[A week ago]
“Well, we’re all here. Again,” Dorian Draven fixed Over Seer with a pointed glare. “What could be so important that you’ve called us back here?”
Not every member of the Council was actually present in the chamber, but the fact that all of the high seats towering above the chamber were either occupied by one of the signature villains, a screen displaying them, or one of their trusted lieutenants gave Over Seer some measure of satisfaction. Despite being barred from having a seat of her own, and even though she would be forced to crane her neck to look up at them all, she still possessed enough pull to gather these twenty seven titans together in one room at her whim.
It was also nice to be the one summoning them for once. Ordinarily, the fact that most of them visibly wore their frustration on their faces at being here should’ve made her uneasy but after so many of these meetings over the past couple weeks, all she felt deep down was spite. Her eye sigil rotated around the dark circular room, unable to see a single face peering from behind their absurdly raised desks which didn’t belong to someone she hadn’t come to loathe by now. While they’d simply irritated her for most of her career, dragging her onto this platform day after day to berate her while they argued over pointless drivel had sharpened that into outright hostility, not that she’d let it show. She would be the professional one here.
“We have a positive on Dr. Maniacal’s death,” she stated simply.
“Great,” Arex waved a hand, as if to immediately dismiss her. “So get a bounty ready for Draven’s endless piggy bank to pay out and let’s get on with our lives.”
Arex looked like a dumb brute who was simply here as a favor to someone. Dressed in a fur-lined vest he left open (which almost exposed most of his chest had it not been for the large reptilian skull at the center), the man didn’t seem the type to sit on a council of scheming villains so much as the person they’d tap on the shoulder to solve their problems. He sported a thick mane of black hair and seemed to eternally be in need of a shave, though not a spec of hair dotted his powerfully muscled arms. He was only slightly larger than the average man might be, and if you didn’t catch his golden eyes with slit pupils, you might be forgiven for mistaking him for a supe with a minor strength power, especially with how brutish and simple he tended to behave.
But despite this act, Over Seer and likely most of the other councilors knew the shapeshifter possessed a keen intelligence, even if he seemed not to ever want to use it. His relatively simple power set which he summed up as “the ability to turn into any dinosaur” was one of the more terrifying examples of body morphing that Over Seer had on file. Those slightly larger than average muscles concealed the full power he boasted.
Almost instantaneously he could harden his skin with scales harder than diamonds, grow claws that could shred steel, enhance his sense of smell, vision, taste, hearing, and even grant himself the ability to feel the conductivity of the air around him, and his body healed quickly from just about any wound inflicted, assuming you could manage to wound him at all. This was all just advanced shapeshifting and didn’t take into account that he could at any time simply open his hand and replace it with the full gaping jaws of a T-Rex, growing to the size of a small shed in seeming defiance of any sort of conservation of mass.
That would make him a threat in and of itself but despite everything the man was deceptively intelligent and fiercely charismatic. Over Seer constantly had to test the loyalties of her spies that were involved with his agents as he was adept at using others to win them over. He rarely showed his hand directly but he knew how to play the politics of the villain world.
“I’d preFER… if we COUld… settle things OURselves,” NecrOver wheezed. “I have… apprentices who coULD… use the PRACTice...”
Similarly, she knew the ancient Nilean necromancer played up his own appearances. The breathlessness was real, but that was truly because the man didn’t really need his lungs. This only occasionally let him down, such as in his debut when he attempted to call himself “Necrotic Overlord”, but most of the time he didn’t really choose to speak as much as have his undead servants of varying levels of intelligence deliver his messages for him. Trained in the secret arts of the pharaonic lichhood of Nilea only to be cast out before he obtained the true secrets of immortality,1 NecrOver’s body was ravaged by the arts he practiced. However, the cybernetic enhancements and sorcery had long ago managed to compensate for all of that, and he probably could find a decent voice box, but Over Seer had learned the death mage loved the effect his current voice produced and hated writing longer speeches anyways.
He hunched over the desk in front of him, most of his body covered in coal black rags with a jagged skull mask peering down to stare at the spy master. Odd nodes and metal spikes pierced his long back, green lightning sparking between them on occasion while wisps of toxic black fog flowed outside his robes.
