He blocked it with one hand, and the scrap of metal slipped from her hand and went sailing into the nearby cornfield.

The true origin of corn circles: Cape battles.

Then he slid forward and tapped the flat of one hand against her chest.  

Uh oh.

Striker abilities, this might be bad.

She bounced off of the ground and fell in a heap.  It took her one attempt at standing before she realized it was futile.

Well, shit.

Two PRT soldiers stepped forward to try to spray him with foam, but he dispatched both with a throw of something that looked like a thick frisbee.  With nobody left to stop him, Madcap proceeded to tear doors off the containment vans until he found the prisoners.

So far, it seems Jamie has failed.

Jamie tried to move again.  Everything hurt too much.

“No,” Madcap said.  “Leave her be.”

What?

Is he making sure the other villains spare Jamie because he’d like to fight her some other time?

Madcap, by contrast, was wearing a customized costume that had cost no small amount of money.  A faceguard covered the lower half of his face, and was imprinted with the image of a wide grin.  Black facepaint surrounded his dark eyes, accentuating the whites, and a pointed black leather cap connected to the mask and his costume.

Not bad.

His armor was more aesthetic than functional, and featured broad, spike-studded pads.

I suppose if his power already protects him, he can get away with that.

“I hit pretty hard myself,” Jamie replied.  A glance over her shoulder revealed that the two men who’d been driving the containment van nearest her were running.

I suppose there’s not much else they can do, so fair enough.

She knew it was empty, a decoy.

Ahh, that explains it.

Are all of them empty? Did Jamie get the PRT to set up a fake transport? Except Madcap is a mercenary, so he probably primarily attacks transports people pay him to attack.

She wrested the bumper free with a tug and then swung it at Madcap like an oversized bat.

Heh, nice.

Use the bumper to bump him!

Which left only the task of freeing his clients.

Ah, okay, we’ve switched perspectives entirely, it seems.

Let’s see what Jamie’s like in costume!

“Stop!”

Right on cue.

Madcap turned.  Jamie stood in the middle of the street, opposing him.  

Ah, never mind – Madcap wouldn’t know about the name Jamie, unless she’s using that as her cape name for some reason.

Her low-budget costume consisted of a black bodysuit and a domino mask.

How classic! I like it.

“You’re cute.  Nice body, and the costume is a nice mix of pathetic and adorable in a three-legged-puppy kind of way.   But you don’t want to try to stop me.  I hit pretty damn hard.”

…well, he’s proven that much.

The mention of her costume embarrassed her.  She hadn’t had the money after buying her powers.  Still, three legged puppy?

No appreciation for the classics, these days…

“Seems you have something.  Congratulations,” the Doctor said.

Good job, Doctor.

■

Another one of these? I suppose it’s possible that the last section too was in the past relative to Interlude 10.5.

Madcap hit one of the armored PRT vans hard enough to make it roll.  The driver of the second tried to steer clear, but Madcap stepped into the path of the incoming vehicle.

Oh hey, looks like we’re really seeing this through!

So Madcap is clearly strong. I doubt that’s the extent of a Striker 7 power, though.

It struck him and the vehicle virtually bounced off of him, the hood crumpling as though it had hit a telephone pole.

Wow. Can he fly too?

He rolled his shoulders, and then kicked the vehicle.  It skidded along the road and collided with the third truck, which had already pulled to a stop.

Ouch. So are these vans carrying people sentenced to the Birdcage?

Hey, why do the PRT use vans for that, anyway? They’ve got people who can teleport others en masse. Are they worried about the Birdcage candidates’ powers interfering with the teleportation? Or maybe the taxiporters don’t have enough range?

Though she didn’t feel dizzy, she found she lacked the sense of balance to stand, and tipped forward.  Between one heartbeat and the next, everything seemed to click.  She felt as though she were floating in slow motion rather than falling, her body thrumming.

Flight?

She extended one arm toward the arm of the chair to catch herself, but she underestimated the speed and strength of the movement in the midst of this slow motion world.  The chair was sent flying, skidding across the floor.

