#juliet godsmith

[myrastuff]

I've had a second modern AU iteration of Harrow in the works for months now, and I'm idly working on a story with @wingedashley about her, but it occurred to me the other week that I don't think I've ever posted pictures of her here. So here's Juliet Godsmith: CEO of Soltech Industries, inventor, genius, and occasional sort-of superhero.

[wingedashley]

Falling for you

(Notes: This fic is 4K words long. Shoutout to @myrastuff for helping with editing, and for creating this superhero AU in the first place.)

Alice Song woke to the soft beeping of her watch’s alarm.

She took a deep, shuddering breath and blinked the sleep out of her eyes. She’d fallen asleep resting her head against the window by her seat, and on any other day the view would’ve taken her breath away. Cruising 85 kilometers above the ground, the shuttle just barely skimmed the edges of outer space. So close to the Kármán line, the upper half of the sky was black as night despite the harsh glare of the sun. She could see the curvature of the Earth dipping into every horizon.

But today wasn’t about sightseeing. She had a job to do.

She shifted in her seat, straightening her back as she stretched her arms and legs. The shuttle’s interior was dark and quiet, sparse but still surprisingly cosy. Her mid-flight nap hadn’t left her cramped and sore like on a regular airplane, where the upholstered seats weren’t designer-made for style and comfort. The soft hum of the shuttle’s engines reverberated through the small space, its automated lights still calibrated for broad daylight. She smiled. That’s what you got for flying without a human pilot, she supposed.

As she stretched, a holographic window opened up a few feet from her face, projected from the shuttle’s ceiling. The plane’s soft spoken AI chimed through the speakers.

“Incoming call from-”

“Put her through.”

It would take a few seconds for the call to connect, enough time to freshen up. After all, it wouldn’t help to give Juliet the wrong impression. With practiced ease, she detached her brain’s chronology from the rest of her body and compressed it, accelerating her mind’s eye in tandem to gloss over the span. She blinked, and blinked again.

By the time Juliet’s office sprang into view before her, she’d been awake for hours.

By the time Dr. Juliet Godsmith extricated herself from the ongoing soiree, the sun had started to set on the horizon. She breathed a sigh of relief as she stalked through the labyrinthine halls of the company office towards her private lab, the click-clack of her cane slowly drowning out the sounds of laughter and music from somewhere behind her.

Of all the times for a crisis like this to happen, it had to happen now. She should have been handling this herself; her mistake, her neck on the line to fix it. But that would put the whole company on the line in the process, and probably end up getting her killed as the icing on that cake. It had to be Song, fighting her battles and saving the day. A proper superhero, for all she seemed set on denying it. Her plan was ludicrous, but it was the best one that either of them had.

By the time she made it to her office she was already breathing heavily, exhaling sharply as the door slid closed with deceptive softness. “Security level to maximum, Aurora,” she spoke to the AI as she settled herself in, resting her cane against the desk as a dozen holographic displays opened in a panoramic array before her. “Run this operation on the burner rig, I want all records wiped as clean as we can get them.”

“Yes, doctor Godsmith.” The AI affirmed it had completed the action with a short, mechanical chirp.

The overhead lights came on gradually, replacing the dimming daylight from the floor-to-ceiling one-way windows with her own perfectly replicated blend of artificial sun. The tender reds and oranges of twilight mixed with the artificial afternoon to cast her office in a riot of warm colours. All of which stood in remarkable contrast to the shadowy shuttle camera feed projected onto the central display before her.

Song was brooding in the passenger seat. Piercing blue eyes glared out at the sky below, her pitch black hair blending into the darkness behind her. Gone was her cocksure grin, the happy spark behind a perennial smile. For all her too-young-to-die posturing, she looked very… mortal. Juliet sighed.

“Aurora, add reminder for tomorrow, 9 am. Review personal privacy filters on camera AI, update recognition algorithm.”

“Yes, doctor Godsmith.”

She closed the feed with a wave of her hand, leaning back into the oversized office chair. Song did this every few weeks, there was no need to feel this nervous.

If she had any more time… well, it didn’t matter. There wasn’t any time left at all.

She opened a call to the shuttle, clasping her hands before her and leaning forward on her elbows. She smiled, and it didn’t feel all that fake at all.