“And why should your people handle it?” Life Tyrant rolled her eyes.
The practically undead supervillain’s stooped form whipped around to face the greenskinned woman dressed in extravagant silks and filigreed jewelry. Vines crept around her, bursting up from the ground beneath her. Once an average botanist, now a megalomaniac who controlled plants and animals and also boasted the ability to mutate almost anything or anyone she touched (albeit with quite a few stipulations; though the threat of such body horror was typically scary enough to cow people into compliance), Life Tyrant naturally always fought with NecrOver whenever she could find a spare moment.
One would think it would be their goals or powers being opposed. In a way, Over Seer strongly suspected that was correct, but it had more to do with the fact that several years ago the two had attempted to conquer the world on the very same day on practically opposite sides of the globe, only to find their respective schemes had canceled each other out when the effects of both of their superweapons ended up overlapping: necrotic magic met rampant mutation science and both fizzled in seconds.
“Whatever the matter,” the crackle of red lightning split the air as the life-sized clay figure of an armored samurai spoke up, hollow eye-sockets glowing, “this matter should not have merited summoning us. I am busy.”
At that, the chamber erupted into shouting again. The Thunderer’s trip to the hellbreak2 below Tian had been kept secret from all the rest of the council members and, worse, had been successful in recovering one of the Narakan Seals, representing a sizable shift in the power balance of the council. Coupled with this was their aloofness and outright hostility towards these meetings now that they were one step closer to goals they refused to elaborate on (not that anyone around here shared information), not to mention refusal to commit the few forces they regularly employed to any other council member’s plots recently.
Over Seer, tired of this exact same tantrum, decided to throw out the information that would redirect all the anger in the room.
“What I mean to say is that we have a positive match on this individual to a previous incident, not that we know who they are,” her voice cut through the shouting, aided by a slight bit of magic.
You could feel every eye turn, every ember of anger slowly stoked towards a raging inferno within their black hearts as they prepared to start shouting again. Over Seer simply stared at Dorian Draven, waiting for him to speak up.
The man, dressed in a crisp black suit with only a few subtle embellishments in this room full of costumed villains, glared down at her. She knew he understood what she implied and that unlike everyone else in the room who was suddenly outraged that the mere spymaster had dared to waste their time, he hated her for forcing him to address the situation if he wanted to learn all of what she’d discovered.
Fuck you, say the line, she thought, containing her grin. It was a small thing, coaxing him into a cliché, but it was taking control from him and making him go through the motions.
“You would not waste our time,” he relented, motioning with his hand to silence all the other microphones in the room, though Over Seer still heard Arex bark a laugh, “which means you have something important to tell us about this, so get on with it.”
Satisfied at winning the small power play, she launched into her explanation.
“We have reason to believe that the perpetrator once worked with our organization,” she addressed the room, causing a ripple of mutters to break out. “Furthermore we have reason to believe that acting rashly to apprehend this individual might result in the significant loss of a valuable asset that we believe is in their possession.”
That finally got them all to listen up. Even Life Tyrant and NecrOver had stopped glaring at one another as they both sat up to listen more closely.
Now unfortunately came the trickiest part…
“This all relates to Marquis Blood, a former member of our League,” she stated, hoping to leave it there and move on.
Unfortunately, Arex managed, even without his mic, to cut her off, “Who?”
Over Seer waved a hand and tried to dismiss where this thread was going to end up, “A villain who is largely unimportant. A fallen Duchard noble who-”
“A fucking Thelee?"3 Crimson Dagger hissed, causing several more outcries.
The League may have originally come from the Thelee regime that was forced into hiding, but the superhuman supremacist ideals alienated a lot of Atlantheans, Juneans, and non-powered supervillains who ended up overthrowing them to form the League properly. Hell, a small amount of the council rallied around Draven because he was such a major force in the villain community without a single superpower more than they cared about how much of his almost endless funds kept the organization alive, oddly enough. The idea that he was a “common man” appealed to them in a weirdly prideful way which let them draw a hard line between their predecessors and themselves and stoked the ambitions of their underlings who believed they could become just as powerful with just the right job or by riding their coattails to greatness, compared to the ideal of being predestined ubermensch.
