October 29, 2022

Maddy Oakes was at Yorkdale on a Saturday night.

It had been an elegant suburban shopping destination, and briefly the largest enclosed mall in the world, when it opened in 1964. Decades later, it retained a faint aura of its former grandeur, even though the most upscale retailers had fled back downtown to the so-called “Mink Mile” of Bloor Street, and the sprawling complex had come to feature a tackily giant multiplex and a Rainforest Cafe. The sheep-bear had parked her beloved Yamaha V-Max underground, and meandered through the mall on her way to her destination. At one point, the sudden echo of her footsteps made her look upwards; she hadn’t realized when the architecture had shifted, but noted the dramatically steep arches of the vaulted ceiling as she traversed the oldest section of the building.

They were here to meet back up with Carmen Rayne, the Korps recruiter who’d gently, but smugly, raked them over the coals earlier that evening… at Taco Bell, of all places. Maddy was trying to reconcile their curiosity about the freedom and support the supervillainous organization could offer in breaking away from her unbearable role as a token trans member of Ontario’s Heroes, with the fact that the Korps were still, you know, criminals. And overwhelmingly queer criminals, at that; the kind of people her late father, the rage-prone superhero Heartwood (as well her current boss, the rage-prone former superhero Caleb Hagen) tended to call “perverted terrorist subversives.”

The sheep-bear was still torn, despite the heart-to-heart she’d had with Carmen to address some of her most pressing concerns. The cat had, in response, insisted on giving her a tour; of what, Carmen hadn’t said. Maddy assumed it was a secret Korps facility of some kind, since the cat had mentioned tonight was their Halloween party. She imagined an underground lair hidden in disused stockroom areas, or a sealed-off portion of the parkade, something along those lines. In her mind it was small, dark, and cramped, but possibly… welcoming? She had to hope, at least.

Arriving at a crossroads in the wide walkways, they looked around, and spotted the sign for their destination: the Sunglass Hut. Sure enough, there was Carmen—a curvaceous gray tabby in a leather jacket, languorously leaning against a nearby wall. She grinned like the proverbial Cheshire Cat on spotting the sheep-bear across the room. Fuck, Maddy silently huffed, biting her lip. The cat made villainy look so enticingly, effortlessly cool.

Carmen clapped Maddy on the shoulder as she approached. “Hey! Glad you decided to come.”

The sheep-bear smiled weakly, confused. “I mean, you said to meet you here in an hour because you had something else to do first…?”

“Yeah, I did—and I didn’t. Maddy, you get that that was a no-strings-attached opportunity to back out, right?” The cat purred smugly. “But you didn’t take it! So I’m glad.”

“Oh,” Maddy said in a small voice. She had not, in fact, realized that. “I guess—I guess I am, too.”

Carmen nodded kindly, and started walking, gesturing for Maddy to follow. They proceeded along to a service corridor between two storefronts, following it to an unmarked door. “Okay,” the tabby said candidly, pulling a small pile of magenta fabric—unfurled, it turned out to be a scarf—from her pocket. “Here’s the part where you have to trust me. Maddy, can I blindfold you? It won’t be for long, and it’s the easiest way to do this.” Suddenly very serious, she added: “I promise that no harm of any kind will come to you.”

The sheep-bear looked around uneasily. The door was visible; what was there to hide at this point? Still…

“I’ve come this far,” she conceded. “Do it.” She turned around, letting the cat carefully wrap the scarf around her eyes, knotting it in the back. It only caught once on the point of her left horn, and the villain mumbled a faint apology.

Suddenly, Maddy felt momentarily disoriented, and they lurched forward, their balance off-kilter. Carmen grasped their arm—was she already grasping their arm before that point?—to steady the sheep-bear.

“Sorry about that,” the cat sighed, and immediately began undoing the scarf’s knot, pulling the impromptu blindfold away. “Madison Oakes, welcome to your first Korps site. Well, second, I guess, if we’re counting that one front downtown, but that’s more of a satellite operation…”

Maddy boggled as she looked around. The two were no longer in the mall’s cramped service corridors, nor some dingy sub-basement; far from it. Instead, she stood in a massive, brightly lit, high-ceilinged atrium. It might have been the largest indoor space the sheep-bear had ever seen, possibly bigger than the whole of Yorkdale itself. There was greenery everywhere, in massive planters and delicate hanging fixtures, and the walls were hung with warmly-toned wooden and metallic panels, magenta accents and helical iconography everywhere. She couldn’t read the signage—it was written in a language she didn’t recognize—but it was clearly directional in nature, pointing to various destinations down vast airport concourse-wide hallways. People of all shapes, sizes, species and gender presentations bustled around, many wearing the Korps’ signature Rose-Coloured Glasses.

