“Hey,” Face-Off said, and Christine jumped a little. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” He handed her a Diet Coke.
“I was lost in thought for a second, that’s all. I space out sometimes, as in a lot. All part of the Dark charm.”
“No problem.” Face-Off sat on another chair and took a sip of his beer. He had to produce another face to do it; Christine recognized the old tough guy he’d looked like when she first met him.
“By the way, what is your name? ‘Face’ is a little impersonal. You saved my butt; I would kinda like to know your name.”
“I have lots of names,” Face-Off said, getting up and standing in front of the TV. His face changed, and now she was looking a black-haired man who looked a bit like a younger version of the guy from that Showtime show Episodes, what was his name? Matt something. “In Little Italy, I’m Tony.” His voice had changed and gotten much more Jersey Shore-like. Even his body language was different, with more hand gestures and nods at nothing in particular. “Tony’s a funny guy, a real wiseass. But people like him, ‘cause he’s always got money to spend, and he sucks at playing cards but he don’t mind when he loses.”
He whirled on his feet, and when he spun back around he was a thin-faced kid with messy brown hair. “On 137th Street I’m Dean.” Dean apparently couldn’t stand still; he started doing little hops in place, and he hugged himself and rubbed his upper arms a lot. The way he slouched his shoulders made him look a lot shorter than his usual five ten. His voice was whiny and annoying. “Donny's a junkie, a little dope fiend. He usually has enough cash to pay for his medicine, though, so people don’t care if he hangs around.”
Another whirl, and now he was a blonde in a crew cut. He looked mean until he smiled. He had a sweet, friendly smile. “Johnny hangs out with the hookers on West 28th. He buys them coffee and donuts, and never tries to pull any shit on them, so they trust him a bit, enough that they will share with him any street gossip they hear. They also know that if they tell Johnny about a pimp who gets too slap-happy with his girls, the pimp will end up having a nasty accident.”
“That’s pretty awesome,” Christine admitted. “You should be in the movies. But those are masks. What about, you know, the real you? I know that’s kind of Oprah of me – do you have Oprah here? Never mind – but who are you, really?”
The blank face was back. “This is my face, the only face I’ve got,” he said as he sat back down. The Tony-face appeared for a second while he chugged some beer, then disappeared again. “When I make a face, it is a constant effort, like keeping a muscle clenched. Not a big effort, but you have to concentrate on it all the time. When I relax, this is what you get.”
“Uh, were you always like that?” Christine asked.
“Did I scare the shit out of the entire maternity ward when I was born, you mean?” Face-Off said and chuckled. “Nah, nothing so dramatic. There was an incident when I was sixteen. That’s when my old face went away. For some reason, I can’t bring it back. I’ve tried to do it off old pictures, and I can’t get a grip on it.”
When he said ‘incident,’ her Christine-senses picked up a nasty emotional spike. Whatever the incident had been, it hadn’t involved sponge cake and cuddly kittens, unless the kittens had ended up baked into the cake. “Okay,” she said, pointedly not asking any questions about the incident. “That’s your face. Cool. What’s your name?”
He hesitated for a second. “Mark. Marco, if you want to be technical. And if you say ‘Polo’ I’ll… I’ll get miffed. Marco Ernesto Martinez. My father was Puerto Rican, my mother Italian. Call me Mark.”
“Mark it is,” she replied. She raised her Diet Coke to him. “Thanks for saving my butt, Mark.”
He raised his beer bottle in return. “Cheers. Pleasure saving you. Now that you’re a Type 2.5 or higher, you’ll probably end up saving my butt if we get in trouble before we get you home.”
Condor had explained to her the whole power classification thingy. It was a nerdy thing to do, assigning numbers to powers and trying to rank them. She could see a couple of geeks at a comic book store or worse, an online forum, having furious arguments about the actual PAS numbers of some superhero or another. Who was stronger, Ultimate or Mighty Mouse? That made her smile, and she explained why to Face-Off – to Mark.
Mark was mentally grinning when she was done. “Oh, yes, we get a lot of that shit. Is so-and-so a 2.7 or a 2.8? Neos are as bad or worse than vanilla humans about it. ‘What’s your number?’ That’s the question we ask each other to see where we fit in the Cosmic Pecking Order. The whole thing is ridiculous.”
“So what’s your number?” Christine said. “Hey, I am a nerd. And a geek, pointdexter, dork – with my last name, I get that one so effing much – you name it. I like linking numbers to things.”
“I’m a 2.3 or 2.4. So I usually say 2.4 to puff myself up. Which means you are anywhere between thirty and a hundred percent more powerful than me, supposedly.”
“I guess. But I don’t know what I’m doing yet, so I’m sure an experienced 2.1 can gank me pretty good.”
Mark nodded. “That’s part of why I think the rankings are bullshit. There’s plenty of cases where Neos beat opponents several times more powerful than them. The whole testing system isn’t an exact science, either, and the tests fail big time at predicting how far you can push your powers when you get angry or desperate. Plus some people develop their powers over time, so this year’s 1.2 can be next decade’s 2.2 or whatever. And the actual powers you have also count for a lot. The electric fucker that tried to kill me when I was rescuing you could hit me from range, so unless I closed the distance he had the advantage, no matter what our numbers were.”
