by Mia Archer
I really wished the evidence gathering in front of me didn't keep looking worse and worse for yours truly.
I opened my eyes again. Blinked at the overweight cop with a bristling mustache and an epic stomach that stuck out well past his belt. Like we're talking the kind of belt that looked like it had to be made of space-age materials in order to hold back that considerable gut.
Maybe I should’ve used my other senses earlier, because I totally recognized the guy now.
"Ron?" I asked. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"I think the better question is what the hell are you doing here Miss Terror?" he asked. "Always thought you were too wily and mean to wind up in a place like this."
A place like this. Again that didn't seem good. That would seem to preclude me being in the drunk tank at an SCPD precinct. Come to think of it I hadn’t seen Ron the last couple of times I’d been visiting those fine local cop shops. Not that I’d been on a business visit to a local precinct recently.
Ron had always been pretty nice to me. As far as cops went. It helped that I dropped some anonymous money into his bank account every time he was nice enough to me back when I was semi-regularly spending time in the Starlight City penal system. Eventually he'd put two and two together and my treatment started getting better even though we'd never actually hashed out a quid pro quo in so many words.
It was the same with all the cops in Starlight City. I was basically unofficially helping the city keep salaries low with all the bribes I was paying out on the regular, and did I ever get a thank you from the bean counters at city hall?
"It really sucks what they did to you Miss Terror," he said, nodding ever so slightly. "But I'm afraid there's not much we can do now. They threw you in here and…"
He shrugged. A fatalistic shrug that I can't say I cared for. Fatalistic shrugs seemed like the kind of thing that only happened when someone thought they couldn't do any more to help. It's not like I expected him to try and break me out of jail or anything, but…
Come to think of it, this jail looked a little odd. All the bars seemed somehow different. I reached out and flicked one with my fingernail. It didn't make the same comforting ping sound they usually did.
A tingle ran own my spin and then decided to go for a trip down all the other nerve endings in my body. Which wasn’t a pleasant experience considering some of those pathways weren’t functioning at one hundred percent after whatever the hell had happened to put me here.
It wasn’t a feeling I particularly cared for, but this seemed like a day for things I didn't particularly care for to be happening.
"Where the hell am I Ron?” I asked, dreading the answer even as I asked the question. But I needed more information. It was one of the big rules of villainous triage. Figure out where the heck they’re keeping you so you can figure out a way to blow a hole in the side of the place and make your escape as soon as possible.
"I'm really sorry Miss Terror," he said. "They moved me here a couple of months back. I figured you wouldn't mind considering you weren't really spending much time in the local jail anymore and…"
I held up a hand and that was enough to buy his silence. At least my money that I'd transferred into his account was still worth something. If I’d listened to him prattle on for much longer it would’ve only added to my headache.
Not to mention I didn’t want him to go cheapening the arrangement we’d come to by saying it out loud. There were all the usual niceties of bribing someone that had to be observed, after all.
"I don't need your apologies, Ron," I said. I spoke slowly. Ron seemed like the kind of guy who’d benefit from a little slow talk. "All I need to know is where the hell am I?"
Ron suddenly looked like he’d rather be just about anywhere but where he was standing.
“Ron,” I said, talking slowly again so he’d know just how serious I was. “I really need you to tell me where I am right now. If all the help you’ve gotten over the years is worth anything, then it’s worth telling me that much.”
Ron sighed. Forced himself to meet my eyes. That really wasn’t good. Even the cops I’d made friends with over the years, sort of, as much as a villain can be friends with the cops she’s got on the take, didn’t like meeting my eyes.
That meant he didn’t think I was much of a threat, wherever the fuck I was. I had a hard time believing that, but if a simple kind of man like Ron suddenly believed it then it meant I needed to tread carefully.
"I'm afraid they've put you in SuperMax Miss Terror," Ron said.
I felt dizzy. I had to lean against the wall because otherwise I was going to fall on my ass and it wasn’t going to be pretty considering I didn’t have any of my wonderful toys that kept me from hurting myself when I fell on my ass.
SuperMax. The most notorious villain prison in Starlight City. A place so secret most people supposedly didn’t even know it existed. A place where villains stupid enough to get caught without the means to manipulate the justice system were sent to rot and be forgotten.
And those assholes threw me in that hole without even so much as reading me my rights or giving me a chance to buy my lawyer a new boat? They had the audacity to hit me with a bit of extraordinary rendition without even a show trial?
"Motherfucker," I spat out.
6
SuperMax
Was it necessarily the best response to the situation? No, probably not, but at the same time I was willing to bet Ron had heard a hell of a lot worse from his charges before.
The villainous rant as you were being dragged off to the clink was a time honored tradition, after all. Telling everyone within earshot that they would rue the day they decided to cross you, that sort of thing. I’m sure the language around here got a lot more colorful than the occasional “motherfucker.”
Besides, it was one of those discoveries that was worthy of a little bit of cursing. Maybe a lot of cursing, come to think of it.
