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It was 2AM on a Monday night, which meant Penny was eating hot wings. It could have been Tuesday or Wednesday, and she would have been doing the same thing. She was a nomad of chicken wings; she traveled to where the best deals took her. That night, it happened to be Bill’s Saloon, a shitty hole-in-the-wall bar with more dust on the tables than paint on the walls.

She’d been there for an hour already, finishing basket after basket of All-U-Can-Eat wings and demanding hot sauce and beer every other wing. The lone bartender working that night was used to the spectacle of the 5’0” assistant producer from Destiny City Nightly News. She came in every Monday after wrapping up that night’s program, laden with scripts and stories to share, and took up the corner spot at the scuffed bar.

Her job was her life, and Penny made no complaints about it. After getting her Masters, she decided that it was her manifest destiny to be the number one newscaster in all of Destiny City. Unfortunately, none of her screen tests went well for reporter positions. Penny was reassigned to production instead. Being a creature of diligence, she assumed that working hard enough in that department would somehow pave the way for her to become the next Barbara Walters. She’d been assigned to the 11:00PM news for a year and a half now, and given enough time, Penny was absolutely certain she’d be the head of the entire network. And, also, the Barbara Walters thing.

Until then, she had Monday nights with wings at Bill’s Saloon.

The bar was supposed to close down at 2AM. Penny knew it. Bill knew she knew it. And yet the girl seemed remiss to rush through the last basket of wings, her fingers coated in layers of sauce. She nibbled at the corner of a bone, absentmindedly flipping through a folder of scripts with her clean hand.

Without glancing up, she said, “This hot sauce is for pussies, Bill,” and waved a half-gnawed chicken bone at the portly bartender. “Didn’t I tell you last week? This is not a Taco Bell. I want some real ******** hot sauce.”

The bartender was nowhere near Penny. He stood at the opposite end of the bar, shining a glass and doing everything in his power, it seemed, to ignore her. At the start of her visit, Bill was always happy to sit and hear her loud stories about her day, or funny anecdotes about what the DCNN anchors were like behind closed doors. But the second that clock struck 2AM, he made it his life’s mission to show Penny with every fiber of his being that she needed to leave.

Penny just wasn’t taking the hint.

Besides, there was someone in a puffy jacket propped up at one of the back table. And hey! There was some stocky guy walking through the front door just that minute.

A bulky guy with tattoos crawling up his arm walked into through the creaky door of Bill's Saloon. Penny spared him a glance, but she was on her fourth pint and her fifth basket of wings. As much as she could put away food like a champion, she was started to feel stuffed to the brim. The woman had just considered throwing in the towel on her final basket when the newcomer decided to sit beside her and touch one of her empty baskets.

Like a lion watching a hyena approach their fresh kill, Penny snapped into defensive mode, curling her last basket of wings close to her chest and taking a wet bite of a particularly crispy piece. "Cheap wings are cheap," she said, shrugging.

Penny was a talker and had no qualms about striking conversations up with strangers -- so long as they didn't bother her while she was working, which was more or less always. Even now, as the dark-skinned man struck up a conversation, Penny kept one eye on the script beneath her left hand, idly scribbling notes as they came to her.

As she finished editing one line, Penny noticed a bird-shaped tattoo on the newcomer's forearm peek out from under the rolled sleeve of a black shirt. She reached out and touched the etched black outline without asking. "So, what -- did you win a contest at a frathouse for who could fit the most tribal tattoos on a single arm or what?" The petite woman slammed back the remains of her most recent pint of beer and then clapped her hand down on the bar. "Billy, you charming b*****d, bring me beer before I have to dangle under the tap to avoid dehydration."

Bright green eyes flashed back to the stranger, wide, curious. Penny could talk to a wall if it seemed like a listener. Chatting up some cute guy at a bar was child's play.

Penny pointed a clean chicken bone at the guy beside her. "Arguing with me is a losing battle," she said. The bone fell into the basket with a crinkle of parchment paper. "I once talked a pastor out of resting on the Sabbath." She paused for dramatic effect. "If you know what I mean." There were two wings left. She lifted the larger of the pair. "Did I mention it was Easter? Because it was totally Easter." There was nothing ladylike about the massive bite that Penny took out of the wing.

