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Description

One might imagine that MI6 offices are darkened rooms, full of suited men who are lit only by the glare of five monitors, each with a different camera feed. All in a secret bunker next to an abandoned subway.

Actually, Agent Courtney Birch sat is a well-lit office block, guarded from the rest of the Home Office by only a single thin wall with a security locked door. The only thing about the Office for Metahuman Affairs which would matched the stereotype was that her chair was flanked by four different monitors. To be fair, though, one of them was just her email inbox.

The other two chairs were occupied by Simpson, his monitors full of satellite feeds of remote parts of England, and Brown, who was looking through SIMS (Supervillain Information Management System) and cross-referencing to immigration and national insurance records.

Her own screens were full of a news report and two different police databases. She was looking for the Chloromancer villain Belladonna. She had a hunch that the plant-controller was the best explanation for the fact she hadn't had a regular update from Vine in over a week.

The hunch might have been based on the two months she spent with Vine serving as Belladonna's maid-cum-double agent. It had taken her almost a year to get her clearance reinstated and put back in charge of the OMA after that.

She leaned back as far as her chair would go, her hands running angrily through her brunette hair, pulling out a few strands. This was the fifth false alarm running a search for chemicals on the crime data. Who knew that there was a new legal high that was almost identical to pollen chemically? Okay, it was probably worth putting in a note to revisit that next week, it did sound like something for the team to look into.

But it didn't get her any close to finding Naz.

As she left her desk to put the kettle on, she did wonder if she was doing the right thing. If the Office really wanted to be of maximum value there was a strong argument they should be trying to make better contact with Exponential Girl. Or maybe Congregation. Even Jarl would be a good shout for someone to have on retainer. They were all more powerful than Vine, they could serve the country better on government payroll.

But Naz was still her friend. And she justified it because Naz's disappearances had a very strong tendency to be due to some form of mind control (which is why she wasn't actually allowed to share any sensitive intel, Courtney simply pointed her in the right direction when needed). If they found Naz, they would probably be able to take a villain into custody. Maybe one which would get her back in the higher-ups' good books, and give her team more than the minimum resource they were working with.

Seriously. Two people? For the country's entire superhuman co-ordination team!?

She returned to the Office, herbal tea in hand, to see Simpson's hulking body, huge in every dimension, looking over her desk.

"Boss, I-"

"Ma'am"

"Sorry, Ma'am, I've found Vine's house."

"Well don't just stand there, show me!"

Courtney sprinted the whole two yards over piled up paper and stationery to Simpson's desk. On one screen was a map of the UK, with a little box over a seemingly random bit of Bedfordshite countryside. Another showed the aerial view of a cottage half a mile from the nearest road, with two greenhouses next to it. A third screen showed close up images.

"I sent a drone there while you were gone. It's definitely her."

It definitely was. She felt her face heat up just to see it. Through the small window, the drone had captured an image of Vine, her long black hair unbound and messy, framing her face with her lips wide open in an 'o'. Pointing at the crotch of a mediterranean-looking man.

"You have more pictures of the guy for ID, right Simpson?"

"Yeah bo- Yes, Ma'am!"

Simpson's big fingers stabbed at the keyboard, and she heard an email notification from her own desk.

"Okay, Simpson, head down to Whitehall and look for passport records matching his face." She turned to the small, dark-haired woman who was too absorbed in her beloved information system to even be listening to this important new info. "Brown, see if you can find anything in the passenger records matching this face!" Her own hand gestured at the screen, and the younger woman finally turned to look - and blushed harder than Courtney had.

"Y-y-yes Ma'am... Gladly!"

Courtney remembered what her first temptation had been when she saw the man. Something that was still suspiciously niggling at the back of her mind.

"And stay focused. No... no stress relief." She said with as much implication as possible. "He's obviously Powered, and we don't know what'll happen if we... you know... even with an image."

Brown had turned back to her screens, her hair pulled against the sides of her face to hide as much as possible. "U-understood, Ma'am."

Courtney squinted her eyes as she loaded up the picture Simpson had send over to her computer. She didn't want to take any chances after previous experiences with villains that had Naz acting in that way. But once she had made sure her gaze never focused on the villain's visage, her short, thin fingers easily danced over her keyboard, setting up a database lookup that would identify the perp.

Simpson had already returned from the Immigration office before the lookup was complete, but she had found him in the end.

Incubus, a South European villain they had only a bare-bones file about from Interpol. Seemed to be most active in Sardinia.

So why was his flight from Oslo? And his passport called him the very-not-Latin name Friedrich Winnecke?

The passport seemed far too good a fake for this to be a lone actor. So the obvious conclusion was that he was acting on somebody else's behalf. She left that with Simpson to investigate - finding who brought the villain to her turf could wait until she had got Naz out of her situation.

"Brown, who do you think we should send after this guy?"

The small brunette span her chair around, and excited grin on her face. "Well... Edifice seems perfect for this sort of mission. But..."

Courtney allowed herself a small grin as she nodded. "Obviously not him."

"Obviously." Brown's thin face contorted in concentration. She loved to fangirl over the supers the Office worked with, but she also clearly wanted to make a good contribution. "Ermm... Fungus probably wouldn't work well with Vine, if my taxonomy lectures meant anything."

Courtney frowned, not really understanding the science side of things. "How about Congregation? She might be able to get Vine out, at least."

Brown nodded, but then after her lip became a flat line, she shook her head. "No... Think about it. The name, Incubus. The picture. I... I don't think we should send a woman." Courtney shrugged, accepting the younger agent's reasoning. Then the girl spoke up again. "But, Incubus... How about Smite, then?"

Courtney smiled at that. Oh, it would be fun to send the knight in shining armour to rescue Naz. And she imagined her friend would have an entertaining conversation with the stick-in-the-mud that was Vincent Hammond-Drake.

With that phone call (on a landline of course), she decided the day's work was done. Through her commute she wondered whether she should tell Naz who sent the persistent warrior to save her, or if it would feel better reveling in the knowledge she did it without even the plant heroine knowing.

