She was wearing an all black summer dress with red ribbons that crossed around her neck and shoulders in the shape of a pentagram. She wore crimson leather driving gloves, even though she’d taken the bus to come here, and high-heeled sandals that looked extremely impractical. Her long dark hair was gathered under a beautiful silk scarf that covered her head, and she wore large sunglasses that made her look like a movie star from the twenties trying not to be recognized in public. Naturally, both of the security guards swivelled to look at her as soon as she came in the museum, and one of them turned to keep shooting glances at her even after he’d accepted her ticket.
Part of that was her thrall, Oasis knew, but part of it was also that she was just that beautiful. They’d certainly thought so at twenty, even before they’d learnt to see past how she presented herself and into who she was.
She also looked suspicious as fuck today, but that was all part of the plan in order to detract attention from Oasis themselves who was supposed to be doing the actual robbing.
Richard moved as if he was about to turn to see what Oasis was looking at, and they panicked and blurted out a “Right! You’re absolutely right, of course!” without even remembering what they’d been talking about in the first place.
“Well of course I am!” said Richard, looking pleased. “The league can’t just go about sending people NDAs all the time -”
He kept going, but Oasis tuned him out, busy trying to will Karry into looking at them. She paused in the middle of the room next to the massive dinosaur and did turn around, sweeping her gaze over the exhibits as if uncertain which one to tackle first. When her gaze landed on Oasis and Richard, she blinked.
They didn’t dare take their eyes off of the other superhero too long, but they gestured at them subtly with the hand hanging by their side and glanced back at her quickly, trying to convey that they should abort the plan.
Katarina’s face split into a broad grin. She wiggled her own fingers at them, blew a kiss, and walked away into the depths of the museum. Oasis swallowed. Shit. The plan was still on.
Karry and Oasis had planned this as carefully as they could.
After about an hour of back and forth in Karry apartment on Saturday, they had finally thought to look up if there was such as thing as a virtual tour of the museum on the Internet. They’d spent another two hours carefully touring room after room on the Google map-esque website and taking careful notes, and realized that everything that they needed was already in the museum.
Well, aside from magic, but Karry could and would gladly provide that for them.
Technically, the museum was protected against magic. But Katarina wasn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill magic user, and Oasis doubted that any security in Toronto was prepared to face something like her. All of the super villain-ing that she had been doing in the past year and a half was a laughable sample of her powers, and those powers worked unlike that of any human wizard. No one in this time past knew about what she could truly do, aside from Oasis. Shielding against her spells was almost impossible, not when she truly got going.
All of which meant that all Karry had to do to completely overwhelm all of the museum’s magical security system was walk up to a particularly rare and precious exhibit, and emit a blast of power.
The first alarm that tripped didn’t make a sound, but both of the security guards at the door tensed, and brought a hand to their belt where the tinny, panicky voice of their colleagues could already be heard coming from their radio.
Oasis shifted their weight nervously. Richard’s family had rejoined them now, and Oasis hadn’t been able to come up with a way to politely slip away. Their brain was working overtime, but seemed stuck on the ‘stupid’ setting. Their sweaty hands clenched and unclenched on the strap of their purse while they pretended to laugh at a joke they had barely heard.
Over their head, they knew, the cameras were still rolling.
“- and how about you, kid, anything new in your life? Perhaps… someone new?” asked Richard with a grin an a wink, and Oasis’ attention snapped back into the conversation fast enough to give themselves whiplash.
“Hum, I mean… no. Not really.”
Richard tilted his head, his grin turning sharper like a hound on a scent. His wife good-naturelly rolled her eyes, and turned her attention to preventing her younger son from putting his hands all over the exhibits.
“That didn’t sound very convincing. Is it, as the kids say, ‘complicated’?”
Oasis shifted nervously, all of their nerves still attuned to the silent alarm they could imagine was spreading panic through the building as of this very moment.
“I don’t really know what to say,” they replied faintly, having no idea why Richard suddenly gave a damn all of a sudden. “I thought that there might be someone, but I blew it. Or they blew it. Anyway, it blew,” they tried to explain, as honestly as they could without mentioning the words “my ex-wife” or “time-travel.” The less Richard and the league knew about the future, the better. Knowing them, they would all try to jump in and help, and there would be too many hands on the wheel blurring the timeline for Oasis to be able to do anything to fix it.
“Ah,” sighed Richard, “Young love. I understand perfectly.”
