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Robert knows it’s going to be a stupid call the second the summary populates.
POSSIBLE BURGLARY IN PROGRESS
West Torrance, boutique wellness retail corridor
Silent alarm triggered at Moon Baby Crystal & Somatic Alignment Studio
Caller notes: “They’re stealing the singing bowls and maybe the aura lamps?”
Secondary note: “The owner is on site and armed with palo santo.”
Robert stares at the screen.
Then he reads it again.
Then he leans back in his chair and says to nobody, “Armed with palo santo.”
The dispatch floor hums around him. Keyboards. Low voices. The soft bureaucratic pulse of problems being sorted into columns. In another window, a city camera shows the strip mall frontage: dark glass, tasteful signage, one panicked woman in expensive linen pacing outside a storefront and waving something smoky at the door like she’s trying to exorcise shoplifting itself.
Chase passes behind him with coffee and glances at the screen.
Robert doesn’t look away from it. “How many crimes do you think palo santo can stop before it becomes more of a mood?”
Chase slows. “What the fuck is palo santo?”
“Magic wood, apparently.”
Chase leans in, squinting at the incident notes. “Right.” He considers it for a second. “Stick kind or spray kind?”
Robert points without enthusiasm. “Stick.”
Chase winces. “Low stopping power.”
“Thought so.”
The timer on the icon ticks down. Robert scans the available roster. It is, somehow, worse than the call.
Punch Up is still across town dealing with an altercation outside a bar with a name like Tax Evasion. Waterboy is on a flood response support call and already looks one inconvenience away from evaporating. Flambae and Prism are tied up together on crowd control at some influencer launch, with Flambae making it worse and Prism loving every second of it. Malevola is technically available, which means she is either two minutes from the site or choosing not to answer because the crime insulted her aesthetically. Golem and Invisigal are assisting on a motorway pileup, which means wreckage is moving at the speed of continental drift while nobody is entirely sure where she is.
His eyes land on two green names.
Sonar.
Phenomaman.
Robert stops.
Then slowly grimaces.
“Oh no,” he says.
He clicks them both.
Across the floor, Blonde Blazer rounds the corner from the corridor with a folder tucked under one arm, halfway back from whatever meeting just ended. She slows as she passes Robert’s desk, catching the particular look on his face like a pressure change.
“What?” she asks.
Robert is already patching into field comms. “Nothing. Just making an interesting choice.”
“That is never what nothing sounds like.”
The comm line opens with wind noise and Sonar talking over it.
“...and I’m just saying branding-wise, if a guy can absorb energy, fly faster than a jet, and fold a car in half by accident, ‘Phenomaman’ is actually too humble. You could be something like, I don’t know, Sun Daddy.”
There is a pause.
Then Phenomaman says, with the weary patience of a man who has made peace with terrible company, “There are few gifts more tragic than your command of language.”
Robert closes his eyes for a second.
“Hey, guys.”
“Bobby!” Sonar says brightly. “To what do we owe the pleasure. Promotion? Bonus? Secret investor meeting?”
“It’s a burglary.”
“A burglary of the non-powered variety?” Phenomaman asks.
“Looks like it.”
Sonar gasps theatrically. “No powers? Boberto, you shouldn’t have. A moon store burglary with one of my favourite weirdos? You do know how to treat me.”
“No confirmed powers.”
“Hot,” Sonar says.
Phenomaman sighs. “Do not describe crime as hot.”
On Robert’s camera feed, their GPS tags swing toward the wellness strip. Sonar’s icon moves fast in short erratic bursts, which means he’s covering ground the way he covers most things: on foot and with unnecessary confidence. Phenomaman’s line is smoother, cleaner, infuriatingly normal.
Robert pulls up the storefront feed just as the silent alarm re-triggers.
Inside Moon Baby Crystal & Somatic Alignment Studio, three men in black hoodies are moving quickly through soft purple light and aggressively spiritual decor. One is shoving boxed merchandise into a duffel bag. One is trying to detach what appears to be a mounted brass gong from a display wall. The third has stopped in the middle of the room and is staring at his own reflection in a mirrored pillar lined with salt lamps.
Robert leans in.
“Okay,” he says. “Three suspects. No obvious powers. One possible morale problem.”
