October 4, 2022

The sheep-bear took a sip of her chai latte and checked her reflection in the nearby wall mirror, self-consciously smiling wide and smoothing out a wrinkle in her costume’s dusty rose scarf before she clicked to answer the incoming call from the reporter. A video window opened to show a petite snowy owl wearing a black tank top, sitting in a cluttered home office.

“Hi there! Glad we could finally connect,” the owl said airily. “Call me Frost, they/them. Professional name aside, it’s Madison, right?”

“Hi, Frost! I prefer Maddy, actually, and it’s she/they for me. Happy to chat! I was so thrilled when your editor got in touch; this’ll be my first interview with an actual queer outlet. The TV and the papers always ask the same questions, you know? ‘How did you end up following in your father’s footsteps?’ ‘What’s it like to be Toronto’s first trans superhero?’ How am I supposed to answer that? Heck, I don’t know, I’m just out here doing the professional Hero thing and transitioning at the same time.” She giggled in what she hoped was an endearing way, but worried might have come off as vapid.

Frost tilted their head sharply, smirking. “Okay! We can start there, sure! I’m sure you’ve been getting that question a lot, but I have to ask something; you get it, right? Your dad was Roger ‘Heartwood’ Oakes, the ‘Pride of Grande Prairie,’ a local independent superhero from 1991 until 1998, and then a government-backed PHL Hero with the Prairie League until his unfortunate passing in 2005. How do you think he would feel about where you’re at right now in your life? Would he be proud of your career as ‘Heartforce’?”

It was a slightly different angle than most interviewers had taken, and Maddy turned the question over in her mind, heart sinking just a bit. She considered, also, the value of being more honest than her usual answers to the cishet interviewers who saw her as a mild curiosity—or a spectacle. They took a deep breath.

“That’s… a good question, Frost. I’m sure he’d at least be proud of me for stepping up and wanting to do something good, once I started getting my powers. I don’t know how he would have taken the gender stuff, honestly? He was a guy from small-town Alberta. My mom took some time to come around, but now she’s a really dedicated ally. So I’d like to think he could have learned and grown and been supportive in his own way too, hopefully?”

“Of course,” the owl smiled. “By the way, you know you’re not the first trans Hero in town, right?”

The sheep-bear grimaced. “I mean, yes, Sunrise, technically she was briefly out before defecting to the Korps…”

“Well, sure, there’s her,” Frost said. “But that’s not even considering folks who were stealth, for all intents and purposes. I did some digging! Not a shock the morning shows didn’t, but I am a little bit disappointed the Star or the Globe and Mail couldn’t be bothered. Anyway, I found that there was a street-level superhero who went by ‘Roncy Red’ operating in the mid-to-late 60s, Polish-Canadian fox guy, minor speedster. He was found dead in a Country Style Donuts bathroom in 1970, of a heart attack.” They paused, gesturing vaguely with their hands and looking off into the distance while composing their next words. “…And of course it’s always a little problematic to use modern terminology for historical figures, but it turned out he was AFAB and had had top surgery—the reporting in the Telegram was super gross about it, actually, I’ll spare you the details but I’m sure you can imagine—and definitely lived as a man. Since his name and civilian identity were never known, I don’t feel bad about claiming him as transmasc, and the earliest trans Hero in Toronto?”

She perked up. “That’s cool? I didn’t realize; Ontario’s Heroes told me I was the first, not counting Sunrise, but I guess they might not have been counting unregistered supers either.”

The owl nodded. “Or they might not have a great grasp on queer history generally,” they said with a raised eyebrow. “Although given the way they treated Sunrise and distanced themselves from her, that’s not surprising. Or consider their own history, I mean; when the first Barrage died a few years ago, I remember it turned out he was a police detective in his civilian identity, and took part in Operation Soap—the bathhouse raids.”

Maddy wrinkled their black ursine nose. “That’s terrible. I’m glad that’s not happening any more, at least; I mean, I would never want to be on a team that’s still hurting that community like that.”

Frost looked slightly askance at them. “Mmmm. Now, speaking of police and Ontario’s Heroes—are you aware of Pride Toronto’s decision last week to ban Heroes from attending their events in costume?”

Maddy’s heart sank again. “…Wait, what?”

