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A couple weeks before her high school graduation, Kentucky James went to Chastisers HQ and got her picture taken for an official photo ID, in both her real shape and her humansona. She added “Rex” to a roster below established young heroes Cub Canada, Superior, Pagan, and Bulkette, and only rolled her eyes a little as she got labeled a "provisional C-tier hero.”
Honestly, Kentucky wasn't sure about this whole “hero” thing. She wanted to go into academic research and educational outreach. But she was no good at experimental physics herself, so super-business was the best way to get access to the sort of time travel tech that her research ambitions required.
Plus, when Ducky Dodgers and Hawk Sterling-Stewart personally invited you to join the Young Chastisers, you didn’t just say no. Even if it was just a former babysitters/quasi-cousins nepotism thing. And her dad had been nagging her to get some sort of internship for the summer before college.
.
Kentucky’s first mission was a mixed bag. She got to really let loose busting up a B-tier villain’s warehouse hideout, but some freaked-out civilians called the cops on the “rampaging t-rex.” That sort of stereotyping was exactly why she needed to do educational outreach! Her second, at least, was an unalloyed win: she helped save the whole day by disarming a ton of bombs throughout Capital City’s UN building. (Hawk always pretended to have just one body for hero stuff, and the rest of the team was…not Alex-tier shit at puzzles, but definitely slower with their wire cutters than Kentucky.) That saved a bunch of people, and it would look great on her résumé!
But on the third mission, Cub Canada shoved her out of the way of some sort of ray gun just to take the full blast himself, and Kentucky watched her team leader/shapeshifting practice partner/former embarrassing tween crush (former!) implode in a burst of light.
She did not hesitate to go full T. rex about it. She shed all humanshape and charged the evil Dr. Dementia, roaring. She chomped off the villain’s ray gun and her whole arm with it, and spun around so her tail slammed the bleeding, screaming woman into the nearest wall.
Dementia still smelled alive—good, no need to be a provisional C-tier villain. But she wasn't moving—even better. Kentucky resisted the urge to finish her prey, and instead spat out the ray gun (and swallowed the arm). She shifted back down to the tall, feathered, but basically humanoid form that she used for heroing.
Pagan was already kneeling beside the pile of bright red and white uniform that used to be Ducky Dodgers, Cub Canada. The cloth shifted, and Pagan pulled it aside to reveal…Ducky Dodgers, as Kentucky had once seen him in an old photo. Of when he was like four years old.
Ducky the toddler took one bewildered look around: at the young adult heroes, newly armless villain, and fighting-wrecked laboratory (smashed machinery, overturned tables, shattered glass oozing mysterious liquids, etc).
He burst into tears. “I don’ wanna be ki’napped again!”
“Sh sh shh, it’s okay!” Pagan swooped in to hug him. “You’re not kidnapped! We’re your friends—I’m your girlfriend!”
“Thank fuck, it’s only a de-aging ray,” Kentucky said with feeling. She looked down at the ray gun in her arms—covered in tyrannosaurus slobber, but basically still intact. There were a number of dials on the side, unlabeled but colored. “Hang in there, Ducky, maybe we can reverse it.”
Holding a weeping toddler-Ducky in her arms, Pagan shot Kentucky a filthy look, and extended it all the way to the mad scientist collapsed and bleeding against the far wall of her laboratory lair.
“You’d better try to reverse that, first, Rex. What the hell?”
“You’re the one with healing spells,” Kentucky retorted. “I’m sorry—“
“Guys, enough with the squabbling.” In her big yellow form, even bigger and tougher than Kentucky at half-feathers, Bulkette’s rumbling voice topped theirs with ease.
In a softer, gentler voice, albeit still rumbling like boulders, she said, “Superior? Did you get caught in the blast?"
She was kneeling on the opposite side of the lab from Dementia. Before her, Superior’s biomechanical hoverboard had fallen from the air, alongside a crumpled green and orange uniform.
A gray-green blur lunged out of it and slammed into Bulkette’s torso. She screamed.
Cyan power leapt from Pagan’s outflung hand and dragged Bulkette backwards, away from the threat. Bulkette was already swallowing her screams, down to whimpering gasps. Flying in Pagan’s magic, she yanked something out of her stomach and flung it hard and far in the opposite direction.
