Alex finished installing the second gravitor generator and checked the alignment of the casing, ensuring the emitter was lined up correctly inside it. Despite the fact that Celestial Scientist had machined the armor plating while refusing to hold onto the generators, much less take measurements herself, the fit was pure perfection with not a nanometer overlap to be seen. He grinned and slipped both of the vambraces on, locking them into place on the gauntlet.
The short scientist behind him let out a groan, “Finally! Now let’s finish going through everything now that you’ve got your stupid orb throwers in.”
“If I pay you another grand, will you just call them gravitor generators already?” he asked, standing up to go through the walkthrough with her.
“I refuse to compromise my principles on that subject,” she stubbornly told him.
“...So at least ten grand?”
“Twenty on every project you insist on adding them to.”
Alex didn’t bother to respond to that, instead slipping on the helmet and adjusting the locking mechanism as he worked his jaw to let the cloth bandanna covering his lower face slip down. The armor was remarkably breathable but it was kind of a poor idea to wear that inside the helmet.
He was still maintaining a secret identity around Starsilk’s hideout out of habit. He might've locked Celestial Scientist into a contract, but he’d yet to be formally introduced to the other members of the lab’s team. Not to mention that there were a few other villains in the hideout today who he didn’t know personally. Even when he was running around as the Iron Menace, he didn’t make it a habit to take off his helmet around just anyone and saw no reason to change that for whatever his new identity was going to be as he prepared to enact world domination.
Speaking of those villains and the other members of Starsilk, he’d met the taller, blue skinned lady with pointed ears who apparently was leading the mission Celestial had floated his way. No name yet, but she seemed familiar. Like him, she had been wearing a mask over her lower face, hers resembling a jagged respirator with fang-like teeth across the front. At the time, he’d also been sporting a pair of sunglasses for extra anonymity, earning him an incredibly deliberate roll of her blood red eyes before she shuffled him over towards Celestial and started chatting with a villainess called Turnaround. There would apparently be more joining the meeting, but Starsilk Labs wanted him fully kitted before the meeting began, so he’d been helping put the finishing touches on his new suit.
As Alex lingered in his thoughts, he slowly realized that the helmet’s heads up display hadn’t kicked on yet. He rechecked the seals and found he missed a latch, which he quickly flipped shut, yanking the bandanna out the way to do so and drooping it over his discarded shades on a nearby table. Instantly, he went from staring at the world through a simple polarized visor to watching the inside of the helmet seemingly disappear as internal screens lit up to display the exterior around him. Icons flashed around the edge of his vision which he ignored for now.
With his vision a lot clearer, he stared at the mirror that C.S. had set up for him in the corner of the room, moving around to get a better look at the finished design. Ditching the purple and cyan look for a green and gold combo with a slightly blockier configuration of the paneling, there wasn’t a single soul who would connect him back to Tech Crash with this new appearance. It wouldn’t be his first pick of color scheme but it wasn’t like he couldn’t change that down the line. It was getting a new name to stick that was the issue.
“Tell me the next couple names aren’t all green-themed,” he muttered.
“You said not to make them color or animal themed so we skipped that,” Celestial assured him.
Still don’t love that she’s saying “we,” Alex noted silently.
“Alright, so what’s this thing got?”
Celestial smiled and flipped a laptop around to face him, revealing a presentation she’d thrown together.
“Thank gods for the villains of this city ‘liberating’ enough strength enhancing underweave to fill out your entire costume. I was even able to double layer it on your upper body this time so you should see a better output there.”
“Enough to rip a bank vault door open?” he remembered her first sales pitch.
“Not quite yet, and I wouldn’t try that trick until I work out some kinks with the fingers on the glove so you don’t rip them off or crush them against six inches of reinforced plate. I do have to make sacrifices if you still want to be able to do things like open your hand or point at someone,” she told him. “Still, combined with the reinforcements to the powered components of the armor, this will at least let you leave a bruise on most of those bulletproof heroes if you keep hammering on them. I wouldn’t try to arm wrestle Commander Cosmic, but you could probably bloody his nose without breaking an arm.”
She flipped the slide, “Moving on, I didn’t just move the lasers into internal housing, which I need to reiterate will add more delay for firing, I also added some micro thrusters to the chestplate. You picked up on the jet boots quick enough, but if you don’t want your teeth to know exactly what every type of wall around you feels like, please test those before going out.”