Without having answered that question, she arrived back at her one-story house in the suburbs. She put the oven on to roast some potatoes and the chicken left from the night before. She texted Matt, but he was busy. So she took out her meal, prepared her plate, and popped on Netflix as she flopped into the sofa.

The next morning, her desk greeted her with a 10 centimetre thick stack of paperwork from Sergi on the overnight team. All she could think was that Sergi was lucky they were friends, otherwise people would've been suffering for this.

She sighed loud enough as she leaned back in her chair that Simpson had to ask if she was okay. She punished him by sending him to make her tea. Then she looked at the stack.

"Simpson!! Why didn't you tell me about this!?"

The big man shrugged. "You were going to see it anyway, thought it'd be better if you had a cuppa first."

Courtney bristled. She wasn't sure if that was from compassion or self-preservation, but he was right. She took a deep breath before looking at the report again. Inquisitor was sighted in the UK again. Murray's projection had him heading towards London. Just as they'd put Smite up in a safe house 50 miles away.

Either she had horrible luck, or someone had predicted that move. Both seemed plausible. Luckily, London still had an ace up its sleeve. She scrambled through her desk until she found the right burner mobile, then dialled right away. That way, Mystic would know it was an emergency.

One Prediction later, and Courtney had sent Mystic to find Kinesis, than take care of the problem. Brown had asked to go along to the scene. It wouldn't be dangerous, the two superhumans were the best the city had to offer, and even Stromburn wasn't a match for them. But even so, there was something going on behind the scenes, here. So it was Courtney who was squished against the doors of a sweltering Northern line train.

When she arrived at the Square, the fun was already over. She flashed her ID at the police who were shuffling away gawkers and setting up a yellow-tape perimeter, and found a short, dreadlocked woman in a purple cape looking curiously at a shard of metal.

"Birch." The Mystic's lofty voice sounded in her mind.

Courtney replied out loud. "Come on, you don't need to do that."

"Perhaps we do, you know as well as I you were caught off guard. What neither of us know is what ears are listening in on us. So we talk on the plane of thought." The words vibrated again in Courtney's skull.

Unpleasant as it was, Courtney relented. Mystic was impossible to argue with. One of the many reasons she hated working with the woman. One of the other reasons was the fact they were surrounded by shrapnel instead of by police holding a pale man bound in some magical force. You know, the sort of thing you expect when you send a mage to subdue a villain.

"Where's the perp, then?"

"Sorry." Mystic's voice was not sorry. "I used a binding rune, but then when Sogo punched him, it reacted badly." The woman gestured at the debris. Courtney wasn't sure if she was annoyed at the blatant lie, or grateful that she at least thought of an excuse. "Don't worry about the boy, though. I've put him in a trance so he won't remember the explosion. Wouldn't one to ruin the poor little thing."

That 'poor little thing' was a muscular man who felt twice Courtney's size when they squared up. But he was now curled up on a nearby patch of grass looking like some sort of ridiculous huge baby. "Thanks, Mystic." Courtney thought with a sigh, as she went to examine Kinesis, and the destruction around him.

She'd seen enough footage of the metal-winged menace to know that the Inquisitor's wings were black, with power cores which glowed a sickly green.

But the metal sticking out of the grass was silver.

She sifted through the pieces until she found one with an industrial marking on it. "Polaris."

Another piece of what was becoming a very dangerous puzzle.

By the time she was back in the office, Brown already had three screens full of information on the company. A shell in Panama, she couldn't trace any of the apparent directors, and there was no clear link to any manufacturer. But it did fit perfectly.

"Both of you, go over to R and get him to send a single-0 agent or two to see what they can find in Panama. It'll be good practice."

Her two juniors nodded, and got to work on the Powerpoint they'd need to present the case for it. Courtney was sure they'd do well enough - R loved flexing MI6's strength in vulnerable developing countries. So she entered a trance of paperwork until day's end.

She arrived back in the suburbs, throwing a steak and some carrots and parsnips in the oven. She texted Matt for a while as they cooked, he couldn't come over, but she had a nice chat with him regardless. Once the food was ready, she threw herself into the sofa and popped on Bake Off.

The next day started with a few more fruitless hours of all three people in the Office looking into Winnecke and Polaris, and turning up nothing. Even Sergi's night team hadn't found anything.

The monotony quickly changed when her green burner mobile - the one she used for Naz - started to ring. An unknown number.

She motioned to Simpson for him to come over. He was observant enough to notice her being inducted over the phone, and strong enough that even if some dirty trick worked he could stop her from doing any harm. Confident that she was protected, she answered the call.

A harsh southern accent, clipped with impatience, greeted her on the other end of the line. "Hey. Vine told me this was a useful spook's number."

"You know Vine?"

"Yep. Viper, she might have mentioned me?"

She remembered Naz's slurring voice mentioning how it was 'sssso funny' she was friends with a snake-named heroine as her eyes were filled with a meta-powered snake's hypnotic colours and the two women were putting on a show for him. She blushed.

"Yes. Courtney Birch here. What's going on?"

"Just busted a drugs operation. But I had to fight down Hansoo to do it. Probably got some mind control drugs involved. So I thought I should call it in. Plus I think Hansoo needs medical attention. Gave her a pretty big dose of paralytic venom."

The only silver lining was that it might not have been linked to the last two days' incidents. She sent Simpson and Brown to liaise, she still needed to make it through all the paperwork which had come out of the Leicester Square battle - she hadn't even had chance to put together a convincing excuse for why they couldn't mind the Inquisitor's body!

Plus, now she had to move Viper's file over from the 'to see' register over to the 'allies' register. She took a quick look through the information they already had. Natasha Rhodes, a woman who could produce many biological poisons. More prone to vigilantism than anything, but also responsible for quite a few breakouts of heroines from mind-controlling villains. It would be good to have another strong-willed heroine for when Mystic was being too awkward.

Not that she got the sense that Viper would be any less tiring to deal with.

That sense was confirmed when their meeting consisted of registering her on a new burn phone. Not even a handshake. She watched the muscular blonde leave the safe house before turning to Brown and Simpson.

"What do you think of her?"