SuperMax. The jail where they sent anybody convicted of crimes of villainy against the city who couldn’t be held in regular prison, which was a fairly sizable population. Of course the practical upshot of that given the sad state of the criminal justice system in this city, state, and nation, usually meant SuperMax was the kind of place where they sent villains who were either too new to be able to afford a good attorney, too stupid to launder the money they were using to pay their attorney properly, or they'd fallen on hard times and no longer had the ability to pay an attorney who was good enough to get them out.
The key point there was getting convicted of a crime. Or being low enough on the old sliding scale of villainous power that the normie authorities could actually keep you long enough to put you in SuperMax.
It would’ve been a terrible miscarriage of justice with acquittal going to the highest bidder were it not for the fact that everyone in the villainous community knew the place was a joke. The number of villains who disappeared for a few weeks or a few months, only to be back out on the street well before any sentence could’ve been served in full, was proof enough of that.
I’d always treated the place like the revolving door joke that it was. Not much of a concern. Beneath my notice to the point I never thought about it. At least it hadn’t been a concern until I found myself in one of their cells without any of my usual toys and a cop staring at me with a sad look that told me I wasn’t going to be getting any phone calls to my attorney anytime soon.
Thanks to that bloodsucking shark of a lawyer I'd never been in a situation where I had to worry about doing more than an overnight stint in the local lockup at one of the many fine establishments maintained by the Starlight City Police Department, but clearly that had changed. The real bitch was I really didn’t have a few weeks or months to figure out how all those villains escaped so easily. I needed to be out now, damn it.
"Why the hell would they put me in SuperMax?" I asked, dreading the answer even as I asked it. "The cops never put someone in here without a big show trial."
It was
true. Every time they actually managed to catch a villain who looked like they weren't going to be able to afford the best attorney money could buy, seriously there were times when I thought the real supervillains in this city were the high powered attorneys who took on cases from people like me, was when they were sure they could get a conviction. Prosecutors were even more wary about going after super criminals than they were regular criminals in Starlight City.
It was one of the sad facts of life that wasn’t actually so sad for me as I was a villain of means. The justice system worked differently for different people. Particularly for rich people. Particularly for Night Terror. The greatest villain that…
Oh fuck it. You know where I'm going with that line, and the fact that I was sitting in a cell in SuperMax was proof enough that I wasn't nearly as great as I liked to think I was. I couldn't even manage to conquer one city, let alone a country or a planet. Who did I think I was?
"You really don't remember Miss Terror?" Ron asked.
I leaned against the bars. Slid down until I was on my butt. Which wasn't particularly comfortable considering whoever designed this place hadn’t exactly made the bars for comfort.
They hadn’t exactly poured the concrete floor with comfort in mind either.
"Humor me for a moment Ron," I said.
Silence stretched out. I looked up and Ron was clearly confused. He had the look of a puppy who understood that master was trying to get it to do something, but it couldn't quite understand what that something was.
“Sorry. Allow me to rephrase that. Assume I have no idea what just happened to me between getting hit over the city and winding up here, and fill me in on every detail," I clarified.
His face lit up with a smile. There was a task he was up to. The puppy had discovered what master wanted and now he was ready to play a fun game.
"Oh. Well that's easy Miss Terror," he said. He nodded off beyond the edge of my cell’s bars to something I couldn’t see.
I sighed. "You're going to make me get up, aren't you?"
"Well I'm afraid there's not really any other easy way to explain it Miss Terror," he said.
"Righto," I said. "Might as well get off my lazy ass. See what fresh hell awaited me out just out of sight in my cell.
I wrapped my hands around the bars and leaned against the things. Wasn't that what everyone did in prison movies? Though I was pretty sure most prison movies didn't have a giant wide screen HDTV set up and tuned to Starlight City News Network. That was definitely an extravagance they didn't have in the precinct jail cells either.
Then again I could understand the impulse on the part of prison administrators to keep the inmates as happy as possible while they were guests of this facility. After all, they were running a prison whose population had a high likelihood of escaping at some point, and who were known to come after the people imprisoning them for a little bit of revenge if they felt they'd been slighted in any way.
"Great Ron," I said. "You're showing me the Starlight City News Network. You do realize there are rules against cruel and unusual punishment like this, right?"
"What does that even mean Miss Terror?" Ron asked, scratching his bald spot.
"Never mind Ron," I said. "What am I…"
My breath caught. Something flashed across the screen. Something green. Something moving impossibly fast. Something that shouldn't exist in Starlight City these days.
"That's impossible," I said. "She's back?"
I guess that sort of made sense. If there was anyone in Starlight City who was capable of capturing me it was Fialux. The only problem being the last I remembered, and I was willing to admit that my memory was spotty, we'd been on good terms. Very good terms.
