Aradia. And thanks to you as well, Thrúd. Would you mind dropping me off back at the Academy?”

“It would be no trouble.” Aradia summoned one last portal, opening to Xena’s office at the Astra Academy. “Tell Alice I said hello.”

Xena stepped through the portal, and it shut behind her, leaving Aradia and Thrúd standing among the rubble of the fight.

“This would have to be at least a few million worth of damage we’ve caused here,” Thrúd said, adding it to a mental tab of damages caused by her allies in fights.

“I can take the hit to the company funds. It’s well worth the safety this grants the citizens of the city, and the world, with a good woman being empowered by that much.”