Excerpt from Jane’s Secret Radio Broadcast 3/21/0092:

  “You call it your Secret Origin. Why’s that?”

  “Because mystery is how all of this is able to work. Like, you aren’t really named Jane, are you?”

  “No, Mr. Fox, I’m not.”

  “So, you know that a fox hunts best from the shadows.”

  “Indeed. What made you want to tell your story now?”

  “I’ve finally accomplished some things. I’ve finally made a name for myself. Don’t have much family anymore, so if somebody was finally able to figure out who I am, it wouldn’t matter much. Plus my girlfriend is the strongest Superhero there is. Who’s gonna mess with me now?”

  “Good point. So where did all of this start?”

  “It started with my friend Gus — um, Augustus. Even before we found the cave, I knew he was going to change the world. He had this energy, this heart that fascinated you like some kind of shiny diamond. He was good, really good, and he pushed you to be better without judgement. He just expected things from you, and you wanted to make him happy.”

  “How does this fit into the story of the Seventh Red Fox?”

  “We don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “We don’t put numbers next to the name. It’s not like Bronze Boy. We’re all the Red Fox. I’m the Red Fox, and Gus was the Red Fox.”

  “Right, mystery. Makes sense.”

  “Yep. So, when I found the cave, there was never any thought in my mind that I’d take the Fox Serum. He was the hero. Of course he should take it. My girlfriend at the time, ah let’s call her Jill, kept telling me I was the better looking, but I didn’t believe her. Gus was the most handsome man I knew. Naturally he’d be the face of the Red Fox.”

  “So why did you take the serum?”

  “Well, so, swinging with the grapple gun looks easy, but even if you’ve read the manuals, it’s very difficult. He was swinging to a robbery one night, and broke his damn foot.”

  “Not ideal.”

  “No ma’am. So he broke his foot, and ah, and a Supervillian shows up. Atlas, big guy. Of course I needed to take the serum. And Jill took it too. We didn’t stop the bad guy that night, but we chased him off.”

  “And that’s where you got the idea to share the mask?”

  “Well, we’d been talking about it for a while. Jill didn’t want me to join, but Gus always expected that I’d take it too. There were three solutions of serum. He said it was fate. I didn’t believe in that stuff at the time.”

  “You do now?”

  “Maybe. No. Hell if I know. I’ve worked hard to achieve the things I’ve achieved. But the way some things line up — It makes you wonder.”

  “So, the three of you became heroes. You, your girlfriend, and your best friend.”

  “We did. We became heroes. And we were darn good ones, too. I was never one to get into fights as a kid, but once you do it, once you see the look on a bully’s face when you pop ‘em one good… man it feels righteous. It feels like you were doing something good for once. And swinging on the grapple. That stomach-up-in-heart feeling as you swing, as it launches you forward — nothing else like it.”

  “This was in Houston, right. Not Kit City.”

  “This was way before Kit City.”

  “So why did you move? What made you leave Houston?”

  “I’m sure you can tell where the story is going.”

  “I have a guess. But I want to know what it means to you.”

  “It crushed me, Gus’s death. It destroyed my life. He was the hero. Jill — I don’t know what she thought. And every time she tries to explain it we just fight. She left. I guess she didn’t want to feel like her life stopped because of what happened. Maybe looking at me made her feel guilty. I don’t know.”

  “To clarify, your friend was killed by Flameopath.”

  “Yes. Flameopath — what a stupid name — he killed my best friend. And he paid for it. I wish killing him had actually stopped him for good. But sometimes the job gets weird.”

  “You don’t normally kill your villains. It’s typically frowned upon in the hero community. What changed?”

  “Well, I met Sniffer Sleuth, for one.”

  Red Fox Action Log 41 cont:

  We rushed to the intel bay. Almost the entire team crammed into one elevator.

  White Rabbit seemed as bouncy, and cheerily inscrutable as ever. Glue Guy inhaled a bag of chips. Levitron brooded six inches from the ground, as if his tension had him by the scruff of the neck, dragging him up into the air. Barry smiled stupidly, as if eager to finally have a chance to show off.

