This will be my first story entered on fictionpress. It's a multiparter, which surprised me somewhat. I always imagined my first attempt would be... shorter, somehow.
Anyway, just so we're clear - I love superheroes. Superman, Flash, Wonderwoman, Atom, all those guys. But my favourite heroes of all tend to be the ones who don't have superpowers - Batman, Nightwing, Green Arrow. The heroes who worked to achieve a destiny rather than had the gifts placed upon them. I wanted to explore these ideas about heroes in my first story and this is the result. I hope it's enjoyable.
Reviews and concrit and much appreciated.
The Vigilante Project.
By Scarab Dynasty.
Prologue One: Speed.
She never admitted how much it used to hurt –the running. Admitting the pain always made it worse. Screaming always made it ache just that little bit more. So she grinned (or at least, grit her teeth) and bore it, just the way her mother had taught her. No time for tears in a world like this. Certainly no time for little girls with dolls and toys, and who needed to cry when they got shot and hurt.
So she keeps moving. Even with the sharp little bullet stuck in her upper thigh and blood, trailing down to her new cream socks. It hurts. It hurts a lot, and she would never pretend it doesn't. But she doesn't stop running.
It's been a long time since she last did.
How long has it been since she last played with toys? How long has it been since she wanted to?
She isn't sure she remembers. But she does remember having toys, once, a long time ago. There was even one toy that she still has today. A teddy bear with blue eyes, light brown fur and a dark red duffle coat, which sits at the end of her bed. She can't remember where she got it –she suspects that she stole it from another child. Old habits starting young, and all that. It's probably covered with dust, since she hasn't played with it in such a long time, but for some reason, she never wants to get rid of it. And the other children tend to leave it alone and never tease her about it, so she figures it's okay to hang onto.
Toys are for kids. She can't remember the last time she was a kid.
'Stop the clock, damnit, stop her moving!'
'Slow the little brat down, before she gets away!'
She skids around the corner, socked feet dragging at the marble tiles. She knows they'll be worn out by the time she gets back to the car. If she gets back to it. But shoes would cause too much traction for her to be able to run her fastest. They're coming. Still following her, scrambling towards her through the corridors and shadows, yelling orders to each other. Many of them have guns, and they're all after her. She glances forwards into the endless marble hallway and scowls. The clock?
Ohhh no. No thank you, mister. Not this time. She's had just about enough of their freaking clock.
The clock in question stands ticking away at the other end of the hallway. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Huge and grey and made of marble, with metal spokes that are catching rust. The base of the clock is lined with Golden Canisters filled with… something or other. She never stopped to find out what, and she certainly isn't going to stop now. She starts to run towards it, though, moving faster than ever. The air blurs and burns and shrieks around her, all at once.
She remembers the days when she used to run for fun. She was fast back then, too. The fastest in her class. The teacher said she'd never seen a girl as quick as this one. Back then, though, she'd run because she wanted to. Now she ran because she didn't have any choice.
Well… there was a choice. Just not a very nice one.
After a few years, it had started to get less and less painful and more and more exhilarating every time she broke the speed barrier, until she found herself yearning to break it again and again with every run. The thrill is hot and intense and burning in the base of her brain, even while she's staggering from a bullet in the thigh which she'd been stupid enough to slow down enough to get.
Running is what she does. What she is. Her all and everything.
In this world, running away when threatened is always the only option. at least it is, if you can't hold a gun or a knife or a shuriken, and you don't have someone to look after you.
And really, it seems that that's all her powers –that's what the other children call them, anyway– are able to help her do. Run faster. Get away quicker. Escape, kick, punch, pull away. All the things a thief needs to stay alive.
The door is still too far away, and there are… bad guys –or good guys, or enemies or whatever you want to call them, she gave up trying to work it out a long time ago– on pretty much all sides of her. Left, right, she hears their footsteps and feels the rifles clicking, each groaning catch feeling like an eternity to someone with her understanding of time and speed. No normal human would be able to get from one end of the room to the other before–
Stop that, her brain tells her.
