Fireye opened her door to find Paragon on her front stoop. Paragon, lynchpin of the Security Council's global defense strategy, was pushing her recycling bin aside and inspecting the chipped paint on her doorframe.

"Holy shit!" dropped out of her mouth before she could stop herself. "Paragon? What are you doing here? I mean, what the hell are you doing here? Is it good or bad? Could you sign my–"

"There's no time for that now," he said in his famous basso, eyebrows tight on his face, lips drawn into a hard line. "Get inside, out of sight. Do you know where your family are?"

Fireye's fiery eyes widened, and the temperature around them raised a full degree. "Bad, then." She cleared her throat and put on her hero game-face, then one that the cameras knew, the one she'd worn under the blood spatter when she'd put down Exterscius. "Ok. Ok. Do you need help? What can I do?"

Paragon pushed past her and swiftly pulled the curtains shut. It was only then that she noticed his hands were shaking. Paragon's hands were shaking. What fresh hell could shake the hands of the man who had literally turned back Hell's own invasion?

"Get your wife, get your kids," he said. To his credit, his voice didn't waver. "You need to vanish. New identities, new names. New bodies if you know a polymorpher who will help you within the hour. If not, just get out and get to the other side of the planet. Whatever contingencies you have, use them."

"Fuck, Paragon, slow down and give me a real sitrep." Fireye forced her breathing to steady, pulled her focus in. "What in the absolute fuck are we dealing with?"

Paragon turned his arresting ice-white eyes to meet her burning ones. She could feel the pressure emanating from them, could feel her own flames rising to match. He took a deep breath.

"The Tickler is coming for you." He said it slowly, clearly, without inflection. In her mind, Fireye could distinctly hear a record-scratch play, stopping the inner music of the moment.

"Say that again," she said.

"The Tickler is coming for you." His voice, balm to millions, cracked just a bit. "She'll be here soon."

"The Tickler," said Fireye. "The prankster. The one who made the mayor of Lagos piss his pants on the news last week. That Tickler."

"Yes," said Paragon, his voice level.

"You are not serious," said Fireye. "This isn't funny. You scared me."

"I am far past serious," said Paragon. "My daughter is dead."

Fireye's jaw slowly descended, dragged inexorably downward with uncompromising force.

"No. No no no. Your daughter is The Black Knight. I just saw her on the news."

"Do you know why?" asked Paragon in a dead voice.

"She foiled a plot on the President," answered Fireye, alarm rising in her chest.

"As it turns out, she foiled a prank on the President." Paragon's tone turned flat and clinical, the words of a recon unit reporting to command. "The Tickler's son Sideshow was setting off some cuss-word fireworks over the President's head, protesting the fracking policy or some other nonsense. But Shelley's team was there, and Sagittarius put a stellar arrow through his eye. Sideshow was gone in seconds."

"That's terrible," began Fireye, "but we both know he shouldn't have been there. And the kid makes sparkles. His mother makes people laugh. The hell is going on, Paragon?"

"Omar," he said in that lost, hollow tone. "My name is Omar."

"Omar," said Fireye, "please help me understand."

"She's not just going to kill our kids," said Paragon, said Omar, said the most apocalyptic single human force in recorded history. He looked at the floor. "She's going to make us kill our kids."

Fireye noticed then the bags under Paragon's eyes. She ran out of words; he'd run out of tears.

"It's very Biblical, isn't it?" he mused without affect. "An eye for an eye, a child for a child. She caught me in the audience at Shelley's award ceremony." He paused, then looked back at her, gaze to gaze, parent to parent. "Did you know that a laugh is an involuntary spasm? That's what she really does. She makes you spasm."

"So..." said Fireye, and then it caught her. "Oh. Oh, no."

"Yes." Behind his voice, Fireye could hear the bile rise in Paragon's throat, could hear the acid hit his vocal cords. "I killed them. I killed my little girl, I killed them all. I twitched and they died and I knew it was her. I'd be glad that the President wasn't there, if I thought I could ever be glad again."

"You need to know," he continued, dead-eyed,, "that she can do it from anywhere. She's got a truly photographic memory, and all she needs to do is see you once. That's it, that's all she needs, and she's got you forever. Most of us have been marked for years, and we never guessed. What would happen to your kids if you lost control and looked at them?"

Fireye's face went ashen. "She has to be stopped."

"How?" asked the most powerful man in the world.

She searched for answers. "Surprise? Mind control?"

"How many of us do you think she's ever seen?" His voice rose, fear and anger meeting in rising volume. "How many of us could she turn against one another and make fucking chaos bombs out of our powers?"

His shoulders squared, finally, and his face evened out. "So you will get your kids, and you will vanish. And we will both pray that ordinary humans can handle her, with their invasive security cameras and their terrorizing drone strikes. We will pray they can even find her, a lifelong fugitive with a singular strategic genius and massive popular support, who has decided that the hegemony of heroes is over and that she will personally visit upon us the Plague of the Angel of Death."

"Yes, yes I will." Fireye began to leak cinder-tears down the sides of her face. "Thank you for telling me."

"Thank me when we live," said Paragon as he mastered his grief and began to flex his onyx wings. "Now go. I have a hundred more stops to make tonight."

EDIT: re-jiggered a paragraph and added punctuation. Also, feedback always welcome!