Kingdom Hearts fic: Potentials - Chapter 7

[mistressofmuses]

In chapter 7: The trio finally encounter their new enemies.

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Excerpt from An Introduction to the History of the Super-Powered by Victoria McGuire:

As power manifestation events increased, soon it was not enough to classify all manifestations solely under the “superpower” heading. There were simply too many different types of power. Many researchers, reporters, and theorists all created different classification systems, ranging from two categories up to lists so sprawling and complex that each individual power was given a unique heading.

The version that has persisted the longest as the most functional is technically called the Vale-Martinez classification, coming from a blend of those two proposed groupings, however the official name is rarely used outside of theory texts. It broadly classes all manifested powers into five categories: Enhanced Ability, Elemental, Mental, Dimensional, or Artifact.

Enhanced Ability:

The most common type of manifested power is the enhanced ability. These are superhumans who show abilities that are not in and of themselves abnormal, but are present to an extent that is beyond normal human ranges. There are plenty of strong people, but super strength goes beyond that. Running quickly isn’t abnormal, but super speed is.

Elemental:

The second most frequently seen subtype is elemental control. This category has been criticized for being too broad, but it still functionally groups like powers together. This refers to manifested abilities that grant a person control over something specific, but external to them. Most common are the classical elements: fire, water, air, electricity, etc. Sometimes these are more abstract, like spatial manipulation, or relatively nebulous concepts like light and dark.

Mental:

Mental powers are those that originate within the mind of the individual and exert power over something external, if the ability does not fall into one of the previous categories. (For example, while elemental fire control may originate in the mind, its effect is limited to a specific element.) This category includes things like telepathy, telekinesis, animal control, and newer powers such as technomancy. It is also the controversial designation for things like flight, which are somewhat more similar to enhanced ability (as they are a physical capability) but don’t meet the requirement that it be possible to a lesser extent in a non-superhuman.

Dimensional:

Dimensional superhumans are rare, and can be difficult to classify. Any superhuman, regardless of other powers, is considered “dimensional” if they are from a world or dimension other than this one. While this makes the category less based on description than origin, it’s valuable from a scientific standpoint, as the existence of dimensional individuals is of great interest for study. These individuals may be given a secondary classification as a better descriptor of their abilities.

Artifact:

The final category is artifact-granted. This is the rarest and in some ways least understood subtype. These individuals have, as suggested, an “artifact” of some type—often a weapon—that grants them abilities. They usually report having been “chosen” by these items, though sometimes it’s merely that they were the one to find said object. In many cases, they cannot be separated from their artifact, and attempts to do so fail. But in theory, were they to be separated, the individual would revert to being an ordinary person.

Undetected abilities?

There has been a valid criticism made of the general classification at all of superhuman abilities, beyond disagreement over the classifications used. How is it determined what is human and what is superhuman? Particularly with “enhanced ability” powers, where is the dividing line between “extremely strong person” and “super strength?” Where is the dividing line between “record-setting world-champion runner” and “that athlete is actually superpowered, so they aren’t eligible to compete?”

Beyond that, it’s widely considered that superpowers began to appear just over 30 years ago, with potential consideration that some legends or historical figures may have been early examples. But what of superpowers that are sub-measurable? Is someone who never has a vending machine steal their money just fortunate, or are they a low-level technopath? If someone has a lucky charm that helps them ace their tests, could they actually have been chosen by an artifact that has a very specific effect? And taking those considerations into account, could that mean that superhuman abilities are far more common than is widely believed?

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The Nobodies had grown more threatening. More sightings and outright altercations, to the point it seemed like everyone in the city must have had at least one encounter. No casualties yet, but the Heroes went about patrolling with the grim certainty that it was only a matter of time.

But other than the increase in number, there was no sign of the villainous “side” they were supposed to be preparing to fight against. None of the human-like intelligent enemies that were supposed to be lurking.