“I’m actually licensed for most forms of jet travel,” Alex told her as he activated the various hatches on his chestplate, blinking through the commands in the corner that matched an icon on the slide on her screen. “It turns out that you can actually earn tax credits by signing up as an emergency volunteer for specialized search and rescue assistance.”
“...That explains why you didn’t need a month to not flip on your face with the boots,” Celestial chewed over her words. “Why the hell are you signed up for S and R as a villain though?”
“Tax credits are tax credits,” he shrugged. “I had the training from some older jobs so I went ahead and dropped 40 decks on a formal course to hit the qualifications so I could save almost 500 decks a year. It also keeps anyone from looking too closely into why a civilian might know how to operate a jetpack if it ever comes up. Besides, even though we’re in third place for NAU’s super disasters, I’ve only needed to actually help out one time and that was after that big thing with the mole people.”1
Celestial didn’t bother responding to that and simply flicked to the next slide, displaying his new gloves, “We might be ditching the grenade launcher thanks to someone discovering probably the only way to blow it up, but I’ve loaded you up on a few pouches of your favorite cans. They’re all the smaller ones that were supposed to go in the launcher, so don’t expect to flood a whole building in Retch. We kept the wire launcher and both its configurations but I made those canisters easier to reload. Just slap them in the slot on the side, no more having to crank them in place. Like with the rest of the armor, the gloves now have a gel layer added to pull heat away, but the market price on the good stuff is still too high to fully protect against firestarters. I still say you should ditch your orb gun to let me slip a concussive blaster, tesla shot, and aural pulse in there.”
“Not a chance.”
“Then that’s it for the gauntlets,” she clicked ahead. “We’ve got hardlight responsive shield generators in your shoulder pads with rudimentary sensors hooked up to them. This should stop small arms fire and dampen some heavy hits, but please don’t push it. The upper limit on the hardlight isn’t rated for anything military grade.2 You can manually trigger it, but your armor’s powered components are pulling from the same pulsar generator as these. While your battery can run for a couple decades with maintenance, it will bottleneck if you’re redlining it. You want to be able to move in this thing, don’t make a bubble around yourself and try to hamster ball around for more than a second.”
Alex shifted his body around to feel the weight of the suit. The assistance from the hidden servos and other power assisted parts took most of that off him, but that slight resistance reminded him that he was now completely covered in the armor and it locking up on him would make him a sitting duck. He chewed on that for a moment before calling up the command to trigger the shield. A square-foot pane of golden not-glass materialized in the air at the center of his gaze at a little under a foot away from his face. His eyes moved and the odd glass-like shield slowly followed their movement. A blink pulled up a quick set of options that he almost accidentally triggered. He moved his sight to the corner of the screen, ignoring the shield slowly trailing along and saw a power reading from the generator. Celestial had opted to display that as a meter which emptied under large power draw.
Oof, this was not efficient at all according to that. Deactivating the hardlight immediately caused that meter to tick back up quickly. Okay, shields are expensive, use them wisely.
“Looks like you’re figuring out the helmet commands,” the scientist noted. “I’ve got some notes for you to read over later.”
She tapped a few keys on the laptop and Alex saw a little icon ping on his display. He fumbled a bit trying to get the blink commands to work there, accidentally flaring his thrusters again. A little annoying but he’d rather the quick commands from blinking be related to stuff useful in the heat of a fight than opening his email. Eventually he wrangled control over the settings and brought up the message. As he scrolled through Celestial’s notes, a question popped up.
“This thing doesn’t look that bulky, how is all of this working?”
The armor, despite its powered components, honestly didn’t bulk out Alex that much. No boxy bits or pistons sticking out. If it weren’t for the extra room his gauntlets needed to fit the gravitor generators, it would be easy to mistake Alex for your average supe who depended on their powers, not their tech – albeit one who decided to armor up a bit.
“We’re using a lot of nano plates for mechanical motion, which also lets it absorb shocks a lot better. There’s two hidden computers, one basically layered throughout the helmet and one near the belt, to help run a lot of the onboard commands. I had to put the second one in for redundancy since I’m going to bet you’re gonna get punched in the face and I don’t need you having to reboot everything every time that happens. Should be seamless swap over if there’s any interruptions. I actually tested that with some strategic brick tests for your information. Unfortunately, all communication elements are actually remote, so don’t expect to be able to read any of your messages if you’re in a dead zone,” she told him.
