Chapter 5
It took a while for Steph to get back in the flow of writing, after being distracted by the small matter of Aaron Holt acting rather weird. She took a break when she got home to munch on a chocolate spread sandwich she made before she hopped onto her laptop and got back to writing. Steph still had a few more days before she had to submit the piece of work anyway, so she had time.
That’s when the sound of Kate Bush’s high pitched squawk started playing from her bed side table.
She had two phones at the ready, each with a unique dial tone so she could tell which one was for her normal life, and the other was for more extracurricular academy.
As ‘Wuthering Heights’ blared from the cheap speaker in the flip phone that was straight out of the 2000s, Steph knew immediately what was happening.
“Hello? What’s happening?”
“Skylark, we’ve had an unexplained incident we want you to look at. How soon would you be able to come over to Hanley Street.”
Steph tensed up immediately at that. That was the street that Aaron lived on, hopefully nothing too serious happened that affected him. He was already having a visibly bad day as it is. She better go check on him again after she goes and investigates whatever is going on.
“Quite soon sir. Just sit tight and I’m sure I can find where you are.”
“You’ll be able to see it from quite some distance away that’s guaranteed. Later Skylark.”
“Later Sir.”
As she ended the call, Steph stood up from her chair and gave her back a quick stretch, feeling several bones in her spine cracking. It had been a good while since she really had to stretch her muscles out, but it was time.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and held one hand up into towards the sky, palm extended up. With that she whispered a well recited mantra.
“Till lost on her aerial rings. In light, and then the fancy sings.”
As she finishes the lines, one would see a large bright light flash out of the girl, just as quickly, disappearing as Steph swings her extended arm down back to her side, slashing through the blinding light.
Steph’s hair, a pretty normal orangey red in her civilian form, had lost all the orangeness to it, turning a bright vibrant red. Normally wearing it in an untidy ponytail, her hair was freed up, fluttering behind her in an invisible wind. Her facial structure became sharper, her cheekbones more prominent, a subtle change, but enough of one to make people who know her to struggle to identify her in this form.
The colour of the hair matched her long red cape, reaching down to her calves, and her knee high slightly heeled boots, held tight to her calves with a pair of black bands, fitting comfortably over a pair of black thigh highs, that were much stronger than they would perhaps appear.
The rest of her outfit had less of a splash of red, the only visible part being the top half of a red and white sleeveless top, finishing with a dark blue scarf-like collar. That matched with the gloves that covered her lower arms, and the pleated skirt, which modestly went down to the middle of her thighs. The skirt was held in place by a brown belt, with a golden emblem in its centre, showing a logo with of a non-descript bird with its wings extended outwards.
Steph turned to her window, already opened as she liked it, and let herself slowly start to lift from the ground, the invisible wind seemingly picking up, whipping up her cape and her hair. The hero then wooshed out the window elegantly, making her way invisibly and quickly through the sky towards the scene of the incident.
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The fire department had, at the very least, had experience with putting out car fires, and by the time Steph had arrived on the scene, the charred Range Rover was only smoldering at this point, surrounded by water and foam from the fire engines that had put it out in the first. From her vantage point up higher in the sky, she could see that the car, while parked outside Aaron’s flat building, didn’t seem to cause any visible damage of sort to the building. She breathed a sigh of relief at that. She noticed the presence of the tall, burly officer, visible by his browning trench coat and baseball cap, standing just off to the side of the wreck. Steph let herself fall out of the sky, and landed directly next to the detective, causing him to jump ever so slightly. The hero had a little chuckle at that.
“Jesus bloody Mary of Christ of Babylon give me a little warning would you?”
“That wouldn’t be fun would it, Sir.” Of all the people that made use of her services, Detective Viktor Lind was one of the most frequent of requesters. While officially part of Scotland Yard, Viktor was a Swede who had specially been called in to deal with, as they called it in official business, ‘unexplained incidents’. A lot of these, as described by Detective Lind, were at most, a misunderstanding, and those he didn’t bother calling the hero over for. So the sign that she was even here meant that the detective at least had a hunch tat something was up.
Steph cleared her throat, and cut right to the chase.
“So, what’s the lowdown on this wreck?”
“We would think it was a normal car fire, but there was a witness who described something different happening.” With a gesture from the detective, the two made their way over closer to the wreck. Even from a distance, Steph could make out the massive gash that spread out from the right hand side of the car. She didn’t say anything yet as she let Detective Lind go on.
“The witness saw what she described as a ‘large black hammer’, falling full speed from the sky and cutting through the side of this Range Rover. It ruptured its fuel tank and caused fuel to leak out, which eventually led to the fire you see in this damage. We were lucky the fuel didn’t reach too far, otherwise it could have spread further.”
“You don’t think this is a prank do you? Like a hammer, that could easily just be something thrown elsewhere.”
“That’s the thing, Skylark. We had a look in the car, there was nothing that reassembled what the witness described.”
“Could they be mistaken?”
“We thought so at first, but have a look at what was left behind.”
Steph peered into the damaged hole of the Rover, and had a look at the floor of the car. It was mostly fire damaged, but she could make out a few peculiar things. There was a massive imprint in the street below, caused evidently by some strong, big object that had caused the damage to the car. But, no object had been left behind, and instead, she saw a few drops of what could be described as a tar-like substance.
“We don’t know what that substance is yet. We tried to collect it but, it seems to have a mind of its own.”
The hero put her hand out to try and touch the substance, and to her surprised, one of the drops seemed to move away from her grasp. She tried a few more times, failed to do so, and the goop like substance seemed to do a little hop into the air, almost making fun of the hero, hen absorbed itself into the ground, disappearing from view.
Steph narrowed her eyes, this wasn’t really explained by anything that she knew of in terms of science. It seemed like something out of science fiction, which could mean…
“Could we maybe be dealing with some extra-terrerstial? Causing damage here?”
“It’s entirely possible, that’s why we called you Skylark. We want you to be in the lookout for anything that could possibly have caused this, it could be a danger to those around.”
That’s what she was here for, and the responsibility that she had accepted when she became Skylark. Often times, hidden from view of the public, there were hidden dangers that she was responsible for taking care of, before hysteria took hold of the public and caused more damage to them. She was the ultimate damage prevention weapon that these guys had, and she knew ( and wanted ) that responsibility.
“Leave it to me, I’ll try and figure this out.”