“Describe the space,” Phenomaman says.
Robert glances at the feed. “Uh. Expensive witch Etsy. Low lighting. Crystals. Incense. Potential slip hazard if anything goes wrong.”
Sonar makes an approving noise. “Atmospheric.”
“There’s also a civilian outside.”
“The palo santo lady?” Sonar asks.
“Yes.”
“Alive?”
“Yes, Sonar.”
“Just checking. Don’t get snippy. This is why middle management fails.”
The GPS markers stop moving. Live street cam picks them up a second later: Phenomaman dropping at the far end of the strip mall in full costume, all broad shoulders, primary colours, and exhausted Superman body language, cape dragging behind a man who still looks built to save the world even if getting dumped seems to have taken the wind out of the pose, while Sonar drops beside him in hybrid form like a bat-headed Wall Street goblin in a navy suit, red tie already halfway to horizontal.
The owner rushes them immediately.
“Oh thank God,” she says, smoke still trailing from the palo santo stick in her hand. “There are men inside my shop and they are disturbing the energy.”
Sonar places a hand to his chest. “Ma’am, I need you to know I respect that as a sentence.”
Phenomaman takes the palo santo from her with practised gentleness before Sonar can make it worse. “Please step back from the entrance, small being.”
“That wood is consecrated.”
“That wood may be consecrated. It is also flammable. This is a suboptimal pairing.”
Robert watches Sonar tilt his head toward the door, listening. Ears twitching. posture sharpening under the nonsense. It happens fast with him. One second chaos muppet, next second all the frivolity falls back just enough to show the predator underneath.
He points at the storefront.
“Two near the rear wall,” Sonar says. “One dead centre. Breathing hard. He’s either panicking or really into the incense.”
“He’s staring at himself in a mirror,” Robert says.
Sonar considers that. “Could still go either way.”
Phenomaman rolls his shoulders once. “Plan?”
Robert pulls the live layout from the building permit overlay. “Front entrance, stockroom in back, single employee exit through the alley. No sign of hostages. Keep them inside. Don’t break anything unless it’s funny.”
Sonar makes a delighted sound. “Jesus, Bobby. Buy me dinner first.”
“It wasn’t for you.”
“It sounded for me.”
Phenomaman cuts in before Robert can answer. “I will take the rear. Sonar, you will hold the front and deny them exit.”
Sonar bristles immediately. “Deny them exit. Wow. Bleak.”
“It is a bleak assignment.”
“What if they run?”
Phenomaman does not turn. “Then you will stop them before they complete the attempt.”
Sonar makes an offended sound in the back of his throat. “You make everything sound so joyless.”
“It is how I endure,” Phenomaman says. “Hold the front.”
Phenomaman launches upward instead, cape cracking behind him as he clears the strip mall in a single clean arc. The alley cam catches him a second later dropping at the rear exit hard enough to rattle the metal security door in its frame before he reaches for the handle.
At the front, Sonar pushes through the door.
The burglars look up. There is half a second of confusion as they take him in. Bat head. White eyes. Expensive navy suit.
Sonar spreads his arms. “Good evening, retail offenders. I’m gonna need everybody to stop doing crime in the moon store.”
The guy with the duffel bag freezes.
The guy wrestling the gong says, “What the fuck.”
The third guy turns away from the mirror so fast he nearly walks into a display of rose quartz eggs.
Robert watches the room process Sonar in real time.
It never gets old.
One burglar recovers first. “Who the hell are you meant to be?”
Sonar bares a little fang. “That is such a rude first question.”
He takes two slow steps forward.
Behind them, the stockroom door opens. Phenomaman steps out and fills the doorway behind them.
Now the burglars have Sonar in front, Phenomaman at the back, and nowhere useful to put their fear.
The one with the gong drops it.
The crash is appalling.
Inside, the duffel bag guy does the universal math of bad decisions and picks the wrong one.
He charges Sonar.
Sonar brightens instantly. “Oh, good choice.”
“Sonar,” Robert warns.
“Relax, Bobby. I’m doing customer service.”
