“Vera, let it go. You’re not doing anything,” I told the little robot.
She ignored me.
Apparition tried, floating close and tugging at the floating ceramic chips that made up Vera’s body. “I know you hate them, my angel, but this one is locked up. You can’t harm it, and it can’t harm you.”
Vera ignored her, too.
“Vera? Vera!” I barked, raising my voice.
“Vera, please,” Apparition begged.
Claire stepped into the path of the heat beam, which winked out before it could touch her.
“Claire!” I squealed in shock.
She tossed her butter-yellow hair, arrogantly satisfied and oh, so playful. “Vera would never hurt any of us.”
I wanted to snap at her that she couldn’t have known, but she was right. I just wouldn’t have had the confidence to do that myself.
With Vera’s hands lowered, Apparition draped herself over the little robot, making shhhing noises and whispering, “Turn away. Don’t look at it. It might as well be light years away, trapped in there.”
That seemed to be working, to the extent Vera didn’t start shooting again, even when Claire skipped away from both Conqueror Orb and Puppeteer aquarium.
Claire’s attention had been captured by the cylinder of magma. About my height, it had a fish tank sort of look, too, just… with churning, glowing, orange and red goo inside. It gave off no more heat than the one filled with water.
Claire pointed at the lava while looking back at Ray. “Core Beast.” No shortage of emphasis in those words, either.
“Gaah,” came Ray’s reply. He and I joined her.
Ray stared at it, mouth pulled tight and wide like a frog’s, until he agreed, “If I wanted to lock up an unkillable elemental that made a body by melting things and sticking them to itself, this is how I’d trap it.”
Claire reached out and grabbed my arm, fingers digging in convulsively tight. She stared into my eyes with her face more pale than her ivory hair, and an expression pulled taut like Ray’s. Voice fluttering, she choked out, “This is Evolution’s base.”
GAAH.
“The Core Beast was one of the monsters Evolution defeated that no one else could stop. It’s never been seen since,” Claire said.
GAAH.
Ray groped back towards rationality. “I don’t think Evolution built this place, but I think he found it and used it as his hoard.”
G- no. My brain would not stay shut off by surprise for long, and I had my own two cents to add. “I’m not the superhero trivia expert here, but I remember he fought a fifty-foot tall poisonous gorgosaurus, and beat it by releasing mites that burrowed into its feathers.” Evolution could beat anything. Even things it didn’t seem like he could possibly defeat. Especially those.
Claire took a quick look around, confirming there was no cage that big in there, before she joined Ray in watching me in horrified expectation. “Yes?”
I jerked a thumb back the way we came. “That big canister in the last room, the one like a tanker truck with all the biohazard symbols on it and filled with green stuff―that’s the kind of thing you’d store leftover virulently toxic dinosaur puke in, right?”
We all took deep breaths. These peculiar underground rooms contained distilled power and history. Especially history. The most famous and successful superhero in modern history had also been among the most mysterious.
Another thought rattled into place, and I raised a warning finger. “Nobody tell Lucyfar about this place. Only a crazy person would mess with what’s in here.”
Pulling Vera over to us by the hand, Apparition covered her mouth as she giggled. “That’s both funny and not at all funny at the same time. I’ll keep the secret.”
Ray’s hand flew up so fast, it made me jump. He put his finger to his lips.
We all listened.
Someone in the distance shouted, but whiny rather than angry or scared.
Despite getting distracted, we’d caught up with our quarry.
The voices, plural, came from one of the exits at the end of the star points. This one stood open, and we hugged the wall, trying to stay out of direct sight of the next room as we snuck up to it.
With the way the walls came to a point, stealth wasn’t exactly easy. If Mammon or his goons were paying any attention, they would see us.
They didn’t see us.
They were too busy arguing, which was also why they hadn’t heard us.
In purpose, this next room belonged with the others. That is, it was clearly a super powered junkyard. Unlike the last two rooms, ‘junk’ seemed more the operative word.
