Xoxox

The worst thing about being able to fly was that it was fully possible to wake up from a bender not knowing what continent you were on. Azure reluctantly surfaced from alcoholic oblivion to the sounds of someone talking rapidly and loudly to her in a language she didn't even recognize, let alone speak. "Shush," she groaned out, rolling over and putting a pillow over her eyes to block out the painful sunlight. She didn't know whose pillow it was. She didn't much care.

The person kept speaking, though. Azure lifted the pillow just enough to see who they were. She didn't recognize the face, but that was definitely a policeman's uniform. Azure winced. She really hoped she hadn't caused an international incident again. It was always so embarrassing when they tried to deport her and she had to explain that there wasn't technically anywhere to deport her to anymore.

Which was why she was drinking last night. A toast to her mom, who would be sixty-three today if not for the inconvenient fact that in this reality, her great-grandfather took a different train to London the day he would have met her great-grandmother. Causing him to meet a different woman, causing him to have four sons instead of three daughters, causing him to have seven completely different grandchildren, causing a woman named Azure Haven to get maudlin drunk every time she looked at a genealogy website and saw sixteen living reminders that the universe she was born in had ceased to exist.

Azure sat up, keeping the pillow carefully positioned between her and the window, and started rummaging around for her clothes. She wondered if she was in one of the countries that got weird about nudity. It still kind of surprised her that anyone got weird about nudity-back in her universe, lusty old Queen Vic had pretty much done away with those ludicrous taboos for good, but over here they all acted like that crazy old Puritan sect she read about in History class. "Um...do you speak English?" she asked, reaching for the sweater she wore last night. It was lying in a heap on the floor with tiny fragments of safety glass tangled in the fibers. That wasn't a good sign.

"A little," the policeman said. "Miss Azure, yes? The British superhero?"

Azure stumbled out of bed, grabbing a pair of leggings that had a wine stain on the thigh. (Wine, right? Please say it was wine.) She fumbled around for the wrist comlink she knew had to be around somewhere. "I'm not a 'superhero'," she said wearily. "I'm a podiatrist who keeps getting stuck in the middle of somebody else's bad life decisions, okay?"

The policeman looked blank. "Sorry?" he said, perplexed.

She found the comlink, buried under a pile of men's clothing that brought up vague memories of some life decisions of her own that she probably wouldn't be proud of, once she fully remembered what they were. The piece of complex technology had seen better days; it looked like a piece of modeling clay that had been squeezed by a particularly petulant child. She had a sudden flashback to getting a call in the middle of the night and dismissing it with maybe a little more force than was necessary. "I'm Azure, yes," she grumbled. "What do you want?"

The policeman smiled. Azure could tell he was about to ask her for help with something. "If you could please come with me, Miss Azure?" he said, gesturing toward the door. "The Prime Minister of Belgium wishes to speak with you."

Azure staggered toward the door, wishing she had the kind of superpowers that let her metabolize alcohol faster. "I hope that means I'm in Belgium," she muttered to herself. "Otherwise the Liberty Squad is really going to be pissed at me."

Twenty minutes (and, blessedly, a cup of coffee and a croissant) later, Azure found herself ushered into the kind of office that made her feel even more underdressed than she already was, facing a balding man who looked like his face was made for smiling. He wasn't smiling at the moment. "You are Miss Azure, yes?" he said, in a heavy French accent. "The British superhero?"

Azure grimaced. "Can we not call it that?" she said her voice thick with exasperation. "I mean, sorry, Your Minister...ness...but I'm really not a superhero. I'm just a normal person who gets stuck in some weird situations." She saw the look of confusion on his face, and realized she wasn't going to get out of this without giving the full lecture.

"Look, where I come from-came from," she corrected herself, tearing off the scab of grief yet again, "telekinesis was no big deal. I'm actually weaker than most-my range barely extends beyond my skin, and I can only exert about ninety tons of force. It's not my fault that I'm stuck in a parallel reality where the only people who can do what I do decide to dress up in skin-tight outfits and punch each other for a living, is it?"

"But you are Azure, are you not?" he said. "You assisted the Liberty Squad with the battle against Garox, the struggle against the maddened Olympians, the War of the Cthorians...there are whole nations of people that owe their lives to you!"