The burglar gets one arm’s length away before Sonar opens his mouth and lets out a short, sharp sonic shriek. Not enough to rupture anything. Just enough to hit like a wall. The sound punches through the room. Chimes rattle. Hanging prisms jump on their strings. Every loose brochure by the register lifts and scatters like frightened birds. The man’s whole body seizes mid-stride. Knees buckle. Momentum carries him one more stumbling step before it abandons him entirely. He pinwheels backward, arms grabbing for balance that no longer exists, and crashes shoulder-first into a tower of boxed crystal singing bowls.
They come down in a sparkling avalanche of wellness merchandise. Boxes burst open across the floor. Foam inserts skid everywhere. Two lacquered bowls roll in widening circles, humming faintly as they spin. A framed sign reading ALIGNMENT BEGINS WITH INTENTION snaps cleanly in half beneath him.
The burglar lies there stunned, blinking at the ceiling, surrounded by premium spiritual debris.
Sonar lowers his chin and smooths the front of his suit.
“See?” he says into comms. “Measured response. Growth.”
Robert keys back at once. “You screamed a man into retail shelving.”
“I screamed professionally.”
Phenomaman gives one short laugh before catching himself.
Sonar snaps toward him. “Was that joy?”
“It was weakness.”
“I treasure this moment.”
“Well,” Phenomaman says, already moving for the second burglar, “that was regrettably effective.”
The second burglar makes for the rear exit on instinct and nearly bounces off Phenomaman, who is already filling the doorway like a structural problem. The impact barely moves him. It mostly redistributes the burglar.
There is a brief, deeply one-sided scuffle. One panicked swing gets caught at the wrist. Another dies somewhere useless against Phenomaman’s chest. Phenomaman turns him with the calm economy of a man repositioning furniture, guides his momentum past him, and folds him neatly over a yoga bolster with almost insulting gentleness.
The burglar lands draped across it, winded and blinking at the floor like it has personally betrayed him.
Phenomaman places one broad hand between the man’s shoulders to keep him there.
“No,” he says, in the tone of someone declining a second dessert.
The burglar makes a weak attempt to rise.
Phenomaman presses two fingers down.
“No again.”
Across the room, Sonar claps once, delighted.
“Oh, clinical,” he says. “That was artful. Efficient. Mean in a tasteful way.”
“It was basic leverage.”
“It was character assassination.”
The burglar groans something muffled into the mat.
Robert keys in over comms. “Rear exit secure?”
Phenomaman doesn’t look up. “Very.”
Then, after a beat, with grave consideration:
“This room contains far more cushions than any crime scene should.”
The third guy, the mirror one, puts both hands up immediately.
“I’m out,” he says. “I’m so out. I didn’t even want the crystals. Darren said they were easy to fence.”
From the floor, Darren, buried in crystal bowl packaging, yells, “Don’t say my name!”
Sonar crouches in front of the surrendering burglar, looming cheerfully.
“You tried to rob a place called Moon Baby,” he says. “You were never built for this life.”
The guy nods with the desperate sincerity of someone who has seen the error in his path. “Yeah. Yeah, honestly? Yeah.”
Phenomaman steps out from the stockroom doorway and closes the door behind him with deliberate calm. He crouches and starts zip-tying wrists with the calm efficiency of a man who has accepted that this is now somehow part of his evening.
Robert keys in the police handoff and logs the call.
“Scene looks contained,” he says. “Any injuries?”
“That was, I admit, mildly phenomenal,” Phenomaman replies.
“Speak for yourself,” Sonar says. “I’m thriving.”
The owner bursts through the still-open door before anyone can stop her.
She takes in the wrecked displays, the toppled gong, the unconscious Darren, the zip-tied suspects, Sonar crouched like a demonic gargoyle in the middle of her chakra section, and Phenomaman standing among the debris looking like a cologne ad for conflict resolution.
Then she points accusingly at Sonar.
“Did you scream in here?”
Sonar rises to full height with offended dignity. “Ma’am, I projected with precision.”
She looks around the room again. One of the hanging aura lamps lets go of its cord and crashes to the floor. Her face does something Robert can only describe as astral grief.
Phenomaman steps in immediately. “Insurance should cover structural and inventory losses. SDN will document the incident. I regret that the moon store remark cannot be retracted from history.”
Sonar points upward toward Robert’s voice like he can somehow hear the exact shape of judgment through a corporate audio channel. “I want it noted,” he says, “that I solved this elegantly.”
