Other than that it was eerily quiet. Too quiet. A sickening thought hit Sasha when she gazed through the remains of the kitchen door to the other side of her house. Where the living room had been and where she had left her guest.
“Jennifer?” Sasha called out. One time. Two times. Three times. Each time louder and more desperate then before.
But there was no response.
Holding her bleeding hip, Sasha staggered into the living room. She could no longer feel any pain though - any trace of which was suppressed by the mind-numbing concern for her friend. She worked herself through the shattered furniture, shoving broken chairs and wooden planks aside, until she spotted the sofa where Jennifer had sat on when she had left her. The impact of multiple machine gun rounds had toppled it over. An iron fist clenched around Sasha’s stomach as her gaze wandered lower, discovering the pink-dressed shape on the floor, behind the sofa. A pool of blood had formed under Jennifer’s body. Her lifeless eyes were staring right at Sasha.
Devastated, Sasha let herself sink down to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. Tears were running down her cheeks, while she began to realize the sickening truth that Jennifer was dead.
Sasha didn’t hear the sirens of the approaching police cars. She didn’t notice the cops storming into her home, or the paramedics who treated and bandaged her wounds. She just absently nodded when a cop asked her if she would feel able to make a statement. Sasha was then escorted to a patrol car and taken to the police station for questioning.
Sasha would not remember the next four hours of answering questions. She would only remember politely declining the cop’s offer to take her to a hotel when they were done with the questioning, walking the long way home in the dusk instead, lost in thoughts about what had happened. And what she would do now.
The decision came about halfway there.
When she reached her house in almost complete darkness, Sasha knew that she could no longer live in the house she had barely finished moving in. With its entire front side gone and half of its rooms reduced to rubble, for all practical purposes her home was destroyed beyond repair. In addition to her home being gone, Sasha realized that her ex-husband would eventually learn that his assassin had failed to kill her - and send someone to finish the job.
Sasha entered the remains of her home, careful not to stumble over the debris or to look into her living room, where she expected she would see the chalk marks on the spot Jennifer had died.
Sasha ascended the stairs to the first floor and stopped before the door to the den, which had escaped the barrage completely undamaged. She hadn’t unlocked the den since the day she had moved in, but she did so now. When she switched on the light in the small windowless room, Sasha gazed at the memories of her past. Her Ph.D. degrees where hanging on the wall, next to pictures of her and her parents taken on her graduation day. With disgust, she stared at the photo taken on her wedding day, showing a smiling Sasha in a pink wedding dress, standing next to the man who had sent the hit team after her today. How could she ever have been so blind, marrying a guy just to have to find out that he was in fact a gangster boss? Having an IQ over 180 didn’t seem to prevent people from doing stupid things.
In the corner, Sasha found the chest she was looking for. She opened the lid and took out a wrapped package. It contained a dress her mother had made for her a few years ago, when she had quit her university job, and Tom and Laura Clarkson tried to persuade Sasha to join her father’s police force’s superhero detachment. They were both very sad when she had turned down their offer and chose to be a waitress instead.
Sasha unwrapped the costume and looked at it. She remembered trying the dress at her mother’s request, and joking to her that it looked seductive enough on her that she wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to use her superpowers or her looks as a weapon.
Without further hesitation, she removed her worn clothes and the bandages that were no longer needed. She had never needed them in the first place, as her body was able to quickly regenerate from all but the most lethal wounds, but of course she hadn’t told the paramedic that. Her wounds were already no longer visible. Then Sasha squeezed herself into the dress. The shiny black leather mini-skirt still fit just as perfectly as the purple strapless top that left her midriff exposed. She slipped her feet into the black heeled leather boots and put on a pair of fitting opera gloves before she slipped two pairs of silver bracelets bearing arcane symbols on her upper arms and wrists. The last item she retrieved from the bag was a glowing purple choker, which she put around her neck.
