Dahlia Darkholme
Mirage

Dahlia stood with the other students and watched as one after the other the superpowered trainees turned bot after bot into a pile of scrap electronics for the robotics department to repair. Cringing at the thought of ever having to be an opponent to one of them, she heard one of the girls ask a very odd and at the same time earnest sounding question. She recognized after a moment of thought that the girl must have been an alien. She had met and heard of a few aliens around the school and some of them didn’t seem to quite grasp slang terms.

She kept looking and saw as the other girl’s eyes widened and her friend began to laugh. Then her shock turned to anger and she barked defensively at the alien girl, who floated off with her hands over her nose, afraid, and still obviously not understanding fully the meaning of the girl’s choice of words. She recognized the girl as Kay Flat, a trainee with the adaptive muscle memory in her Wing Chun class. Dahlia at once felt bad for the girl, it wasn’t her fault that she hadn’t learned all of the tiniest informal additions to the language. Thinking this, the other girls’ insensitivity bothered her tremendously. She instantly felt a need to do something, but she had no idea what.

Her feet began moving before she knew what she was doing. Her walk was leading her in Kay’s direction, almost involuntarily. When she finally reached the girl, she was shot a stare of pure ice. Her mouth opened, “You know, Kay. All of us here are different in our own way, it’s not really in the spirit of heroic unity for you to make fun of a girl for being herself just because she embarrassed you on accident.”

Kay’s eyebrow twitched, and her mouth curled into what looked like a smirk covering up a snarl “Since when is it any of your business, you scaly blue freak?” Dahlia was taken aback. She was shocked at how these powered kids could be just as cruel to one another as the normal children were to them. “Besides, how would you know anything about heroic unity, villain?” The girl narrowed her eyes, “ You don’t even belong here.”

Before she could do anything to stop it, Dahlia’s fist was connecting with Kay’s jaw. Her eyes widened when she realized what she had done, and as she stood there staring at her hand she noticed a counterattack headed straight for her face. Arching back, she managed to dodge Kay’s fist, but not before another one came at her, scraping across the skin of her cheek.

She could tell how angry Kay was by her movement, she was usually much better at hitting her target, she had left Dahlia feeling pretty battered after a few spars in class. “I am going to beat you into a bloody blue paste, Lizard!” Her irate flailing was the shapeshifter’s advantage, throwing all of her weight into another punch, Kay lunged at her.

Dahlia waited until she knew Kay was coming at her full force before she dodged to the left and grabbed the girls wrist, using the momentum from her own punch to topple her to the ground. Once she was down, deciding that finishing the fight wouldn’t exactly make her mentor very happy, Dahlia did the only thing she knew to do in the threat of detention, run.

She took off full speed out of the crowded safety zone and into the deserted hallways of mid-period. Once she neared the end of the hall, she reached for the closest doorknob she could find, changing into her human form as she crossed the threshold. She was met by the surprised stares of her classmates, one of whom being the alien girl that Kay had insulted.

“Sorry for interrupting, but If the principal, Daredevil, or Kay Flat comes in here looking for me, you never saw me.” with that she ran to the farthest corner of the library that she knew existed, getting herself lost from the rest of the student body by twisting her way through the narrow, mazelike infinity of the reference bookshelves.

She let out a breath and slid her back against one of the shelves, plopping down on the ground in a heavy pile. She believed that she was safe for the moment, but knew in her bones that she was going to be in so much trouble when a person of authority found her. She stared at her hand again, thinking more about what she had done, and although punching Kay Flat in the jaw was the best rush she had gotten since she came to this school, she couldn’t help but feel guilty. ‘I told Dee I wasn’t going to do anything like this, gave him my word.’ She clenched the hand into a fist, ‘but even he goes a little crazy with “The Power of Justice” or whatever he calls it, sometimes, maybe he won’t be so harsh on me.’ She felt bad for breaking her promise to her mentor, but couldn’t say she felt bad for Kay. She didn’t know if this meant that Kay was a bad person, or she was, but she liked to think that Kay deserved it.

Dahlia knew that she would be waiting for a while, at least until her next class, so she decided to pull a book off of the shelf. Volumes that far back in reference were outdated and hardly ever got used, so it was covered in a bit of dust. The pages were yellowed, the ink was smudged from water damage, and the binding was falling apart, but she could still make out the bold letters of the title, “A Brief History of the Watchmen Volume 3: Walter Kovacs, Rorschach”

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