“His father was, but as far as we could tell, the Marquis only inherited his powerset, not his ideology,” Over Seer again tried to move past it before-
“Who did he work for?” Gormash, the exiled alien prince from beyond the solar system, asked the one question she’d been hoping to avoid.
She sucked air through her teeth before daring to continue, “Due to his disagreements with Overlab, he attempted to provide his services to individual members of the League, often courting various council members for funding his researches. The last contract he managed to secure was working for the Thunderer to attempt to deal with one of their enemies.”
Over Seer braced herself as she saw lightning crackle in the corner of her vision. She didn’t mind that. No, it was the inevitable arguing that she knew was about to occur as she reminded the 10 second long attention span of the council that the lightning villain existed and they all remembered how mad they were.
Unexpectedly, she was spared this fate from the most unlikely source.
“HA! I remember him now!” Arex roared with laughter, drawing everyone’s eyes. “That old codger who cost you almost a billion decks!”
Sporadic laughter peppered the chamber as the Thunderer somehow visibly seethed within their faceless proxy. Over Seer knew there was a chance she’d pay for reminding everyone of the embarrassment but was thankful to dodge the ten minute argument for the fifth time today.
“Enough,” Draven cut through the noise again before turning to face her again. “I remember him now. It’s been what? Ten years since his arrest after he promised some new weapon and ended up simply agitating a demigod? What does this have to do with Maniacal’s killer? The Marquis has not escaped Fort Solemn, unless you are privy to news the rest of us are not, spymaster?”
She nodded, “I am always privy to such things. But no, Marquis Blood is still behind bars and we have no desire to free him. However, I’d like to talk about what he was doing at the time.”
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“As you can see,” Fencer gestured to the opposite wall, “the Thunderer’s rise to power was predicated on victory after victory against stronger foes who wielded the power of lightning. In this exhibit, you will see that these efforts bore fruit because of their meticulous planning and willingness to work with all sorts of different schemes to get the better of their foes.”
Alex looked back to the artifacts he’d been admiring a few minutes ago. There were several odd things for a lightning villain to have like rubber gloves or a fire hose. He’d originally chalked it up to some of the heroes that had fought the villain but was now picturing the absurdity of someone dressed in full set of samurai armor wearing those gloves over it.4
He returned his attention to Fencer, who seemed willing to wait for his attention to return.
“This is what led the two to cross paths. The Marquis had an ambitious plan that would’ve targeted the most powerful wielder of primal storms…”
Alex arched an eyebrow.
“...Not including Weather Warrior,” Fencer admitted. “But he’s an anomaly for many reasons.5 No, the one who tamed the Storm Unending by eating it whole on a dare, Thana Alsdottir!”
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“You really tried to fight a god?” Arex asked, incredulously.
“She’s not a true god,” Thunderer waved a hand dismissively. “Besides, countless of us have fought her and other demigods. We would not be in this chamber if we were not prepared to try our hands against them. Besides, I did not plan to fight her in a fair fight. I believe you should know I’m smarter than that.”
“So how did you plan on beating her?” Life Tyrant asked, not bothering to hide her intrigue.
Over Seer couldn’t tell whether to be frustrated at getting sidetracked or gobsmacked that apparently all it took to get these idiots acting like old chums swapping stories was giving them a moment to reminisce about old fights. Seriously, looking around the room, she saw every single one of them looking over to Thunderer with clear interest for the suit of armor to tell them all about fighting a hero when they’d spent the entire week shouting themselves hoarse over some imagined slight.
“To be honest, I’ve mostly forgotten,” the Thunderer admitted with a shrug. “The Marquis promised to construct a weapon that would even the playing field and suppress her powers. It would make her mortal enough for me to defeat her and drain her abilities for my own.”
“And you believed him?!” Arex howled. “Did he tell you he had a god on retainer? Mortal weapons can’t truly harm the divine and no anti-supe tech can do jack against it either!”