Her free fingers continued tracing the odd mishmash of lines and shapes on the stranger's arm as she polished off another chicken wing and another swig of beer. She liked travelers, liked talking to them. It gave her ideas for pieces DCNN could run more often than not. Edging toward drunkenness, she wasn't exactly in the best state of mind for it, but Penny had once signed a major contract with a local advertisers while second-hand high from a music festival she had covered right before the meeting.

When the newcomer started sharing about his tattoos, Penny felt compelled to one-up him. She straightened on the bar stool, tugged her button-up blouse out of her skirt, and then hiked it clear up to the white lace of her bra. There, trailing along her side in a looping cursive, was the phrase:

I was the kind nobody thought could make it.

One hand was still sticky with chicken so Penny toweled it clean with a napkin, keeping her shirt hiked up by clamping it in her armpit. "I also have a tribal butterfly tramp stamp. Take my advice -- don't drink tequila in Costa Rica with your sorority sisters and a random German tattoo artist on a stranger's yacht. Because you'll wake up with a ******** tribal butterfly tramp stamp. And that's one postcard I could have lived without." Over share? Yep. That was Penny. She drowned the memory in another sip of beer.

The bartender crossed to the door and switched off the open sign. "Tabs close in five," he said briskly. Penny gave him a salute with her free hand and then turned back to the stranger to shrug it off. She was still talking. Bill crossed toward the man in the puffy jacket tucked near the corner and repeated himself. The guy didn't respond so Bill give him a nudge. Then another. Then another.

Penny's mouth fell open in disbelief. "Who said this? Who said this?" A chewed and chipped nail stabbed at the quote trailing up her side. "Miss. Barbara. Jill. Walters. Herself." The petite woman looked vaguely pious in that instant, her head bowed in drunken devotion. "She is only a revolution for all women in broadcasting! A ******** legend, man. A pinnacle of grace and talent. She's my goddamn hero." Penny let her shirt fall back into place and leaned forward onto the bar.

"Kids today," she murmured, drowning the words in a sip of beer, "don't know anything about anything."

Okay, so maybe this burly guy looked about as far from a kid as she did, but Penny was the type to refer to everyone as 'kid' no matter the age.

There was one wing left in the basket. "Leave no man behind," she said to the chicken, scooping up the final piece and tearing into it.

In the corner of the bar, Bill was losing his patience with the unresponsive patron. He said something gruffly and then gave the man a push. There was the distinct sound of something screeching, and then a long, inky black tentacle exploded from the puffy coat, grabbed Bill by the throat, and threw him across the room. The bartender hit the wall with a thud and then collapsed to the ground.

Penny spewed chicken out into the air. "What the ********!" she shouted, hopping down from the barstool -- half-eaten chicken wing in hand. Her beer on the counter tipped over and spilled. "What is that thing?" The words left her mouth, and suddenly, a youma burst out of the puffy jacket, all tentacles and snapping jaws.

And look at that -- it was coming right for them.

Penny was wide-eyed and stammering beside her barstool. DCNN had covered 'monster attacks' and 'terrorist strikes' night after night, but this was the first time she had actually found herself face-to-face with one. She far preferred watching them on shitty cellphone videos to the real deal. Her fight or flight sense kicked into high gear -- and it told her to run. Bill's Saloon was cool and all, but Penny preferred living to dying over cheap beer and wings any day. Or at least most of them.

One hand fell back to the bar to brace herself, the other reaching out to the bulky stranger she'd just been swapping tattoo stories with just a moment ago. Fingertips brushed his arm, but instead of feeling bare skin, she touched a hard leather instead. Penny turned suddenly, staring at the spot. He was... he was... a ******** gladiator?

No sooner had she barely grazed him, and he was off running. "You're a ******** superhero, and you didn't even tell me," she slurred. Adrenaline was a sobering thing, but Penny was slow on the uptake just then. For all the footage of magical schoolgirls and militant warriors she had seen, this red-suited kid didn't exactly fit the mold. He didn't have a weapon, did he? And he didn't seem to be casting a swarm of bees from his hands or anything.

Staggering backward toward the wall, Penny felt her fingertips brush a smoothed wooden pole. When had Bill's gotten a pool table? She turned to stare at what she was touching and found herself grasping not a pool cue, but some sort of giant bow -- straight out of Robin Hood. The hand that grasped it was attached to a wrist with a strange bronze band, and the arm that branched off of that was otherwise bare. Green eyes blinked quickly, and then the petite woman looked across the bar to the mirrored wall behind it.



