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April 7, 2010: The Curious Case of the Shared Bedroom

The round table discussion was being broadcast live, like any good circus. A blurry band of grayish-silver clips snaked across the camera lens; a smudgy pink hand followed soon after, dragging the offending tentacle back off screen. Five chairs sat in a semi-circle, in a spread of professional suits and lips pressed down to civil lines.

“Have you even stopped to consider that what you’re doing is furthering prejudices against our kind?” Thus spoke the man with the moth antennae and the quiet disposition of an academic. Lawrence Kaplan, head of the Sociology department at Berkley. Whether his hair was silver from age or mutation was a matter of much speculation amongst his students.

“Kaplan, shut up.” A man in a beige suit scowled. Trent White, head priest at the Church of Humanity in Queens. He nodded to the young woman seated further down the line. “Go ahead, Ms. Ralls. Tell it like it is.”

“Thank you, Mr. White.” The red head graciously smiled. “Mr. Kaplan, I found your recent thesis on furthering mutant rights to be a work of either naïveté or negligence. You talk about prejudices like there’s no truth behind them. If blacks didn’t keep ending up in jail, if Muslims didn’t keep strapping explosives to themselves, if mutants didn’t go on casual killing sprees in the name of equality, I’d be happy to report about orphans and puppies. Until then, I’ll report what I see. Have you ever considered that publishing in academic journals doesn’t help put a human face on--”

She was cut off by a scream. The camera listed briefly to the side as the cameraman startled.

“It’s coming through the wall!”

“Philman, relax. Oh, wow. Would you just look at it? I’ve always wanted to see a—”

“Is it hurt--?”

“The blood! The blood is coming from its hooves!”

“Oh god. Oh god oh god. I read about this—it caved in a whole street downtown. It’s going to kill us all. It’s going to—”

Mr. White stood suddenly tall and furious amidst the chaos. “Unicorn.”

Someone tripped onto screen; their foot caught on a cord, ending all sound on the broadcast. This later allowed a legion of YouTube posters to edit in the song of their choice, no matter their skill in making videos. The Church of Humanity priest grabbed a boom mike. Gripping it like a lance, his face curled in wordless rage, he charged towards the camera.

A blurry gray mesh of paperclips crawled over the lens, obscuring the view. The broadcast was cut.

Technical difficulties.

The little troublemaker would have been flattered to know that the government considered her “influential,” and she would have had some choice words for anyone who thought her segments were slanderous. By definition, slander was untrue. All she’d said was that Meld killed and maimed people. Frequently. Violently.

When the larger mutant slammed her head into the concrete, it proved a point in that regard. Maxine was no longer in a condition to appreciate that fact, however. Her vision blurred. Something warm started to trickle from her nose. The paper gathering at their side suddenly faltered, its actions becoming as unclear as Maxine’s thoughts. She had to get out. She had to get away. But the hand in her hair seemed to feel a lot more real than her own uncoordinated escape efforts.

She wasn’t sure if the footsteps were real, or just part of the pounding in her head until the woman spoke.

>> "Actually, this seems pretty true to life. You're the Can Opener, right?"

Oh good. A fan.

This bright, opinioned reporting intern was a young lady. Young ladies knew that rational conversations started with polite handshakes, not bladed she-hulks lurking in twisted New York City bushes in the dark of the night. Pretty pictures like ‘skinny little neck’ and ‘gushing blood’ were not helping the violent woman’s cause. If Meld wanted to talk, she could have picked up a phone.

Maxine’s own eyes watered from being this close to the octoclip’s attack, but it was obviously nothing compared to being at the epicenter. The homicidal woman actually let go of her. And proceeded to roll on top of her.

“Get off of me!” The red head struggled to pull herself free. Fat weights less than muscle. Muscle weighs less than titanium limbs. Maxine’s wiggling was doomed from the beginning.

Rex sat atop Meld’s head, cold metal tentacles oozing over her scalp. The black pen kept flitting through the air around them: here it hovered near an elbow, there it flew in front of a tail eye. On the ground a few feet away, sheets of paper were beginning to slide out from the slash in their prison. They gathered themselves into a tidy stack at the side, the sheaf growing with a sound like raising hackles.

They don’t call it “running for your life” because the metal-legged homicidal psychopath behind you wants to have a pleasant midnight chat. The red head was used to running, thank you. She’d been up and running at five every morning since she was fourteen. She just wasn’t used to running after a day of classes and work, in three inch stilettos. A lesser woman would have horror movie tripped by now, thank you. If she’d had time to undo the shoes’ straps, she’d have shown this woman some real running.

If she survived, she was only going to wear slip-ons from now on. If. That was very much in doubt, when a hulk of metal and flesh knocked the air out of her lungs and smashed her against the concrete in a way her rib cage was going to feel in the morning. Her purse and the sack of paper went flying.

Rex crawled to a perch atop the purse and sat, tentacles wiggling as the attack continued.

