Justice Wing, Serial, Superhero

Interviewing Leather, Part Twelve


I hope folks like it.

We also (finally) have some fan art to put up (my delay — not theirs. They rock!). The first comes from Brian Stinson, based on Katie Tandler’s art, and is called Leather the Series. Click on it to see it in full size — and you want to see it in full size:



Tephlon’s Dynamo Girl!


And yes. That means this is not the last part.

In a way, this was going to be the blowoff to my story just as much as it was the blowoff to the week’s criminal undertakings. This was the crime scene I was going to be at ground zero for. I’d like to say I was feeling a surge of adrenalin and a cool sense of adventure, but to be perfectly blunt I felt carsick.


Priceless or not, it looked like an old pot. And while she was psyched — Leather was always psyched after a job worked — she wasn’t nearly as into the Urn as she had been the commercial jewelry they still made fun of. This one wasn’t about money. It could have been any macguffin. And it was being hauled to a new crime scene on the off-chance Leather needed to distract or bargain down Darkhood or the cops.

Which is of course why I was strapped in next to it. The collar was strapped around my throat again. I’d submitted without a struggle, but I didn’t put it on myself this time. Nor did they ask me. This time, I was a prisoner, and the threat of blowing my stupid head off wasn’t to guarantee my good behavior while Leather played at superhero.

Carsick barely describes it.

Leather was drumming her fingers on the car door. “Is the MickDee’s still serving breakfast?” she asked.

“Until ten thirty,” Marco said. He was driving. Wheelman, like they said. The Bagmen were behind the two of them, with me and the urn in the back.






“Okay then,” she said. She was bouncing in her seat, all nervous energy. I remembered what she was like on the Dynamo Girl run — all smooth and professional. Excited but not frenetic. It must make a difference to know how it’s all going to play out in advance. Or at least know how you intend for it to play out.

The plan was, if anything, even more basic than the jewel heist. It was literally “drive up to the bank, double park, get the hostage and the urn out, hit the bank and start grabbing all the cash they could.” There was no finesse, no careful planning. This was an overt shout, taunting Darkhood and the Meridian City Metropolitan Police to try and catch Leather. And in a weird way, it was no-lose for Leather herself.

Seriously. The worst case scenario involved her successfully stealing maybe millions of dollars. If the cops showed up but Darkhood didn’t, Leather would tangle with them, probably win and escape scot free. Her legend would increase and she’d be ready to move on to her new lair and her new touring city. If Darkhood showed, then it was fifty/fifty she’d get away, they’d probably take no money, but there’d be a superhero fight to add to her resume. If she got caught but the henches got away, it would be a phone call to one service. If she got away and the henches didn’t, it would be another phone call. If they were all captured, then the Steve would do his thing. Even as we rode, the Service was pulling everything out of her old Lair, so there was no chance the cops could raid it and get anywhere. The money from her earlier jobs was all laundered and banked. Prison would practically be a vacation for them.

Really, it’s hard not to be cynical. No matter how you slice it, crime did pay for Leather and the gang. All that could happen was jail time, and it was clear Leather and the Henches weren’t scared of jail.



Leather giggled. “Tempting.”



“I’m gonna be sick,” I muttered.


They had spare cloth moneybags. The other bagman got me one in time. They threw it in one of the brown trashcans before Leather got back with a pile of meat and egg swag in paper sacks, and we headed for the real job. To her credit she looked concerned or at least sympathetic when she’d learned I threw up. The smell of cooked egg really didn’t help.

“So I don’t get it,” one of the bagmen was saying. “You didn’t want one of us going in because we’d be recognized and they’d call the police, but you were okay with breaking through the front window and stealing a couple sacks of breakfast?”



“I didn’t steal them. I left a fifty.”

“That window would have cost more than fifty bucks.”


Within a couple of minutes, we were. This bank was at the top of a long sloping hill in the West Highlands. One of the hilltop neighborhoods where tourists and marketplaces were thick, overlooking the Underlands Dynamo Girl had patrolled two nights before. This was an old bank, back when they made them into temples of finance, all granite columns and elaborate architecture, and “THE FIRST MERIDIAN NATIONAL BANK AND TRUST” carved into the top. Of course, all the glass down closer to the doors declared it ‘BankOne,’ the subject of one and probably more than one buyout over the past ten years or so.