Unlike the beautiful and elaborate walls so far, the lumpy, uneven walls of the new room were red with rust and mud. The ceiling rose a mere couple of stories high, and the simple, boxlike shape also stood out against the elegant weirdness I’d gotten used to. Damp dirt also marked the floor, a sign that the swamp had leaked in somewhere, but nothing grew out of it. No mysterious, graceful wall lights brightened up this room, either. Mammon had brought half a dozen lamps, which produced weird shadows, especially along the walls.
Oh, and then there was the junk. Most of what I’d seen so far had been elegant, gleaming, almost alien in its super-advanced technology. This room held the broken leftovers any doofus mad scientist could produce. Most of it might not even be mad science. I recognized a conventional tail pipe and muffler sticking out of a pile. A small crane, upside down, stuck out near the back. Not to mention that this room contained at least five times as much rubbish, all thrown into heaps.
The reason for the disorder might be that Mammon had cleared away the center of the giant trash bin so he could set up a machine of his own. I had to wonder where he’d gotten this thing. It looked almost like Remmy had built it, because clearly someone cobbled it out of pieces of half a dozen other devices, some blatantly magical. The green stone arches definitely had a magical air. From them, each of the two arches had five rings, held in pieces that if used would fit together around someone standing under the arch. I knew this, because Mammon himself occupied one arch, while the other stood currently empty. Lots of otherwise normal looking wires and hoses connected the two arches, through a center tripod stand with a wooden skull as the centerpiece. The rings had also looked pretty normal, or at least something I’d expect in a scientific laboratory, with plastic boxes and wrapped copper wires, in turn attached to restraints that clamped Mammon in place with medically sleek design.
Of course, he couldn’t operate something like that while locked into it. Not without help. Help he had aplenty. At least a dozen doughy minions stood off to the side, wearing the same robes but even less defined than the ‘angel’ helpers he’d used at the hospital. Those were clearly the ‘before’ specimens.
The ‘after’ specimens huddled on the opposite side, doing all the arguing. When Mammon had talked about upgrading with channeled power, he had not been kidding. The most normal looked more human and alive than any of the basic soldiers, but also hideous, with a slimy white pallor, bulging eyes, and gill flaps. On the other end of that scale, four stalked eyes protruded from the boxy head of a creature hunched forward like it wasn’t completely comfortable as a biped. Maybe it bent forward because of the huge wings weighing it down. I couldn’t make out many details because a dense carpet of short, rippling tentacles covered the monster like fur. The gnarled, huge-toed feet looked more like roots.
Grotesque.
Those might be the far ends of a spectrum, but were hardly alone. Three more mutated freaks crowded close. Compared to the others, the bulgingly muscular anthropomorphic fish looked almost familiar. Butt ugly, sure, with big green scaly plates and teeth randomly studded within its flappy round mouth, but hey, Sharky back at Northeast West Hollywood Middle had him beat for homely any day of the week. The tall, shiny black humanoid with maybe twenty oversized eyes peering out all across its body merely qualified for ‘weird.’
Their last fellow minion almost qualif
ied as ‘pretty.’ She―that curvy figure’s gender could not be mistaken―integrated her human shape with the fish-and-tentacle-and-eyeball theme much better. Yes, her eyes were too big, but also shimmering rainbows with flat, thin pupils that rotated and moved side to side. She did have tentacles, but only two, thick like an octopus’s and lifting out of the lower back of her head in alert, snakelike curls. Her skin shone with the same deceptive, amphibian softness of an octopus, all pale gray and pink mottling with faint purple stripes. A fat tail lashed behind her, maybe another tentacle.
Unlike the others, she had more than physical mutations. Phantom eyes, little more than colored shadows, floated around her body in shifting orbits.
They all wore ripped, scavenged, and rearranged scraps of gray cloth that might have been their former robes. Well, the winged tendrilly thing didn’t bother, but the female definitely needed that bandeau and skirt for decency.
She still had Mammon’s voice. A bit higher-pitched, coming from a woman’s throat, but obviously Mammon. Especially the way she complained. “Why did you copy me into this body? Do you know how weird this feels?”
