by Archer, Mia
Weird. Very weird.
If an animal was acting like that in Starlight City, even by the standards of the weirdness that regularly went on there, you can bet your ass that’s an animal that probably would’ve had a visit to the shelter and then a needle.
Then things got really bad. It was like a scene out of a bad movie or something. The cat dragged the poor driver out through the door that’d been ripped off, though the guy looked pretty fucked up already.
It didn’t take long before all the other cats in the vicinity had descended on the guy. One even popped out of the back seat of the car and jumped on him. I guess that explained why he’d already looked so fucked up.
Purple liquid flew through the air as they worked the poor guy over. At least I was pretty sure it was a guy. It was hard to tell because the camera resolution Sabine was working with wasn’t exactly up to the standards Natalie had back home.
“Um, are they just licking that guy to let him know it’s okay he hit one of their own?” I asked, knowing that wasn’t the answer but still hoping for the best.
“If you believe that then I have a hover transit terminal in Brok’lan to sell you,” she said.
I stared at her. I knew she was probably making a joke, but this hardly seemed like the time for humor.
Then again Natalie had developed a sort of gallows humor of her own in her years working the villain business.
“Come on,” she said. “I mean what are the odds these aliens would have a city that was so close to Brooklynn, and a major transit landmark right next to that city? It’s like every planet with intelligent life has a Brooklynn Bridge or something and…”
She stopped and waved a hand. “Tough crowd. I can see you don’t appreciate the idea of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Transit Jokes.”
“Right,” I said. “So I’m guessing those kitties aren’t licking that poor guy?”
“Oh they might be licking him a little bit,” Sabine said. “But only because their tongues are located in the same part of their mouth as their jaws. Surprisingly that’s not the case with all the life on this planet.”
I suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to be very ill. It was probably a good thing I hadn’t had all that much to eat before I went through that portal.
It was difficult to make out what was going on because the screen kept shaking. As though there was a constant wind hitting whatever camera Sabine was using to have a look at the city. Weird.
“I’ve seen enough,” I said.
“No, you haven’t,” she said. “You’ve seen that those cat things are allowed to kill and main indiscriminately, but look at what else is going on around it.”
I reluctantly looked at the screen. I didn’t want to, but I needed to see this. I needed to know what kind of sick world I’d landed on.
Thankfully by the time I turned back most of the cats had covered up most of the gore and grime. Sure there were occasional purplish chunks that flew through the air, but for the most part I couldn’t see much of the gory details through the swarm of cats walking all over the dude.
That odd shaking was still there though. Like the screen was vibrating in time with the lava vibrating around it. Odd, but not as important as what was going on up on the monitor.
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
“No, what’s disgusting is the way all the people around are reacting,” she said. “Look at them. That’s the real horror of what’s happening on this planet.”
I looked at the rest of the people. I realized exactly what she was talking about. They stood around like nothing was happening. No, it was worse than that. They were standing around slack-jawed staring at nothing. As though they didn’t care that someone was being ripped apart right in front of them.
It occurred to me that I’d seen something like that before. It’d happened to me once upon a time. Back when I was under the sway of an asshole named Rex Roth who’d used his mind control abilities to take control of yours truly.
I put a hand up to my ear without thinking about it, then quickly pulled it away. I didn’t want this Sabine chick to get any ideas about what I may or may not have about my person.
I was still in a suit Natalie gave me. The suit, and the powers that came with it when it was powered up, were her attempt to give me my powers back after I’d been thoroughly robbed of them.
Sure the suit had been burnt out. Dr. Lana ripped the reactor right out of the back of the thing which powered the whole thing down.
Almost the whole thing, that is. Because there was one bit she hadn’t touched. The in-ear implants Natalie gave me. She said it was a standard bit of kit she used to avoid hearing loss or tinnitus through active noise dampening.
There was another advantage to having these things stuck in my ear and independently powered though. Something I hadn’t thought about that much until I got to this world. They kept things like mind control from affecting me.
That was how Natalie managed to keep her wits about her back when that jerk Rex Roth was using his mind control powers to not only try to control me, but to also make me think I’d actually be interested in him. As if.
Sure it’d turned out I did have a liking for the slightly geeky types, but I had a liking for the slightly geeky ladies thank you very much.
“So why is no one down there trying to save that poor man?” I asked, knowing the answer even before Sabine told me.
“Simple,” she said. “The parasitic worms that run things on this planet have come up with some way to use telepathic mind links with the humanoid creatures on this planet, and they use that connection to control the locals.”
There must’ve been something about the blank look on my face. She sighed and rolled her eyes.
“Means they use mind control to run things on this planet,” she said.
“Oh.”
Something else occurred to me. She’d been on this planet for a good long while. At least a few years if Natalie’s timeline for this chick getting shoved through a portal was correct.