Juliet’s face popped onto the stream, all prim and cunning and perfect. She was wearing a full-length sequined gown, and a smug little half-smile that told Alice she’d invented something that would disrupt another million-dollar industry… or impressed another supermodel.

Let’s not think about that.

“Party went well, I take it?” said Alice.

“Is going well, I hope. We’d better make this fast, or they’ll be fresh out of hors d’oeuvres before I get back.” Juliet’s smile widened into a grin as she leaned back in her throne-like chair, tapping on a keyboard off screen. “Are you ready?”

“Born ready.” Alice grinned. She stood from her seat, stepping closer to the open space by the bay doors to begin her warm up routine. The holographic window followed her… not that she minded. It wasn’t every day that she got to do calisthenics in a skin-tight plugsuit, let alone in front of little miss Stark herself.

Juliet, for her part, seemed far more interested in some readouts floating in her side screens. Poo. “On an unrelated note, I took your request for swim goggles and whipped up something a bit more… fashionable.”

Alice could hear the clack of manicured nails on a keyboard as a hidden compartment opened in the wall with a pneumatic hiss. It was a visor, a single ear-to-ear screen designed to fit across the bridge of her nose, between two large over-the-ear headphone pieces held together by a strap. Same colour and size as the one Juliet wore, except for the ear covers. Fashionable, indeed. She lifted it from the compartment, pulling it over her head to adjust it in place on her face. She smiled, it still had that heady newly-replicated smell.

Whipped up indeed.

Juliet piped up, directly in her ears this time. “If you do find a way to break this one, could you try to bring it back in one piece? I could use the test data. It’s hard enough building a sensor suite that can survive the G forces you put out, let alone one that can wirelessly communicate through all your… temporal folding.”

Alice had to laugh. Juliet always made it sound so frightfully gauche. The visor’s insides lit up after a quick boot sequence, mapping an augmented reality display into the shuttle around her. Her eyes flicked across the visual keyboard as she filled in her login details.

“And what about my… other request?”

With the clack of a keyboard through the visor comm, a second compartment (how many did this damn shuttle have?) opened behind her. Alice turned to look at it, and stopped. She stepped up to it with more than a little trepidation, before pulling out a device she’d only seen on TV. Modelled in museums.

“Really, I should be making you something custom-fitted, but it’s been years since I played with this sort of tech and I was having difficulty with the…” Juliet cut herself off ahead of the technical explanation, conscious of the time. “Anyways, it was easier to convince a few world governments and one admiral that they owed me a favour. I hope you don’t mind something secondhand.”

It was a smooth disc of chrome, with a series of glowing blue rings embedded inside. Like a comic-book arc reactor. Leather straps hung from its sides, a surprisingly oldschool harness for such an incredible piece of technology. Courtesy of its last user, she supposed.

The visor mistook her hesitance for confusion, and layered diagnostic data over the machine:

97% MATCH CERTAINTY: Prototype Soltech egomorphic field reservoir. Last seen…

She dismissed the window. Impulse’s field projector, custom built by Dr. Godsmith herself. She squelched the automatic pang of jealousy.

The device was synonymous with the late superhero, and ever since she’d inherited his powers she’d always wondered when she’d get her hands on something like it. Even now, held at arm’s length, she could feel her field slipping and sinking into the device. Filling and feeling it out like it was meeting an old friend.

She shivered.

“It’s… thank you, Juliet,” she muttered, before slipping it onto her back and tightening the straps around her chest. Impulse always wore the damn thing on his chest, and it certainly made for a pretty striking heroic silhouette. But for the next 30 minutes, the less blinking lights she had pointing forward, the better.

Besides, it clearly wasn’t designed to fit across breasts.

It normally took a bit of effort to stretch her field to something new and foreign on her person. It was still licking at her visor, assimilating the device over long minutes. But the ring pulled at her, drawing her aura into it like a black hole, twisting and coiling it around its core. She stepped up to the starboard bay doors, stretching her face in a mock yawn as she tested the airtight seal around the visor’s screen.

“Song…” The inventor’s voice wavered for a moment, until she restarted with more conviction. “Alice. You know you don’t have to do this alone. It’s the best plan we have now, but that doesn’t mean it’s the optimal solution. We can figure something else out, I’ll handle any fallout. I’ve dealt with worse.”

