Recently, I exchanged some teasing tweets with 2 friends about writing the origin story for the character one of them had just called the other. It took me a couple weeks, but Evan, Rho, here it is. -SL
“Hijo de p–” cursed Rocio, looking briefly at her burned finger. A new little red welt joined its siblings to pulse angrily on her poor, abused hands. Every time she used the hot glue gun, she was reminded why she hated the damn thing. Still, she thought, considering her nearly-finished ensemble, This is going to be well worth it. My very own invisibility togs. Rocio bit back a giggle of glee.
This career-defining project had started mundanely enough. During a raid on the lair of a pretty mediocre villain, The Sapphire Jeweler, who turned himself a startling shade of blue in an alchemical explosion some years back, Rocio had come upon a large sac of weird, matte black jewels. At the time, they just looked cool, so she grabbed them and tossed them in her loot bag. They were quickly overshadowed in her mind by the shrink ray she found and claimed, which turned out to work only about half the time, so had to be dismantled on the order of the high tribunal. By the time Rocio dug the stones out several days later when she was tidying her gear, she’d forgotten all about them.
Sitting down to look at them, Rocio grabbed a handful and examined them in the palm of her hand. Up close, she noticed that the stones were actually a very dark blue, not black, and had the effect of making the eyes slide away from them. Rocio, feeling them in her hand and knowing they were there, could see them clearly as long as she focused, but her eyes kept wanting to look just next to her hand, away from the stones themselves. Rocio sat up straighter. This find might be a lot more interesting than she thought.
A couple of hours’ worth of trial and error had yielded the hypothesis that the stones absorbed light and repelled attention. As such, anything covered in the stones would be, if not invisible, shadowed, difficult to see and watch. They didn’t have to be bunched together in an unbroken area to work, either. She thought she had enough that, if she spaced them wisely, she could make herself, if not a literal invisibility suit, something very close.
And so it was that Rocio had her career path radically changed. Her one innate superpower was the ability to see and communicate with ghosts and similar entities. She couldn’t sit down and have a normal conversation with one, but limited communication was possible. With the trials coming up, Rocio was finally going to go out in full costume for the final trial, which was to take place out in the field. She had planned an outfit and persona based on that power, sort of a beturbaned Madame Zorlinka medium type, only with more sass. These stones, and the suit, had prompted Rocio to throw all that out the window. Even though the trials were only a few days away, she thought it was worth it, to get it right. Once she’d passed the trials, she’d be a full-fledged member of the Order of the Platypus, the world’s only league of super-antiheroes. And once she became a member, rebranding was unheard of. No, the turban and robes, which had never felt like quite the right look, were history. This not-quite-invisibility suit, this shadow suit, if you will, was edgier, cooler, and much more likely to be found worthy of membership. For the last several days, every second not spent drilling and rehearsing for the trials themselves was spent on the shadow suit. It was slow going, and fraught with more hot glue burns than she’d had in her life, which was saying something, since the last five years had been spent as an understudy of the Order, which often entailed helping antiheroes with costume and equipment repairs.
Rocio planned to unveil the rebranding at the final trial, and not before. Everyone would expect her to come out in the turban and robes, but instead, Rocio, the Shadowmaven, would come out, exhibiting the costume’s power as soon she entered the Great Hall, sending everyone’s gazes sliding off of her. It would have been nice if she had found a suitable sidekick before qualifying, but a sidekick was one thing that could be acquired later, so there was still hope for that.
The day of the trial, Rocio woke with a start, her face resting gently in a puddle of drool on her worktable. She had worked much of the night, but she had finished. Hurriedly, she got ready for the first part of the trials, where she would stand before the tribunal and answer their questions. The nervousness she would have been feeling about the oral examinations had disappeared in a fog of exhaustion and excitement about the shadow suit. The questions were more or less what she expected. What differentiates you from a vanilla superhero? How does your power help you in antihero work? That kind of thing. Rocio sailed through the examination without breaking a sweat, and before she knew it, the time had come to do her practical.
For the practical, Rocio was wired up and sent out on the mission. It was a simple Robin Hood job. She was to go to the junkyard that was a front for some two-bit gang that was new in town, liberate the contents of their safe, and drop it all off in the drop-box of the orphanage across town. Then right back to headquarters to report, and she would be a full-fledged member of the order. Arriving at the junkyard, Rocio found the security to be laughable. She quickly short-circuited the outdoor surveillance and electronic lock. A scan told her there was no other security or surveillance between her and the room where the safe was kept.
Rocio tossed a casual, “Hey, goat,” at the scrawny black goat tethered just outside the backdoor. She was about to waltz right in the backdoor, since she had disabled the security. Her hand was on the knob, when a morose voice nearby remarked, “It’s Mortimer, actually,” in a very conversational tone. Rocio dropped to her heels and spun to greet the newcomer. Intrude on her cakewalk final test, would he? She’d make him shit his pants for his insolence.
“Listen, assho-” But there was no one there. That is, no one, but the scrawny black goat, who had come right up next Rocio, and was looking at her with unnerving directness. What the fuck? Rocio started analyzing the field, as she’d been taught, looking for places where company might be hiding. The goat sighed. Record scratch. The goat. . .sighed? Rocio eyed the goat warily. It occurred to her that he might have a speaker around his neck or something, but a quick check revealed he wasn’t even wearing a collar.