Simpson's shoulders bounced - a weight shifting which Courtney imagined would take some effort. "She seems like she's on our side. A bit of a bitch, though."

"Hey!" Brown scolded him with a light punch. "She probably just doesn't like people that much."

Courtney missed Vine. She was one of the only heroines who wasn't psychologically dysfunctional. Actually, did extreme vulnerability to hypnosis count as a dysfunction?

She was getting distracted. "Okay, kids. Thanks. I'm gonna need you to head back to the office and put together everything you know and can find on this drugs corp though."

The two saluted and 'Yes Ma'am'd, and Courtney headed home. She put the hob on to start on some stir fry and did a bit of dirty talk with Matt over the phone. By the end they (finally) booked a restaurant for Saturday. She giggled like a schoolgirl as she took her plate to the sofa to (finally) catch up on His Dark Materials.

The good news kept coming. Her desk greeted her with a ten page report on Lalande Pharmacuticals. She texted Simpson and Brown, thanking them for their hard work and making sure they wouldn't come in later. They deserved a day off. She sipped her tea as she rifled through the dossier. This week had been hell, but with those two holding up the Office, and Murray's research skills on the night team, she could see them solving this mystery.

Of course, given the week she was having, it wasn't even a surprise when sending both her staff on a day off turned out not to be the sort of good deed that goes unpunished.

This time it was a call from her Home Office contact, the police were reporting buildings falling apart in a suburb of Sheffield, apparently randomly.

Probably due to a metahuman.

She let out a long, performative sigh. Only to be reminded that now she was alone, no-one was going to make her tea just to shut her up. Lacking a better option, she threw herself into the investigation.

Using her MI6 login, she brought up images from multiple traffic camera across the city onto her screen.

It looked more impressive in real life than in a rushed description on the phone. She saw a house shake for a moment, then the east wall seemed to buckle in on itself. Then it burst outwards, the bricks that formed it forming a protruding lance. The lance vibrated a few more times, as if wriggling itself out of a bind, then shot out towards the east, its component parts hovering and orbiting around each other.

On other cameras, similar formations of swirling rocks moved northwest. Another directly south.

After some frantic searching, she found the correct visual. A few police had already seemingly just made it to the seen, and a small mass of people were gathering at what they assumed was a safe distance, phones out. Great, a lot of footage on this one she'd need to ask Sergi and Murray to track down and delete.

And in the middle of this street was a huge mass of brick, along with plaster dust and some hunks of concrete with rebar pipes sticking out. But there was a humanoid form visible in the centre of the mass. Some sort of gravity-based power, based on the behaviour of the rocks.

But Hansoo was already in psych rehab with Vine, so there was no hero nearby. She'd need someone with incredible strength...

Kinesis didn't return her call, and Mystic didn't either.

She checked with Congregation, who wasn't close by enough to be helpful.

She rubbed her knuckles against her temples. It would definitely blow the month's budget, but there was only one person in reach she could think of. She pulled out a blue-and-yellow burner phone, and speed-dialled Superia.

Only ten minutes later, their radar picked up something moving at speed across the North Sea. Enough speed, Courtney realised, for a human body to move across the water's surface without sinking. She laughed, Superia really was full of surprises. Before the police had even finished setting up their perimeter (a few rolls of yellow tape had now been added to the ever growing mass of stuff orbiting around the metahuman), a tall woman with broad shoulders and long, straight blonde hair leaped over a house and landed next to the mass.

Her huge thighs and calves clearly strained against the gravity's pull, her blue cape was almost pulled off. But she grabbed it with one hand (Courtney noticed the blue nail polish - stylish), as the other simply pulled away some of the bricks.

The man in the centre was thin, with long black hair matted with grease. His sunken eyes looked more like one of the villains after years in Tartarus Prison than those of someone with a real zeal to attack society.

An experiment, most likely.

Courtney was still finishing that thought when she saw him knocked to the ground by a single right hook from Superia. The mass of building parts fell on her, but mere seconds later her hand appeared out of the rubble, pulling it away and lifting her six foot body out. The man was in her arms, unconscious and badly bruised.

Superia would wring her for every last penny, but it was good to have someone who actually cared about capturing the villains. Alive as well.

She called the heroine to arrange a pickup point, then called T to get the interrogation unit ready.

Later, she'd have to get the money together, which promised to be a fun time. Maybe she could get Brown and Simpson to do it to 'help with their development'. Yeah, she liked the sound of that idea.

With Superia's incredible speed, the handover was done in the next half hour, but Courtney had to wait the rest of the day to get anything out of T. And all they had for now was that his codename was Asterism. But it was enough to work from.

Winnecke, Polaris, Lalande, Asterism. Too many events in one week to be a coincidence (way too many!).

Lacking any better ideas, she ran a simple online search on the terms.

Huh, they were all stars or things in Ursa Major or Ursa Minor.

Exactly the sort of hint some cocky supervillain would leave for her.

Bears, then?

Searching 'Bear' on SIMS predictably did not reveal anything.

But on a hunch, Courtney looked into a few specific groups. The best she found was that Stamford Industries had a bear mascot. It wouldn't convince anyone (except Brown who loved this sort of thing), but it was enough to work on.

Work on tomorrow, that is. She logged off with a sigh of triumph and headed home.

She opened the door, took off her coat and, as always, went through to the kitchen to pre-heat the oven. She turned to the living room, looking for her personal phone to contact Matt.

There was a man in her living room.

He was sat on the sofa, arms spread behind him in a way which somehow didn't look slovenly. Instead he just looked comfortable, in charge. The smirk on his attractive face made it seem like he was used to being in command of a situation. He stood up, brushing off and straightening his fitted suit.

Courtney was still gawking at him when he spoke, his accent was pronounced and practiced, his annunciation as smooth as a news reporter's. It was proper Queen's English, but Courtney detected a little hint of the North in his accent, and was sure it was on purpose. "Courtney. I truly admire your dedication to always getting home before 7pm. But it did make it rather a challenge to get here in time for you."