Alice looked down at her feet, and saw the Earth projected below the shuttle’s floor on her aug display. Drexler’s lab was marked on the ground below, to her left, along with the curving ballistic trajectory of her projected route onto the site.

“Me going in alone gives you the highest plausible deniability, and I can improvise a high speed exit strategy without worrying about anyone else slowing me down. Going now means we can solve this before it becomes an international crisis.”

Alice looked forward, staring through the doors at the void beyond. She grimaced.

“And of course you’ve dealt with worse. We wouldn’t have powers if we hadn’t dealt with worse…” Her voice faltered. “… It doesn’t change a damn thing.”

I couldn’t be there for you then. But I sure as hell can be there for you now.

She could practically hear Juliet smile.

“Fine.” said Juliet. “Though I have to ask, when did you become an expert in breaking into secure military facilities?”

“Since when did you start building tech that could end the world if it fell into the wrong hands?”

“Mmm, touché.”

They faded into a companionable silence, the visor’s clock ticking down the final few seconds before the shuttle arrived at the drop window. She briefly considered leaving her now-obsolete watch behind, but decided against it. As much as she’d fought to not do the jump in a bloody space suit to keep her weight down, a few grams wouldn’t kill her.

And, well… she ran a thumb over its screen nervously. The thought of being without a working timepiece was too difficult to bear. Never again.

“Alright,” Juliet’s voice through the visor broke the silence, “it’s showtime.”

The bay doors flashed green as they waited for Alice’s signal. She checked her harness, flexed her fingers in her suit. Her visor was comfortably saturated in her field at this point, and it had completed the software handshake with the projector on her back. Which, in turn, had finished absorbing as much of her field as it was able. Ideally, optimally, she’d want to hyperventilate before this next bit… but it really wasn’t all that necessary.

Besides, in the off chance that she actually died, she really didn’t want that to be Juliet’s final memories of her. She smirked.

Taking a few deep breaths, she hit the bay door controls. She made sure to exhale sharply as the shuttle’s interior explosively decompressed. As much as she’d have loved to hold her breath, the vacuum would’ve ripped it right out of her chest anyway. She felt her saliva bubble away as the insides of her mouth froze.

To her pleasant surprise, her ears didn’t so much as pop. Thank you, Juliet.

She stepped forward, to the lip of the void. She felt her lungs and heart slow, her power deftly scaling back the speed of her metabolic processes in tandem with her mammalian diving reflex. Her eyes drooped, arms spread wide by her side, as she fell forward into the cold sky beyond.

Juliet tapped her fingers against the desk in nervous anticipation. Now began the wait.

At Song’s altitude, she’d take almost 10 minutes to reach the lab. Her desk’s holographics were dominated by a volumetric display of the atmosphere between the shuttle and the landing zone, Song just a blip on a parabolic track. A side screen showed a camera feed of her receding further and further away from the shuttle.

Juliet clenched her teeth. Any lower, and the spaceplane would drop out of the ionosphere and risk detection. Song was plummeting into this absurd, half-formed plan at terminal velocity, completely alone.

She glanced at another side screen, the internal feed from Song’s visor. It depicted a sharp cross section of the girl’s face: her unfocused blue eyes. Her fingers tapped harder, she bit her lip.

Sod it.

“Aurora, hook me into the company satellite mainframe.” It barely took her a minute to coordinate every Solnet satellite in the hemisphere to train their sensors on the girl. Her windows shifted as a new volumetric display took center stage, a perfectly triangulated 3D reconstruction of Song in free fall. She’d have to scrub a lot of mainframes after this whole mess was over.

She looked… angelic.

Without an atmosphere in the way, the sun burned bright on her skin. Her hair floated in a soft wave behind her, utterly ethereal. And oh god, her in that suit… Juliet tore her eyes away, flushed. Form fitting, ideal for speed, of course Song would insist on it. Impulse always had, and Juliet was starting to realize what his legions of fans had seen in the damned thing. Thank you, aerodynamics.

Wait.

She snapped her focus back to the visor’s screen. Song’s eyes weren’t unfocused anymore. They were tracking something on the ground below with the focus of a hawk.

“What do you see?”

Juliet’s voice felt tinny and distant in Alice’s ears. She scanned the ground again, straining her eyes through her torpor.

Shit.