Regardless, it was a bank, and a big one. The Leathermobile careened up the fifteen cement steps in the front, coming up on a top landing and skidding around. It felt like we’d driven through a potato field, and if I hadn’t thrown up five minutes before, I’d have done so right then. As it was there were dry heaves, just in time for me to be hauled unceremoniously out of the back seat by one of the bagmen.

“Remember, stay close,” the bagman hissed to me as he dragged me to the bank’s front doors. “You don’t want the collar going off.” The other bagman was setting the box with the urn in it next to the door. Leather skipped back down the steps, turned and got a full running start for the doors. She took the stairs five at a time and leapt at the top of them, curling into a ball going at least fifty miles an hour, and smashed through the doorways, shattering the glass overhead and to the sides of both the doors and blowing the doors — designed to open out — into the room.

There was immediate chaos and the sound of an alarm as she rolled seemingly chaotically through the lobby. The lie was put to her seeming lack of control when she turned it into backflips, ending with a handspring that landed her on top of one of the islands where deposit slips and chained pens lived. “Ladies and gentlemen!” she shouted. “Welcome to your very own bank robbery! Everyone down on the floor right now! We don’t want anyone to get hurt!”

There were screams, of course. Men and women alike panicked and fled. There were three security guards, but they had to recover from their own surprise before they could react. That gave Leather a chance to dive, twisting in the air and landing in front of the first. She kissed him, deftly unbuckling the belt that held his gun, mace and radio, and threw it into the corner with a twisting motion. “Be good now,” she said to him as she rolled to one side, just in time to not be maced by the second guard, who’d reacted a little bit faster.

Rather than take the risk that he might actually hit her with the spray, Leather did a backflip, landing behind a panicking businessman. “Hi!” she said, deftly lifting him up and darting to the side, keeping him between her and the guard.


Leather dropped the buisnessman to the floor, feet first, then used his shoulders to spring up and over, hooking her legs around the guard’s neck and rolling over his head, hooking and flinging him fifteen feet into the third guard, who had managed to get out his radio. Why his radio I have no idea — the alarm was already going off. But then, what would a security guard normally do when an acrobatic twentysomething began smashing things and doing handsprings in the lobby. I mean, it doesn’t come up in the training manuals, does it?

The two guards hit and went down. Leather’s lips curled into a smile as she regained her feet, sweeping up a pumppot of complimentary coffee the bank had at the front of their velvet rope line and spinning, throwing it towards the third guard’s legs. He had been running for the gunbelt she’d tossed, and she hit perfectly, making him go sprawling and rolling.

It looked like it hurt. My heart was pounding. This wasn’t like watching Dynamo Girl. These were the good guys, and Leather was humiliating and hurting them.

At the same time, I have to admit she looked fantastic. Her movements were freer than Dynamo Girl’s had been. She did riskier moves, and spent more time setting up elaborate strikes. Now, satisfied that the security guards were down, she did cartwheels to the front of the line. “Don’t you just hate a linecutter?” she asked the woman who was crouched on the floor at the front of the line. “How’s it goin’, boys?”

“Not so bad,” one of the bagmen shouted back. They were handing cloth bags to tellers, and getting money dumped into them. The tellers looked freaked but did what they were told. And no doubt were dropping dye bombs or setting off more alarms as they did it. Clearly Leather and the others didn’t care about that, though.

“Good! We need to hit the vault?”

“Can’t hurt!”

There were sirens outside.



I followed.

I know. I’m an idiot. But I’d come all this way, I had a bomb on my throat, there was bad shit going down all around me and all I knew was the lead of my story was diving towards police. I wasn’t going to miss this. I had my camera out and everything.

By the time I’d gotten out, Leather had dove down the steps for the cops. Which is smart, if you think about it. She didn’t want them to set up perimeters behind their cars, shooting bullets and tear gas at her. She wanted to be close at hand so they’d have to engage her — especially since there wasn’t any chance they could beat her in a fight.





It was one of the bagmen. They were coming out, sacks laden. I couldn’t imagine how much money was in those things. Leather turned to look at him, which is when I realized there weren’t any more cops. She’d taken them all down. And what’s more — and perhaps more incredibly and more frighteningly, all at once — I could tell she hadn’t really hurt any of them. She’d bloodied their noses and encouraged them to lie down and be in pain or unconscious, but I doubted any of them would miss a day’s work over this.