His baritone chuckle sent shivers down her spine. She couldn't keep the waver out of her voice. "I'll arrest you for trespassing if you don't leave right now." How had he known to come here. How had he known her name. Everyone outside her team knew her only as B, and even her team only knew her surname.

The devious smirk on his face became mock concern for a moment. "But if I left, I wouldn't be able to praise you for finding a link I was leaving hints for. And well before I ever expected it!" He clapped lightly, then tilted his head. "Oh, I see you're confused, dear. Well, I have a mole in your IT department, you see. She saw your search history, and forwarded me all the confidential details."

Courtney knew she shouldn't have hesitated for a single moment, but that revelation finally broke her out of her shocked stupour. Her hand went to her belt, and in one fluid motion she had pulled out her pistol, unlocked the safety, and pointed it at the knees of the intruder.

"You're going down, Hardrada" She snarled as (definitely not before) she fired her perfectly accurate shot, then twisted her hips slightly to send another bullet into his other knee with a bang that shook her eardrums.

Through the ringing in her ears, she heard him make a strangled noise of pain. But despite the blood flowing from both legs, he still smiled at her. Not the faux-polite sneer from before. It was a hungry smile, teeth bared. He said something, but she couldn't hear it. Then the muscles in his arms visibly twirled around under his sleeves. They bulged, ripping the white fabric of his shirt. Then the flesh on his face started visibly warping, his nose getting long and broad, then starting to merge with the skin of his chin. The same thing happened to his legs, muscles breaking out of the suit's confines, limbs getting visibly longer. Dark brown hair started to sprout all over his body.

And when a huge, humanoid bear stood before her and roared, she definitely noticed that there were no wounds on its legs.

Before she could take aim at his heart and finish it, a huge paw had swiped at her chest. She was against the wall of the kitchen the next second, her head and spine pounding with sudden pain.

She saw the huge creature stomp on her pistol, utterly destroying it. Through a pulsing red mist, she saw the creature morph back into Hardrada, his fairly-muscular (but nowhere near superhuman) body now fully on show.

The world faded to black for a moment, and then she was still up against the wall, still hurting in ten different places. But now she could barely breathe.

A huge furred arm held her against the wall, attached to the otherwise human form of the home invader.

She coughed out her question - the only thing she could ask. "Why not just kill me now?" She dreaded the answer. This would only be because he had a fate worse than death for her. And she knew his reputation. There were many, terrifying possibilities.

What she wasn't expecting, when her eyes finally focused, was to see his human hand playing with a mobile phone.

"You're more useful to me as an agent than as a corpse, that's all. Now just look here."

Suddenly the phone's screen was all she could see. And all it was filled was a single, colourful spiral.

Her head hurt so much. The soothing colours made it hurt a bit less. The constant movement burned itself into her eyes.

It started to tickle. Inside her eyes. Like it was coming out of her brain rather than signals sent to it. It was a weird feeling. Wrong. But it wasn't as bad as a splitting headache. Maybe she should embrace it. No... it was a symptom of... something.... hypnosis, that was it!

She had to resist it.

Courtney struggled to shut her eyes but it worked. Like wriggling out of the hands of Matt when he tickled her, the simultaneously pleasant and unpleasant feeling went away instantly.

But that meant now she could feel the crushing weight of a bear claw pushing into her chest. She could feel her head cloud as its oxygen supply dropped.

And automatically, without her willing it, her lungs tried to force more air into the body.

So she coughed. A pathetic little noise. A show that she couldn't resist, she was already too beaten up to fight back properly. She couldn't focus.

Well she could focus, actually.

On one thing.

The spiral her open eyes were now fixed on.

She tried to tell herself to shut them, but it didn't work. They simply wouldn't close.

And the tickling was even worse now. The spiral was faster, more colourful.

More powerful.

She couldn't take it. She couldn't stop it. She couldn't push the source of the tickling away. She could only laugh like an idiot.

And even when she laughed it was unbearable, but it still felt good. Giggling uncontrollably would make anyone feel good in any circumstance.

As the endorphins rushed through her brain, dulling the pain even more even as the tickling got even worse, she realised there was only one way out of this. She tried to shake her head, to deny it. But her eyes remained locked on to the spiral.

It was unbearable.

But she was a servant of the Crown. She wouldn't give in to a tickle.

That's the point of tickling though, isn't it? It's irresistible.

Yeah, irresistible.

Courtney hadn't been able to resist the last few times this happened.

She wouldn't now.

She stopped even trying.

She let her mind break. She let the tickling sensation explode throughout her body.

Everything went white.

The last thing she saw was the spiral turn off, and her own blank expression reflected in the screen.

Courtney blinked a couple of times, roused by her phone.

It was Matt, texting again after what seemed to be a two hour gap.

She must have dozed off. She didn't even remember putting on her pyjamas. She stifled a long yawn before calling him back to apologise and chat.

The next day, Courtney threw herself into her desk like always, giving the same sigh as always to signal Simpson to get her a coffee.

She stared at the screen as it loaded. She'd love to find more on her hunch about the link between Asterism and Mesmer Inc. It made so much sense. Instinctively, anyway. Maybe it was even part of the same conspiracy as whoever brought Incubus and the Inquisitor to her country.

She set Brown on it all day while Simpson finished off the Viper file and put together a new one of the Asterism bloke.

But seven hours later neither she nor the younger woman had found any good links. She sighed again.

"God, I give up. Simpson, do you have any ideas what could link this week's incidents?"

He smiled his deceptively stupid looking smile. "Sorry boss, nothing from me either."

"Ma'am" She corrected him with a mock stern grin.

"Nothing from me either, Ma'am." Simpson laughed.

Oh well, she supposed the team would have to treat them as a weird string of isolated incidents. At least there was none this last day.

She stretched and started to pack up for home. Courtney Birch simply settled back into her routine, no new connections made.

-----

So this one got away from me length-wise. It's hard to capture a montage sort of feel with the written word! Didn't help that I was trying to cram in worldbuilding details into each little skit ^^'

So yeah, even though the Spectrum arc is still going on, this is the start of a proper story arc for Vine and co.! I've thought of this story as the opening scene of a movie, so hopefully it has some of that energy in it ^_^

Description

One might imagine that MI6 offices are darkened rooms, full of suited men who are lit only by the glare of five monitors, each with a different camera feed. All in a secret bunker next to an abandoned subway.