“I assume that means you’re patched in to me?”
Celestial almost snorted, “Yes, but you’re not paying me to sit in a chair and babysit you. You give me cash and I make you cool toys. Oh, don’t expect to be able to remote hack anything either. The transmission from the suit doesn’t really work that way, it just reports requests back here and receives back what the lab directly transmits to it. It’s not an open connection. That keeps you mostly free from being hacked yourself by traditional means…”
“But superpowers are superpowers,” Alex finished, knowing the deal there. Even rudimentary computers with no wireless capabilities weren’t going to keep out a supe with the power to “hack” via touch. Also cracker boxes, but if someone was gonna hold one to him for long enough to be a problem, he had bigger worries.
“Not to mention some AIs could spot the frequency we’re using, crack the encryption we’re using, and sneak in that way. They’d have a bitch of time actually using the connection between your comms and the suit to actually do any damage but they could really get annoying if they’re creative. So try not to go pissing off the Human Virus or Cyberlich anytime soon. Finally, we’ve got one last thing that I know you’re gonna love,” Celestial smiled.
The screen flipped over to that glorious piece of tech Alex had been salivating over.
“You’re being loaned a teleport beacon, like everyone else on this op is,” she told him. “You get to keep yours afterwards though.”
So fucking cool!
She could apparently see his enthusiasm through the mask and seemed to feel the need to put a damper on it, “First up, this is just a beacon, we’re not giving you teleporting tech. This calls back to the platform we’ve got set up and feeds it with your location plus a bunch of other data needed to yank you back. That means: you’re in a place blocking signals? You don’t get teleported. Secondly, the platform fits five people. It looks like it can fit more but it’s so that if it grabs everyone while all of you are spread out, you don’t end up stitched together on a molecular basis. Also, don’t dick around on the platform. When you get yanked through space-time, get off it ASAP.”
“It’s that dangerous?” Alex shuddered, worried about stepping in the wrong direction and suddenly being merged with an incoming villain.
“No, it means you’ll be blocking the way. The teleporter doesn’t spool up if there’s anything on the platform. And if you’re yanking the ripcord, it means everyone should be. It’ll let everyone on at the same time if you all pull it at once, but if you stagger your pulls, you lollygagging on there means someone else is probably crying wondering why no one is plucking them away as a hero whales on them,” Celestial explained. “Speaking of which, we call it a ripcord because it’s one way and expensive as hell. Fixed sets of paired teleporters are easy on our budget, but we’re talking about something that has to run a lot of calculations to equalize atmospheric pressure, lock onto a moving target without satellite assistance, calculate target parameters, and forcibly create a fold in space time rather than a bridge connection from two handshaking terminals.”
She pointed at the beacon, located on his belt, “That is going to heat up a lot. Like 'start to melt some of its internal bits' hot. And the pad itself is going to eat through almost a full power cell per person. It takes us roughly a week to get the beacon and its paired section of the pad back up and running and that costs us quite a bit. The others don’t need to get this lecture since they have to give those back but for you, I need to be clear: Don’t fucking use this on other jobs unless you have to, especially if you fuck up a job and aren’t bringing home a paycheck unless it’s life or death. And if we tell you the pad isn’t ready, it’s not going to be ready for a whole week, got it?”
She maintained a very pointed glare throughout her warning. Alex nodded, “Got it. Emergency only, long cool down, and make sure I’ve got the loot if I’m gonna pull the cord.”
“Alright then, we’ll go over any final questions after the meeting,” C.S. shut the laptop and looked over at a phone that had been lighting up on a nearby desk. “It looks like the princess is ready for you.”
Princess?
---------------------------------
The moment Alex walked into the small meeting room, he was immediately greeted with the shout of, “Here he is! The Viridian Vagrant!”
His eyes locked on to Turnaround who was grinning ear to ear.
“No,” he said flatly.
“Aw! Come on!” she whinged. “I know you said nothing color themed but you gotta admit that one’s pretty good!”
“It’s you…” Alex realized, eyes narrowing behind his mask.