The owl looked to a handwritten notebook at their side, and shuffled through some printed pages before finding the right one. “Okay, one sec… here we go. The Annual General Meeting was last week. 85% of members voted to extend the ban on police attendance to include professional Heroes, on the basis that most operate as extensions of the police. Which is true, right? As an active member of the OH roster, you’re legally a provincially-delegated peace officer, and have the same powers as cops to investigate and arrest criminal suspects, in addition to your, uh, talents?”

Their eye twitched, and they hoped their outrage wasn’t obvious; the Hero took a deep breath before she replied. “I… well, that’s interesting, and that’s the board’s call, I suppose? I just think it’s disappointing to be painted with the same brush as bad cops, just because I’m trying to help people in my own way.”

It wasn’t as if she was actually a cop herself, she fumed silently, even if she happened to be allowed to arrest and detain suspects, under certain circumstances. Or because she had the legal powers to seize evidence, or commandeer civilian property, or… well, she was better than the cops, anyway. She’d never cause the harms they did, she was certain.

“Not the board, the membership,” Frost corrected, still looking down at the page. “The executive director and several board members spoke against the motion, actually, but the vote was 316-55 in favour.”

Maddy grimaced briefly before rallying with a forced smile. “I guess that just means I’ve got work to do, then! I’m a nonbinary trans lesbian, and I want to show everyone that there’s a place at the table for us serving the community. Superpowered queer and trans folks should be able to feel included as Heroes, just like everyone else—if we did, maybe the bad guys would have a harder time recruiting.”

“Is it just about recruiting, do you think? Last poll I saw, trust in and support for Heroes, registered superheroes, was still hovering around 30% among all self-identified LGBTQ2+ respondents. The other 70% clearly aren’t all anarchists and supervillain fans, right? It’s a role where you’re at least working in parallel with traditional law enforcement, a lot of the time.”

“I think,” they said, gathering their thoughts and suppressing the urge to huff with irritation, “That Heroes have historically not done a great job protecting everyone, and that has an effect on our reputations from those who’ve been ignored or excluded. That’s part of why I’m with OH; like I said, I want to change those attitudes.”

Frost nodded. “Speaking of which, Ontario’s Heroes recently announced that you’re their first ‘LGBTQ2+ Champion.’ Is that a position you wanted? Is that something that’s compatible with the other expectations of your job?”

“It wasn’t something that I expected, I’ll be honest! But I’ll tell you the same thing I told Director Hagen when he approached me about it—I’m honoured to be the first in that role, and hope I can be a resource for mutual education and respect between OH and the community.”

The two chatted on for another half-hour in much the same vein, touching on the Hero’s favourite pop culture touchstones (The Hunger Games and American Chopper); costuming thoughts (the OH tailors had suggested the bold reds and whites of her father’s gear, while she’d insisted on subtler shades of maroon and cerise, a concession grudgingly made to her ongoing desire to distance her Heroic persona from Dad’s); family (her homemaker/part-time dental clerk mom, varsity athlete little sister, and the grandfather and aunts and uncles and cousins she’d seen much less of in the years since moving to Ontario); and even some teasingly semi-scandalous inquiries about her taste in women (soft, femme, and forward). Eventually, the questioning trailed off, around the time she finished her latte.

“I think I have what I need for my piece,” Frost noted brightly as their eyes scanned up and down their screen. “Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?”

Maddy shook their head with an easy smile. “No, I’m good! It was great chatting with you; really just a breath of fresh air compared to some other outlets,” they chuckled.

The owl nodded. “Hey, happy to! I can give you a heads up when it’s all ready to post—mind if our social team tags you? It should be up in a week or two, hopefully, once my editor gets through with it.”

The sheep-bear enthusiastically agreed, said goodbye, and beamed to herself as she clicked off the video call. That went well, she thought, before pondering what to order for dinner.

October 17, 2022

On a Monday morning two weeks after the interview, Maddy stood near the centre of a cavernous hall deep beneath the Mississauga waterfront. Bright lights and corrugated steel panels alternated in a rough dome shape from the walls to the ceiling; the harsh glare concealed which of the clay target throwers and beam emitter cannons embedded in the walls were primed to fire at any given second.

