The pizza was soon ordered, delivered, and then eaten… at least by Dani and Perfect. While waiting, they’d talked fruitlessly in circles around the question of Palazzo’s whereabouts and status, but Perfect had tabled the discussion and declared it was too late to do any more work that night.
“Doesn’t anybody else want any of this?” she asked when she and Dani had eaten their fill, lifting the box of cheese pizza with three slices left in it. “Ray?”
“I only eat big greasy street vendor kind,” he said. “With loads of pepperonis.”
“Ew,” she said.
“You travel with a carnival, you get a taste for that kind of thing,” Ray said.
“Donnie?” she asked.
“I don’t eat anything I ate before my conversion,” Adonis said.
“Really? Why’s that?” Perfect asked, as she put the pizza away in the fridge.
“Because nothing tastes right,” he said. “But if I don’t know how it’s supposed to taste, it doesn’t bug me.”
“D.J. mentioned that things tasted different for her,” Perfect said. “She couldn’t quite quantify it, though.”
“Yeah. Me, neither. Pop hit the roof when I told him that,” Adonis said. “Said the system was perfect, and all the diagnostics showed it should be fine. He said it was all in my head.”
“It could be because the experience of eating is so multisensory,” Perfect said. “It’s pretty well-known that the flavor of food is a mixture of both taste and smell, and of course, the texture and temperature also come to bear. Even if all those sensory impressions are being accurately mapped and conveyed to your brain, it still might seem ‘off’… I’d love to have a chance to go over the specs for this stuff. Do you think that might be possible?”
“Yeah, uh, I don’t really like talking about ’specs’ and things like that,” Adonis said. “This is my body now. I don’t really like being reminded that it’s not real.”
“Oh, sorry,” Perfect said, a little embarrassed. “I’m just… well, I like high tech, and you and D.J. are the highest tech things… oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Just stop apologizing. The thing is, though, you told that magnum guy you were going to give him a per diem?”
“It means a daily allowance,” Perfect said. “From the Latin…”
“‘Per day’, yeah, I got that,” Adonis said. “The thing is, I don’t have any money.”
Perfect sighed.
“I don’t need a lot!” Adonis clarified. “I don’t have to eat and my clothes don’t get sweaty so I don’t need a lot of them, but I’d kind of like to be able to pay my own way, places.”
“The thing is, I do have some assets that give me a nice recurring income,” Perfect said. “But, if I’m going to pay people, I want them to treat this like a job.”
“Well, totally,” Adonis said. “I mean, I’d have a job already if I could get one, but… my documentation is a little out of date, if you catch my drift.”
“Me, too,” Dani said.
“Might as well just make this a salaried position, then,” Perfect said. “I guess that might make it easier to attract more members. I’ll have to look at some numbers. It’s not going to be a lot. I’m not going to be financing ski weekends, just on principle, but I want you guys to be comfortable… and now that I think about it, it’s got to be really hard to juggle a full-time job with a crimefighting career. I’m lucky enough that I don’t have to, and I’m still always short of time.”
The wheels were turning inside her head.
“I wonder,” she said. “There are some well-known heroes who are either known or suspected to be independently wealthy, but for every one like that, there’s two dozen others who are probably working or just plain broke. What if somebody started a fund, which other heroes could pay into as they were able, which would subsidize the activities of the rest. Of course, there would be no reason contributors would have to be limited to active heroes… but there would be some ethical issues involved, on both sides. What do you think, Ray?”
“No,” Ray said, quietly but firmly.
“You don’t like the idea?”
“No, I don’t want to be ’subsidized’,” he said. “I don’t want your money, and I’m not going to treat this like a job. It isn’t. A job is something you do to get the money you need. Like Don here, I don’t need a lot of money… but I do need to do this thing, anyway.”
“Well, if you’re going to do it anyway, why not get paid?” Perfect asked. “Then you’ll be able to spend more time on the heroing and less worrying about where your next paycheck’s coming from.”
“I don’t need much sleep, and I don’t have to spend a lot of time working anyway,” Ray said.
“What do you do?” Dani asked. She couldn’t imagine the tall, lean man covered with glowing tattoos kept a secret identity.
“I busk,” he said.
“You busk?” Dani repeated.
“Means he’s a street performer,” Adonis said. “From the Latin, ‘buscus’, or literally ‘dweeb in face paint’.”
“It actually comes from a word which means ‘to prowl’ in a variety of Romance languages,” Perfect said. “And it’s not a very reliable way of earning a living.”
“Yeah, right, unreliable,” Ray said. “That’s why it suits me.” He stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, at least one of us needs to do the patrol route tonight.
“Wait,” Dani said. “What’s our name?”
“‘Our’?” Adonis repeated. “How many people do you have in there?”
“I mean, the team,” Dani said. “We need to know what to call ourselves.”