He glared at the lounging villainess as she spread across one of the mismatched couches arranged along with a similar hodgepodge of chairs in a rectangle around a coffee table. She was dressed in a black skintight outfit littered with a multi-color mess of arrows running everywhere across it. A set of simple body armor protected her chest, forearms, and knees constructed out of some rubber-like material that stretched and moved with ease. The arrow designs ran rampant over this part of the outfit as well, like kudzu swallowing it whole. Her fingerless gloves left a sharp set of nails painted in a vomit of colors exposed. The fingers attached to those technicolor talons absently traced through the air, caught in a never-ending dance to some unknown melody only audible to her. He’d previously seen her wearing a helmet with a T-shaped visor over her face, but that was currently resting on the coffee table in front of her, leaving her fluffy black hair with neon highlights free to bounce with every movement of her head. Toxic green eyes strolled up and down his armor as her playful grin never faltered.
Her every movement looked erratic, but there was an almost practiced flow to them. Alex had done enough team ups over the decade to recognize this act: Turnaround was pretending to be manic and unpredictable during this first meeting to either intimidate or to make others underestimate her. It wasn’t a complete falsehood, more like she was exaggerating her own personality as part of her mask, even as she left the physical one on the table’s surface.
Sand Devil cheerfully added, “My vote’s currently for ‘Ignis Fatuus’. You know, since you apparently fly around a lot and have all kinds of tricky gadgets.”
“Literally nothing about me is ghost themed,” he tiredly pointed out, not sure how the horned woman had gotten a will-o’-the-wisp vibe from his tech. Seems he was wrong about it just being one person supplying the list of supernyms.
Sand Devil flashed him a grin informing him that she didn’t really care about staying on theme much. The red skinned woman sat up gracefully opposite Turnaround, projecting an air of professionalism backed by her extremely suspect Avalonian accent. A turtleneck dress made of some unknown pitch black material matching her long draping hair appeared to shift and flow down her body, the hem of it seeming to eternally crumble away into nothingness. Long gloves covered her thin arms, only her exposed shoulders betraying the stronger physique hidden beneath. Her flesh looked like red sand in an hourglass, eerily smooth but with eternally shifting and moving lines disturbing grainy patterns across it. Her silhouette seemed to fluctuate whenever she moved, like the edges were dissolving or lingering behind for a moment. Warm yellow eyes prickled her gaze across Alex.
If Turnaround was putting on an act to appear erratic, Sand Devil’s performance was composure to mask pure chaos. Powerful taloned hands delicately cupped a drink that she sipped from as she projected the idea that she was a frail backliner who might disappear in a puff with the lightest hit, as opposed to someone who could savagely match fisticuffs with a lot of heroes in this city.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
A voice spoke up, “I think Trick Blast seems like a good name…”
Everyone in the room gave a quick start and turned towards the speaker who had been sitting adjacent to Sand Devil, all of them apparently having forgotten she was in the room.
Despite her small frame being bulked out by an outfit that looked like a cross between a Great War fighter pilot and something worn by an old school car racer, Velocity Val always seemed to disappear from your sight the moment you looked away. Perhaps it was the drab color scheme she always stuck to. Maybe it was the fact that her plain auburn hair was never really styled into any shape you could describe with any more interesting descriptions than “short”. It could just be that the speedster’s timid personality for a villain just made her seem to shrink out of view the moment another supe was in the room. Even in costume, the only thing that really stuck out about her was the heavy Northern Steppeland accent that all her years of living in Victory hadn’t managed to dull.
“That’s…” Alex considered it for a moment. “Actually, Trick Blast is one of the first sensible ones you guys have come up with this week.”
That earned him boos from Turnaround and Sand Devil while Val seemed pleased with herself behind the thick aviation goggles, high fluffy collar, and knit scarf she hid most of her face behind.
Alex looked over pointedly at the blue skinned woman dressed in a crisp suit, still wearing the skull-like face mask. The woman glanced up from the tablet she’d been poking at to glower at him with glowing red eyes.
“I’m not involved in this,” she sighed, her voice heavily modulated by the mask. “You do need to come up with something already though.”
“Just give me a sec,” Alex said as he slowly sat down in the plush chair across from her, feeling out the way the suit was altering his normal movements. The underweave wanted to accelerate every motion while the reinforced armor’s additional weight (which he kept forgetting about) added to his downward momentum. He felt like he was holding himself back from slamming through the chair in an instant with a subtle application of willpower more than straining against the force, but was hyper aware that if he was careless the armor would quickly cause a lot of collateral damage.
“Fine, think on it,” she dismissed the subject. “Let’s do introductions then.”
