by C. T. Phipps
“I think you mean crazy awesome.”
“No, I don’t,” Lisa said, making a finger gun and zapping my restraints. She then blasted the Overlord suit’s joints and side. That allowed me to move but didn’t free me from the suit.
“Can you get me out of this thing?” I asked.
Lisa nodded and conjured a glowing candle-like flame on the end of her forefinger. “Sure, just don’t move.”
She started using it as a blowtorch as I stood there motionless.
“How is everyone?” I asked. “Are you the only one not brainwashed? How are you not brainwashed?”
“All of the Society of Superheroes, Texas Guardians, and other heroes belonging to the Foundation for Harmony Emergency Team have been psionically conditioned to be able to resist brainwashing over time. Your mind resets after a few hours. We’re all playing it cool.”
Aside from wondering why Tom Terror missed that, I was quite impressed. “Wow, that’s a great idea. Who came up with that?”
“Merciful,” Lisa said, citing my insane alternate universe doppelganger. “He made an incredible number of improvements to superhuman security during his time as a Society of Superheroes member. The Nightwalker had pointed out they needed better mind-control defenses before but didn’t push the issue in case they needed to subdue a powerful hero with it at some point.”
“But you’d mostly need to subdue a powerful hero if they were mind-contr…” I trailed off, ignoring what she was saying. “Do you know what happened to Mercury and John?”
Lisa shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t. Unfortunately, the power in the prison cells is still working despite Tom thinking we’re all brainwashed. I’ve used a camouflage spell to cloak myself, given to me by the Trenchcoat Magician while he was hitting on me, but it won’t work indefinitely. It can only keep the Skull Castle’s A.I. fooled for so long.”
“Skull Castle?” I asked. “Dammit, I should have come up with that.”
I’d really screwed up here. I needed to rescue as many people as I could. Thanks to Lisa, I probably could.
Lisa’s efforts allowed me to push the Overlord armor open like a coffin lid, exposing me to the light. I also made a mental note to beat the crap out of the Trenchcoat Magician for hitting on my barely legal niece.
“Free!” I said, jumping out.
“Oh, Merciful Moses, Gary!” Lisa said, turning around and looking disgusted. “That’s going to be a nightmare for my therapist and me to discuss.”
I looked down. “Right, better conjure a cloak.”
I snapped my fingers.
Nothing happened.
“Ah, crap.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE RULES OF SUPERVILLAINY ARE BROKEN!
“Oh, that isn’t good,” I said, staring at my hand. I’d lost my superpowers. That meant Tom Terror had the Death Orb.
Yeah, that wasn’t good. He already had one of the Primal Orbs and they had turned a semi-competent mid-tier supervillain (not naming names, but me) into one of the most powerful wizards on Earth. What could it do for someone who was widely acknowledged as the most dangerous mortal in the multiverse?
“Yeah,” Lisa said, looking away. “I haven’t been this traumatized since I went looking for superhero slash and ended up finding an entire archive about you and Stingray.”
I wrinkled my brow, disgusted. “They do know we’re brothers, right?”
“I think that was the point!” Lisa said, looking nauseous. I didn’t envy her making that discovery while looking for some quiet-time fiction.
“The Internet is dark and full of terrors. Also, really disturbing porn.” I sighed and walked over to one of the surgical tables, grabbed a sheet and wrapped it around me as a toga before putting another sheet over my head as a makeshift hooded cloak. “Okay, you can open your eyes.”
“You replicated your costume in bedsheets? Really?” Lisa asked, turning around and looking confused.
“You’re dressed as a Nazi,” I pointed out. “You don’t get to give me fashion advice.”
Lisa rolled her eyes. “It’s always Nazis with you.”
“P.H.A.N.T.O.M is run by a bunch of Na…” I started to choke out angrily before calming myself. “You know, screw it, we’re just going to stop the bad guys and forget this entire incident ever happened. Like Kentucky is trying to forget that Nazi paraphernalia was something that could be sold at their state fair until 2018.”