It shattered another rack of beakers as it flew. Then it caught itself on an overturned table, and sprang back toward them with a shriek like an overflowing tea kettle.
Kentucky jumped forward and swung the ray gun like a baseball bat. Something in it crunched, but so did something in—
Kentucky was staring at what had to be the world’s cutest toddler, crouched on the floor a meter from her. It had chubby cheeks, messy brown curls, and a wobbling split lip. It looked up at her with the biggest, wettest, most innocently hurt and bewildered, slit-pupiled neon green eyes.
But Kentucky knew the truth behind this S-tier perception filter. She blinked, and saw an insectoid monster. It was about the size of a human toddler. It had a pillbug’s armored carapace, a scorpion’s stinger, and jagged mandibles (one chipped) all its own. The bright green eyes were the same—but emotionless. Calculating.
Hungry.
About five years ago—coincidentally when Hawk Sterling-Stewart decided to become a Hero—every zeranid on Earth had “evolved” into a “new species.” Identified by a blue streak on their shell, “yeranids” were pests, not monsters. They ate wildlife, or the occasional lost pet or scavenged human corpse. Like worldwide coyotes.
This zeranid did not have a blue streak on its shell. It looked exactly like the scourge of the 2012 Space War, when zeranids destroyed 250+ inhabited planets, nearly including Earth. Kentucky hadn’t been in the 21st century yet, then, but she’d seen pictures—and she knew an apex predator when she met one.
"Hawk, Hawk, it's me!" Kentucky babbled. She gripped the broken ray gun like a club. "Kentucky James! Do you remember me? You’re one of my best friends. We're honorary cousins. I'm on the Do Not Kill List."
Kentucky hadn’t noticed the disappearance of the light telepathic comms that Hawk (Superior) usually held throughout the team. It came back now like a slap in the face. Normally Hawk spoke in clear sentences, texts directly to the brain. De-aged(?), it flung concepts like paint at a Jackson Pollock canvas.
veryslightlyMeAlly(usuallyreliable?) (lowpriority), it identified Kentucky. Priority: Increase. Selfpart(you)COMMAND: Stayinplace(selfdefendIFnecessary).
It scurried forward. Kentucky leapt out of the way, and turned to keep tracking it. It was going for—oh god, the bleeding mad scientist.
Okay. Okay!
Breathe through the fight/flight instincts, especially the instinct to drop humanity again and lunge and bite. Never bite Hawk, or ingest any part of it. Ironically, Hawk was the one who’d taught Kentucky all her best tricks for restraining her natural drive to hunt and kill. Man, it’d be kicking itself for this lapse, later.
Also don't think of this as a potentially deadly superhero crisis, way out of her league. Think of it as a…a death trap. Kentucky had been whetting her teeth on death traps, literally, since she’d been brought to modern Canada.
First rule of surviving a death trap: get out of the death trap. There were two doors in this lab; one of them was blocked by a topped lab table but she could shift bigger and yank that aside. The other wasn’t blocked at all, and she wouldn’t even have to dodge around Hawk to get at it.
"Guys?!"
Kentucky jumped at the reminder of other people (prey) in the room. She wasn’t the only one. Pagan was still on her knees, squinting after Hawk like her brain was ramming into a brick wall over and over. Perched awkwardly on Pagan’s lap, Ducky was sucking his thumb.
Bulkette wasn’t paying attention to anything beyond her own torso, which she stared down at from her prone position on the floor. She was still bulked out, but her voice was high and nervous. "Guys, there's still bits in me. And they're moving."
“I’ve got you.” Pagan reached over to Bulkette's torn-up stomach, cyan glow reigniting in her hand.
"Don't!" Kentucky yelped.
Pagan stopped. But she only did so in order to snap up at Kentucky, "Okay, what is your problem?"
"What?"
"Um." Ducky looked away from the arguing girls.
"Do you even want to be here? Do you even want to be a hero?" Pagan tossed her perfect mane of red hair and ticked off her glowing fingers. "You resort to deadly or near-deadly violence. You use real, personal names in the field. You just punted Superior, when it’s a baby, and now you don’t want me to save Bulkette—"
"Tessa is probably turning into a zeranid," Kentucky interrupted, wracking her brain for Bulkette's 'real, personal' name just to pointedly use it. "If you stick your hand in her, it could infect you, too."
Pagan stared at her like she was insane. "Literally why would she be doing that."
