October 30, 2022

Maddy stood in their living room, listening to their bitter nemesis creep away down the condo hallway. They panted rapidly, trembling with fear and fury at what the rat had just said, before casually slinking out the door.

He must have known something. He had to. The week prior, she’d been assigned to infiltrate the Korps, by Director Hagen himself; Slider was her ostensible (if absentee) handler for the op. Hagen had told the sheep-bear that she was to be taking Doc Gallant’s experimental psi-blockers—the wolverine considered them essential to staving off potential mind-altering attacks from the Korps, whether originating from their trademark Rose-Coloured Glasses or high-powered hostile telepaths—and the rat had been present.

But Slider had just realized that Maddy hadn’t been taking the pills. He’d seen the bottle of medication on their bathroom counter, still full. Never mind that he’d broken into their apartment—supposedly out of ‘concern’ for the sheep-bear’s safety—and had been watching them sleep for who knows how long after they’d gotten home from the Halloween party; if the rat turned them in to Hagen, the director was likely to excuse the fully improper invasion of their privacy.

Maddy padded back to the bedroom, fuming, and threw herself back into bed. She roared with rage for several minutes (into a pillow, to muffle the noise, which mostly resulted in a damply spittle-flecked pillow) before lying still, staring up at the ceiling. She growled, and rubbed wearily at the sides of her muzzle.

What exactly did Slider know? What was he playing at? They tallied up the evidence. The rat had continued needling them about failing to make contact with their potential Korps contact, Grace Dunlop, the doe lawyer they’d met at the downtown Toronto front company. What Maddy hadn’t reported to Slider or Hagen was that they had in fact met with Grace another several times since then—in addition to an actual, dedicated Korps recruiter—as well as attending the Halloween party at their secret base, apparently underneath the Yorkdale Shopping Centre.

Well, maybe not dedicated, the sheep-bear considered; Grace said the tabby was a working field agent, and Carmen had mentioned at the party that she was leaving Toronto soon for some kind of hush-hush op in New Jersey. Regardless, despite her anxiety, and waffling, and the struggle of working through revelation after revelation that she hadn’t known as much as she’d thought about the world of professional heroics, Maddy was cognizant that she was circling ever closer to actually signing on with the Korps.

Maybe. Probably? They wanted to join—they’d never felt more connected to queer peers than they had the previous night, where they didn’t have to be any kind of Hero, or hero—but couldn’t. Not yet. First they would have to quiet the naysaying voices in their head, the ones screeching about how disappointed their family would be, or warning that they’d be giving up a respectable career to bum around with sleazy criminal anarchists.

It was ridiculous, Maddy knew, but she would have to make peace with those doubts before officially coming to a decision. The sheep-bear hoped that pressing her stern grandfather for answers, about his role in the cover-up of her raging asshole ‘Hero’ father’s death, would help illuminate matters.

Was Slider aware of any of that context, though? Was he merely suspicious? Or did he genuinely think—per his constant jabs about the super-team’s erstwhile LGBTQ2+ Champion being nothing more than a hapless ‘diversity hire,’ unable to report any progress in the infiltration assignment—that Maddy wasn’t capable of such subterfuge? They groaned, paralyzed with worry.

Still, the sheep-bear thought, if the rat had planned to move against her, he probably wouldn’t have told her to go ahead, fucking go out to Alberta to see her grandfather, what the fuck did he care, and so on. So she must still have had time. Maddy swung her legs off the bed, intending to start packing; if she was going to start riding out the next morning, she’d need to be ready. She breathed a sigh of relief that the OH motor pool had just serviced her beloved Yamaha V-Max a few weeks prior.

As they got up, they looked again at their Halloween costume, neatly stacked by the bedroom window. Next to it was a fat manila envelope. They’d noticed it earlier when they’d woken up, but struggled to recall what would be in it; the previous evening (that had admittedly lasted well into the small hours of the morning) was a bit of a blur, past a certain point. Maddy bent over and picked it up, quizzical.