Patrols had been increased. When posted, the new schedules had almost all of the Heroes working six days out of the week, pairs and trios assigned to smaller than usual sections of the city, trying to keep up with the incoming reports. In times of non-crisis, the city generally had one or two teams on active patrol at a time, with the others “on call” in case something big happened. Now three and four teams were on duty at once, and it still didn’t feel like enough.

Radiance squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, trying to shake exhaustion off. She’d had twice her usual amount of coffee, but she knew this was the kind of tired that nothing short of a full night’s sleep could touch.

“Nothing yet,” she said, trusting her voice would come through clearly.

She was almost always the lookout these days, since her powers were the least useful in a direct fight with the Nobodies. But with this kind of exhaustion, she was afraid of missing something.

“Down here either.” Keyblade’s response was as clear as if he were speaking in her ear. “It’s like no one is even out on the streets.”

“People are worried about these new monsters,” Corridor said. “Not quite curfews, but it’s like people got when the Heartless first showed up.”

Radiance remembered those confusing days. That was the first time they’d had genuine monsters coming into the world. It had been decades since the first superheroes (and shortly after, villains) had appeared, so extraordinary danger wasn’t exactly new. But creatures, dangerous and unreasoning, had been. The Nobodies were somehow more frightening, since they represented something not yet understood, and less, because at least they’d been through something like this before.

Three sharp beeps sounded over the communication system. Radiance winced. The sound was meant to get attention, but it sounded like something scratching the inside of her skull.

“A report of several suspicious persons had come in,” said the dispatcher. “One quarter mile north and two miles east of your position. Three people, dressed in black, no physical description. A shopkeeper confronted them for loitering, and one of them threatened her. Please investigate.” The three sharp beeps repeated.

“You heard her.” Radiance felt the corridor open as soon as Corridor spoke. “Let’s go.”

His doorway opened behind her just long enough for her to step through, and then they were traveling in the direction they’d been directed toward. They found the shopkeeper who’d called for assistance with little trouble; she was waiting inside her store, but came out when she saw them. Her description wasn’t any more detailed than the dispatcher’s, but she pointed them down the street.

If anything, it felt even more deserted than the first area they’d been in. These were mostly storefronts and restaurants that would usually have had signs out, or customers sitting outside enjoying the weather, but there was no one. A few nervous faces looking out the windows, and even more stores that already had closed signs up.

“I hope we aren’t just following some bored teenagers,” Corridor said after a few minutes.

“Yeah,” Keyblade agreed. “Considering how few people there are, I guess anyone out could be marked as somehow suspicious.”

They hadn’t seen the three people wearing black yet, but ahead, at the mouth of an alley, Radiance spotted the tell-tale flash of white that they’d grown too familiar with other the last few weeks.

The Nobodies drifted around the frame of a closed door, their focal point seeming to be the door itself as well as a pile of old papers left out with the trash.

Keyblade flicked his fingers, weapon coming into existence with the motion. His grip tightened, ready to engage, but Corridor held out an arm to stop him.

“Don’t you think they’re acting a bit odd?”

He was right. Radiance had seen dozens of the creatures by now, and while drifting down an alleyway wasn’t out of the ordinary, it was certainly strange for them to have an apparent focus. Particularly on something non-living.

“Are they looking for something?” she asked.

The Nobodies paused and turned toward the trio, as much as something faceless could be said to choose a direction. Radiance readied herself to draw them towards herself, so that Keyblade and Corridor had a better shot at taking them out. She gestured with her left hand, pulling it in a twisting motion toward herself, a hand signal to let the other two know what she was going to do.

But the creatures didn’t approach. Instead they retreated.

“Definitely odd,” Corridor said.

The three fell out of their ready postures and gave chase, following the Nobodies through the narrow alley and tight turns, suddenly letting out onto a quiet side street. The Nobodies seemed to be frustratingly matching their speed, never escaping, but never letting them get closer.

