Act One, Scene Fifteen
“You are not going out dressed like that,” said Countess Prudence Cartwright firmly, her arms crossed, her eyes focused on her clone-daughter.
Mercy Cartwright looked up at her mother, arms crossed in what was, by dint of great practice, almost exactly the same pose. “Mother, it has been four hundred years. Fashions change.”
“Yes,” said Prudence calmly. “So does safety, dear. If you went out dressed like that four hundred years ago, your only worries would have been ministers and muskets.” She sighed. “In an age of superheroes, sniper rifles and sarin gas, one must take precautions.
“Nobody is going to shoot me at Catherine’s welcome party!”
Prudence shook her head. “You can never be too careful. Really, you aren’t even wearing the cute little gas mask I made for you.”
“I’m already immune to gas!” Mercy said.
“Only those varieties that are mithridatisable and visible,” Prudence said.
“I’ve got nose filters,” said Mercy. “And I am going.”
Prudence smiled faintly. “And what happens when they bomb your car, and your own momentum is about to kill you?”
“Personal airbags from my arsenal,” she said.
“And when they throw an inferno grenade at you?”
“Steal the high-heat air. You ran bigger risks in the old days.”
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“I ran those risks to bring myself to this present situation.”
Mercy shook her head. “Catherine will be there. I haven’t seen her in... years. Wow.” She grinned sunnily. “It’s been a while.”
“Catherine is always welcome in this house, but there are plenty of others who will be there with whom you should not trifle. The brutes Pyre and Fear, for instance.”
“And so will the rest of the Balog siblings,” said Mercy.
“Yes,” said Prudence calmly, waiting.
“So,” said Mercy. “You are suggesting that the Titanium Tyrant can’t protect his own children. That the security there isn’t good enough for them.”
Prudence smiled. It was a little smile, but it was with her face, not just her mouth.
“Good work, Mercy. Do you want me to call one of my knights to drive you?”
“Nope,” said Mercy Cartwright, holding out her hand to her mother.
Prudence dropped a key into it, which vanished before it touched her daughter’s skin, and Mercy swept out of the room. Prudence watched her leave with a sigh and turned back to her palace. She governed the most efficient and peaceful (and second-most-prosperous) county in Novapest, but that was just so no one would misgovern it for her. Her chief interest took place inside, behind three locked doors, two secret passageways, four different airlocks and more lethal traps than any normal person would bother with.
Her sanctum looked like a chemical lab that had been converted from a temple used by sixteen different gnostic sects with very different interpretations of the knowledge they were seeking and exactly how metaphorical it was or wasn’t. Ritual circles coexisted with alembics and petri dishes, but whatever the combination each section of the laboratory was carefully secluded from the rest. Maintaining some mild security were the huge semihumanoid monsters that stood sentinel around the edges of the room. Prudence had started with homunculi, but by the seventeen hundreds she’d moved from tiny men in flasks to armies of super-soldiers and never looked back. She passed by one particularly enormous monster, shaking her head. “Now if only I could still do that...”
Her destination was one of the side rooms, where seventy-six rodent cages lined the walls. #29074 had done promisingly in some of the earlier tests, but Prudence wasn’t sure how well it would stand up to organics. Time to find out. She flipped the light switch on -
- Seventy-six dead rodents. Prudence clicked her tongue.
“It did work once,” she said, and shook her head. Once and never again, and her with mortal daughters and dying friends.
She sighed, and beckoned for a homunculus to enter and clear the remains away for examination.
“Well, then,” she said, without any particular hope. “Time for the next experiment...”