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Not the whole Avant Garde. They don’t all live in this dimension. See, the universe is kind of like a shitty apartment building. All the dimensions nice and separate and doing their own dimensional thing, only the walls are thin and the insulation is garbage and the roof leaks, so sometimes you can hear everyone else screwing and practicing bass and yelling about who forgot to take out the trash. Some people have the super’s key ring and can just go rummage around in other people’s stuff whenever they want. Some people are shut-ins.
Look at me analogizing like it’s normal to know this stuff!
Anyway, Still Life and Greyscale came to lock us down, knocking at the door like FBI agents when they were all of six months older than us, considerably less employed, super invested in playing twin minotaur mages on an MMO called Warlock and Key: The Online Adventure, and called Simon and Nina.
Simon clapped his hands and said, “Let’s all have a drink. We’ll all need a drink.”
I didn’t move to get drinks. Because A, I’m not your waitress, guy; B, don’t invite yourself into my booze, thanks; and C, Simon was in black and white. Like an old photo. Just sucked dry of color. Other than that, he looked like a normal twentysomething, a little sweaty, a little too big for the weddings-and-funerals suit he’d obviously felt the occasion deserved, but normal. Just desaturated. Greyscale. Nina looked like the human version of one of those insta-vintage photo filters. She dressed like she’d walked off the set of a 1970s kids’ show: rainbow-striped shirt, suspenders, pink jeans, green-rimmed glasses, puffy black braids. Like she was gonna teach me about phonics in a minute.
I like Nina now. She keeps chickens because she likes them better than people, and for whatever reason, her powers don’t work on chickens. My hands are tied behind my back but I can feel the brown eggs she dropped off last week resting in their carton. I asked her once:
“How come you play that computer game all the time if you have superpowers in real life? Isn’t it boring? I wouldn’t touch a game about filling out grant applications and freelancing for the AP, you know?”
Nina Batista petted my cat and whispered, “In the game, if I lose, nothing bad happens.”
The situation was this: there were, in fact, such things as dimensions and cosmic battles and what amounts to magic even if it isn’t technically magic. Superpowers existed. Superheroes existed. Supervillains definitely existed. Some of these powers didn’t come from a person but from objects that sort of chose a person. The Avant Garde was a group of people who had these objects, and now Jason had one too. Nina Batista and Simon Stewart were Still Life and Greyscale. Jason would meet the Pointillist, Bauhaus, Turpentine, and Zeitgeist in due time.
“It’s not really a button,” Nina explained shyly, nodding toward the zombie eagle on Jason’s coat. “It just looks like one in this reality. It’s . . . a semi-sentient energy nexus embodying the power of one of the Seven Eidolons of Artifice, who live in the Imago Dimension. Godlike beings of pure emotion that feed on the vibrations created by all human art. We are their avatars. We fight for freedom and goodness on this plane of existence. Does that make any sense at all?”
Jason and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Sure,” we said at the same time. “We grew up watching Star Trek, so . . .”
“Yeah, that doesn’t even sound that weird,” Jason finished for me.
Apparently, Jason’s button was the sigil of the Chaotic White Eidolon. Simon won the Voracious Red Eidolon’s cuff links in a Big Claw machine when he was twelve, and Nina stole a bracelet from a bodega in eleventh grade that turned out to belong to the Pacific Violet Eidolon. Whoops. Jason explained about the neo-imperial combo box and Alan Greenspan and the alien tentacle lizard CEO and the Civil War soldier with a smartphone and all the rest of our one-hour photos.
“What . . . what can you guys do?” he ventured.
“Shapeshift,” said Simon.
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“Freeze time,” said Nina.
“Cool,” said Jason.
A classic awkward silence descended. I snapped a picture. Couldn’t help it. It’s stuck on the outside of this refrigerator with a MOMA magnet.
Simon pinched his cuff links and pixelated into a black-and-white tabby cat. He trotted over to MacArthur, hoping the cat would be easier to talk to than humans. MacArthur smacked him in the face with one meaty paw and yawned.