Fucking perception filter. Fucking Stewarts. Oh god, Kentucky was starting to sound like her dad. Okay, regardless, she was not going to ruin her lifelong streak of not being eaten and/or assimilated, serial mass murdered, or death trapped, just because of Hawk's secret identity bullshit.
“Because Hawk’s a zeranid,” she informed the other girl. “Hawk’s the Zeranid.”
Ducky took his thumb out of his mouth and said more loudly, “Um. K’ntucky? Hilly?"
Pagan tightened her grip on him, and gave Kentucky a preppy withering glare over his head.
“Listen, new girl,” she sneered. “You’re only on this team because—“
Whatever she was about to say, or what Kentucky was about to snap back (maybe literally), was interrupted by a scream of pain from the far side of the room.
It faded into a gurgle as they both spun to look. Hawk was crouched at Dr. Dementia’s head. Or, what used to be her head, before Hawk had plunged in its stinger and started pumping her full of acid. Her body was now dissolving into goo in a slow wave going down, which Hawk chased with its extended proboscis and happy sucking noises.
“Hawk!” Ducky squirmed and shouted. “No eating people! 'Specially not when they're alive!”
Even in Kentucky's sight, Hawk was flickering back and forth between adorable human toddler and insectoid killing machine, as the perception filter overcompensated for the obvious. But Pagan, heir of the Magenta Warlock, was one of the most magically powerful people in the world. She was destined to be a god or something, or at least an A-tier hero.
"But," she said faintly, as her brain rammed one more time against the S-tier brick wall, "Hawk can't be a zeranid!"
Sympathy twisted in Kentucky’s gut. It wasn’t Pagan’s fault she was a born-and-bred superhero, ideals and bitchiness and all. Whereas Kentucky had grown up with an evil fairy godparent in the apartment across the hall.
“It is Alex Stewart’s kid,” she reminded Pagan.
"But-" Pagan bit her lip, then burst out like she'd been holding it in for weeks. "But it kissed me on Midsummer!"
Never mind that sympathy.
"But you and Ducky—! Never mind. I don't care. Wait, fuck.” Kentucky took a reflexive step back. ”You and Hawk kissed?"
Pagan shoved Ducky safely away and jumped to her feet, hands over her lips. Her gaze darted between Hawk, merrily liquifying and consuming a woman, and Bulkette, now biting her forearm to keep from crying out as she writhed in pain.
Kentucky's gaze followed the same path, and came warily back to Pagan.
Ducky, four years old and wearing nothing but an oversized undershirt, bit his lip as he spun slowly to look all around again, trying to figure out what was going on.
"...Well, you're not going all hivemindy or body horror-y, now that Hawk's reverted to...whatever Hawk's reverted to," Kentucky offered, after several long seconds of silence. "So I guess you didn't swap enough spit to be assimilated?"
"Yeah," said Pagan. She was still touching her lips. "Yeah, it was– pretty chaste. I mean, it probably didn't even count—"
"It still definitely counts as cheating," Kentucky said flatly.
"I knowww." Hildred Minimon, Pagan, buried her whole face in her hands. "Ducky, please don't remember any of this when we get you bigger again. I'll tell you everything then, I promise."
(Some sort of sympathy still torqued in Kentucky’s gut. It tangled around the triumphant cartwheels of a really stupid lingering tween-crush gland.)
"Okay." Ducky glanced nervously over his shoulder. "Can we stop Hawk from eating the lady, now?"
The only solid part left of Dr. Dementia was her feet, and they were going fast. Hawk looked at least a kilo bigger than it used to. There was, technically, still a lot of dissolved meat/blood/zeranid acid left to eat.
"Yeah." Pagan dropped her hands from her face. "Yeah, okay."
She straightened her back. Her jaw firmed and her eyes started to glow. Kentucky's instincts pinged the shift from potential prey back to rival predator.
Pagan ordered, "Ducky, you’re too little to fight—stay back. Stay safe. Rex, you're the zeranid expert here—figure out how to stop Hawk.”
“Excuse me?” Kentucky squawked.
“You’re obviously more of an edgy loner antihero type,” Pagan reassured her confidently. “You’ll do great without my help.”
Kentucky sputtered. "What the hell are you doing, then?"
Cyan sparks were crawling all over Pagan's silver supersuit, and her red hair floated in an airless wind. Cyan fire wreathed her hands and shone in her eyes.
