Chapter Text
"Can I repeat that this is a wild goose chase?"
Rith flinched in surprise as her sibling’s voice cut through the static of her headset, claws digging into the gargoyle she was perched on. Aching and full of cramp, she realised she hadn’t moved since the sun had set, and so she stretched to her full length, 15 feet of snakelike draconic body, with scales the colour of cool seawater. She kept her white mane brushed back out of the way of her hazel eyes, and her horns arced backwards towards her spaded tail.
She'd been so intently watching the warehouse she was staking out she'd forgotten Mel was tuned in, and as it turned out, she had also forgotten to eat anything. She looked around to make sure nobody had their eyes on her before she grabbed her dinner, because the one thing she didn’t look like was a “local girl”. She also wasn’t keen on clothes - they never came in size “XXL Noodle”, and her scales were protective enough to be going on with. She was hoping to get away with a few crimes tonight, and “public nudity” wasn’t a planned inclusion on that list.
Satisfied that she was unscrutinised, she wolfed down the pasty she got from the corner shop, coiled back up and tapped the link button to reply.
"Do you mind, sib? I'm concentrating on this while you get the distraction ready, or did you forget?"
Mel audibly yawned down the microphone, as performatively as the dragon had gotten used to. She could imagine the sergal, purple fur down her back and arms, tossing a coin to keep their hands busy. The leather jacket that they never took off, covered in punk patches and antifascist imagery - their worn jeans barely reaching down to their shins. "I'm working on it! I'm just saying, y'know. Whatever weird bit of shit they dumped must be something useless or they'd have come back for it."
Rith sighed. They had a point, but the forced yawn irked her as Mel knew it would, so she couldn't resist biting back. "Sorry to bore you, dear Melissand..."
"Don't call me that, you know it fucks me off. It’s Mel, you're not our mum."
She laughed. Then again, she couldn’t remember their mother at all. In fact, she couldn’t remember much past the last few weeks, memory loss having claimed everything before that. Her parents must have been as patient as the peaks to raise someone as strange as her and as grumpy as Mel. If only she could remember their names, or how the two ended up making a family together.
Anything at all would have been a good start.
Mel cut through her reverie. "That's the other thing, sis, what do you think this thing is going to do to help you? Even if it’s the glasses - and by the way it’s not going to be glasses, they’re way more careful than that - hypnotism doesn’t fucking work on you, remember?”
She wanted to retort that finding a hypnotist on an ad in the Post Office window was not a guarantee of quality, but Mel was winding her up for fun, and the dragon had already gotten tired of playing along. All she knew was that her broken brain needed something drastic to fix it. She knew who she was and what she was - there’s really no mistaking a dragon, especially at her size - and all sorts about the local area and the UK, but everything else had slipped through her claws like sand, other than nightmares of water and darkness and a quiet drip in an endless void. No friends, no family, just her and Mel living in their rancid little flat. If there was any way to remember, to find what she had lost, she had to take it.
"If it's anything from the Korps, I have to go for it," she said firmly.
Mel sighed dramatically, long and loud. "Fiiiiiiine. If you find out you repressed all your memories because it's a bucket of fucking trauma, I told you so, 'kay?"
"I wouldn't expect anything less of you, dear sibling,” the dragon replied, going back to her vigil and thinking about what could be.
—
Rith’s obsession with the Korps was probably not healthy, but being one of the only things she could remember, it had been all she had left to hope for.
The Korps had risen in prominence in the last 50 or so years, a supervillain group operating out of hidden corporations and bases across North America and further. She made sure to catch every sighting and report, every fight and raid, every news report on the appearance of the Overlord and the ever-present Karen. Task forces of their allies wearing black and magenta, raiding the pockets of immoral plutocrats and defending the weak and disenfranchised. The newsgroups she signed up to had made maps, pins and coordinates representing every incident and sighting, as their agents spread their message that the status quo wasn’t there to help them, but to keep them in line. She hyper-focused on the visors, the ‘Rose-Coloured Glasses’ produced by Thorn that governments said brainwashed their wearers into lifelong slavery. She’d seen through that propaganda almost immediately, having witnessed the people who’d been recruited - their lives beforehand broken and crushed, and afterward bright and full of potential.
She wanted that. She needed that.
