Chapter 11
"Ahem. I think we got off on the wrong foot." A flat, monotone voice with just the faintest sprinkle of emotion — detectable if you were paying close attention, especially alone like this. "I think we should get acquainted properly. Ahem."
There will probably come a day when someone says to me, *Herman, you have no idea how awkward I felt*, and I will just smile quietly and shake my head. Because no one could fully convey the atmosphere currently occupying our cell.
I was sitting across from an enormous bat. A genuine, literal werebat in the most direct sense of the word. A werebat who was embarrassed, averting his eyes, and fidgeting with his fingers like Hinata Hyuga.
He was *ashamed.* He was trying not to look at me.
He was also sitting on a small chair with his enormous body hunched over the only table in the room, occasionally drumming on the surface with his fingers, which produced a deeply irritating clicking sound that bounced off every wall.
"P-possibly…"
"Don't tell me my appearance gave you a stutter." For the first time in our conversation, my cellmate's head turned toward me. Enormous red eyes without pupils stared, unblinking. The stubby flat nose twitched periodically, as if the creature was sniffing at something. "That would be a terrible entry in my personal file. I am a Harvard graduate, for the record."
Why he mentioned that last part, I had no idea, though my brain did briefly blue-screen trying to imagine this monster sitting in the front row of a lecture hall and raising his hand — or wing — to answer a question.
"I think we should get to know each other properly. I'm Sonar." He tried to reach across the table toward me and managed instead to split it cleanly in two. "Hm. I'll have to tell Harry to order a dozen of these — they break too easily, but that's still better than straightening the metal ones—"
"Herman." My introduction received a vague nod, and then the werebat's interest evaporated completely.
Muttering to himself, Sonar scratched his skull thoughtfully with the tip of a wing. More precisely, with enormous talons, each of which could have opened my skull like a tin can.
What kind of idiot had decided to put me in a cell with this thing? It was a bat. What if it ate people?
I scooted back involuntarily. The chair produced a horrible, bone-scraping shriek, which caused my companion in misfortune to turn around. Sonar studied me for a few seconds, tilting his head slowly from one side to the other.
"I know what you're thinking. And no, I don't eat people." The upright ears drooped slightly, and the whole bat hunched further, pulling an expression that only disgruntled huskies and very specific internet photos had previously achieved. "They're unpleasant. Especially heavy drug users, obese diabetics, and people of loose morals. The general quality is poor, but those three subcategories are in a class of their own."
I swallowed, digesting the fact that this individual had developed a taxonomy of human flavors.
"It's really a matter of preference," Sonar continued, apparently unaware of either my reaction or the liquid now gathering at our feet, launching cheerfully into what could only be described as a Hannibal Lecter fireside chat. "Addicts — all the organs are dead. Obese people are difficult to chew. And the promiscuous ones… well, would you want to eat a pie that multiple people had been involved with? One person added a special ingredient, fine, that's one thing. But several?"
"No," I said, producing a smile of some kind. "I would not."
Sonar nodded in complete agreement, and the atmosphere in the room shifted. He was still speaking in that same flat voice, but something had changed — a low-level threat had come into it, pressing gently against the air.
"Hey, don't get any ideas," he said, pointing one enormous talon in my direction. He stood up from behind the broken table and began moving toward me with an unhurried, menacing quality. "I'm trying to make parole here. So if you cause any trouble, or come up with any clever ideas, you will become a small pile of bat excrement. Are we clear?"
He bared a set of enormous teeth and leaned closer, clearly going for intimidation.
Then he slipped on my water and walked face-first into the wall.
His head, which weighed approximately as much as a bowling ball, survived the impact without apparent difficulty. The wall did not, and now had a network of cracks radiating from the point of contact, each of which was visible from across the room.
Not knowing whether to panic, finish him off, or call for a guard, I did none of these things and just stayed on my chair, waiting to see how this resolved itself.
"Ow." He didn't stay down long. A few seconds later the werebat was back on his feet, swaying slightly and heading for his bed. "Ow. Hey, listen — do you happen to have any coke on you? Or maybe some meth? I'll pay. Just for the headache."
"Sorry, no." I spread my hands helplessly. The bat regarded me with deep suspicion. I held the pose for approximately ten seconds before he collapsed onto the bed, mid-fall already beginning to shift back toward something vaguely human — except for the head, which shrank a little but retained its essential character.
