by Archer, Mia
Well I tried not to think about what it was the perfect spot for. Needless to say I knew Natalie would be stoked if she found a piece of real estate like this.
The girl hit a button that made a nice loud click. Part of the mountainside opened in front of us revealing a ramp that went down into the thing.
“Huh,” I said. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”
“I’m just getting started,” the girl said. “Now come on. I can’t wait to show you the place!”
I turned and looked at the city in the distance one final time. Smoke still rose from the place. Presumably from the giant monsters I hadn’t managed to take out.
As I looked at the city I found myself thinking they could deal with it. If they wanted to fire on me every time I tried to help them then maybe they deserved to get stomped under a few giant irradiated lizards.
I kicked myself for thinking it even as the thought flitted through my mind. That wasn’t the way a hero was supposed to look at the world, and I wasn’t going to let being transported to this world change me.
I was going to get a look at this lair though. Those alien idiots could take care of the giant monsters themselves for the next half hour or so.
Maybe they’d be a little more grateful if they got kicked around a little before I came back to save the day. Yeah, that sounded like a good plan.
9
Totally Not A Villainous Lair
The girl floated up off the ground and flew down a twisting tunnel that led deeper and deeper into the volcano. I figured she knew what she was doing, but still.
“Aren’t you worried about running into lava or something?” I asked.
“I mean yeah,” she said. “Occasionally you get lava coming through one of the tunnels and it’s a pain to deal with, but it’s not like it’s much of a worry.”
I decided I wasn’t going to ask why she wasn’t all that worried about being dipped in lava. I also decided I wasn’t going to reveal why I wasn’t all that worried about being dipped in lava.
We emerged into a massive room open to the sky that looked damn impressive. Like I let out a whistle impressive.
“Dang,” I breathed. “You really went all out with this place.”
“Yeah, well I figured what’s the point in having a volcano lair if you don’t incorporate liquid hot magma in all your decorating?” she asked.
The room was a massive cylinder that ran up to an open air thing that was presumably the hole thingy in the volcano where the lava came out. I’m sure there was some fancy word for the hole thingy the lava came out of in a volcano, but I didn’t know what it was.
That sort of geeky thing was more Natalie’s speed. Though come to think of it she’d never shown much of an interest in geology.
“You drilled this hole in the middle of the volcano hole?” I asked.
The girl hit me with an odd look. As though she was trying to figure out if I’d really just asked that question. As though she thought the question was the stupidest thing she’d heard all day.
I didn’t like that look. Whenever I asked Natalie a sciencey question she was always more than happy to answer. She got excited about explaining stuff. She seriously loved letting someone know something new.
It was different with this girl. She reminded me of one of those geeks back in middle school or high school who’d decided the whole world was going to hate them before they gave the world a chance and so they acted all high and mighty and condescending without giving people a chance.
Yeah, this girl might remind me of Natalie, she might be looking pretty good in that catsuit, but that didn’t make her Natalie. It was good to have a reminder of why I so desperately needed to get home.
“It’s called a caldera,” she said with a sort of superior tone I didn’t care for. “And yes. I figured a lot of people think “volcano lair” and build into the caldera walls, but how many people fashion a lair that goes right in the middle of the thing?”
I didn’t think most people gave this much thought to the design and building of volcano lairs at all, to be honest, but she was talking and I didn’t want to stop her.
I looked around. The thing must’ve been a real pain to put together. Lava flowed down the walls on all sides and traveled down channels towards a central bubbling pool. Bridges ran over the lava rivers, and all around that lava was a weird sparkling shimmer.
Like she was using shields.
“How do you keep everything from being burnt up?” I asked.
“Proprietary secret,” the girl said. “Sorry. You might be from earth and you might’ve done some impressive stuff since you got here, but I don’t really know you.”
I smiled and held a hand out. I figured it never hurt to be friendly. Even if I was hanging out with someone who gave me a bit of a bad vibe. Someone who was hiding the fact that she had shield tech.
A bad vibe didn’t change that this girl had helped me out. She was the only friendly face I’d seen since arriving on this world, and that meant I at least owed her an introduction.
“Right. Well my name is…”
I hesitated. I was suddenly unsure of how I should introduce myself to this girl. On the one hand if I introduced myself as Fialux that would obviously sound like a hero name and she’d probably figure out that I’d been in the hero business back on earth.
Then again if I introduced myself as Selena that would give her my real name. Which could potentially cause some trouble if we both ever made it back to earth.
I decided the superhero name was probably the best. I’d be a first rate idiot if I thought she didn’t realize what I was. Especially after everything she’d seen me doing since I arrived on this strange new world.
“Fialux. They call me Fialux back home.”
She held her hand out and took mine. It felt like she was trying to squeeze pretty hard, but it wasn’t nearly enough to cause me any discomfort.