So, she spent her nights hoping without hope that they would come here to the United Kingdom, to upset a government still enjoying the spoils of British colonialism. Endless campaigns backed by weaponised nostalgia, native heroes strutting around in red, white and blue capes, quoting Churchill and Cromwell while smiling for their adoring fans. As far as they and the government was concerned, it was the end of history - everyone who was smart knew how the country should be run, the last Prime Minister had successfully fixed ghoulish austerity and deregulation to be in everyone’s future, and had made sure anyone in power after her would have to toe that line. Society no longer existed - and the establishment of a status quo that could never be torn up was her greatest achievement. All that was left for the rest of the country was to do their duty and understand their place. The halls of power are not for you - let us make sure you’re safe, forever, as long as you don’t ask too many awkward questions.
Rith herself lived in a dreary block of flats in a wasteland on the edge of Sheffield, where she could watch the husks of the old steel industry slowly erode to dust from her bedroom window. The block itself was slowly emptying, everyone else moving to where the jobs were, but it suited her, in a way. The more people there were around, the more attention she received, and attention for her was suffered, not sought. Mel made enough to keep the landlord off their backs, but they’d only recently moved to this building because… Well, she didn’t remember.
Her life, her broken mind, her weird appearance - all just bricks in a wall, blocking her from her future. There was no escape except to the nightmares she had every night, or the dreams she could watch unfold on her stolen internet connection. Then, suddenly, opportunity knocked, and a crack in the barrier appeared.
The Korps were in Yorkshire.
The news reports had been light on detail. Some gunshots out in the Peaks, probably pest control, nothing to worry about. A little light seismic activity, not unheard of. Just strange coincidences. Mel had been sitting on the police radios though, and caught a faint trace of superhero activity, a fact which made absolutely no sense - the Dark Peak was a tourist attraction, shiny rocks and fossils, nothing to entice the warring factions of global superpowers. In any case, some items had been recovered from the scene and were being stored in a police lockup on the edge of town, but despite this the cops had issued a press release stating firmly they were taking no further action.
“Probably nothing,” the sergal had said, “but you wanted me to tell you if I saw a hint of anything ‘super’, and this is a hint. Follow it or don’t, but if you do I'll come along for the ride.”
In her mind, ‘don’t’ was no longer an option.
—
She checked her watch again. 11:45pm, 5 minutes before the plan was due to begin.
Hang on.
She tapped the link again - “While I’m thinking about it, why do you monitor police r-"
Rith was interrupted by a deafening explosion, pieces of brick showering her hiding place. Panicking she covered her head, and pressed herself back against the church wall. In her desperation she almost slapped the button on her headset. "What the fuck was that?! Mel! Was that you?!"
She could hear the sergal's smirk through the radio. "You wanted a distraction!"
"D-Did you blow up a building?!" Her voice came out way too loudly, the high-pitched whine in her ears making her worried she had permanent hearing loss. “Also, and I don’t want to sound picky, but you’re fucking five minutes early!”
"Language, sis! It's fine, they were demolishing it anyway. I just... moved it up the schedule a year or two. Orrrrr maybe five. Anyway, you always said I had a dramatic personality."
"This is not quip time," Rith growled. "Could you have done it more than like 100 yards from where I'm working, maybe?!" She was livid, starting to scramble to gather everything into her saddlebag.
"Love you tooooo!" came the reply in a sing-song voice, shortly before the click of the connection being closed.
FUCK sake, add ‘destruction of property’ to the crime list, then, she thought. What's another ten years in Broadmoor between siblings?
She rubbed her sibling out of her mind and yanked her headpiece off her ear, jamming it into her tailbag. She waited for the sound of sirens to pass - finally, after a few minutes and a double-check that everyone was watching the slow collapse of the old brewery, she flew slowly over to the warehouse. Despite being a competent enough sorcerer and her lack of wings, flying was one of the things that came naturally to her. She'd even remembered the odd magic spell or two, though nothing compared to some of the veterans of the Korps she’d seen, who slung magic like it was child’s play.
She set off. She’d deliberately picked a moonless night so she could drift above headlight level and avoid any questioning looks - even though her nightmares made pitch-black darkness terrifying, there was enough ambient light from the houses around to keep her calm. From a distance, she thought, she’d probably look like a bat. A wingless, silent, noodly bat.
She had to hope nobody would look at all.
As she glided down over the warehouse door, approaching from above the viewing arc of the security camera just like she'd practiced, she hovered above it, and drew a rune into the plastic shell, edges sharp and jagged like her claws.
“Yù va.”
The clawscript blazed with power, embedding itself in the camera. If she'd done this correctly, it would loop the last hour of footage again, meaning she had 60 minutes to work with. She couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief as the rune activated, even though her magic hadn't failed her before. As long as she knew how to do something, it worked first time every time.
