“You all did a great job,” Elizabeth said. “The Maniac thought he’d kill us back there.”
“Yep,” I said. “Great job, ladies.”
Although I was pretty sure that Maniac had planned on us escaping, I didn’t want to discourage my women. I’d known this was going to be a trap, but I still felt like I’d come out on top and learned a bit more about my enemy’s goals.
Once Aileen brought us safely back to the mansion, we all headed inside and went to get cleaned up. As much as I wanted to go over every scrap of information that we had on the Maniac, I figured that we would all be able to focus a lot better if we weren’t covered in the blood of our enemies. Plus, it wouldn’t hurt if we changed into our civilian clothes so that Aileen could clean our super suits while she multitasked whatever other project I assigned to her.
There were more than enough bathrooms for us all to get cleaned up at the same time, so while I would have been happy to share a shower with my girlfriend, I also didn’t mind that we all just took quick separate
showers so we could meet back up in the living room and talk about our plan to deal with the Maniac.
There would be time for shared showers later.
Once I’d changed into comfortable clothes, I headed back to join the girls in front of our wall of screens in the living room. Elizabeth wore tight black leggings with a loose linen blouse that showed off plenty of cleavage, and Penumbra wore a short pair of denim shorts paired with a skin-tight tee shirt. Norma, of course, had changed into one of her usual frumpy outfits, but I was pleased to see that her flowered skirt was a little more form-fitting than usual, even though her purple sweater was still about three sizes too big.
We all settled in around the living room, while Aileen brought us a tray of steaming coffee. Mine was black, like usual, and so was Elizabeth’s, but Penumbra took a little bit of milk in hers, and Norma’s was piled high with whipped cream, sprinkles, and even a few chocolate chips placed on top. My mousy assistant took her sugary coffee from Aileen with a little smile, and I realized that since Norma hadn’t even offered to help my AI robot, she must really be tired.
Then again, we had just finished our third major fight of the day and the sun hadn’t even set yet, so we had sure as hell been busy. It would be good to get some rest at some point tonight, but first, I wanted to look at
everything we had on the Maniac, so we could try to figure out what his plan was and exactly how much time we had to stop him.
“Okay,” I sighed and then took a sip of my black coffee. “First off, Penumbra, you did a great job with that grenade back there and with getting all of us back into the plane.”
“Thanks!” the blonde said. “I’ve been practicing.”
“Well, it shows,” I said. “Everyone did a good job. We figured it would be an ambush, but there were a few unexpected surprises.”
“You weren’t so bad out there yourself,” my girlfriend teased as she flipped her dark wet hair over her shoulder.
“Oh, I know,” I said. “Now, let’s talk about what we have on the Maniac.”
“We have a tape recording now, so I guess that’s something,”
Elizabeth said, “even though I don’t think he said very much that was really helpful.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “And I’m sure he expected us to survive the ambush since otherwise, he wouldn’t have anyone to play his stupid little game with, so the question is if he wanted us to take away any information from that, or if he just wanted to try to fuck with our heads.”
“If that was his goal, then I’ll be honest,” Penumbra murmured. “It kind of worked. All those people and what he did to them… it’s just, like…
you know?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” my girlfriend said. “I’ve never come across any supervillain before who’s so brutal. It’s like he’s not even human.”
“Pull up everything we have on the Maniac,” I told Aileen. “If I see everything all at once, then maybe we can start to put some puzzle pieces together.”
Aileen strode over, sat down in the chair across from me, and crossed her legs in an oddly human gesture, while at the same time, her consciousness pulled up a number of the files that we had on the Maniac, so each screen in the living room displayed a different set of information.
“This is not everything,” Aileen said, “but we do not have enough screens for all of the information that the Shadow Knight had collected on the Maniac.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “This is a good place to start with.”
“Would you like me to begin cleaning your suits?” Aileen asked.
“Yes, but I’ll have you change the screens and continue to scan for data at the same time,” I said. “Just a little bit of multitasking for you.”
“That is what you designed me to do, Creator,” my AI system replied as she stood up again and moved toward the basement workshop where we had all dropped off our suits.
After Aileen left the room, the screen directly in front of me was a recent news article on the Maniac and the Shadow Knight. It had only been published a few days ago, so the subject was, of course, the Shadow Knight’s death. The article went into great detail about the state that the Shadow Knight’s body was found in, and as I scanned the contents, I immediately knew that the Maniac had visited Slade after Elizabeth and I left him.
Sure, I might have blown the Shadow Knight’s head off his body, but that had killed him, and that was all I was really interested in. But the condition that his body was later found in was much worse and much more grotesque than just one exploded head. Instead, the Shadow Knight’s body had been found beaten to a completely unrecognizable pulp with the remnants of the skull and jawbone missing, and there had been so much blood that two veteran cops had lost their lunches at the scene.
That was clearly the Maniac’s work rather than my own, but it made it easier for the press to blame the Shadow Knight’s death on the Maniac, so they didn’t have to look for other possibilities.
