by Archer, Mia
To put it in even simpler terms that a layman who doesn’t remember their seventh grade science might understand: bubble no make expensive jet go boom boom into ground.
I’d also fired those bubbles off at full power. Unlike the Starlight City News Network helicopter which had gotten about half power which allowed it to move slowly and gently to the ground while at the same time moving fast enough that it could actually get to the ground before the field wore off. I wasn’t interested in any of those assholes who’d been firing on me continuing to have the ability to fire on me.
They’d be hovering there for awhile while I took care of business. I turned back to the lizard and smiled, though it hadn’t noticed me hovering up here among the fleet of drones watching it.
Some of the drones had noticed me though. They were moving in close, though they backed off when I blasted a couple out of the sky.
I grinned. It was nice to know I had an audience. Now it was time to get to work and show this giant lizard who was the real terror in this town, and hope that mysterious heroine also made an appearance so I could introduce the new hero in town to how we did things in Starlight City.
14
Pest Control
Now that I’d taken care of the gawkers getting too close I turned my attention to the giant lizard. And realized that not only was the thing staring up at me with pure hatred in its eyes. If you could ascribe that sort of emotion to a thing that barely had two cells to rub together in the walnut it called a brain.
Giant irradiated lizard seemed to be full of hate, which I figured was a side effect of suddenly finding yourself growing about a hundred sizes too big.
They were also full of excess nuclear power that they tended to release violently, and this one was powering up its primary weapon. I could hear the telltale sound that was like a pair of high tension power lines that were suddenly getting a little too much juice combined with a transformer that was on the verge of exploding.
Not the kind of thing you wanted to hear from a giant lizard that could spit nuclear fire and was pointing its mouth in your direction.
The thing fired a pinkish purple blast. I reacted by doing something I always said you should never do as a hero or a villain.
I held my wrist blaster out in front of me and fired off a beam on the widest dispersal I dared that would still let the beam hit with enough power to push back. My beam slammed into the giant irradiated lizard’s beam setting off a spectacular explosion between the two of us as our beams met at practically the speed of light.
Here’s the problem. A beam like that from a giant irradiated lizard? Well, let’s just say the nuclear waste those things like to wallow in for temperature regulation that eventually causes some of them to undergo the mutation that gives them a hellacious growth spurt wasn’t exactly the most powerful pool of nuclear material. We’re talking stuff that was leftover from the good old days of the Manhattan Project. Impressive for the time but it didn’t hold a candle to some of the nuclear tech available these days.
God help the world if one of those things were to actually find its way onto, say, a nuclear submarine or some other modern nuclear powered device.
The practical upshot of the lizard’s wallowing in spent nuclear waste from old Department of Defense science experiments was the nuclear fuel powering the damn things was never all that powerful to begin with.
I mean sure it was powerful enough that they always gave the military a run for its money when they did pest control. Honestly, I didn’t know why they hadn’t come up with some exotic weapon that destroyed oxygen or froze the lizard’s metabolism.
I figured as often as the military had tangled with the fuckers at this point they would’ve tried something.
Maybe they didn’t bother because they knew there was always a good chance some hero or villain would come along to save the day and save their asses in the process.
The point is the power these lizards put out didn’t hold a candle to the miniaturized fusion reactor I had powering my stuff. So I was able to hit it with an atomic blast that was a hell of a lot more powerful than anything the lizard could ever hope to put out.
At least it should’ve been enough.
The explosion slowly dissipated leaving me floating in the air firing down at a giant lizard which was still firing its nuclear breath up at me. That was out of the ordinary. I’d tangled with these things a couple of times before and I’d gotten a feel for how much power their internal reactors put out, and the thing shouldn’t have been able to go toe-to-toe with me.
“Is something wrong?”
The voice crackled in my ear and my jump almost vaporized me. The thing about going beam-to-beam with anyone was the tolerances were down to fractions of a millimeter. If I was off by even a breath it might be enough to send the lizard’s beam roaring up at me which would really ruin my day.
“Kinda concentrating here baby,” I said to Fialux. “Not the time to go chatting in my earpiece and surprising me.”
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “Just making sure you’re okay.”
“I’ll be fine if you let me concentrate on my work,” I said.
I had to give the lizard points for persistence, though in my experience these bastards really were nothing but malevolent persistence.
The two beams of radioactive fire stayed about even with each other for a long moment, longer than they should’ve, and then the lizard’s finally started to give way. And we’re not even talking it started to give way in a slow and suitably dramatic fashion.
No, it was like one moment the lizard was firing with everything it had, and the next my blast moved down and hit the damn thing right in the mouth. Which made me feel better, but that should’ve happened as soon as our beams hit each other, damn it. Not a minute later.
What was going on with this thing? Had those idiots at the DoD started dumping more modern nuclear waste in the lizards’ habitat?
