Tragedy, Act Two, Scene Five
May 27th, 2013
Act Two, Scene Five
“Hey, kid.” Luminosa surveyed him from head to toe. “What happened to you?”
The guy who had worn a hood sighed. With her usual timing, she’d arrived right when he’d removed his shirt to start daubing anti-bruising cream on the bruises that covered his upper torso.
“Knight,” he said.
Luminosa shook her head slowly. “I leave you alone for one night, and you get beaten up by one knight?”
“She wasn’t dressed like a knight.”
Luminosa crossed her arms. “Yes, that’s what happens when you go out into a dangerous area without backup or Type II Invulnerability. You get beaten into a pulp by a supervillain you never saw coming.”
“I should’ve killed her.”
“You didn’t? There’s hope for you yet.”
“She got away.”
“Do you know who she is?”
“Never seen her before. Luminosa?”
“Yes?”
“What did you mean, ‘in the Jacobin spirit?’”
She sighed. “French Revolution. The Jacobin faction was the extreme one. After they overthrew the monarchy they started killing each other off and everyone who didn’t want them to keep power. The term gets used these days for revolutionaries worse than the people they overthrow.”
He snorted. His eyes did not meet hers.
“Look, kid. I’m trying to tell you literally the single most important thing you will hear in your life. Now pay attention.”
He raised an eyebrow and she blinked next to him, lifting him by his shirt collar. She was stronger than she looked.
“You need rules.”
She blinked away again, leaving him to drop down to his feet with a sudden jolt.
“Normal people have hundreds of rules, hundreds of different commandments. They have the police, they have their families, they have religion, they have society. Wear pants, don’t say ‘hell’, don’t shoot your neighbor. If they don’t follow the rules, they face the consequences: social or legal punishment.
“We are outside the law as much as the revolutionaries were, as much as revolutionaries always are, and if we do not have a code, that will destroy us.”
He looked away, and then she tapped him, lightly, on the small of his back. He gritted his teeth.
“Do you know where supervillains come from? Superheroes. You think there was something odd about Greenrose joining the Titanium Tyrant? The only strange thing is that it didn’t happen sooner. Paragon’s your first example. Starts out with a shiny gold costume on the side of Right, and then he’s annoyed at the difficulty of getting his name into the papers and he just realizes that there’s nothing - nothing at all - stopping him from keeping the money instead of giving it back to the bank, and from there it’s just a short walk straight to hell. He’s not alone. The reason we have so many supervillains is because superheroes wear masks.”
He stared sullenly.
“Listen, Jacobin!”
He started, and, finally, met her eyes.
“There’s no code from outside that can be pressed on you to hold yourself sane. You’re in enemy-occupied territory; if you were born in Liverpool or Ontario or Boston, I’d know where to tell you to go. So unless you want to leave -” she emphasized the word “- Novapest, and honestly I think you should, you need to make a law for yourself, or be destroyed. Not a principle, because you can justify anything with an appeal to the right principle, you need to find yourself a rule to follow, some rule that you will never, ever break. You need a law, or you will become lawless. And my law is, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ I can only keep the other nine on good days, but there’s one bright-line rule that I do - always - keep.
“Now. Do you want to be the Titanium Tyrant?”
He held his gaze on hers.
“Shut. Up,” he said, enunciating very clearly.
She drew herself up to her full height, plus another inch of levitation.
He shook his head slowly, keeping his eyes locked on hers.
“Can you really be that damn selfish, Luminosa? Do you really care about your morality more than people’s lives? Do you think I care if I’m ‘destroyed’? I expect to be dead in a week! And you know what? If I save one life before I die, if I stop one of the murderers - stop for good, put down, kill - before he takes another victim, then I did a damn good job. It doesn’t matter if I’m going to be as bad as the Tyrant, because if we’re both in the ground together, I’m going to inspire a revolution and he’s going to be eaten by worms!”
He shook his head. “Get out of my house. I’m willing to be Jacobin, if it means I get to try to kill a king.”
She vanished, and he slammed his fist into a wall.
“Never meet your heroes,” he murmured, and then looked up. “Well. If I have to do this alone, that’s what I’ll do.”