In lieu of trying to type out a text message with her eyes, she fragmented a new timestream for her visor and carefully decelerated it. Show, don’t tell: the slower anything moved in relation to normal time, the faster the subjective frequency of any waves. All she had to do was pull the visor’s cameras down the EM spectrum juust far enough to-

“Oh,” said the voice in her ear.

Song’s eyes were incredible, even by metahuman standards. They were one of the many adaptations her body had been pushed through to adopt Impulse’s powers. She could see radiation ranging from gamma rays all the way down to, say, radio waves.

There were three radar installations below her, ringing Drexler’s lab. Scratch that, four. She could maybe risk falling past one. But with that many triangulating together, probably on high alert, she didn’t stand a chance. And that wasn’t even the worst part.

“They’re SAM sites. Surface to air missiles. You could probably take one direct hit with that projector online, but you can’t take four.” A pause, an intake of breath, “I’m pulling the plug. We’re aborting the mission.”

Juliet sounded panicked. Which made sense, there wasn’t really an exit strategy for this leg of the mission. If Alice had to guess, Juliet would force the shuttle out of its thermosphere cover and probably risk the world’s most one-sided dogfight to buy her a few minutes.

Alice grimaced. Not if she had something to say about it.

She splayed her arms and legs out in a spread eagle, before reaching out to the field enveloping her body to clock it down.

Time slowed. Every nerve, every atom throttling to a crawl. The world around her exploded into blinding blues and purples as high frequency light overloaded her sluggish retinas. She felt warm, the air spiking in subjective heat and pressure to her slowed skin. She felt her stomach sink as her drop to Earth suddenly accelerated. A kinematic illusion, her brain playing catch up with her subjectively faster trajectory.

But for all the things that sped up around her, gravity did not.

The earth spun beneath her, far faster than it ever should. But she still fell with the force, and speed, of a single G, relative to her own pocket of time. Her visor struggled for a long second to recalculate her new trajectory… one that plateaued over the lab to land in the ocean well beyond it. Her face broke into a smug grin with the sharp intake of breath from the other end of the com.

“Well then. That’s a neat trick. Didn’t realize you could slow your fall like that.” Alice listened in a happy daze; Juliet’s voice was wonderfully, gloriously, legible. No speed up at all. Somehow, the inventor had built a machine that could package her voice perfectly across compressed time. She always hated having to keep her auditory nerves running at a different rate than the rest of her, it was such a debilitating experience.

With the boosted atmospheric pressure, she decided to finally open her mouth and inhale a few, deep breaths. Some of that daze was feeling a bit too literal.

Juliet was speaking again. Blinking the fog away from her mind, she tried to pick up the thread of the conversation she’d lost. Audio compensation or not, there was no fixing the fact that Juliet was literally in a faster timestream than her. Her messages came thick and fast. Something about the view being spectacular?

“- will bring the shuttle around and pick you up from your new landing zone. I trust that you can swim.”

She almost rolled her eyes, until Juliet paused, left her hanging on her words like she hung in the air. Even with her mind running a bit faster than the rest of her body, a second of silence was a worryingly long gap in realtime.

“…Don’t worry about Drexler, or the transponder. Don’t worry about diplomatic incidents. Just come back safe, Song.”

Practically a whisper, it almost felt like an admission. To what, she didn’t dare guess. She had to focus on what came next. Slowing down was always the easy part.

She’d been tracking the sweeps of the radar beams, putting together a map of how they intersected, the transient gaps and windows. But everything moved so dizzyingly fast, her crawling nerves struggling to keep up with the shifting sensor net.

She felt her mind fragment, executive functions slowing further and further as her planning functions endlessly accelerated. Her vision narrowed. Blood rushed to her head. Tinnitus keened in her ears. A dull pain settled between her eyes-

There.

Like a bolt of lightning down her cortical stack, she felt the raw certainty of a route found, a plan committed. Her mind telescoped back in on itself as she heard her lungs draw a deep, shuddering breath. She was drifting right above the installation, the SAM sites forming a perfect ring of interlocking death.

What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?

“… Song?” Juliet was talking to her. “Song? The visor doesn’t have much of a biometric suite, but your-”

Tyger Tyger, Juliet.

For a single dizzying moment, everything clicked into place. Alice reached the laboratory’s zenith. The radar beams finished sweeping directly over the installation, to return to scanning their surroundings.