She stood and looked at the other four super villains, “You may call me Starweaver. I am the one organizing this-”
That caused something of a stir as both Sand Devil and Turnaround began to speak up, only for Starweaver to glare at both of them, “BEFORE you say anything, no I will not be joining you. That will be another member of Starsilk who some of you are familiar with.”
Whatever that was about pacified the two of them. From the snippets of overlapping conversation that Alex could make out, it sounded like whoever had brought them in on this job had been this mystery member. Alex held off on asking who they were for now, but made a mental note to make sure it got brought up by the end of these introductions.
“We’ll go over more details in a second, for now, if you all would kindly tell us who you are and what you do, I would appreciate it,” Starweaver folded back down into her chair, her hands coming together to steeple in front of her.
Before she’d even fully come to a rest, Turnaround bounced to her heels.
“Right! Name’s Turnaround. I turn things around!”
With a snap of her fingers, Alex suddenly felt a lurch and found himself facing the wall. He shifted to look back just in time to see the woman gleefully snap again and the chair below him seized around again. As he dizzily looked up, he noticed that all of the other seated villains seemed equally as disoriented.
As all of them steadied themselves, Turnaround continued, “I can redirect moving objects as well. It’s a little harder when it comes to energy blasts but if I see it coming most of the times I can do it. I can use my power on just about anything for a block or two but it’s a lot harder if I can’t see it.”
“Can you redirect force?” Alex asked.
She wiggled her hand, “Kind of? I’ve tried the whole ‘invisible wall’ trick I’ve seen some people pull off with redirective barriers but since I’m not actually creating something solid to flip stuff, I’ve gotta deal with Newton’s Laws and all that. I’m not stopping anything by applying my own force or grabbing half of a punch’s momentum and turning it around to cancel out, I’ve got to take the whole thing and point it somewhere else.”
“We’ve verified she’s able to affect Nation level heroes,” Starweaver cut in. “She might not be able to stop a punch directly, but flipping a hero around midpunch so it lands elsewhere or having a flyer barrel into his friends behind him is still extremely useful.”
Turnaround beamed at that and let herself drop back onto the couch with a muffled thump. Alex was about to stand up, figuring they were going around the room in a circle before he noticed that Sand Devil was already beginning to rise. He reluctantly remained in his chair and stewed on his name for a bit longer.
“I am Sand Devil, as I am sure you are all aware,” she laughed. “I possess the ability to conjure and control sand from the pits of hell.”
She held her palm upwards in front of her and an inky blackness danced on it before collapsing into a pile of grains in her hand, bleeding off the edges to the table at the center. She poured the rest of it down and it slowly seemed to fill up the invisible outline of a small humanoid shape. Once complete, the tiny sable golem saluted before seeming to vanish in a non-existent breeze.
“I can also heat the sands enough to cause minor burns,” she explained. “And I know a few spells common to those from my realm, though I hesitate to compare myself to a trained sorcerer.”
As she stood there, Alex now noticed a spaded tail drift behind her, wagging like a corded whip ready to snap out. Starweaver’s gaze flicked to it as well and it seemed she felt the need to interject here as well.
“Devil here is also trained in one of hell’s martial arts and can handle herself in a fight.”
“But it’s my powers you value,” the red woman grinned. “I can control a total of fifteen simple constructs simultaneously, which includes projectiles, traps, and twisters.”
Her dress spun around her like a spiral as she said the last one.
“Or two larger, more complicated simulacrums if you keep those pesky heroes out of my face,” she pointedly looked over at Turnaround who simply laughed.
“You were fine. Besides, Anachronist was the one who walked away from that fight with a black eye,” Turnaround let the rest in on some of the details of their shared history.
Sand Devil simply raised her nose at the remark and delicately returned to the couch. Starweaver shifted her gaze to Alex.
“Trick Blast?”
Ugh… it sounded good at first but now that I hear it again.
“Not sure that I’m gonna go with that now that I think about it,” he told her, earning him a glare. “It’s not exactly the type of name you’d expect for a villain who… uh, you know?”
“Has ambitions of world domination?” Starweaver finished what he’d really wished she’d left unspoken. He stopped himself from groaning but the reaction from the other villains was not what he’d expected.
“Oh dude, seriously?” Turnaround seemed excited. “You should’ve led with that! Here we are giving you wimpy names like Lasersmash! You need something like ‘Devastator Obliterator’!”
