by Mia Archer
Sure the place was a joke. Sure people escaped on the regular. The question was would I be able to do the same since I was basically a regular human tossed in here with a bunch of supers? Damn it.
I came out of the funk brought on by those memories tumbling out of the memory hole. I smiled.
I might not have powers, but I did have the one thing that’d helped me on my rise to power: my superior intellect. These assholes didn't have a chance.
I looked up. Smiled my sweetest smile at Ron. I liked the guy, after all, and it was nice to be nice.
"How long has it been since they came through those portals?" I asked.
"It's been a while Miss Terror," he said. "You've been in there overnight, so they’ve had some time to cause trouble.
I froze my smile on my face. I had to. Otherwise I’d be cursing up a blue storm. That wouldn't do. Not when I was trying to be nice and friendly. Not when I was trying to project that I was still in control even though the situation obviously proved I was anything but.
“So they just tossed me in here with a potential concussion?” I asked.
"Yeah, the docs looked at you and said you'd be okay if you slept it off."
"You'll forgive me if I'm not exactly confident in the doctors at this place Ron," I said, fighting a wave of dizziness.
"Oh no Miss Terror," he said. "Not at all. I wouldn't trust them to take out my wisdom teeth, let alone diagnose a concussion. But I looked you over and I'm pretty sure you're okay."
"Why Ron," I said looking at him with a more genuine smile. "I wasn't aware you had any medical qualifications."
He shrugged and rolled his shoulders. Blushed just a little.
"I don't. Not exactly, at least. But I do know what someone looks like when they've been knocked out real good and they’re in danger. From experience, you might say."
"I bet," I said, looking him up and down.
From the top of his bald head surrounded by a fringe of ginger hair down to his thick muscles under that considerable gut I'd already mentioned.
Ron looked like the kind of guy who probably enjoyed attacking the buffet down in the prison employee commissary just a little too much, but at the same time his was the kind of fat that also had some muscle underneath.
Deceptively dangerous, is what I'm getting at. At least if you found yourself on the wrong side of a fight with the guy.
"Thanks for the help Ron," I said. "All joking aside, I really do appreciate it."
"Don't mention it Miss Terror," he said. "After all, my daughter is going to be the first in our family to go to college, and she won't have any pesky loans to worry about.”
He put his finger up to his nose. I figured that was the closest Ron got to being sneaky about admitting to the fact that he knew I was the one bribing him.
That bribe was paying off dividends here. I wondered if I could get him to maybe give me a tour of their confiscated items room. Surely my stuff would be in there, and if not then at the very least there were sure to be some toys from other villains that I could make use of.
Assuming they were stupid enough to keep the confiscated items in the same facility as the magnificent bastards who used them to regularly cause chaos in the city. That didn’t strike me as the best strategy considering what they were keeping here, but given the number of times I'd heard of people making escapes from this place it wouldn't surprise me if there was some secret stash of super weapons somewhere to aid in those escapes.
I turned my attention back to the television.
"So you want to risk me suing you assholes for cruel and unusual punishment, right?" I said. “That’s why you didn’t change the channel?”
Ron looked confused, but stayed at attention. "I've never heard of a TV show being cruel and unusual. Mostly they tell us not to beat the shit out of the prisoners."
"Well it's true. I might take that case to the Supreme Court just to prove it.”
Nancy Norris wasn't there. Which would’ve been about the only thing that made an SCNN broadcast halfway tolerable. Odd. It was an anchor that looked like a clone of every other handsome anchor ever with perfectly coiffed blonde hair. Basically the kind of asshole they used to put up on the network before Rex Roth took over anchor duties for a little while there.
He hadn't exactly been the kind of stunning looker they typically put on screen, but then again he’d probably managed to make his way to that coveted anchor position on the back of his mind control powers. Which made sense considering how ugly he was. Had been. I had a vaporized him, after all.
Now there was a pleasant memory that made me smile. Even in this place.
"I'm sorry Miss Terror," Ron said. "But if you want to talk to an attorney you're going to have to put in a formal request."
I rolled my eyes. "Yeah. And you'll probably send that formal request through after a couple years of dragging your feet, I'm sure."
"I'm not really allowed to talk about the legal stuff," Ron said.
I looked at him and winked. "You're a smart man Ron. Now I was wondering if you could…”
Only something on the screen drew my attention away from trying to get Ron to let me into whatever arsenal of villainous goodies they kept in this shithole of a prison.
"What the hell is that?" I asked.
Ron turned and stared at the screen. Grunted a very fatalistic grunt. “I’d imagine that’s more heroes trying to stop the new management and getting their asses kicked.”
Up on the giant TV a lance of fire arced up from between some very tall buildings and slammed into one of the flying saucers. It didn't do as much damage as, say, the beam I’d used to take the middle out of one of those suckers earlier, but it did knock the thing off course and break through the shields to char the finish on that fancy alien flying saucer metal.
