Villains Don't Save Heroes!

by Mia Archer

  But before I could say anything, before they could move away from me or even register surprise, I was gone. I found myself with light shining down on me and wondered if something had gone wrong with the teleporter, but then I heard the roar of a crowd and realized I’d been transported to the Starlight Dome in the middle of a game.

  I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye and saw an oblong ball coming at me. The computer told me exactly what trajectory it was on and so it was simple enough to grab the thing as it sailed towards me. Then I saw big beefy guys barreling towards me, not a good idea to grab a ball like that on the middle of the field, and there was yet another flash of white and I was in the dummy lab still holding the football.

  “Did you decide to stop and play a little pigskin while you were out saving the city?” Fialux asked.

  She stalked over to me. I stood in stunned silence looking around. Right. I didn’t have much in the way of power reserves right now so of course the computer was going to cut the emergency teleportation protocol short in the name of getting me here with enough power to spare.

  “Can’t talk right now,” I said, tossing the ball to her which surprised her enough to keep her from looking too pissed off. “I have to…”

  What I had to do was get out of my current suit and get into a new one. It’s not like it would even take all that long. I just needed a few seconds where something wasn’t trying to kill me to tell the computer to swap out the old one with a new one.

  But of course I wasn’t going to get those few seconds of something trying not to kill me. I’d pulled up my wrist computer and my hand hovered over the thing when a bright light filled my vision.

  When that vision cleared a second later I looked down in horror to see that there was a blistered bloody mess. I wiggled my fingers and that mess wiggled.

  Well then. That was going to take some time to fix in the medbay. It also hurt like a motherfucker. With my suit running at less than optimal power it didn’t have the sense to pump my body full of all the nice chemicals that usually helped me not to feel pain on the rare occasion when I actually took a real hit.

  “I don’t think so Night Terror,” Dr. Lana growled. “We’re done playing games.”

  “What the hell are you…”

  Dr. Lana raised her wrist blaster and pointed it at Fialux. For a wonder she stood proud even though she had to know that one blast from that thing would be enough to end her without her powers.

  “I’m going to deal with you after I get done with this one,” she said, reaching around behind her and patting her strange oversized anti-Fialux gun that had been strapped to her back. “I don’t know what’s going on with you or how you’ve kept your powers, but I’m going to find out even if it means vivisecting you to see what’s still making you tick!”

  “Over my dead body,” I said, taking a protective step forward.

  “That can be arranged,” she said.

  Her knockoff wrist blaster started to make an ominous hum. The sort of ominous hum I’d always loved before because it meant I was about to bring down the hurt on some deserving asshole.

  Only there was something off. There was a steady beeping going on under the hum. Dr. Lana noticed it too, and she seemed to know enough about the sounds her stolen equipment made to know that beeping was out of the ordinary. She looked down at her blaster and arched an eyebrow.

  “What the hell is wrong with this?” she growled.

  I smiled. “It’s not the wrist blaster.”

  She looked up at me. Powered it down. The hum stopped, but the low beeping noise continued. Only now that there wasn’t the ominous hum of her knockoff blaster filling the room letting me know of my imminent demise the beeping became more obvious.

  And it wasn’t a beeping at all. It was a computerized voice. Counting down.

  “What the…”

  “You just made one mistake,” I said, my grin widening as the computer reached twenty.

  “What? What’s going on? I don’t make mistakes! What mistake are you talking about?” she shrieked.

  “Fucking with me,” I said, sprinting towards her.

  Dr. Lana was looking around in a panic now. It would’ve been delicious if I had time to truly enjoy it, but unfortunately now wasn’t the time. She had something on her that I needed, and I was going to get it before she met her very timely demise.

  “Ten, nine…”

  Dr. Lana braced herself for me to hit her, but of course that was the last thing I intended to do. No, at the last moment I pivoted and she sort of cartwheeled because she’d been preparing for a hit, not for me to dart around her.

  I grabbed the rifle on her back and ripped at it. Luckily for me she had the thing set up to release easily, which made sense if you were bringing something like this into combat, and I rolled away.

  “Five, four…”

  I came up from the roll, but I wasn’t finished. I kept my momentum going and dove for Fialux. I slammed into her and we went to the ground and tumbled over and over before coming to rest on the wall just as the computer reached one.

  I turned to look at Dr. Lana. She looked more confused than anything now, but as the computer finished its countdown she turned to look at me and it was clear she’d realized I’d somehow beaten her, even if she couldn’t figure out exactly what was going on. My actions said it all.

  Don’t feel too bad for her though. It’s not like she was going to have much time to think about being defeated.

  “Thank you for visiting Night Terror labs,” my recorded voice cackled over loudspeakers set up throughout the room. “I can’t help you right now, but I’ve set up plenty of automated toys that’ll give you a great idea of what would’ve happened to you if we did meet!”

  Everything struck at once. Lasers. Antigrav kinetics, which was a fancy way of saying bullets that didn’t use traditional propellants. Plasma blasts. I wasn’t joking when I’d made that recording. The dummy lab hit intruders with every nasty trick I’d ever added to my arsenal all at once.

