by Erin Halfelven

3.8 Parsifal

The Garden Grove police lieutenant in charge of investigating meta-crime had taken the call from the outlet mall security officer, got the details and put them on the computer for access by patrol officers on their in-car computers. Lt. Bryce Handford's main job was coordination with the Federal Office of Meta-Crime, but he also supervised most local investigations that the Foamies didn't care to bother with.

The Overman Act made it a federal crime to use meta-powers to break the law, whether the law broken was federal or not, but that didn't mean the Feds wanted every single case. Still, they usually wanted to see the paperwork on any such investigation. Sometimes it was like taking your dad along on a date, the sense of someone very critical looking over your shoulder.

An inch or so over six feet, a pound or two over two hundred pounds, a year and a month past forty, a shade darker than milk chocolate, with thinning brown hair and tired hazel eyes, Bryce might have made captain of detectives in a different police force — or maybe not. His superiors had him pegged as having an attitude problem, but Bryce had the job he wanted to have. A small group of rotating detectives under him, some authority over the uniforms and an unclear chain of command above him. He did pretty much what he wanted to do with his time, protected people working for him from shit coming down from above, and kept the federal forces as happy as they were likely to be.

Bryce's job involved a lot of paperwork, and he normally had to CC the local agent of the FOMC on every single piece. He'd been familiar with all of the men and meta-humans who had held the office over the years and was aware that there was a new marshall in town and who had been assigned to the Orange County Bureau as Special Agent in Charge. So he wasn't surprised to see a tall guy in spandex and a short white cape standing by his desk when he got back from a trip to the copier.

"Lieutenant Handford?" asked the man, smiling and holding out his hand.

"Call me Bryce," said the plainclothes policeman, taking the offered handshake carefully. Some of these super-mooks literally did not know their own strength. "Parsifal, right?"

"My friends call me Perry," the federal agent said as they moved toward the seats around Handford's desk. Two of the police office staff and one plainclothes detective, all three of them female, tried not to be obvious about staring at Parsifal in his tighty-whites.

Bryce looked him over without saying anything. Parsifal stood about six-five with a lean muscular build revealed in the traditional skin-tight costume of a superhero. In his case, all-white one-piece tunic-and-tights with no belt. Not even a panty line; and his boots were white, too. The only bits of color in his uniform were the gold clasp at the neck to hold on his cape, the gold edging of said cape, and the blue star high on the left side of his chest. He wore no gloves; his hands were large but looked narrow, his fingers long and his nails neat and clean. He had dark red hair, an improbable shade of true red due to his otherworldly origins, and bright blue eyes in a tanned and very handsome face.

Bryce's eyes avoided lingering on one of the more legendary aspects of Parsifal's anatomy and felt relieved when the prominent bulge was out of sight after they sat down. He smiled at the meta-human. "You were in the Cavaliers, right?" he said, making conversation. The metas liked to think that everyone knew every detail of their public lives, even when those details might be a bit unsavory.

Parsifal winced. "Galahad is dead and Lancelot is in Flatiron," he said naming two of his old partners. Flatiron was the nickname of the Federal Correctional Institute for Meta-Offenders at Apache Mountain in Arizona.

"Uh, right…." Bryce feigned embarrassed. He'd known the pressure points of Parsifal's history. "Met your dad once," he said, trying an icebreaking comment to relieve the tension he had deliberately created.

"Was he sober?" asked Parsifal with no expression at all.

"Oh, c'mon!" said Bryce and Parsifal flashed a grin.

Bryce grinned, too. A federal agent with a sense of humor would make his job a bit easier. Parsifal's father was one of the old time supers, Dyna-Mann, who had once got drunk on cranberry juice cordials and nearly wrecked Los Angeles during the Fimbulwetter War. It was legendary but not at all typical of the German super's history.

"So how did you screw up to get assigned as SAIC in Orange County, CA?" Bryce asked.

Parsifal laughed out loud. In fact, OC was considered a plum assignment in all federal agencies.

After a few more jokes, they finally got down to business. "I understand you've had a bit of a jooce problem?"

Bryce stopped smiling. He nodded. "Two kids went hyper earlier today. Busted up some shops in Santa Ana then ended up in a face off with a patrol unit where Garden Grove and Orange come together. The boy picked up a patrol car and tossed it into the path of a bus. The girl set fire to herself and about fifty parked cars. They were overhyped and went into burndown. We got them in the intensive care meta-unit at UCLA's OC clinic."