“Ranged versus melee, gotcha,” Christine said. Her games had the same issues. And unlike games, the world didn’t have designers to bitch at about game balance and ask to please nerf the ranged Neo powers so they didn’t win every duel. The number one rule of the Reality Game was ‘life’s unfair.’ “So why even bother with the ranking system?”
“It makes people feel a little better, I guess. If you can measure things they aren’t quite so scary,” Mark said. He made another face – the Christian Bale look-alike this time – and finished off his beer. “So how about you, Christine? What’s your story before you got dragged into Olympus 2.0?”
“Me? God, nothing much to tell. Born and raised in New Jersey, mostly around Princeton Junction. Junior in college, Physics major at UM, which meant I was headed for grad school, except I was getting kinda sick of physics, I love the math but the theoretical stuff is more annoying than useful sometimes. That was back when my problems were little things, like wondering if I really wanted to do what I’d been studying for two years, and if I had gone too far to change my mind. Plus there weren’t a lot of women in the Physics department, which can really suck. Yeah, you end up being the center of attention sometimes, but it’s the wrong kind of attention, you know? And a lot of a-holes thought I didn’t belong there because as far as they were concerned only people with dicks can understand the mysteries of the universe.
“Lately I’ve been playing too many computer games and letting my grades slip; it’s almost like I want to fail. But if I do, the a-holes are going to smirk and say the girl couldn’t hack it. So should I finish my degree to show them what a-holes they are, even if I’m not sure that’s what I want? I was thinking of maybe taking a year off and think things through. Guess I am taking a year off now,” she realized out loud.
Mark just sat there, listening and actually paying attention, unlike your typical guy. Usually by that point her dates’ eyes glazed over or they interrupted her, either to talk about themselves or to ask some stupid question meant mostly to shut her up. Except this is not a date, just an ex-victim and her rescuer yakking it up, her brain dutifully informed her. “And my social life sucked. My roommate Sophie thought that party was one of my last chances of having a normal college experience. I’m not saying I had no social life. I had t
wo serious boyfriends and stuff, but they didn’t work out. As in both relationships ended in total disaster. One cheating a-hole and one domineering d-bag.” Smart, let’s talk about my exes. Guys love to hear about other guys, said nobody ever.
Who gives a frak? Her brain retorted. Are you actually interested in a murderous guy with no face?
What if I am?
Then I think you have serious problems. Plus it’s pretty pathetic, swooning over your rescuer like some loser bimbo. So last century, or even the century before that.
We’re just talking, she replied, and realized that outside in the real world, it had gotten pretty quiet. “Sorry,” she said. That made it how many times she’d said ‘sorry’? A large integer, that was for sure. “Mind wandered off again.”
“That’s all right,” he replied; his mental smile was warm and relaxed. “I was pretty wound up about tomorrow. I don’t like doing things without a clear plan, a definite goal, and it’s driving me apeshit. This little chat has helped me relax for a bit. And trust me, Cassandra is the queen of the wandering minds. Sometimes she’ll stop in mid-sentence and won’t say a word, or listen to a word I say, for a good hour or two. I usually grab a book and catch up on my reading until she comes back to earth.”
That led to a nice conversation about books; they exchanged favorite titles for a while. Both worlds shared a lot of the same classic authors, like Tolkien and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Things changed radically after World War Two, which made sense. No J.K. Rowling, for example. Stephen King, yes, although his books were very different, except for the Dark Tower series, amusingly enough. George R.R. Martin was around, but he wrote long convoluted novels about the doings of a bunch of fictional Neos instead of fantasy. Supers sold better than dragons in this world, she supposed.
Movies came next. Some actors existed in both worlds – Nicholas Cage, for one, the Olsen twins for another, except in this world they were triplets and one of them was a Neo superhero. Katherine Heigl made rom-coms in both worlds. Bruce Willis, yes, but no Demi More or Ashton Kutcher.
How did that work? If chaos theory was right, very few people born after, say, 1945 should exist in both worlds. Butterfly effect and all that jazz, little changes building up until almost nothing was the same. Oh, well. She wasn’t that big a fan of chaos theory. Maybe the butterflies canceled each other out some of the time. When she had the time, she’d have to sit down and try to figure it out. If she ever got back, a careful study of the two timelines would make for a great paper. She might get an A or end up in an insane asylum. Maybe both.
Christine normally didn’t talk to near-strangers for hours on end, but next thing she knew, it was well past midnight. Time flies when you’re having trans-dimensional comparative pop culture discussions.
The Freedom Legion
Atlantic Headquarters, March 14, 2013
Chastity Baal looked at her debriefer with thinly-concealed contempt.
“Can you tell me again how you managed to take down a Celestial?” Swift asked. To have him of all people in charge of her after-mission report made for the perfect topper for this caper. She, the Mandarin and Celsius – whose prognosis remained rather poor – had been flown to the Atlantic Headquarters with undue haste. Going to the Pacific Headquarters would have made far more sense, but politics had overruled common sense, as was the case all too often.