"What," she began, staring at herself in shock, "the ********."

The stranger was taking on the nasty monster all by his lonesome, and something about that felt suddenly wrong to her. Power pulsed in her veins, a buzzing to jump to action in her head. One hand darted up to her back, pulling free an arrow before she had the time to realize they were there. It was like muscle memory.

Shouldering the bow, she notched the arrow and prepared to let it fly -- only to feel it slip from her grasp and fall to the floor. Whoops, apparently shooting a bow wasn't that easy. Across the room, the youma seemed to be gaining steam, slapping harder and faster at the dreadhead than before. There was no way that she'd be able to shoot an arrow now.

And so, instead, she let out a boisterous scream and launched herself onto the back of the youma, punching it in the back of the head. "I'm a superhero too!" she shouted. It was a very exciting thing to a drunk woman.

Penny gasped when Kam stumbled backwards. She had been in plenty of fights in her day, but it usually ended with her on her a** and someone else walking off with a distinct feeling of satisfaction. Penny went to war with words, not fists. But it was those words that most often got her into trouble, even into fights. This beast was the singular exception in her life -- and she didn't want Kam to leave her alone with it.

"Hang on to it?!" she shouted, landing a wet punch into what she assumed was the monster's temple. "That's a lot easier said than done!"

But the dreadhead was already at the bar. "Are you getting a <********> beer?" she shouted. If he was drinking while she was tempting death, Penny was so going to slap him. Or something.

The youma tried to shake her free, but Penny was as tenacious as she was tiny. It wasn't until she had locked both legs and arms around one of the waving tentacles that she noticed Kam coming back. He struck it twice, and she felt the monster shudder beneath her. Its other tentacle whipped up and struck her, sending her tumbling back onto the thing's head.

One hand dug into a spongy mane of what she assumed to be hair, the other reaching to pull her bow off her shoulder and into her hands. Gripping with her thighs, Penny lifted the bow with both hands and slammed it down into the youma's head. She had no idea how strong she was -- it buried itself halfway into the thing's head, causing it to scream and writhe with increasing ferocity.

Penny shoved her bow deeper into the monster's head just as Kam delivered the killing blow. Without warning, her makeshift steed burst into dust beneath her, sending her spilling to the ground. Lucky for her, the other superhero broke her fall. "That was," she said, panting as she rolled off of him, "a hell of a thing." She was laying on something and rolled to the side to pull it out: her bow.

Holding it above her, Penny could only laugh, loud and high. "A ******** bow, man," she said, nudging him with a hand. She tossed the bow to the side. It clattered across the floor, bouncing into the jukebox. The thing churned to life, clicking right into "Highway to Hell" with a whir of gears.

Still breathing hard, the newly-discovered superhero tried to take account of herself. "I feel like Xena, Warrior Princess," she said, turning to face him. God, she didn't even know his name. "Can you please tell me what exactly just happened to me?" Apparently Penny had forgotten all about the bartender passed out across the bar.

None of this felt familiar to Penny. There was no tug in her brain, no odd deja vu looking at her uniform. Instead, as the boy beside her proclaimed what they were, Penny felt the truth of it. She felt it the second the words left his mouth. Sitting up, she shook her head, trying to reason out what this was, why she felt at peace with it, and more importantly, what her goddamn name was.



A flurry of sliver hair whipped left and right. "Did you hear something?" she said, eyes widening. The voice sounded old and certainly female. Gehenna was about as far from those two characteristics as a person could get. Again, she felt truth in those words, though they seemed spoken by some disembodied presence that Cimmerian couldn't rationalize in that instant.

Bright mint eyes fell to Gehenna's outstretched hand. He wanted a handshake; she gave him a highfive. "Cimmerian," she said, testing out the words on her tongue. "Page of Pluto -- and you should call me Meri."

The bite-sized Knight got to her feet and extended a hand to help up the much larger crimefighter. "I hate to be the dumb girl," she said, tugging him upright. "But how in the flying ******** did that just happen? One second, I'm eating beer and wings, and the next there is a bow in my hand and I look like something out of Robin Hood." She glanced down at the bows on her uniform. "Naked, girly... Robin Hood." One eyebrow raised.