Azure stared into her coffee for a long moment. "That doesn't mean I'm a hero," she said uncomfortably. "That just means I'm not an asshole sometimes. Look, can we just get to what I fucked up last night so I can try to call up Venus Ascendant and grovel until she agrees to pay for the damages? I don't have any money, and you can't deport me unless you've got a time machine and a cosmic deity lying around."

"Deport?" The Prime Minister finally gave her a smile, but it was a wan, tenuous looking thing. "No, Miss Azure, we have brought you here to ask you for your help. Belgium is in the middle of a crisis, and we believe that we may need the aid of a superhero. It involves your Prime Minister."

"Sue Perkins?" Azure asked, momentarily confused.

"Ah, no," the Prime Minister corrected. "The Right Honourable Theresa May. She was here on a state visit, and I'm afraid she has..." The smile vanished again, unable to sustain itself in the face of the end of his sentence. "Disappeared."

"Oh." Azure shrugged. "That's too bad. Maybe you should get the police to look at that or something? They do that here, right?"

The Prime Minister's face spread into a smile again, but this one looked downright pained. "They do," he said. "But this disappearance has some unusual aspects. The Prime Minister had retired for the evening, and was going over some correspondence, when she suddenly departed her residence. She evaded her own security detail, a genuinely inexplicable decision on her part, and has not been seen since. Her private secretary remembers handing her a letter that she read and burned shortly before leaving, but he cannot remember the contents. And then there's this."

He slid a piece of paper across the desk. "It is very simple for a ransom note. An amount in pounds sterling, a Swiss bank account number, and a time. The person who delivered it is a local bartender with no criminal record. She says she has no memory of how it came to be in her possession, only an irresistible urge to bring it directly to me."

Azure shrugged. "Yeah, that's weird, but...I mean, I'm not a detective. This sounds like a job for Sherlock Holmes or something, you know? I don't see why you think you need a superhero. Which by the way I'm not."

He shrugged in return. "It seems like an unusual kidnapping, one that requires an unusual investigator. One with experience in the bizarre. One with the ability to handle herself in a fight. One who currently owes three million euros in damages to parties public and private in the city of Brussels, which will naturally be forgiven in the event that the Prime Minister is found unharmed."

"Oh." Azure blushed. "Then I guess I am that kind of superhero, at least."

"I thought as much."

*****

Two hours later, and Azure was sitting on a rooftop feeling stupid.

They'd taken her into the Prime Minister's residence. "We've kept it undisturbed," a policeman said, thankfully one who spoke better English. "So as not to muddy any extra-sensory perceptions you might pick up."

Azure had wandered around the room for a few minutes, trying to think of a diplomatic way to tell them that she didn't have any extra-sensory powers. That was when she noticed the wastebasket.

"This is where she burned the letter, right?" she asked, picking up the small metal trashcan and looking inside. Most of the contents had burned to ashes, but Azure was able to pick out a small fragment of pink paper that had escaped the conflagration. It looked to be a scrap from near the bottom of the mysterious letter, one that only said, "XOXOX," and then the tail end of a name in scribbled cursive. It could have been an 'e'. Or an 'a'. Or anything, really.

"You guys know I'm a podiatrist, right?" she muttered, shaking the wastebasket from side to side to see if she could find anything else. "I mean, you want to find out whether the Prime Minister had good arch support, I'm your woman, but..." She gave the bin another little shake, hoping to find maybe a signed confession.

She didn't see anything, but as the ashes drifted up to tickle her nose, Azure found herself wrinkling it in a familiar disgust. "Anyone smell that?" she asked, waving the bin around. "That kind of...ooh, weird smell?" She took the surviving fragment and held it to her nostrils. "Oh, yeah. That smells weird. Definitely not a normal paper smell, not even burnt paper."

"You have found a clue, then?" the policeman asked. He looked excited, like he'd been waiting his whole life to work with a real live superhero-stroke-great-detective. Azure felt like a childless aunt trying to have a conversation about Santa Claus.

"Well, I mean...I don't know what the smell is, but I've smelled something kind of like it before. On a team-up. With...other superheroes." She smiled awkwardly. "One of them, Doctor Phobos...he's a chemist, an expert with mind-altering drugs. He uses them to fight crime. I think I should call him in." She reached for her wrist comlink, before remembering that she'd squished it like Play-Doh the night before. "Um...can I get someone to bring me a spotlight? And a really big marker?"

