Chapter 9

“In a comic book, this kind of scene would be cut around, you know?” Jinx asked, her chin resting against the table, her hair frazzled by her having put her hands through it half a dozen times.

Mr. Leland, who had been midway through a paragraph, hesitated for a moment. When Jinx didn’t interrupt him again, he coughed.

“ ... as I was saying, this clause involves the Hero and the Villain’s agreement on property damage and the handling of the post-fight clean up.” He said. “In the following neighborhoods, you will not be held liable for damages due to reconstruction insurance and local DIRT facilities. The list, enumerated here ... does it fit with everyone’s satisfactions?”

Nova flipped to the page in question and started checking through the neighborhoods that had been checked as safe. He frowned, tapping it. “Half of these are residential and the other half are office parks. I’d have thought we’d have clear grounds for collateral damage at, like, the Zee Quarry or something.”

“Ah, that’s a common misconception,” Mr. Leland said. “The Zee Quarry, and the abandoned building district of the city are both technically outside of Century City’s municipal grounds, and, thus, don’t need to be covered by this.”

“We’re not gonna fucking fight in a quarry!” Jinx snarled.

“Actually, I think I might,” Shadecraft said. His accent was a beautiful one – exotic, as if he had never quite heard how other people spoke and was just doing his best based on his estimations. “You can really let loose with the pyrotechnics there.”

“Fine, yaoiboy can fight in the quarry like he’s a third rate dimensional wanna be emperor,” Jinx said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder at Shadecraft as she turned to glower at Mr. Leland. “But I don’t fight in quarries. I have class.”

“Well, while that may be the case, it is also legally irrelevant at the moment,” Mr. Leland said. “Since we have no objections to the list of neighborhoods to be fought in, we can all sign this page.”

“Actually, uh,” Inferness said, holding up her finger. “I want to disallow the Meadowlark district from any of our battles.”

“Understood, any objections to it being removed?” Mr. Leland asked.

“Yeah, I wanna know why,” Jinx said, her eyes narrowing, speculatively.

“You are legally barred from asking that,” Mr. Leland said. “Under the 1998 Metahuman Rights act, all supervillains and superheroes are given legal rights to secret identities.”

“We are?” Nova asked.

“Oh, huh, I didn’t know that,” Mom said.

“That’s why we have lawyers,” Mr. Leland said, his lips thinning into a thin smile, the only kind of smile he seemed to have. “The legal rational is fairly simple – by enshrining the right in law, we make it actionable if someone takes actions to uncover, reveal, or generally interfere with secret identities. This both cuts down on flagrant violations of telepathic invasion of privacy and ensures everyone can continue to maintain their psychologically stabilizing quote normal end quote lives.”

Mom nodded, slowly, while Anna DeVries, who was still on her handheld, said: “If we come up with a really good plot-line, would you be interested in maybe, just maybe, fighting in the Meadowlark district?”

“It’d have to be one fuck of a good story,” Inferness snarled.

“Okay,” Mr. Leland said, his voice firm. “We’ve got the districts settled. Now, we have to move on to the next clause...” He started to drone on again. Nova did his best to listen – but words started to smoosh together, one bit of legalese tumbling into another. He shook his head, clenched his teeth, closed his eyes, opened them again, and focused on the page. But then his eyes started to travel up the table, sliding along it down to his Mom. Lady Luck was meditatively chewing on a nacho, leaning back in her seat, her cape draped around her shoulders elegantly. He was trying to make her look like his mom in his head – but the domino mask and the costume did just enough to break up the lines of her face that it was hard to remember sometimes. He wondered if the symsuit had some hypnotic effect, or if it was just ... acting and the human brain.

What was interesting is she didn’t act like ... Mom ... well, okay, she did. But she also didn’t. She still was trying to take care of him, and would scold him if he used swears. But she was also a lot more ... carefree and bubbly and less serious.

Then something a little unsettling ticked in his brain.

She didn’t stop acting like Mom. She just stopped acting like Lisa DeWitt, mild mannered normal house wife and started acting like ... Lady Luck. They’re both my Mom, but ... well...

He didn’t think she was going to ever go back to acting like Lisa DeWitt. Since, like, what was Lisa DeWitt, exactly? She was just any housewife married to a reasonably successful museum curator, right? She had hobbies like, doing puzzles and watching soap operas, and she had taken care of the kids, but, like, compared to Lady Luck, was there anything appealing about being Lisa DeWitt?