She looked back over her shoulder - the blazing building was already being hosed down by the emergency workers and her window was closing. She dropped the bag and concentrated her self - her anima - and as she did she got smaller, and smaller, until she was barely the size of a newt, getting a better view of the base of the door.
The door was flush to the ground, with no gap to crawl under.
She swore under her breath - shitting shit it. The dragon skittered back and forward anxiously, squeaking in dismay as she re-ran the alternatives through her mind.
Plan B - find a window. She zoomed around the sides, bumping into a drainpipe in her flustered state. They were all shut, locked and tamper-proofed. She had a rune that could melt a pane, but she would have to touch it for that, and she didn’t want to leave any more evidence. Fuck.
Plan C - check the roof. Returning to the bag and inscribing another rune upon it - “kaìdh ar” - she shrank it to her size so she could take it up to the top of the building. She spotted a ventilation pipe, and with a long sigh of relief, wriggled into the mouse-sized opening.
She quietly thanked whoever was listening that she hadn’t had to go to Plan D - a trip through the sewers could have been more than she could bear.
As she slowly skittered through on all fours, she went through the plan. Find the Korps device, which should look like a pink visor. Don't put it on straight away, and extract. Set up a clean area, bubble it with a protection rune, set another rune to keep the area dust free, do as much as she knew how to do before even touching it. See if it can unlock her memories. If not, dispose of it, melt it with that other rune if necessary. Keep contact with it to a minimum in case of... Hypnosis traps? Are those even a thing? Well, she thought of it, so they probably did too. It's what she would do to stop someone breaching the whole network. Either that or just have it explode and remove the head. They're probably more subtle than that, but worth considering. Yeah, she'd need to set up lots of protection. Maybe something physical? Do they make hazmat suits for dragons? Do tin foil hats actually work?
She slapped the side of her head firmly to end that train of thought before it went completely off the rails, just as she got to the end of the pipe. It came out in the staff room, fed by an extractor fan above the cooker. She quietly detached the filter pane and floated down onto the hobs, grabbing a tea towel and wiping grease from her scales. It was dark, just the green light of the microwave clock lighting the room. She hovered in the kitchen until her eyes adjusted to the low light and she had enough visibility that she could navigate. She found the exit door blissfully ajar, so all that was left was to coast down onto the warehouse floor where rows and rows of tagged and referenced contraband filled every shelf. Every item that the local police had confiscated in the last 6 months was dutifully stored and arranged here by reference number. Looking around, her eyelights rested on drug paraphernalia, knives and blades, and in one case a fence post that had been wrapped in barbed wire.
Despite the mounting stress she couldn’t help but laugh. “Better not tell Mel about all this, they’ll be breaking in after me…”
Quickly working out the dating system, she aimed for the row that contained items from the date in question - 13th of August, about a month ago. Arriving at the end of the rows, she found only one for that date - a small, hockey-puck looking black disc with a camera lens in the side and no other defining marks. This had to be the Korps device, but what did it do? Curiosity overwhelmed her and she poked it, but the device remained silent and ominous. Cursing herself for risking damage, she decided regardless to shrink it, stowing it in her pack.
Floating out the way she came, she wondered if she’d got the wrong item. It was in the right place, on the right date, she thought - and why have a foreboding black disc if you’re not putting secrets in it? If nothing else, the Korps knew how to play the game. She sighed. Not RCGs, but definitely something. Now to get it back home and figure out how to use it to contact them. Tonight was just the first step. She had a long few days ahead of her.
—
In a control room in the middle of the city, a soft glow from a camera feed lit up the face of a tired blue greyhound. She tugged anxiously at the collar of her work shirt and turned to the figure behind her.
“Someone did come for the object, sir, but the subject was too small for me t’get a good look at. Some… size-shifter, maybe? Is that what you guys call them? The footage is all here for your teams to analyse but our cameras are nothing like the ones you have down at GCHQ, and the external feed was taken down. I-I’ve not been able to-”
The muscled figure behind her grunted to interrupt. “It’ll have to do,” he said. “We got someone to take the bait, at least. I’ll obviously be thanking your sergeant for your cooperation in this matter, Miss Fairfax, but you are not to speak of it to him or anyone else in your department. Are we clear?”
The hound gulped as she heard the threat implied in his tone. She turned to address him, “Y-yes sir, obviously. Thank you for your… time?”
He’d already gone, cape flowing around the corner of the door frame. She immediately un-tensed, slumping in her wheelchair, flicking off the bright monitor and sitting in the dark.
“Oh Evvy, what the fuck have you gotten yourself into now…”