"Shame. Well then — I'm going to sleep." He turned to face the wall and was snoring within seconds, muttering a last instruction on the way down. "We'll talk after lunch. Feeling a bit off."
"That was very strange," I said to no one.
"No kidding, man." The Black guy from the cell across the hall was hanging off his bars and gave me a thumbs up. "You held up pretty well. The last guy shit himself and passed out."
"Great." Speaking of which — in the corner of our cell stood the most classically institutional metal toilet I had ever seen. My mind immediately produced an image of an enormous bat attempting to use it. "All right. I should probably lie down too."
---
What is prison? And what is prison for supers? On the surface, no real difference — but that's only what it looks like from a distance. The actual gap is enormous.
Though first it helps to understand that supervillains are also sorted into categories. Not a ranking system like in anime — nothing that clean. The current world keeps it simple.
First category: those who might still reintegrate into society and become functional people.
Second category: the genuinely gone cases, locked in solitary, no possibility of parole, bail, or any of the other small dignities available to regular inmates. Smaller cells, thicker walls, worse food, treatment that borders on medieval — and far more super-powered guards than anywhere else.
Our block was the first category. Plenty of ordinary guards, supers who weren't at the extreme end of the power spectrum, and conditions that were objectively livable. The cell materials were higher grade than standard facilities, and in the event of trouble the guards would go straight to live ammunition targeting our specific persons — but otherwise the setup was reasonable.
Prison turned out to be not entirely terrible, and much of that was because I had, through some impossible alignment of fortune, ended up with a decent cellmate. The enormous monster-bat was sociable in his way, and nobody particularly wanted to get on his bad side — especially when he shifted into full form.
Sonar himself was… I can only describe him as a grotesque iteration of Sheldon Cooper, if Sheldon Cooper had grown up inside a crime family. Criminal. Con artist. Scammer. Professional internet menace. Absolutely a monster who had eaten human beings on at least one documented occasion. And yet — almost no sense of humor, limited tolerance for sarcasm, an emotional range comparable to a microwave oven. Charisma that somehow poured off him anyway, and a head stuffed with such a genuinely impressive catalogue of knowledge that it was hard to reconcile with everything else.
In short: complicated on the surface, but underneath it — and this will sound irrational — fairly straightforward. You just had to talk to him without an agenda, which in the eyes of every other inmate here placed you somewhere between extremely stupid and clinically insane.
This was especially true for the ordinary inmates from other wings, who crossed paths with us during yard time. Unlike supers, they were too afraid to push back at all, and so they stood there visibly sweating while Sonar walked them through the investment logic of his personal cryptocurrency, nodding dutifully every time he looked their way.
A simple example, happening right now: Sonar was in his human form, but even so, the man he was talking to kept flinching at the bat-face and jerking away from sudden movements.
"Look, Bert, just trust me on this — you know where I went to school, I know these systems inside out." There was as much intensity as his monotone could carry. "Put everything into Sonar Coin. You will not regret it. The money will flow—"
I was sitting on a nearby bench during yard time, doing my best not to absorb the pyramid scheme being pitched to the fifth mark of the afternoon. After lunch, Sonar had given me a brief orientation tour — explaining where to obtain Twinkies, burgers, cocaine, meth, heroin, dead mice, dead pigeons, new books by someone named Willem Vanderstenk (self-proclaimed genius among geniuses), and several other items I hadn't known were available.
God, the moment he'd recovered, he hadn't stopped talking for a single minute. The entire brutal monster-bloodsucker image disintegrated instantly — not helped by the revelation that Sonar vastly preferred eating small rodents, which relieved my concerns about cannibalism considerably. As for blood — not really his preference, it turned out. Which raised the question of why he'd consumed human bodies at all. Mr. Bat declined to answer, though given his relationship with cocaine and related substances, I suspected the answer involved being significantly not sober at the time.
A vegan werebat. This was supposedly a superhero world, not Twilight. What was happening.
Anyway. The conversation wrapped up, and Sonar was about to share his analysis.
He'd filled me in on the general structure of the facility, the things that only matter once you actually live somewhere, and the broader shape of how things worked here.
"Much better." The moment the Mexican kid walked far enough away, Sonar dusted his hands on his pants after the handshake with an air of satisfaction. "I'll leave here richer than when I arrived. What about you, Herman, right? Any interest in getting in on this?"
