Ally stormed through the office -- stomping down the halls, snarling at the interns, and pushing her way past a protesting receptionist, before, finally, kicking open her boss's door. "I'm quitting," she announced.

Martin, sitting calmly and quietly behind his desk, looked up from his computer. He sighed at the sight of her. "Ally..."

"I'm serious this time, Martin. I'm gone."

He looked at her over the rims of his glasses. "It couldn't have been that bad."

"Two hours," she seethed. "The bimbo kept me waiting for two hours, outside her trailer, and she didn't even--"

"You didn't call her a bimbo, did you?" Martin interrupted wearily, taking off his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose.

"I should have." She put her hands on her hips. "This whole thing was a waste of time, Martin. Three weeks of sucking up to her creepy agent to get the interview, two hours fighting traffic into Stapleton, another two hours sitting in the hot sun waiting for her to finish her stupid salad...and all I got out of it was five minutes of umm's and like's. The airhead was on her phone the whole time! And she couldn't remember anything about the robberies anyway."

Martin frowned. "Nothing at all?"

Ally shook her head. "The Phantom of the Mind had her in some kind of trance, from beginning to end. She didn't even remember being kidnapped."

"Hmm. That's too bad."

"I've got nothing, Martin. How am I supposed to turn this into a five-page feature?"

He thought about it. "We could cut it down to three."

She snorted. "Right."

He leaned back in his seat and studied her for a moment. "So you're quitting."

"Yeah."

"And you're serious this time."

Her eyes flashed. "Yes, I am. I'm sick of this fluff. If I don't start getting some better assignments--"

"Close the door, Ally," he said wearily.

Ally, cooling off, suddenly realized that half the office was listening in on the conversation through the open door behind her. She threw the eavesdroppers a dirty look, which scattered them, and closed the door.

Martin looked at her thoughtfully. Her editor was one of the few people capable of holding her gaze for more than a moment; her striking heterochromia (she had one blue eye, and one brown eye) tended to throw people off. "Sit down, please," he said.

She found a chair and sat down, grumpily, folding her arms over her chest.

"We're understaffed right now," he said. "You know that, right?"

"I know," she grumbled.

"Rich is on vacation, Julie is on sabbatical, and Jonah's still embedded with the Offshoots. You're all I've got until October."

"What about Reggie?"

Martin rolled his eyes. "Reggie's sixty-four years old, and he's never worked anything but the crime beat. I suddenly start giving him annoying assignments, you know what'll happen? He'll retire a year early, and then we'll be even more understaffed."

"I just don't see why we can't give some of this junk to the freelancers."

"I can't give them everything," he said patiently. "The regulars are already stretched pretty thin. I know you don't like working these entertainment angles, but it's only for a few more months, and someone has to--"

"I get it, I get it," Ally cut in. "But I'm going crazy here, Martin. It's been months. I'm an investigative journalist, for heaven's sake, not a puff-piecer. I need a story -- something I can really sink my teeth into, you know?"

He nodded. "I understand." He paused, then added, "I don't want to lose you, Ally. I don't want you quitting on me."

She sulked. "I wouldn't really quit. You know I love this magazine."

"I know," he said gently. He steepled his fingers together, thinking, before puffing out a breath and saying, "All right. Here's what we'll do. Hana's been looking to start writing; we'll give her a staff writer position and give her some of these lightweight stories to start, just to get her feet wet."

"She'll appreciate that," Ally said. Hana was their copy editor. Ally had been friends with her for years, despite the fact that the two of them didn't really have anything in common.

"No doubt," he agreed. "And as for you..." He looked at her intently. "Okay. I was planning on saving this for October, after things had settled down a bit around here, but since you're insisting..." He trailed off.

"What?" she asked. "What have you got?"

"You want something you can really sink your teeth into? All right; I've got something. You might have a bit of trouble with it, though."

"Trouble is my business. What have you got?"

He paused, just a bit dramatically, then said, "I want you to find the Signal City Flare."

Ally frowned. "The Signal City Flare?"

"You don't remember him?"

"I remember the name, but..."

"Yeah, that was one of ours. Julie gave him the name. She got it from an eyewitness, a young lady; she said his body was giving off some kind of incredibly bright light. He saved her from a gang of the Neo-Rasputin's thugs up in Stone's Row last summer."

"Superhero, then?"

"Apparently. He only made a couple of brief appearances last year, though, before vanishing; we haven't had a confirmed sighting since last October."

None of this sounded all that promising to Ally. "Only a couple of appearances?"

"He scared off a couple of muggers in Wellington later that summer, and he might have been part of the group that fought the Pyromech in Cincinnatus Park back in September. We haven't been able to confirm that."

"So what's so special about this Flare? Why do you want him found?"