The buildings grew taller and denser, rapidly returning to true city streets. There were more cars on the road, and pedestrians hurrying out of the way of the monsters and Heroes.

“Are we heading into a trap?” Radiance asked.

She was furiously trying to overlay her mental map of the city to their current location. They’d already left the section they’d been assigned to patrol, though that was expected if a Hero team was in pursuit of a threat. She couldn’t see how this could be an ambush; the creatures were taking them toward the opposite of a dead-end. If the creatures kept going the way they were…

And they slid through another alley, which let out on a wide paved square. Flowerbeds and benches surrounded the area, a popular spot for people to meet and talk, have lunch, and the like. Usually it would have been crowded, but the few civilians who had been taking advantage of the space rapidly retreated when they spotted the Nobodies.

Corridor drew up short. “That can’t be good.”

Radiance stopped next to him, as did Keyblade. She immediately saw what he meant. A second small knot of the creatures… with Trickshot, Nocturne, and Gambler in pursuit.

But even as the two groups of Nobodies met, they didn’t turn to attack, instead drifting behind a group of people who were not running for an escape.

It was a large group, almost all dressed identically in long black coats, except for one young woman jarringly clad in white.

The other three Heroes also stopped, keeping a safe distance. She saw Corridor make the hand symbol for ‘wait’ at them, and Trickshot made the same gesture back.

The group of strangers didn’t move to attack, though their stance was a clear implied threat. Radiance quickly did a headcount. Nine, plus the woman who looked like she was there just for contrast. Radiance almost wondered if she was a hostage, but she wasn’t trying to escape. Her eyes were downcast, but she didn’t look distressed.

One, a taller, muscular man with long dark hair and sideburns spoke first. His voice was deep and the tone was mocking. “So this is what the city has to offer.”

Clearly, he was not impressed and wanted them to know it.

Trickshot snapped, “More than enough to deal with you.”

Radiance took a deep breath. That was some bad math. But she also knew what this was. It was the posturing, the introduction. Not a full-blown fight, not yet, or else they wouldn’t still be standing off against each other. And she was glad of that. Nine, maybe ten of them, if the girl was also a combatant, versus six Heroes. And they also had the Nobodies. Those might not be impossible odds, but she didn’t particularly like them.

Her eyes flicked automatically toward Gambler, who had to be examining those numbers very carefully. The way he was frowning didn’t make her reconsider her assessment.

Another of the black-robed figures spoke, a woman with short blonde hair. “Is that so?” A twist of her hand revealed throwing knives gripped delicately between her fingers.

One of the other men put an arm in front of her.

“Come on Larxene, that’s not very friendly.” This man had bright red hair, and distinctive tattoos below his eyes.

Someone on their side had to respond now, that was the way these things worked. It was Keyblade, this time.

“If you’re working with those things, I don’t think we’re going to be friends.” He shifted his stance, holding out his weapon in a two-handed grip, making it clear he was ready to fight if they pushed it.

The first of the black-robes spoke again. “Very nice. Roxas has something like that.”

One of the shorter men in the crowd, youngish, with blond, spiky hair took a half step forward into his own stance, brandishing his own weapon… a keyblade almost identical to Keyblade’s.

“What?” Keyblade asked, his grip slackening as he almost stumbled backward.

Radiance felt an odd hollowness in her chest, and her heart seemed to still and then pound too fast to make up for it. A keyblade? That didn’t make any sense.

“How do you have that?” Keyblade shouted. “Who are you?”

The red-haired man smiled, like that was the exact question he’d been hoping for. “We’re the Organization. Got it memorized?”

Radiance could hear the capital letter, as surely as she’d heard it when they started talking about an Event.

Then there was a lurch in the feeling of the world, just as a tear appeared in the substance of it. It looked something like one of the dark corridors, but jagged at the edges. The black-clad group and the girl in white stepped back, and the tear closed around them.

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Corridor opened his own passage and pulled all three of them away.