Actually, Agent Courtney Birch sat is a well-lit office block, guarded from the rest of the Home Office by only a single thin wall with a security locked door. The only thing about the Office for Metahuman Affairs which would matched the stereotype was that her chair was flanked by four different monitors. To be fair, though, one of them was just her email inbox.

The other two chairs were occupied by Simpson, his monitors full of satellite feeds of remote parts of England, and Brown, who was looking through SIMS (Supervillain Information Management System) and cross-referencing to immigration and national insurance records.

Her own screens were full of a news report and two different police databases. She was looking for the Chloromancer villain Belladonna. She had a hunch that the plant-controller was the best explanation for the fact she hadn't had a regular update from Vine in over a week.

The hunch might have been based on the two months she spent with Vine serving as Belladonna's maid-cum-double agent. It had taken her almost a year to get her clearance reinstated and put back in charge of the OMA after that.

She leaned back as far as her chair would go, her hands running angrily through her brunette hair, pulling out a few strands. This was the fifth false alarm running a search for chemicals on the crime data. Who knew that there was a new legal high that was almost identical to pollen chemically? Okay, it was probably worth putting in a note to revisit that next week, it did sound like something for the team to look into.

But it didn't get her any close to finding Naz.

As she left her desk to put the kettle on, she did wonder if she was doing the right thing. If the Office really wanted to be of maximum value there was a strong argument they should be trying to make better contact with Exponential Girl. Or maybe Congregation. Even Jarl would be a good shout for someone to have on retainer. They were all more powerful than Vine, they could serve the country better on government payroll.

But Naz was still her friend. And she justified it because Naz's disappearances had a very strong tendency to be due to some form of mind control (which is why she wasn't actually allowed to share any sensitive intel, Courtney simply pointed her in the right direction when needed). If they found Naz, they would probably be able to take a villain into custody. Maybe one which would get her back in the higher-ups' good books, and give her team more than the minimum resource they were working with.

Seriously. Two people? For the country's entire superhuman co-ordination team!?

She returned to the Office, herbal tea in hand, to see Simpson's hulking body, huge in every dimension, looking over her desk.

"Boss, I-"

"Ma'am"

"Sorry, Ma'am, I've found Vine's house."

"Well don't just stand there, show me!"

Courtney sprinted the whole two yards over piled up paper and stationery to Simpson's desk. On one screen was a map of the UK, with a little box over a seemingly random bit of Bedfordshite countryside. Another showed the aerial view of a cottage half a mile from the nearest road, with two greenhouses next to it. A third screen showed close up images.

"I sent a drone there while you were gone. It's definitely her."

It definitely was. She felt her face heat up just to see it. Through the small window, the drone had captured an image of Vine, her long black hair unbound and messy, framing her face with her lips wide open in an 'o'. Pointing at the crotch of a mediterranean-looking man.

"You have more pictures of the guy for ID, right Simpson?"

"Yeah bo- Yes, Ma'am!"

Simpson's big fingers stabbed at the keyboard, and she heard an email notification from her own desk.

"Okay, Simpson, head down to Whitehall and look for passport records matching his face." She turned to the small, dark-haired woman who was too absorbed in her beloved information system to even be listening to this important new info. "Brown, see if you can find anything in the passenger records matching this face!" Her own hand gestured at the screen, and the younger woman finally turned to look - and blushed harder than Courtney had.

"Y-y-yes Ma'am... Gladly!"

Courtney remembered what her first temptation had been when she saw the man. Something that was still suspiciously niggling at the back of her mind.

"And stay focused. No... no stress relief." She said with as much implication as possible. "He's obviously Powered, and we don't know what'll happen if we... you know... even with an image."

Brown had turned back to her screens, her hair pulled against the sides of her face to hide as much as possible. "U-understood, Ma'am."

Courtney squinted her eyes as she loaded up the picture Simpson had send over to her computer. She didn't want to take any chances after previous experiences with villains that had Naz acting in that way. But once she had made sure her gaze never focused on the villain's visage, her short, thin fingers easily danced over her keyboard, setting up a database lookup that would identify the perp.

Simpson had already returned from the Immigration office before the lookup was complete, but she had found him in the end.

Incubus, a South European villain they had only a bare-bones file about from Interpol. Seemed to be most active in Sardinia.

So why was his flight from Oslo? And his passport called him the very-not-Latin name Friedrich Winnecke?

The passport seemed far too good a fake for this to be a lone actor. So the obvious conclusion was that he was acting on somebody else's behalf. She left that with Simpson to investigate - finding who brought the villain to her turf could wait until she had got Naz out of her situation.

"Brown, who do you think we should send after this guy?"

The small brunette span her chair around, and excited grin on her face. "Well... Edifice seems perfect for this sort of mission. But..."

Courtney allowed herself a small grin as she nodded. "Obviously not him."

"Obviously." Brown's thin face contorted in concentration. She loved to fangirl over the supers the Office worked with, but she also clearly wanted to make a good contribution. "Ermm... Fungus probably wouldn't work well with Vine, if my taxonomy lectures meant anything."

Courtney frowned, not really understanding the science side of things. "How about Congregation? She might be able to get Vine out, at least."

Brown nodded, but then after her lip became a flat line, she shook her head. "No... Think about it. The name, Incubus. The picture. I... I don't think we should send a woman." Courtney shrugged, accepting the younger agent's reasoning. Then the girl spoke up again. "But, Incubus... How about Smite, then?"

Courtney smiled at that. Oh, it would be fun to send the knight in shining armour to rescue Naz. And she imagined her friend would have an entertaining conversation with the stick-in-the-mud that was Vincent Hammond-Drake.

With that phone call (on a landline of course), she decided the day's work was done. Through her commute she wondered whether she should tell Naz who sent the persistent warrior to save her, or if it would feel better reveling in the knowledge she did it without even the plant heroine knowing.