“I know that now!” the Thunderer snapped. “It wasn’t like I was born knowing how suppression technology worked! I assumed that of all people, someone who claimed his father fought against and alongside gods might have known something. But he didn’t and nothing came from it, so I moved on.”
“Actually…” Over Seer smiled as all heads turned towards her.
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“Marquis Blood had realized something about Ms. Alsdottir, due in no small part to his obsession with the heroes that had bested his forefathers and his devotion to seeing them brought down,” Fencer explained.
Alex remembered that. The man was obsessed with Mr. Wonder and his allies, going on long winded rants over all of them with the slightest prompting. He still didn’t like to bring up the “first heroes” out loud because of how he’d trained himself to avoid mentioning them in conversation.
“He rationalized that her powers came in no small part from her connection to the Storm Unending, not her godly father or her valkir mother! But you might say, ‘That still is a divine source!’”
Alex pointedly would not say that. In fact he was trying to be as quiet as possible. Fencer was right though, it was a divine source: a primordial storm that seemed to represent mankind’s fear that a storm they were trapped in would never end and no doubt must have been around forever due to its ferocity and how long it lingered overhead. Probably. Or it came from space. A lot of weird things came from space and got stuck here.
“The key though was that despite Thana, the Stormdaughter, being known for her powers since mankind first encountered her, was not always in possession of them by her own account, meaning that ‘godliness’ wasn’t an intrinsic part of her!” Fencer excitedly pointed out. “That meant there was a separation, however small, between that divine part of her and the rest of her physical existence. While we have found that so called ‘ascended gods’ still inherit all the protections that so called ‘natural gods’ possess,6 the Marquis asserted this also meant that if he could find a way to block her from tapping into that, similar to how some anti-magic measures could block warlocks from the otherworldly entities they attempt to barter with, then he could find a way to block all forms of divine power on the physical plane.”
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“And he would be wrong,” Draven asserted.
The man had spent decades fighting Mr. Wonder and had experience with the ideas behind power suppression. Obviously everyone knew of zeronite, the mysterious extraterrestrial alloy that seemed to be the one thing that could dampen the hero’s strength and Dorian Draven’s entire saga of attempting to match the strongest being alive by using it constantly. Dig a little further though and you would learn of the countless battles against other heroes that Draven managed to bring down to his level with his countermeasures. Hell, most advances in super speed suppression and even the extraterrestrial defense networks around the world reluctantly owed a vast majority of their foundations to the disgraced businessman turned villain.
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He was practically a symbol of villains punching upwards because of it. While his humanity earned him a lot of respect in the League, it was the fact that he was considered the expert on anti-hero measures which truly made most people consider him the de facto leader of the League.
Which is why Over Seer was hesitant about arguing with him on this point.
“According to all known research, you would be correct,” she agreed. “While the era of the gods is practically over, their blessings and curses have long been concluded by scholars of the arcane and similar fields to be something that becomes part of the person on a level we can’t begin to fathom. While mutations might suddenly allow someone to throw beams of light from their hand, we can identify the genetic differences or even the arcane influences that are causing it and isolate them. Meanwhile all attempts to do so when it comes to the divine, either performed on gods themselves or their champions have failed to provide results. You can block a lightning bolt thrown from the hands of such an individual, but largely your only countermeasure to stop them from summoning one would be to tire them out or submerge them in water.”
Thunderer spoke up, “Which is why he failed to deliver and when the heroes captured him, he was left to rot. His delusions had finally led him to waste too many resources in pursuit of the impossible. Which begs the question, Over Seer: why are we spending so long discussing this?”
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“Because despite everything, according to his accounts,” Fencer smiled, “he succeeded.”
“According to him,” Alex pointed out.
Fencer’s smile didn’t fall, “Yes, unfortunately, we simply have his word for this, as all of his records were destroyed during his capture.”
Alex mentally celebrated. It was short lived however.
“Except, here’s where the story gets odd.”