  I corrected myself. I didn’t actually know Barry. My distaste for his temperament didn’t mean he was really the man he seemed on the surface.

  Betamind was here too. Bright green eyes, wide like some kind of prey animal, and slender, he didn’t look like a hero, but I knew looks could be deceiving. I also didn’t want to judge his looks too harshly in case he was peeking in on my thoughts.

  I’m sure he was used to that sort of thing, but there wasn’t any need to antagonize the kid.

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  “Bunny,” he said, “please stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Betamind can’t control what he hears,” Sleuth said with a sigh, “anymore than I can control what I smell.”

  “Well I can’t be responsible for what he hears,” White Rabbit said. “It’s my mind. He can butt out.”

  I thought comforting thoughts the rest of the way to the top floor, fluffy puppies and cute kittens. When we exited, Betamind power-walked away from us.

  With the exception of the lights over the elevator and the fire escape, darkness shrouded the floor. At least that’s all I noticed at first. Soft, twinkling LEDs led us from the elevator to the computer screens in the middle, and myriad colors on the screens played off the faces of the people working there.

  In addition to the two I’d already met, there was a third kid at a station — black kid, dark inquisitive eyes illuminated by his screen, and a bulky set of headphones on his head.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Barry, the only one of the group to hang back with me.

  “That’s Milton. Or, er, The Brain. He’s in another memory cascade. Watching a movie to calm down.”

  “I’ve heard that twice — ‘memory cascade,’” I said.

  “Oh. Uh. He never forgets. Ever. So sometimes it becomes too much, his memories, and he gets lost in the past. Watches a movie, or reads a book, or something to come down.”

  “Makes sense.”

  I’d never heard of anything like that. I wondered where they’d found him. There were so many people with superpowers now. All the events of the world keep piling up on top of each other. The Gem War, the Dark Energy Event, the Culling of Heroes, the Meteor Impact, all of these world events spawning people with extraordinary abilities, or killing them off.

  Then there were people like Sniffer Sleuth, who just seemed to be born with a keen sense of smell. Maybe this kid was like that?

  I let Barry go first, and we caught up with the others. Upon reaching the bay of computers, I noticed a distinct lack of Nora.

  The two kids I’d already met stood up from their computers, and the girl greeted us. She’d changed into a button up shirt and skirt, but the shirt had clearly not been ironed in weeks and hung untucked and wrinkled. Getting a closer look revealed that she was likely of Middle East and North African ethnicity, with her short dark hair cut in flat straight bangs across her brow.

  “Hiya gang,” she said, a hint of a Californian accent to her, “Nora is sick, so I’m going to lead the presentation.”

  “There’s a presentation?” I asked.

  The sound of retching could be heard from somewhere in the distance.

  “There is,” she said. “I’m Parvati.”

  “Is that an alias?”

  “It could be for all you know, nosy.”

  “I am a Fox.”

  “Does that actually work on people?” she asked, face incredulous.

  I shrugged.

  “Anyway,” she tapped a button on her keyboard and a picture of a beautiful woman appeared on the screen. It was grainy, likely taken from security footage. “This is who those on the street call ‘Lady Lovely,’ or just ‘Lovely.’ We have reason to believe she’s gone full supervillain.”

  I took note of the woman’s features and bearing, such as could be seen. I didn’t recognize her. She certainly hadn’t been the woman on the bike — too full figured. I expected she was striking in person, with long medium colored hair, and a round, pleasing face.

  I tried not to frown so settled for setting my jaw in frustration. None of this was adding up.

  The skinny white kid pushed a button for her, and she continued.

  “This is a shipment of military grade firearms being offloaded to a warehouse in The Basket.”

  The Basket is what they called the Baskerville Borough of Kit City. It did not have a sterling reputation. The photo showed burly men carrying what looked like a crate of rifles. The kid pushed the button again, showing a picture of a trailer carrying some kind of mammoth machine under a tarp.