Swift met her stare with his own glare and waited for an answer. Chastity was generally rather discriminating about who she allowed into her life and her bed. Her brief affair with Larry Graham had been a monumental mistake that had haunted her for years. Larry had found her at one of the lowest points in her life – still mourning Tommy, feeling truly alone in the world – and had, if not taken advantage, certainly seized the opportunity she had foolishly offered. He then had had the gall to blame her for his philandering, and had remained a chilly, hostile presence in her life. Fortunately, their work in the Legion very rarely put together. Tonight was a vexing exception.
She waited a few more heartbeats before answering. “I used the special munitions Doctor Slaughter provided,” she said, lying by omission. She wasn’t ready to discuss the dagger, not until she had a chance to speak with its creator. “Celsius had also engaged the Celestial and possibly weakened him before I finished him off.”
“Okay, fine,” Swift conceded, speaking loudly to make himself heard over the noise in the background. Heavy machinery was hard at work not very far away from Freedom Hall, where the debriefing was being conducted. The Hall itself had been largely undamaged, but even its normally pristine marble walls and columns were pock-marked with shrapnel. Chastity had gotten a good look at the devastation on the flight in. Freedom Island had been attacked before, but it never had suffered so much damage.
Swift waited for the noise to abate somewhat before continuing. “I’ll give Celsius an assist for putting down the Celestial. That might cheer him up if he ever wakes up. Artemis is debriefing Bao right now,” Swift added, declining to use his wife’s real name in Chastity’s presence. Then again, Chastity was depersonalizing Larry by thinking of him in his costumed guise, so perhaps she shouldn’t cast stones. “We’ll find out what he knows. We're hoping he can tell us if there is any connection between the Empire and the attack.”
“The timing of the defection is suspicious,” Chastity commented. ”We were contacted by Bao six days ago. The attack’s preparations would have been on their final stages then. If someone is trying to frame the Empire, the defector would make a perfect tool.”
“We’re not just going to take Bao’s word for it,” Swift said dismissively. “We have enough mind-snoops in the Legion to make sure he’s telling the whole truth and nothing but. This ain’t our first rodeo, you know.”
“If the attack came from the Empire, wouldn’t it have been more sensible to take Bao to the Pacific Headquarters? That’s going to be our forward base of operations if the worst happens.” Chastity thought she knew the answer but wanted to see if Swift would admit to it.
He shrugged. “Two of the Pacific Councilors – I think you can figure out who – have a vested interest in not pissing off the Empire. Some of us on this side of the world thought we’d be better off presenting them with solid data. That way they don’t have to resist the temptation to massage the info before presenting it to us. The younger crew is a little too willing to do whatever it takes to find a peaceful resolution even when there’s none to be found.”
Chastity didn’t say anything. She hadn’t been working with the Legion for very long as Neos measured such things, but even so had become keenly aware of the rift between the ‘original’ Legionnaires – the founding heroes of World War Two and a select few from the First Asian War – and the younger generations, especially the younger generations from countries other than the US or Great Britain. That rift could turn into something dangerous down the line. She shrugged mentally, unwilling to let Swift see anything she was feeling. She was a covert operator, not a mover and shaker.
“Are we done here?” she asked.
“Yeah. That about covers it.” He glanced at the computer. “You’re off the clock until 1300 hours tomorrow. Doc will be handing out assignments at Freedom Hall then. Don’t let the door hit your ass on your way out.”
Chastity rose from her chair and left without saying a word. Dealing with Swift’s juvenile behavior could wait. She had someone important to see.
* * *
“Chastity! What a delightful surprise.”
Daedalus Smith looked anything but delighted, but he stepped aside and let Chastity enter his personal quarters at Freedom Hall. The Hall’s neoclassic exterior hid a high-tech warren of gleaming corridors, cylindrical elevators and computer terminals every few dozen feet, with sensors and cameras monitoring everything and everyone. The living quarters for the senior members of the Legion were several levels underground and resembled a luxury hotel, featuring hallways covered with thick lavender carpets and decorated with expensive replicas of renow
ned paintings. Daedalus’ room was at the end of one such corridor.
Chastity’s former lover was wearing a bathrobe, but he did not look as if he had been sleeping when she came calling. His handsome features were marred by his customary smirk, but his eyes showed no amusement, just cold calculation. She glanced past the richly furnished living room and caught a glimpse of a naked young woman just before she shut the bedroom door.
Daedalus shrugged. “She’s a bit shy. Her name’s Lydia; she’s an emergency medicine specialist. Vanilla, but very athletic. You’d like her.” His eyes gleamed with amusement for a second. “Maybe the three of us could have a little party.”
“I didn’t come here for that,” Chastity said as she walked past Daedalus.
“Yeah, I figured as much. So what brings you here unannounced? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in the midst of a crisis here. You are dropping by during my allotted four hours of R&R, probably the last I’ll get for the rest of the week. So what gives, Chaz?”
“The dagger. I used it in Kazakhstan.”
“Oh, yeah? How did it work out for you?”
New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Page 19
