Prompt: Lexeme, the autistic Star-Touched from Chicago, meets her 'archenemy.'

With a wild laugh, a pale young man in his twenties, stringy blond hair falling just past his shoulders, reared back with one hand tightly clutching a half-full bottle that had a burning rag stuffed inside. "Hey, you fucking cocksuckers!" he bellowed at the top of his lungs, "why don't you try to see how many innocent little babies you can kill when you're all on goddamn fire!?"

He took a couple steps forward and began to hurl the Molotov cocktail toward the abortion clinic while grinning in fierce triumph. It was early in the morning, with the sun having barely risen over the horizon, but there were still doctors and nurses inside the building. Doctors and nurses who were about to learn what it was like to be on fire, thanks to the gasoline he'd already secretly spread over the outskirts of the whole place. This Molotov was just the trigger to set it all off.

Except the bottle had barely left his hand and began to arc its way through the air before a new voice cut right through his manic laughter, a voice that came from all directions and seemed to practically shake the ground around them. It was a single word, "SMOTHER." And just like that, the actual word itself physically appeared in the air in front of the incoming bottle. The letters were each about a foot tall and eight inches wide, and looked like they were made of thick foam. As the bottle smashed into the T, it and all the other letters wrapped around it to form a ball of that foam, smothering the gasoline and flames before bringing it to the ground without any damage.

With a gasp, the pale man pivoted, eyes searching until they fell on a single figure standing at the edge of the parking lot. She was barely illuminated in the early-morning light, a woman who stood five feet, six inches tall, with a long-sleeved, loose-fitting shirt that was dark gold and had a pair of burgundy lines running all the way up the sides before extending down the outside of her arms. The lines weren't actual letters, but curled and twisted enough to look like some faint resemblance to cursive writing. Her pants were the opposite of the shirt, that deep reddish color with gold lines of cursive almost-letters running along the outside. Her boots and gloves were a red that was so dark they were almost black, and she had a burgundy helmet with a gold visor.

Rather than look at the guy who had thrown that molotov, the woman's attention was on the building in the distance. But when she spoke, she was clearly addressing him. "Your ignorance is no excuse for your hate. You tried to hurt people, tried to burn and kill them. That's not for life."

Immediately, the man pivoted to her and tried to pull a gun from his waistband. But before he could get very far, Lexeme used her power twice in quick succession. First, she said, "DISARM." That word appeared smaller than the first, jagged, sharp letters that all shot that way and separated. The D smacked into the pistol while it was still being tugged out, wrapping itself around the weapon while the I interposed itself behind the trigger to make sure it didn't go off. The two letters ripped the gun away. At the same time, the S wrapped around a knife in the man's boot, the A and R tore his bag full of more Molotovs away, and the M caught the strap of the Uzi slung over his shoulder to send that safely to the corner of the parking lot as well.

The second word she spoke was, "FLATTEN." That word manifested much larger, shaping itself like a train made out of those letters. A train that slammed into the man, knocking him flat against the ground. Before he could recover, she was there, handcuffing him while he lay completely dazed and out of it.

Before Lexeme could call for someone to pick this guy up, however, another voice caught her attention. "Lexeme! I knew I'd find you around here as soon as that dipshit started planning his little attack!"

It was another man, who came into view from across the parking lot where he had clearly been lurking and watching. "I just knew you couldn't resist butting in, even in this new city! You didn't expect to see me here, did ya!? You really thought you could run all the way from Chicago to Detroit just to get away from me! Kinda shocked to see me again, huh, bitch? You need a sec to wrap your head around it? Or are you just gonna run away to a new city again and hope I don't find you this time?"

Most might have thought that Lexeme was staring at the building she had just saved to ensure the gasoline that had been poured around it wasn't being set off by some other method, or just that it was safe in general. In truth, the woman's attention was fixed on a small porch light on the wall just above the emergency exit door. It was flickering slightly, near the end of its life cycle. It would be steady for a few seconds, then flicker a bit. Never the same number of times, and in no set pattern. Annoying. It was annoying. The light should have been replaced already, what if it went out and they needed to leave in the middle of the night? It flickered again, two times. Then only came back for a couple seconds before flickering again. Another change in pattern. Another annoyance. They needed to fix the bulb before it went out. She would tell them they should fix it.

