Superhero Bar Stories: Midnight

Hey, kid. Pull up a chair. I'm hearing good things about your work with Titania. You thinking about striking out on your own once your trial's up, or do you plan stay with Titania as a team?

Really? Good to hear it. No, you're not interrupting anything. Me and Bob here, we were just swapping stories. Topic? Well, it hadn't started as anything in particular, but Bob just finished talking about how he finally captured Midnight. You want a quick recap while he hits the head? All right: Midnight was a supervillain around five years ago. Darkness-based powers: he could see in the dark, make whole areas dark, and travel more or less anywhere he wanted at any moment within his own darkness, which he could stretch out for as much as half a mile. He wasn't the restrained sort of villain, either. Not like Dr. Diablo, say. He did whatever he felt like: robbery, kidnapping, assault... it got worse from there. And we didn't know who was doing it, because it was always dark -- even for security cameras that were equipped with infrared, even night-vision goggles, everything. Whenever he showed up, anything even vaguely close to visible light just... died.

Even Captain Amazing can't see through his darkness. He hears about a robbery in progress, busts in through an open window... and then has to stop, because he can't see anything and with his strength he can't be blundering around. He'd kill someone by accident. But he remembers The Seer, from out in Sacramento, and he gives him a call.

Yeah, sorry. Bob is The Seer. Bob's a psychic, and one of his powers is that he's aware of everything around him. So the next time an area goes dark, Captain Amazing carries The Seer into it and turns him loose. And Bob locates the guy, and grabs him telekinetically. And Midnight tries to slide out through the shadows, but The Seer has a solid grip on him, and... nobody's quite sure what happened. But a moment later the lights are back on, Captain Amazing comes flying back in, and Bob's lying on the ground next to this skinny guy in all black who's weirdly... stretched out. Like, his left arm and his right leg are six inches longer than his other arm and leg, and his head and chest are weirdly misshapen.

Yeah, yeah it was. I told you when you started that you'd make mistakes, and the thing was to own them when they happened. Bob still feels bad about this one. I think Captain Amazing does too. I mean, The Seer was just trying to capture the guy, keep him from hurting anybody else. He didn't expect to maim him. But sometimes when you have two different kinds of power in direct conflict, weird things happen.

Hey, Bob. Yeah, I was just telling the kid here, because I think he needs to know. He's working with 'Tania, probably will be for a while. Lightlance, when he's in costume; Cyrus when he's out. And now it's your turn -- I'm going to get the next round, so you get to tell the kid uncomfortable stories about me.