They couldn’t go to the apartment; they were still on duty, and even if they hadn’t been concerned with finishing their shift, the Defenders of the Light would have had the right to follow them. He dropped them on the sheltered rooftop patio of a trendy club that wouldn’t be open for several more hours, a single story building with taller buildings on each side.

“What the hell was that?” Corridor asked.

Radiance replied, “How could someone else have a keyblade?” She looked over at Keyblade, like he might have an answer.

He just shook his head, leaning forward, hands braced on his thighs as if he were catching his breath after a long run. After a moment he just shook his head again.

Corridor was the first to recover, or at least to pull together an approximation of it. “We have to go make a report. This is the enemy we’ve been waiting for. We should have gone straight to Headquarters. Sorry.”

Radiance wanted to argue, to insist they deserved a moment to think, to sort through it, but she knew he was right. They were on the clock, and the Defenders of the Light needed to know that the enemy they’d been waiting for had shown up.

And they’d all promised that they were going to be exemplary Heroes.

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It was later that they finally had their chance to react with something other than detachment. The Defenders of the Light weren’t opposed to their Heroes showing emotion, but they preferred it on camera, not during a report. Those they preferred to be neutral, as if the whole altercation hadn’t already been recorded and sent to the researchers to analyze.

So it was after they’d made their reports, pretending they were impartial, once they were off from scheduled patrol, when they could retreat to the apartment and really think about it.

Sora paced, Kairi sat on the couch, and Riku leaned against the opposite wall, arms crossed.

“I thought I was the only one,” Sora said.

It was not the first time he’d said it, though Kairi understood why. The keyblade was literally integral to his identity as a Hero. And artifact-bestowed powers were rare as it was.

“It wasn’t just the keyblade. How good a look did you get at the person carrying it?” asked Riku.

Kairi answered with what little she did remember. “They called him ‘Roxas.’ Blond. Maybe a bit younger than most of them. Or just shorter.”

He waved his hand, dismissing that as inconsequential. “Yeah. His hair is shorter, and lighter, and styled differently. But did you see his face?”

Sora paused in his pacing to glare at Riku. “I think I was probably staring at the fact he had my weapon.”

Riku hesitated, but then pressed on. “He looked like you.”

Kairi felt a chill down her spine and thought back. She had sort of glossed over it, even in her own mind. But the vivid blue eyes, the round, youngish face… they weren’t completely identical, but if they changed the hair, had the same expression on their faces…

Sora raked his hands through his spiky hair, messing it up even more. “Okay, then how the hell is there someone with my weapon who also looks like me?”

“I guess that’s one of the things I’ll have to find out.”

“Is there anything else we know?” she asked. “There were ten of them total, dressed in black…”

“Mostly,” Sora corrected. “The girl was in white.”

She thought back to the woman. She hadn’t looked happy, or even comfortable, but she hadn’t been scared, and no one had been restraining her. “She didn’t seem like a hostage.”

“Naminé,” Riku said.

“What?” Kairi asked.

“I think that’s her name.”

Kairi shook her head. “None of them said her name. Of them all, we only got two introductions: Roxas, and Larxene. And that they call their group ‘The Organization.’”

“Naminé…” Sora repeated. “Why does that name sound familiar? Was that someone we used to know?”

“It doesn’t sound familiar to me at all,” Kairi said.

Riku shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’m sure we’ll find out more.”

They weren’t able to spend the night together this time, no matter how much they wanted to. There was a press conference scheduled for the next morning, and all of them had to be perfectly presentable. And honestly, the day had given them all plenty to think about on their own.

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By morning, everyone had seen the footage from the encounter the previous afternoon. And even in the absence of direct violence, the threat this “Organization” represented was enough to frighten a lot of people.

The press conference took place in a room set up like a convention panel table, each of the Heroes with a mic, and a packed room of people hoping to get their questions answered.