“True…” Sand Devil nodded along. “Had I known I would’ve put forth suggestions more befitting, such as Prince Worlddeath.”
Alex didn’t know where to begin with how to respond to those. His mouth simply hung open behind his mask.
“Okay, how the hell did you all come up with your own names if this is the kind of things you keep suggesting?” Starweaver massaged a temple.
“I turn stuff around,” Turnaround answered bluntly.
“I believe mine was more clever,” Sand Devil boasted. “Besides the obvious, mine is a reference to those whirlwinds, similar to the ones I trap foolish heroes in.”
“Dust,” Alex pointed out.
“I beg your pardon?” her eyebrow shot up.
“Those are dust devils. Sand devils are a shark.”
She blinked before groaning and sinking into her seat, “Oh gods, is this why almost all the messages I’ve been getting on Con Nect have been from Atlantheans?”
Turnaround hooted at that, slapping a knee while Sand Devil sunk further into the cushions.
“Mine was supposed to be Velocity Gal, but people misheard me,” a heavy Steppeland accent broke through Sand Devil’s sounds of misery, causing the room to jump again and turn to look over at Val. “Um… yes, my name is not Val actually.”
“Oh! Uh, I did not know that,” Starweaver looked slightly embarrassed.
“It is fine. The name has stuck and you may call me Val,” she nodded.
“And how did you come up with your name, hmmmmm?” Turnaround badgered Starweaver.
She waved dismissively, “I’m sticking to the space theme that our lab chose. It fit my powers.”
“And those are?” Sand Devil leaned forward.
“We were just about to introduce…” she held a hand towards Alex to take it away only for both Turnaround and Sand Devil to object in their own ways.
With a look of clear frustration, Starweaver simply undid a button and let her suit jacket fall with a quick shimmy of her shoulders, exposing the sheer shirt beneath and four-
In an instant, Alex felt something jab at his neck, forcing him to lean away. Looking up he saw four bone like protrusions lancing from the back of Starweaver’s torso to tap at the throats of each of the other villains in the room, all of whom were now silent as the grave. The spiked appendages retreated, curling back like spider legs to hover behind the villainess.
“Holy shit, you’re like an evil, elvish Arach-” Turnaround began.
“Don’t,” Starweaver warned, her tone freezing the air. Her gaze went back to Alex, causing him to gulp involuntarily as his eyes flicked to the spikes dangling in the air behind her.
He remembered she was waiting for him to finish his introduction and quickly snatched together something based off one of the latest misunderstanding of his gauntlets.
“Riftmaker. That’ll do for now,” he decided. It seemed to satisfy the crowd judging from the reactions of the gathered villains, all seeming to agree with it in some way or another. Hell, Alex could see a future for that one. Sure, Trick Blast was serviceable but he couldn’t quite picture the headline “Trick Blast Conquers the Eastern Seaboard!” no matter how hard he tried.
“Alright then, Riftmaker,” Starweaver rolled a hand for him to continue, “share with the class what our mad scientist has got you running with.”
Alex began to list off the suit’s capabilities, enjoying the appreciative nods from the others. Starweaver would chime in with some statistics every now and then that were apparently in the manuals that Celestial had sent over. Leave it to the mastermind of this meeting to know what her coworker had cooking. He briefly mentioned his gravitor gauntlets with the explanation that they could rapidly increase and decrease gravity between objects to either deliver blows or yank objects to him, and for the first time in over two weeks no one piped up with some stupid comment about them “not being physically possible” or some shit. Starweaver even nodded along with him.
As he wrapped up, the villainess spoke up again as she played with her tablet, “Alright then, let’s move on to-”
“Um, what about me?”
“Fuck, girl, we need to get a bell on you,” Turnaround shouted after everyone else jumped for a third time and Starweaver set the device back on the table.
“Sorry!” Val looked over at Starweaver, who nodded her permission to continue. “I’m Velocity Val and I’m a speedster.”
“What’s your top speed?” Turnaround immediately asked and leaned in close.
“Um… 280 kilometers per hour?”
Turnaround tilted her head, “Uh… how much is that-”
“A little over 170 miles per hour,” huffed Sand Devil, apparently anticipating that question.
“Right… how fast is a bullet again?”
Alex spoke up, “Varies. But usually in the four digits for either of those measurements.”