"Went there first," said Parsifal seriously. "The docs won't tell me anything except that they don't know if the kids are going to make it."

Bryce shrugged. You jooced, you took chances. He had callouses on his soul from where he used to care too much.

"How'd they get enough pure stuff to go major?" asked the ex-Cavalier.

"Santa Ana cops screwed up," said the lieutenant. "Busted a dealer but failed to find his stash. The kids found it; they were already joocers but only for the high and the rush. But they ended up having access to something like 4000 street doses. It's a wonder they didn't blow themselves to Antartica."

Parsifal made a clucking noise and stared at the blotter on Bryce's desk. He finally said, "They go permanent meta, it's going to be some messed up."

"Too early to tell. Stupid kids." Bryce sighed. They might die; they might recover completely, they might go permanent meta with powers… they might wake up as monsters.

Bryce moved some papers around on his desk. "Had another joocer episode today, too. Over at the outlet mall. Two old hands, The Bruise Brothers, just causing a racket and making trouble. A couple of kids dressed like Skarab and Damselfly, evidently unregistered metas, nearly took them down, but Howie and Pete escaped."

"New generation? What will this be? The fifth Skarab and the fourth Damselfly?"

"Depends on how you count, I guess," said Bryce. "First Skarab sighting was 1934…." They both paused a moment and exchanged significant looks. No one knew about metas in 1934, but that was the year of the second sighting of the Comet Prometheus; an event that allowed astronomers to calculate the near-Earth orbital path of the Golden Passage. A lot of old time Mystery Men who first appeared in the years around that time later turned out to be early metas.

Parsifal looked interested. "The old man is supposed to be dead but no one believes it. Rumor, in fact, had him living here in OC."

"The old man?" asked Bryce. "You mean the original Skarab? He'd be like a hundred now?"

"Not quite but close," agreed Parsifal. Bryce shook his head but Parsifal pointed out, "He once survived being in the blast radius of a nuclear bomb test."

"Fifty years ago. Before either of us were born. How old is your dad?" He shuffled papers on his desk, then started something to the printer that served his computer.

Parsifal shrugged. "No one knows; he wasn't born in this timeline. But when he was in the Hitler Youth pre-WWII, he looked about thirteen. A very big thirteen. His foster parents claimed to have found him wandering naked in the Bavarian mountains in 1931, looking maybe six or so."

"Fuck it," said Bryce. He pulled a grainy picture out of the printer tray and pushed it over toward Parsifal who leaned forward to look at it.

It was a print from a frame of a security camera in the outlet mall. It showed a bulky older man, square-jawed, beetle-browed and with blue eyes almost as bright as Parsifal's.

"He's still alive, isn't he?" said the federal agent.

"Looks fairly alive," said Bryce. "Not pushing up daisies or singing in the choir eternal. He'd just rolled his ninth perfect game on the skeeball court at Dave and Busters."

"There are people in Washington who will be pleased to hear that."

Bryce nodded. "Pretty impressive scoring," he said with a straight face.

Parsifal grinned. "Wonder if Skarab's Insect Lords are any kin to my dad's Martians?" he mused, looking the picture over carefully. "I guess those were his kids…."

"Grandkids, stuttering-g-great-grandkids, whatever," agreed Bryce. He pushed over some pictures of the new Skarab and Damselfly.

"Look pretty young," said the ex-Cavalier who could have passed for a teenager himself, despite being four years older than Bryce. He smiled. "The girl is fly."

Bryce winced. "You are entirely too white to make that joke, Percy."

"Perry," said the federal agent, acknowledging the zing with a shrug. "I'm not white, I'm meta."

"Huh," said Bryce. He pulled the photos back and looked at them again. He genuinely liked most of the overfolk he knew, and Parsifal seemed a good sort, despite what had happened to his old partners. The two kids in the pictures looked like they were having fun. He hoped vaguely that nothing bad would happen to them, knowing as much of the history of the Skarab clan as almost anyone without a secret clearance was likely to.

"Meta-girls always seem too good looking to be believed," commented Parsifal, watching Bryce stare at the images.

"Got that right," said Bryce. "Your mother was Babe Hanrah? The Olympic swimmer who had her medals taken away when they found out she was meta?"

Parsifal nodded. "Naomi Hanrah, that's right."

Bryce smiled. "Now she was superfly," he said.

"Yo' mama," said Parsifal.