The lizard stumbled back into a building, and I figured that was my opportunity. I figured while there were drones watching me doing something suitably heroic I should ham it up. I’d already hammed it up just a little with that beam thing, that was dangerous and stupid but it looked so cool, but I had a nameless faceless heroine to show up.
If she wasn’t going to be brave enough to show herself this time then the least I could do was one up her last performance. So I put all the power I could into my arm and hit the thing with one hell of a right hook.
Okay, so maybe part of that was that I wanted to take the thing out in a suitably dramatic fashion, and maybe some of it was that I was frustrated to the point that I felt a strong desire to punch something. The giant lizard would do well enough since I couldn’t exactly punch out a pupil who was being very difficult about taking her lessons or a new heroine who refused to show herself.
The giant lizard stayed frozen for a long breath. Then it slowly started to topple over like some giant tree in the Pacific Northwest. I was tempted to put my hands to my mouth and scream out timber, but didn’t.
There were enough cameras watching right about now that I didn’t want to do anything that would give the impression that I was taking this anything less than completely and totally seriously.
The lizard fell and upped the insurance policies of the poor bastards who’d left their cars in the street.
I winced at that. I always did. Hey, I might be an evil super villain who regularly tried to take over the world, but I could remember a time when I’d been a piss poor grad student who could barely rub two pennies together and my car was the most fabulously expensive thing I owned.
So I never cared for it when I saw other people’s cars getting ruined. Especially when I knew they were probably going to get screwed over by insurance companies claiming the giant lizard rider on their auto insurance policy didn’t apply to this particular attack because they didn’t get the rider that included a lizard with radioactive fire breath or something.
“Honestly,” I muttered. “P
eople talk about me like I was the most evil person in the world.”
“What was that?” Fialux asked.
“Oh nothing,” I said. “Just thinking out loud about insurance companies.”
“You think insurance companies are more evil than a villain trying to take over the world?” she asked.
“Obviously you’ve never worked in the insurance or finance industries. Those assholes did way more damage on a way more massive scale than I could ever hope to. Banality of evil and all that,” I replied.
“Uh-huh,” she said in a mumble that made it clear she wasn’t buying it.
That was something for someone else to worry about though. Right now I had a formerly super powered heroine to get back to since there was no sign of the currently super powered heroine making an appearance.
Besides, if Fialux’s reaction to me taking out those bank robbers was anything to go on she was really going to go wild after watching me take out the giant irradiated lizard.
At least I hoped she’d be really worked up after watching me take out the giant irradiated lizard. I flew at top speed back towards the building where I’d deposited her, but I was surprised in midair as something slammed into me.
I panicked. Activated several emergency protocols that would’ve done some very nasty things, but then I realized the something that had slammed into me was peppering my face with kisses.
Not the sort of thing that mysterious faceless heroine who may or may not be Dr. Lana in recovery would do. Even though if it was Dr. Lana that would raise all sorts of questions as to how she got powers like that to begin with.
Either I was being attacked by the world’s most affectionate enemy or a certain heroine had gotten so worked up that she miraculously figured out how to fly in a straight line with my antigrav stuff long enough to slam into me.
When the blur resolved itself after I finally stopped tumbling through the air I saw that it was Fialux, but I gently pushed her away. It was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done, but I managed to do it.
“Not in front of the cameras,” I hissed.
She looked at the drones floating around us. Most of them were recording the giant lizard where it had fallen, but several had turned their attention to us, and I’m sure the sight of Fialux hovering and smooching on Night Terror in the aftermath of a giant lizard attack would be worth at least a small mention on the stupid Starlight City News Network that night.
“Who cares?” Fialux asked, and she planted a huge kiss right on my lips as she wrapped her arms and legs around me.
Oh what the hell. I figured if she was going to enjoy herself then the least I could do was enjoy myself as well. So I went with it. I didn’t even care all that much that there were multiple cameras watching us from multiple angles.
Those perverts could enjoy the show, because I was going to enjoy kissing my girlfriend, damn it!
When we finally came up for air a few minutes later several more drones had moved in. At least one of them bore the Starlight City News Network logo, but the others were just regular old civilian drones or drones being used by also-ran cable networks that didn’t have nearly the numbers of SCNN.
Mostly they looked to be civvy, though, which meant those idiots just got the kind of radiation exposure you usually didn’t see unless you were going for a picnic in the middle of a surface-level nuclear waste disposal area.
Idiots. It wasn’t going to kill them or mutate them or anything. At least not in the short term. The kind of mutations they’d get in the long term weren’t going to be the kind that gave them super powers either.
No, the kind of mutations those idiots were looking at would be doing their part to keep the good oncology doctors of Starlight City in business over the next few decades.
I hoped the potential cancer years down the line was worth them getting this totally awesome video. Not that I cared all that much about cancer incidence in the wake of irradiated lizard attacks. No, I just cared about Fialux.
