One of the first things Janelleâs handlers did during her training was condition traditional fear responses out of her. She wasnât very emotive, even in youth, but like anyone, she was reactive upon provocation. She squealed when surprised, shouted when in shock, yelped when afraid. In what would become her line of work, those normal, human reactions got people killed.
So her trainers surprised her repeatedly, constantly, and cruelly. Simulated attacks when her guard was at its lowest. Dropped centipedes on her face as she was dozing off at night. Fired guns in the room next to her during down time. Pounded on bathroom doors. An exclamation of any kind, hell, a wince, was a failure, and failure was met with a suitable punishment.
They disturbed not every quiet moment, because that would be too predictable, but enough to hone her hypervigilance. Enough to teach her two things: how to detect someone approaching, and how to suppress her external response in the rare occurrence that someone did surprise her.
One day, Invisigal is screwing around at lunch. She appears behind Flambae with a shout, scaring not just him, but the whole team except for CoupĂŠ. While everyone else is choking on their meals and grumbling at Courtney's antics, Janelle just keeps eating as if nothing happened.
Sonar kicks off the conversation, "Coop, I don't even think I've seen you flinch when she does this shit."
The others agree. They've never seen her jump at anything.
Janelle explains that they don't make it hard. They're all so obvious. Even Courtney in full stealth is easy to detect.
So the Z-Team, being the Z-Team, takes that as a challenge.
Sonar bows out immediately, all too aware of the weight and echo of his own footsteps. Instead, he self-nominates as the bookie. Anyone who can get the drop on CoupĂŠ stands to win big.
Malevola takes that literally, opening up a portal above CoupĂŠ's head then descending upon her. Janelle simply glides aside, letting the demoness crash to the ground.
Invisigal, now with something to prove, pulls out all the stops. She makes more attempts than anyone, remixing old techniques, testing new ones. Nothing works and she backs off, defeated, when CoupĂŠ's threats start to get more descriptive than usual.
Phenomaman tries floating up behind her, and while that's always managed to surprise others, it's no match for her senses. She greets him without even turning around.
Flambae gets busted two steps into a cartoonish tiptoe, even with the fire he set near her car as a means of distracting her.
Prism sends in a perfect decoy of herself to engage CoupĂŠ in a conversation while she sneaks up on her. Janelle dissipates the duplicate with a shadowy dagger and Prism, who barely made it into the room, ousts herself by asking CoupĂŠ what if that had been the real her and not a hologram, to which CoupĂŠ replies, "But I knew it wasn't you."
Even Waterboy works up the courage to jump out of the janitor's closet when she walks past, then apologizes immediately when it fails.
Golem actually gets the closest. He hides in plain sight, disguising himself as just another pile of rocks outside, then takes a similar approach to Waterboy. He waits for her to walk past and when she does, he bursts up with a roar. CoupĂŠ just blinks at him. No one can see the surprise in her hitched heartrate or bated breath, so she wins again.
Robert stays out of it because he knows better than to try his luck with a world class assassin. In fact, he put money on Coop at the start of all this.
Punch Up stays out of it because he knows CoupĂŠ.
He knows that underneath the collected exterior, that old habitual hypervigilance has been in overdrive for the last few weeks.
He knows that while she never lets her guard down fully, she had categorized the Z-Team as the people she could trust the most. Now they're the ones she's defending herself against, and her body, her instincts, don't differentiate jest from jeopardy.
He also knows better than to fight battles for her. If he told the Z-Team to knock it off, she would want to knock his head off his shoulders.
So he sticks by her during the day, even if it means getting jumpscared a few times himself. Despite this, his presence brings her tension. Consciously or not, she expects from him the same thing that the rest of them are doing.
In the evenings he attempts to ease that burden. He uses his strength to work the knots and stress from her shoulders. He reads books aloud to her because she's wound too tight to focus on reading herself. He doesn't complain when she brings more knives than usual to bed, or when she spends all night disturbing them both with her fitful sleep. He suggests gently but firmly, and only once, that she put an end to their team's inadvertent terror.
And eventually she does. She doesn't tell them why it bothers her, what the inner cost of outward calm is. But they respect a line when one of their own draws it, and the attempts end that day.
As an apology, they fork over all the money from the betting pool to her.
She uses it on dinner and a show. First, tickets to a haunted house, where the Z-Team gets a taste of their own medicine while she watches on with stoic glee. Second, with the little bit of money left over, shitty takeout and good beer to split with Colm. Her own small token of gratitude to the person that provides the closest thing to safety she knows.