And now she was sitting on a rooftop. Pointing the spotlight at a cloud. Wincing at the extremely hasty and probably woefully inept drawing of the skull symbol Doctor Phobos wore on his chest. On the ground below, locals pointed up at the 'Phobos Signal', taking pictures of it and uploading them to social media. Which probably meant this would work, and much quicker than trying to get the Belgian government to contact the British government to contact the United Nations to get a priority message to the Liberty Squad's satellite headquarters who would then contact Doctor Phobos...but Azure still felt stupid.

Five minutes later it began to rain. Because of course it did.

Five minutes after that, just when Azure was getting thoroughly sick of telekinetically shedding rain like a wet dog, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She spun around rapidly, shouting, "Don't do that!" The response wasn't quite what she expected. Then again, neither was the responder.

Instead of Doctor Phobos standing behind her, his dark gray cloak fluttering in the breeze, Azure found...someone else. A slender, athletic young woman wearing an outfit with a similar color scheme, albeit one with slightly lighter grays and softer reds. Instead of a skull, she had a stylized eye on her chest, with a crack down the middle as if it was made of glass. "Sorry," the woman said, looking genuinely sheepish.

"You're not Doctor Phobos," Azure said, continuing her streak of feeling stupid as she blurted out the obvious. "You're that sidekick of his, right? Deimos?"

The woman quirked her mouth in the kind of smile that suggested she was trying very hard not to laugh really hard at the thought of her being mistaken for a Teen Wonder. "No, the boys are off in South America trying to find some jaguar talisman. Holds the key to an ancient mystery thousands of years old, fate of the world at stake...you know. Work stuff. I'm Eris. I help them out sometimes."

"And are you a forensic chemist too?" Azure knew she sounded bitchy, but she really didn't need a semi-competent blunt instrument wandering around looking for something to hit. That role was already filled. "Because what I need is a forensic chemist."

Eris bobbed her head a little, looking uncannily like a kid who wanted to show the teacher she did tomorrow's reading along with today's. "Actually, I was a forensic chemist before I became a superhero. It's a long story. There was this supervillain who kidnapped me and forced me to help her drug Washington's water supply, and she dosed me with mind control drugs, and because I was subconsciously trying to fight them I wound up getting sloppy and causing a lab accident, and-um, I'm telling it now, aren't I. Anyway. If you want to show me the evidence, I've got a private lab on the stealth jet we can use."

Azure blinked. "You have a stealth jet?"

Eris pointed up. Azure followed her finger, but she didn't see anything...until a large black airplane faded smoothly into view in the sky just overhead, its engines blending into the background noise of wind and rain so quietly that it seemed to be floating. "Oh. Yes. So you do," Azure said. "Hang on, I'll go get the evidence."

Eris gave her another one of those barely controlled grins. "Why don't you do that."

After Azure had signed the ashes out from the Brussels evidence room, she brought them back to Eris, who subjected them to a number of fiddly tests involving litmus paper and centrifuges and long swirly tubes of glass. Azure tried to tell herself that Eris would probably be just as out of her league dealing with a case of plantar fasciitis, but it didn't help. Finally, she swiveled around in her chair to look at Azure. "I think I know how she did it."

"It was the smell, right?" Azure felt obscurely proud of herself. "I thought that smell was familiar." She knew she was never going to be cut out for this superhero gig-hell, these days it seemed like she wasn't even cut out for day-to-day existence. But even getting a little thing right felt better when you knew it was going to save the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Eris nodded. "It was the smell. Well, indirectly. The paper was impregnated with a powerful psychoactive drug that was absorbed through the skin, rendering whoever held it extremely susceptible to suggestions. It uses some of the same compounds as Doctor Phobos's fear gas, that's probably why it seemed familiar to you, but it produces a whole different effect. Instead of making people feel rattled and panicky, it makes them eager to please." She paused as her brain caught up with her mouth. "It'd be nice if we could do that instead of beating up criminals, but it needs a bigger dose than you could deliver with just a quick spray."

