He spasmed on the ground, his eyes locked onto the horrified expression of his sister while her powers burned through his body. It rippled outward from the center of his chest and down his helpless limbs causing them to twitch and sending shockwaves of agony all across his frail form. A cry of dismay caused him to shift his blurry gaze to the outskirts of the training mats where his father was yelling at him to stand up while his mother and grandmother glared at him with hateful expressions.
“I swear to you,” he heard his father pleading to them, “he managed to do it the last time we trained!”
“And yet, all you’ve managed to do is waste our time yet again by proving what we already knew,” his mother’s cruel voice cut the man off. “So what if he managed to manifest it once? Did you think we’d be impressed by that? Did you want us to wait around for him to figure out how to do it again while everyone else around him has advanced far beyond that?”
His eyes flitted back to his sister who had wrangled her face back into a dispassionate stare fixed off in the distance past her prone and smoldering brother, calm and collected as she prepared to be called upon by the two women at the edges of the room. Sure enough, they shouted for her to follow them, not even instructing her to bow to end the fight. As the three of them left, his father glared back at him as he regained enough motor control to manage to slip an arm underneath himself to begin the arduous process of standing up.
“You worthless piece of shit,” he hissed. “Go clean up and do whatever you want with the rest of the day. And don’t you dare use your power now that they’re gone like you did last time! Gods, why the hell do I even try with you anymore? You’re nothing and you’ll never be anything!”
He stomped away, leaving the boy crying there in the dark.
---------------------------------
Alex cracked open his eyes as the dream receded.
What a fantastic fucking start to the day.
He shoved off the blankets and let a finger trace the ghost of where a burn scar had once been at the center of his chest. Well, now there was a fresher one over it, courtesy of standing right next to an explosion or two, but it still seemed like he could feel the old one lingering below that larger patch of scarring. Pushing off the bed, Alex strolled into the bathroom to glare at the mirror.
In truth, it had been a long time since his subconscious had thrown up that particular memory as a dream. Hell, now that he was hanging onto the degrading strands of the dream, he realized he didn’t even have the faces attached to the blurry shapes anymore. He just knew which shade belonged to whom and got a vague reading of what the expressions on their faces were supposed to be in the moment. Dreams could be funny like that: you get blobs that you can recognize as people and things in the moment but when you tried to think back on them when you woke up, you realize that you hadn’t actually pictured them in your head. At least he hoped dreams were like that. Gods I hope I don’t have aphantasia from all the head trauma over the years.
Eh, he felt it probably had more to do with the fact that almost two decades had passed since he’d seen any of those bastards he once called family so the actual details of what they looked like were thankfully fading. Good riddance.
Despite that, he could still picture their eyes though, all of them sporting the same steel grey irises he had most of the time. However, when he remembered his mother and sister using their powers, they took on this radioactive glow. The twin lights of red from his sister’s eyes ended up poisoning memories where he was fairly certain she hadn’t been using her abilities. It meant her specter which haunted his hazy recollections was more identifiable by that pair of crimson set of headlights than any feature he could recall. The same was true of the caustic orange glow of his mother’s, more vivid in his dreams than the sound of her biting voice as it ripped apart just about anything he did. Dad’s powers, as pitiful as he remembered them being, didn’t work that way so his amorphous blob was just taller than Alex’s childhood self. Meanwhile Alex had never seen dear old grandma bother showing him what she could do. He was fairly sure he never saw her in person again after that particular memory.
Alex checked his own eyes for any telltale shade of difference to them. He’d only managed to catch his own appearance once when he’d gotten his powers to cooperate and the glow was nowhere near as pronounced as his sister’s but it looked like it was the same hue of red. You had better not do shit today, he mentally told his piece of shit powers after being satisfied that he couldn’t see even a hint of the wrong color in them. They’d be welcome to join when they stopped ruining his life, but until such time they needed to sit on the fucking bleachers where they belonged.
He let his gaze drift over the rest his face and wondered if it was worth skipping a shave this morning. His stubble seemed even enough to pass for the purposeful beginning of a beard if he left it. Checking the clock, he was pretty sure he had the time, but opted to instead just do a light rinse off, a quick brush, and decided to grab a slightly better breakfast than usual.
I don’t need to nick myself after a dream like that, he rationalized. Especially since you should try to start out a Heist Day with your best foot forward.