“Are you talking to me about weird?” asked the four-eyed thing, which sounded like Mammon gargling.
The merely damp and pale minion clasped his arms over his chest and shivered. “So what if you’re a chick? You’re fully alive. I didn’t get enough juice. This body is fading, I can feel it. Am I even sentient, or just a cheap recording?”
“Being female is better than being so hungry,” the four-eyed thing complained.
Mammon himself proved to be completely awake, if a bit tied up, as he growled at them, “You’re all copies, and lucky to be alive. It’s not my fault this ritual keeps screwing up and making females. If we don’t activate some of them, my brilliant plan won’t get anywhere.”
Breathy and echoey, but also Mammon, the shiny black eyeball guy said, “Why does he even need to explain this? It’s the dumb ritual’s fault. It makes more girls than guys.”
He wasn’t joking. Mammon had brought a whole bunch of minions, and they weren’t just divided into ‘untransformed mannequins’ and ‘argumentative freaks.’ Seven more had already been transformed, but stood mindlessly with the blank basic models. A full five of them were obviously female. Unlike the males, they mostly had a similar thin-but-decidedly-female build, if at different heights, with a big trend for something sticking out the backs of their heads. Practically uniform.
And one more, still being worked on.
The space separating jabbering eldritch clowns and mindless dummies wasn’t empty. Scraped away dirt bared a wide patch of metal floor, on which Mammon had painted a complicated series of interlocking circles and symbols, decorated with little household objects like egg beaters and clothes irons. Notably, on opposite ends sat the cursed book and my jade statue.
Between them slumped a minion mid-transformation. Still mindless, it stood there as smoke leaked from the book towards it, and winding green-and-copper sparkles from the statue. Already clearly female, it grew fangs and a bunch of heavy metal plates that complemented its metallic ram’s horns. Behind it, the magic candle sat in a circle all by itself, drawn around Mammon.
The finished minions paid the in-progress monster no attention, maybe because it had turned out female. They had better things to do. Like argue.
Raising a threatening claw at the shiny black figure, the bulky fish creature snarled, “I remember making that ritual, and so do you! It’s perfect! Don’t you question my work!” At least, he tried to snarl. He had the voice of the original. It quacked.
“It’s Mammon’s work,” sulked the octopus girl.
“We’re all Mammon!” the fish yelled, flapping his arms.
Behind the others, the pale guy asked, “You guys think I’m real, right? I have a full personality?”
“If he does devolve, can I eat him?” gurgled the one with the eystalks.
“Don’t be disgusting,” said She-Mammon.
Eyestalks jutted his boxy head forward. “Well, excuse me, but I’m starving over here. Why didn’t we stop to pick up hamburgers on the way? The merging of their corrupted flesh with ours would bring us another step towards freedom.”
The fish turned on him. “Shut up about how hungry you are! I’m hungry, too. We’re all hungry, but―”
“I’m not hungry,” Pitch-Black-And-Eyeballs corrected him.
“Me, neither,” said the girl.
“All creatures hunger, for we are emptiness, and devouring each other we seek absolute nothing,” droned Eyestalks.
“I said, shut up!” barked the fish.
Octopus Girl covered her eyes with one webbed hand. “You are such a weenie.”
That brought Eyestalks back to regular conversation. Sort of. “You’re a weenie.”
“You are both the biggest weenies I have ever met,” said the fish.
Pitch-Black-And-Eyeballs pointed over the fish’s head at the pale guy. “No, that guy is the biggest weenie.”
Pale guy ignored them, too busy pinching his own arm. “Do I feel pain, or am I pretending to?” he muttered.
Behind them all, Mammon shouted, “I forgot how broken this stupid machine is. You’re just like the last bunch of weenies it gave me!”
“I wish I still―” Octopus Girl started to complain, only to stop as a banging noise interrupted her.
Not just one banging noise. A rhythmic series of them, like heavy metal boots charging up behind me.
