Edna is sitting perfectly still, a statue. Quite literally, the boy may not have an ounce of powers, but he can build an immobilizer ray, it’s quite impressive actually. Once she would have offered him a card, fashion is not limited to the ‘good’ or the ‘evil’, it is pure, open, neutral.
But that was before the Ban.
Now, now she knows he dances with fire, too foolish to wear flame retardant cloth. He wants what he can never have. What even the great Edna Mode cannot give him. And she knows he will hurt her friends to get it. There are precious few supers now who still talk to her, but she counts every one she ever dressed a friend, no matter how estranged. The closest resemble family.
And the boy will hurt them, with her help or without it.
That does not mean Edna is without power here, she has been kidnapped before, of course. Some of the most traditionalist villains will arrange meetings no other way, it offends their sensibilities. She can respect that, fashion is about sensibilities. The subtle game of prisoner and captor is actually fun when she plays with a good partner. The boy is not a good partner, he takes the game too seriously, and all she needs to do is acquiesce with her normal levels of snide dismissal.
It’s almost too easy to ask him for design input.
He shows her countless drawings, some the obviously deliberate hand of a child, devoted to a craft he had not mastered, some the mad scribbling of a spoiled man. The colors document his changes, how he darkened them, how the hues became stark and bold tipped into offensive, aggressive. It is a study in the fall into madness done in carefully chosen fabric swatches and angular fashion plates.
Her hand stutters over the one at the bottom of the stack, the newest.
“Do you like that one? I put a lot of thought into it. I wanted to use the je ne sais quoi of the greats. The classic jumpsuit design I pulled from Mr Incredible, my idol as a child, you know. And you can’t go wrong with a domino mask, even if some say it’s too simple to hide the identity.” He smiles, guileless child with no idea, no idea at all what he’s going to push her to. He had dropped the one name, the one family, that Edna would move mountains to protect. She was going to kill the boy, as she had others, and he would say thank you as he took his poison.
“Nice cape,” she says. “Little short though. Stratogale’s went to the ground.”
Some people say not all heroes wear capes when they discuss the actions of non-supers. If Edna Mode has any say, and she has substantial say, no hero (super or not) will ever wear a cape again. He shouldn’t have chosen this path, because she will make him a cape, and he will die. He is a villain, and not under the protection of her vow to give no cape to an innocent again. She will make the suits for the ones who go to defeat him, and they will live. She will take note of all his strengths and stack the deck. Edna Mode will play god, decide who lives and who dies and how the history is recorded. She knows this, and she knows who and what she is. She accepts it.
Later she makes a new funeral outfit for herself.
It’s elegant and chic and will remind the world of her name. The fall of the fabric will draw eyes to her, and the sweep of the veil will make men kneel in support. It has neat tucks and a demure silhouette. It has every aspect of good fashion, from the slight cinch of the waist to the beads at the hem and neck. It has specially designed outerwear that drapes dramatically over her arms as she bows her head respectfully by the memorial to the ones who died in Syndrome’s attack.
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