Oasis seriously doubted that. There was nothing in their life that Richard could relate to or understand, and to be honest they were more than a bit confused that this conversation had already lasted as long as it had.
“Still,” the older man continued, looking toward his wife (who was, undoubtedly, charming, even though she tended to fade in the background next to her husband’s larger-than-life exuberance) with an absent-minded smile, “It’s good to settle down. Have a family, children…”
As much as Oasis didn’t want to spend any more time than necessary talking to Richard, especially in the middle of doing something exceptionally illegal, something in his tone caught their attention. He almost sounded… morose, something that they would have never expected could be in his repertoire of emotions.
“Is something… wrong?” they asked, grimacing internally. Now was not the time!
A strange look passed over Richard’s face, but it was gone in an instant. “Nah,” he said, waving a hand. “It’s nothing. We just thought the family might get bigger for a little while there, but I suppose that wasn’t to be.”
A strained silence fell over them then, and they both sort of stewed in it for a moment, as they both realized at the same time that they were not really close enough to share that sort of conversation, but also both arriving at the independent realization that perhaps neither of them were close enough to anyone to share that sort of conversation, really. It’s what happened when you were a superhero; you always defaulted to feeling more understood by your peers, even if they were peers you almost never met and definitely had nothing in common with. Oasis had had to fight all their life to remain close to their many cousins. They had been life savers, every last one of them, after their divorce, but even though they’d been supportive, none of them could quite understand the intricacies of the superhero life and the reasons that had eventually pushed their wife to leave. Even Alice, who had remained their closest confidante for thirty years, hadn’t quite known what to say to them at the time. And she definitely didn’t seem to know what to make of them now.
A second blast of power finally made the alarms scream, which meant that Karry had almost certainly broken something. Richard straightened up immediately, his head swivelling to look around at the commotion.
Then a third and final blast silenced the wailing, and well as the light, the a/c, and (presumably) the cameras. Oasis didn’t know how and when Karry had learnt how to put out an EMP blast, but they hoped that it had fried whatever generators the museum had for their security systems. They really, really didn’t want the cameras to record what was about to happen next.
They started to move, but a heavy hand landed on their shoulder, keeping them in place. Their heart jumped up in their throat, but Richard wasn’t looking at them, instead pointing at his wife who had gathered her children around her protectively.
“Honey, take the children outside! Stay safe. Oasis and I will go see what’s up.”
“Yeah,” they chimed in, the panic in their brain finally parting like heavenly clouds to show them the solution to their dilemma. They pointed away from where they knew the necklace was located. “You check the exhibits on this side and I’ll do the others!”
The other hero agreed and they quickly parted ways.
Most of the tourists in the dinosaur exhibit were panicking, heading en masse toward the exit. Oasis shouldered their way against the flow of bodies toward the room they’d cased out on the virtual tour.
As expected, just on the left of the doors leading to the early medieval exhibit, was a large glass cabinet containing a fire hose and a big red extinguisher. Oasis pulled the sleeves of their hoodie over their hands, then yanked the door open and grabbed the extinguisher. They didn’t know if an alarm was supposed to sound out when the glass door of the cabinet was open, but if it did, then whatever Karry’s magic had done to the electrical system had fried it.
They quickly made their way to where the necklace was laid out. They had to squint in the darkness, as even the emergency lights seemed to have been affected by whatever Karry did, and the museum didn’t have nearly enough windows to illuminate it’s large interior.
They reached a large glass display, containing several jewelry and clothing items that had supposedly belonged to some European princess or another. Karry had huffed loudly at that, but had confirmed to them that the ancient-looking silver necklace with a large ruby laid out at the centre of several twisting wires inscribed with mysterious runes was indeed hers. Oasis didn’t waste any time admiring the other objects in the collection and slammed the butt of the extinguisher violently into the glass.
They’d sort of expected it to take several tries, picturing thick bullet-proof glass to protect the exhibits just like in the movies, but the entire thing shattered pretty easily. They tossed the extinguisher aside and plunged their hand inside of the ruined display to grab the necklace.
As soon as their hand closed on it, a strange feeling ran up their arm even through the thick fleece of their sleeve. It felt like the sudden, heart-stopping shock of plunging head first into cold water, before your body can properly comprehend the chill.
They cursed and pulled the necklace out. Without wasting any more time they stuffed it into their front pocket before running back out the way they’d come.
Comments (0)
See all