Against the grain

Someone had read one too many of those Greek Demi-God hero books for kids. You know? Perry Jacksonville, or something? The ones that are kind of like Perry Hotter, except filled with Greek mythology gimmicks rather than wizards and scars. They’d read too many Greek mythology stories, and the results had been... unnerving. Whatever mutant had been blessed with their plant manipulation power, they had decided to go vicious with it. And their inspiration? Let’s just say they put the cereal in Serial Killer.

Demeter. Let’s just toss that name out there. Demeter, Greek Goddess of grain and agriculture. If that name doesn’t make you shudder, you clearly aren’t as big a mythology nerd as some people.

Demeter was the Mother of Persephone, a Goddess connected the the seasons by one simple factor. Whenever she spent her winter months in the Underworld visiting her husband, Hades, her mother Demeter would go Nuclear Winter and cause all the crops on earth to wither and die. And this was the best case scenario. When Persephone has first been kidnapped, and Demeter had learned Hades was the daughter thief, she’d caused a blight in crops that caused the death and starvation of most of the Greek world. The death toll got so bad, Hades threatened to open the gates of the Underworld up to the newly-deceased and kick off a zombie apocalypse. Only Divine intervention had saved the mortal world from their combined wrath. The solution had been to let Persephone spend 2/3 of the year in the mortal world, and the winter months in Hades with Hades. Hence Winter, hence crop death. On a lesser note, she’d also once cursed a man for trying to cut down her favorite trees. He hadn’t been able to get full, no matter how much food he ate. A very scary Goddess, Demeter. Vengeful. And the killer had derived inspiration from the woman. Fantastic.

Like most kids in the 90s, Amelia had read her share of kids books. She wasn’t as nerdy as the killer. It hadn’t been until a comment from one of her forensic investigators, a girl named Anya, that it had clicked and she had remembered the Greek Gods.

They’d been huddled around car with a dead body in it, absolutely chock-full of Frosted Flakes. An arm had stuck out from amid the sea of sugar sweet cereal, like “hey, call on me! I know the answer!” Anya had noted the make and model of the car, and commented wryly. “This looks like a Tribute.”

The car was a Tribute. A Mazda Tribute. Full of cereal. Ha ha. Except the comment had made something click. Tribute. Tribute to what? Who? Why would someone do this? And so the questions had flowed from her like captain crunch dumped into a bowl. And she’d dug around for the prize.

It had not been the first victim. It had not been the second. She’d stumbled upon the victim while responding to another call, and came back to it after a quick arrest. According to forensics, this was the third such case... and with so many grain-related deaths under the killer’s belt, there were sure to be more.

Amelia went proactive with her response to the serial killer. She looked for connections and a pattern... and found one. Then she took it upon herself to stake out the next potential victims home for SUPER’s sake... and for the safety of the city.

—

The man rushed past the antique store, breathing hard. As he went past the window, an old mirror facing the street caught his reflection, reflected his fear. There was something after him. He glanced over his shoulder, blue eyes wide. His reflection vanished from the mirror as he rushed down the street. Something shaped like a baby in a linen diaper, with little dove wings and a sneering face passed by the mirror a second later. It had eyes like onyx, and two rows of sharp teeth. In its hand, it clutched some sort of leafy stick.

It was in the middle of the day, but even in the middle of the day on a New York street, that sort of thing tends to go unnoticed. Someone else’s problem.

The man wheeled around the corner. His foot came down in a puddle as he stepped off the curb, sending ripples across its surface that disturbed the image caught on the once-still water. The little thing fluttered on by, over the rippling pool.

“Help!” He shouted. “Somebody, Help me!”

He had no direction. The road was slick from a recent rain. He nearly slipped on some slime as he ran towards the other side of the street. He was operating entirely on fear. As far as he knew, he was alone and unnoticed, even in a city of millions. He wasn’t.

