by Mia Archer
One of his pretties. The poor girl who got smashed by the irradiated lizard. She’d been out there on his orders?
My eyes narrowed. One more crime to lay at this asshole’s feet on top of bad fashion sense and being a boring smarmy asshole.
"What are you doing here Rex?" I growled.
He threw his arms out and gestured to the giant lair surrounding him. The throne wasn't the only thing that was over the top. Banks of computers, all dark now, ran along one wall. On the other wall were giant monitors, presumably so he could keep tabs with what was going on in the city. Also dark now thanks to my directional EMP.
Basically it looked like a stupid journalism major's idea of how to configure an evil lair. It sucked, it wasn't very functional, but it was obvious he’d put a lot of work into it at least so I had to give him that.
It was like looking at the participation trophy of evil lairs.
"My darling Fialux," Rex said. "I'm sorry you had to see this before I was ready."
"Did you really think you could get away with this, Rex?" I asked.
I winced as I said it, though I wasn't really feeling any pain. But I needed to make sure and look like he’d hit me good and hard if this was going to work. I needed to look weak and vulnerable.
Weak and vulnerable couldn't hurt him. Weak and vulnerable wouldn't be plotting a way to eliminate him once and for all. I needed to use his massive ego against him.
"What are you talking about Night Terror?"
The sneer was obvious in his voice. He hated me almost as much as I hated him. The details weren’t important. Let's just say one of my plans ended up humiliating the great Rex Roth in front of the entire world and leave it at that.
It might have involved him being terrified of one of my toys. That's all I'm going to say.
Maybe he peed his pants a little. Or a lot. While he was crying.
In the middle of a live report on national television.
That’s all I’m going to say.
"It really was a clever plan," I said.
Rex smiled and the puffed up a bit. "Why thank you," he said. "That's high praise indeed coming from the second-best villain in the city."
I bristled at that jab, but I kept up the act. There was a reason I was number one, and part of that was because I wouldn't let ego get in the way when it mattered. I just hoped that Rex would.
"What's she talking about Rex?" Fialux asked.
Rex walked over to Fialux. He reached a hand out and put it under her chin with a smile. His other hand came out. His eyes did that weird glowy thing but of course there was no reaction from Fialux because she was wearing a mask independent of any meddling supercomputers.
Confirmation piling on confirmation, but I still had to be careful. If I didn't play this right then it could all blow up in my face in a seriously bad way.
"Don't worry about what Night Terror's saying," Rex said.
Yup. He was definitely going for the double cross play. Turning the superhero against me and probably letting her rip me apart. Sure Fialux had that prohibition against killing people, but Rex didn't seem to have any pesky moral compass preventing him from ordering her to kill me. It was splitting morality hairs, but it was a hair splitting that could’ve resulted in Fialux splitting me right down the middle with her super strength if I hadn’t given her that mask.
I was really glad i gave her that mask.
Rex looked for a long expectant moment and sighed when he realized his trick wasn’t working. That was the problem with having one arrow in your quiver. And he dared call me second best. The prick.
"Do you really think you can control her?" I asked.
"Is it any different from what you've done? Don't think I won't forget how you tried to steal my favorite pet away from me."
"I did nothing of the sort," I said. "She’s free to come and go as she pleases, and I'm certainly not giving any orders."
Rex whirled on me and his face was a mask of pure fury.
"You just had to interfere, didn't you? And I made the mistake of trusting that damn computer, thinking it could keep you under control," he said.
"So CORVAC was in on it?" I said.
"Yes! And it would've been the perfect plan too, if that bag of circuits hadn't screwed up!"
I glanced at Fialux. She was looking at good old Rex Roth like he'd sprung a second head and fangs. Good. Now I just had to keep him talking long enough to let him hoist himself by his own petard with a villainous monologue.
"So what? You keep Fialux occupied and CORVAC keeps me tied up? That was seriously your plan?"
Rex shrugged. "It was working well enough. I keep the greatest hero in the city under my sway, CORVAC keeps the city's greatest supervillainess in check and makes sure you don't get too successful. We maintain the balance, run the city from the shadows through you two, and no one’s the wiser. Until that computer decided he wanted to be more front and center. The idiot."
"You've got that right. CORVAC was an idiot," I said.
"And he'd never shut up! Always whining about wanting to attack the city!"
"Tell me about it. He wouldn't shut up no matter how many times I told him he wasn't suited for combat."
"You think you had it bad? He was just playing at disobeying your orders. He actually disobeyed..."
Rex stopped and his eyes narrowed. I shook my head. Huh. Apparently Rex Roth and I had at least one thing in common. Hatred of CORVAC. But it wasn't enough to save him.
He took a step towards me, his fist raised and I had to hold back a laugh. If he thought he was going to get me by getting physical then he had another thing coming. It’s not like he had super strength or anything that would actually be useful in a fight.
No, he was just a dude with one trick I’d rendered useless. An asshole with a mind control augmented charisma score. Which explained why everyone in the city seemed to love him while I saw right through him to what an asshole he really was.