Then she looked at the address label—to the Ontario Office of the Registrar General— and everything came flooding back.

Maddy was just starting on her fourth Cosmo of the night, and feeling very loose. After Carmen and Redline—Volta, rather—had departed the party, she’d been left with Grace and Rin as her minders in the labyrinthine secret Korps base. (She realized, in retrospect, that she’d never stopped to ask if it had a particular name.) The K-LAW agents, respectively the chief counsel and CEO of the biotech firm/Korps front Helical BioSpectra, Inc., had gladly taken responsibility for the sheep-bear.

Several others had joined them around their table at the Dominion Club. To Grace’s left was Dawn, a tiny dik-dik dressed as a classical mad scientist in a fluorescently UV-reactive pink Howie coat and oversized goggles; she smugly held leads of chain that wrapped around her giant eland husband Orion, costumed in erotically-distressed rags and prosthetic stitches apparently suggesting him to be the scientist’s escaped, sexily-hulking monster.

To Orion’s left and Rin’s right was Vixie, a short demimorphic fox girl. She was a friend of Carmen and Volta, apparently, also new to the Korps (alongside her sister Ellen), and had tagged along for their brief trip to Toronto. She recounted in a slight stutter how Ellen was laid up in intensive care at another facility (!) where she was currently a skeleton (?!), yet had still insisted that Vixie go and enjoy herself because villains must throw the best Halloween parties. Maddy was fairly certain that they’d tipsily misunderstood at least part of that story.

Next to her, Rin was recounting tales of field agent sluttiness past; they evidently had quite the reputation for finding a way to turn any covert op horny. While Maddy had caught parts of the first few—flushing intensely at the shameless details they offered (complete with illustrative gestures in some cases!) and gasping at the hot goss of closeted queerphobes the anole had bedded for kompromat purposes—she’d tuned out while talking with Grace. However, Vixie had been listening intently. The demivixen’s eyes were wide as saucers at the anole’s anecdotes, to say nothing of Rin’s candid answers to her extensive questions about their analingus technique and experiences.

For Maddy’s own part, the sheep-bear had spent the last half-hour or so spilling their guts to the deer, first venting at further length about their exhausting teen PHL experiences, and then sharing more of the previous week’s conversations with their mother.

“An’—an’ so I said to Mom, y’know what, I thiiiink I wanna change my name after all. So of course she says, oh, I thought you liked Maddy? An’ I do, though! M’ lucky ‘Madison’ still works f’r me, hah, fuck yeah weird gender-neutral 90s names. But no, what I meant was, I don’t wanna have his last name any more. Mom kept her maiden name, an’ Brianna changed hers a coupla’ years ago, but I had to stay an Oakes, f’r the legacy thing.”

Grace smiled, nodding along with heavily-lidded eyes. The deer didn’t drink or smoke, but was, Maddy had learned, partial to chocolate edibles; she’d been pleasantly, affectionately high and giggly for the past few hours. It took her a dizzy moment to focus. “So just… um… just your last name? That’s all you want changed? To what?”

“My mom’s name,” the sheep-bear mumbled proudly. “She’s, uh. She’s not perfect, okay, an’ she took a bit to um, work through it when I came out—she grew up, like, super small-town Alberta Baptist—but she packed us up an’ moved alllll the way to Ontario just so I could transition without Dad’s family gettin’ in the way. So, yeah, I, I wanna be a Gillespie.”

Grace chuckled lightly. “Is that all? Well, heck, I can do that for you right now, hee!” The doe shuffled out from the curved banquette seat, and gently tugged at Maddy’s arm to join her. “C’mon, up up up! We’re going to K-LAW!” she said, punching the air, a gleam in her eye. Standing proudly in her warrior princess revolutionary costume, the words might as well have been a battle cry.

Maddy shrugged, and unsteadily rose to their feet, grasping the doe’s offered hand for support. They turned away briefly, flushing, but managed to steady themselves well enough.