"I am not letting my best friend get hivemind-assimilated by the person I cheated on my boyfriend with!"
She took two swift steps to her right, dropped to her knees beside Bulkette, and stuck both hands directly into Bulkette's writhing torso. Both girls lit like torches with pure magical power, oblivious to the rest of the world.
Fucking high-tier superheroes.
The exits were both still available—but Kentucky wasn’t going to run. ‘Edgy loner’ her finely tailed ass!
Second rule of surviving a death trap: stall the trap. Jam the mechanism, block the giant rolling stone, distract the villain with witty banter…
Kentucky spent about half a second considering a This isn’t you! speech. Then she considered that Hawk was now slurping up what used to be a woman’s pelvic bone, and she looked around for weapons instead, or some sort of holding cell.
The de-aging ray’s nozzle was bent at a right angle to its body, and wisping smoke. She stood in the middle of an evil laboratory: mostly chemistry, some mechanics; all wrecked in a fight that had included a tyrannosaurus rex and a grizzly bear.
She threw the broken ray gun over her shoulder, and squatted to the level of the immediate toddler. “Ducky, you’ve been invulnerable since, like, birth, right?”
Ducky nodded. His thumb was back in his mouth.
“Great!”
Kentucky scooped him up in her arms, growing as she did. Bigger, tougher, toothier—and about 60% of the way between extremes was a sweet spot of tyrannosaurus strength and human shoulder joints, which let her pitch a killer fastball or, say, an indestructible toddler.
“Play-wrestling time!” she shouted. “Maiming only! Shapeshifting optional! No running away!”
She flung Canada’s Top Teen Heartthrob, currently four years old, at the apocalyptic bioweapon, and watched them become a rolling ball of carapace, tentacles, flailing fists, and gleeful(?) screaming. Death trap: stalled.
She was already reaching for the phone on her utility belt. No hero was supposed to carry a personal phone in the field, but literally everyone did. Third rule of surviving a death trap: If you’re really stuck, look for clues, or ask for help.
The world’s primary expert in managing a baby zeranid didn’t pick up until the sixth ring. (Well, maybe secondary expert—but she wasn’t risking an evil fairy godparent wish on this yet.)
“I didn’t do it—oh, hey, Kentucky. ‘Sup?”
“Morgan!” She kicked a lab table into blocking the whirling dervish of nigh-unkillable lethal toddlers. Ducky had turned into a bear cub. More glass shattered; dissolved flesh was smearing everywhere.
“I know about the time in Venezuela, when you and Dad got shot and went to the Medicator to hide it,” Kentucky said quickly. “Hawk just got de-aged, so it doesn’t really remember us. Tell me how to make it not try to consume the Young Chastisers, or I’ll tell Alex everything.”
“Kentucky Eleanor James! Are you blackmailing me?” Predictably, her dads’ nemesis sounded delighted. “See, you should’ve accepted my internship offer—”
“The Chastisers pay. You don’t,” she snapped. (Okay, maybe Pagan had a point about the ‘antihero’ thing.) “Just give me a cl–aaah!”
Claw-tipped tentacles latched onto her leg and scurried up. Hawk crested her shoulder and swiped its proboscis over her ear and phone, drooling acid.
Morgan!(bestfavoritesafe/guard(doNOTmakebecome))! ALLstatusstrange(killconsumemakebecome? protectsave??) Morgan!WANT! Priority: FindMorgan!! Priority: JoinMorgan!!
“Awww! Hey, Hawk!” Morgan cooed statickily, through the acid-soaked phone, which Kentucky was now holding away from her ear. “Are you a baby again?”
Morgan!(bestfavoritesafe/guard(doNOTmakebecome))!WANT!!!Hawk dug its claws into Kentucky’s outstretched arm and shrieked telepathically.
The psychic pressure was giving Kentucky a sinus headache. Ducky paused trying to climb her legs, and pressed his paws against his head.
“I’ll bring you home right now,” Morgan promised. They snapped their fingers.
Kentucky’s phone fell, as her arm spasmed with the sudden loss of a deadly 10 kilo weight. It landed with a squelching clatter in a puddle of blood and acid. With a final burst of wet static, it died.