Satisfied with her dress, Sasha took an empty sports bag and put her university degrees and photos in it. She didn’t want to leave the items behind and she knew she would not return to this place, ever. The one picture she left hanging was her wedding picture. She didn’t want to see again for the rest of her life.
Closing the den’s room, Sasha looked down the stairs for a final time. “I will avenge you, Jennifer,” she muttered to herself. “I will no longer accept innocent, good people getting harmed and killed by criminals and me standing aside idly, despite having the means to do something about it. And I will come for you too, Roger. There will be no place in the world where you can hide from me. I will not rest until the day when I will have brought you down, no matter what it takes.”
Her transformation to a superheroine completed, Sasha stood up, slung her bag over the shoulder and took the stairs up to the roof. Up there, she could see the city’s lights all around her, brilliantly shining in the darkness. Sasha reached out for the magic power within her and willed it to life. She closed her eyes and spread out her arms like wings, while she slowly lifted her own body up into the sky, opening them again only when she was floating high above her house. She deeply inhaled the fresh night air and gazed towards downtown, where she could make out police sirens penetrating the silence.
That was where she was needed.
January 5th, 2011
Zig-zagging through the urban canyons of downtown Vancouver, Sasha soared around skyscrapers, keeping her eyes fixed on the packed streets below. It was an early evening, typical for the winter season: The sun was long gone, but the streets were still bustling with activity, as workers flooded out of the office towers and started their commute home on the congested streets, while shoppers swarmed over downtown’s street malls.
Sasha had decided to make this sort of evening patrol a daily routine. It was the equivalent of what a person able to fly would consider an evening walk anyway. Even if it turned out that her help was never going to be needed, she still enjoyed the view and the fresh air.
She smiled as she gazed down at the antlike crowd on Robson Street, and wondered how much money Vancouverites were spending during an average evening on the city’s busiest and most exclusive shopping street.
Sasha frowned as she spotted a black SUV driving down Robson Street at a speed that was not covered by any legal speed limit. While speeding was as common in Vancouver as it was anywhere else in the world, it was a dangerous thing to do in this particular place, with so many people crossing the street – and not always doing so using the official pedestrian crossings.
Just as Sasha wanted to let her gaze move on, as she was of course not in any legal position to hand the speeding car a traffic ticket, she gasped as the vehicle took an unexpected turn towards the curb and bounced itself onto the crowded sidewalk a second later. Screaming pedestrians jumped aside to safety as the SUV shot towards a jeweller’s store and came to a screeching halt just in front of it. Three men wearing black trench coats jumped out and stormed into the store with drawn guns, while the driver stayed behind the wheel.
Sasha could see one of the men grabbing a female shop assistant at her hair and roughly pulling her down to the floor, while his accomplice pointed a gun to the owner’s head and handed him a large empty bag, motioning wildly at the bag.
Sasha was witnessing a robbery in progress. Her heart was racing. She had been consciously looking out f
or situations like this - to be able to help out if she was needed - but now that she had found one, she was scared and frightened. A myriad of possible scenarios unfolded in her head, many of which ended with her failing to save the shop owners, or with her having a bullet in her head.
Banning the pictures from her head, Sasha went into a wide loop and aligned her flight path with the beleaguered shop when she came out of the arc. Her eyes narrowed as she accelerated downwards in the direction of the street level, the chilly winter air now stinging her face at the greater speed. She drew on her magic to conjure up a protective shield in front of her, and devoted all available power to making it as strong as she could.
When the jewellery shop filled her entire field of vision, Sasha closed her eyes.
A split-second later, Sasha smashed into the shop window like a human artillery shell. At 150 pounds Sasha was hardly a heavy woman, but she was flying at near jet fighter speed when she hit the window, giving her body considerable mass inertia. The impact shattered the reinforced glass to thousands of pieces with a thundering bang. Sasha’s energy shield absorbed most of the blow and deflected the razor-edged shards to the side - but the white-haired woman still gasped as the air was being knocked form her lungs by the collision.