I was the only person in the city wearing a mind control countering mask most of the time. It must’ve been blocking out his mojo and I never realized it all this time.
Then his fist loosened. He looked at it, then back to me. A smile broke out his across his face.
"But there's nothing saying I can't keep on with the original plan even if that damn computer managed to fail, right?"
I raised an eyebrow. "What are you talking about?"
He took a step towards me, that smile still on his face. It looked like he was trying to turn on the charm full power, but as I looked at him I still saw the same sniveling, skinny bag of slop that I hated so much. Was he really trying to use his mind control on me?
"It doesn't have to be like this Night Terror," he said. "You could join in my takeover of the world. The two of us working together! We’d be unstoppable!"
"Are you crazy? You know I can counter your mind control, and you know I can’t stand you."
The smile slipped. Was he really expecting mind control to work on me? Hadn’t he noticed I was standing here talking to him, insulting him, rather than standing around slack-jawed looking at him like he was the best thing since the invention of subatomic matter teleportation?
Which I invented thank you very much.
It appeared I was in luck. It appeared my assessment of Rex Roth was still very much true. He was an idiot. Of course I don’t know why I expected a journalist to notice subtle detail. Whatever. That was his mistake and not my problem.
He was good, I'll give him that. No sooner had his smile slipped then it was back in full force.
"Not orders Night Terror. With your gadgets and my mind control we could rule the world! I don’t need mind control to appeal to your well developed sense of megalomania. I think we both know that."
"So that's your plan for world domination?" I asked. "Take influential women under your control and get them to do your bidding?"
The smile slipped again. "Of course that's my plan! And it's not like I'm doing anything wrong. Selen
a was happy. Content. Right baby?"
He turned Fialux but she looked anything but happy. Only he smiled and seemed to take that as confirmation that he was absolutely right.
I rolled my eyes. Rex was your typical twenty something manchild who never learned how to appropriately interact with women, and the shit cherry on top of the crap sundae was he had those crazy mind control eyes that meant he never had to learn the lesson that he was a useless pile of crap with no redeeming qualities and no interest in developing them.
"So let me get this straight. Now that CORVAC failed your big plan was to use mind control on me?" I asked. “And if that doesn’t work you’re going to keep right on using your mind control on other women until you get what you want?”
"Of course," Rex said with a shrug. "Why not?"
Here we were right back in the same place I’d been in a dark alley awhile back trying to entice Fialux into rescuing me. Rex was a mad dog just the same as that asshole in that dark alley. The only difference was he was working on a scale that far surpassed anything a lone criminal working the bad part of town could ever hope for.
And what did we do with mad dogs?
I raised my wrist blaster. His eyes widened, but it was already too late. Oh yes, he'd seen me use the wrist blaster countless times before. He'd seen exactly what kind of damage it could do. He was the great Rex Roth, the only journalist brave enough to cover supervillains and the heroes who fought them.
"No!"
He tripped over his own feet as he scrambled up and turned to run. Unfortunately he turned to run directly away from me instead of jumping to the side.
“You should’ve paid better attention in Surviving A Heroic Intervention, Rex,” I said as he scrambled away. In a straight line. “Rule number one. You can’t outrun the speed of light.”
Rex’s final terrified cry still hung in the air as the disintegration beam shot out. The beam made contact with his body and a moment later there was nothing but disassociated molecules that used to be Rex Roth.
I stood and brushed off my suit just in case some of those molecules happened to get on me before they dispersed. The last thing I needed was Rex Roth molecular remnants getting on me.
Yuck.
Fialux might have a policy, but I wasn't above taking out the trash when it was obvious it needed to be done. One death to prevent many. That was a tradeoff I was willing to take.
"Rex won't bother anybody ever again," I said.
I turned to Fialux. This next part could get dicey. She frowned as we locked eyes, and it was clear she wasn’t happy about what I’d just done. "No killing."
I floated over and put a finger to her lips. "That's your rule, not mine. I might be playing for the other team now, but that doesn't mean I'm going to play by all of your rules."
To my surprise her frown split to a grin. "The asshole did deserve it."
I grinned right back at her and went in for a kiss. After all, wasn’t that what the hero was supposed to do after saving the day?
43
New Sheriffs
The sun shone down on a bright day at the university. The sound of construction went on steadily off in the distance where the school was putting together some of the buildings CORVAC crushed on his rampage through the city.
Luckily the University had a pretty hefty insurance policy in case of super powered disasters. Sure the feds bitched about rebuilding the city again, but it’s not like they could just abandon an economic engine like Starlight City even if it was more disaster prone than other cities.
As I always did when I heard the construction I thought back to CORVAC. I wondered about that megalomaniacal computer a lot these days.
Sure he'd been a jerk, sure he'd been sarcastic, sure his last act had been to try and kill me, but there were still times I missed his sarcastic jabs. There were times when I missed his unique ability to pull off a support role in a way my current AI just couldn’t.