He picked over the gear that he still stored here and made sure everything was in his bag before heading out with a whistle.
---------------------------------
Alex ended up slightly disappointed to see he wasn’t the first one to the meeting point. Sure, he’d needed to swing by Starsilk to grab his suit and took a detour beforehand to grab a bagel sandwich from the deli down the block from his building, but he still thought he was making good time.
Worse, it wasn’t Val or even the other Starsilk staff who’d beaten him here, but Turnaround and Sand Devil, both of whom were leaning against the wall chatting to one another. He twisted his flight down and landed a short distance away from them, dusting himself off before waving.
“Oh hey! Riftmaster!” Turnaround called out to him.
“It’s Riftmaker,” he corrected.
She grimaced, “You sure? Still time before the debut to change it. I think ‘master’ has a better flow to it myself. Besides, you’re not really making rifts if I remember your powers, right?”
He exaggerated a roll of his head to brush aside her critique along with the small chime that accompanied it. Unfortunately, Sand Devil took that for an opportunity to add one last suggestion.
“Given that you’re all about lasers and gravity, I propose Lord Laser Crush.”
“No.”
Her grin told him that even she knew that one was awful. Alex let the two women return to finish out the conversation they’d been having as he settled himself against the wall.
The group of villains had set themselves up in a dead end passage stuck near a forgotten construction site that was caught in some bureaucratic hell. Graffiti nearby told the story of some bored kids who frequented the area, but as far as Alex had made out with a quick sweep, it didn’t look like they were in danger of being discovered, assuming there weren’t any hidden villain bases in the area. Given that Starsilk was apparently working with Vandal Eyes to set up this job, he was kind of trusting that there was some assurance this place was still unclaimed territory.
This area probably was just a smidge too close to Amberheart for anyone to want to set up a permanent lair. Alternatively, whatever projects were on hold here might be in too much danger of actually making it through the red tape and labyrinthine zoning paperwork which could see this place springing back to life in a few months. No villain wanted to have to sneak past the residents or patrons to whatever shops might pop up in a well trafficked area every time they left their hidden fortress. It was unbecoming.
“Hey, what are you after anyways?” Turnaround addressed him, snapping Alex back to reality.
“Hm?”
“She wants to know why you want to take over the world,” Sand Devil clarified. “She’s been trying to guess since the meeting.”
Oh gods, no! Alex realized with horror that this was about to be the sequel to the group’s name suggestions if he didn’t immediately put a stop to it. The problem was…
“There’s a lot of reasons,” he deflected, not entirely inaccurately.
Sure, the imminent threat of being chased by a global cabal of supervillains was a very motivating factor, but as he said those simple words a few other memories flashed through his mind, all of them giving him answers to the question he himself hadn’t considered until now. Each of them he remembered himself having thought “One of these days…” at the time. A few too many involved him peeling himself off the pavement. There were a couple of flashes of archival footage of Professor End Point, his legion of robots filling the sky behind him as he cackled in front of a pedestal before the Nations Union’s headquarters. There was a moment from his days as a minion under Frost Fiend, watching his boss make his big speech. And then there was a small room, locked from the outside…
“I’ve just always kind of liked the idea,” he continued, interrupting Turnaround as she took umbrage to his previous non-answer. “I guess I kind of want to see if I could actually give it a go. See exactly where I end up.”
“Trying to miss the moon?” she teased.
“I don’t think this is the job I want to use that metaphor beforehand,” he joked back. Ending up amongst the stars didn’t seem so appealing when the hero team you were fighting sported their particular name.
“Why not join the League?” Sand Devil questioned in a more serious tone than either of them were using.
Before Alex could answer, Turnaround barked a laugh, “Cause joining the League to conquer the world is like signing up to be an office drone so you can run the company and knowing they’re still gonna make you into the janitor! Those assholes are just there to stifle anyone with an ounce of ambition. Fuck em all!”
Alex hadn’t expected her to have that opinion, especially since she had a reputation of joining up for just about any villainous team-up thrown her way. The ounce of congealed malice in her statement told enough of a story of a rancid history with the League he hadn’t expected. He was equally shocked to see Sand Devil nod along.