Adrenaline still pounded in Kentucky’s ears. There was a strange, not-quite-electric crackling behind her—
Right, Pagan was still burning the zeranid out of Bulkette. It seemed to be working—the magical fire was mostly concentrated in Bulkette’s stomach, now, though cyan sparks still rippled over both of them. Both their eyes were still shining blankly.
A muffled, tinny version of the Canadian national anthem was playing. It took Kentucky a long moment to realize it was coming from Ducky’s— from Cub Canada’s discarded uniform.
Kentucky shifted most of the way back to human, so she could crouch down and use her thumbs to search through the cloth. Ducky followed close at her heels, still a gangly bear cub, sniffing curiously.
They found Ducky’s cell phone, which was ringing with the anthem, and his official Chastisers communicator, which had about fifty missed alerts. Kentucky’s probably had the same…in her bag at home, where she’d left it. (She usually had her cell phone and Hawk’s telepathic comms, okay?)
“Ducky! Thank fuck on a moose,” said Captain Canada, the second Kentucky answered the ringing phone. “Are you okay? Is your team okay? Do you have eyes on Hawk?”
“Uhh no?” Kentucky had had a very stressful last 15 minutes, and now she was being bludgeoned by the news that Captain Canada, leader of the actual Chastisers, patriotic paragon of civility and heroism, could swear.
“I mean, um, no, ma’am? I mean, Ducky’s fine, kind of. But Hawk’s gone—oh, this is Ken— Rex, by the way. Sorry.”
“Rex? Oh, the dinosaur girl. Ohio James’ kid, right?” Captain Canada didn’t wait for that answer. “What do you mean, Hawk—that is, Superior—is ‘gone’?”
Kentucky’s mind raced. It was one thing to out your cousin to your shared teammates, who had a right to know. It was another thing entirely to out them to a genuinely adulty adult. But Captain Canada was Ducky’s mom, Hawk’s aunt, so maybe she knew…?
“Hawk got de-aged. Well, Ducky got de-aged—”
Ducky shoved his muzzle in and whuffed at the phone.
“—and I swear the ray did not hit Hawk, but it changed anyway. To, um. You know how, in 2012…?”
Captain Canada groaned. It sounded suspiciously like, “Fucking Stewart.”
An instant later, she was the Hero of the North again, commanding with reassuring calm. “I believe I understand, Rex. You should all come back to HQ, as quick as you can. Be careful on your way—every zeranid on Earth went nuts about fifteen minutes ago, and started attacking the nearest humans. About five minutes ago, they all turned and started converging on Capital City. And there might independently have been some sort of zombie outbreak throughout the province.”
Kentucky just wanted to get a PhD in Paleontology then split his time between research and public education. She only needed a time machine in order to return to the Cretaceous to visit her birth parents, and bring back proof that tyrannosauruses and many other dinosaur species had been intelligent, eloquent tool-users. She’d actually heard that Rex Roofer was working on time travel right now—but he was so evil that he made his interns pay him, and a heist on a RexInc lab without an inside man would require literal magic to accomplish.
…She wondered if she could convince Pagan it was for the greater good. It was—the greater good of correcting the historical record about her birth species! Pagan would probably enjoy cutting loose, amidst whatever was going on in her romantic life. Or Kentucky could invite Ducky, to help him get over the inevitable breakup, and they could just bulldoze through together…
“Rex? Are you still there?”
“Yes! Sorry, ma’am—Cap. We’ll be there in, uh, twenty minutes?”
“I’ll expect you then.” Captain Canada hung up.
Kentucky looked around the lab once again. It was trashed, but they could lock the doors and call a cleanup crew later. The villain was…no longer a concern.
(Hawk was going to feel so bad about that, once it was re-aged. It had been doing so well as the famed heroic scion of ultimate evil. Kentucky didn’t feel great about it herself. Would Hawk have gone for the woman if Kentucky hadn’t already started dismembering her?)
Cub-Ducky squinted up at her adorably, with what Kentucky recognized as the focus of someone who couldn’t quite remember how to shapeshift back to their natural form. Bulkette’s stomach was closed, and she looked just plain asleep. Pagan was slumped over her, a few sparks left dancing in her hair. She gave Kentucky an exhausted thumbs up, then passed out.
Dammit. Hawk’s fold-out hoverboard had crawled out the door (don’t think about that), and teleportation magic was their backup ride. Some idiot was going to call the cops again if she had to run through downtown carrying people in her mouth.