[Teaser] Self-Made Destiny

[Nailah Weaver]

Her wings move, beating against the cool night air. Beneath her the lights of London are bright and things almost feel normal. She doesn't know where she's going, but she'd often let her instinct (or her power) take her to where she'd inevitably encountered a drug deal or someone fencing stolen goods. Occasionally a mutant mid-crime for her to stop or a gang getting up to no good. Lately it has been different though. She's too high up to hear any alarms or spot what's going on in the streets and that makes her painfully aware of how much her power has taken over. Her movements aren't her own, acting out some script she's not privy to except in waves of deja-vu. She wants to scream but instead she silently dives...

Being in the right place at the right time can do a lot of things. Always being in the right place at the right time is something else entirely. How much does one have to really move to dodge a punch. A bullet. Inches at most. Even less if you're operating in hindsight. No flinching at the narrowest of misses and responding with the exact amount of force to the exact point necessary to disable. Kidney, solar-plexus, armpit, childhood trauma, names of loved ones, the nightmare they had last night. Sometimes she spends twenty minutes arranging seemingly innocuous pieces around the spot a fight will take place in so she's have a trash-can lid to grab at the right moment, an empty bottle will find it's way underfoot or a bullet ricochets just right.

She hits the organized crime in the city where it hurts. The supply-chains that link street-level dealers and gangs to the 'wholesellers' and imports. Obscurity protects them most of the time, but it doesn't save them from the winged scourge and neither does increased muscle. They time their operations, spread themselves out to run more smaller, simultaneous pick-ups and deliveries. It works, she can't be everywhere at once and some loss is always expected, be it from cops, junkies with too much ambition or wanna-be superheroes. It leaves them spread thin though and recruiting's harder when word on the street is you're all but guaranteed to have your arm dislocated or your ribcage cracked at some point. Still, money, drugs and violence are the great motivator and there's plenty of them to go around to keep things running.

Those things at least make sense to Nailah when so many others don't. Sometimes she goes days without bringing anybody down, instead darting all over the city instead and acting out mundane or even absurd little tasks. An old lighter left on the windowsill outside a second story window. Logging into an email account and sending a message mentioning something about overtime. Literally helping an old lady across the street once, flying several blocks only to hurl a rock through a store window. All she can do is second-guess it inside her own head while dutifully performing those tasks as accurately and perfectly as anything else, setting up some kind of elaborate Rube-Goldberg machine.


A woman somewhere in London has misplaced her lighter and spots one on her window-sill. Lighting her cigarette at the open window she spots a neighbor and waves a greeting.

Said neighbor stops and returns the wave briefly and thus gets into his car mere seconds later. Seconds that mean minutes later he's just a touch too late to an intersection and runs a red light.

Another driver crashes into him, sending the car spinning. After statements are taken and paramedics check over everyone the second driver heads for the tube to get home now that his car is totaled.

In the station he's just in time to notice a drunk woman staggering near the curb and catches her by the back of her coat before she can fall onto the tracks. The line is not shut down and runs unimpeded.

Inside the train a passenger is on her way home from work, early because her boss cancelled her overtime in an email. She gets home hours before she would have and catches her husband in bed with an escort.

The resulting fight throws off the husbands plans and he spends the next day talking with his wife instead of day-trading and hitting up his connection to feed his coke-habit.

His dealer ends up sitting on a good week's worth of product he thought he'd move when he's stopped by a cop. The Bobby has been more fastidious in his random stops since dealing with a nasty accident the other day.

Busted the dealer calls his buddy to post bail for him, leading to his friend having to find a replacement for his own duties.

Duties that involve playing private security for one of the higher-ups in the gang in his penthouse. A job he does well enough save for forgetting to lock a single window.

His boss, stressed from the revenue he's been missing out on thanks to some mutant punk hitting his streetlevel thugs, gets a call from an upscale escort service.

Having lost one of her regulars, the woman is looking to bolster her income and the gang-leader is happy to oblige.

A bit too eager he forgets to close his laptop as he heads for the bathroom to take a shower.


Nailah is unaware of any of this or the dozen other chains of causality playing out across the city. All she knows is she lands on the roof of a building, slips in through an unsecured window and quietly pads through a fancy penthouse, the sound of a running shower coming down the hall. She strolls into an office decorated with antique collectables and trinkets, paying them no mind and heading straight for the open laptop. She ignores the spreadsheet of codified but obvious records of schedules, drops, revenue and money laundering and instead opens a list documenting the man's private collection as well as a number of auctions and less savory sources of items he has an eye on. She changes some tags around and flags a number of items as bought, sends a couple of messages through the man's UseNet and initiates several BitCoin payments. Small enough to not cause massive issues for something he'd been eyeing anyway but large enough to cause a splash. Not that Nailah really follows the intent.

But hundreds of miles away it nudges the black market for smuggled wares. Money flows, product moves and sends causal ripples into the future. Someone has more money than they otherwise would have at the right time to buy a shipment here or there, someone elses misses out, profits shift, promises from one dealer to his customer fall through and he's forced to make bigger gambles with someone who's emboldened by making a good deal with somebody else. A single point of purchase in London drops into the pond of black-market artifacts and antiques and changes the future. Wares change hands, smuggling routes shift. A little fewer drugs make their way to London, in their place collectables and relics. At a small private airport in Morocco a man finds room for one more small crate of (supposed) pineapples, inside a number of canopic jars, statuettes and a single sphere of solid gold but otherwise almost boringly plain. As the plain starts and rattles the cargo the sphere shifts ever so slightly and for a moment what little light hits it through the slats of the crate reflects off of it in an unnatural shimmer and gives the impression of a single eye reflected in it's surface in an unblinking stare...