She isn't a normal human.
She keeps running.
The things she can do, (as weird as they are), are going to get her out of this place alive, and for that, she's just a little grateful. She's grateful for the fact that whenever she speeds up, the rest of the world starts to slow down, like the timeline is some kind of reflex action, attached to her brain. She's grateful for the fact that the twenty five seconds that it would take most normal people to get from where she's standing now, to the door at the other end of the room, she can take in three. She's grateful for the fact that her mind moves at a pace fast enough to make their air explode behind her, the speed barrier breaking as she flies.
She's grateful, basically, for the fact that she can run. "Like hell on legs", Abby had called her, the first time she made the mistake of taking Abby with them on a stalk.
Abby wasn't kidding, though.
There's a saying she heard once, that says you never hear the bullet that hits you. In truth, this is a fallacy. The fact is that the gunfire sucks the sound out of the air. The explosion that you supposedly never hear when it's aimed at you is a mixture of chemicals and the sound of the bullet smashing through the sound barrier almost the second it leaves the barrel. So one thing she's not always faster than is a bullet. Not always.
She runs faster, feeling the blood coursing down her leg, her muscles aching.
Newton said it first. For every action there is an equal and an opposite. This girl knows all about Newton and his little laws of physics. She just happens to believe that rules are made to be broken. Those are the rules. She's the opposite.
Or tries to be. It doesn't always work.
It's probably something more than just that, which means she's able to… do the weird, Newton-bending things that she does. But she doesn't really know anything much about that. They tested her, back in the labs. Ran her through circuits and made her smash boards and measured her blood pressure, but nobody ever found any real answers. There was so much talk about finding out what she was and examining her and testing her and not nearly enough about curing her. She's actually kind of... glad they didn't try to cure her, now that she's free. Her power helps her to stay alive. So she uses it thus. That's all she needs to know.
Somewhere in the world, she knows, there is a whole room filled with reams and reams of cardiogram readings and subject analyses and biological feedback and blood, hair and skin samples. All of them hers.
There's a difference between knowledge and information.
They haven't worked that out yet, either.
She's still racing towards the clock, watching the slow drag of the pointer between eleven and twelve, and they still haven't figured it—
Ow.
The pain again. From her leg, from her spine, from everywhere.
To beat the clock she had to make it across the room in two. She hadn't. She wasn't quite fast enough. And now, vicious waves of energy are spreading throughout the room like an electrical circuit crossed with a spider's web, hitting her like waves of water, slowing her down and dragging her fiercely back to normal time. Whatever it is that gives her the power to break Newton's laws is ripped away from her, and she feels herself slowing down, one painful fraction of a second at a time.
But they made a mistake.
They're always doing that.
As she slows down, she sees the world around her begin to slow down, too. The clock decreases the speed of everything. It's not just focussed on her. Which means that if she's now moving at normal speed…
She takes the chance to look around, though just turning her head is agony, because it takes what feels like forever. She sees the room around her, ripped into slow motion. A man takes five seconds to blink an eyelid, another is starting to register their experiment's mistake and the impact of surprise is taking a whole twenty-five seconds to fully register on his face. She's almost tempted to stay and watch. She's almost -but not quite- laughing at the sight.
No. Better take advantage of their mistakes while she can. Now functioning in purely "normal" time, she staggers to the door, bleeding from the thigh and clutching the knapsack strap tightly against her chest. She's out at the car parked three streets away by the time the bad guys/good guys/enemies have sped back to normal time, and she's got her legs back again. Of course, the Athlete's Euphoria is already starting to wear off .
She jumps into the back seat, croaks something about Newton not liking her this evening. Her driver doesn't ask questions. Nor does he turn in his seat to so much as glance at his passenger as she clutches her thigh, hands all slippery with her own blood. He merely starts the engine and starts to drive away.
End Prologue One