Without having answered that question, she arrived back at her one-story house in the suburbs. She put the oven on to roast some potatoes and the chicken left from the night before. She texted Matt, but he was busy. So she took out her meal, prepared her plate, and popped on Netflix as she flopped into the sofa.

The next morning, her desk greeted her with a 10 centimetre thick stack of paperwork from Sergi on the overnight team. All she could think was that Sergi was lucky they were friends, otherwise people would've been suffering for this.

She sighed loud enough as she leaned back in her chair that Simpson had to ask if she was okay. She punished him by sending him to make her tea. Then she looked at the stack.

"Simpson!! Why didn't you tell me about this!?"

The big man shrugged. "You were going to see it anyway, thought it'd be better if you had a cuppa first."

Courtney bristled. She wasn't sure if that was from compassion or self-preservation, but he was right. She took a deep breath before looking at the report again. Inquisitor was sighted in the UK again. Murray's projection had him heading towards London. Just as they'd put Smite up in a safe house 50 miles away.

Either she had horrible luck, or someone had predicted that move. Both seemed plausible. Luckily, London still had an ace up its sleeve. She scrambled through her desk until she found the right burner mobile, then dialled right away. That way, Mystic would know it was an emergency.

One Prediction later, and Courtney had sent Mystic to find Kinesis, than take care of the problem. Brown had asked to go along to the scene. It wouldn't be dangerous, the two superhumans were the best the city had to offer, and even Stromburn wasn't a match for them. But even so, there was something going on behind the scenes, here. So it was Courtney who was squished against the doors of a sweltering Northern line train.

When she arrived at the Square, the fun was already over. She flashed her ID at the police who were shuffling away gawkers and setting up a yellow-tape perimeter, and found a short, dreadlocked woman in a purple cape looking curiously at a shard of metal.

"Birch." The Mystic's lofty voice sounded in her mind.

Courtney replied out loud. "Come on, you don't need to do that."

"Perhaps we do, you know as well as I you were caught off guard. What neither of us know is what ears are listening in on us. So we talk on the plane of thought." The words vibrated again in Courtney's skull.

Unpleasant as it was, Courtney relented. Mystic was impossible to argue with. One of the many reasons she hated working with the woman. One of the other reasons was the fact they were surrounded by shrapnel instead of by police holding a pale man bound in some magical force. You know, the sort of thing you expect when you send a mage to subdue a villain.

"Where's the perp, then?"

"Sorry." Mystic's voice was not sorry. "I used a binding rune, but then when Sogo punched him, it reacted badly." The woman gestured at the debris. Courtney wasn't sure if she was annoyed at the blatant lie, or grateful that she at least thought of an excuse. "Don't worry about the boy, though. I've put him in a trance so he won't remember the explosion. Wouldn't one to ruin the poor little thing."

That 'poor little thing' was a muscular man who felt twice Courtney's size when they squared up. But he was now curled up on a nearby patch of grass looking like some sort of ridiculous huge baby. "Thanks, Mystic." Courtney thought with a sigh, as she went to examine Kinesis, and the destruction around him.

She'd seen enough footage of the metal-winged menace to know that the Inquisitor's wings were black, with power cores which glowed a sickly green.

But the metal sticking out of the grass was silver.

She sifted through the pieces until she found one with an industrial marking on it. "Polaris."

Another piece of what was becoming a very dangerous puzzle.

By the time she was back in the office, Brown already had three screens full of information on the company. A shell in Panama, she couldn't trace any of the apparent directors, and there was no clear link to any manufacturer. But it did fit perfectly.

"Both of you, go over to R and get him to send a single-0 agent or two to see what they can find in Panama. It'll be good practice."

Her two juniors nodded, and got to work on the Powerpoint they'd need to present the case for it. Courtney was sure they'd do well enough - R loved flexing MI6's strength in vulnerable developing countries. So she entered a trance of paperwork until day's end.

She arrived back in the suburbs, throwing a steak and some carrots and parsnips in the oven. She texted Matt for a while as they cooked, he couldn't come over, but she had a nice chat with him regardless. Once the food was ready, she threw herself into the sofa and popped on Bake Off.

The next day started with a few more fruitless hours of all three people in the Office looking into Winnecke and Polaris, and turning up nothing. Even Sergi's night team hadn't found anything.

The monotony quickly changed when her green burner mobile - the one she used for Naz - started to ring. An unknown number.

She motioned to Simpson for him to come over. He was observant enough to notice her being inducted over the phone, and strong enough that even if some dirty trick worked he could stop her from doing any harm. Confident that she was protected, she answered the call.

A harsh southern accent, clipped with impatience, greeted her on the other end of the line. "Hey. Vine told me this was a useful spook's number."

"You know Vine?"

"Yep. Viper, she might have mentioned me?"

She remembered Naz's slurring voice mentioning how it was 'sssso funny' she was friends with a snake-named heroine as her eyes were filled with a meta-powered snake's hypnotic colours and the two women were putting on a show for him. She blushed.

"Yes. Courtney Birch here. What's going on?"

"Just busted a drugs operation. But I had to fight down Hansoo to do it. Probably got some mind control drugs involved. So I thought I should call it in. Plus I think Hansoo needs medical attention. Gave her a pretty big dose of paralytic venom."

The only silver lining was that it might not have been linked to the last two days' incidents. She sent Simpson and Brown to liaise, she still needed to make it through all the paperwork which had come out of the Leicester Square battle - she hadn't even had chance to put together a convincing excuse for why they couldn't mind the Inquisitor's body!

Plus, now she had to move Viper's file over from the 'to see' register over to the 'allies' register. She took a quick look through the information they already had. Natasha Rhodes, a woman who could produce many biological poisons. More prone to vigilantism than anything, but also responsible for quite a few breakouts of heroines from mind-controlling villains. It would be good to have another strong-willed heroine for when Mystic was being too awkward.

Not that she got the sense that Viper would be any less tiring to deal with.

That sense was confirmed when their meeting consisted of registering her on a new burn phone. Not even a handshake. She watched the muscular blonde leave the safe house before turning to Brown and Simpson.

"What do you think of her?"