“You solved it loud,” Robert says.
“It was a loud environment.”
Phenomaman glances around at the wrecked crystal displays, the shattered lamp, the toppled gong, and the faint residual hum still vibrating in the wind chimes.
Then he says, completely straight-faced, “I would classify this as a clean save.”
Sonar turns to him, delighted. “See? That’s why you’re my boy.”
Phenomaman gives him a flat look. “Don’t make that weird.”
“Impossible brief,” Sonar says automatically.
Robert groans into his headset.
Blazer, from across the dispatch floor, goes very still for one second, then says, “Why do I feel like that was aimed at somebody specific.”
Robert swivels his chair just enough to look at her.
“I truly cannot imagine,” he says.
She narrows her eyes.
On the monitor, Sonar has already found a polished black sphere from some nearby display and is checking his reflection in it while one of the burglars sits zip-tied on the floor re-evaluating every life choice that led him here.
Phenomaman notices and says, “You are not permitted to steal from an active burglary scene.”
“I’m not stealing,” Sonar says, scandalised. “I’m auditing.”
Then, after a pause: “This lighting is incredible for me.”
The first cop through the door has the expression of a man who was told this was a routine burglary and is now being asked to process Sonar, Phenomaman, three groaning suspects, a floor covered in crystal debris, and one woman in linen whispering furiously about spiritual contamination.
Robert watches the bodycam feed hit the dispatch monitor and mutters, “Oh, this is gonna go great.”
It does not.
Phenomaman gives his statement with the grave dignity of a man testifying before history itself. He does not sit. He does not lean. He stands in the middle of the wrecked chakra section in full primary-colour sorrow and says, “The threat has been neutralised. The remaining damage is largely aesthetic.”
The younger cop blinks up at him. “Right.”
Phenomaman looks toward the ceiling for one long second, as if asking the universe to either improve or finish the job. Then he turns to Robert’s voice in his ear.
“Am I still required here?”
Robert glances at the feed. Two officers on scene now. Three suspects zip-tied. Owner alive. Property damage already spiritually maxed out.
“You’re clear.”
“Understood,” Phenomaman says. Then, after a beat: “This was, despite everything, not an entirely joyless use of my time.”
He launches straight up through the open frontage hard enough to rattle the hanging lamps again. The owner makes a wounded sound. His cape vanishes into the night.
Sonar watches him go, one hand resting on his own chest like he’s witnessing a theatre exit worthy of study.
“Dramatic,” he says.
“Jealous?” Robert asks.
“Professionally inspired.”
Sonar starts toward the door instead of the roof, adjusting his tie with two fingers as he goes. He’s halfway into the night air when the older cop hauls Darren upright by one arm and immediately makes two mistakes in quick succession.
First, he underestimates how much crystal bowl packaging is still all over the floor.
Second, he hands Darren off to the younger cop, who has already committed to holding a flashlight, a notepad, and a suspect at the same time.
Darren slips.
Not falls. Slips.
His trainers skid on a scatter of packing foam. His shoulder twists free. For one bright, stupid instant everyone in the room is too surprised to stop him.
Then Darren bolts.
The younger cop yells, “Hey!”
The older one yells, “Shit!”
The owner yells, “Not through the salt!”
Darren barrels through the door and cuts hard into the side alley, still half-cuffed, moving with the blind mechanical commitment of a man who knows jail is real but is willing to test whether an alley might solve him first.
Robert is already leaning forward. “Sonar.”
Sonar turns his head.
Then smiles.
“Oh, now we’re talking.”
He goes after Darren on foot at first, expensive shoes slapping pavement as he cuts into the alley with enough speed to make the younger cop wisely give up within three steps. The alley cam catches him in profile for half a second: bat head, white eyes, red tie streaming out behind him, posture sharpened from chaos into appetite.
Darren hears him coming and looks back.
This is the tactical error.
He puts on a little more speed out of sheer animal panic, clips a dumpster corner, pinballs off wet brick, keeps going.
“Rob,” Sonar says between strides, almost delighted, “permission to make this weird?”
“No property damage.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“Minimal property damage.”
“Perfect.”
He changes in motion.