“You’re going to have to try harder than that if you want to hurt me,” I said.
The pressure grew greater, but only in the sense that I could actually feel the pressure. Ever so slightly. Like it was barely there, but it was there which was saying something.
Finally the girl grinned and released her grip.
“Had to try,” she said. “You’ll forgive me if I let my curiosity and desire to do some testing get the best of me. It’s not every day a living goddess drops in your lap.”
I arched an eyebrow. There was something about the notion of dropping into her lap, something about the way she said it, that felt a little odd. Like she was almost hitting on me.
I mean it’s not like I’d never been hit on before. It’s just that it felt weird because I was with Natalie. Not to mention the last place I expected to find another woman hitting on me was on a strange new planet who knew where in the universe.
“I’m Sabine by the way,” she said. “Nice to meet you Fialux. Or whatever your real name is, since I doubt that’s what your parents put on your birth certificate.”
“It isn’t,” I said with a wink. “But if you really came from earth then you know all about secret identities. Especially if you’re rocking a place like this.”
“That I do,” she said. “Secrets on top of secrets.”
She arched her eyebrow and gave me another once over. Maybe she thought she had a chance since I was presumably the only earthling within like a trillion miles, or however long it would take to get back to earth.
“So, Fialux,” she said. “I was wondering if you were going to tell me how you got here and how you’re able to fight off the giant monsters paying my planet a visit?”
Her planet? Now that was odd. As far as I could tell this planet belonged to those strange blue humanoids who’d been doing their best to blast me out of the sky.
I decided not to bring that up just yet. I didn’t want to upset this girl when I’d just met her, after all.
“Actually me being here and the giant monsters paying a visit have a lot
to do with each other,” I said. “You can blame a crazy lady who worked for some research thingy at Starlight City University.”
“The Applied Sciences Department?” Sabine asked, suddenly a lot more interested. “Are you talking about that bitch Dr. Lana?”
“Huh. Small universe,” I said.
I wasn’t as smart with all the math stuff as Natalie was, but even I knew the probability that I’d been flung across the universe only to meet someone who knew Dr. Lana were pretty small.
Unless… Natalie was always going on about how Dr. Lana was stealing her stuff, and there was a story she’d told me once about her time at the Applied Sciences department that was tickling the back of my mind. It’d been disjointed because she’d been drinking quite a bit that night at a party.
I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t even remember having the conversation if I brought it up. Which I never had, because she’d asked me over and over again to reassure her she hadn’t done something stupid that night while she was in the drink and I was mostly sober since I had to keep a brewery’s worth of booze running through me to feel anything when my powers were working.
She’d slurred something about an accident with a portal to another part of the universe. An accident that’d resulted in her getting permanently kicked out of the Applied Sciences Department. It was the thing that set her on her path to becoming a villain, and apparently something that took a crapload of jello shots to get out of her.
“Let’s just say I know her,” Sabine said.
“More’s the pity,” I said. “That’s one acquaintance I wish I’d never made.”
Sabine sighed. She leaned back as though she was going to have a seat. I worried she might hurt herself since there wasn’t anything to catch her, but she came to rest on a cushion of nothing.
Huh. All these years I’d had the ability to fly and it never occurred to me to do something like that. I leaned back and used my flight ability to recline as though I was in a chair.
It was actually surprisingly comfortable.
“So were you a student at Starlight City University or something?” she asked.
“Sort of,” I said.
“And how did you get here?” she asked.
I wondered if I was doing the right thing saying what I was about to say. Still, I had a hunch. Some of the details didn’t fit what I’d been told that drunken night, but at the same time I figured the pieces sort of fit.
It’s not like I was a stranger to seeing people being manipulated by mind control or having their memories not be quite what they remembered them to be.
“The same way you did Sabine,” I said. “Getting thrown through a portal from earth.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you think you know about me?”
“An awful lot, actually,” I said, barreling ahead and hoping I was right about this and not making an ass out of myself.
Then again it’s not like it’d be the first time I’d made an ass out of myself in front of a villain in a sexy catsuit. It’d suck, but it wouldn’t be the first time.
“I’m willing to bet you were dating a pretty young woman named Natalie. Maybe the two of you met in the Applied Sciences Department. Maybe it was somewhere else. The point is you were working on an experiment together and then Dr. Lana decided to steal your design.”
Her face got darker and darker. Clearly she didn’t like this story, and I figured that meant I was close. So I kept going.
“Long story short, you got shoved through a portal pointed at a planet somewhere in the far flung reaches of the universe,” I said.
She snorted. “Far flung?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I have no idea where the heck we are, but it has to be trillions of miles from home.”
“You’re right on that,” she said, her voice a low growl.
“Right. So you get shoved through the portal and find yourself on this world, but you manage to survive by using some of the technology you had on you to shield yourself from whatever radiation is bombarding this world.”