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“It was discovered that those records, stored on a portable device in the lab, were destroyed prior to the raid on the Marquis’s facility,” Over Seer quickly explained. “We managed to gain access to said device before its components failed and verified that the data had been expunged rather than damaged. While we didn’t have too much time for more than an initial examination, from what little we could access in that time-frame, it appeared this was done by the Marquis himself judging from the access logs on the device.”
“I remember this,” Draven muttered. “The Marquis claimed sabotage, but we concluded that he was simply trying to hide his failure. Nothing supports him having succeeded, while everything concrete points to him attempting to concoct a scenario where he managed to do the impossible but tragically was betrayed. Conveniently by a dead man. Are you claiming otherwise?”
She gulped. This was where things got tricky.
“Before I give my thoughts, I want to talk about the other things Marquis Blood stated in his account of the incident. And to do that, I need to talk about AHM-TA-0423.”
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“Anti-Hero Material, Thana Alsdottir, version number four hundred and twenty-three,” Fencer’s grin was predatory as his eyes fixed on Alex.
Alex cleared his mind. Allegedly Fencer wasn’t a psychic but he couldn’t take any chances. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
“According to the captured villain who attempted to plead his case to agents of the League, AHM-TA-0423 was a gas that he had synthesized through a complicated procedure that was incredibly costly. So costly and after so many failures up to that point, not just with the Stormdaughter but with other heroes like her, that he only made three canisters of it, all about yay big,” Fencer said, spreading his arms to show the rough size of the objects in question.
Don’t think about it.
“According to him, on November 34th, 2116, his hired henchmen engaged Thana Alsdottir while she was on patrol somewhere in Chiefmeet7 in Orion City. During this engagement, he tested the first of these canisters.”
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He watched her fall from the sky, shocked. It shouldn’t have worked. It couldn’t have worked!
His friend clapped him on the shoulder, “Hell of shot! I can’t believe you got her!”
He looked down at the gauntlet he’d used to launch the gas at the hero, something churning in his stomach. He knew this was a crossroads for him. A moment where everything changed. And yet, as he looked up to see her spiraling towards the rooftop below, he couldn’t celebrate.
This wasn’t his victory, it was Blood’s. He was going to wake up the next day and nothing would be different for him, even as the world was about to change. No... things would be different for him.
They’d be worse.
It was relief then when he saw a few arcs of lightning rip away from the rooftop from where the hero had crashed. They weren’t nearly as blinding and didn’t seem to score lines into the walls they touched like they previously had, but they were still there.
“Bah!” his boss’s voice came over the comms. “Looks like she didn’t absorb enough of the gas with that hit. We’ll need to hit her in an enclosed space next time. Troop Leader! Order a retreat and retrieve all our supplies before she recovers!”
Troop Leader. Ugh, out in the field he wasn’t even allowed to think his own name. He set to work ordering everyone about, feeling like nothing more than a glorified gas launcher.
“Soon, she shall menace me no more!” Blood’s voice droned over the comms, apparently thinking that his griping counted as inspirational speeches.
She might menace you no more… but I’ll bet I can do that just fine, he thought as a plan began to hatch.
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“The Marquis claims that this engagement left the Stormdaughter grievously wounded,” Over Seer explained. “No records from the hero guilds corroborate this, but she did vanish from public view for about a day.”
“That’s not really enough to go off of,” Life Tyrant pointed out. “She could have… Wait, 2116?”
Over Seer nodded, “Yes, while the incident in question has nothing we can reliably source, the following incident, referred to by the code OC3002116, is one that we have more substantial information on. The murder of Thana Alsdottir’s fiance in his own apartment by one of Marquis Blood’s top lieutenants at the time.”
“The one which he blamed for the sabotage,” Draven’s fingers steepled.
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He sat there on the couch, eyeing the tied up figure opposite him. A bit of insurance. His hand rested on the red metal canister next to him. This one was made for transport, unlike the last one which was meant to smash open and release its contents. Still, the valve at the top would open easily enough. The room would flood with gas within seconds if he were to twist it.
He wasn’t sure what this would do to a normal person, only that it definitely worked on her. That’s why he’d reinforced his armor and sealed all the holes he could, not to mention putting some filters in the mask. He admired himself in the reflection of the television screen and felt like a true villain.