Not all at once. Not elegantly. The alley camera catches it in pieces as his body drops lower and larger, suit surrendering to fur and mass and wrong geometry. Shoulders surge outward. Wings tear loose in a black rush that nearly scrape both walls. The frame of him lengthens, collapses, reconfigures. One second a bat-headed man in a suit is sprinting down an alley after a burglar.
The next, something much larger hits the pavement hard enough to shake the bin lids.
Sonar’s mega-bat form lands in a four-point crouch and launches again immediately.
Robert has seen him do this once before. It still looks fake.
It is not a mammal run. It is not a flight takeoff. It is some cursed middle answer his body found under duress and then committed to with full confidence. He hurls himself along the alley in brutal forelimb-driven bounds, shoulders doing most of the work, hind limbs kicking through after, wings opening and snapping half-folded for balance in ugly, powerful beats.
He looks like a gargoyle trying to become a drag racer.
Darren makes the mistake of looking back a second time.
“What the fuck!” he screams, which is fair.
He pushes harder, feet skidding on damp concrete, shoulder clipping a fence hard enough to rattle it. Ahead, the alley narrows around stacked milk crates, a chain-link gate, and one overturned rubbish bin leaking something oily into the centre line.
Sonar gains on him anyway.
Fast.
Too fast for something that size.
Each landing sounds like a dropped wardrobe. Each launch looks like a bad idea solving itself through momentum. Wings flare, claws bite, shoulders drive. He is almost on Darren by the time the man reaches the gate and tries to scramble over it with one hand still half-restrained.
He gets one foot up.
Then Sonar lets out a short, sharp chirping burst. Not a full sonic hit. Just enough to scramble the moment. Darren flinches mid-climb. His foot slips. He comes off the gate sideways and lands on his ass in a puddle with a sound that is, in its own way, quite impressive.
Sonar lands in front of him.
Not on him.
In front.
Huge. Furred. Wings half-open. Glowing red eyes catching the alley light. Too much tooth visible in what is technically a smile.
For one terrible second Darren just stares upward, soaked, shaking, hands braced behind him in oily runoff.
Sonar lowers his head.
“Hey,” he says, voice dropped into that enormous chest resonance that makes the fence hum. “Counterpoint.”
Darren tries to crab-walk backward. There is nowhere to go.
Robert keys the comm. “Status?”
Sonar doesn’t look away from Darren. “Contained,” he says. Then, pleased with himself: “Beautifully.”
Two cops arrive in the alley a few seconds later, breathing hard, trying very much to behave like this is still a normal arrest. The younger one stops dead when he sees a giant bat in a red tie crouched over the suspect like a cathedral nightmare.
Sonar glances back at him. “You guys are, respectfully, very slow.”
The older cop points at Darren. “Can we take him?”
Sonar looks down at Darren, who has fully given up and appears to be reconsidering every choice he has made since childhood.
Then Sonar looks back at the cop.
“Yeah,” he says. “But, just as feedback, your handoff mechanics are dogshit.”
Robert audibly laughs on comms. The older cop pretends not to hear it.
By the time they haul Darren upright, Sonar is already shrinking back down, the larger shape folding in on itself with ugly, efficient speed, wings collapsing last in a black rustle tight against his back before the shoulders finally narrow and leave him hybrid again, tie gone, shirt ruined, dignity somehow intact.
He smooths one hand over the front of what remains of his suit and starts walking back toward the storefront like he absolutely did not just turn into a nine-foot alley cryptid to solve a paperwork problem.
“Sonar,” Robert says.
“Yeah?”
“That was property damage adjacent.”
“No property damaged.”
“You scared a cop so badly he dropped his radio.”
“Emotional fragility is not a structure, Bobby.”
When he steps back into the light spilling from the storefront, the owner takes one look at the state of him and says, “Did you get alley on you?”
Sonar, without missing a beat, replies, “A little. But I wore it flawlessly.”
From dispatch, Robert puts his head down on his desk for a full second.
Chase glances at the monitor. “To be fair,” he says, “that was a pretty good run for the fucker.”
Robert lifts his head slowly. “Do not encourage him.”
Sonar checks his reflection in the dark window and says, “Too late. I already feel seen.”
On the bodycam feed, Sonar checks his reflection in the dark window of the moon store, bares one fang at himself approvingly, and says, very softly, “Still got it.”