Vixie piped up, leaning past Rin’s bodice as they sipped at their champagne. “Oh! M-Miss Grace! Can I c-c-come see K-LAW too? I always w-wanted to g-get pounded on a t-table like in the l-lawyer shows!"

"...Don't you mean pound on a table?"

The demivixen beamed at the deer innocently. "W-why would I m-mean that, M-Miss?"

Grace opened her mouth for a moment, holding up a finger quizzically, then closed it and took a deep breath. “Maybe, um, later,” she giggled. “Gotta focus for a l’iiil tiny bit right now. Be right back!”

The two squeezed out through the crowds towards the club’s main entrance. Luckily, Maddy learned, they didn’t have to go far; the K-LAW offices were right next door in the ‘Base Operations & Support’ sector, apparently. Grace led Maddy down a corridor signed with what the sheep-bear assumed must be the legal department’s divisional crest—the magenta Korps helix, but with the silhouette of an open book’s pages substituted for the standard winged motif.

Finally, they came to the right suite; Grace tapped her wrist to a wall-mounted sensor, just as she had in the HBS back hallway, and the door slid open with a faint chff. The deer ushered Maddy inside, and invited her to sit in a very plush task chair (much nicer than the uncomfortable guest seat in her downtown high-rise office, Maddy considered) while she slid bonelessly into another, behind the desk.

“Mmmmkay,” Grace mumbled. “I… oh, you know what, let’s make this a little easier. ROSE, can you… eh… oh, right; can you sober me up for a bit?” Suddenly something in her expression changed, and the deer straightened up, no longer floppy or dazed-looking.

Maddy looked around in confusion. “...Rose? Wha? What happened…?”

“Oh! ROSE is…well, to abstract it rather a lot, think of her as the AI behind our operating systems. It’s more complex than that, but,” The deer tapped the temples of her cateye-framed Rose-Coloured Glasses. “She can be right in your head with RCGs, and help out with things like mental focus, or adjusting physiological processes or neurotransmitter levels on the fly through biofeedback. I’m still very high right now, technically! But ROSE is—and again, this is something of a simplification—temporarily helping me rout around the parts of my brain that are full of cannabinoids, at the moment.”

Maddy’s own head swam through the explanation. The Korps’ trademark RCGs didn’t just… hypnotize their wearers? Although, she realized, what sense would that make? She’d seen Grace without them, in public, wearing identical frames without the pink lenses; the deer clearly wasn’t having her mind constantly controlled, as such, if she voluntarily put them on and took them off. (Or, at least… it wasn’t happening against her will? That was a peculiar thought that stuck in Maddy’s mind, despite her inebriation.)

The sheep-bear propped their face up, elbows on the desk, as they leaned forward. “Issss, uh, that all they do?”

“Oh, no, that’s not the half of it,” the deer said, typing away furiously as she spoke. “There’s also long-distance secure, encrypted communication, fully mental if you prefer—two people wearing RCGs can have a silent conversation as if they were telepaths—as well as complete integration into wider Korps systems. I’m sure you must have noticed me waving near doors to open them? I have a subcutaneous transponder implant in my wrist to manually trip the sensors, but I could also just mentally trigger the wireless locks through ROSE as well.”

“Huh,” Maddy mumbled. “So, what’re you doing, though?”

“Just… one sec. Okay, done!” Grace said cheerily, tapping the Enter key with a flourish. A chunky inkjet printer to her side—squatting low on the desk like some hunched beast—spat out a sheaf of pages in the space of a few seconds. She picked them up, as well as a few pens and a strange-looking squared-off tool from a drawer, popping out a tab to turn it into a clamp-like press of some kind. The deer fanned the pages out in front of Maddy like she was dealing cards. “Here we go. Ontario change of name forms, falsified mandamus order to waive the fees and guarantor requirements and expedite processing, including transmitting the registration to the Alberta Vital Statistics Office; also an application for a new Alberta birth certificate, and another mandamus order to make that one free and high-priority too. Madison Skylar Oakes, do you solemnly declare that you want your name to be Madison Skylar Gillespie?”