Her forceful approach had the desired effect though. The goons inside were frozen in shock, and in no position to think of doing anything harmful to their hostages. Safely landing on her feet inside the shop, Sasha dropped her energy shield and freed up her magic potential again. She locked her concentration on the man threatening the show owner – or rather, on the weapon in his hand. Reaching out with her mind, Sasha formed an invisible magic hand around the gun and pulled hard. The gangster’s eyes went wide as his weapon was torn from his hand by an unseen force and flew aside, clattering on the floor at the other end of the shop, far out of anybody’s reach.
Sasha had already switched her gaze to the pair of gangsters holding the female shop assistant. She pointed one of her hands at each of them and released a kinetic burst that threw the two goons backwards and into the display cabinets behind them. With a shattering crack, the two black-clad men knocked into the glass and were quickly buried in a mass of shards, metal and jewels.
Only one thing left to do now. Sasha whirled around to face the shop front. The SUV’s driver was staring at her from wide open eyes, as he had to helplessly witness his accomplices getting overwhelmed in mere seconds.
The man desperately fumbled around with the gear shift until he had finally found the reverse setting. But Sasha had no intention of letting him escape. She reached out with her mind and locked her telekinetic powers onto the car. With a command of her mind she lifted the vehicle up high into the air, just in the same instant as the driver floored the gas. But the tires had left the street already and spun wildly in thin air, accompanied by a desperate howl of the engine. With an enraged snarl Sasha gave the hovering vehicle a final push and the heavy SUV flipped around in the air. In the same moment Sasha released her mental lock on the car, subjecting the vehicle and its driver to the normal laws of gravity again. The SUV crashed back into the street upside down, with a shattering bang that sent a shockwave as far as to the interior of the store and knocked a few pedestrians from their feet, who were too nosy to have realized that standing so close to an ongoing crime was a bad idea. The toppled SUV wasn’t going to drive anywhere anytime soon.
A noise on the ground behind her made Sasha whirl her body around, just in time to see the last standing gangster rushing towards her, wearing a hateful grimace of a face. She had disarmed him earlier, but he wasn’t yet completely disabled. The man had grabbed a metal rod from the debris and charged at Sasha with a dark growl.
The gangster swung the impromptu weapon at Sasha’s head with enough power that the blow would have certainly broken her skull if it had hit her. But it never did. At the last possible moment Sasha recalled her protective force shield around her. The rod hit the invisible barrier with so much force that the impact tore the weapon from the gangster’s hands, drawing a pained yell from him. Sasha shrugged at him and pointed her fingers at the man. A blinding arc of multi-forked lightning shot out of Sasha’s hand and tore into the gangster’s upper body. With a primeval scream, the gangster staggered back a few steps, before he collapsed unconsciously on the floor, his senses overloaded by a jolt worth many thousand volts of electricity.
Only then Sasha relaxed with the comforting knowledge that the danger was over. She looked at the show owner and his assistant, and smiled.
“You’re both ok?” she asked empathically.
The man kept staring at her, unable to say anything, but the girl smiled at Sasha and nodded. “Thank you, you have saved our lives,” she said.
“You’re very welcome,” Sasha said, and pointed to the disabled gangsters on the floor. “I think the cops should be here in a second, they can take care of them.”
Sasha turned to leave and took a few steps towards what was left of the store front.
“I think I have read about most superheroes protecting our city, but I have never read about you,” the young Asian girl said. “Who are you?”
Sasha stopped. Until this moment, she had never thought about how to answer that question. After a second, she turned around.
“I am White Sasha.”
January 11th, 2011
Tom Clarkson’s head peeked out from behind the newspaper he was holding in both of his hands. He cleared his throat, making Sasha start who had been sitting in an armchair across from him, absently sipping a coffee. “So when were you planning to tell us that you have become a crime-fighter after all?” Tom Clarkson asked his daughter.
