A Normil Day

Armand Cole

Extraordinaries have weaknesses. Always.

For the most powerful heroes, this almost always comes in the form of a substance or energy that dramatically disables them. The stronger they are, the worse the effect.

Guardian's weakness is called centrone radiation (which shouldn't exist, but by now, you're sick of me going on about that). It has to do with time travel; reasonable, by the new rules, since he was sent backwards in time to save Earth's future. Adam Stitch is weak against electricity. Sometimes the weakness is obvious; fire-slingers being vulnerable to cold, ice-users vulnerable to heat. Or perhaps it's some cost to using their power, some side effect, or something like only being able to cast spells after sunset. A limiting factor.

Ask the man on the street and he'll say there's one exception to that. Sigil. Sigil breaks all the rules.

Part of that is because I'm not like other Extraordinaries. For a split second, back when I died, I was the pivot point that the whole world turned on. I attempted something forbidden, to save humanity, and there were side effects. Concepts from my psyche, cultural detritus and familiar stories, leaked onto the raw fabric of the universe. There are side effects for me, too. I'm knit into reality. The laws of physics are like my limbs.

But the other factor is that I hide my vulnerabilities well. Sigil has a time limit. Three minutes, to the second, and then I fall into the Beneath, to resurface in the real world at the stroke of true midnight. (Magic has no truck with Daylight Savings time.) There are vanishingly few people I can communicate with, and I must have an invitation before fusing.

Also—worse, as far as I'm concerned—I'm not Sigil. Not exactly. Sigil is an amalgam of myself and whoever I empower.

Three years ago, in a small (shouldn't exist) country called Orskavia, there was a mad prince with a flying fortress. And in the fortress's dungeon there was a woman, starving and weak and near death. She thought the young American-accented man was just a figment of her imagination, but she was well past caring. She talked to him. She invited him in.

You all know what happened next. Sigil manifested. Right in front of the fortress that held the monster that had killed his (her) children.

He made it go away. It, and all the people on board. Soldiers, prisoners, Prince Rath's mistresses, cooks, janitors, technicians. In an instant, without even a gesture.

For a while, I swore I would never fuse again. But then someone's bleeding, and dying, and masonry is crushing hundreds as a villain takes out his rage on a city, and—and I don't know how not to.

Sigil might have just one more vulnerability, a tiny chink fit for a stiletto, but like everything else, there's a price for exploiting it. You see, Sigil has a purely human body; it's just protected by the power of the cosmos. If someone were to attack him, near-instantaneously, with something he can't perceive—like, for instance, a high-velocity sniper round, right through the head—

Well. You get the picture.

The price is that you'd be killing the host, too. Someone who might not have acted on any of their darker impulses if a certain ghost had the sense to stay the hell out of their mind.

If it ever comes up, I hope that whoever has the rifle is more cold and ethical than I am. Because I couldn't do it.

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Author's Note: perhaps a bit of an infodump, but Extraordinary weaknesses are going to become pretty relevant in a few chapters—and also, of course, there's some character stuff.  The action will pick back up in a little while.

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