“I hadn’t actually given that a lot of thought,” Perfect said. “I made a program that combines adjectives and nouns to make random but meaningful names, but that seems a little arbitrary. The thing is, I’ve been planning to have a team for so long, but I wanted to approach it as forming a team with others, not starting one on my own and asking people to join it.”
“I always wanted to be on a team called The Mighty Men,” Adonis said.
“Yeah, there’s just a couple of problems with that,” Perfect said.
“Three,” Dani said. “Raven.”
“What?” Adonis said. “They have teams called ‘The (Whatever) Men’ on TV all the time, even if there are girls on it. It’s like they don’t count.”
“It’s too bad we don’t have a theme to our powers or something,” Dani said. “Though, Adonis is kind of a robot, and Ray looks a bit like a pirate, and Perfect, you’re kind of like a ninja… damn it, if I was just a monkey or a zombie we’d be set.”
“Well, we could look at the circumstances that brought us together,” Perfect said. “Though I don’t really fancy the idea of calling ourselves ‘The Pawns of Fate’.”
“Is this really that important?” Ray asked. “I mean, it’s one thing to treat it like a job… at least that way you’re taking it seriously. But this is more like turning it into a secret club or something.”
“Excuse me,” Perfect said, “but weren’t you the one who was utterly flabbergasted that I didn’t have a secret superhero name all picked out for myself? If nothing else, having a team name will make it easier for us to form working relationships with other heroes and groups. ‘Oh, you’re with the Arcane Guardians? I’ve heard of them!’ works better than ‘Oh, you’re with those people, over there.’”
“Ooh, Arcane Guardians,” Dani said. “I really kind of like that.”
“How about ‘Mighty’ Guardians?” Adonis suggested. “Not all of us are magic.”
“No, but we’re on a magic case,” Dani said.
“It’s an arson case with magic in it,” Adonis countered. “Anyway, is this the only case we’re ever going to do? You might as well say we’re the Church-Fire-Investigating Men if we’re going to pick our name based on what we’re doing right now.”
“We… aren’t… all… men,” Dani said through gritted teeth.
“I’m man enough for the whole team,” Adonis said.
“That’s flattering, but I don’t swing that way,” Ray said.
“Ain’t what I heard,” Adonis said.
“Look, let’s just table this discussion as well,” Perfect said. “We don’t have to come up with a name right away.”
“You know, I’m still not sold on this whole thing, but if you really want a name, you should ask Broker,” Ray said.
“Great. We can be the Mighty Mynx Men,” Perfect said.
“I like that,” Adonis said. “Though maybe something else instead of ‘Mynx’. It doesn’t go with the ‘Mighty’ or the ‘Men’.”
“Discussion tabled,” Perfect said.
“You know, you keep saying that,” Adonis said. “But it’s more like, discussion detabled, since you’re taking it off the table.”
“That’s a fascinating bit of linguistic insight, Donnie,” Perfect said. “But I’d really like to get to work on analyzing the bit of fabric the Dock Shadow gave me, Ray has to patrol, and you two have to be anywhere other than my kitchen.”
“Why?” Dani asked.
“Because my lab’s right downstairs and voices carry,” she said. “You can have some more of the pizza if you get hungry in the night, though.”
“Okay,” Dani said. “I think I’ll probably just go to bed.”
“You… um… coming back here tonight?” Perfect asked Ray.
He shook his head.
“I think I’m just going to keep crashing at my own place,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Okay,” Perfect said. “Good. I mean, that’s fine.”
Ray headed out and the rest of them headed down into the basement, Adonis and Dani going through to the other townhouse and then back upstairs while Perfect set to work extracting the secrets of the blackout dye from the bit of cloth.
Dani’s room was on the top floor, and she was surprised to find Raven— the tall, thin dark-haired woman who’d watched over her since her ordeal with the Bone Lords—waiting inside for her, smiling blankly and standing in front of the dresser.
“Eep!” Dani yelled. “Jesus, Raven, you startled the shit out of me.”
“You okay?” Adonis called from the other room.
“I’m fine!”
“You see a spider?”
“No, I didn’t see a spider,” Dani replied.
“A mouse?”
“Why the hell would I scream at a mouse?” Dani asked. There was no answer. She shook her head. “He is such an annoying idiot,” she told Raven. “When did you get back?”
Raven said nothing, but she moved away from the dresser, revealing a picture in a silver frame. It was the photograph from Dani’s computer desk, in her old room… the one of her in her old body, with her mother and father.
She’d always hated pictures of herself, because they were never remotely true to how she saw herself in her own mind, but now that the outside matched the inside, the sight of somebody she recognized as herself, framed by both of her parents…
She hadn’t lost them, she reminded herself. They were still alive, and living right where she’d left them. If she ever got her situation fixed, or figured out how to explain it to them… and anyway, she hadn’t even been away all that long.
There was no reason for her to be going all misty-eyed. There was no reason for her to start crying.
When she did, Raven… as mute and unexpressive as ever… put her long arms around Dani and held her in silence.
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