Then again, the last I remembered I’d seen her being thrown through a portal to some unknown irradiated planet somewhere in the universe where she was almost certainly doomed. Clearly that certain doom wasn’t nearly as certain as I’d thought. Much to my delight, though at the same time I couldn’t help but think that it was also much to my dismay considering the situation I currently found myself in.
That Fialux was alive and well and obviously we were no longer on good terms was yet another one of those many things that was screaming at me that something had gone terribly fucking wrong with the world.
"Okay," I said. "So Fialux is back, and…"
Ron held a hand up.
"Give it a minute Miss Terror," he said.
"Sure thing," I said. "Why not? I've already wasted so much time hanging out here. What's another couple of minutes when the world has obviously gone terribly fucking wrong? I mean the only thing that could possibly make this worse is if CORVAC…"
That was when I realized something else was off. All this time I'd been stuck in a jail cell and I hadn't heard one sarcastic comment. Not one diatribe on how I deserved this for being an idiot and letting anger get the best of me in combat. Usually when I went into the hoosegow CORVAC was more than happy to give me an earful about everything I’d done wrong to get there in the first place.
I surreptitiously reached up and tapped at my ear, and sure enough it was empty. Someone had really worked me over before sending me into SuperMax, and that someone knew what they were looking for.
Well they mostly knew what they were looking for. I still had my contacts in, after all, showing me all the delicious data that was usually fed through my mask. It was always nice to have a backup, after all. Even if that backup seemed to be having trouble accessing any of the usual external feeds. Everything was offline, like I was in a dead zone.
Which made sense, considering where I was.
I looked up to the HDTV again. At least that was a lifeline to the outer world, even if it was playing stupid Starlight City News Network. And up there on the screen I saw the source of my demise. It was a playback of whatever fight had led me to my current predicament.
I floated in the air on an obvious recording SCNN had taken of me earlier. I was talking with some woman who looked vaguely familiar. It looked like I was having a conversation with her, and then Fialux slammed into me and we both went flying back. Though from the ragdoll moves I was pulling it was clear it was a less pleasant experience for me than it was for Fialux who clearly had her powers back.
"Damn," I whispered.
"That's right Miss Terror," Ron said, shaking his head. "Looks like the city’s under new management."
That was very perceptive. I decided I didn't like it when Ron was being perceptive.
"I'm sorry Ron, but could you please give me a moment?"
"Is something wrong Miss Terror?" Ron asked.
"No. Nothing's wrong. I just feel like I have a bunch of memories that are about to come crashing back, and I’m gonna need to have a sit down while that’s happening.”
"Oh you go right ahead with that Miss Terror," Ron said. "Happens all the time around here. Let me know if you need any smelling salts or anything."
"Sure thing Ron," I said as I held onto the bars for dear life.
At least the bars distracted me from the nastiness that was about to run through my head. I was intimately familiar with a variety of “space age” materials that weren’t quite ready for the consumer level. Mostly because I spent a great deal of time in my lab fabricating a lot of them myself.
Though honestly I preferred the term “Night Terror” materials. After all, the heyday of the space age was mostly back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The military might be happy using equipment that hailed from that era, but not me.
The point is I was intimately familiar with materials science since it was something I regularly had to manipulate and bend to my mad science will to create all the wonderful hyper advanced super science toys I used on the regular. So I could appreciate that these bars were really sturdy. Like I would’ve given a pretty penny to a get a look at their manufacturing process.
Basically the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a prison that regularly held individuals who could really fuck shit up.
&
nbsp; I might've gone with the enhancement route to make my own superpowers, but there were plenty of villains out there who'd been naturally blessed with things other than brains. And they put them to good use. Right up to the moment they were thrown into SuperMax, that is. These bars felt like they were built to withstand just about anything, which was sort of the point.
I was distracting myself from what was really important though. No amount of speculation on how they made these bars would save me from the impending mental breakdown that I needed to have before all of my memories got restored. This part was never fun, I’d learned that hard way coming out of the medbays repeatedly, but it had to be done.
I should’ve taken Ron up on those smelling salts since I didn’t have any of the high tech solutions I enjoyed in my lab. I braced myself. Freed my mind of distractions. Waited for the shit fit to start.
Sure enough a moment later all of the bad memories came flooding back.
7
Memory
I gasped. I remembered getting the key to the city. Now there was something I never thought would happen in my career. Curiosity mixed with a healthy dose of dread and unease washed over me as my mind showed me portals opening over the city. Fialux came through one of those portals. That was impossible, but there she was.
And that woman. That woman who’d seemed so familiar. That woman who, I was pretty sure, I'd dated once upon a time. Which begged the question why she was a man in those memories.
Mind control. Mind control and memory loss. It was a cheap tactic used by wannabe villains who couldn't manipulate a situation to their advantage fair and square and so they had to go rummaging around in other people's minds and memories.
And now all of that had resulted in me stuck in a prison and stripped of my powers. Stripped of my equipment. I was alone with just my brain and my heads up display. In a prison Starlight City had devised to hold people who had powers. And I was stuck there with none of my toys.