Yes, I know that was an oddly specific example, but I learned that fact while talking to C.T. Phipps about being the ghostwriter for my autobiography. Yeesh. Some things you could just do without knowing.
“You did it again,” Lisa said. “Stop bringing attention to the bad guys’ ideology.”
“What? Your plan is to ignore white supremacy into submission?” I asked, processing that. I could have looked for a doctor’s outfit or coveralls in the laboratory but didn’t want to accidentally put on Tom Terror’s underwear. Maybe that was a weird thing to worry about right now, but it was something in the back of my head. Who knew what kind of weird diseases or rashes he’d picked up on other worlds? That and we weren’t anywhere near the same size.
“Yes, we should ignore them!” Lisa said, sounding oddly interested in the subject for a woman trapped in a base surrounded by fascist minions. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity. The best thing to do is just ban them from all social media until they shrivel up and die from no Internet.”
“Your generation confounds me,” I said, checking for anything I could use for a weapon. In the end, there were just devices I couldn’t figure out the use of and left alone. I didn’t want to grab what I thought was a death ray and end up firing the invincibility ray. There was one time I took something from Cindy’s room that turned out to be most definitely not a weapon. Very embarrassing. “I swear, Lisa, it’s the music you kids listen to. All your Lorde and Cardi B. Tsk-tsk.”
“Uncle Gary—” Lisa groaned.
I continued, finding nothing useful but a personal energy shield belt I wrapped around my toga. “In fact, your whole media. Clearly you can’t trust anyone who doesn’t know what ALF or Full House is. Where did I go wrong raising you?”
“You didn’t.” Lisa said. “I lived with my grandparents until a few years ago and you spent most of that time in prison.”
I paused. “Oh, right. Mind you, I’m still hashing out my timeline. I’m not sure how much time I’ve spent doing things like raising my family versus team-ups and crossovers. My history is twisted like a pretzel dipped in sauce, eaten, then replaced with another pretzel.”
“Uncle Gary—”
“It’s like Theseus’ ship. If you replace the entirety of a Medieval Greek tourist attraction with no wood paneling after the termites and weather destroy the original but do it one board at a time, is it still the same ship? I have some cyborg friends who have wondered about that. It also applies to brain cells.”
I wasn’t exaggerating either. Time travel, alternate realities, and the acts of all-powerful gods had left me confused as to what the hell was going on in my life. It was part of the reason why I’d retired from supervillainy and had tried to live as normal a life as a billionaire with two Super daughters could. It hadn’t worked out well as anyone reading this book could probably pick up on. I was terrified that, one day, I would wake up and my family would be missing, and I wouldn’t even remember they were gone. That worry kept me up at night and was infinitely more terrifying than the idea some enemy of mine from the past (living or dead) might come to kill me. Wow, that got depressing quickly.
Lisa looked at me like I’d wandered off mentally. Which I had. At least it wasn’t a flashback. “Uncle Gary, you didn’t used to be this scattered brained. Have all the times you’ve had the crap beaten out of you caused brain damage?”
“That’s impossible. I regenerate all damage,” I said, before pausing. “Though that would mean I’d remember everything from the time I gained my powers and I don’t. Huh. Maybe I
should contact a neurologist.”
“Uncle Gary, we’ve got like a minute left on my spell keeping us from being found and we started with a lot of spare time.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “So, uh, where are we going again?”
I was doing my very best not to think about the fact that my niece was no closer to being out of danger than she had been when I had concocted this stupid plan. Indeed, I’d actually made things worse by bringing John and Mercury with me. I’d given Tom Terror the weapons he’d looked for, an all-powerful magical artifact, and forced Lisa to rescue me. I was going to have to give her something awesome for Hanukah. Like Australia.
“We need to free all the other superheroes and shut down the activation of Tom Terror’s superweapon,” Lisa explained our current goals. “Plus get the Spear of Odin and the two Primal Orbs from him. Once Tom Terror is stripped of his power and the heroes are free, we should be able to overthrow the last of P.H.A.N.T.O.M.”