“What? How…?” Maddy’s mouth hung agape, and they walked in circles around the recruiter, trying to take everything in. “God—god-fucking-dammit, Carmen,” they sputtered, “Where the fuck are we?”

“Told you,” the cat smirked. “Could be home, if you like. Come on, let’s go over to the LRT stop, and we can take a loop around the different sectors. We’ll finish up at a tailor in the Quartermaster’s; if I’m taking you to the Halloween party, you’re going to need a costume, girl.”

“There’s trains in here…?”

Nearly three hours later, surrounded by throngs of costumed, lustily energetic partygoers—there must have been thousands of people in this “Dominion Club” Carmen had led her to—Maddy was still utterly stunned by the sheer scale of everything she’d seen. This was an entire underground city! It had residential areas, offices, research labs, and recreational facilities, as well as the kinds of vital infrastructure that might ordinarily be provided by some level of government, from medical clinics of all types (including one solely for transition-related care, the size of a city block!) to power, transit and telecommunications.

They felt vaguely ridiculous and unworthy, appreciating now just how overwhelmingly massive and complex the Korps’ operation was. And this was just one site of many, Carmen had said! It made the drab gray tunnels and industrially-carpeted offices of OH Lakeview seem laughably tiny and under-resourced, by comparison; whenever Maddy went to the facility, they had to park their bike in a dingy former tire warehouse, for fuck’s sake.

The sheep-bear insisted to her tour guide that it wasn’t necessary to outfit her with a costume for the party, but Carmen had insisted. The cat had taken her to a small tailoring boutique alongside a row of similar facilities, and introducing her to the proprietor—a short, wizened wallaby in a dapper vest, named Montgomery—told her that money was no object, nor would it be particularly difficult to quickly fabricate anything she could think of. What, Carmen had asked, was Maddy’s dream costume, that she’d never been able to pull off on her own? Who would she have dressed up as for Halloween when she was younger, given unlimited resources?

Disbelieving, Maddy gave the wallaby instructions for cosplaying one of her childhood heroes that she was sure he wouldn’t be able to fulfill, let alone in the twenty minutes it took him to do so. And that was how she had wound up at the party dressed in snugly fitted black suede and matte-painted lightweight armour, right out of the movie poster, complete with what she suspected was a fully combat-ready bow and over-shoulder quiver of arrows.

Carmen (dressed in a flowing crimson trenchcoat and broad-brimmed Cordovan hat) had briefly left them alone near one of the many bars in the club, having gone off to find someone she wanted to introduce. That had been several minutes ago, and they were getting antsy. The sheep-bear squeezed past the shaggy bulk of an older wolverine who wore a Ren Faire-esque blonde pageboy wig, tight white tunic and pink doublet. A tall, lithe ferret in the costume of a scarecrow, and cheerfully scarred brown bear dressed like a stereotypical hayseed farmer—the latter would have fit right in among Maddy’s rural Alberta cousins, the Hero imagined—likewise had to part to let them pass.

Coming up to the bar proper, she passed a short, twunkish mouse in drably similar costume, green-dyed fur and some kind of antennae, talking to a lean falcon femme festooned with gem-laden jewelry and wearing the loose wrappings of an ancient mummy—although Maddy, flushing, was certain that actual ancient Egyptians had likely left more to the imagination when dressing the bodies of their honoured dead. The two walked away, drinks in hand.

The sight made their dry mouth water. They were growing more anxious in the crush of sweaty bodies, too, and it crossed their mind that they wouldn’t mind a bit of a buzz to take the edge off. When they were able to flag down the bartender, Maddy ordered a Cosmo, and immediately began nervously sipping at it.

Fixated on her drink, the sheep-bear stumbled; her bow, slung over her shoulder, had become caught in the frills of a huge, flouncy vintage-looking dress worn by a slim reptilian figure.

Maddy backed away, disengaging their bowstring from the tangle, then looked up and realized exactly who they’d bumped into. “Mx. Gorgoni,” they gulped, eyes wide with panic.