Amelia didn’t know the man’s path, but she knew the chase well enough. Or, we’ll, the chaser. They’d mapped out the route, her and her forensics pal, figured out the victims were always lured out by something... and then herded. Herded somewhere in particular. Always the same series of alleys in a specific set of blocks. After realizing that, all it had taken was watching the victim until he left the house, then moving to cut them off at the pass. She had extra eyes, of course. And they were tracking the GPS signal on the man’s phone. SUPER didn’t just leave bait out in the open when it could get hurt. There was a safety net.

There he was, right on cue. She kept a low profile as she watched the man rush past a parked car, forced into an alley with all the grace of a sheep being controlled by a sheep dog. There would be a car in the alley, unlocked. She had scoped that out. A bit of false hope, before things got bad. But even with all of the things her team had figured out, they hadn’t been able to trace it back to its source. And so she had to watch... and intercede only when things grew dire.

It was under control, seriously. She certainly didn’t feel nervous about SUPERs insistence on playing God. Or their crappy belief that protecting human life cane before protecting mutants. Mutants were lower on the priority list, because they had powers that could help protect them from threats. And... Amelia gritted her teeth. The karpos was definitely a threat.

Someone was killing people in New York City in increasingly freaky ways.

Sometimes being an X-man was all about flashy missions, Atlantis, rips in space and time and whatnot. Other times, it was a whole lot of patrolling with really nothing to see or do. And yet, as it so often happened with all kinds of jobs, going the leg work actually amounted to a whole lot more useful time than the occasional boss fight downtown. Even before having a police connection, that was what the X-men did best. Keeping the streets safe from petty criminals, and ati-mutant bigots.

Also, serial whatever-the-hecks.

The man looked scared. It was no surprise. Maya only caught a glimpse of what it was fleeing from, but it was enough to cause nightmares. She followed along in the mirrors, trying to get a good angle to get between the person and the... thing, or at least get a clear shot at it. The thing, not the person. But the alleys were dark and twisty, and not all reflections were created equal. As the man turned the corner and spotted the car, Maya knew there was trouble.

No, no, no, don't...

No, no. No. Don’t.

She did.

Amelia heard the click of the car engine as the man tried it, tried it again, failed to get it to turn over. Tried again once more, in desperation. The sound drove her to open the door of the van she’d been staked out in. To open the door, and stride towards the alley, despite everything in her head telling her “give it another minute. It’ll be fine. Gotta catch it at the exact right time...”

Amelia ignored the standing order, and went to intervene in the situation. Little did she realize, she wasn’t the only one in the area who could have responded. If she had, she honestly wouldn’t have been sure how to respond to... that.

The man was in the car. The little diaper baby demon thing was grinning at him with its manic grin, hunched in front of the car windshield clutching what appeared to be a stalk of some sort of grain. The man was hammering the drivers side window. The doors were locked. He was stuck. Behind him, shredded wheat cereal was starting to pile up.

Things had paid off for her. Despite her haste, the little grain spirit was off its guard. He was entirely focused on his prey.

Amelia pulled a dark blue scarf free of the kangaroo pocket on her green Carhart hoodie as she entered the alley. Something on the scarf caught a glint of light as she let it unfurl. Some sort of metal pin, maybe?

Without a word, she flung the scarf towards the demon baby’s back. It fluttered across the distance, to wrap itself around the creature like a rope. The little monster wriggled, wriggled, and spat out a curse under its breath. Something that sounded oddly like “wheee~!”

Her attention drifted away from the diapered creature for just an instant. Just long enough to glance towards the car and ascertain the man’s current situation. In the background of her mind, Amelia thought she heard a sound that sounded like slurping a long noodle... but Amelia didn’t place what it was until the baby tackled her from behind, shouting the same thing he’d muttered earlier.

“WHEAT!”

The slurping sound she had heard had been him sucking up the nearest noodle-like object in the vicinity. Her dark blue scarf was gone. Her favorite blue scarf. He’d eaten her favorite scarf.

‘Oh hell no,’ Amelia thought, as the little beastie bore her to the ground. He tore at the back of her hoodie with razor sharp claws. Over and over, again and again.

What on God's green, f**ed-up, multidimensional earth was that creppy a** baby thing doing?!