After today… Everything was going to change.
The door began to open.
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“When originally confronted, Blood claimed that he had sent the man there himself, only to change his story when it was discovered that no samples of AHM-TA-0423 survived and all of his supposed research data was gone,” Over Seer explained. “He claimed that his lieutenant had stolen the remaining two canisters and confronted the Stormdaughter without his express order. According to her side of the story, she opened the door and was met with her fiance, a Mr. Lake, as a hostage and the man holding a gas canister approximately two and a half feet tall and maybe the size of her fist in width.”
The entire chamber was silent, most of them leaning forward in anticipation.
“Lending credence to Marquis Blood’s claims that the gas could affect her, by her own admission, what happened next was spotty. Though it should be said that even Mr. Wonder has been noted to be rattled when at the center of an explosion. From what she could remember, Blood’s lieutenant released the gas, causing her to retreat. Something caused it to detonate, however, with post incident analysis implying that a discharge of magical energy was the cause. The resulting blast destroyed a quarter of the apartment building, though thankfully most of the apartment’s residents were away at the time and the rest managed to evacuate safely. The bodies of the lieutenant and Mr. Lake were never recovered and given the damage at the center of the blast it was assumed that there was nothing to recover other than slight traces of a magical signature that did not match any on file at the time. The Stormdaughter was out of commission for almost ten days following the incident. When she was cleared, she dismantled Marquis Blood’s entire operation within the very same day, but required multiple other heroes to talk her down from murdering him.”
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“She was vengeance incarnate,” Fencer marveled at his memories. “That hatred that tempts a hero into another path. Her world could have been shattered and with a single push we might have seen the birth of one of the greatest villains of all time. Sadly, she chose to spare the Marquis and devoted herself twice over to protecting others and other boring pursuits.”
Fencer sighed loudly. Alex had only heard of what had occurred afterwards. He didn’t dare stick around.
“It took an oddly long time to figure out the name of that mystery henchman,” Fencer recovered from his melancholy to circle him, peering over him as Alex refused to meet his gaze. “The man in charge of that agency he came from, Jorge Herminez, was extremely tight lipped, even when the League leaned on him. But eventually, he caved as he dissolved his company to keep the rest of his group safe, at least those that the Stormdaughter didn’t put behind bars or in a hospital. Our mysterious protagonist of this tale… Roger Stevens.”
Alex didn’t react. No point in confirming that for Fencer. Instead he stared at the empty spot in the display, seeing the outline of the canister in his mind’s eye on the empty patch of wall.
“Thing is, the numbers don’t add up,” Fencer began counting on his fingers. “I said there were three doses of AHM-TA-0423, but our story only features two. There’s one missing, and according to our poor Marquis, it went missing along with the other one. Most who knew of its existence assumed that the explosion was as large as it was because both of them went up in a fireball, but I’ve always doubted that…”
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“We always believed that regardless of whether or not AHM-TA-0423 was effective, that both of the missing containers were present in the blast, contributing to the size and damage of the blast. We still have no proof that they weren’t,” Over Seer explained. “But what we do have proof of now is that the perpetrator of the OC300216 incident survived. Moreover, evidence gathered by the heroes has linked the magical signature found at the center of that incident to the enchanted rubble used to kill Dr. Maniacal.”
Mutters broke out across the chamber.
“I thought you said you didn’t have a name,” Arex pointed out.
“We of course investigated this Stevens character, but since the agency obviously operated outside most regulatory bodies, the identities of its employees weren’t verified,” the spymaster stated matter-of-factually. “From what we were able to piece together, no such person matching the description of Roger Stevens with that name exists, or at least was present in Orion at the time, leading us to believe it was an assumed name and likely they would have another one by now.”
Draven leaned forward, “All this is to say that you believe that our colleague's murderer has stolen from us, betrayed our organization previously, and might be in possession of our property. I see why you risked calling upon us now.”
“Yes, but… since we’re in the realm of conjecture…” Over Seer tiptoed to her point, “I wanted to call attention to the thread that ties these two incidents together.”