She let go of her power.

Her body snapped back to real time, the world dropping back to chilly normality as every particle in her body sprung back into action. And then she kept on pushing, driving her temporal momentum forward as she clocked her entire self up.

The world was dark, redshifting into a red and black hellscape. The world was cold, chilling to near absolute zero.

The world was still.

She couldn’t breath, the air frozen in time around her. She couldn’t see the SAMs, her eyes shifting frantically to adapt to the grim red sun. She hung in the sky, frozen for a gut wrenching moment, her momentum reduced to negligibility.

And then she fell.

She pulled her arms and legs tight against her sides as she picked up speed, dropping like a javelin through the frozen sky. Her power was red lightning in her veins. The world was a shrinking cage of radio waves, flanked on all sides by the invisible eyes of an angry god. She felt herself break the sound barrier, stabbing out of the stratosphere like an orbital strike.

A dozen seconds into her breakneck descent, she heard Juliet’s delayed gasp in her ears. She laughed with aching lungs.

Welcome to my wonderland.

The laboratory grew in her vision as she felt the shockwave of compressed air stretching against her finally ignite. Fire scorched her sight, seared the caked frost from her visor. Countless warning windows exploded across the edges of her vision, which she ignored for the only readout that mattered: altitude.

500 meters from the ground and dropping, she decided to prime the projector, slid her eyes across the ring’s controls, and-

ERROR: RADIO BLACKOUT. Potential causes: active jamming, spacecraft re-entry, ionospheric anomalies…

No. No no no.

The emergency release. She’d seen it in the museum, briefly noted it when she picked the thing up on the shuttle. Teeth clenched, she whipped her left arm behind her back to grab for the switch.

Her arm had only extended from her profile for a microsecond, but a microsecond was all that the angry sky needed. The sudden asymmetry to her profile whipped her into a tailspin. The burning, freezing night spun her end-on-end as she flailed for the release.

So that’s why Impulse always wore this thing on his chest.

The altimeter kept draining.

In a handful of terrifying moments, she found the latch, grabbing and holding on to it for dear life. With a silent scream, she clocked up as hard as she could with every iota of power she had left, and clocked her mind further still.

5 meters

The world collapsed into darkness, her eyes failing her completely, her breakneck fall suddenly slowing to a lethargic sink. She couldn’t tell up from down. It felt familiar… like diving.

Like drowning.

3 meters

She screwed her eyes shut and pulsed her senses through her field. It caressed the edges of her temporal bubble, tracing a thousand soft fingers against walls of frozen sky.

With a slow spin she righted herself, orienting against her wake. She extended her feet to help cushion the landing. She splayed her right hand before her, fingers outstretched.

(1 meter)

Her fingers and feet touched the roof of the laboratory. They sank into the concrete like it was dust in the wind.

Two knuckles deep, she flicked the switch.

The field stored in the projector blasted through her body like a shockwave, pumping down her legs and arms to dig deep into the concrete. She felt her power stretch across the rooftop, licking down at the load bearing supports. The effect was immediate, the concrete hardening and absorbing the shock of her descent. Dust became rubber as her momentum scattered into her field.

And like a wire snapping, she whipped back to realtime.

The world gasped back into light and warmth as she slammed into the flexing rooftop. Her fragmented mind was still a step ahead of her body, watching with dispassionate curiosity as the shockwave rippled away through the ground beneath her.

It rippled up her body too, her bones and limbs twisting and warping far beyond their breaking points, held together by the aftershocks of her field. The wave rippled through her skull and she struggled to hold onto consciousness, shivering as it passed up through her hair.

And then, finally, it was over.

Her brain crashed back into realtime all at once, following the rest of her. For the first time in far too long, she was all in one piece; even the minor instinctive temporal eddies that wormed their way through her metabolism had all collapsed in sheer exhaustion.

It was a surprisingly nice day out. The sun was high in the sky, and all she could hear was birdsong from the nearby forest. No surface to air missiles, no foxy geniuses, nothing. Only the soft chime of her visor rebooting broke her from her reverie. She laughed, gasping for breath, and rose from her three-point landing.

Cheeks flushed, flakes of cement scattering from the grooves she’d dug into the ground, Alice stood tall, turning back to look up at the sky and straight into the eyes of her audience.

She winked.