Simpson's shoulders bounced - a weight shifting which Courtney imagined would take some effort. "She seems like she's on our side. A bit of a bitch, though."

"Hey!" Brown scolded him with a light punch. "She probably just doesn't like people that much."

Courtney missed Vine. She was one of the only heroines who wasn't psychologically dysfunctional. Actually, did extreme vulnerability to hypnosis count as a dysfunction?

She was getting distracted. "Okay, kids. Thanks. I'm gonna need you to head back to the office and put together everything you know and can find on this drugs corp though."

The two saluted and 'Yes Ma'am'd, and Courtney headed home. She put the hob on to start on some stir fry and did a bit of dirty talk with Matt over the phone. By the end they (finally) booked a restaurant for Saturday. She giggled like a schoolgirl as she took her plate to the sofa to (finally) catch up on His Dark Materials.

The good news kept coming. Her desk greeted her with a ten page report on Lalande Pharmacuticals. She texted Simpson and Brown, thanking them for their hard work and making sure they wouldn't come in later. They deserved a day off. She sipped her tea as she rifled through the dossier. This week had been hell, but with those two holding up the Office, and Murray's research skills on the night team, she could see them solving this mystery.

Of course, given the week she was having, it wasn't even a surprise when sending both her staff on a day off turned out not to be the sort of good deed that goes unpunished.

This time it was a call from her Home Office contact, the police were reporting buildings falling apart in a suburb of Sheffield, apparently randomly.

Probably due to a metahuman.

She let out a long, performative sigh. Only to be reminded that now she was alone, no-one was going to make her tea just to shut her up. Lacking a better option, she threw herself into the investigation.

Using her MI6 login, she brought up images from multiple traffic camera across the city onto her screen.

It looked more impressive in real life than in a rushed description on the phone. She saw a house shake for a moment, then the east wall seemed to buckle in on itself. Then it burst outwards, the bricks that formed it forming a protruding lance. The lance vibrated a few more times, as if wriggling itself out of a bind, then shot out towards the east, its component parts hovering and orbiting around each other.

On other cameras, similar formations of swirling rocks moved northwest. Another directly south.

After some frantic searching, she found the correct visual. A few police had already seemingly just made it to the seen, and a small mass of people were gathering at what they assumed was a safe distance, phones out. Great, a lot of footage on this one she'd need to ask Sergi and Murray to track down and delete.

And in the middle of this street was a huge mass of brick, along with plaster dust and some hunks of concrete with rebar pipes sticking out. But there was a humanoid form visible in the centre of the mass. Some sort of gravity-based power, based on the behaviour of the rocks.

But Hansoo was already in psych rehab with Vine, so there was no hero nearby. She'd need someone with incredible strength...

Kinesis didn't return her call, and Mystic didn't either.

She checked with Congregation, who wasn't close by enough to be helpful.

She rubbed her knuckles against her temples. It would definitely blow the month's budget, but there was only one person in reach she could think of. She pulled out a blue-and-yellow burner phone, and speed-dialled Superia.

Only ten minutes later, their radar picked up something moving at speed across the North Sea. Enough speed, Courtney realised, for a human body to move across the water's surface without sinking. She laughed, Superia really was full of surprises. Before the police had even finished setting up their perimeter (a few rolls of yellow tape had now been added to the ever growing mass of stuff orbiting around the metahuman), a tall woman with broad shoulders and long, straight blonde hair leaped over a house and landed next to the mass.

Her huge thighs and calves clearly strained against the gravity's pull, her blue cape was almost pulled off. But she grabbed it with one hand (Courtney noticed the blue nail polish - stylish), as the other simply pulled away some of the bricks.

The man in the centre was thin, with long black hair matted with grease. His sunken eyes looked more like one of the villains after years in Tartarus Prison than those of someone with a real zeal to attack society.

An experiment, most likely.

Courtney was still finishing that thought when she saw him knocked to the ground by a single right hook from Superia. The mass of building parts fell on her, but mere seconds later her hand appeared out of the rubble, pulling it away and lifting her six foot body out. The man was in her arms, unconscious and badly bruised.

Superia would wring her for every last penny, but it was good to have someone who actually cared about capturing the villains. Alive as well.

She called the heroine to arrange a pickup point, then called T to get the interrogation unit ready.

Later, she'd have to get the money together, which promised to be a fun time. Maybe she could get Brown and Simpson to do it to 'help with their development'. Yeah, she liked the sound of that idea.

With Superia's incredible speed, the handover was done in the next half hour, but Courtney had to wait the rest of the day to get anything out of T. And all they had for now was that his codename was Asterism. But it was enough to work from.

Winnecke, Polaris, Lalande, Asterism. Too many events in one week to be a coincidence (way too many!).

Lacking any better ideas, she ran a simple online search on the terms.

Huh, they were all stars or things in Ursa Major or Ursa Minor.

Exactly the sort of hint some cocky supervillain would leave for her.

Bears, then?

Searching 'Bear' on SIMS predictably did not reveal anything.

But on a hunch, Courtney looked into a few specific groups. The best she found was that Stamford Industries had a bear mascot. It wouldn't convince anyone (except Brown who loved this sort of thing), but it was enough to work on.

Work on tomorrow, that is. She logged off with a sigh of triumph and headed home.

She opened the door, took off her coat and, as always, went through to the kitchen to pre-heat the oven. She turned to the living room, looking for her personal phone to contact Matt.

There was a man in her living room.

He was sat on the sofa, arms spread behind him in a way which somehow didn't look slovenly. Instead he just looked comfortable, in charge. The smirk on his attractive face made it seem like he was used to being in command of a situation. He stood up, brushing off and straightening his fitted suit.

Courtney was still gawking at him when he spoke, his accent was pronounced and practiced, his annunciation as smooth as a news reporter's. It was proper Queen's English, but Courtney detected a little hint of the North in his accent, and was sure it was on purpose. "Courtney. I truly admire your dedication to always getting home before 7pm. But it did make it rather a challenge to get here in time for you."