The interview had gone live on the Xtra website on Friday. Her initial satisfaction had soured somewhat when it first became the target of the usual right-wing haters, but then, also, bitter criticism from within the queer community for her alleged naïveté and craven centrism; this was a deep, disappointed anger of a type that the previous puff pieces somehow hadn’t managed to incite. Unnerved, the Hero had locked down her social media accounts by Saturday morning, which at least spared her some degree of dogpiling when the pundits—Canadian and otherwise—began disingenuously parsing her words to write their fiery weekend columns. (There’d also been a handful of vilely transphobic rants about her from British newspapers on Sunday, which made her feel sick to even scan the headlines.) She’d spent the past twenty-four hours trying not to think about it, but repeatedly succumbing to the compulsion to read the comments and check her mentions.

At least while Maddy was only on-call—their standard duty shift on Mondays and Thursdays—the sheep-bear could distract themself and vent their frustrations by taking advantage of the gym and training facilities in the regional OH command base. Listening to the whirring in the machinery, they gently reached out with tendril-like fields of telekinetic force, probing for the telltale shifts in air pressure that would telegraph—

The program started. She’d cranked the difficulty, and immediately faced a barrage of orange discs hurled at her from a dozen different randomized angles. The sheep-bear flexed her fingers and swept her arms in great arcs behind her, mentally flicking away one projectile after another in a loose motion she always imagined as something like the inverse of fanning an old-fashioned revolver, while focusing her attention on finer detail work to a series of the targets approaching her face. For those, she mentally grasped one in mid-air with a careful, tai chi-like swoop—rolling to dodge the mock beam weapon blasts from the secondary targeting system, just then coming online—and used its own momentum to sling it around her like a discus, smashing it straight through a file of four others.

They panted, beginning to get winded, as they dove backwards. Another fan of beams lightly singed the shards scattered across the polished concrete floor; to evade them, Maddy telekinetically pushed up and back against the ground, bounding up several meters. With a final flourish, they reached out, froze several more of the clay targets in mid-air, evened out their respective altitudes, and let them fall to shatter in unison. The clock ran out, and a buzzer sounded. “Hostile evasion rate: 100%; target accuracy: 100%,” droned the scoring audio.

They landed on both feet, hunched in a defensive crouch, closing their eyes and grinning at the hot streak; this was the sixth perfect run of the morning. Suddenly they heard a scuffle behind them, and whipped their head around just in time to see a long-tailed brown blur pass by. The next thing they knew, Maddy’s knees gave out from underneath them, and they were flat on the floor, laying across a sprinkling of crumbled clay bits.

“Hey, kid,” the rat said, looming over the sheep-bear’s prone form despite his slight, slender build. “Gotta watch your six better! You never know who might be sneaking up,” he joylessly smirked as he chattered away. “You’re stronger than you let on, bud. Why do you stick to an evasive pattern that’s all reflexes, no muscle? Lemme guess, don’t want to look too butch, eh? Respect, respect. Anyway, I come bearing news! Bossman wants to see you. Like, now.”

It was Neal Salton, the team’s snickering twerp of an infiltration and stealth specialist, who operated under the callsign “Slider.” He irritated Maddy, not least because he insisted on always using they/them pronouns for the sheep-bear, and called her things like buddy and friendo and pally, as if he was auditioning for the role of a second-rate wiseguy in a direct-to-streaming gangster film. She closed her eyes and flexed her wrists slightly, concentrating for just a second until—

“Whoa! Shit,” Slider mumbled angrily as a wave of telekinetic force pushed a ballistic resin-cast floor plate up from beneath him, suddenly launching him backwards into the rear wall with a faint thud.

Maddy cocked an eyebrow as she picked herself up, and ran a hand through her dark hair to shake out the debris. “Yeah, Dad was a heavy; I’m not,” she snapped, patting off the orange dust streaking her white leather jacket. As she opened the door to head off for the executive wing, she looked back at the still-groaning rat and scowled. “Thanks for the advice, Neal, it was great sparring with you. Next time there’s one of those team-building retreats up in North Bay, let’s be sure to buddy up for the trust fall thing, huh?”