“You ready?”

“Oh yeah! We’re rolling in it!”


It looked like a missile, and when it hit her back it exploded into sparks powerful enough that one arced out to a metal garbage can nearby. Leather convulsed and went down on the steps, her body spasming.


Darkhood was across the way, up on top of a bus that had been stopped by the onrush of police cars. His clothing was rough cut brown and black — it looked medieval, but his gauntlets were modern archery gloves and his bow was pristine. He had turned to cover the bagmen, standing tall, his hood back enough so we could see the domino mask that covered his eyes. “Put the bags down, boys!” he called. “You made a good run of it, but it’s over now!”




“You might want to rethink career counseling,” he said shifting his grip–

Leather rolled forward, grabbing the nightstick off one of the downed cop’s belts, and threw it at Darkhood. We’re talking a seriously mighty throw — the kind of thing the Big Unit would sell two children and a controlling interest in Roger Clemens’s memorabilia to be able to throw.

Darkhood rolled to the side, firing his arrow at the club and nailing it in midair. His net deployed even as it was knocked up into the air, and Darkhood rolled forward. As he came out of the roll he had another arrow nocked and he fired it, forcing Leather to dive and roll over it — she’d been running for him. As she came up from a roll he shot another arrow at her feet. This one exploded — a concussive charge that threw her back towards the police cars. She twisted in midair and tried to land on her feet, but she misjudged the landing and rolled back over the vehicle. I saw her head hit pavement and winced.

And because I was there, I took another picture.

Leather managed to roll to the side. I could see her looking under the car, watching Darkhood run — he was circling behind, keeping a wide arc. He wanted a clear shot, and he wanted to keep his distance away from her. It hit me that’s what this fight would come down to — Darkhood wanted distance so he could nail her with arrows. Leather wanted to close so she could kick his teeth in. And so far he was ahead on points.


“Worry not, fair lady,” Darkhood answered. His voice was calm. Measured. He made the ‘fair lady’ thing sound normal too — like this was how people talked. “I’ve got plenty of arrows for all occasions.”

“Yeah? Let’s find out, mumbletypants!” And Leather threw herself backwards, landing on her hands at the base of the stairs and handspringing with enough strength to clear her to the landing at the top. Not ten feet from me.

Right next to the box.

As she flipped, she also had twisted, avoiding a fired arrow by inches. It impacted above us with an electrical discharge. Darkhood ran to the side, another arrow nocked as he jockeyed for position.

“Hey spiky!” Leather shouted, tearing the box and lifting the Mountbatten Urn where it could be clearly seen. “Is this what you’re looking for? Huh?

Darkhood skidded to a stop. “Leather! Put that down — gently! We can talk about this!”


I stared, my hands working my camera almost mechanically, as Leather did a forward in air roll and flung the priceless urn out and away from herself, far over Darkhood’s head.

Now, I’ve looked at the pictures, and I know intellectually what happened. I know that somehow — somehow Darkhood threw himself backwards, managing to drop the arrow he was holding, nock twoarrows at once, fire them while the Urn was almost exactly over his head, draw, nock and fire a third arrow, and hit the ground at a horrid angle, stretched out and back-to his enemy. I know that somehow, the two arrows he fired first had a cable connecting them, and embedded themselves both in telephone poles, the cable retracting taut. And I know the third arrow deployed a net that snagged the urn at the precise instant the net would also hit the cable and wrap around it.

I know that. I’ve gone through it. And I have a horribly blurry photo of the net arrow being launched with the other two arrows still in the air. I also know Darkhood doesn’t have superhuman powers. He’s just that. Damn. Good.

But at the time, all I know is he threw himself backward, arrows going flying, and then the urn was tangled up in a net sixteen feet in the air, swinging in the breeze in the middle of the street.

Leather didn’t stop to stare or be agog. She just ran forward, with all that superhuman speed, straight at Darkhood. And that’s why she did it. The urn wasn’t a ransom item, it was a distraction. So long as she was at a distance, Darkhood could take her. But get him focused elsewhere, not moving, back-to her and sprawled on the ground, and she could close the gap. By the time he’d started to turn over, she was in the air, over him, and dropping an elbow hard into him.