Draven motioned for her to continue, so she took a deep breath before launching into it, “Marquis Blood’s contract was to weaken Thana Alsdottir in order for the Thunderer to steal her power for themselves. Meanwhile, Dr. Maniacal was killed while utilizing his Ascension Machine, siphoning the power from others to empower himself. While this could be a coincidence, the fact is that in this latest attempt, the magic used managed to bypass Maniacal’s shields, even if they were probably failing at the time from his machine. This speaks to an improvement in strategy over the past ten years, probably alongside an increase in power.”
“You believe that this guy is following Sparky’s lead?” Arex gestured to a very indignant looking clay figure that flickered with angry red lightning. “If so, and assuming he’s been eating his veggies since, then we’re talking about someone with some real weight, and that’s before he might’ve chowed down on the meal Manny cooked for him.”
Over Seer folded her arms and nodded, “Indeed, the potential threat is quite large, which is why we need to be cautious, especially if he still possesses the remaining AHM-TA. There’s too much potential for it to be inadvertently destroyed or worse held hostage should we handle this without care. I leave the decision of what must be done to the council.”
She expected to be dismissed then and there, only for Draven to surprise her.
“This is indeed troubling… Though I believe there might be a solution, if a little counter-intuitive to our usual methods,” he drummed his fingers on his desk as he looked over the gathered council.
The final reason he was in control was how quickly he came up with plans. Even though this council was full of villains that claimed to heed no one, they all truly loved someone who could blaze a trail ahead that benefited them when they didn’t immediately possess a plan of their own. As much as the League preached selfishness and rule through strength and power, and as much as every villain gathered in this room got here by forging ahead with schemes and plots of their own, it was comforting to have a plan laid out for you. Sure, almost every single one of them would be secretly scheming about how best to turn this to their advantage, and a few would immediately launch into critiques, but it was telling that every single of one of them was turned to listen to the average human sitting amongst them.
“Over Seer, we will require your networks to make this work,” he informed her. “Now then, here is what we shall do...”
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“...And if I’ve doubted it, then I assume others will too,” Fencer leaned forward, sharp eyes piercing Alex over his spectacles. “Which is why I’d like to offer you an opportunity to retrieve this missing artifact for me. Before the League begins to suspect that it still exists and seeks to claim it for themselves.”
Alex stood there silently for a minute, a weight that had been on his back for years bearing down on him now at the forefront of his mind. His thoughts ran over questions he’d been asking himself for almost a decade now.
“Well?” Fencer prodded. “Care to take this contract?”
Alex met his eyes, “You mentioned that the League seizes things from your collection. Wouldn’t they do the same with this?”
Fencer shrugged, “It is their property and they no doubt would request it back from me. Still, they would be lighter in their approach with me than I suspect they would be with its current owner.”
“Giving you enough time to siphon off a bit of it,” Alex reasoned, “maybe even figure out how to synthesize it.”
“All I care about is the container, my friend,” Fencer claimed with a shrug.
“No,” Alex began to pace, watching Fencer’s self-assured expression fall, “what you care about is the story. And if the League gets their hands on this, the story changes. Suddenly, they have a way to throw down some of the older powers. Maybe even poke at it enough to figure out another weapon to use against Mr. Wonder. A bunch of them think he’s a god anyways, right?”
Fencer’s frown deepened as Alex continued, “Then all of a sudden, it’s like zeronite again. What it means to be top of the pile changes. You need to be able to beat a god, and if you’ve got a couple billion lying around, then you can just buy it in a bottle. Just like how you can pay some interstellar smuggler for your ticket to getting a few licks in on Mr. Wonder if you’re rich. Your key to rolling with the top dogs. Show up for a big fight and throw hands with the divine, right? Because after all, the League beats the Stormdaughter and a few others on a weeknight so you have to be this tall to ride these days, right?!”
Fencer’s eyes widened as Alex rounded on him, the man taking a step backward, “I-”
“This is what you like, right? The villains get stronger, the heroes have to adapt, the upper limits go higher, and the guy who was holding the secret is just a footnote in one of these exhibits, right?! After all, it would take a miracle for him to catch up now! But that’s fine because he was always just a nobody and the giants are the only ones people can see in this world!”
