Super•Villainous

XXX

By the next day, I marginally recovered from the shock of all I learned. My heart had settled around the news, perhaps a little downtrodden and coated in dust from the explosive upheaval of what I thought had been the reality of my life, but I could adapt to it, given time.

I hoped that I would get that time.

I still went to work like normal; I had nothing better to do, really. As with most of my ingenious schemes, the idea to use my all-access pass into the darkest corners of the Guildhall in order to uncover any dark secrets they may have been hiding worked better in theory than in practice.

I held some hope that perhaps they were foolish enough to leave documents alluding to gross negligence and misuse of power in the Archive for me to peruse at my leisure while I "organized".

Crossing my fingers, I pleaded for the karmic forces of the universe to let them be fools.

Windless, one of the sister Supers working up at reception, walked me down and gave a brief rehashing of my duties, as well as a quick check on my progress from yesterday, before leaving me to my solitude. Twice, Ren dropped by to check up on me, an event neither of us particularly looked forward to, but for better or for worse, he became my de facto handler over the recent days.

I didn't know who I pitied more, him or me.

It soon became apparent that in order to snoop I actually needed to do what they brought me there to do, which came as a devastating blow. Nevertheless, I persevered and set to work clearing a path through the mountains and valleys of paper, where one ill-directed sneeze could summon an avalanche to suffocate me.

Through a series of hops, skips, and well aimed leaps, I made it to one of the nearer filing cabinets and forced open a middle drawer, one I could easily rifle through. It took several increasingly insistent tugs, a war against the rust that sealed parts of the wheels in place.

Passing thoughts about the odds of getting tetanus stilled my hands temporarily, before I disregarded the notion, not because I thought my curse would allow for me to NOT get tetanus if even the smallest chance existed, but because my dad made it a point to keep me vaccinated against such things. On the off chance my immunity failed me, I imagined I stood a competitive chance of being able to sue the Guild for bad workplace safety. Maybe. I wasn't a lawyer. Was that even a thing? I hoped so. After all, I didn't want to get tetanus without getting a hefty tuition payment out of it.

"You might have more success organizing if you'd start with the paper on the outside and worked your way in."

I jumped, cursing against my suddenly spiked heart rate. "Who the hell—"

The papers in my hands scattered in every direction, the unmistakable sound of cascading sheets mimicking the sound of a dozen phone books being fanned at once, followed by a light creaking as a filing cabinet began tipping forward.

At that point, I wasn't even surprised.

Now that I knew all these incidents were the result of a "curse", as my dad put it, I couldn't even muster the energy to be afraid of the inevitable scrapes and broken bones that being crushed by metal would entail. I wasn't even all that taken aback when the decades old cabinet bounced off a barrier of invisible wind that tore through my hair. A firm pressure around my arm jerked me out of the way in the knick of time, right as the wind withdrew and allowed the metal cabinet to crash to the ground exactly where I'd been standing.

I could have wept at the catastrophe around us. "That will take ages to put back the way it was."

"That should be the least of your worries," Tempest remarked, surprising me by his proximity.