The anole nodded cordially. “Hello, Maddy! I’ve been hearing a lot about you lately. I’m glad you decided to give us a chance.” They preened, striking a pose with their slinky arms and delicate, long-fingered hands, before launching into an enthused infodump. “Do you like my Madame de Pompadour costume? It’s a traditionally tailored Rococo Robe à la Française. You see, here I have the paniers to support the wide hips of the jube, and then the manteau portion goes over that, with the stomacher visible over the bodice; now, the engageants of the arm portion aren’t actually sewn in, as such, but—”

Maddy opened her mouth and closed it several times, struggling for a response, and feeling ever more like the walls were closing in on her. She looked up and down Mx. Gorgoni’s elegant teal-blue dress; it struck a fine contrast with their supple cerulean scales, admittedly, as they rattled off ever more details about 18th-century Ancien Régime fashion trends. But what could she even say to someone Heartwood had nearly killed in one of his brutal rages? Finally, she blurted it out anxiously: “Oh God Mx. Gorgoni, I’m so sorry about my asshole dad—”

The anole raised a hand, waving her anxiety aside. “It’s okay, Maddy. And you can call me Rin. Grace told you about our history, eh?”

The sheep-bear cringed, rubbing the back of their neck. “Um. Thank you, Rin. Not… a lot. She said it wasn’t her story to tell, but the upshot was that Heartwood, uh. He hurt, um—I mean, I assume you two fought, and—and he almost killed you..?”

“Oh, back when I was doing field ops out of Ottawa, yes. I got lucky, and got away from him before he could finish the job. That Canada Day party was the last time I ever went out on a covert mission; he basically ended my career in the field. But it’s not your fault,” the anole continued, “And we don’t really believe in the ‘sins of the father’ thing around here, believe me; there’s plenty of folks with abusive parents who’ve made their way to the Korps, myself included. I’m sorry for letting that resentment spill over to how I treated you last week; you didn’t know. Although, to be fair, we had good reason to think you were hostile at the time.”

“To be fair, I was,” Maddy admitted regretfully. “Even if I was being set up, even if I knew I was personally compromised somehow by being a PHL Hero… I still let myself want respectability on some level. It was easy to believe that the Korps was just, you know… all dangerous, cackling maniacs, before I met Grace.”

“Oh, we’ve got our fair share of dangerous cacklers,” Rin cackled. "But it’s an aesthetic. Mostly. Sometimes. Anyway, 'Be gay, do crimes' doesn't necessarily mean destruction for its own sake," the anole said warmly. “One of my dearest friends in the world is a doctor with the Medical division, attached to one of our other sites. I recruited her back in the 90s, when she was working for the government. And you know what? She’s never been particularly gung-ho about the villain thing, honestly. She was just happy to have a place to work on her biotech research, where her values wouldn’t be compromised.”

The sheep-bear gazed off into the crowd of revelers, dancing and laughing and gyrating joyfully. Several partygoers walked in front of Rin and Maddy, and she looked back to Rin. “Has… has it always been like this, for the Korps?”

“Not exactly,” the anole said, slightly cagily. “But as long as there’s been supers, there’s been queer supers who figured out it was a better deal to find our own path and build our own world, rather than try to assimilate.” Rin sipped their drink (apparently champagne in a flute glass) and looked wistfully off into the distance at a well-endowed serval woman in a tuxedo and top hat. “I know he was before your time, and—Overlord love him—never had that much of a public profile, but have you ever heard of Degrade? Supervillain, biiiig buff stallion, active in the 80s and 90s, his power was that he could disintegrate inorganic materials at short range. He mostly used it to knock out alarm systems and do B&Es."

Maddy shrugged. "No, sorry. I don’t really know that much about Heroes or villains from before I had to start studying in the junior PHL training curriculum with the Prairie League Cadets, and that was 2012. Mostly just the big names that everyone’s heard of, like any civilian."

Rin raised a gold-ringed eyebrow, smiling sadly. "Well, we dated for a while, he and I. It was when I first got into this life. He got me into this life, actually, but we broke up. I wanted to join the Korps, and he didn't."

"Oh? What happened?"

"Rod liked working for himself, and not having to listen to anyone. For him, the supervillain thing was just a means to an end, a way he could carve out a little shelter from a hostile society and take care of himself."