She snapped her fingers. "Of course! That's why the suggestions were contained in the actual letter. Because it needed to be something they would hold for a while, long enough for the drug to take effect while they read the instructions they were being drugged into following. There was probably one set telling the secretary to make sure the Prime Minister got it and then to forget its contents, and then a second set that told the Prime Minister to ditch her security detail and report for kidnapping. The perfect crime, really."

Azure looked down at her fingers. She thought back to the tiny scrap of paper she held in her bare hand. "Um...about that?" she said, wiping her hand compulsively on her sweater.

Eris shook her head, obviously picking up on Azure's fears. "You didn't hold it for long, and there weren't any instructions for you to follow. You should be fine. Unlike the Prime Minister, who's probably being held captive in a chemical supply warehouse right now." She leaned over to a computer terminal, and began pulling up a map of the area. "Looks like there's about seventeen in the city, but we can rule out anything that belongs to one of the big international firms-she'll want somewhere with a relatively small staff, one she can control easily."

Azure looked nonplussed. "The Prime Minister?"

"Huh?" Eris spun around again, and her eyes widened in sudden realization. "I'm so sorry!" she said. "You probably think I'm a total flake. No, I skipped a few steps in my explanation because I was already jumping ahead. I'm really sorry about that. The chemicals used...it's kind of like a signature, you know? I recognized it right away. We're dealing with a woman who calls herself 'Sangria', the same woman who...indirectly...got me into crimefighting. She specializes in chemical mind control, and she likes to hole up in chemical factories and supply warehouses so that she's always got a ready working supply of components."

Eris spun back to the computer, typing rapidly as she spoke. "Annnnnd...there we go! One chemical supply warehouse, on the outskirts of the industrial area, owned by a local family, with three canceled deliveries in the last two days. That's got to be the place." She smiled. "I don't know how crimefighters did it before Google. Come on, let me jab you with a needle and we'll get going."

Azure sighed. "You know Doctor Phobos did the same joke, right? Aren't you people supposed to be grim avengers of the night or something?"

Eris blushed a little. It did not help make her look any grimmer. "Dark. Dark avengers of the...um, so you know about the shot?"

"Yes, but I need the lozenge, instead." Azure felt bizarrely like she was talking to her pharmacist, but she understood that a team-up with Doctor Phobos and his crew wasn't exactly like hanging out with Adventure Girl. They sprayed the area with neurotoxins in the course of every fight; if she didn't take the same counter-agents they did, she'd be just as nervous and jittery as their enemies, and that wouldn't do anybody any good. And of course, her body tensed up into invulnerability any time someone tried to inject her with something, so she needed an oral version instead.

Which meant they'd have to sit here for fifteen minutes while it took effect. This was why Azure made such a lousy superhero. She was just sure that Adventure Girl didn't have to take a fifteen minute time-out before fighting crime. She took the proffered lozenge and gave it an experimental suck.

Licorice flavor. Just her luck.

*****

Twenty minutes later, and Azure was doing the only thing she still felt like she was any good at. Hitting things.

They'd agreed on a deceptively simple plan. Since the warehouse was bound to have guards, and since Sangria was bound to know that at least one superhero was looking for her (okay, so putting a giant spotlight with the logo of a famous member of the Liberty Squad out all over social media probably had downsides too, everyone was such a fucking critic) then they needed to give her what she was looking for. A big, loud, obvious target, one she couldn't ignore.

And a woman flying in and smashing up the place with her super-strength and invulnerability qualified.

"You go in and draw attention to yourself with a conspicuous display of violence," Eris had said, "and I'll slip in through a side entrance and get the Prime Minster out. Then we can start hunting for Sangria-she probably won't show her face unless she thinks she's got an opportunity to drug you into submission, so we'll have to find her. Oh, and if she does show up? Don't get near her. She's a candy-ass in a fight, but she'll take advantage if you let your guard down, and the chemicals in her lipstick are incredibly potent. Even with the similar compounds, that lozenge won't help."

Which was why, after ripping the shipping gate off its hinges, Azure was swinging it around like a baseball bat. Because she was lousy at deduction, terrible at stealth, awful at secrecy, and frankly these days not so great at coping with grief without turning to alcohol, but she was really good at wrecking shit. As the armed men coming at her were rapidly and painfully finding out.