  There was only one little problem with my victory that made it less than a total victory.

  See I hate doing manual cleanup. It’s one of the reasons why I had an army of small robots in my real lab that handled that cleanup for me.

  When I built this place I didn’t want to waste any more energy than I had to, and that included wasting energy on having a fleet of robots running around the place cleaning things up.

  My solution? As soon as everything got done royally fucking up anyone who dared to try and follow me via teleportation the remains were, in turn, teleported to the Starlight City landfill.

  I watched in vague horror and with growing unease as the sparkle of the teleporter appeared around what was left of Dr. Lana, it wasn’t pretty, and before I could shout at the stupid fucking computer that didn’t have the common sense not to teleport an enemy who could obviously heal herself she was gone.

  “Fuck!” I shouted. “Fuck, fuck, fuckity-fuck fuck!”

  I just didn’t know enough about her healing powers. My failsafes had royally fucked her up good, and that would’ve been enough to kill anyone short of Fialux at the height of her powers, but after Dr. Lana came back from that shot through the gut I wasn’t going to put money on those Vegas bets that she was permanently dead.

  Actually I was going to have to quietly place some bets in the Vegas dead pools. Whether or not a hero or villain was actually dead was big money out there, and I figured if she was still alive then making some money off of it would salve that wound just a little.

  “Um… What was that?”

  I turned. Looked Fialux up and down. Fuck did she look good. Like she was the best thing I’d ever seen right about now. As I looked at her I was reminded of why I fell head over heels for her in the first place.

  “So Dr. Lana was about to kill me,” I said.

  “I saw when you transported me to this place with no way out and only one old plasma screen TV playing the news,” she s
aid, her tone neutral.

  “Right. Well she was going to kill me, then probably you since she was talking about vivisecting you. My suit was busted and I couldn’t pause long enough to have a new one transported out because my computer is mind-bogglingly stupid and I figured if I only had enough energy to do a few teleports then I’d taunt her and get her to follow me to this dummy lab I set up as a death trap for anyone who figured out how to track me while I was teleporting and…”

  A finger on my lips stopped my stream of consciousness recitation of everything that’d gone down in the past ten minutes.

  Fialux grinned. Leaned in close and pressed her lips against mine. My toes curled and I melted into her as all the tension from tonight drained away under that kiss. She pulled away, her eyes twinkling.

  “My hero.”

  50

  A Night’s Work

  “Seriously, you were so fucking amazing!”

  I leaned over my computer. The good old fashioned non-intelligent computer that couldn’t do anything worthwhile. The computer that had been part of the reason I had so much difficulty fighting off Dr. Lana in this most recent fight.

  But this computer hadn’t tried to kill me. And I was pretty sure the computer who had tried to kill me once upon a time had just saved my life.

  Talk about a confusing world that had turned itself upside down a couple of different times in the past half a year or so. It was getting exhausting.

  “I mean the way you lured her back here, and…”

  Selena was obviously still pumped from our little fight out over the city. I was surprised that she’d be this psyched over that battle. I was really surprised that she would be this excited over me luring someone back to my dummy lab so all the failsafes I’d put in place could kill her.

  Even though I wasn’t quite willing to believe that she was truly dead. No, I had a feeling she was out there in a Starlight City landfill slowly regenerating. The fact that I’d gone out to the coordinates the computer transported her to and found nothing only strengthened that thought.

  That could’ve been that the trash was constantly being moved around by the fine sanitation workers of this city, or it could be that my archnemesis was still out there biding her time and waiting to heal up enough to come at me again.

  I sighed. “Okay, so I did good today. You don’t have to gush about it so much.”

  “Are you kidding?” Fialux asked.

  She pointed to a monitor up on the wall that was playing the Starlight City News Network feed over and over. I’d muted it, but the captioning was still on.

  “That crap?” I asked. “I just leave it on so I can tell when someone’s attacking the city. It’s not like they ever have anything good to say about me.”

  “Are you sure about that?” she asked.

  She tapped a button on the remote and the anchorwoman’s voice filled the room. Though it might be more accurate to call her an anchor girl. She looked young. Like fresh out of college young. And familiar.

  “To recap tonight’s top story. Noted villain Night Terror took a heroic turn yet again, saving the city from four giant robots and a mysterious new villain who’s accompanied the recent robot attacks. It’s theorized that this new villain, not Night Terror, is the one responsible for these attacks.”

  She paused. Turned to smile at the camera. It was a small secret smile.

  “There were no SCNN casualties when reporting this story thanks to the new drone program suggested by this reporter, and I think I speak for everyone when I say thank you Night Terror.”

  Then she winked, and I realized why she looked familiar. She was from my class. I guess pushing for that drone program got her a big old promotion to the big desk. And I had a feeling when she thanked me she wasn’t just talking about fighting off the robots.

  “Finally some recognition,” I said. “It’s about damn time.”

  “See. I knew you had a heroic streak in you.”