Though, to be fair, when she told me that story this chick hadn’t been a chick. No, Natalie had been sure she’d been in a relationship with a guy that’d ended when she shoved him through a portal.
Obviously what she thought happened with her ex-boyfriend and what’d actually happened with her presumably ex-girlfriend were two very different things.
There was a more important question than that though. More important than a dull thud I heard off in the distance that was timed with another shake from the monitor and a weird vibration that ran through the lava surrounding it.
“You’ve been on this planet for a while,” I said. “So how do you keep from being mind controlled like everything else?”
She waved a dismissive hand. “I have my ways of fighting off the local worms and their mind tricks.”
“Right,” I said, not sure how much I believed that. “That also brings up another question if you’re going to dodge that one.”
“First things first,” she said. “Do you at least believe me about the damned dirty cats now?”
“Sure. Whatever,” I said. “What I really want to know is why you aren’t a dude.”
She blinked a couple of times as she looked me up and down. She seemed more than a little confused by my question. Then she looked down at her outfit. As though she was trying to figure out whether or not her outfit gave off a masculine vibe.
“Um. Excuse me?”
“Well it’s just that Natalie told me a version of the story I told you,” I said. “But the version of the story she told me involved you being a dude.”
Sabine let out a couple of choice curses. The kind of potty language that made me blush. Or at least it had made me blush back before I spent time around Natalie.
Natalie could curse like a sailor when she got in the mood, and given all the crap that’d happened to us since we got together she’d been in a cursing mood an awful lot.
“That bitch Dr. Lana,” she said. “She
must’ve used some mind control of her own on Natalie.”
“Huh,” I said.
It occurred to me that if Dr. Lana had gotten ahold of Natalie and used some sort of mind control on her then it might be a good idea to get back to earth so I could tell her about that asap. Partly because she didn’t like it when people used mind control on her, but mostly because it didn’t strike me as a good idea to have a powerful supervillain running around Starlight City with a bunch of weird programming in the back of her mind that might be activated if someone said the wrong word at the wrong time.
I didn’t have any proof that anything like that was going down, but it did seem like the sort of half baked scheme Dr. Lana would come up with.
“Right,” I said. “So I’m stuck on an alien world ruled by a bunch of worms inside a bunch of cats who can use mind control to rule a bunch of blue aliens.”
“Exactly,” Sabine said. “So you’ll have to be careful when you’re around them. Unfortunately my solution isn’t going to work for you.”
“Nice of you to not share,” I said. “Natalie always shared her tech.”
Of course I wasn’t sharing either, but she didn’t know that. I also wasn’t going to say anything. If she had her secrets then I was keeping mine.
Sabine pursed her lips but didn’t say anything. I’m sure she didn’t appreciate being compared to Natalie, but it was something she was going to have to get used to.
As far as I was concerned she seemed like a less sane and more murdery version of Natalie, and that didn’t feel like a good combination no matter how easy she was on the eyes.
I was about to ask her more about exactly how she was able to overcome the whole mind control problem when there was another thud accompanied by lava sloshing around behind the force fields keeping the lava in place, and this time around it occurred to me that the noise and the vibration was entirely too close.
“What the heck is that?” I asked.
13
Thin Villainous Line
“That’s either the volcano getting ready to erupt or one of those giant monsters you were fighting is getting a little too close for comfort,” Sabine said.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
I was surprised. She seemed so nonchalant about the idea of a volcano erupting under her or a giant monster coming over to ruin her day, and yet she just dropped it there like it was nothing.
Either she was very confident in her ability to fight off any giant monsters that might be coming after her, or she’d developed the same ridiculous attitude as every other idiot in Starlight City where dangers to life and limb were concerned.
“Totally serious,” she said. “You don’t need to worry about either one though.”
Her face went blank for a moment. I’d seen that from Natalie before. Usually when she was accessing the heads up display in her mask that allowed her to keep total control of a battlespace.
It was the kind of stuff that would’ve been amazing for the military. If she’d ever consider selling something to the military, which she totally wouldn’t.
“Right,” Sabine said, coming back to reality. “Video feeds show a giant monster got close enough to the outskirts of town for us to feel it. Seismometers are showing the volcano isn’t on the verge of blowing up today.”
“Today?” I asked. “You mean the volcano is in the habit of blowing up often enough that it not blowing up today is something to note?”
“Maybe just a little,” she said.
“You mean those cat things built an entire city in the shadow of an active volcano that could blow at any moment and destroy their city?”
“I mean they’re creatures that clean their own assholes by licking them,” Sabine said. “Not to mention people build cities in the shadows of active volcanoes on earth all the time. We’ll see how Seattle does when Mount Rainier blows it into the ocean and buries all the towns nearby in lahars.”
“I have no idea what you just said,” I said.