Ahh, actual time powers? Niice. Time is a cool category, even with the powers that don’t involve actual time travel.

She fell hard, the moment over, her fall no longer slow motion.

Oof.

On the other side of the room, the chair hit the wall and shattered.

So she can slow time down for herself, consequently making her movements faster.

Makes sense, with the meditative void’s feeling of detachment and calm.

The ground split.  Chasms tore into the surface, dividing it, and-

Another image.  Earth.  It was as though she was looking at everyone’s face and every object and every living thing on the planet at once, from every angle, but then she was looking at a different everyone and everything, then another.

Hm. She put herself in the mindset of complete awareness of her own body. Did the Dandelions exaggerate that and give her complete awareness of the entire planet?

It dawned on her that it wasn’t her doing the looking.  She was a bystander.  Before she could realize what this other was looking for, the scene changed again.

Huh. The power / the Dandelions looking for a thing to latch onto, like Bonesaw described?

Utter blackness and silence.  It was only in this stillness and quiet that Jamie realized there was an undercurrent.  An impression.  She hesitated to call it an emotion. 

Reaching.  It was the only word she could use to place it, and it didn’t quite fit.  It was an action that was simultaneously frustrated and frustrating.

Is the power having trouble because she cleared her mind?

The pain cleared away so quickly she thought she might have imagined it.

She was on the ground, she realized.  On her hands and knees.  Tears ran down her cheeks.  Not all were from the pain.  Some were sympathetic.

Let’s see what happened.

Maybe it failed to find a power for her at all?

“Relax.”  The Doctor’s voice sounded far away.

She was panicking, and the idea that she was panicking made it worse, because it could mean she’d change.  She might look different.

The panic increases the chances of that, and that only fuels the panic, which makes the chances even scarier…

Scales, spines, metallic skin or something else.

Don’t think about spiny, scaly, metallic elephants!

The darkness swallowed her field of vision and she felt as though it were creeping over her skin.

What had she been thinking, doing this?

It’s certainly a big decision.

I wonder if Cauldron would be willing to use the cape who revokes powers on customers who got powers they didn’t like. Probably not with a refund, though.

Have to calm down.

She’d taken up Tai Chi when she was thirteen, something one of her therapists had encouraged to deal with stress.

Is that what she was doing while waiting for Cauldron?

She couldn’t move here, and it was impossible to stand, let alone do her exercises, but she could try to reach that mental state.

Sounds like it.

She attempted to take deep breaths, but she couldn’t even tell if she had air in her lungs or if she was breathing in or out.  She tensed the muscles in her fingers and toes, then forced herself to relax them.  She did the same with the muscles of her hands and feet.  She worked her way up through the entirety of her body, focusing on that simple action of tension, relaxation.

Honestly, being able to do this under these conditions is admirable.

It began to burn, the intensity increasing second by second, until she was convinced it couldn’t get any worse.  It did.

“Hurts,” she groaned, trying to push herself to a standing position.

…what if the vials work by causing a trigger event rather than by replacing one?

“It’ll get more severe before it gets better.  Stay in the chair.”

“Didn’t tell me,” she could barely speak with the way her chest felt like it was caving in on itself.

“I didn’t want to alarm you before we began.  It’s normal, and it does get better.  A minute, maybe two, and you’ll be surprised at how fast the pain goes away.”

At least it’s not a lengthy ordeal.

She clutched the arms of the chair.  As unfathomably bad as it had been just moments ago, it kept getting worse.  She had to endure another two minutes of this?  It felt like the burning inside of her was melting through the walls of her throat and stomach.  She could imagine the tissue blistering and dissolving, expanding outward until it touched on her lungs and her heart.

Hm. I wonder if she’s going to end up with a power that changes her biology significantly on the inside, like Aegis’.

As it seemed to consume her lungs, her breathing began to dissolve into breaths too quick and small to bring enough oxygen into her lungs.  Darkness began to creep in at the edges of her vision.

I’m beginning to question my assertion that two minutes isn’t lengthy.