His eyes drifted down from her face to her elegant throat to the swell of her breasts.

God, was Mom stacked in her civilian ID? He flushed, slightly, his ears twitching up as the thought went round and around in his head. He couldn’t remember, but of course, he hadn’t really been checking back when she had been Lisa DeWitt. But now that he thought about it, she did start wearing thicker blouses at one point. And he couldn’t remember the last time she had gone to the pool with him and the rest of the family. He bit his lower lip, hard, as the mental image of Lady Luck, domino mask still on, wearing a sultry bikini popped into his head. It was a classic fantasy, but...

Honey... She purred, an entirely different name and tone of voice from the old fantasies. His cheeks burned, hard.

“Mr. Nine?”

Nova jerked, blinking and looking at the lawyer. “Uh, what?” he asked.

“This next part requires more input,” Mr. Leland said, his voice a bit stern – but it was clear he was fairly used to people not listening to huge tracts of the law. “It involves fan-work.”

“Uh...” Nova blinked. “We can legislate fan-work?”

“You can attempt to do so,” Mr. Leland said. “Several metahumans have a vested interest in maintaining a specificity to large popular conceptions and what they’re believed to be under their masks and in their private lives-”

“He’s asking if you wanna sue slashfic writers,” Jinx groaned from her slump, her body having slid almost entirely off her chair in her ennui induced limpness.

“What? No!” Nova said. “Free speech!”

“Uh...” Mom rubbed at the back of her neck. “Honey, I appreciate your dedication to the principles for which this country was founded, but there have been precedents set involving the writing of fiction about real characters – it’s the same as libel or slander.”

“You can tell people’s life stories without it being libel,” Nova said, frowning. “That’s how we get, like, fifty million Minuteman and Mentor biopics.”

“Yes, but firstly, those biopics can be sued if they, for example, have Mentor and Minuteman working for the Xagalians or something,” Mom said. “And the legal issue that some people have run into is ... well, uh, you know Skrayper’s teenage sidekick, Buggo?”

“Yeah,” Nova said. “Uh, didn’t he become The Spectacular Ant-Lord?”

“No, he’s Friendly Neighborhood Ant-Man,” Jinx said.

“That was two re-brands before, he’s the Red Ant right now,” Inferness added.

“I still call him Buggo, to be honest,” Mom said, blushing. “Anyway. A lot of people wrote Sky/Buggo slashfic.”

“And?” Nova asked.

“Buggo was twelve at the time,” Mom said.

“Oh my god!” Nova exclaimed, his ears pinning back against his head.

“Yeah, well, some people are sick perverts who write about lots of fucked up stuff,” Mom said. “And, like, when people don’t know the actual Buggo and the actual Skrayper, when there’s sometimes a hard time telling the difference between fan work and real works, I’ve had people think that I have a rivalry with Clockmiss! Clockmiss doesn’t even live in this universe!” She shook her head.

Nova frowned, crossing his arms over his chest. “What do you guys think?” he asked, looking over at Jinx and Inferness.

“Ehhh, I can just kill them,” Jinx said.

Mr. Leland frowned at her and Mom scowled, leaning forward on her elbows.

“Kidding! Kidding! God, a supervillain can’t even joke about killing a few pervy fan fic writers...” Jinx shook her head. “My other heel contracts don’t have a fic clause, cause your sisters are fhu-reakyyy!” She wiggled her eyebrows at Nova, whose cheeks burned brightly.

“Please don’t imply my children are sex freaks,” Mom said, her voice gentle.

“I wasn’t really implying, I just state-” Jinx grunted as someone kicked her under the table. “Okay, fine, I’ll be good.”

Inferness shrugged. “I’m down for fic writers going nuts.”

Shadecraft signed. I have no real opinion, since, well, I don’t exactly go around in this get up every day, it won’t effect me most of the time anyway.

“Okay,” Nova said, rubbing the back of his neck. Besides. Can anything they write be worse than what I’ve already done? He nodded. “I’m fine with it.”

“All right then.”

The paper was signed.

“Smell ya later, super zeroes!” Jinx said, her hands clasped behind her neck, her hair swishing dramatically as she sauntered through a glowing red portal opened by Inferness, who grinned and threw up devil horns.