“We will come with you,” Helena said suddenly, “but you won’t like what happens next.”
“Is that a threat?” Mister Fist asked.
“No, it is a fact. Wherever you take us next, my lawyers will be there within…” Helena looked at an invisible watch on her wrist, performing the gesture just to infuriate Mister Fist even further. “Five minutes? It usually doesn’t take them that long. That’s the point of being on call, right?”
“Just because you’re wealthy, doesn’t mean you will get out of this,” Plume told her.
“That’s right,” said William Bottorf, “Centralia has laws. This isn’t the Southern Alliance.”
“Please. What would you know about the Southern Alliance? I happen to have friends there and have visited multiple times. So cut it with the patriotic crap. And I agree with you, we do have laws,” said Helena, “but it’s the interpretation of those laws that matters. And unfortunately, these interpretations can take quite some time. I don’t know how many years, because my lawyers haven’t looked into all the details of this case, but let’s just assume it will be a lengthy battle. But I hope you have representation, because we plan to fight this all the way to the end, whatever that end may be.”
“This isn’t right…” Mister Fist said.
“Plus, we’ll just reveal your identities to the public,” Ozella said, startling everyone. “Like you, Bill…”
Sam’s eyes went wide as his nostrils again flared up. “Holy shit, Bill? That’s… Holy shit! Heroes Anonymous Bill?”
“Do something…” Mister Fist said to his team’s telepath, but the next thing they heard was MindLenz falling sideways, cracking her head into the wall.
“Thank you, Dinah,” Ozella said, stepping forward, her bangs in her face as she smiled at the shocked exemplar team. “Let’s talk without a telepath for a moment. And don’t worry, I will heal her up at the end of all this.”
“Ozella?” Sam asked, surprised to see the nerdy statkeeper acting so confident. Upon closer examination (through the hole he’d blasted in the wall) he could see that Ozella’s hands were shaking, that she wasn’t able to make eye contact with anyone as she spoke.
“I know who all of you are, and I also know intimate details about your lives, such as the fact that you volunteer as a sponsor at a Heroes Anonymous group, Bill,” she told Mister Fist, “or that you are having a relationship with one of your students, Ava, an exemplar in training,” she told Plume.
“What? No. That’s not true, Bill, I mean, Mister Fist, that’s not true.”
“I have already forwarded all this information to Helena, who has sent it through via a private mental messaging channel to her assistant. I would choose your next move carefully.”
“You’re blackmailing us?” Mister Fist said with a snarl.
“Bill?” Sam asked. “You are like totally against non-exemplars acting like exemplars, but you are an exemplar, and you lead non-exemplars. My mind is fucking blown at the moment, I’m sorry. Oh shit. And that one-time Plume was actually at one of your meetings with… who was that guy? Roman, yeah, that’s his name. Is that the student you’re talking about, Ozella?”
She nodded.
“This is humiliating,” Mister Fist said under his breath. “Humiliating!”
“We can burn this place to the ground…” Plume said, an inferno igniting behind her eyes.
“I think you already threatened to do that, fire lady.” Zoe shrugged. “But I don’t know how you will justify burning down the home of one of Centralia’s richest women,” she said with a hint of disdain in her voice. “I mean, she’s probably already transcribed everything that has happened here and forwarded it to her assistant. Right, Helena?”
“Yes. Everything has been forwarded.”
“So sure, blackmail,” Ozella said, her voice growing stronger. “I guess that you could call it that. We’re not going to stop. And even if you take us to jail, I don’t think we will stop at that point either. And you can’t take our powers away, you should know that by now.”
“You don’t know that,” said Plume, the ends of her hair igniting and settling.
“So that leaves us with a couple of options: One: we keep fighting each other until one of our teams wins. I don’t like this option,” said Ozella. “Two: you help us get registered and possibly even help us with some of our training. I don’t think you would like that option, to be honest. And then there’s option three: you leave us alone and let us do what we do, and we leave you alone and let you do what you do. Maybe there’s a chance in the future where some information will be shared, but we can address that later.”
“I…” Plume shook her head as she placed a hand on Mister Fist’s muscled bicep. “We need to go, rethink this.”
“Dammit,” William Bottorf said as he shouldered past Zoe. “Damn all of this.”
“Yes, you really do need to rethink this,” said Helena. “We don’t want to battle you, be that fight physical or legal. It’s just going to be a bloody mess in the end, and if we can avoid that now…”
“I hate this,” Mister Fist said. “I hate to agree to this.” A wicked smile formed under his mask. “You will be at all scheduled meetings going forward or I will contact your parole officer,” he told Sam. “The rest of you as well—well, not you because you haven’t been convicted of anything,” he said to Ozella. “But you’d all better be there!”
“Petty,” Zoe coughed into her hand.