But at least convention panels were fun. Radiance sighed. This wasn’t meant to be fun. She wanted to ease fears, of course. She understood why people were shaken up. Hell, she was still shaken up, which made it that much more difficult to fulfill the symbolic role of the Hero, even as she recognized it was even more necessary.

Though in all honesty, she wasn’t having to do much besides sit there and look serious. All six of the Heroes who had been present for the “altercation” were here, which meant the questions were being shared, and not all that many had come to Radiance.

Ordinarily, that would be a cause for frustration. She would have been concerned that it meant she wasn’t being taken seriously, or worried about her numbers, since it was hard to get very many views or shares if she wasn’t recorded saying anything. But at the moment, it was a relief.

It was still hard to sit there, knowing almost as little as the people asking the questions.

Multiple people, some of whom she recognized from the formal press event, asked about the keyblade, and the fact that one of the new enemies had one. What that meant for Keyblade the Hero. How that was possible. If it meant something sinister about the weapon itself. They just kept rephrasing the questions when there wasn’t an answer they liked.

And all the answers the Heroes gave to every question could be distilled down to the same platitude: “We’re investigating all possibilities.”

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The lack of official explanation didn’t stop the theories, and Kairi was torn between obsessively checking blogs and forum boards and wanting to avoid them entirely.

Aliens, new Heartless, time travelers… all of those theories were thrown around, sometimes joking, sometimes more than half not.

She should have been grateful, and in some detached way she supposed she was, because the not-quite-fight had certainly captured interest. All the Heroes who’d been there were trending, videos from the square where the tense stand-off had happened were being played over and over, and she knew they’d all get nice payments at the end of the month for it.

That was cold comfort against everything else; how little they personally knew, how the Defenders of the Light certainly knew more than they’d let on, how Riku was still slated to betray them.

The bed in her non-secret apartment felt even lonelier than usual, but they were still trying to be on their best behavior. For them, that meant at least usually being exactly where they were supposed to be. A couple goodnight texts were still a lousy substitute for actually being together, but she finally managed to fall asleep.

It didn’t last long.

A sound woke Kairi, the noise of someone moving through her room.

Radiance had been through every training program ever offered to Superheroes in the region. So once she was awake, it was second nature to return her breathing to the natural cadence it had in sleep, to keep still and assess a potential threat. It was a useful skill for kidnappings, for being held hostage…

…And for waking up to an intruder. Whoever it was knew how to move quietly, footfalls barely discernible. There was a rustling of paper over near Kairi’s desk, followed by the soft sound of a framed picture being picked up and set back down. Kairi knew which one: a picture of the three of them, no masks, no secret identities. One of the small risks she’d taken, keeping something that connected their civilian identities to each other.

Radiance tensed, sitting up and turning toward the threat in one fluid motion, lights already flickering over her arms and down to her fingertips. She tried not to worry about how that made her identifiable, how this was probably just some burglar who had no idea the mayor’s daughter was also a Hero…

It was the young woman, the blonde who’d been with the rest of the Organization members, still in the white dress. Radiance’s flickering light illuminated it in the darkness, making the strange girl practically glow.

Naminé. That was what Corridor and Keyblade had called her, though they hadn’t known why.

She looked at Radiance with wide blue eyes, more surprised than frightened. The expression took on a briefly sad look as she said, “You’re a lucky girl.” Her voice was sweetly musical.

Radiance held up a hand, calling more light to illuminate the girl better, but didn’t even manage to get out of her bed before she felt the corridor open, and Naminé vanished.

And looking at the empty room, she wasn’t completely certain what Naminé had said. “You’re a lucky girl”? Or “You were a lucky girl”?

Note: The name "Victoria McGuire" and the "Vale-Martinez classification" from the beginning "excerpt" are silly little easter eggs referring to a couple of my favorite novels that deal with superpowers. The "Villains" series by V.E. Schwab (the V stands for Victoria) features a character named Victor Vale. The "Velveteen vs." series by Seanan McGuire features a character named Velma Martinez.

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