“I thought you were a speedster!” Turnaround jeered. “I’m pretty sure there are cars quicker than you!”
Val got defensive, “I am! I can run on water at top speeds and dodge most people’s aim!”
Starweaver interrupted the brewing argument with a clap of her hands, “Val more than qualifies as a speedster and works perfectly for the role we need her for. Now then, I’ll introduce our final member.”
She pulled the tablet up and tapped something before flipping it around. Alex was glad he was wearing his mask because he knew his eyes bulged when he saw the woman on the display while she introduced herself and went over her power set, apologizing for not being there and having to leave this message.
That was Terrorantula. Oh shit… Uh… Fuck… Would she recognize him?
Really fucking wish Celestial had let me know who would be joining this mission or told me who else was part of Starsilk! But no, just “hey boss, Starsilk has an open spot on a team for a mission to test out your new gear. My coworker could use someone like you for it and it’d let you immediately score some upgrades.”
Starweaver flipped the tablet around as the video finished playing and said, “I can give you more details on her abilities if you need them. Any questions?”
“Nah, me and Devil have worked with T before,” Turnaround chuckled. “I’m assuming she’s taking the lead or are you gonna be baby sitting us from a comfy chair?”
“She’ll be in charge,” Starweaver affirmed.
Okay, no pressure. Just, don’t be awkward around her. You can be professional. You can be so fucking professional. In fact you’re gonna stop thinking about how you misread all those signs and asked her out right now, Alex thought, and then kept thinking about that anyways before refocusing when he realized that Starweaver was finally going over the plan.
“We’ll be hitting up a local P.H.O.T.O.N. storage site for a shopping list. My associate needs some items to help upgrade Riftmaker here, but there’s a lot of valuables there along with several deckvaults on site from some of the side gigs that the lab runs that they have yet to creatively massage into their books.”
“You said this was also a practice run for a certain… upcoming target,” Sand Devil purred. “I’m assuming there will be contracted heroes?”
Upcoming target?
“Kind of,” Starweaver’s fingers danced over her tablet while the four pointed legs quivered as they hunched above her like a claw. Flipping it around, she revealed a set of portraits of some heroes, “P.H.O.T.O.N.’s not renting capes from Amberheart but from their corporate pool. Private sector heroes so don’t worry about them being actual mercenaries or vigilantes.3 In fact, it’s Team Icon.”
“Team Icon?!” Turnaround guffawed. “I know this is our first mission but seriously? There’s warm-ups and there’s bullying. I mean, I’m definitely in but this isn’t a practice run, this is a beat down.”
Starweaver grinned, “Oh don’t you worry… They are the warm up. You see, last few months, P.H.O.T.O.N. has been worried about Icon’s performance and just how much tech they’ve been forced to leave in that site while their downtown lab has been undergoing renovations. So they’ve tossed a little bit of money to Amberheart to ensure there’s a hero patrol nearby, just in case a level three alarm gets called in. The goal isn’t to beat up Team Icon. We’re here to get our score and to make sure everyone knows that when that other job happens, they need to get the hell out of our way.”
She flipped around the tablet and tapped twice, then spun it around one more time to face them all. Alex’s blood was pure ice and he heard air hiss through Turnaround’s teeth at the sight of the new portraits.
“We’re going there to crush the Starlight Squad.”
-Optics, totally fried. And don't even get me started on the power supply. You know how expensive this gear is, son?
-Ma'am, tell that to heroes.
1. Civilian emergency services are still extremely important even in most cities that have a sizable hero population. Victory’s large hero population and large array of organizations with super powered staff has meant that it has almost never needed to tap its emergency volunteers for aftermath work. This program is more important in places like Seasmeet and Washgreen which have less ancillary organizations that offer superpowered talent for emergency services.
2. Despite the fact that formal militaries have mostly been a thing of the past for almost a full century, the term “military grade” remains in common use to refer to firearms and technology often covered by the same international treaties which covered the dissolution of these militaries. Civilian ownership of these is a matter of an individual country’s laws, so the term does not automatically imply criminality.
3. Private sector heroes are basically part of hyper specialized security firms that tend to work with organizations on a national level, typically registering as heroes with the cities they reside in but only accepting contracts which have been prenegotiated. Relationships with other heroes tends to vary wildly but there tends to be a negative association from non-“corporate” heroes with those that pursue this career path