The newly arrived man's words penetrated that cloud of thoughts, even as her right hand rose a bit, fingers stretching out and up as far apart as possible before closing together into something that was not quite a real fist but somewhat close to that, then went apart once more. The repetition was calming, countering the distractsing annoyance of the flickering light enough for her to process what he had said. Not that processing the words made them any more comprehensible. Her head tilted and she found herself looking over to take in his appearance again. It didn't help. "Who are you?"

Clearly, out of all the things the man had expected to hear, out of all the responses he might have anticipated, that wasn't one of them. He made a noise of confusion, then disbelief as he stared at her. She wasn't meeting his gaze, only seeing his face out of the corner of her eye while staring rather intently at his brown leather jacket and red shirt. Nothing about that, or his faded jeans and brown boots stood out. His face… it just looked like a face, as far as she could tell. He was a pale white man with no mustache or other facial hair, and nothing else that stood out.

"Oh ha ha, very goddamn funny," the man finally settled on retorting. "As if you could forget me, as if you could ever let go of our bitter rivalry. Lexeme and The Variance, locked in an eternal struggle, with Chicago standing as a battlefield between us. I make a move, you counter it. You think you're arriving to save innocents from a simple robbery, I reveal myself and force you into a struggle for your very life. I put together a plan that will make me millions, you show up to stop me. You really thought I'd let you walk away from that, walk away from us? You were so wrong."

His words were met with another lingering moment of silence while the woman studied his face as well as she could without actually looking into his eyes. Her brow furrowed behind the helmet in her attempt to understand what he was saying, or at least match it with some form of reality. But in the end, all she could offer was a slight shrug and apologetic, "I'm sorry, I think you're confusing me with someone else. Would you like to wait and see if they show up to stop you?"

"What th--" The man, who apparently went by The Variance, made a noise of disbelief and more than a little annoyance. "Okay, I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing, or why you think it's gonna work, but knock it off. We've been enemies for over a year! We've fought over a dozen times! I tried to steal a ten million dollar collection of comics, including Detective Comics number 27, the actual first appearance of Batman, while they were being shipped to a rich bastard, and you jumped in to stop me! I found out where Innoveight was keeping their big, fancy fucking helicopter locked up, but before I could take off with it, you showed up! You were trying to stop those Femalevolent chicks from burning that guy alive, and-- okay well I waited till you were done with that cuz eesh, but then I jumped in to ambush you before you could leave!"

Lexeme listened through all that, though it didn't actually help that much. If anything, it made the situation more confusing. Anxiety and uncertainty kept tugging at her stomach. She didn't like it. She didn't like any of this. It was supposed to be a fight. She had shown up expecting a fight, but this was a conversation. An unexpected conversation with a stranger who was saying very confusing things. She would have preferred a fight. Conversations were annoying, confusing, and long. She couldn't figure out if she was lost in just the usual way she was lost when trying to talk to strangers, or if this guy was just intentionally screwing with her. What was his end goal?

Finally, she made herself respond with a pointed, "Why would you lie and put yourself there? I did those things, I fought those three men, but they were different. The one who tried to steal comic books had wind powers. The one in the helicopter had a rubber body that could stretch. The one who ambushed me after the Femalevolent fight could duplicate himself and objects."

"That was me!" The Variance snapped in disbelief, arms flailing a bit. "Those were all me, they were always me! My powers change every day based on the alphabet! Comic book was G day. G for Gust, wind powers! The helicopter happened on N day, N for Noodle! Rubber powers! The day I ambushed you was an A day, A for Abundance, cloning things! They were all me the whole time, how did you not-- how the hell could you not realize that? I don't even wear a mask! I'm using a hologram projector for this face, but it's always the same face, I look exactly the goddamn same every time! You've seen me like once a month for a year!"

After a moment of silent thought, Lexeme offered a simple shrug. "I'm not good with faces."

"How could you-- what do you-- what kind of-- I don't even-- you're not--" The Variance kept on sputtering like that a few more times before blurting an utterly disbelieving, "Oh come on, the Chicago news talks about our rivalry all the time! How could you not put two and two together and realize who they meant when they kept going on about all the different battles we've had!?"

Again, Lexeme shrugged. "Why would I pay attention to the news? All they do is talk about how amazing it is that someone with my--" She made air quotes with her fingers. "--condition is even capable of making a sandwich for myself, let alone stop criminals. They want to pin a medal on my chest for being an inspiration. I'm not an inspiration. I don't want to be a showpony. They're dumb and annoying. The news, not showponies. I'm not a trophy, I'm a superhero like the rest of my team, but they don't put them on a pedestal like they want to put me. They want to use me. They know nothing about me. So I ignore them. I don't read about myself. It's too frustrating."