Now that I looked at her I could see that faint shimmer around her as well. That made sense. She’d said it herself. This world was being bombarded with radiation that should kill complex life, but she was still alive.
“What does any of this have to do with how you got here?”
“Simple,” I said. “I don’t know much about all that technology stuff, but I do know that one thing Natalie was always complaining about was Dr. Lana stole her designs and duplicated them almost exactly. I’m willing to bet one of the things she did when she duplicated the whole portal thing was reuse the coordinates so it was still pointing to this world you were marooned on when she decided to send her lizards over here to grow big and strong.”
“And how do you know all of this?” she asked.
Her voice was dangerous. Like we’re talking I would’ve been worried if I didn’t have my powers back.
“Simple. Natalie and I were an item and she told me. That’s the kind of thing you tell your girlfriend.”
After a few drinks, but Sabine didn’t need to know that.
The girl let out a roar that surprised me. Though that wasn’t nearly as surprising as her flying across the chamber full speed and slamming against me, sending us flying back towards one of those walls dripping with liquid hot magma.
10
Attacked
I was so surprised at the girl attacking me that I didn’t react right away. I chided myself for not reacting right away. That was fighting the way Natalie was always getting on me about. Letting the other person dictate the terms of the fight because I was pretty sure I could sponge up the damage.
I reached down and tried to break her hold with a move Natalie taught me in our training, but for a surprise the girl easily countered it and flipped me so I had a front row view as she slammed me into the wall of liquid hot magma.
I’m not sure why I even kept thinking of it like that. It’s just there was something about seeing lava running down the edges of a villain’s lair that brought that phrase to mind.
I kept my eyes open as I slammed into the wall, though for a surprise I didn’t actually slam into the superheated rock. No, I slammed into something tingly that rippled around me as I hit it.
Of course. Shields. She had shields up around the lava to keep it from heating everything in here to the point that it was thoroughly cooked.
I guess that made sense. If she was a normal who couldn’t stand up to that kind of heat then she’d have to have some method of not getting hit by the convection currents.
“Who the hell do you think you are coming here and telling me you were dating her?” Sabine growled.
She kept pressing. I figured I was safe enough, I didn’t feel any heat or anything, but then she tapped something on her side and the shield disappeared right where I was pressing against it.
I was treated to an up close and personal demonstration of how she kept from being fried. Her hands pressed into the lava right along with my head, and I got a view of those same shields showing up around her hands.
That made sense. Natalie hardly ever went with shields around her whole body, at least she hadn’t when she was fighting me, but maybe this girl needed something like that if she was going to survive the radiation on this planet.
I let her hold me in the lava for a moment, then sighed. Of course I regretted sighing because it necessitated breathing in hot lava which wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience even if it didn’t exactly hurt.
I tried to think about what Natalie would do in a situation like this. Then I smiled. Yeah, Natalie would have some fun with this.
I put my hands out to either side. Pressed against the shields, but they disappeared too and my hands sank into the lava. Luckily for me the lava layer wasn’t all that deep, so it was easy enough for me to press against the wall on the other side and use it to shove us both back.
I only shoved a little bit. Just enough to push my head out of the lava. I spit the lava ou
t of my mouth and took a deep breath. Screamed at the top of my lungs.
“No! Oh God no! You’re killing me! I’m burning alive! This is the worst pain that anyone in the history of creation has ever endured!”
She pushed my head into the lava again. This time I was smart enough to close my mouth before it went in there, but I still got lava in my nose.
She held me there for a little bit while I struggled, but eventually the idiot seemed to realize there was something terribly wrong with her lame plan.
I mean I guess it wasn’t that lame, honestly. If anyone else had been pushed into lava it would’ve killed them, after all. She just happened to be playing this game with the wrong person.
She pulled me out again. Whirled me around so I faced her. She had her eyebrow raised and she looked more confused than anything.
“I can’t help but notice that you’re still alive despite saying you’re in the worst pain any living creature has ever endured,” she said.
“Well yeah,” I said. “I wanted you to feel like you were actually getting somewhere. It’s nice for people to feel positive.”
She frowned. “You really do know Natalie, don’t you?”
“Yup,” I said. “It’s where I learned how to do this.”
I flipped up and pushed my legs into the lava. Not like it mattered since we’d already established the stuff wasn’t going to hurt me. I pressed as hard as I could, and that was pretty hard.
We flew across the room, lava trailing after us as I slammed her into the shields on the other side.
She tried to get out of my hold the same as she had last time, but I was ready for her. This time she didn’t have the element of surprise, and that meant it was time to kick some ass.
I had to pause to give a nice good exhale though. Lava streamed out of my mouth and nose in a string and fell to the ground where it rapidly cooled into the world’s weirdest snot glob.
Sabine’s eyes went wide. Her mouth worked as though she was trying to say something, but I was over it.