Look, I had to spend a lot of Takeout Tuesdays with the Avant Garde. The truth is, Simon and Nina are the only ones who have anything in common besides having picked up a piece of interdimensional anti-fashion at some point in their lives and ended up with a really specific, terrifying, world-shredding new hobby. The Pointillist and Bauhaus couldn’t even stand to look at each other. Meetings were like trying to make conversation at a middle-school dance.
It turned out Jason and I were entering a program already in progress. At least, Jason was. I guess I was just . . . the loyal viewership. There must be something in the water in New York. All the villain wannabes disembark at Port Authority and try to make it big. Just like everyone else. If you can destroy the world here, you can destroy it anywhere. Remember when the Arachnochancellor crowned himself Emperor of Chicago, time-shifted Lakeshore Drive into the colonial era, and mind-controlled pretty much the entire Midwest for the duration of the holiday shopping season? After Avast and the Unstoppable Id hit him in the head with Navy Pier, he gave that interview to the BBC from Sarkomand Sanatorium. He sat there whining into his iridescent exo-suit, Yeah, but I didn’t destroy New York. So, it barely even counts.
So, Jason Remarque became the seventh member of the Avant Garde, and out they went to play Whac-A-Mole with the city’s criminal element. The Pointillist was their big gun—he could reduce anything to its constituent atoms just by touching a truly hilarious pentagram choker straight out of a preteen goth’s regular rotation. With the cosmic power of his Class of 1977 UCLA ring missing its oversize sapphire, Zeitgeist could command people like puppets. Bauhaus could click a tongue piercing with pop-art yellow frowny faces on either end and summon a gang of huge geometric dark-matter blocks that defended her (and only her, unfortunately) like she was their own best baby. And Turpentine could take you right out of the timeline if she dragged on an e-cigarette with a glowing blue tip. Like you’d never been born. At first, Jason didn’t know how he could contribute. They seemed to have the bases covered. But soon enough, he was spraying up paint armies of presidents in clown suits, GMO zombie vegetables, mecha Disney princesses, and dinosaurs with gasoline nozzles instead of tiny, tiny arms.
You’d think with a roster like that, the Avant Garde would be unstoppable. But a lot of the Imago objects had changed hands lately, and almost everyone still had kinks to work out. Basically, every night turned into a live-action role-play of those endless Who Would Win in a Fight? arguments. They started small, the supervillain equivalent of back-alley muggers, small-timers who didn’t even have brand names or grand plans yet. And because none of them felt so hot about killing, they held back. Jason came home hungry and bloody and conflicted. And high as Lady Liberty on his own supply of adrenaline.
I kept on part-time at Art Mart, freelancing the occasional shot of a press conference or a Knicks game, writing other students’ theses. Before I knew it, I was our only income. Jason couldn’t work; he slept most of the day and ran with the Garde at night. I hadn’t taken a real picture in months. Just still lifes with current events and portraits of graduating seniors in pearl earrings. The darkroom slid back into being a bathroom again. I let my hair grow out—no more cash for relaxer or Lady Sings the Blues. MacArthur glared at me resentfully as he ate his dry food, remembering the halcyon days of Beef Bounty Feline Feast in a can. I was just lonely enough to create my own mage on Warlock and Key—a wombat necromancer named Marsupia with a very unrealistic strength stat. I started raiding with Simon and his minotaur, Sketlios the Earth Mage, when I couldn’t sleep and Jason snored away. Nina hardly ever logged on anymore, but she and I played KrissKrossWords! on our phones most days. Simon always hollered For honor and King Minos! into my damn headset when his minotaur charged some hapless gnome.
“I majored in Classics,” he said apologetically over the headset. “Minotaurs are Greek, did you know?”
I did.
Life turned into one of Nina’s bubbles of frozen time. The same day, repeating forever. Work, second work, home, eat, game, sleep.
“It’s a little bit fascist, don’t you think?” I said to Jason one night after he’d dragged himself home from a semi-successful round with some kind of plutonium elemental dude downtown. I couldn’t help it. I was in the middle of some freshman’s ethics midterm.
Jason looked up from his third bowl of Frosty Frogs, startled and hurt. “What the hell does that mean, Sam?”