"I want an interview. I want to find out what happened to him."

"Yeah, but why? This guy obviously never amounted to anything." Some superheroes had long, busy careers in Signal City, battling villains, foiling plots, and pulling people out of burning buildings; these heroes tended to become celebrities, featured in magazines like Champions Weekly. Others, like this Signal Flare character, disappeared from the scene almost as quickly they as arrived. It was a revolving door; the heroes and villains were always coming and going.

"He may not have amounted to much, in the long run," Martin admitted, "but he did distinguish himself, on one occasion. You've heard of Fade, I'm sure, and the Cauldron?"

"Of course."

Martin smiled slightly. "It might interest you to know that the Signal City Flare is the only hero who's ever fought Fade, and won."

Ally blinked. "This guy fought Fade?"

"And won," he reiterated. "This was late last year. Fade was practically unknown then; the Cauldron hadn't really acquired their reputation yet at that point."

The Cauldron was a well-known supervillain cabal. Led by the mysterious Fade, this shadowy threesome -- whose other members were the speedy female martial artist Talis Smoke and the vampire Marjolaine -- had been in the news almost constantly lately. They broke into secure facilities, robbed armored cars, and battled superheroes all over the city; Fade himself was known to have personally fought (and overpowered) Nightjar, the aging Blunderbuss, and, most recently, the super-strong Earthmover.

"You're telling me this nobody defeated Fade."

He nodded. "In Stone's Row, in October. He handed Fade over to the police after the fight; unfortunately the creep managed to escape from police custody just a few minutes later. They never even got him to the station to book him."

"And the Flare?"

"Hasn't been seen since that night."

"Well," Ally said, leaning back in her chair. "Well, well. Interesting."

"We've been giving over a lot of coverage to the Cauldron lately. Our readers are starting to ask questions. They've been going over our old articles on the website, and wanting to know what happened to the Flare -- the only hero, so far, who's proven to be a match for Fade. Finding this guy would be big, Ally." He looked away for a moment, turning contemplative. "People are starting to get pretty worried out there, you know. These past few weeks have been bad. The city's villains have been running wild since the Star Marshal showed up, and successful syndicates like this Cauldron group are only making matters worse."

"Aren't the Offshoots keeping a lid on things? I've been reading Jonah's reports; they're pretty optimistic."

"The Offshoots are doing the best they can...and Jonah's trying to stay positive, I'm sure. If you read between the lines, though..." He shook his head. "Personally I can't wait for our heroes to come home."

Ally nodded in agreement. Three weeks ago, the Star Marshal -- a spacefaring hero who hadn't been seen on Earth in several years -- had appeared in the skies above Signal City, warning of some kind of cosmic threat he called the Great Filter. Half the city's heroes had flown off to help him battle the alien, or whatever it was, and so far as anyone knew they were still out there battling it, somewhere in deep space. With the Signal Corps, most of the CrossGuard, Stormchaser, the Ancient Greek, Zona'na, and the Paranormals all off-planet, and with the government-sponsored Fireteam Alpha working somewhere overseas, the Offshoots -- a superhero team from Santa Florentina, in California -- had been flown in to assist the city's remaining, beleaguered heroes. Jonah's articles had seemed to suggest that they were doing a fairly good job of keeping the city's villains in check, but maybe things weren't going as smoothly as they seemed.

Her thoughts were already returning to this story, though, about the Signal City Flare. "Is anyone else working on this, that you know of? The Sentinel, maybe? Aces?"

"I don't know, but I doubt it. Every story about the Flare has been a Champions Weekly exclusive. Local stuff. There might be a reference to him in Sixgun's Metahuman Review, but if they have anything on him they got it from us."

"I like it," Ally said, a smile slowly spreading across her face. "I like it. What's my deadline?"

"I can give you two weeks."

She winced. "That's not much."

He shrugged. "Best I can do. I'm going to need you back on the regular features in September."

"You really think I can find this guy in two weeks? How exactly do you expect me to track him down, anyway?"

"You're an investigative journalist, aren't you?" He gave her a sardonic smirk. "Investigate."

She gave him an irritated look, but he was already dismissing her, returning his attention to his computer. "The Signal City Flare. Two weeks."

She rose from her seat. "All right. I'll see what I can do." She hesitated then, brushing some of her red hair over her ear in a sheepish sort of way. "Sorry for barging in like I did, boss. I didn't mean to make a scene."

The smirk reappeared. "Of course you didn't. Now get out of here, get to it. Oh, and send Hana in here after you, would you? I need to give her the good news."

Ally nodded dutifully, leaving him to his typing.

The Signal City Flare. Two weeks.

She found herself grinning as she stepped out of the office. This, she decided, was going to be fun.

BH