That was a lot better than it seemed the military was able to do, at least. Also, I wouldn’t want to mess with whatever hero or villain was putting out that kind of power, though I wasn’t aware of any in Starlight City who could pull something like that.
“More heroes?” I asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“A bunch of heroes and villains who've been laying low for some reason have decided to come out and fight those bastards," Ron said.
"Really?" I said.
I'd always assumed there weren't all that many big villains or heroes left in Starlight City. No new worlds to conquer and all that.
At least there hadn't been all that many villains or heroes who were willing to show their face to me. Sure I’d heard about the occasional person fighting crime in some of the nastier parts of Starlight City where crime was such a regular occurrence that someone could make a career or a hobby out of beating the crap out of low-level offenders on a nightly basis.
But there hadn't been many challengers showing off powers lately. Though I suppose if they did decide to hang around the town then it would make sense they’d finally come out to play when the situation seemed really dire.
Or maybe they’d seen me defeated and carted off, and finally felt safe to come out and play without fear of Night Terror swatting them down.
"I'm surprised there are that many left to fight," Ron said. “Not that it’s doing a damn bit of good.”
“I’d have to agree with you there Ron,” I said.
Honestly, I was surprised there were many heroes left. I thought I'd either taken them out or chased them away, but clearly that wasn't the case. Clearly there were enough superpowered individuals left that they could take the fight to these aliens.
Good for them, but it was yet another example of things in Starlight City not being quite what they seemed to me. It made me question how dominant I really was.
It brought to mind a line I’d heard after some air bombardment or another a few decades back. The military rained down fire and fury on some guys that were doing some bad stuff in some part of the world most people couldn't spell or pick out on a map, and the generals had been crowing about how grea
t the destruction was. And then someone had asked why, if the destruction was so great, the enemy forces were able to muster up so many vehicles to do their eventual withdrawal.
I found myself facing the same question now.
Why, if I'd done such a good job of taking out the heroes and villains in this city, were there suddenly a lot of them rising up and fighting off this invasion? That was great that they were fighting, doing their duty for the city, but they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
A surprise, to be sure, and I wasn't sure it was a welcome one.
8
Heroes
"Who's that?" I asked, taking a gander at someone who’d appeared up on the big screen.
"Not sure," Ron said. "Seems to be really fucking strong, whoever it is."
That was for damn sure. Someone in a brilliant scarlet suit flew through the air. The camera was too far away to make out whether they were man or woman, and it looked like they were "flying" in same sense that those giant robots Dr. Lana created had been able to “fly.”
Which is to say this person had enough strength to throw themselves through the air, with the obvious trade-off that they couldn’t change direction once they’d made the leap. As I watched they slammed into a group of armored alien troops floating over the city and started ripping into them before jumping off them and landing on top of a flying saucer which they proceeded to rip the shit out of.
Interesting. It would appear that a good old fashioned close in kinetic attack, say punching one of those ships from point blank range, was enough to break through their shielding. Odd that they would operate on Frank Herbert rules, but I wasn’t going to knock it.
Assuming I could get out to use a weakness like that to my advantage.
That was getting really interesting, so of course SCNN chose that moment to switch to a boring anchor with some boring latebreaking news. They switched to a shot of a group of military people hiding behind a person who was holding out their hands and seemed to be generating their own force field. At least everything that slammed against an invisible dome in front of them disappeared.
When the alien munitions stopped landing that person started waving their hands. The only hint I got that something was going on was a slight shimmering in the air, sort of like something straight out of an old Predator movie right before something happened to a dude who was famous for having lots of muscles in the ‘80s, and then the armored alien troops that had been floating in to rain destruction down on them started to scream as holes appeared in them. As though something invisible was running them through. Interesting.
Mildly terrifying and slightly unsettling, but interesting too. I’d never really thought of using my shields as an offensive weapon, but I was learning all sorts of interesting crap from the SCNN feed today.
The show lasted as long as it took for Fialux to land in front of the merry band of misbehaving military and one hero, doing your classic superheroine landing of course, which was hell on the pavement and a larger drain on the city's paving revenue than potholes.
Unfortunately the intrepid hero shielding the ground troops didn’t last long after Fialux’s arrival. The time hash said that scene had played out about fifteen minutes ago and they were just now getting the shaky cell phone video.
There was a commotion from off to the left where I couldn’t see. The cell next to me was surprisingly dark for all that everything in this place was well lit. There was some crashing. And then none other than Fialux appeared in front of my cell carrying the same poor bastard who’d just been up on the big screen.
Damn.
I didn't particularly care about that poor bastard, but that little drama up on the screen did go a long way towards answering the question of how I'd gotten thrown in here in the first place. Clearly Fialux was dropping people right into prison again.
That was similar to something she'd done to me the first time we met. Which totally didn't work back when she’d tried it, due process had still been a thing back then after all, but something told me the niceties of the old justice system with all its wonderful exploitable legal loopholes were out the window now.