Ten minutes later, Maddy stood awkwardly in the office of Caleb Hagen—formerly the nigh-bulletproof Hero known as Canadian Shield, and since his retirement from the field years prior, the Queen’s Park-appointed head of Ontario’s Heroes. The Director was most frequently known amongst his subordinates for his episodes of unhinged rage against OH’s perceived nemeses; not just criminals or organized supervillains like the Korps, but also Aurora Squadron and Minister Simonds, protestors and activists, civil rights lawyers, or indeed any rival authority figures he felt intruded on his turf or bogged down “getting the job done” with rules and regulations.

Maddy didn’t care for Hagen, but had to admit that (unlike Slider, for one) he’d at least been… polite to them, for the most part, and he said some of the right things about having an “inclusive team that truly represents Ontario.” Sometimes. Usually when he was on camera at a press conference with his boss, the Solicitor General of Ontario, or with Lawrence Rockwell, head of the Provincial Heroes’ League. Like the press event the previous summer, where Maddy had been introduced as a new prospect on the developmental team, or the time earlier that year, when they’d been announced as a fully-fledged Hero with an OH callsign. In private, however, was another story.

It was for that reason that Maddy tried to avoid being alone with the Director. The anger in his eyes—to say nothing of the way he physically dominated spaces with his volatile energy—made the sheep-bear nervous. Being called on the carpet had their heart racing, even before Hagen spoke a word. It was necessary to restrain the impulse to take a defensive stance, and begin telekinetically bracing for attacks, despite how fundamentally absurd she knew that possibility to be.

The wolverine glared as his subordinate, eyes narrowed. His voice was steely with fury, his claws crabbed around a pencil held to his temple, and he seemed on the verge of exploding before the sheep-bear could say a word. “Heartforce, what in the fuck did you think you were doing, taking an interview like that without running it by Comms first?”

Maddy shrank into herself, but managed to squeak out a reply. “You—Comms—you and Martha told me I could talk to the media on my own now! We had that meeting last month…”

Hagen squeezed the pencil in his grip, snapping it in half. “The media, yes. Softballs from Breakfast Television or Chatelaine for Scarborough soccer moms, not…” he enunciated very carefully through gritted teeth, “…Political shit from your community’s gossip rags.”

“I mean, it’s the only real serious queer media outlet left in Canada, I wouldn’t call it a gossip rag—”

“I don’t care what you call it, Madison. I’m disappointed,” he muttered darkly. “Martha’s people are doing what they can to head off the more pointed inquiries, and we can probably have this blow over without a press conference, but you’re clearly not ready to be off the leash. I refuse to entertain another bloody Sunrise boondoggle; the last time was all I needed, thank you very fucking much. We’ve got to get ahead of this, get you some more face time in action, interviews with the friendly outlets; really ram you down the public’s throats. Plus, starting Monday, you’re leading GTA Team B in operations until I tell you otherwise.”

She didn’t understand. It might not have been the Guardians of Ontario, the prestigious and historic unit known internally as ‘Team A,’ but Task Force Toronto was still a respected Hero group; being given more responsibility didn’t sound like a punishment. “...Sir? What about Lightbox? Where’s he going?”

“Nowhere.” He raised a sullen eyebrow, realizing Maddy’s confusion, and sneered with cruel delight. “Oh, did you think this was a promotion? Not a goddamned chance, Oakes. Lightbox will still be giving the orders, and keeping an eye on you, from base. We’re just going to put on a little show, and play-act for the cameras that you’re good for something other than the ‘diversity’ piece. Do you understand me?”

Her eyes watered with shame and embarrassment. “Yes, sir. Whatever you say, sir.”

“Good. In the meantime, you have an assignment,” he sneered, handing the Hero a standard-issue ruggedized tablet showing a street map. There was a marker downtown, not far from the curving towers of Toronto City Hall. “All the details are there. Break-in at a high-profile biotech firm, police couldn’t investigate. Find out what happened, and if there’s a risk any dangerous information might have fallen into the wrong hands. This one ought to be perfect for you.” With that, the Director turned back to his computer, pointedly ignoring his subordinate.

Receiving Hagen’s silent message loud and clear, the sheep-bear tightly grasped the device and nodded hesitantly; she hustled out of the office, jaw clenched. It was only once she reached the elevator that Maddy realized the tempered glass tablet screen had splintered and cracked under her hoof-nailed fingers.