Sliding behind a barrel near the door, Rocio ventured cautiously, “What’s Mortimer, actually?”
“My name,” came the patient reply, still from what sounded like the goat’s direction. “You said, ‘Hey, goat’ when you passed me. But my name is Mortimer.” The goat, and Rocio could see clearly that it was the goat, belched.
“So, you’re, what? I’m supposed to believe you’re some kind of talking goat,” Rocio countered, feeling, as she did so, that she was giving more concession than she should to the idea by addressing the goat directly.
“Don’t be absurd,” replied the goat. “Goats don’t talk.” Rocio cocked an eyebrow and gave the goat a hard look. “This is a possessed goat, you see,” concluded the goat who was not a talking goat. “It’s not the goat talking, but me, the spirit possessing the goat’s body.”
“So you’re a spirit, possessing a goat’s body, using human language,” I summed up. My sarcasm was lost on the goat spirit, who nodded enthusiastically.
“Which still doesn’t explain why you can hear me,” mused the goat. “Even the ghost-friendly types I’ve met have only barely been able to catch one or two words across the aether. Why can you hear me?” Absurdly enough, the goat, Mortimer, was eyeing Rocio suspiciously. “Must be whatever magic your outfit is glowing with amplifies the signal between the two sides of the veil.” Rocio was startled by the idea.
“The shadow stones, really?” Rocio asked, fingering one of the stones on her sleeve. It would be disastrous if it came out that she had based her persona and costume on power that she did not understand. “I thought they just made me hard to look at.” Rocio reached again for the door, conscious of the time limit on the trial. Just as she was about to turn the knob, Mortimer stopped her, “The door is booby-trapped,” he informed her calmly. “The boss man prides himself on using ‘the old ways.’”
“What, like tin-can booby traps?” scoffed Rocio.
“Tin-can booby traps and heavy things that fall straight down when you open the door,” elaborated Mortimer. “Just use the window in the next room over.”
“Uh, thanks,” said Rocio. She was shaken by how close she had come, again, to failing the trial. Stradling the windowsill of the next room, Rocio called softly, “Hey, Mortimer, don’t suppose you want to save me some time in here by giving me the combination?”
“19-12-36,” responded Mortimer. “And be sure to get the little key taped to the underside of the shelf. You’re going to want that.” In record time, Mortimer instructed Rocio on where to find the valuables and how to get into each spot. Rocio climbed back out the window and patted Mortimer’s neck.
“Thanks, Mortimer,” Rocio offered. “I would have probably flunked my mission is it weren’t for you. You’re a life-saver.” Rocio went out the gate and started her jaunt across town to the orphanage. She was just about to cross Watson St. when Mortimer, whom she had not heard approach, hailed her.
“There’s an ambush waiting for you across the street,” Mortimer reported with little concern.
“Aren’t you at all upset that I almost walked into it?” Rocio demanded, whirling on him. Mortimer took a step back.
“No,” he responded confidently, “I knew you weren’t going to, because your trusty sidekick was here to make sure you didn’t.”
Rocio scowled. “I don’t have a sidekick,” she snapped.
“Sure, you do,” corrected Mortimer cheerfully. “We’re going to be great!” He adopted a cheesy announcer’s voice. “Mortimer and his pal, the Dark Bedazzler!”
“The Be-what?!” Rocio asked distractedly.
“Bedazzler,” repeated Mortimer. “Because you have the stones attached to your outfit, like those bedazzler sets, only your stones are dark and shadowy, so you’re the Dark Bedazzler.”
“Absolutely not,” said Rocio with a wince. “I am the Shadowmaven.” They argued about the name, and the order of their names, the rest of the way to the orphanage and back to headquarters. Rocio was relieved that only she could hear Mortimer. She wouldn’t put it past him to try to talk over her in front of the tribunal.
Rocio gave her report to the tribunal and waited anxiously for them to finish conferring. Finally, Rocio was called forth to hear the verdict. She barely noticed Mortimer taking his place next to her. The chairman of the tribunal peered at Rocio and Mortimer for several uncomfortable minutes. “Apprentice Rocio, while it is unusual for a candidate to rebrand to close to the trials, without informing the tribunal that you had done so, the incorporation of the spirit stones into your costume, giving you the benefit of shadow-walking, as well as amplifying your natural ability to perceive ghosts and spirits, was nothing short of brilliant. We are pleased to inform you that you have passed, and will be inducted as a full-fledged member,” the chairman gave an almost imperceptible smile. “What name will you go by?”
Rocio was trembling with excitement. This is it! She opened her mouth to announce herself as the Shadowmaven.
“The Dark Bedazzler,” Mortimer cried. Rocio looked at him murderously.
“The Dark Bedazzler,” she sneered, dropping her voice to a quiet growl, “It’s Shadowmaven, goat.”
“The Dark Bedazzler?” repeated the chairman, in a stunning failure to read another person’s tone of voice. Raising his voice, the chairman announced to the assembly, “Antiheroes, I give you The Dark Bedazzler!”
Rocio’s attempts to be heard saying, “No, the Shadowmaven! The Shadowmaven!” were drowned out by the cheers of her new colleagues.
The Library at Wildwood 