Review: Realignment

Realignment
A Korpsigin Story: Book 1
Bibi Heartsglow

FurPlanet Productions
July 2025

Print Edition $19.95
Ebook Edition $9.95

Realignment is the newest Korps Universe novel published as of this writing (I think), and as with the others, comes with a subtitle indicating it’s the first in a series. Volta and Carmen from Induction are major characters in Ellen and Vixie Foxpaw’s story, and Ellen—also known as B-tier hero Lawful Neutral—has been mentioned in stories before this. The Foxpaws are demimorphs, genetic throwbacks to the humans who haven’t existed for ages. They’re still recognizably fox women, but their features are more human than furry.

Ellen works for the “Everyone’s Hero Association,” a superhero group run by a glory-seeking CEO trying to build a business—and a name—using heroes with offbeat powers. As it turns out, Lawful Neutral, with a malleable power that lets her temporarily have any ability she can weave into a groan-inducing pun, is the EHA’s ticket to fame. But she’s living a decidedly unglamorous life despite that: the pay’s mediocre, the risks are high, and she struggles to provide for both herself and her sweet autistic sister Vixie. They both have employment problems—Vixie dealing with working retail at a hardware store, Ellen dealing with her recurring nemesis Redline beating the snot out of her, and both of them dealing with homophobic bosses. This reaches a perilous point when a persistent coworker keeps asking Vixie out on a date, making her worry that she’s could be revealed as a lesbian—which could end not just her job but Ellen’s as well.

Lawful Neutral’s fight with another Korps supervillain, a tough but comically cheerful and chatty shark woman, proves to be a distraction, keeping Ellen occupied while the Korps carries out their real plan: kidnapping Vixie. Ellen reasonably assumes this is a shockingly evil way to go after her—but unlike Ellen, we know the Korps aren’t actually that kind of villain. Ellen’s boss, however, might be: he’s not only not interested in saving Vixie, he’s openly contemptuous of it. Ellen ends up facing her “enemies” on her own, and learns they aren’t at all what she’d assumed.

The second half of Realignment refocuses on Ellen’s uneasy acclimation to life with the Korps. She resists thinking of herself as a Korps member, even to the point of refusing to wear the signature Rose-Colored Glasses she’s still not convinced won’t brainwash her. Vixie embraces her new friends (and friends-with-benefits) in the Korps wholeheartedly, which makes it even more awkward for Ellen. On top of all that, she’s developing a crush on Carmen, the feline villain who helped rescue her. This crush ends up becoming a progressively bigger focus of the novel as it moves on; once Ellen is living with the Korps, there’s little superhero action and a lot of disaster lesbian rom-com.

This is the most visible sign of Realignment’s origin as separate stories about the characters rather than one long narrative. This technically makes it a fix-up, and like many fix-ups, it feels somewhat less like a novel than a short story cycle. This isn’t a knock; the stories are, after all, good. It just doesn’t have the strong throughline that Induction and Dissolution do. But Ellen and Vixie are both lovely, we get new takes on both Volta and Carmen, and it’s fun to see slice-of-life and light comedy within this world. (Also, it comes to an end that, despite literally ending on a question mark, doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger.)