I was skeptical of this being the last of P.H.A.N.T.O.M. People had decided the legacy of World War II was dealt many times before. Every time, the (tiki) torch-wielding jackboots had shown up again and again. Still, I was willing to give it a shot and nodded. “Gotcha. Pretty basic video game logic. Go to place one, do the thing, move onto the next one.”
“If you say so,” Lisa said, turning around to walk out the door.
That was when it occurred to me this could all be another one of Tom Terror’s twisted mind games. I’d failed miserably in this mission so far because I couldn’t think ahead. I was so used to relying on my mastery of how things were supposed to work, in comics and movies, that I was failing because those were no longer the rules. Destruction’s love of the genre and forcing it onto reality was no longer the case and now anything could happen. I needed to be smarter and more cunning than ever before. That started with anticipating the twists before they happened.
I immediately grabbed her and checked Lisa’s neck. “Ho-ho! I have found your off-switch, Robo-Lisa, and know that you are actually part of a plot by Tom Terror to…”
She didn’t have an off-switch.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, isn’t that embarrassing.”
Yeah, this was going to be a long-long period of adjustment.
Lisa glared at me and pulled away. “You actually thought this was all a complicated plot by Tom Terror?”
“Err, sort of?” I asked.
“And you didn’t think I could actually escape on my own?” Lisa asked, frowning. “After all the training and working with superheroes I’ve done? Gee, thanks, Uncle Gary.”
I felt guilty for underestimating her. “You will always be my brother’s little girl, Lisa. My brother’s little girl who I am vaguely condescending to.”
“Vaguely?” Lisa pushed me away and the two of us departed from the room, leaving behind Tina Terror. A part of me was reluctant to do that since she bore such a resemblance to Cindy. That and I was always hesitant about leaving an enemy behind me. It was proof positive, somewhere along the way, I’d become a “real” supervillain since I lived in a constant state of paranoia and battle readiness. It was just another price I’d paid for living the way I did. You know, to go along with all the excitement and ridiculous rock-star excess.
What was my point again?
Either way, we headed down the halls and it seemed that the Trenchcoat Magician’s spell was still holding. We were passed by many armored P.H.A.N.T.O.M Skull Troopers, Elite Guardsmen, and officers dressed like Lisa.
“You should have me in binders until we reach the Detention Level,” I said, walking behind Lisa.
“Does every sentence out of your mouth have to be a pop culture reference?” Lisa said, sighing.
“No,” I said, pausing. Then I grimaced and gritted my teeth before sucking in a breath. “Chewbacca. Dammit!”
Lisa muttered a series of obscenities. “I’d say I wish I’d gone to live with my mother, but I still remember how she tried to sell me to Omega Corps’ media division.”
“Now, now, it’s not that your mother didn’t love you. It’s just that she loved money more.”
Lisa chuckled at that. It was a bitter chuckle but that was something we all shared.
“Thanks,” Lisa said. “We’ll get through this or die trying.”
“It’s the second part that worries me.”
Somehow, we managed to get into an elevator down to the basement. I felt the magic around us shiver, and then die.
“Yeah, the spell has gone away,” I said, upset I’d used so much of its time getting my head straight. I had the beginnings of a plan forming as well as the sense I had come up with a plan earlier but just…forgotten it. That wasn’t going to do me any good right then, though.
“I don’t suppose you have any magic that could help,” Lisa muttered. “Because I don’t know how much magic is your own and how much belonged to the Reaper’s Cloak and Primal Orb.”
“Everyone in the world can do magic if they recite the proper number of invocations, make use of spiritual deals, or know the right chants. The big difference between science and magic is that it’s less like building a generator to get electricity than it is signing up with a power company. The gods, spirits, and demons you invoke can shut off your source of oomph whenever they want. They may also not have enough for what you want to do or charge more than it’s worth.”
“That was a surprisingly concise metaphor,” Lisa said.