"Leave me out of your sch-schemes," I said, shaking the accumulated liquid off my hands and splashing some water on my face. Out of the corner of my eye I caught Sonar staring at me with his trademark unblinking gaze. It was deeply unnerving — it always made me leak more — and eventually I couldn't take the pressure and turned to ask. "Is s-something wrong?"
He stared in silence for a few more seconds, then opened his mouth and screamed at full volume.
I nearly left my skin. Most of the other inmates in the yard did the same. This, incidentally, was another major reason people avoided extended conversations with him.
I ended up on the ground, the bench having launched me sideways, rubbing my back and tailbone. When I finally got my eyes open, Sonar was standing over me with one hand extended. His blank, unblinking stare and the head tilted sideways gave him the energy of a seagull, or the particular kind of child who hands you a band-aid after a shark bite.
"Thanks," I said, taking the hand. No point in making enemies over nothing. "Why did you scream again?"
"Echolocation, man." He shrugged and sniffed the air with his flat nose, then raised his arm and applied the same technique to his own armpit. "God, this is terrible. I'm a valedictorian and I'm rotting in this dump—"
And there it was, the most reliably recurring theme. I'd learned quickly that there were exactly four topics guaranteed to get a response from the werebat: Harvard; narcotics; breasts; and money — specifically, methods of acquiring it. Not entirely useless common ground, given that I hadn't attended Harvard, had never used drugs, had seen breasts mainly in my imagination with my previous life excluded, and had complicated feelings about money.
The finance angle was particularly layered, considering Sonar was in for major fraud and would be here for a while — which implied he was accustomed to operating with figures well outside my frame of reference.
So I decided to just go in order and learn more about my neighbor for the next year and a half. The time wasn't long, but it was long enough that basic mutual comfort was worth pursuing.
"What did you actually study?" That decision — to talk without an agenda, to ask without purpose — was ultimately how I ended up with a genuine friend in prison. I shudder to think how many jokes Grandma and Amanda are going to make about that. But I don't regret it.
And you should have seen his eyes light up when I asked the question. Like a child, I swear.
---
"Are you going to finish that?"
I looked at the skinny rat that had set off my improvised trap, made a face that I couldn't entirely explain to myself, and stepped aside, opening my palm toward the small corpse.
"Help yourself."
"Thank you." Without ceremony, Sonar crouched down, picked the rat up by the tail, and swallowed it whole. He literally lowered it tail-first into his throat — or possibly further — and that was that. Horrifying. "Plans for today? Cards? Sleep? Or maybe something worth discussing?"
I was still working through my answer when he read the pause in his own way.
"Don't tell me you're going to play with water again." He stretched out on his bed in human form, hands behind his head, tracking me with that trademark empty stare. Maybe someday I'd get used to it. Maybe also to the screaming. And to the ambient bouquet of smells that had come to define our living situation.
"I'm not playing with water. I'm training."
"Your power is terrible." I shrugged at that rather than arguing. Winning a verbal argument with Sonar was not something I had ever managed. You had to prove things through action — words he simply didn't accept. "I just became strong. No training required."
"Lucky you. But actually I was going to go use the toilet." I delivered this news with a vindictive smile. Sonar winced and covered his sensitive ears with a pained groan.
He rolled over to face the wall and curled into a ball, waving at me — go ahead, he'd suffer quietly and try not to listen to whatever atrocity my digestive system was about to produce.
There was a whole history to that, actually. After the fifth consecutive day of me filling the entire block with sounds best described as the Battle of Stalingrad from the inside, the guards got worried enough to call a doctor. The poor old man turned visibly pink, shook with suppressed laughter, and was clearly fighting a losing battle while I explained my situation, under the tired, flat stares of the correctional officers.
The neighbors had opinions too.
"CODE RED! Hydrant's heading to the throne!" The same guy from across the hall was already sprinting for his bunk, stuffing homemade earplugs in. Half the block followed. "GO! I've notified everyone!"
"You're all terrible."
This reputation brought me no joy, and I told everyone so regularly. Except Sonar — he genuinely could not understand why I was called that, even when I explained it in detail. The bat brain had its limitations.
I'd just settled in when someone knocked on the cell bars.
"Sergeant, I'll be quick—"
"Relax." The large, heavyset Black officer with the impressive brush mustache massaged his eyelids, dragged his hand down his face, muttered something under his breath, and continued. "You have a visitor. Inmates in good standing get two visits a month. So finish your business, clean yourself up — your sister and your grandmother are here."
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