“Let’s just go our separate ways, then,” Helena said. “If you want us to attend the meetings, fine, we will do that, and we won’t expose who you are, so don’t expose who we are. That’s how this works. Your information has been stored in such a way that not even the strongest telepath in Centralia could get to it, in the same way we store the Knight Corporation’s financial information. I will do everything in my power to make the storage of this information even stronger. But if anything happens to us, and if you come after us again, well…”
“It’s blackmail,” William Bottorf said, his fists tensing.
“It sounds better than a lawsuit to me,” said Helena. “Especially the kind I was going to bring against your group. I’m sorry that this little meeting had to end in this way, and I hope that going forward we can find a better way to work with each other. I really mean that.”
“No you don’t,” William said.
“Yes, she does,” said MindLenz, who was sitting on the ground, half-revived. Dinah was next to her, still healing her up, her form only visible to the four would-be heroes.
“And one more thing: we have a name now, so when you’re ready to help us get registered, it would be greatly appreciated,” Helena told them.
“A name?” Plume asked.
“Vigilante Justice,” Ozella chimed in. “I’m Human Shield; he’s Nosey; she’s Ballerina; and she’s Tiger Ears.”
“Dumbass names,” William Bottorf muttered. “Dumbass.”
“Says the clone man without a codename,” Zoe said sharply.
“William Bottorf is my codename!”
“Yeah? Well, Tiger Ears is mine, so deal with it.”
“You will never be a registered group,” Mister Fist growled. “Never. Not in a million years. Let’s go.”
And with that a teleporter appeared out of a portal, Mister Fist and his team stepping into the portal and vanishing.
“Well, glad that’s over with,” Zoe said, looking at the group. “Who’s up for some more training?”
Chapter Four: Infamy Incarnate
(It’s time to check in with the good doctor.)
By this point in our narrative, Dr. Hamza Grumio had a tarp covering the hole that the four meddling wannabe heroes had blown in the wall of his laboratory.
It was something that he was planning to have fixed soon, something Hamza would have to bargain for until he got the contractors to his home, where he would be able to use the mind control serum on them.
But for now, it could wait.
; After all, his lab did close off from the rest of the house, and he had other rooms that jutted off his lab, allowing him a couple of closed spaces to work. It was in one of these rooms that he set the piece of Mia’s wing, scientific terms and molecular structures floating before him.
Sometimes seeing intricate details of everything bothered Dr. Hamza, other times, he merely accepted it and looked past. But now that he had gotten used to it, it was incredibly helpful in a laboratory setting.
He simply knew things: chemical combinations, anatomical facts, anything related to the classification of matter. And it made him ponder his ability even more. The more he saw, the more he understood.
But how?
The words in the structures, while “accurate” to some degree, were also concepts created by exemplars and non-exemplars alike. They were the names that scientists had given them, which Dr. Hamza understood as his brain being able to utilize information he had once learned, expand upon it at a quantum level, and interpret it as such.
It almost reminded him of the way a brain worked with a person’s vision, filling in the blanks at times, the image making its way to the visual cortex, where the brain tries to make sense of the mess. Except Hamza’s cerebral cortex also provided him with overlaid information to fill in these blanks, theoretical concepts and intricate mathematical equations, the kind of stuff he had always enjoyed.
It was an incredibly odd power.
“Mia, Mia, Mia,” Dr. Hamza said as he put on a new pair of plastic gloves and began dissecting the portion of her wing. He cut some of it, putting it in a test tube lest it liquify, like the sample he had from the other man.
He wanted tissue and blood samples to play around with first, knowing that whatever cure he came up with would need to be tested before he tried to use it on Mia herself.
He didn’t want her to die, not after everything she’d been through.
And yes, Mia had crippled him, but he had enslaved her, and Dr. Hamza figured if he rescued her, that it would solidify their bond, make up for past grievances. Hell, now that they were both exemplars, maybe he would be able to re-spark their connection.
It would be a long sell, he knew that, but freeing her from her vampiric overlords was a start, and eradicating them would be a bonus.
He could see himself now, finally getting the recognition he deserved, the man who cured vampirism.
Dr. Hamza had read up on the Western Plague, as had most Centralians.
Biographical accounts, lengthy magazine articles, comics, various types of fiction—it fascinated exemplars and non-exemplars alike. It was never his main interest, not at the time anyway, but he had perused some of the literature, and knew enough about the infection to know that it had come from a single exemplar.
“And what a strange power you had,” Dr. Hamza said as he used a syringe to absorb some of the blood that appeared on the surface of the wing, careful to put it in a test tube.
The exemplar who had started the initial infection was likely dead, or at least he was rumored to have been killed by some of the vampire hunting squads that the Western Province had put together. At least whoever was responsible for bringing the infection to Centralia was containing it, because if there were vampires running rampant, Dr. Hamza would have known about it.
Everyone would have.
But thus far it seemed awfully quiet, and mental news update about the subject proved fruitless.
Dr. Hamza was well aware that the team of exemplars was looking into it, and if he hadn’t despised them so much, he would have been impressed that four fake heroes had also been involved.
Helena Knight, the one with hypnotic abilities; Sam with his superpowered nose; Ozella with her weird invisible friend who could heal people; and the tiger girl, Zoe, who would have been a great subject had Sam and Helena not ruined their fun.
