From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

This is a short piece of fiction about Shadows Dance.

Emperor's New Clothes

She shifted on the leather couch, the mainframe buzzing nearby. She had turned off the tv and borrowed the quilt from the cot in the infirmary. It wasn’t a bad place to sleep, but it wasn’t home. She kept worrying about one of the other members of Solace discovering her on a late night mission, or worse, if the leaders gathered for a meeting in the wee hours of the morning. The mainframe hummed and clicked, its neon glow making the space alien. But she couldn’t stretch out in the arbor, though the environment was more relaxing, and the infirmary cot was guaranteed to be seen while heroes worked through the night. Which left the control room, with its buzzing and big leather couch.

-Dancer-

She smiled, at least she wasn’t alone. “You know my name, Light”

-You like when I call you dancer, though.-

“What’s up?”

-You can’t sleep.-

She paused then sighed in resignation. “No, probably not.”

-Want to try something?-

She stared at the ceiling and grinned. Light of Moon Accord came up with “somethings” for them to work on. They started as random ideas, based on things he had heard of Warshades, legends or theories. They turned into late night practice sessions on esoteric mental choreography, where he tried to find phrases to explain mechanics not found in human physiology. It was similar to her previous life of rehearsal after rehearsal – and it had some spectacular pay offs.

The thing with what he called changing form, a sort of a hop and twist, only mental, and her bipedal form was changed to something… not. Instead of running or jumping, she could fly, not like a bird or a plane, but like a balloon, or a fish, slipping through the air with purpose. It was a new way of moving, of thinking and being, and it was beautifully free and powerful.

He said he learned it from a previous host, and she had learned that Kheldians called it “nova form”. Colloquially, people referred to it as “squid form” due to the tentacles, she supposed. It was ingrained as a part of the Kheldian being, and pretty common, bringing many to interchange “squids” for “Kheldians”. Light felt that was not only overly familiar, but imprecise and encouraged lax thinking. Kheldians weren’t squids any more than they were apes, however they could remember and assume their previous host forms. Neviah, of course, took great joy in teasing him about becoming a squid.

It was a “recent” memory for him, the nova species hosts, so it was easy for him to teach her how to shift herself enough for him to transfer her mass and shape their energy into his old host’s form. And consequently, rain destruction on their enemies that was the envy of many of those they partnered with.

She yawned and sat up, “Alright, what have you come up with for us?”

-I think we can become… if not invisible, less visible, a shadow form.-

“You didn’t tell me about a Shadow host.”

-Not a host, and I’m still working on defining the other one clearly enough to use, but similar. Only instead of shifting your mass out of phase entirely, and linking it to an alternate waveform, this would be only slightly shifting it out of phase, allowing you to remain able to affect things with your mass, or portions of it anyway, at times.-

“ooooo….kay…”

She could hear the Kheldian’s put upon sigh. –We could be very hard to see.-

“Oh! Cool! Yeah, let’s try it!”

So they did, Neviah taking instructions, Light formulating different experiments. In their own way, each could focus and work tirelessly. When they finally got to sleep they were able to conceal themselves. From a distance they were very hard to notice, though close up they still had weight and brushing against someone would get their attention. But it was satisfying, to make another bit of progress together.

“You know what I’m going to do with this, Light?”

-What, child?-

“Go home.”

-Home? Child?- He got no response, the girl was fast asleep.

Shadows Dance woke up the next morning in a mischievous mood, proud as a cat bringing home a kill. While Light saw many ways Neviah’s plan could go wrong, he wanted to test out their new ability, and this would do it.

Neviah slung her dance bag over her shoulder and started for King’s Row, materializing from the Solace teleporter as nothing more than a shimmer of darkness, a dancing shadow, indeed. The walk went quietly, and quickly, she could find her way back to the apartment from the tram station blindfolded, without tripping on a crack or stumbling into a Skull hangout. Not that Skulls concerned her now, melding with Light had taken care of that worry, once and for all. It wasn’t their harassment she avoided them for, but she needed to make her way home undiscovered. The gangs were easy to avoid, the Council might not be.

Nothing was amiss, and the sweet afternoon sunlight almost convinced her that everything could be normal again until she reached the crime scene tape on the door. She leaned against the wall, hard, overcome with emotions she had been holding back for weeks. Where moments ago she had been cajoling the insecure Kheldian, now it was her symbiote who urged her on.

-Neviah. We need to go in there.-

Shadow took a few steps forward and Light blinked them through the door. The apartment was a mess, cupboards emptied onto the kitchen floor, the sofa cut apart, pictures torn from the walls, they had brutalized her home. The sight shocked her, but quickly she distanced herself from this place – it wasn’t a home anymore, but a jumble of things. It was far more difficult to distance herself from the discolored patch on the wood floor, all that remained here of her mother, far more difficult not to fall to her knees there and weep, beg what goodness remained in the world to return her mother to her and let her have her life back.

She stepped over it quietly and headed for what used to be her room. The destruction in the tiny room was just as complete as in the living space. Drawers emptied, awards flung off their shelves, the collection of porcelain figurines left mostly in shards. She tried not to think of the shattered little dancers, innocent and happy, as the childhood she left behind.

-Neviah.-

“I know. We may not have much time.”

-I’m sorry, but they could be watching.-

“Its alright. I’m not going to forget this any time soon, no matter how little time I spend staring at it.”

She got to work then, salvaging what she came for, what remained of her clothes that could stand up to hero work. She looked for the few bits of jewelry that she and her mother owned, her grandmother’s sapphire necklace, some heavy silver bangles, but anything of value had been stripped from the apartment, along with the destruction.

It was the creak of the fire escape that warned her, and the muffled swear word that followed. When the combat suited soldier’s face crested the windowsill, she had turned to shadow. She hurriedly tacked a note on the refrigerator and let Light take them both out of the building, folding the space around them to teleport them straight up through the walls between, and then fled for Solace, her lungs burning from effort, her eyes from stress and pain.

-Are you alright?-

She splashed another double handful of water on her face, pushing back soggy tendrils of hair and looked in the mirror. Her face was thin and pale, her violet eyes almost seeming to glow, she smiled ferally at the image.

“I’ve been worse.”

The general stared at the incident report screen, frowning at the scanned attachment.

“Dear Dad, Sorry, have to run but we’ll come visit you soon. We have a lot to catch up on.”