Sasha’s cheeks blushed a notch towards the pink scale of colour. “I am sorry dad. I wanted to, believe me. For some reason I lacked the strength to do so. I thought you’d be mad at me.”
Tom put the newspaper back on the table. Sasha couldn’t really read the upside down letters from where she was sitting, but she still recognized herself on the large photo of last night’s event on Robson Street. She hadn’t quite made the lead headline, but the report about a previously unknown white-haired heroine stopping a robbery in progress still occupied a prominent place on page one of the newspaper’s local section.
“You did a nice job there. Four arrests, no innocents harmed,” Tom complimented, drawing a smile from the still embarrassed Sasha.
“I guess I did quite some damage to the shop though, didn’t I?” Sasha whispered with a trace of guilt in her voice.
“It’s all right, Sasha. It’s much preferable to an innocent losing their life, and nothing that their insurance won’t cover. Believe me when I say that I have seen much worse when metahuman crime fighters were involved. The result tends to look like a warzone more often than not.”
Tom leaned forward to look sternly into his daughter’s eyes. “There is another issue at hand, that’s far more important than a few shattered displays in a store, though.”
“What do you mean, dad?”
“Sasha...I know you mean well, but you have no mandate to fight crime. You’re walking a very thin line when going after criminals without having a badge, you know? In my experience, sooner or later all unsanctioned heroes will do questionable things that bring themselves in conflict with the law. Actually you can’t fight crime as a civilian at all without violating at least a few rules. This is of course putting us into an awkward position, because cops are supposed to enforce all of the law, not just the parts of it we want to enforce. Just between you and me, a great many of those little transgressions committed by civilian crime-fighters we tend to ignore and look the other way when they happen, because we are still on the same side, fighting for the same goals. But if you cross the line too much, I might be put into a situation where I have to hunt down and arrest my own daughter, and you can imagine that I really wouldn’t like to have to do that.”
“I am aware of that, dad. But I have no idea what I can do about that issue, t
hough. I want to help, and I can no longer tolerate myself standing aside and watch innocents suffer under people like Roger.”
Tom crossed his arms in front of his chest. “The solution should be obvious, Sasha. Join the force and get a badge. We would be more than happy to have you in the RCMP. I told you that before. More than once.”
Sasha nodded. “I know, dad. And a part of me really would like to. But I can’t,” she whispered.
Tom frowned. “And why’s that?”
“Because every single time I have been part of a group, someone had to suffer in the end. Sometimes it was me, sometimes it were the people around me. I am meant to be alone, dad.”
Tom firmly shook his head. “No human is meant to be alone, honey.”
Sasha shot up from her seat, tears forming in her eyes. “As you and many others pointed out so often, I am not a normal human, dad.”
And Sasha ran up the stairs to her room and closed the door behind her.
January 30th, 2011
Sasha knelt on the factory roof, watching the delivery truck pulling into the small warehouse’s parking lot through a pair of binoculars. She knew that the warehouse was a part of the Stinger gang’s shady operations and what exactly it was the gangsters were doing inside. But even if she hadn’t known, the activity looked suspicious enough, given that small businesses usually didn’t start to process any deliveries at past midnight.
The white-haired woman watched a pair of muscle-packed workers walking out of the warehouse with cigarette butts dangling from the corner of the mouths. Never stopping to puff at their smokes, the two brutish looking men started to unload unmarked boxes from the truck right away. One minute later, an expensive sports car approached and shot into the parking spot next to the truck at break-neck speed, before it came to an abrupt halt, only inches away from the building’s brick wall. Sasha rolled her eyes in realization that the driver likely performed this dangerous manoeuvre habitually, as an attempt to show off his driving skills to whoever would actually feel impressed by it. The driver’s appearance matched his driving style. Methodically chewing on a gum, he wore a pair of dark sunglasses despite the moonless night really didn’t warrant that sort of eye protection. The out of place accessory did fit his black leather jacket and gelled hair, though.