“People on earth are just as stupid,” she said, then her voice got quieter. “Besides. It wasn’t exactly an active volcano prone to blowing when they built the city.”
“Excuse me?”
“So maybe I drilled down deep enough in this planet’s crust to hit a magma chamber so I could have the appropriate ambience for my lair,” she said. “And maybe that made the mountain more prone to erupting and spewing out lava than it was when it was dormant.”
“Wait a second. You’re telling me this was a dormant volcano, and you decided you were going to drill down until you made it an active volcano again because you thought that would look cool?” I asked.
This was crazy. The more I learned about this girl the more it seemed like she was every evil villainous impulse that Natalie had ever had minus the heart and ratcheted up to eleven.
“So what if I did?” she asked. “I mean the volcano was right there. What was I supposed to do, have a cool volcano lair that didn’t feature a bunch of lava?”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head.
“You’re nuts,” I said.
“Maybe I’m nuts,” she said. “But I’m nuts and I have a really awesome lair, so whatever.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I said.
I was starting to think I needed to be nice to this girl less because she was the only friendly face I’d found on this world and more because I was worried if I wasn’t nice to her then I was going to have to spend every waking moment wondering if she was trying to come up with a way to kill me.
I was already busy enough trying to figure out how the heck I was going to get off this world.
“So did you ever figure out a way to create a portal back to earth on this side?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
I didn’t think there was much chance she’d done that. After all, if she’d figured out how to open up a portal back to earth then she would’ve used it a long time ago to return home to a world that wasn’t ruled by damned dirty cats.
Then again with the way cat pictures were popular back on earth I guess it was sort of up for debate whether or not our world was ruled by the little furry things.
“Actually I have figured out a way to do it,” she said.
“Really?” I asked, hope rising inside me for the first time since I’d been thrown onto this world.
“Yeah, but there’s a catch to the method I came up with. Well really it’s the method Natalie came up with, and I helped her refine the design.”
I sighed. I should’ve known there’d be a catch.
“What’s the catch?” I asked.
“Well it turns out I need more power than I can get by tapping into the geothermal potential energy of a recently reactivated volcano,” she said. “Which is totally part of the reason why I reactivated the volcano in the first place Miss Judgypants.”
“Whatever,” I said. “We’re past the part where I’m annoyed at you for reactivating a dormant volcano. What do you need to make the portal work?”
“Pretty much the kind of energy that I could only get by harnessing the fusion plant on the other side of the city. A fusion plant that’s kept under heavy guard, so I’ve never been able to get to the thing.”
I opened my mouth to ask her what she needed to get access to the thing, I had a bad feeling she was going to say that now that I was here she had some ideas, but there was another loud thump that set her whole lair to vibrating.
“Again?” I groused. It was very annoying having those loud thumps interrupting my train of thought every time things started to get interesting.
“We could turn on the news and see,” Sabine said. “I doubt it’s something we have to worry about.”
“The news?” I asked.
“Well yeah,” Sabine said. “One of the things that seems to be a constant in early technological societies is the development of cable news. Turns out the subsequent development of the Internet on top of cable news is one of the things that leads to the Great Filter. A lot of societies have
trouble surviving the subsequent destruction from everyone being able to mouth their opinion online whether or not they know what the hell they’re talking about.”
“You’re doing that thing where you’re saying words but I have no idea what they mean again,” I said. “Could you just show me the news?”
“Sure,” she said.
“And how are they able to do this? I thought you said they didn’t have satellites on this planet?”
“Well they don’t,” Sabine said. “That’s why I called it cable news. They literally do all of their communication by laying cables. Higher bandwidth even if it makes it more difficult to easily transmit news around the planet.”
“So what do they do if they want to know what’s going on over on the other side of the planet?”
She’d fished out a remote that looked surprisingly similar to the technology I’d seen back on earth. I guess there were only so many practical designs for remote control technology for a humanoid species. Like I’m sure remote controls looked different on, say, a water world ruled by hyperintelligent octopi or something.
“They run a network of cables that goes to the other side of the world. Duh,” she said, clicking a button. “Same as they do on earth. Satellites aren’t the only way people communicate, you know.”
The screen came to life showing us a view of a city under attack. I wondered what it was like to live in a city that wasn’t constantly under attack from dangerous monsters or villains.
“See, it was just the giant monsters attacking the city,” Sabine said. “I told you it was nothing for us to worry about.”
A couple of giant monsters I hadn’t taken out were still on a rampage. There was a path of destruction behind the things that made it clear the locals weren’t doing so hot in their attempts to get rid of those monsters.
This despite the fact that there were a bunch of those open air flying saucers all around said monsters firing everything they had and looking like a more high budget version of those cheesy old Japanese movies Natalie insisted on watching for a little bit before we got around to making out.