Oh, criminy. I’d been having such a good time watching the Eldritch Clown Weenie and Weenie Circus that I hadn’t been on guard at all. Looking back at the approaching noise, I dreaded what I thought it would be.
Yep. Remmy, in full power armor, ran across the prison chamber, and with one last leap landed in front of us, inside the garbage room. “I’m here! What’s going on?”
“We’re about to stop a supervillain in the middle of an actual super powered crime,” answered Claire, radiating glee.
On the other side of the dump, Mammon shouted, “This isn’t a crime yet! But it’s going to be! With my new, super powerful minions, my new crime wave will make me the most famous and admired villain in Los Angeles!”
“The world! The world! Why are you such a weenie?” raged Fish Man.
“I’d have gone with ‘the universe,’” argued Pitch-Black-And-Eyeballs.
Octopus Girl let out an exasperated sigh. “You’re all idiots. ‘In history’ would sound the best.”
“I’m real. I can fight. I’ll be part of this crime wave,” the pale guy declared. He sounded less than convinced.
Remmy looked at me. Tears welled up in her red eyes again. “Penny, you really―I should have trusted―”
She couldn’t finish. She coughed, and coughed, and coughed, doubling over.
Ray ran up to catch her before she could fall.
Claire said, “Remmy, you look awful.”
I brushed a hand over Remmy’s face and down her warm, damp cheek. “She’s right. I’m happy to see you for me, but fighting crime is only going to make your cold worse.”
The coughing fit ceased, and I gave her a hug, which was kind of awkward with the power armor. “Try to stay out of this, okay? We’ll handle it. Then we’ll talk. I can’t let you kill yourself.”
“It really is nice to see you, Remmy,” said Ray, voice soft.
“Get them! Why are you not getting them?” shrieked Original Flavor Mammon.
“I don’t know what my powers are, yet!” answered Pitch-Black-And-Eyeballs.
“Look at all those eyes. They have to do something,” snapped Fish Man.
Octopus Girl lifted an arm, examining her own spectral eyes. “Maybe mine will shoot lasers?”
Amused, voice low, Ray said, “If we ignore them, maybe they’ll fight each other. I want a look at Remmy’s power armor, anyway. This is space-tight, isn’t it, if you close the mask?”
Claire lifted up one of Remmy’s hands, examining the gloves that lo
oked exactly like slightly smaller versions of mine. “You made these?”
Awkward, confused, and blushing, Remmy answered, “Sort of. Not really. Dad had some experimental wiring he made to conduct aetheric energy, and you could make anything flow down it. I sprayed a pair of work gloves with the stuff we use to insulate the outside of a colony station, and bound the thickest conducting strips in a pattern to follow the fingers. You can catch energy with these gloves, now, and contain and redirect it, but that’s only a combination of what the pieces did by themselves.”
Claire did her thing. She gushed over someone’s super powers. “You are good. Penny made a pair of these, but her power pops stuff out at random. You actually knew what you were doing. I bet there’s more technology in the set to make use of them, right?”
Remmy burst into tears again. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
Ray squeezed her shoulders, not that I figured she could feel it. “We may be bad friends, but we’re your friends.”
And then my plan to let Mammon’s minions fight each other failed, along with everybody else’s plans.
In their squabbling, in my stunned amusement at their squabbling, in the confusion of Remmy’s arrival, we’d all paid forgotten the minion mutating in the magic circle.
While we ignored her, the mutations had kept piling up. It had become hard to tell that squat, flabby, sagging body covered in green scales had ever been female. All its limbs, everywhere you’d expect a body feature except the legs, had twisted into tentacles. Head? Nope, just another tentacle, thick and green and ropy. An eye bulged into existence at the end, stared at us, swelled to softball size. Its pupil opened up as a fangy mouth, with another eye inside that.
A much larger mouth opened in its belly, and shrieked. It lashed out an arm tentacle, wrapped that around Octopus Girl, and flung her into the line of unaltered minions. They went down like bowling pins underneath her.
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis Page 16