"Are you… you're serious." Rocking back on his heels, The Variance made a noise deep in his throat as his head shook. "You don't even know about our-- you don't… you don't know me at all." Lexeme wasn't great at decoding emotion in voices (or in most other things, really), but even she could tell that he was having trouble comprehending something that monumental.

"I'm sorry," she offered as politely as possible. "Would you like to take a moment before we fight?"

"Fight?" the man blinked at that before grimacing as he ran a hand through his stringy hair. "Eh, you know what, I think I need some time. This is just… my heart's not really in it."

"I can't let you go," Lexeme pointed out. "You confessed to being a criminal."

"Yeah, well, you know how I said my powers change by the day?" The Variance informed her. "Today is W, for Wander." His hand came up in a salute, even as she started to speak. "Bye!"

He teleported away then. Wander for teleportation. The man was gone. Seeing that, Lexeme slowly walked over to where he had been. She looked in every direction, then frowned at the handcuffed guy on the ground who had started all this with his attempted attack on the abortion clinic. "That was strange," she informed his squirming form.

"Very… very strange."

*************

Prompt: Sterling's reaction to the recent noncanon where Paintball was attacked in the LEAT games and manifested a version of his power in addition to their own.

Damn it, none of this would've happened if they were still in their own city, with the Ministry in charge.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Yeah, no sooner had that thought come to Sterling Evans' mind than he dismissed it. Angry as he was to find himself blocked by a forcefield that had sprung up around the LEAT games arena while one of the local Phoenix gangs threatened Paintball, he couldn't seriously claim that things would have been different back home. Not after everything that had already happened there. The Ministry did its best to keep things relatively controlled, but they weren't perfect. Nowhere near. Especially, oddly, when it came to Paintball himself. The kid had a way of finding danger even they, with all their resources, couldn't have anticipated or done anything about. He was a living trouble magnet.

And now he'd managed to find even more trouble right here in Phoenix, during what was supposed to be a break for the kid. Somehow, this local gang of nobodies had found a way to project a forcefield over the entire arena. Two forcefields, really. The first, inner shield was blocking anyone from getting down onto the field where the gang had surrounded Paintball himself. Meanwhile, the outer shield blocked all the exits, ensuring everyone in the stands had to stay there and watch this. And that no one from outside the stadium could break in to help.

Not that that should have been too much of a problem, considering the dozens of Touched in these stands. Including Sterling himself, now that he'd managed to slip out of sight behind a pillar and sheathe himself in the Silversmith armor. They should have been able to smash that shield. Some of them should've been able to teleport straight through it. But nothing worked. He'd hammered the damn thing repeatedly with a silver battering ram to no avail. It didn't make any sense. How could a simple street gang like Vicearious get hold of a Class S forcefield like this?

If he couldn't hammer his way through, maybe he could find another sort of weakness. The benefit of being able to shape his constructs, and turn them into liquid, meant that the second he found any sort of opening, he could exploit that. While the rest of the Touched around him continued trying their own ways of breaking through, Sterling transformed that giant battering ram into a floating bubble before pushing it right up against the shield. The bubble flattened itself into a puddle, as he tried to see if there were any air holes in it, any sort of opening whatsoever. If he could just slip one single droplet through, that would be something he could work with. He tried slipping some underneath the shield as well, searching intently for the tiniest crack between the shield itself and the floor. All while the civilians around him called out unhelpful advice and pleas for him to help Paintball before something happened to the kid. Like he wasn't already trying.

It wasn't working, damn it. The shield had no openings at all. Worse, Hyperkey and her people had moved straight from threats to action. They were attacking Paintball, all of them at once. The kid was good, damn good considering the short amount of time he'd been around, but even he couldn't handle something like this. Trapped in that arena, surrounded by dozens of heavily-armed or superpowered enemies who were all focused on hurting… or killing him? The kid was in danger. He needed help, damn it, and what was Sterling doing? Standing here outside the shield, unable to break through it. The boy was only in Phoenix because Sterling invited him here. If anything happened to him, if he was… goddamn it, this kid was his responsibility. If he was hurt or killed here, it would be Sterling's fault. He couldn't let that happen.

It was odd, Sterling had been doing this sort of thing for almost two decades by this point. He had seen promising Touched get hurt, die, turn bad, turn good when he'd expected them to stay bad, give up and walk away, and any and all other ways for things to turn out. He'd even helped a fair number of those changes happen, for good or for ill. The man had seen it all, and been personally responsible for almost as much. Seeing Paintball in this situation, well, obviously it should have been bad. But it was affecting him even more than he could have anticipated.