“He would be alive though,” Fencer pointed out as he backed into the glass behind him as Alex closed the distance. “I- This is me wanting to keep as many villains in the world as possible. It’s such a waste when one of them gets knocked off for some perceived slight-”
“But in the meantime, the League gets to go hunting gods and puffing their chest out?” Alex growled. “They get to be legends? They don’t even try to take over the world these days, they just keep the damn status quo going! And you want me to be an errand boy for them again?! You want me to roll over and let these has-beens make off with the prize, to bow and snivel to fossils like them?!”
Something changed on Fencer’s face that Alex couldn’t read, but it annoyed him. It was like the fear instantly drained away and was replaced with something… else.
“I’m not going to let them get a prize like that so they can sit on their hands and do nothing! I’ll tell you what I told Song! If they’re going to come after me, if they truly won’t leave me alone, then I’ll prove I’m someone they shouldn’t mess with and do what they’ve failed to do for decades now!”
He was inches from the middleman of crime now, glaring into eyes that were transfixed on him.
“I’ll take over this world and laugh in their jealous faces! I’ll take your money and build a better suit, a better name, and my own organization that will do what they could never do!”
Alex saw Fencer’s expression for what it was now and almost broke out into a smile of his own. It was a look of naked and pure admiration, acknowledgment of the villain in front of him.
Like that, even though he’d royally fucked up the heist, trashed every ounce of progress he’d made as Tech Crash, and basically sold the clothes off his back just for one more single chance, it felt like he’d managed something important.
“Alright then,” Fencer slipped away from him with an excited grin. “Let’s get you started then.”
Glass Knight by JimQuill is a loveletter to a lot of street superheroes and comic books in general. You can feel the cape-noir inspired vibes just dripping through it. It also stars a protagonist with nifty armor, so you know it's good.
Metaphase by Ashn1 is another cape-y story with a little more teen drama mixed in. It's been a very fun ride and has some great characters and is slowly unfolding to reveal some interesting stakes.
1. NecrOver is one of a handful of exiles of Nilea, which tend to be the only people who leave the closed borders that are enforced by the violent eternal storms allegedly maintained for centuries by its sorcerers. According to him, the Pharaoh Nakht, who took the throne in 1706, still rules to this day, sustained by the magics of his necromancers. His testimony on the rulership of the Pharaoh tends to be much more negative than other exiles and is largely considered to be heavily biased.
2. The lands below Tian are already full of all sorts of dangers due to the effects of the magic leaking down from the floating country above, but it is also prone to hellbreaks, localized distortions into hell that appear and vanish with little warning. While hellbreaks have been recorded elsewhere, they rarely spontaneously manifest in areas without extreme dimensional instability.
3. Duchard no longer practices a nobility system in the wake of the Great War, as almost all nobles were involved in the Thelee regime.
4. At the time when the Thunderer fought Shock Stealer, they had actually been dressed in a relatively modern -for the time- set of Arrestor armor, so the rubber gloves didn’t seem that out of place. The firehose was admittedly seen as silly and spawned several humorous photo edits of the incident.
5. Once dismissed for his relatively slapdash costume and seemingly limited powerset of conjuring clouds, Weather Warrior managed to shock everyone during a Ravog invasion when he assisted Mr. Wonder with defeating the mothership, the weather controlling supe conjuring a hurricane to clear the path towards it. He was seemingly killed in the fight, though has been spotted quite a few times since during odd weather patterns across the globe.
6. In recorded history, there have been no mortals that have actually been confirmed to have ascended to godhood. However, a few gods have claimed that they were once mortals prior to revealing themselves. This led to much speculation for the longest time on the connection between super powered individuals and deities throughout history.
7. A historical district of Orion City, famous for where the namesake of the city gathered the tribal leaders near his home. While the actual founding of the Amera Union occurred in the middle of the two larger landmasses, Chiefmeet has a lot of local pride concerning being the place where Orion announced his new name in front of several tribes and began his journey to travel the continent.