I thought it was over, but he twisted and kicked, and she rolled off and they squared off. He snapped something on his bow and it segmented into two halves, the string retracting until he had — mm. Not really nunchucks. Call it a flail. And he laid about with it. She twisted underneath it, sweeping his legs. His footing went out, but he went down into a handspring, kicking up. She rolled under it and got her footing. They closed, striking and punching. Her inhuman grace. His staggering training. He went in with a taser. She ducked and twisted and struck at his ribs. She hit but he seemed to absorb it — body armor of some kind maybe. They turned and struck, and he went around and tagged her with the taser. She went rubbery, and he went over her–

I don’t know if it was panic or what, but as she fell backwards she curled up and thrust out with those powerful legs, and he flew.She got her feet–

And froze. I froze. We all froze, watching. She had kicked too hard. He was a good fifty feet in the air, and he was going over the edge — the long clifflike edge of the ramp. We were at the peak of the West Highlands neighborhood. Leather had kicked Darkhood out to where he would fall to the underlands.

She was staring, her hand clenched. Her body tense. She didn’t move, watching him twist around as he fell. It looked like he was doing something with his flail — maybe trying to get it back into the bow. Get some kind of line arrow….


It felt like forever, but with a thunk we heard and saw an arrow slam into the retaining fence at the edge. An arrow with a line on it.



Wait!” I shouted. “The collar! You can’t leave me or–” I stared. The dumb bitch had forgotten the bomb around my neck!

Leather skidded to a stop, right at the door of the Leathermobile. She stared at me for a second, then burst into laughter. “Jesus, Chapman,” she shouted back. “There isn’t really a bomb! Who do you think we are?”

I stared as she ducked in, and the car tore out. Stared as the recovering cops opened fire as it escaped. I sunk to my knees, staring, and watched the Leathermobile leave. They got no money from the bank, but they got away. And Leather and Darkhood crossed swords in the light of day. And people would talk about this for weeks. And I wasn’t wearing a bomb.


« Interviewing Leather #11 • About • Justice WingInterviewing Leather #13 »


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24 thoughts on “Interviewing Leather, Part Twelve”

  1. Thandra: Why would they? The money’s probably dyed, or maybe even bugged; they have enough money already where it can’t be reached, and they want to move right now.


  2. For the record, the finally I put in about the fan art was about me finally posting it, not someone finally sending some. I’ve had these for a while. I am a bad person.


  3. ThandraK: The bags were large and somewhat unwieldy, and Leather couldn’t know how quickly the cops would recover to the point where they’d start shooting at bagmen.

    Besides, she’d just almost killed Darkhood. To a degree, that was stepping out of her personal comfort zone, so to be rewarded for it violates the weird sense of… I guess the word is ethics Leather lives by.


  4. A helpful divide I found somewhere in college can be summed up as, “Morals are the code society imposes on you to let you survive it, ethics are the code you impose on yourself to let society survive you.” So even badguys can have ethics, even if they’ve abandoned morals.


  5. At the school we make the demarcation that morals are questions of right and wrong, set by society and subject to discussion and interpretation. Ethics on the other hand, at least in institutional terms, is what we have decided is acceptable behavior. While we can engage in a discussion with our students and coworkers as to what is moral behavior online, for example, we have defined what we consider ethical behavior online. And, when a student elects to attend or a coworker elects to work here, they agree to abide by our ethical guidelines.

    Which is an advantage of being a private school instead of a public one, really.


  6. woo! Leather kicks ass!

    but. uh. Dude. You spelled my name wrong.

    This is a slippery slope we’re on! First people don’t get my name right, then they just don’t mention me at *all*, and then one day I snap and just decide to start *stealing* art instead of making it!

    Sure, it might just start with ripping things from DeviantArt and scrubbing off the watermark, but soon I’ll be swooping into galleries and, like, kicking people.

    I’ll be Andie Lou, the surrealist supervillain with a really terrible Dali schtick. Which is all fun and games until someone gets a razor to the eyeball.

    And when I’m all bundled up in the asylum, telling my story through the grating of my Hannibal muzzle, it’ll alllll go back to this *one* time.

    LOOK what you’ve DONE, man.