Maya had seen many disturbing things over his career as an X-man, but this one was threatening to take the cake. Years of therapy, that one, probably. Especially for the dude now trapped in a car, hammering to get out, filling up with... cereal?...

"Why can't it be a simple mugging, why..." Maya muttered a she slipped into the rear view mirror. She was aware that someone else had show up, hopefully MRC, drawing the hellbaby's attention. Maya grabbed the poor victim and tossed him out of the car mirror into a nearby alley, before turning her attention back to the scene. Second victim. Great. This one was on the ground, being scratched and pummeled, and...

... strangely familiar?

"Ami?!" Maya rushed back to the car, already drawing an arrow. Could it even hurt the diapermonster? Did she have a choice? "Ami, duck!"

>>”Ami!”

>>”Ami!”

>>“Duck!” A familiar voice called out.

Amelia rolled onto one side, and tried to hit the little beastie on her back. Notably not ducking.

Her arm snapped back to brush the diaper critter away. He seized at the arm, and tried to bite it. Amelia gritted her teeth and threw an effort of will at it. The air around her arm rippled and blurred as a wave of unseen force the size of a fly swatter swept out to hit the creature at diaper level. The diapered creature went sailing backwards with a wailing keen.

Trash cans clattered and rocked as the swatted scamp struck them like a rogue fastball... or a rather large fly that had just been smashed out of the air.

Amelia rolled the rest of the way over onto her back, and surged to her feet. The movement of her motion brought her up between the source of the voice and the grouping of cans, in a sideways profile. Unfortunately for the person who’d wanted her to “duck.” Oops.

A can crashed to the ground a split second later, and something shot out of the alley in a raging blur.

“Ran away,” she said quietly.

Amelia turned towards the source of the voice, and saw her ex-everything. Her eyes flicked to the car. The now empty car. It was full of cereal, but there was no sign of the man.

“Did you rescue him?” She asked Mirror. Her tone might have been a little flat. It was hard to tell, what with the stony face she was wearing.

Her posture also might have been a little weary. One arm might have clutched at the other, rubbing it gingerly. It was impossible to tell the extent of her injuries from the positioning of her profile. Her slightly hunched profile.

Ami was definitely not ducking. Doing everything but ducking, actually. Maya tried to get a clean shot at the flying baby (things you never thought you'd say), but the struggle was moving too quickly, and she did not want to risk hitting Ami instead. Honestly, she was not incredibly keen on hitting a baby either, flying or otherwise.

Eventually, Ami won out. As the baby shot up, Maya took aim, but Ami was in the way, and the thing disappeared fast down an alley.

"Are you ok?"

>>“Did you rescue him?”

Maya glanced at the car, now filled with cereal, and then towards the alley.

"Yeah. He probably ran away too, though" she sighed, lowering her bow "What fresh hell was that thing?"

Maya had rescued the bait. Good. He was off and running and somebody else’s problem now. He retreated from her thoughts as they turned to other things.

When maya had asked if she was okay a minute ago, she hadn’t answered immediately. In point of fact, Amelia had purposefully shifted the subject away from that. to the far more pressing matter of the man. But now that that pesky issue of a human life was resolved (and why had she mentally referred to him as bait only a moment before?), they could move on.

Her own state of well-being was small potatoes, compared to that of someone else. At least, she could think of it that way if it helped her sleep at night. It was small, to her. But maya probably cared. Hadn’t she just asked. Again, Amelia shifted the subject of her health away for a moment. Maya had also asked what that freakish thing was.

“Don’t know,” Amelia said. She rubbed her arm. “Minion. Except this one says ‘wheat’ instead of ‘banana’.”

She let the dumb movie joke hang dead a beat, then moved on.

“I’ve been calling it a Karpos. A type of mythological Greek grain spirit. Wailed on me pretty good. But I’m bulletproof, so I’ll be okay. We’ll have to follow it...” she trailed off, looking in the direction the little one had gone.

She wasn’t being entirely coherent, in her line of thought. The train was moving by at a jarring speed that would make it hard for some people to keep up. Lots of stops and starts. A frenetic pace.