Seeing Paintball down there, knowing these… people wanted to hurt or kill the kid, was making Sterling angrier than he could remember being since… well, since he'd found out that Pencil was trying to kill that same boy. Something about Paintball made Sterling feel unreasonably, indescribably furious whenever he was put in danger. Was it simply residual guilt from how poorly he and the rest of his people, his family, had handled the boy's initial appearance?

Sure, the fact was that they had been dealing with a threat against Cassidy at the time, so they hadn't exactly been on their best behavior, to say the least. They were all far too angry, far too quick to jump to the worst threats and behavior. In any other case, they would've gone for a softer approach, would have worked to recruit or at least carefully watch the kid and see how good of a resource he could be. But those people had threatened Cassidy, and this boy had seen the Ministry's reaction to that. It made the whole situation far more complicated. And now he felt guilty not only for how that went, but for bringing the boy down to Phoenix in the first place.

Paintball was here, in this situation, because Sterling brought him here, because he had thought the games would be a safe place. And, to be perfectly honest, because he thought watching the kid compete would be a good way to analyze his powers and skills in a controlled environment. Now he was in danger thanks to that, and Sterling was damn sure going to get him out of it.

But first, he had to figure out how to get through this force field. There would've been more options if they were home, but right here, right now, he was more limited. It was obvious that simply hitting the shield very hard or searching for an opening wasn't working. What else could he do? How could he break through there? The energy for the shield, it had be coming from somewhere, had to be generated from something. Was it inside there or outside? Would they be more likely to keep it where Paintball might be able to get to it, or where others could? Keeping it inside the shield would probably be safer, considering they had all of them facing one kid. But that one kid had also proven to be shockingly effective and resourceful.

That was it. The generator had to be in there, hidden on the field somewhere. If he could find it, pinpoint the location and get that information to Paintball, the boy could destroy it. That would take down the shield and give Silversmith, along with the rest of the Stars, a chance to get in there and stop this.

First, he had to find the shield generator. Then he could get Elena to use her illusion power to show Paintball where it was. Even if her power couldn't actually penetrate the shield itself, the way none of the teleporters around here could, it would still be possible to put an illusion of words and arrows on the crowd outside the shield. Enough to get Paintball's attention, anyway. That could work. It had to work. Now, all he had to do was track down the actual generator itself. And he knew just how to do that. People may have thought that Silversmith's greatest power was the obvious one, but incredible money and resources were right up there on the useful list. If they weren't number one over the metal shaping, they were at the very least neck and neck.

It was those resources that Sterling put to work then. He had long-since begun carrying as many useful Touched-Tech devices as possible, including contact lenses over his eyes that could be activated to search for things such as high electricity output. His gaze scanned the field intently, barely noticing Paintball's continued fight. If the kid could hold out for just a little bit longer, a few more-- there, he had it. There was an unassuming-looking bench with some towels over it on the far side of the arena, with a staggering level of power coming out of it. That was the generator.

Now he just had to tell Elena, who was all the way back in their private family VIP box, what they needed to do. Fortunately, resources and money came to the rescue there as well. A simple whispered word activated the noise cancelling device he always carried with him. No one outside his armor would hear anything he said while that was on, even if they were standing right next to him. No one, that was, aside from Elena herself, who would hear his voice perfectly fine as it came through her earring. In a few words, he'd point out the bench, and have her--

A collective scream went up around him. The sound-dampening device only worked one way, so he could still hear as the crowd began to panic. It was enough to snap Sterling's attention over to the field, heart leaping into his throat as he watched Paintball plummet toward the ground. The fall itself wouldn't hurt them, not with the safety measures the arena had. But falling like that meant every single one of those gang members had a free shot on him. He was a sitting duck, and they were taking advantage of it. Fells and Prevs alike took aim on the falling figure. Sterling's mouth was already opening to bellow a threat, a promise, a warning, something, anything. He had to say something, had to do something to stop this! He had to make them--

An egg appeared, a metallic sphere that surrounded and encased the falling Paintball. Just like that, he wasn't falling anymore. And those attacks, both the gunfire and Fell powers alike, were bouncing off it. The metal egg looked silver, but had a colorful rainbow pattern running through it. Soon, the attacks stopped as everyone down there realized as easily as the audience had that they weren't getting through. The egg was just hovering there in midair, protecting Paintball.

