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“Thanks for walking me home, Derouen,” she said, shouldering her backpack. Since coming across him at the DMV, she felt sort of like Finn Derouen had taken it upon himself to be her shadow--a sort cute and freckly shadow, but with a wicked scar that seemed pretty new, by how often he picked at it. She wasn’t going to ask, because she didn’t want to talk about the time a mountain decided to fall on her, and if she asked she figured that she would have to talk about the damn mountain, so she just wasn’t going to ask. Finn seemed pretty chill with that.

Well, chill enough to hang out doing dumb s**t at the movies, where Anabel had a ten-minute argument with the manager involving the words ‘accessibility’ and ‘I’d love to buy something from the theater but I have a lot of medical diet restrictions that the theater cannot meet, so just let me have my fricking stupidly specifically prepared popcorn and no one is going to get sued’. (It had led to Finn’s snacks coming at a discount and a smug silence from Anabel later when they went to get gluten-free and meat-free pizza.) Now they were, you know, walking, because it was close enough to the Village for Anabel to walk it and she kind of hated the bus this late.

“Seriously, it’s super nice of you,” she was saying, walking backwards down the street so she could look him in the face. That was why she didn’t see the thing that howled until after she’d already bumped into it, at which point she turned to look at it.

It was a monster. A multi-headed monster, a monster with four legs and three heads and each of those heads was decidedly not a dog head, which would have made the monster at least a little understandable. Lacking the ability to positively identify it as Cerberus and the effect of psychoactive drugs in her pizza, Anabel was forced to rummage through her one cryptozoology course for a proper name. The chimera howled, a sound not made much more comforting by the fact that it was a bear roaring, a snake hissing, and an eagle screaming. “Okay,” said Anabel, because the methods for scaring off any of those three types of animals were wildly different, and she was not in a place to just freaking run from anything. “Finn, you wouldn’t happen to have taken cryptozoology, would you?”

The monster was circling. Probably to get a good attack vector for the bear head. If she judged it right, the snake was a constrictor, and while eagle beaks were wicked sharp, they couldn’t maul like a bear could. Anabel did the math, and realized that even if she ran, she was not going to get far before it got her.

Well, what was her first and best hope? Scaring it off, maybe. Maybe. Or hoping the rumors were true, and that the dorky cape man had been seen in the Village more often than usual. She wasn’t sure which was more ridiculous. But either option was better than dying.

Firstly: Holy s**t, Finn was dorky cape man. Anabel now felt kind of bad for spending an entire ten minutes expounding on why deep arctic survival gear was such a bad choice for a vigilante superhero. But she also felt really annoyed, because he couldn’t have just mentioned that to her when she was talking s**t about his clothing choice? Granted, he hadn’t been talking much, and, well, damn.

“Okay,” she said, “save our asses.” Because what was she going to do, b***h him out right now? That would be kind of counterintuitive; she had a very strong desire to stay alive long enough to be allowed on two-hour nature hikes through foothills, after all, and Dr. Mendelssohn said that it was still a ways off yet after the last time she’d gone and decided she knew better for her stomach muscles than the doctor did. She took a few steps backwards, which turned out to be utterly ineffectual when the monster put its powerfully-built hind legs to terrible use and threw itself after her. Evidently, dorky cape man--Finn! what the ******** a meal less nourishing to chew, or something.

Watching Finn kick the a** of the chimera-monster was sort of cool, but also abjectly terrifying. And she had the weirdest feeling that there was something just at the corner of her vision that she couldn’t quite see yet--but that she could reach if she just stuck a hand out for it. So, because hey, if she was about to catch it by getting mauled by a mythical creature she was going to go having taken some really dumb risks, she stuck a hand out into what her brain stubbornly insisted was nothing at all--

and came back with a ring of dark blue stone.

She stared at it as best she could through the weird orangey spots on her field of vision, and in the weird seamless logic that seemed to personify bad dreams or hallucinations, she noticed that her clothes had also changed, and that seemed to make sense. Like her name, which was now--Mistral. Mistral Page of Mercury. And that also seemed to make some sense, for whatever reason the ring from nothing at all made sense. And the blinding blue light.



All of that had taken, perhaps, ten seconds.

And… Finn. Talking to her. Mistral reminded herself to pay attention to the world around her. “Okay,” she said, and then, in case he hadn’t heard her, she repeated it: “Okay, um, one?”

Um, okay, ideas. She looked over Finn’s shoulder at the monster giving chase, tried to not get tense at how close it was. That would help nothing and probably hurt more, if for some reason they didn’t die. “Can you get above street level,” she asked, staring at the way that the monster moved. Bears could climb, but they could climb trees, not sheer building faces. Those hind legs looked powerful but they weren’t going to propel it twelve feet straight up. “I think there’s an alley with a ladder half a block that way,” she added, pointing around the upcoming corner. “It can’t flank that well or it would have before, so turning a corner might buy some extra time?”

She didn’t shriek when they jumped, but she did clutch at Finn’s stupid fur cape, because holy s**t that acceleration did not feel too good on her abused stomach bits. When he set her down, Mistral sat with a whump. Near-death experiences were exhausting, as she already knew; at least this one didn’t have to end with her in a hospital. Unless that thing was smarter than your average animal? She had no idea what the intelligence level of those things was, and no part of her really wanted to know. “Oh, great,” she said, “I’m totally an efficient soldier.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach and squeezed, hoping the pressure would help something.

Okay, she thought; okay, pack it in. And she did, although she was still arguably hugging herself, because she’d just been doing something more stressful than taking a short walk home. And this is why we don’t tense up, she thought.

“So, you’re some kind of Mercury guy,” she said, having packed her confusion and panic in. A quick examination of her own clothes revealed she, too, wore the symbol that meant Mercury; she frowned and put her hands on her knees, leaned against the wall of the building. “Wait, so, have you been deliberately wandering around here on the off chance I’d end up involved? Or--how did you know there was a chance? I’m confused, Derouen.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Like, King and Queen of Cantelon, how many miles to Babylon, Babylon?” That sounded kind of ridiculous, unlike Mistral, which just sounded… mystical. Like something you would read in the back of a Narnia book, a place where fog hung heavy over everything… maybe? She frowned, and looked up at Finn--Babylon--like she was considering getting him institutionalized. They never taught her about becoming a… whatever she was. Page. In college survival courses.

Though she still didn’t feel that great, she got back to her feet. “Babylon was in the Middle East,” she told him, but she didn’t sound sure about it. After all, hadn’t she just grabbed a rock out of thin air and somehow magically changed her clothes?

She examined her ring, the plain and gold thing with its. Wait. “It’s changed.” The surface had been gold, incised with the symbol of Mercury and multiple small depressions, but now. Now? The little small depressions--the “horns” as she’d called them--were full of tiny dark stones. “Thanks for looking out for me,” she said, defeated by the strangeness of her Saturday night. “Um, I think I’m Mistral. Mistral Page of Mercury. So. At least we might be neighbors.”

“Yeah, I think that’d be a good idea,” said Mistral, “but this time, if you need to do any jumping, let me know.” She slipped the ring on her finger, tightened her hands up into fists, and then spread her fingers. Was it her, or was she glowing? “Do I look ridiculous?” She felt like she looked ridiculous, but less so than Babylon, who was wearing a full-length fur cloak in April in Destiny City, which was bullshit. Mistral brushed her hair back from her eyes and put her hands on her hips, which helped with the tremors, and also made her look more confident than she was.