Chapter Text
The mission assignment pinged on their SDN-issued earpieces with the cheerful, tinny fanfare of a corporate jingle. To Herman, hunched over his mop in the third-floor men’s room, the sound was a cardiac event. His earpiece, miraculously waterproof, rung annoyingly loud as he was wiping down the sink, the text-to-speech default voice blaring the seemingly targeted mission to him.
DISPATCH: PRIORITY 2
LOCATION: Torrance Municipal Power Station
SITUATION: Unauthorized activity causing localized electromagnetic surges, risk of cascading failure.
ASSIGNED PHOENIXES: PRISM, WATERBOY
SUPERVISING AGENT: Robert Robertson
Waterboy’s grey eyes blinked three, very rapid times, the words blurring. A joint mission. With Prism. The influencer. Diva. The woman who could blind people with a thought and whose holograms had once fooled an entire security detail during her… less heroic days. A fresh, cold trickle of water ran from his hairline down his neck, soaking into the collar of his wetsuit.
“O-oh,” he whispered to the empty bathroom. “O-okay. That’s… that’s g-good. Co-Cooper — Team….work.” His voice was a thin, reedy thing, swallowed by the sterile hum of the lights. He was trying to be positive. Really. This was an opportunity. Robert wouldn’t have assigned him if he didn’t think… well, maybe Robert didn’t think. Maybe this was a mistake. Or a punishment. Had he left too many puddles in the hallway? Had someone slipped? Was Flambae still angry about the karaoke incident?
His thoughts spiraled, a vortex of anxious speculation that manifested as a steady drip-drip-drip from his fingertips onto the already leaking faucet. He wiped it frantically on his thigh, leaving a darker blue streak on the wetsuit.
Meanwhile, in the sleek, neon-accented ‘trailer’ that was really a ready-room, Prism’s reaction was somewhat less internal.
“The fuck is this?” Her voice, usually a confident purr or a dramatic projection, was a blade of pure, icy fury. She slammed her hand onto a glass tabletop. The sound made the few other off-duty heroes around her flinch. “A power station? Do I look like an electrician to you? And Waterboy?” She spat the name like a bad taste. “The leaky janitor? This a joke, dispatcher? Did you run out of real heroes?”
On her earpiece, Robert Robertson’s pixelated voice remained impassive. “With your powers? Yeah. Your light-show abilities are listed as potentially disruptive to delicate electronics. Consider it a precision exercise. Plus, Waterboy’s… fluid generation could provide a non-conductive countermeasure to any electrical fires. Just made sense.”
“Sense? He leaves a goddamn slip-n-slide everywhere he goes! How’s that for precision?” She rolled her eyes, her teal visor glinting under the harsh lights. “This is bullshit. Did Miss Blazer put you up to this? Or is this because I told that blogger her interview questions were basic? They were, you know!”
“Dispatch leaves in ten minutes, Prism. Be professional.” The call ended.
Prism let out a sound that was half-growl, half-sigh of utter exasperation. “Un-fucking-believable.” She stormed towards the exit, her turquoise boots clicking with a rhythm of pure irritation. A punishment detail. With a human squeegee. Perfect.
The ride in the SDN van may as well suffocate Waterboy whole. Prism sat straight in the back, arms crossed, staring out the window as if the passing strip malls of Torrance were more interesting that the man next to her, which… is fair. The very air around her seemed charged, tiny, almost imperceptible motes of light dancing in her periphery like agitated dust.
Waterboy was crammed into the far corner of the middle seat, trying to make himself as small and dry as possible. He’d brought two extra towels, both of which were already damp. A faint, humid cloud seemed to hang around him. He kept sneaking glances at Prism’s rigid profile, opening his mouth to say something before losing his nerve and snapping his jaw shut with a soft, wet click. The silence was broken only by the hum of the engine and the rhythmic squeak-squeak of Herman nervously wiping his goggles.
The substation was a grim tableau of concrete, steel, and danger. Chain-link fences buzzed with aberrant current. Within the compound, transformers stood like silent monoliths, but one was the heart of the chaos. Arcs of raw, spitting electricity lashed out from its housing, not in controlled lines but in wild, whip-crack tendrils that scarred the asphalt and made the air smell of ozone and burnt metal. A figure, shrouded in a crackling aura of their own stolen power, darted between the equipment, laughing.
“Great,” Prism muttered, stepping out of the van. “A juice-head. Original.” She turned to Waterboy, who was shuffling behind her, a living raincloud of anxiety. “Alright, Herm. Here’s the plan. You stand here. Try not to drown anything critical. I’ll handle this.”
“B-but the p-plan from Rob-robert said-” he stammered, holding up one dripping finger.
“Well I’m revising the plan,” she stated, her voice leaving no room for argument. With a flick of her wrists, bands of solid pink and turquoise light erupted from her gloves, forming a shimmering, plasma-edged disc in front of her. She strode forward, confidence personified.
It went wrong almost immediately.
Prism’s approach was, as always, dramatic and direct. She unleashed a focused beam of intense white light meant to disorient the electricity-wielder. But the energy thief, a scrawny man with wires woven into his jacket was surfing on the substation’s own erratic field. The light beam hit the corona of EM energy around him and refracted, scattering into a dozen blinding fragments that lanced off in random directions. One seared a smoking hole in a control panel. Another zipped past Prism’s head, close enough to singe a few strands of her pink bob.