    My visceral reaction to this can be articulated: Why doesn’t it? In a world where supervillain henchmen have unions, why doesn’t the training manual for bank guards include dealing with supervillains?


  8. Because of those magical words “twelve-fifty an hour.”

    Normal humans need pretty decent training and small units tactics to be able to effectively deal with supervillains. And even then they usually fail. The police is trained to deal with superhumans and you saw how easily Leather thrashed them. Bank guards aren’t paid enough to attract the kinds of specialists you need in these situations. The folks you can get just try to deal with it like they would any other crime.


  9. I’m not saying the manual would read, “Try bullets first. Aim for the head. If bullets don’t work, try reflecting a magnifying glass off the marble floor. If that doesn’t work, try the protective magic item you were issued at hiring …” etc. I’m not saying the manual would tell the bank guard to be proactive. I’m saying either the manual or his fellow guards with greater seniority would at least say, “If it happens, put up your hands and get on the floor with the civilians like you’re told, moron.”

    It’s inconsistent with the rest of this world that a set of bank guards working for a national chain in a decent-sized city would be reduced to extraprocedural confusion by a supervillains launching a robbery. One of them, maybe, a greenhorn, but not all of them. There would at least be corporate policy, even if this particular branch hadn’t any experience. It’s inconsistent to me, anyway, and it popped me right out of the story.


  10. Hrm.

    How can I best put this.

    There are essentially two types of people in the world of Justice Wing. There are the people on the normal side of the street, and the people on the super side of the street.

    The bank guards and the cops that Leather fought are on the normal side of the street. The cops did moderately better because they’re better trained and paid, but a dozen or more cops got put onto the ground essentially in passing, with even specific note that Leather was doing the sort of moves you saw in movies because they were so outclassed they couldn’t begin to compete.

    The bank guards looked particularly in competent because they were clearly narrated. And they were also largely panicking, and they did progressively better or worse based upon that. The first guard essentially had no time to react before he lost his weapons belt. The second guard was scared but did his job — he gave warning and was prepared to strike. The third guard panicked entirely.

    As a side note? It isn’t anywhere near as hard to get a job as a bank security guard as it is to become a police officer. These are often not trained professionals — not just compared to law enforcement, but even compared to Brinks Security. Some banks have better guards than others, but some are just guys in uniform with mace and radios and maybe a gun.

    Darkhood has no super powers, but he is on the supers side of the street. He doesn’t panic. He can hold his own. If he could have kept Leather at range, he would almost certainly have beaten her. When she closed on him, he still managed to make it a decent fight before he got kicked over the ledge. He is just as human as the guards and the cops, but he is on the other side of that street.

    In a very real way, this entire story is about Todd Chapman crossing from the normals side to the supers side. He has no super powers, and he’s not going to get any. He couldn’t fight Leather. But when he first got there and he was threatened with being thrown off the lair’s roof, he went to jelly. At the end of the story, he can be curb stomped by the henchmen and come out of it snarky and asking questions.

    The other thing you’re not considering is the time frame involved. Leather smashes through the door, goes into a roll, and lands on a countertop. She announces there’s a robbery in progress. She then hops down, disarms a guard, darts over a civilian, uses him as a shield, and attacks the second, throwing him into the third. However, in that block of time, the second guard actually got a shot off with mace.

    She then took the first guard out with a coffeepot, while he was moving to retrieve his weapons.

    So. In less than seven seconds, she entered and subdued the three guards. And in that block of time, one guard actually launched an attack and gave her a verbal warning, and a second guard, though disarmed in the first maybe two seconds of her entry, had enough of his head in the game to pursue his weapons so he’d have any chance at all against her. It’s true the third panicked, and grabbed the wrong piece of gear — but he could have done the same thing if a guy with a .33 came in and shot bullets into the ceiling, too.

    Chapman’s comment was that a a woman doing handsprings in the lobby probably wasn’t in the manual. This is true. But whatever is or isn’t in the manual, I would be hard pressed to explain what more we could have expected from low paid, not terribly extensively trained bank guards in this situation. 🙂


  11. I do see what you’re saying. Now, that we’re discussing it. But I didn’t get it from the *story*. I may be the only one who didn’t, and my mother’s rule is not to worry about a criticism you disagree with till it comes from two betareaders, but there you are.


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