It also made it easier for me to understand the Maniac’s mindset.
Clearly, the Shadow Knight’s death had left him even more unhinged than usual, but he had moved from complete rage to a calm and decisive plan to destroy Grayville quite quickly.
So he might either have already had this plan in mind, or he had come up with it surprisingly quickly, but I had a feeling that it didn’t really matter if it was a new plan or an old one because either way, the Maniac would definitely have planned for every possibility. After all, he had coordinated supervillain attacks all over the city for the last few days, hacked into every channel and every TV in the city, arranged the whole ambush for us on the yacht, and killed and arranged all the dead partiers in the cabin of the ship, too.
The Maniac had been one busy motherfucker, and that could only mean that he had everything organized and arranged exactly the way that he liked it. Maybe that was the real clue that the tape recorded message was supposed to tell us. Maybe it wasn’t to give us any kind of clue about the attack itself, and instead, it was just meant to demonstrate the supervillain’s complete control over the situation.
But if he wanted to pretend like he was in control of everything in Grayville, then I was perfectly happy to let him think that way. It would just make it that much sweeter when I finally caught and killed him.
“I don’t see anything about a fucked-up childhood here,” Norma huffed. “Everything that we know about his background, at least before he became a supervillain, just looks totally… I don’t know. Normal, I guess.”
“Yeah, he grew up in the suburbs with a mom and dad, a picture-perfect fence and yard, and both his parents were pretty upstanding members of the community,” Penumbra said.
“That is strange,” Elizabeth said. “Usually, supervillains have something happen that flips them to the dark side, even if it's something little, but I don’t see anything here.”
“Actually, I think that might be a myth that people with ble
eding hearts want everyone to believe,” I said. “Those are the same people who say that supervillains should just be locked up into prison, so they can have a chance to reform themselves and then be released back into society.”
“Well, that might be true,” my superpowered girlfriend replied, “but I don’t even see any juvenile records on him.”
“They could have been expunged,” Penumbra said. “That happened to me, so--”
“Wait,” Norma interrupted. “You have an arrest record?”
“Technically, no,” the blonde said. “Because, uh, they expunged it when I turned eighteen.”
“What did you do?” I grinned.
“Nothing crazy!” Penumbra said. “I just accidentally floated the neighbor’s dog up to their roof, and he ran all around and knocked a bunch of their shingles off. They had to call the fire department to get him down and everything, so they charged me with trespassing and property damage.”
“They sound like idiots,” Elizabeth said. “That was clearly just an accident.”
“Well, that’s what I said,” Penumbra said with a shrug, “but my parents were kind of afraid of me, so they thought the whole incident might scare me into… not being me, I guess.”
“Definitely idiots,” Norma said as she reached over and squeezed the other woman’s hand.
“So that’s true,” I said. “He might have a record that was expunged, but otherwise, there’s really nothing remarkable about his childhood that I can see here. Aileen, can you scan the rest of the Shadow Knight’s files for any mentions of the Maniac’s upbringing?”
Aileen hummed in response, and the screens all changed, but none of them had any more information that seemed helpful. My robotic assistant then brought up the Maniac’s early crime career, so we started to see his progression from more minor offenses to really heavyweight shit.
Most of this data was already familiar to us, but I still wanted to re-examine whatever materials we had on the supervillain just in case we had missed something that might be able to help us figure out his plan to attack Grayville now.
“So, Penumbra, you said that the Shadow Knight never talked about the Maniac’s superpower, right?” I asked. “But did he actually know what that power is?”
“I’m really not sure,” the blonde levitation specialist replied, “but if I had to guess… it’s just, like, the Shadow Knight always had a plan for every villain’s powers, you know?”
“Yeah, and?” I asked.
“Well, whenever it came to the Maniac, it was different,” Penumbra said, “and I always kind of got the impression that he, uh, just didn’t really know what his power was.”
“Maybe that’s why Slade never really wanted to go toe-to-toe with the Maniac,” Elizabeth said.
“That, plus the sick little game that the two of them liked to play with each other,” Norma said.
“Oh, you mean how many apprentices the Maniac could kill to piss off Slade, and how many henchmen Slade could arrest to irritate the
Maniac?” I asked. “Yeah, I don’t think Slade would ever have let anything happen to the Maniac. He was perfectly happy to let all his Silver Squires get killed, as long as he could keep the Maniac all to himself.”
“Ugh,” Penumbra said with a shudder.
“At least we don’t have to worry that the Shadow Knight might show up as a surprise ally whenever we go up against the Maniac,” Norma said and then licked a little line of whipped cream from her top lip. “Thanks to Miles, anyway.”
“That’s definitely a plus,” I laughed. “But it does make me really want to know what that asshole’s superpower is. He obviously has one, but none of the Shadow Knight’s information or the data from any of the news articles is the least bit helpful on that account.”
“How are we supposed to find out what it is?” Elizabeth asked. “If even the Shadow Knight never figured it out, it must be almost impossible to detect.”
“Yeah, you’d think that Slade’s obsession would have been enough to figure out that little bit of information,” Norma said.