That was the toss up with computers. On the one hand sapience made them really god at their jobs. On the other hand it made them a hell of a lot more likely to defy their meatsack masters.
There were still times I wondered if he was actually really gone. Somehow it seemed too easy that a simple EMP blast was enough to take him out.
Then again, he did have the hubris of a top class villain. I’d expect nothing less from a villain who sort of studied under me. I was the best after all.
That well-developed sense of villainous hubris meant both that it was entirely possible I'd actually defeated him with a glaring weakness, and that it was also easily possible such a glaring weakness would turn out to be not so glaring and he'd pop up at the worst possible moment sometime in the future.
That was how all the best villains did it, after all. I could say that with certainty because that’s how I did it.
But best not to think about that right now. I was trying to enjoy my lunch.
"What are you thinking about?" Selena asked.
I smiled. She ended up getting an A on the midterm exam, and it was an A I was more than happy to give her. Her paper on why heroes intervening in a supervillain's business caused more problems than it fixed had been amazing, bringing up points I hadn't even thought of.
Of course she admitted to me that she didn't believe a word of it, but what mattered was she was able to expand her mind long enough to get the words on paper. And I’m not talking about the sort of mind expansion that the journalism majors I knew when I was in undergrad were always going on about.
"Oh nothing really," I said. "Just thinking about how we got together."
"How we got together means nothing to you?" she said with a faint smile on her face.
I resisted the urge to reach out and smack her, both because it would have looked odd to the students and professors sitting around us at the food court and because I knew it wouldn't do a damn bit of good anyways. If the best weapons I could come up with weren’t enough to hurt her in pitched combat then a little playful smack wasn’t going to do anything.
"You know what I mean," I said.
I grinned and reached out to pat Selena’s hand and she hit me with a dazzling smile that still blew me away.
“So when are you due back at the journalism building?” she asked.
Now there was the strangest turn of events in this whole damn thing. Sure it eventually came out that I was teaching the class without a lick of appropriate credentials, but at the same time everybody in my Journalism 105 class had survived CORVAC’s rampage through the university without a scratch despite a direct hit on the journalism building.
The department decided they couldn't argue with the results and offered me a full-time teaching position. Not tenured, but tenure-track. Besides, I had a few tricks up my sleeve that would make sure I got that tenure when the time came.
What can I say? The pay was peanuts, sure, but there was a supreme joy in actually getting paid to torture liberal arts majors for an hour a day. And it’s not like I had to do any real work other than showing up for that hour a day.
Sure some might argue that was fraud or wage-theft or whatever, but what can I say? I might’ve taken a turn for the heroic lately but old habits ran deep. I might’ve saved the city, but that didn’t mean I’d gone completely legit. Much to Fialux’s annoyance.
Besides, the new job would also let me make sure no more journalism students with megalomaniacal ambitions managed to slip through the cracks.
"I'm probably going to be stuck in the office until around 3:30," I replied.
"My last class is over at four," Selena said.
"Any idea what we should get for dinner tonight?" I asked.
I was in the mood for Chinese, but I didn't get a chance to give voice to that thought because just as I opened my mouth there was a loud explosion off in the distance. I turned in the direction of the noise even as people around us started screaming and running in the opposite direction.
Most of the students on campus had learned their less
on: super powered disasters definitely could happen anywhere. Nobody stood around and gawked anymore when there was an attack on the city. That was for damn sure.
All the new construction around campus was proof enough of that.
I turned just in time to catch a glimpse of whatever it was. Or, it would probably be more accurate to say I turned in time to catch the second whatever it was tearing through the atmosphere and slamming into the city off in the distance. There was another loud explosion followed by debris rising up, and then smoke.
Yeah, something was definitely going down over there.
I pulled out my wrist computer and did a few quick calculations, then looked up. Just in time to see another thing fly overhead, tearing through the atmosphere and causing windows to rattle around us as it landed closer to the university. People screamed and started sprinting in the opposite direction.
What had been an orderly evacuation of the university was rapidly becoming a panicked terrified flight. Someone tripped over a desk in front of us and expensive coffee spilled everywhere.
I never understood how all these poor college students could afford all these super expensive drinks. All that student loan bubble money at work, I guess.
Off in the distance there was an eerie humming noise and a saucer shaped object rose from the smoke and debris. I pulled up one of my roving drones that I kept floating over the city for just such an occasion.
A holoprojection jumped up from my wrist and Fialux leaned in and peered closely at it. I figured it was safe enough to pull the projection up. It's not like anyone was paying attention to us anyways.
Yup, definitely a flying saucer of some sort. As we watched the three-dimensional holoprojection a metal arm with a nasty glowing tip stuck out from the bottom, rotated slightly, and blasts of some sort of energy started flying. The sound of a crackling energy weapon followed by booming explosions reached us a few seconds after the light from the projection.
I rolled my eyes. "Alien invasion."
Fialux sighed. "Damn it, I was hoping for Italian tonight."
I grinned. "There'll be plenty of time for that after we kicked ET's ass."