Maddy nodded. "And you...?"

The anole shrugged. "A friend showed me the good that could be done outside the law, with a little bit of organization and mutual aid. Rod didn't disagree, but he just wasn't a joiner like that,” Rin mused. “He's a sweet guy, but he had to go his own way. He retired to open a nerdy gay bar in Miami Beach—they do wargaming nights—and I stop by whenever I'm in the area. He's never quite wrapped his head around the nonbinary thing, but he tries."

Maddy smirked, rolling her eyes. “Tell me about it. Mom… well, as far as my mom is concerned, I’m just a girl. Maybe a slightly spicy girl, but…”

“I know it’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but I can tell you that here, of all places, you are vanishingly unlikely to ever have anyone second-guess your gender or sexuality.”

“It’s true,” said a familiar voice from behind the two. Maddy turned to see Grace Dunlop; the zaftig doe lawyer wore a bright white short-sleeved tunic-dress with golden highlights, a bejeweled tiara framing her swept-back antlers. She smiled widely on seeing the sheep-bear. “Hi, Maddy! I take it your chat with Ms. Rayne was a convincing one?”

Maddy beamed, glad to see a friendly face. “Grace! I love your costume,” she said.

The deer giggled, throwing her head back. “Aww, thank you! But,” Grace tutted, suddenly with a serious mien, “That statement was not responsive to my question, Ms. Oakes…!” Resuming her genuine good cheer, she added: “Really, though, how’s it been?”

“I’ve learned some things. And Carmen did, uh, address some of my worries. I believe her even more about the Korps’ ability to follow through now, though, having seen…” The sheep-bear gazed around the Dominion Club, still in awe. “…Seen all of this. It’s amazing! How is it not, like, common knowledge that you have this whole Supervillain Bio-Dome thing underneath Toronto?”

Grace and Rin looked at each other, and then to Maddy, before speaking at the same time.

“So, you see, the thing about that is—”

“Okay, so historically, what you need to understand—”

At that point Maddy spotted the crimson-clad figure of Carmen Rayne off in the distance, beyond several milling groups of costumed partygoers, just past a bulky civet in a techwear-looking bodysuit and some kind of metallic orange gauntlets. When the tabby locked eyes with them from under her wide-brimmed hat, she waved, and gestured for the sheep-bear to come meet her.

“Oh! I’m sorry,” Maddy said, “I think my tour guide is calling me,” interrupting the pair’s explanation. “Thank you for being so welcoming. And Grace, thank you, for encouraging me to talk to Carmen. It’s… it’s helped,” she said, with a curious sense of satisfaction.

The K-LAW agents smiled.

“Go, go! Enjoy yourself,” Rin insisted.

Grace chuckled lightly. “I’m glad. Now, go, enjoy partying with people your own age rather than us old fogeys,” the deer said warmly. She playfully patted Maddy on the back, gently pushing her forward.

The sheep-bear nodded, waving farewell to them over their shoulder as they began navigating through the crowd towards Carmen. The cat was saying something as they approached, but they couldn’t make it out through the music and the buzz of the crowds, and Maddy gestured to their head to indicate they hadn’t heard.

As she got closer, Carmen pulled on her sleeve, and leaned over to speak directly into Maddy’s ear. The curvaceous cat gestured to her side. “Have you met my girlfriend?”

The sheep-bear turned, to find themself at eye-level with a filigreed, polychromed armour breastplate covering an ample bust. Their eyes were then drawn downward, to a set of very impressively toned, rusty orange-and-white-furred abs, and a slit blue peasant skirt pinned to impossibly wide hips with a circular brooch. It was only when Maddy looked up—and then back down, and up again, to take in the entire figure—that their jaw dropped in shock.

She stumbled backwards a few paces, dropping her drink as her heart rate suddenly skyrocketed. Panicking, her hands shaking, the sheep-bear reflexively dropped into a defensive stance, and reached out with her telekinesis to ready for an attack.

The gigantic red wolf gave Maddy a quizzical look through her angular RCGs as she calmly sipped her Rusty Nail. “Don’t tell me this is the most bare fur you’ve seen on a lady at a party?”

Maddy didn’t dare consciously move a muscle, for fear they might lose their focus. Their hands continued to tremble, regardless. They fixed their eyes on Carmen, and hissed at the tabby through gritted teeth. “YOU’RE DATING REDLINE?!”