“Thank you,” I said, crackling lightning between my two palms. “The Ultranians left the Inner Sun here as a sort of open-source magical power line to tap. At least, that’s how I’m choosing to view it. I can tap that but—”
Someone, probably me, had said I was a fitth-level wizard without the Reaper’s Cloak and that felt like an accurate summation. Mind you, I had an addition ten levels of Thief and probably a couple extra of the Wiseass Prestige Class but that didn’t help me do cosmic alterations to the universe. If you weren’t familiar with Dungeons and Dragons then, the short answer was I wasn’t very good at magic even if I was a very good crook. The Inner Sun might boost my powers significantly, but if I ran into someone else with magic down here then I was probably screwed.
“There’s a but coming, isn’t there?” Lisa asked. “A big but.”
Yeah, there was a but coming. I did not like big buts, I could not lie.
“Well, I have to build my own power line to it and I’m not that great of an engineer,” I said, sighing. “Death claimed she bred hundreds of generations to create our family, but none of us have particularly shown that much in the way of necromantic talent. I mean, Kerri sees ghosts but I’m thinking more Voldemort than Luna Lovegood.”
“I never read Harry Potter or saw the movies, so I have no idea who those people are,” Lisa said.
I pointed at her. “And yet you knew who they are.”
The elevator kept going.
“How deep is this going?” I asked.
“Up,” Lisa corrected. “It’s going up. Remember, we’re in the center of the Earth.”
“Ah,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re still going with that, huh. So, want to tell me if you’re seeing someone. When are you going to be bringing someone back to the mansion? You know, as soon as we get an exact replica built on some island with no extradition tre—”
That was when the elevator flipped over and the two of us fell on our faces.
“What the hell!” I said, lying on the bottom of the elevator.
The elevator doors then pinged.
“Sorry, that’s a thing with gravity around here,” Lisa said.
“Why not put chairs with straps in them?” I shouted.
“A mad scientist invented it!” Lisa snapped, getting up. “How should I know!?”
Thankfully, no P.H.A.N.T.O.M troops came to investigate our shouts and we were left alone. I climbed to my feet and walked out into the central computer core of Skull Castle. It was a massive weird three-story circular computer core rising out of t
he ground with hundreds of servers operating simultaneously around it. Computer cables ran in and out of it, looking like snakes, or tentacles in the dim illumination.
Large floating holographic screens showed various parts of the Hollow Earth, surface world, alien planets, and even a few alternate realities. I actually got a glimpse of Earth-B on the other side of Earth’s orbit. There, the League of Superheroes was punching a giant robot and I saw an alternate version of Mandy fighting alongside an arrow-shooting Cindy.
I sucked in my breath. “The fact we could just enter down here and there’s no one to meet us is really ominous.”
“That’s because I wanted you to be down here,” a deep, ominous voice spoke.
I turned around and saw a balding middle-aged man in a button-down blue shirt, brown pants, and an ugly red tie. He had tiny glasses resting on the bridge of his nose and the body of someone who had probably once played football but had long since lost the war against doughnuts. In his right hand was an alien pistol that had three spikes at the end exchanging an arc of lightning.
“Uh-huh,” I said, looking back.
“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this day,” the man said, softly. “How I’ve schemed, plotted, and accumulated power. Years turned to decades. Each night, I went to bed knowing I was one step closer to bringing about your end and that was the only thing that—”
Lisa blasted him in the face with her sparkler powers, throwing him back. She ran over, grabbed his gun, and shot him in the face. The man disintegrated and all that was left was a fine white powder.
“Hey,” I shouted. “Not cool.”
“What?” Lisa asked, turning around. “He was planning on killing you!”
“Yeah, but he was mid-monologue!” I said, appalled. “There’s rules against these kinds of things! It’s killing someone in the Continental! That was a John Wick reference by the way.”
“I know. It’s something from this century,” Lisa said. “That was Steve Duck, though. The President’s Chief of Staff. He seemed to know you.”
“And now we’ll never know what his beef with me was!” I said, shaking my head. “This is going to bug me for the rest of the day!”