Suffice it to say that Meld’s words didn’t register in the red head’s mind. Maxine knew all about this woman: how she preached lofty ideals while picking fights with people who were no match for her; how she claimed loyalty to the cause of mutant rights, then hacked off the limbs of mutants so she could wear them. Besides the bladed metal arm, Maxine could feel a more human one wrapped around her. She’d met the man it had belonged to, when he came to the studio for an interview. There was more threat in that flesh than in the woman’s metal monstrosities.

Rex seemed to grow bored of watching. Its tentacles reached into the purse, and began to take things out. Lipstick? The cap was toyed with; when the octoclip failed to open it, it was tossed to the side. Camera? Discarded. Poe? The black pen shook itself free of the octoclip’s grip, and fluttered in uncertain circles above the scene. It wasn’t in a song pen’s nature to attack people, and Maxine wasn’t giving coherent orders.

The red head’s arms were pinned by Meld’s grip, but that didn’t stop her from trying to dig her long nails into the woman’s sides, or kick at anything on the killer’s legs that didn’t stun her heels with a metallic impact.

Rex pulled out a wallet. Tossed. A compact. Opened, and discarded. Pepper spray. Its tentacles writhed, turning this prize over for a moment. Then it crawled towards Meld’s head. Two tentacles worked together: one to hold, and one to press down on the button. It knew that button.

Maxine saw the attack coming, and squeezed her eyes shut. This was exactly like her last date with John Spencer. Minus her bedroom.

And suddenly, the conversation turned towards her. It was like the boy had read a memo. She approved; like most people, Maxine rather liked talking about herself on occasion.

“Indian and middle eastern,” she answered, without hesitation. “A girl’s got to have her hummus.” She wouldn’t mind trying that Moussaka sometime, either.

>> "You say you're into investigative journalism. What got you into that?"

The truth?

Maxine was in awe of Stalin. Not just Stalin—Hitler, Joseph McCarthy, Heinrich Kramer, and others. The propaganda greats, throughout history. The men who changed their entire worlds by manipulating the media of their times. They scared the crap out of her.

An ‘unbiased press’ was an ideal she didn’t believe existed. Reporters were propaganda mongers, of their own sort. Still. Being one of the people who crafted what the masses heard, who selected the facts they could find: that was a lot better than being one of the people who turned on the TV and sponged it up.

Maxine intended to make the news, not watch it.

The first-meeting-muzak version?

“I like digging into things, I like finding new angles, and I like being on camera—it seemed like a natural fit.” She rolled the nearly empty chai cup between her palms and leaned back in her chair, preparing to answer the ten year question. She never got the chance.

Aurum’s friend was back, and ducking out as quick as he’d appeared. This was a dangerous trap, as all singles knew: to alienate the friends of your dating target was to set yourself up for disapproving behind-back gossip. It was worse with girls, true, but guys certainly had their own equivalent. She appreciated Shin seeing himself off earlier, but it was time to bring him back into the fold.

“Running so soon? Registration couldn’t have been that rough,” she joked. “Come on—I’ve got to get to class soon, but we’ve at least got time to introduce you to the campus coffee.”

Maxine stood, gesturing the Asian to her chair. She went to grab a third chair from a neighboring table, but Aurum thoughtfully beat her to it.

Under the table, the last screw hung in place by a wobbling quarter turn. Rex crawled back out, obediently lurking behind Maxine’s heels. That should have been their warning.

The night was as black as Maxine's intentions. The red head's heels gave staccato clicks, marking her place in the dark space between street lights. On a normal night, she'd be going to the subway, catching one of the late trains home. Tonight, her footsteps clicked down the stairs of the Wolf News building and past the adjacent station entrance. She was going a few blocks further. She was going to the river.

Over her shoulder, the bag gave a lurch and a kick. Its final struggles got it nowhere. No escape, and no mercy. It had gone too far. Now, with three paperweights sharing its bag, it was going for a swim.

Maxine's legs and arms were covered in small cuts. So were the legs and arms of all the interns too stupid too listen to a mutant when she tells them to get out of the room. She appreciated their concern. She appreciated their effort. It had just been entirely useless, and more than a little distracting when she had more important things to be concentrating on. The third floor printer had attacked her.

More specifically: the stack of paper in its tray had. This was why she tried to avoid that room. This is why she'd vehemently protested moving the coffee machine in there. When an intern is told to fetch coffee, she fetches, even if something has to die.

Judging by her growing migraine and the increasingly violent struggles from the bag, Maxine guessed the paper understood just how serious she was.

She could have just run it under water in the office sink. It wouldn't feel anywhere near as satisfying as this, though. Once she'd bagged it, it had been at her mercy. The red head continued down the street, her soul carving a wicked smile on her lips. Maybe she should have asked another intern to film this for YouTube. A little black and white rendering, a little theme music, and they could make a mutant-styled film noir.

Tonight, little Tommy White Sheaf was going to sleep with the fishes.

Something tentacled gleamed metallically as it crawled over the sidewalk in her wake. It paused for a moment as it came abreast of a certain bush. If it saw the answering glitter from the ruby eye, it didn't warn its mistress: it simply wriggled, then continued on.