“Eh, Slade was too close to the Maniac,” I said, “so he was probably just blind to it.”
“Do you have any guesses, Miles?” Penumbra asked.
Elizabeth rolled her eyes at the way Penumbra said my name, but she just smiled at me like she didn’t really mind. The blonde superheroine had developed a crush on me the first time we met, and even though it had irritated my girlfriend at first, she now didn’t seem to mind the idea of sharing me with other women.
“Not yet,” I said, “but I will.”
It was entirely possible that the Maniac didn’t actually have a superpower at all. He could have just been an incredibly smart person who also just so happened to be really fucked-up. After all, the Shadow Knight didn’t have any superpowers, so the same thing might be true of his nemesis.
Either way, I would find out soon enough.
“Would you like me to change the screens to display additional data?” Aileen asked through the speakers of the house.
“Anything that you think might be relevant, yes,” I said. “Go ahead.”
Several of the screens flipped to video footage of the Maniac, so I let my gaze wander from one TV to the next to try to see what other information I could gather. There were a few videos of his arrests, where the supervillain seemed to go with the police completely willingly, and there was also footage of one of the Maniac’s prison breakouts. There were
a few videos that the Maniac had uploaded of himself, and each one showed a more gruesome killing than the last.
I wondered if the Maniac had uploaded them for the general public, or if he had sent them especially to the Shadow Knight alone for whatever sick pleasure Slade took in the footage.
There was more footage of the Maniac with cops than there was of the supervillain with the Shadow Knight, but even the videos of them together didn’t show us a lot of new data on the supervillain. The only video that I found interesting was a car chase between the Maniac and Slade.
It would have been a normal car chase, except for two little details.
One, it was clear that the Shadow Knight had planned to T-bone the Maniac’s car at an intersection. Slade had been flying down the street but then stopped right as he approached a green light, and the footage showed that the Maniac was headed down the cross-street at the same time, so Slade must have thought he could take him out that way.
The second and more important detail was the fact that the Maniac suddenly turned before he reached the intersection with Slade, so he avoided any kind of collision. There was no way that he could have seen the Shadow Knight’s tank or known that Slade was waiting for him, but
somehow, he had known that the tank was there, so he had turned in time to avoid it.
“Aileen, replay the footage of the car chase,” I said. “Put it on a loop.”
My robotic assistant instantly did what I asked, and as I watched the video play on a loop, I knew that there had to be something here. Maybe the Maniac had X-ray vision and had been able to see the Shadow Knight’s tank through the walls of the building, or maybe he was just extraordinarily lucky.
One of the Wardens had the superpower of extreme luck, and it had worked out really well for him, right up until the day that his luck had suddenly run out. Still, it had been a pretty useful power, and it wouldn’t have been the first time that more than one super had the same power as another one.
I still wasn’t completely convinced that was the Maniac’s superpower, but at least I had something to think about now. I memorized the looped footage until I could replay it every time I closed my eyes, and then I decided that I’d had enough of the Maniac for the moment.
We didn’t know what his power was, and we didn’t know what his plan against Grayville was, but I felt more confident now that I had
reviewed every scrap of information I had on the villain. Besides, as much as the Maniac wanted to cause mass chaos and slaughter, I knew that th
ere was one thing he wanted even more.
He wanted someone to play his game with him.
So as long as I seemed to play by his rules, he would continue to give me enough information to know his next move, and then it would be up to me to stop it in time. But the more information that he spilled and the more clues that he dropped, the more I would be able to work out his weaknesses and his ultimate plan… and the better prepared I would be to stop him.
“What do you think?” Norma asked as she drained the last of her sugary coffee, like it would magically make her eyelids stop drooping.
“Yeah, does the car chase tell you anything?” Penumbra added.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said with a shrug. “But I think we’ve thought about it enough for now. We need to get some rest, so we can come back and look at everything with fresh eyes.”
“Oh, are you sure?” Norma set the coffee mug down so fast that she nearly broke it.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I snickered. “Your eyes are gonna pop out of your head if you keep trying to hold them open like that, Norma.”
“Thank you, Miles!” my assistant said. “I know it’s early, but if I could just sneak in a little bit of a nap or something, then I might be a little more helpful with all this.”
“How about you, Penumbra?” I asked.
“Well, if you don’t mind, I could definitely close my eyes for a few minutes,” the blonde said.
“I’m fine,” Elizabeth said, “but I do need some more food, so I think I’ll just go fix myself something.”
“Good,” I said. “Then I’ll be in the basement with Aileen to work on a few of my projects.”
“Aren’t you tired?” Norma’s brown eyes widened behind her glasses.
“I’ll sleep eventually,” I said, “but not before I take care of a few things that I can’t stop thinking about.”
“You’re relentless, Miles,” Elizabeth said as she leaned down to kiss me and then walked past my chair into the kitchen.
“Just make sure you get some rest at some point,” Norma said, and then she and Penumbra stood up. “After all, we need our fearless leader to be well-rested.”
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