A great piece of ass too.
It was on Dr. Hamza’s to-do list as well, to find a way to cure exemplarism just to spite the fuckers, but it would have to go on the back burner for now. And maybe if he could get Mia, perhaps he would let that part go.
What was the point of going after those kids anyway?
They were going to get themselves killed sooner than later, so maybe it was best if Dr. Hamza let fate play out.
Then again, they had humiliated him, pretty much caused his crippling, and the one called Sam had blasted him with a pretty gnarly weapon, which left Dr. Hamza stunned for a couple of hours.
A couple of hours in which he eventually shat himself.
Somehow, these four had a way of triggering bowel movements for Dr. Hamza, which was another thing that pissed him off.
So he would probably have to get his revenge in the end, unless they got themselves killed.
But in the meantime, Dr. Hamza would find out everything he could about this vampiric infection, discover its cure, and in the process, come up with a way to spread the infection by treating it like a biological weapon.
After all, if fame and glory wasn’t in the cards for Dr. Hamza, he would settle for infamy.
Chapter Five: Like a Boss
(A chapter detailing why Helena Knight would be a pretty cool person to work for.)
Helena Knight finished dressing, going for her usual sexy tomboy chic, not giving two damns or a single fuck about what others would say.
She knew some of her employees talked behind her back, but she also knew that this was nothing new, that her father and her grandfather had experienced the same thing.
Rather than appearance, what was most important to Helena was getting her point across, reworking the Knight Corporation’s contractual process, and figuring out how Fang got their five or six contracts in the first place.
She had an idea of who had okayed the contracts, or rather, who on the board would benefit the most from this sort of agreement.
Not that the board actually oversaw day-to-day operations like the procurement and management of contracts, but she had a sinking suspicion that one of the board members, Richard “Dick” Moonstar, was likely the culprit.
She was well aware of the fact that he tried to get as many shipping contracts as possible for the Knight Corporation, mostly because he owned a company that developed and sold custom shipping gear called DM Enterprises, which just so happened to have a few spare warehouses as well.
Helena wasn’t too keen on this fact, but DM Enterprises was the best in the business, and it made sense for the Knight Corporation to work with them. Centralian ports were privatized because of the work from Helena’s grandfather, who had spent a fortune softening up members of Centralia’s parliamentary system, allowing for the sale of the ports when the government found itself in harrowing debt.
That was years ago, and while the ports and the shipping facilities the Knight Corporation owned still made up a good chunk of their yearly revenue, even more came from commercial real estate. But the privatization of ports was one of her grandfather’s biggest power plays during his time, and it was a legacy she could feel every time the topic was discussed during a board meeting.
Helena was no longer intimidated by the people on the board, some of whom were nearly four times her age. She was ruthless, yet firm, and while she could be fair, Helena got what she wanted when she wanted it.
Luckily for those around her, she didn’t have the desires or the whims of a crackpot dictator. Nor did she second-guess the rarity of her wealth, that most Centralians, would never have anything close to what she possessed.
And part of Helena wanted to stay home today, to rest a little bit more after the previous night, but she felt the duty to her family and her post to hold the meeting and go through some of the numbers, with the ultimate goal of cornering Dick Moonstar once the board meeting had concluded.
Zoe had already taken a modeling gig that morning, using her power-up just about as soon as they finished training. She would be back at the mansion by the time Helena returned, and they could train some more, which was something Helena was
actually looking forward to. Ozella and Sam had other plans, but Helena wasn’t too worried about whatever they were getting up to.
Helena knew that Ozella likely held more keys to Vigilante Justice’s success, and she hoped that hanging out with Sam might unlock more useful ideas. If not, Helena had an idea of how she could spark some transformation for the shy statkeeper...
After making sure her outfit was in place, Helena took a quick look around her office, which was on the top floor of one of Centralia’s tallest buildings.
Her family owned the building, and licensed out the lower floors to commercial and residential groups, saving the middle floors for their accounting, HR, and legal teams.
When Helena became head of the board, she had made it a point to go to each floor for a visit. She planned to do it again sometime soon, but she really didn’t like being at the office, especially now that there were more interesting things to do.
Her hands behind her back, Helena turned to the window, looking out over the city, buildings as far as the eye could see. Such a grand world, with much more to explore.
Of the five countries of her world, Helena had spent the most time in Centralia and the Southern Alliance, where she had a friend named Juniper. She had tried to travel more during college, but her parents had forbidden trips to any country aside from the Southern Alliance, especially because Helena wanted to travel alone, and they wanted her to travel with a team of chaperones.
So Helena conceded and just kept to her studies, working on one of the floors below after she finished her classes.
That was one thing that many people didn’t know about Helena, that she had actually worked for her family’s companies when she was sixteen years of age, always wearing a disguise when she did, her father making her do everything from be a mail clerk to a week-long stint on the janitorial staff after she’d been caught sneaking in late one night.
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