  “This is part of classified material from a NASA hanger,” she continued. “Could be a telescope part, or it could be a rocket engine. Whatever it is, it’s big. And that’s not the only piece of material that’s been stolen recently.”

  “Why don’t the feds just get it back?” I asked.

  “Why, indeed?” she shot back. “We don’t know. Presumably they don’t have the intel we do. Not everyone has access to a precog as skilled as Nora.”

  The next slide showed several pictures of the aerial view of a dockside warehouse.

  “As you can see, they’ve had contractors moving in and out of this warehouse for months. They’re building something here, and due to Lady Lovely’s powers, nobody has any idea what it could be.”

  “What are those powers exactly?” Barry asked.

  “Incredibly potent pheromones, and mental penetration. She can inspire fear as well as love. What the guy you’ve picked up said, um Frank Messina, what he said lines up with the rumors on the street. Anyone that so much as passes by a room she’s in becomes infatuated with her.

  “How infatuated?” I asked.

  “Like,” Parvati answered, “anyone that gets within spitting distance, loses their faculties completely, and wakes up having done things they can’t remember doing.”

  “Like a trance,” I said. “That lines up with the men in the alley.”

  “It does,” Sniffer Sleuth said, walking up to stand next to Pavarti. “Thank you, I’ll take it from here.”

  “You’re welcome, Rick.”

  “At this point,” he said, “with what we’ve been able to get from FBI servers, and our own clue database, as well as the interview Betamind conducted, we have reason to suspect that this Lady Lovely, whoever she is, has gone full Supervillian, and is planning some kind of attack on the city.”

  “But why would she attack us when we weren’t even on her radar yet?” I asked. “And who was the woman on the motorcycle?”

  “Unfortunately we’ve had no luck with the woman on the motorcycle. All of our leads come down to Lovely, and what she’s been doing at this warehouse. As for why she attacked us… It could be simple paranoia. She knows we’re in the city, and that it’s only a matter of time before we stumbled onto her plan.”

  That didn’t add up. I didn’t know anything about this villain, but I knew people. We hadn’t even been close to uncovering a plot like this. I could have wasted weeks scouring the city for clues, and not even getting a sniff of this plot. Attacking us with goons that had seen you, that we could track back to her, that was sloppy — really sloppy.

  I smelled a trap, but my Fox Instincts felt still. I reminded myself that just because it felt like that attack had been a provocation, I didn’t actually have any evidence for that yet.

  “Maybe,” I finally said.

  “At any rate, we know she has a lot of firepower guarding something secret. I want us to infiltrate this hideout, once we’ve prepared. Maybe tomorrow. I think we’re all too frazzled.”

  “What if she attacked us because she was about to start her plan?” I asked. “What if it’s happening tonight?”

  “Our guy, Frank, didn’t tell us this, but Betamind picked it up from his thoughts. He seemed to believe that she was going to be at a Mafia club downtown tomorrow, and hopped to see her again. Even though they don’t remember hardly anything about her, they're still obsessed. If she was planning on doing anything soon, like tonight soon, she wouldn’t need to recruit more manpower.”

  “Do we plan —” I started to say, but was cut off.

  “Trying to do reconnaissance on her is too dangerous.”

  “What about Betamind and Bunny?” I asked. “Couldn’t they team up to defeat this trance ability? He could put up mental wards, and if there is a chance they get caught, she could preview it.”

  I was just spitballing. I had no idea if Betamind even had that kind of power.

  “Betamind doesn’t do fieldwork,” Sleuth said.

  “Sorry,” Betamind muttered.

  “Maybe me, and the new guy go,” Bunny said, glancing at me. “We keep our distance then report back?”

  “Look,” Sleuth said, “I can’t control what you do. The Care Team doesn’t work that way. But I strongly suggest that we all wait until we know exactly our best course of action, so that we can tackle this as a team. If you two go off half cocked and get mind controlled, that could be very bad.”

  “We’re not running anywhere tonight,” I said.

  “Good,” Nora said, walking in from seemingly nowhere. “Hey, can I talk to the new guy, real quick?”

  “Yeah, we’re done here for now,” Sniffer Sleuth said.