And that mysterious heroine with the full face mask that seemed suspiciously like the kind of thing a recovering villain with incredible healing abilities would wear to cover the fact that she wasn’t quite done healing up from sticking her nose in the wrong place.
Fialux made me forget all about those worries as she trailed a finger down my arm, then looked down and blushed.
“So what would you say to heading back to the lab?” she asked.
“I think that sounds like a great idea,” I said.
But I stopped to look around one final time, and that’s when I finally saw her. That strange hero with her cape whipping out behind her, and that full face mask still in place. She was too far away for me to see her eyes, or maybe her eyes were covered by that mask, but I couldn’t shake the feeling she was watching us.
Also? Now totally wasn’t the time to get into it with a strange new hero. Not when I was already depleted from fighting a giant lizard and I had Fialux untrained ready to cause trouble.
Damn it. I was tempted to send Fialux back to the lab and damn the consequences, but the mysterious heroine turned and flew off. I really wished I had CORVAC around. He would’ve been able to track that bitch.
I activated my short range teleporter. There was a flash of white and a moment later we were back home.
Fialux looked around and blinked in confusion. “Where are we…”
And then she realized exactly what I’d done. I’d transported us back to her room. The one that had been designed to look like a cabin in the mountains even though it was buried hundreds of feet below the suburbs.
I’m not talking a cheap cabin with no running water and a hole in the ground out back for the toilet either. No, we’re talking one of those fancy multimillion dollar lodges where people with more money than sense spend their winter vacation.
The point is the room was nice even if it was buried beneath the earth because it was part of my larger lab complex, and it was made to look even nicer than it already was.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re being awfully forward Night Terror.”
“I think I deserve it after saving you and the city,” I said with a grin as I tried to forget that strange heroine who’d been watching and not joining the fight.
I pounced, she let out a surprised giggle, and then I forgot about everything but Fialux for the next little while.
What can I say? She was a good distraction.
15
Manchurian Heroine
“Do I really have to do this?” she asked.
I shook my head. I didn’t actually say anything though. No, I had something that was better than lecturing her this time around.
I hit a button and activated a recording. It showed none other than one of the cameras I always had hidden on my person so I could go back and do an after action report. The practice was invaluable for making sure I didn’t make the same mistake twice, but it was even more valuable for showing Fialux exactly why she “had to do this.”
The recording showed Fialux being dragged out of the back of the bank and then down the alley like she was a sack of potatoes and not someone wearing a suit that should’ve augmented her abilities to the point that a bunch of normal bank robbers didn’t have a chance.
“Come on Natalie,” she said. “This isn’t fair.”
I switched to a first person view of her flying through the air with the occasional shot of the latest giant irradiated lizard to threaten the city clear in the background.
Her begging was loud and clear considering she was right next to the recorder.
“This isn’t fair Natalie,” she whined.
“Look,” I said. “You wade into fights you can’t win. You rely on superpowers you don’t have anymore. If you’re serious about getting back in the saddle then you need to train and take that training seriously. I’m more than willing to teach you everything I’ve learned over a long villainous career.”
“But it’s so frustrating!” she said, as though all the l
essons she’d learned the day before had been forgotten.
It was like dealing with a lazy college student who didn’t want to do the work. I knew because once upon a time I’d been a lazy college student who didn’t want to do the work because it was all so boring and beneath me, and since karma had come around to bite me in the ass in the form of a couple of lazy college students taking my Surviving A Heroic Intervention class.
“If we’re going to get you out there in the world fighting crime again then you’re going to have to learn how to do this right,” I said. “And you’re going to have to learn how to do it with my stuff, because I still haven’t figured out how the hell Dr. Lana’s power sucking raygun works.”
The last bit came out more as a growl than conversation. That was a sore spot. I’d been poking and prodding at the thing ever since Dr. Lana was kind enough to leave it behind in my dummy lab.
Well, left it behind might be charitable. It was more like she dropped it after triggering every nasty countermeasure I’d ever come up with to kill intruders many times over. She’d been severely maimed and her remains tossed off to a landfill before I could ask her anything about how the gun actually worked, but at least I had the gun to examine.
I had the gun and a growing sense of unease that she was out there somewhere healing up and hatching a new plan to ruin my day.
The fact that her body hadn’t been where the teleporter sent it when I went looking was all the proof I needed. I kept thinking of the opening of the second Ninja Turtles movie when the Shredder stuck his hand up out of the garbage. I shivered thinking about a similar scene playing out with Dr. Lana, but luckily Fialux was there to pull me out of my funk with a little well timed sass.
“You know there was a time when I was pretty close to ending that long and storied villainous career you’re talking about,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “And as I recall you sort of did end my villainous career. Maybe. If you squint your eyes and look at it just right. But that doesn’t change the fact that things have changed. Whether you like it or not you don’t have the same powers you had when we first met, and that means if you’re going to do this then you need to get off of your cute tight ass and learn how to fight my way.”