“Um. Yes…?”

“Excellent. Sign here, here, here, and initial here,” Grace smiled, affixing tiny Post-It arrow flags throughout the pages and handing them off to the sheep-bear.

Maddy smiled wryly when she saw what the lawyer had typed in the field questioning the reason for the application: ‘I don’t want anything of Roger Oakes’, including his last name.’ She signed and initialed as she was told, handing the sheets back to Grace. The deer then demonstrated the purpose of the curious square device; it was a notary seal, and she embossed several pages with the words GRACE ELIZABETH DUNLOP ✤ NOTARY PUBLIC ✤ PROVINCE OF ONTARIO before also signing off.

Grace hummed brightly, stepping over to the adjoining room, and returned with a fat manila envelope—there was already something inside, it seemed?—to stuff the stack of papers into before handing it to Maddy. “I know you’re a little drunk right now, dear, but take a look at these when you’re sober? If everything is correct, just pop the envelope in the mail on Monday, and it’ll all be taken care of. No fees, no publication in the Ontario Gazette—that part is a little perk for trans folks, thankfully—and you should have a new, corrected birth certificate in your hands within two weeks, with the surname ‘Gillespie’ backdated to your date of birth.” Maddy’s mouth hung open as Grace stood up and walked around the desk. “Does that sound okay?”

“Grace, I… thank you,” the wobbling Hero said in a near-sob. She hugged the deer, who patted her on the back.

“Of course, Maddy. You’re very welcome. Now,” the doe said, smiling, as she pulled away from the sheep-bear, “Let’s get back to the party, eh?”

It was all there. Applications, signed and stamped; what appeared to be orders from judges that she’d never heard of, with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and the Alberta Court of King’s Bench; there was even a metered postage sticker attached. And then, at the bottom of the envelope, making up the mysterious bulge…

“Oh,” Maddy said out loud, taken aback. “Oh.”

She drew the object out with a shaky hand, and her heart skipped a beat. It was a lightweight, bubble-shaped pink visor, as wide as her face. It was a set of RCGs. For her.

They weren’t ready for this. They wouldn’t—they couldn’t dare. Could they? No. No!

Not… yet, anyway.

The sheep-bear gulped, and carefully set the device down on her dresser while she began to gather up clothes and toiletries in a worn military-surplus duffel bag. Her V-Max wasn’t really a touring bike, and lacking panniers or a top case, Maddy would have to fit everything she needed for a 7,000-kilometre round-trip highway ride inside. When it was packed near to bursting, she happened to glance again at her dresser.

Sitting on top were the set of RCGs, and their secure Ontario’s Heroes comm headset. They looked to the open top of the duffel bag, and then again to the dresser. They couldn’t just leave the RCGs here, Maddy thought. Not with Slider sniffing around. Then they gasped at the realization: Slider had been here. The rat had spent… hours?... just sitting on their couch, no more than a few metres away from the envelope, on the other side of the bedroom wall.

Huffing, Maddy hesitantly packed the RCGs, setting them in the pocket with her phone charger and wallet. She was about to close the bag when she thought better of it, and carefully wrapped the visor inside a folded hoodie before zipping up.

After scarfing a hastily-made, extra-extra-large chorizo-and-Oka cheese omelet—they wouldn’t want to leave all the perishables in the fridge to go bad during the few weeks they’d be away, after all—Maddy closed and locked the front door behind them. Duffel bag over their shoulder, motorcycle helmet under one arm, they strode purposefully down to the parking lot. With one last glance back at their building, they straddled their bike, and rode away towards Highway 400. Why wait for tomorrow? They could probably make it to Sudbury that night, at least. Maybe even Sault Ste. Marie.

It was several hours later, while she was refueling her bike at an Esso station outside Parry Sound, that something occurred to the sheep-bear.

“Wait a minute. Demimorphic fox girl, with a twin sister named Ellen? It couldn’t be…”