All around Sterling, the audience began to praise and cheer for him. They thought he'd made the egg, that he was the one protecting Paintball. They thought he'd managed to reach through the shield to save the falling boy. But he didn't. He hadn't. That wasn't his construct. So whose was it? Who-- how was-- was it an emergency shield that little Trevithick friend of Paintball's had set up? Tech-Touched often created devices that worked or looked similar to the powers of people around them. Did the kid simply create a forcefield that looked like Sterling's power?

Except… except Sterling still had his energy-reading contact lenses active, and he couldn't see the sort of power generation that a shield like that seemed like it would require. The boy had very little actual electricity on him, nothing that would account for something like that shield. Or maybe even Sterling's device just couldn't see it through the egg shield itself? Maybe that was it.

His mind was racing. All thoughts of the generator or contacting Elena so she could direct the boy toward it had vanished. Almost all thoughts had vanished, full stop. The only thing he could do in that moment was hover there just above the stands and stare in confusion as the metal egg floated.

But it wasn't an egg for long. Even as Sterling and the entire rest of the crowd watched, the metal ball shrank and shifted. There were a few scattered cries about Paintball being crushed, but the boy wasn't in any danger of that. Because the ball wasn't closing in on him, it was just wrapping itself around him, encasing the boy not like an egg anymore, but like a suit of armor.

Like Silversmith's armor. Just like that, in front of everyone, the egg became an armored suit.

Over the next few minutes, the only thing Sterling could do, the only thing the entire audience could do, was watch in near-silent fascination and shock as Paintball used that rainbow-tinted silver armor to fight the gang. A gang that was as surprised as the audience. Maybe they could have dealt with the armored Paintball if they'd gone in anticipating that, but they hadn't. They thought they knew what the boy could do and had prepared for that. How could they possibly have been ready for this? How could anyone have been ready for it? This was just impossible.

And it absolutely wasn't just some special Touched-Tech emergency armor. That became even more clear when the boy created a construct of a giant hand, just like Silversmith himself would have. A hand that soon changed into a giant bow and arrow, just to hammer the point home.

Before long, it was over. And not in the way that Sterling had been so afraid it would end. Hyperkey and the rest of her people were down. Paintball was… was safe, was there. The boy was right there, hovering twenty feet off the ground in that armor while the gang that had attacked him lay scattered through the obstacles and grass below. None were in any condition to fight anymore. As for the shield itself, the generator seemed to have been damaged at some point through that, because the forcefield flickered a bit before fading out. Still, no one in the audience moved at all.

No one, that was, except for Sterling himself. His mind had been racing through all that, spending those past few minutes reeling from what he was seeing. Now, he found himself floating through the air, moving past the spot the shield had just been until he was hovering close to that kid. Close to… close to the boy…

Paintball looked at him then, the two only a few feet apart as they hovered in front of one another, clad in armor that was so similar that anyone could tell just by looking at them that there had to be a connection. But what sort of connection, what was… how could this boy be…

"But his papa is Lucent," a small girl's voice rang out, magnified by a nearby microphone to be projected throughout the arena. "Does this mean Silversmith is Paintball's Mommy?"

The words themselves might have seemed silly, an amusing and innocent comment from a child too young to understand. But the deeper meaning behind them, the full implication, was right there. The innocent child's simple question worked to bring an incredibly sharp sense of clarity, cutting through the confusion better and more easily than almost anything else could have.

That armor, the constructs, were not Paintball's normal power. It was Silversmith's, an inherited version. But Paintball could only have inherited his power if…

A metal orb encased them, similar to the egg that had started all this, but much larger. It left the pair cut off from everyone else as they hovered in front of one another. Somehow, he thought to extend the range of his sound dampener so no one outside of the orb he'd constructed around them would hear anything. Even then, when Sterling found his voice, it was smaller than he remembered hearing it since… since he'd learned that Anthony's birthday party was being attacked while Cassidy was there. All that came in that small, quiet voice was a single word, a single syllable. "... Who?"

The silence that followed, as they were cut off from the entire outside world, was almost deafening in its totality. It stretched on for seconds that seemed like hours, before Paintball lifted his head. He only spoke two words in response to Sterling's one, but the two words came unmasked by any voice filter. They were raw and real. They were the two words Sterling had been equally terrified and overjoyed to hear, words that answered so much, yet raised even more questions. Two words that changed everything forever.

"Hi, Dad."

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