“Shit!” she hissed, ducking behind her plasma disc. The thief cackled, gesturing wildly. A massive arc of electricity, thick as a tree branch, snaked across the yard directly toward her makeshift shield.
Plasma, as she found out, was an excellent conductor.
The bolt hit her barrier and didn’t deflect, branching into sizzling veins that raced towards her hands. Prism cried out, a sharp, pained sound, as feedback surged through her photokinetic constructs. The disc flickered violently, threatening to destabilize and explode.
From his designated ‘stand here’ spot, Waterboy saw it all. He saw Prism’s confident stride break. He saw the panic flash across her face, visible even behind the visor. He even saw the lethal energy clawing its way toward her. His own fear, a cold, heavy stone in his gut, was instantly vaporized by a hotter, sharper impulse: the fact that she’s going to get hurt.
He didn’t think. There was no plan, no stuttered attempt at coordination. Pure, adrenaline-fueled instinct took over.
He sucked in a huge, ragged breath, his lungs burning, and then expelled it, not in a stream, but in a vast, pressurized cloud. It wasn't the targeted hydro-breath he used for cleaning or launching. This was a desperate, full-lung exhalation of saturated mist, a personal, portable weather front propelled by sheer terror.
The dense fog bank erupted from him, rolling across the substation yard with surprising speed. It enveloped Prism and the crackling plasma disc just as the electrical surge reached its apex.
And something impossible happened.
The water particles in the mist, super-fine and omni-present, interacted with Prism’s faltering light. The intense beams still emanating from her, fractured and wild, hit the billions of suspended droplets. Instead of scattering uselessly, they diffused. The harsh, dangerous lances of refracted light softened, spreading into a gigantic, shimmering dome of radiant fog that surrounded Prism, a dazzling, amorphous barrier of countless tiny light shards.
The electricity, reaching for her, hit this luminous, water-heavy atmosphere.
Lightning seeks the path of least resistance. The diffused, water-suspended light created a chaotic, multi-path conductive field that was utterly unpredictable. The main bolt splintered, its energy dissipating in a hundred harmless, miniature flashes within the glowing mist, like a firework fizzling in a cloud. The feedback loop into Prism’s powers severed. Her plasma disc stabilized, its color deepening to a furious, protective violet.
Inside the dome, Prism gasped. The pain in her hands vanished, replaced by a strange, cool tingling. She could see the world outside her bubble distorted and beautiful, awash in the rainbow hues of her own light, filtered and amplified by Waterboy’s mist. She could see the electricity thief, his smirk gone, staring confusedly at the sudden, beautiful storm that had materialized to protect his target.
And she saw Waterboy, twenty yards away, kneeling on the wet asphalt, chest heaving from the effort, looking just as shocked as she felt.
An idea fired in her mind. A connection.
“Hey, Drippy!” she yelled, her voice cutting through the low hum of the mist. It wasn’t a sneer now. It was a command. “Keep it coming! And on my mark… breathe harder!”
He didn’t understand, but he obeyed. He forced another great cloud of mist into the air, aiming for the space between Prism and the thief.
Prism didn’t try a focused beam this time. She raised both hands and unleashed a broad-spectrum pulse of raw photonic energy, the light hitting the fresh mist and exploding.
It became a weaponized aurora borealis. Solid-looking bands of pink, turquoise, and gold, made tangible by the water in the air, lashed forward. One band wrapped around a writhing electrical cable, smothering it in a light-soaked sheath that grounded its charge with a spectacular shower of harmless sparks. Another swept the thief’s legs out from under him, the impact feeling like a wave of solid color.
The thief yelped, his aura flickering. Disoriented by the blinding, beautiful chaos, he stumbled back into a main junction box. Prism didn’t miss a beat. With a final, concentrated burst, she solidified the light around the box into a brilliant, opaque crystal of energy, trapping his hands and shorting his connection to the grid. The wild arcs of electricity sputtered and died.
Silence fell, broken only by the drip of water from pipes and Herman’s ragged, wheezing breaths. The glowing mist began to settle, leaving the air clean, ionized, and sparkling with residual moisture.
Prism lowered her hands. Her plasma disc dissolved into fading embers of light. She turned slowly, her boots squelching on the newly soaked ground. She walked over to where Waterboy was still kneeling, trying to get his breathing under control, a large puddle spreading around him.
She looked down at him. He looked up, terrified, expecting a torrent of abuse for messing up, for getting everything wet, for existing.
Prism reached up and adjusted her visor. Then, a slow, genuine smile spread across her face, the first one all day that wasn’t for a camera or laced with sarcasm.
“Well, goddamn, Waterboy,” she said, “You just saved my ass today.”
He blinked, water droplets falling from his lashes. “I… I d-did?”
“Hell yeah, you did.” She offered a hand, not seeming to care that it would get wet. “Now get up. We gotta file a report, and you’re explaining the science of that shit to Robert, because I sure as hell don’t know how we just did it.”
Herman stared at her offered hand, then at her smiling face, illuminated by the soft, ambient glow of the settling mist. A shaky, disbelieving smile of his own broke through his nervousness. He took her hand. His grip was damp, but for the first time since getting this job, it felt steady.
“Okay,” he said. And for once, he didn’t stutter on the word.