His baritone chuckle sent shivers down her spine. She couldn't keep the waver out of her voice. "I'll arrest you for trespassing if you don't leave right now." How had he known to come here. How had he known her name. Everyone outside her team knew her only as B, and even her team only knew her surname.

The devious smirk on his face became mock concern for a moment. "But if I left, I wouldn't be able to praise you for finding a link I was leaving hints for. And well before I ever expected it!" He clapped lightly, then tilted his head. "Oh, I see you're confused, dear. Well, I have a mole in your IT department, you see. She saw your search history, and forwarded me all the confidential details."

Courtney knew she shouldn't have hesitated for a single moment, but that revelation finally broke her out of her shocked stupour. Her hand went to her belt, and in one fluid motion she had pulled out her pistol, unlocked the safety, and pointed it at the knees of the intruder.

"You're going down, Hardrada" She snarled as (definitely not before) she fired her perfectly accurate shot, then twisted her hips slightly to send another bullet into his other knee with a bang that shook her eardrums.

Through the ringing in her ears, she heard him make a strangled noise of pain. But despite the blood flowing from both legs, he still smiled at her. Not the faux-polite sneer from before. It was a hungry smile, teeth bared. He said something, but she couldn't hear it. Then the muscles in his arms visibly twirled around under his sleeves. They bulged, ripping the white fabric of his shirt. Then the flesh on his face started visibly warping, his nose getting long and broad, then starting to merge with the skin of his chin. The same thing happened to his legs, muscles breaking out of the suit's confines, limbs getting visibly longer. Dark brown hair started to sprout all over his body.

And when a huge, humanoid bear stood before her and roared, she definitely noticed that there were no wounds on its legs.

Before she could take aim at his heart and finish it, a huge paw had swiped at her chest. She was against the wall of the kitchen the next second, her head and spine pounding with sudden pain.

She saw the huge creature stomp on her pistol, utterly destroying it. Through a pulsing red mist, she saw the creature morph back into Hardrada, his fairly-muscular (but nowhere near superhuman) body now fully on show.

The world faded to black for a moment, and then she was still up against the wall, still hurting in ten different places. But now she could barely breathe.

A huge furred arm held her against the wall, attached to the otherwise human form of the home invader.

She coughed out her question - the only thing she could ask. "Why not just kill me now?" She dreaded the answer. This would only be because he had a fate worse than death for her. And she knew his reputation. There were many, terrifying possibilities.

What she wasn't expecting, when her eyes finally focused, was to see his human hand playing with a mobile phone.

"You're more useful to me as an agent than as a corpse, that's all. Now just look here."

Suddenly the phone's screen was all she could see. And all it was filled was a single, colourful spiral.

Her head hurt so much. The soothing colours made it hurt a bit less. The constant movement burned itself into her eyes.

It started to tickle. Inside her eyes. Like it was coming out of her brain rather than signals sent to it. It was a weird feeling. Wrong. But it wasn't as bad as a splitting headache. Maybe she should embrace it. No... it was a symptom of... something.... hypnosis, that was it!

She had to resist it.

Courtney struggled to shut her eyes but it worked. Like wriggling out of the hands of Matt when he tickled her, the simultaneously pleasant and unpleasant feeling went away instantly.

But that meant now she could feel the crushing weight of a bear claw pushing into her chest. She could feel her head cloud as its oxygen supply dropped.

And automatically, without her willing it, her lungs tried to force more air into the body.

So she coughed. A pathetic little noise. A show that she couldn't resist, she was already too beaten up to fight back properly. She couldn't focus.

Well she could focus, actually.

On one thing.

The spiral her open eyes were now fixed on.

She tried to tell herself to shut them, but it didn't work. They simply wouldn't close.

And the tickling was even worse now. The spiral was faster, more colourful.

More powerful.

She couldn't take it. She couldn't stop it. She couldn't push the source of the tickling away. She could only laugh like an idiot.

And even when she laughed it was unbearable, but it still felt good. Giggling uncontrollably would make anyone feel good in any circumstance.

As the endorphins rushed through her brain, dulling the pain even more even as the tickling got even worse, she realised there was only one way out of this. She tried to shake her head, to deny it. But her eyes remained locked on to the spiral.

It was unbearable.

But she was a servant of the Crown. She wouldn't give in to a tickle.

That's the point of tickling though, isn't it? It's irresistible.

Yeah, irresistible.

Courtney hadn't been able to resist the last few times this happened.

She wouldn't now.

She stopped even trying.

She let her mind break. She let the tickling sensation explode throughout her body.

Everything went white.

The last thing she saw was the spiral turn off, and her own blank expression reflected in the screen.

Courtney blinked a couple of times, roused by her phone.

It was Matt, texting again after what seemed to be a two hour gap.

She must have dozed off. She didn't even remember putting on her pyjamas. She stifled a long yawn before calling him back to apologise and chat.

The next day, Courtney threw herself into her desk like always, giving the same sigh as always to signal Simpson to get her a coffee.

She stared at the screen as it loaded. She'd love to find more on her hunch about the link between Asterism and Mesmer Inc. It made so much sense. Instinctively, anyway. Maybe it was even part of the same conspiracy as whoever brought Incubus and the Inquisitor to her country.

She set Brown on it all day while Simpson finished off the Viper file and put together a new one of the Asterism bloke.

But seven hours later neither she nor the younger woman had found any good links. She sighed again.

"God, I give up. Simpson, do you have any ideas what could link this week's incidents?"

He smiled his deceptively stupid looking smile. "Sorry boss, nothing from me either."

"Ma'am" She corrected him with a mock stern grin.

"Nothing from me either, Ma'am." Simpson laughed.

Oh well, she supposed the team would have to treat them as a weird string of isolated incidents. At least there was none this last day.

She stretched and started to pack up for home. Courtney Birch simply settled back into her routine, no new connections made.

-----

So this one got away from me length-wise. It's hard to capture a montage sort of feel with the written word! Didn't help that I was trying to cram in worldbuilding details into each little skit ^^'

So yeah, even though the Spectrum arc is still going on, this is the start of a proper story arc for Vine and co.! I've thought of this story as the opening scene of a movie, so hopefully it has some of that energy in it ^_^