Yeah, with the way she was suddenly trying to run the world I got the feeling due process was only going to happen for people who could make it happen. With their fists.
I put my hands on the bars and shouted out to her without thinking about the fact that I was basically challenging a living goddess with none of the toys that usually let me do that semi-safely.
"Fialux!" I yelled.
No answer.
"I want to talk to you! What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Still no answer.
Maybe it was my imagination, but I almost thought I saw Fialux stiffen. For the space of a breath.
I smiled. Good. Maybe she did remember we’d been something to each other once upon a time. Even if she was acting like a first rate weirdo now.
First rate weirdo. Here I was even thinking the way she talked sometimes. It was time to think like Night Terror if I was going to get out of this. She was acting like a first-rate bitch, is more like it.
"That's right," I shouted. "I know you can hear me!"
My screaming seemed to be the invitation all the other villainous inmates needed to add their unhinged cries to the symphony I’d started with my little solo shout. After a short while the entire place sounded like something straight out of the monkey enclosure at a zoo.
Okay, so it's not like it was the ideal place to hold a conversation with my ex girlfriend who was trying to conquer the world, but considering I was in prison it's not like anyplace was the ideal place to hold a conversation.
The place was bedlam now. Guards banged nightsticks against the bars. Some of those sticks sparked when they hit. Other bars looked like they were set up to electrify. At least on the bigger ones. Across the way a villain who looked bigger and meaner than some of the others started really getting out of hand, and then they were blown back as they punched the bars.
"Damn," I said.
"Not a good idea to go starting prison riots in this place Miss Terror," Ron said.
"You can say that again," I said.
“Not a good place to go starting prison riots Miss Terror,” Ron said.
I glanced at him. I wasn't sure if he did that on purpose or if he was having a little fun with me. The slight smile that crossed his face told me it was the latter.
"Come on," I said. "Aren't you guys supposed to be able to control the inmates? I thought this was the famous SuperMax."
"True," he said. "But it doesn't mean we don't have trouble. Last time a huge riot broke out one guy got his arms ripped off."
"Really?" I asked.
"Yup. Luckily for the bastard his power was the ability to regrow his limbs, but it was still a nasty bit of business. Just because he can regrow limbs doesn't mean it doesn't hurt any less than the rest of us when they get ripped off.”
I winced. I was pretty sure I'd heard of the that guy through various underworld channels. If memory served he’d made his bones doing super powered cage fighting in some of the less savory parts of Starlight City, of which there were many.
Supposedly there was a whole criminal underground that thrived on crap like that since they couldn’t play in the big leagues, but those had always been beneath my notice.
Still. The ability to have your limbs ripped off and regrow them was supposedly very useful and popular if the whisper network was to be believed. Not that I’d ever been to one of those places in person.
"I'll have to keep that in mind," I said.
Sure I could regrow arms if I had a medbay handy, but given my current situation I had no idea how much time would pass before I had one of those available to me again. I really doubted the assholes running this madhouse would let me take a field trip to my lab just because I’d lost a couple of limbs in an ill-advised prison fight.
"It's going to take them forever to get this under control," Ron said with a
sigh, though he didn’t make any move to join his coworkers in getting things under control.
"You know you could give me access to my old equipment and I’d have the place under control in no time," I said.
He hit me with a look that seemed to say "nice try." I shrugged.
A girl did have to try. I fully intended to escape from this shithole. The question was how long it would take and how much assistance I’d need on the way out.
Hopefully none at all. Night Terror worked alone. Except when she worked with a heroine she was bedding on the regular, of course. That’d been different, but fun while it lasted.
That heroine seemed pretty busy right now. After all, the entire prison was about to break out in a riot. All it’d take was one of those caged villains breaking out and all hell would break loose. Boy were they trying.
One giant guy who looked like he was made entirely out of rock pounded his fist repeatedly against the bars in his cell. It didn't seem to matter that little bits of his massive hands, such strong hands, chipped off every time the immovable object met the unstoppable force.
It all went silent when Fialux raised her hand. It was a real Freddie Mercury kind of pose, though I'm not sure if that’s what she intended. I’d put good money on her not having any idea who Freddie Mercury was aside from hearing the occasional bout of We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions at games.
Silence. I’d say it was a blessed silence, but it was more unsettling than anything. After all, anyone who had the power to command that group of unruly prisoners wasn't someone I wanted to go against.
I’d gone up against her on several occasions, got my ass kicked every time, and I knew from personal experience just how painful taking her on could be.
"You really need to work on better control warden," she said, her voice easily carrying through the room since there was no more noise.
The guy beside her, a dude wearing a vaguely militaristic gray uniform that looked like reject from the costume department of either Demolition Man or one of the Imperial uniforms from Star Wars, nodded. A bead of sweat ran down his bald forehead.