  Fialux wrapped her arms around me and distracted me with a kiss to the cheek. “Everyone in the city agrees! You were fucking amazing! I mean I knew I liked watching you in action, but this…”

  I’d seen something like this before. It was at a nerd convention at the Starlight City convention center. A young girl in middle school who was way too smart for the cruel social demands that come along at that age with all the social awkwardness that went along with it was gushing to Valerie Vaughn.

  Valerie’s line hadn’t been nearly as long as the line for Carol Connor, the lady who played Stargirl in the eponymous TV show that vaulted both ladies to fame.

  No one ever liked the villain as much. At least not back then. No one had posters of the villain up in their bedroom. No one imagined what it would be like when they grew up and followed in the villain’s footsteps to take over the world, though admittedly my attempts to take over the world involved things that looked a lot more realistic than the rubber and plastic monsters she was regularly throwing at Stargirl in the series.

  No one but that awkward little girl who saw something in Valerie’s performance that no one else did. Something to aspire to.

  So yeah. Maybe I’d been gushing a little at one of my favorite stars. So what? Maybe Valerie had also had some trouble finding work outside of the con circuit because she’d been typecast. Maybe I sent her a nice anonymous pension to help her pay the bills every month as she got on in years.

  No big deal. Just me being me. If you couldn’t help out a childhood hero then what was the point of being the greatest criminal mastermind this world had ever known?

  The point is I’d heard the voice Fialux was using on me now before because I’d used that voice on one of my favorite stars ever. It was nice hearing that voice from Fialux, too, even if it did feel just a little weird.

  She was my girlfriend, after all. She was a famous hero in her own right. Having her gushing about what I’d done felt off.

  “I mean the way you swooped down there and used their momentum against them! I would’ve just stood there and took the hit, but then again when I had my powers I could get away with doing that sort of thing.”

  I suppose it was a good thing she was able to talk about losing her powers without completely losing it. That was definitely progress above and beyond where we’d been, say, earlier this morning.

  I guess going out and saving the city had done more for her than any amount of dancing ever could. Even if it had resulted in her getting kidnapped just a little and nearly killed.

  I hunched over my computer and tried to push thoughts of what might’ve happened to Fialux away. For that matter I tried pushing thoughts of what she was doing right now away, because talk about a distraction. I could feel her breath on my ear and I was trying to work here.

  I was reviewing footage taken by my mask. Particularly footage of that series of rapid hand gestures the robot with the green vision slit that had saved me had made before it sacrificed itself and saved my life a second time.

  There was something to that. Something that tickled something in the back of my mind. Something that…

  “Natalie?” Fialux asked, her voice suddenly quiet.

  I mumbled something that I hoped would lead her to believe I was paying attention to whatever she was saying. To be honest I was more than a little frustrated because I was trying to work here. Sure there would’ve been a time just a few days ago when I would’ve been ecstatic that she was lavishing me with this kind of attention, but that was before I had the mystery of that robot to unravel.

  Not to mention I had that gun Dr. Lana had been nice enough to leave behind when she’d been killed that I had to examine.

  I felt lips on my ear and then they moved down to my cheek. Down to my neck. I arched my neck without really thinking about it, because when you had a total hottie like Fialux pressing her lips against your neck you wanted to welcome that contact!

  Then I realized what I was doing and let out a low growl.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.
<
br />   “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that one of those robots saved me today. That’s the only reason I’m still alive now.”

  She was suddenly all serious. Which admittedly was a little frustrating. Maybe there’d been a small part of me that’d hoped she’d go ahead and push me on the whole canoodling thing she’d been working up to, but then she was beside me down on her knees looking at the same readout.

  “You’re serious?” she asked, then she got a good look at my face. “Natalie. You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something.”

  “Because I have,” I said.

  She looked back at the screen. I’d slowed down the video so I could get a good look at what the robot had been doing with its hands. And now that I’d slowed it down I knew exactly what it was.

  A message.

  “What’s that robot doing?” she asked.

  “Using sign language,” I said. “At least he’s signing letters. Crude, but if you go fast enough it gets the message across.”

  “He?” she asked, obviously confused. “Why would you think the robot is a he? I mean robots don’t really have gender so…”

  “This isn’t a robot,” I said. “What you’re looking at there is an advanced artificial intelligence in a robot’s body. Or at least it was calling the shot in the robot’s body.”

  “Like your computer?”

  “Exactly like my computer,” I said.

  “Why do I feel like you’re not telling me something?” she asked.

  “Here. Let me spell it out for you,” I said.

  I went through the slow motion sign language letters one more time. Fialux only looked more and more confused, but I could understand that. It’d taken me a couple of passes to realize what was going on, the robot only had three fingers on its hand which made it a little more difficult to figure out what it was saying.

  “I still don’t get it,” she said. “I mean if the robot wanted to send you a message why would it even go that fast?”

  “Because he knew I’d be recording everything to review later. He knew a robot flashing hand signals at me like that would be enough to pique my curiosity. To get me to take a second look.”