“A fair point,” she agreed. “That clique-y group truly is a dead end, isn’t it. Better to try and build up your own powerbase and establish your own organization than attempting to bow and scrape for a chance to petition their council for the privilege to do anything of import. It would be delightful to see someone else manage to beat them at their own game someday soon.”
The two hadn’t struck him as the type to really get it. A lot of villains in this town begrudgingly tolerated the League but didn’t really have any overt antagonism for them. It was as though they chafed at the thought of anything that would force them to split profits or have someone else stepping a little too close to their jobs more than actual disrespect of the League’s authority. In fact, Alex had expected the general reaction to his ambitions to be almost universally met with all of his fellow villains attempting to yank him back down whatever ladder he tried to climb or browbeat him into joining the League of Domination if he actually wanted to see anyone rule the world.
“That said, how are you planning on taking over the world with only seven people?” Turnaround cocked an eyebrow, her mask managing to be tight enough to convey this.
“Well obviously,” Alex explained, “I’ll actually be trying to get a henchman group signed on and invest in a proper superweapon to make a credible threat before I actually make a play for…”
He trailed off as he realized what she said, “Seven?”
“Yeah!” Turnaround grinned. “You’ve got me, Devil, and Val along with the three over at Starsilk. Counting yourself, that’s seven.”
“When did you all join in on my plans of world domination?” he asked, flummoxed at this sudden development.
“Eh, it’s only if you don’t turn out to be a fuck up, obviously,” Turnaround told him. “But since Terror is basically trying to make us a team, I figure we’re in for whatever you’ve got going on. Besides, I could use a longer project to work on and yours sounds like it could be interesting.”
Alex turned to look over at Sand Devil, who shrugged and explained, “She figures you’re going to be trying for an island base in the future and wants in on that.”
Turnaround flashed a look of absolute betrayal at her friend’s statement, letting Alex know that Devil had let him in on the truth.
“Island lairs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be,” Alex decided to tell the pair, remembering his time working with Frost Fiend. “A proper island base doesn’t let you get all the creature comforts you’re used to from living in a city. You have to pay out the ass for that shit and it has to be delivered in batches. Anything perishable is pretty much gone the first week after it finally comes in. Not to mention needing to constantly deal with all the sand and dirt everyone tracks in… when you’re not dealing with drainage issues from a storm blowing in. Then there’s the fact that you can’t really enjoy any beaches if you want the place to remain secret, so you’re basically stuck in a bunker with rough humidity that becomes awful humidity if any of the air circulation breaks down. And that’s if you’re smart and don’t end up building something above ground in the godsdamn jungle. Hell, any issue on the base takes like a week to fix because of the logistics of it all if you’re lucky. And, to top it all off, in order keep the place secret, you’ve got to sortie at the worst possible times so your sleep schedule gets fucked and you’ve got to basically stuff as many people into a single transport as possible to and fro.”
He saw Turnaround’s face fall as he apparently shattered her dreams.
“Also, I’m not anywhere close to affording an island of my own,” he pointed out.
“But you will get one eventually right?” she persisted, apparently still undeterred even after his barely-disguised vent.
“...Yes,” he admitted. He looked over at Sand Devil, “Are you also trying to get an island vacation out of me?”
“Of course,” she admitted without a shred of shame. “But I’m not an idiot. I don’t plan to sign up for your plans of world domination just because you may manage to help us take down the Starlight Squad. Unlike her, boredom doesn’t compel me to leap headfirst into danger.”
“Oka-”
“Which is why I need you to sign these first, assuming we succeed today of course,” Sand Devil fished into her chest, her arm sinking elbow deep into the inky blackness of her dress, and pulled out a stack of papers. Wisps of darkness from her dress peeled away from them as she offered the whole thing to Alex.
“What the fuck is this?” he asked, gobsmacked, while accepting them on instinct. He quickly glanced over them.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
The stack… no, the fucking unbound tome of velum pages was covered in precise and sharply penned text that appeared to be written in a tar-like ink which seemed to devour the light around it. Each word felt like it sucked him down deeper into the sentence his eyes passed over, only the period at the end releasing his attention from the knife-like lettering as though he’d managed to rip himself away from grasping tendrils. The pages themselves felt warm to the touch. Wait, Alex was wearing gloves... How the fuck did the pages feel warm?
“It’s an infernal contract,” Sand Devil explained casually. “You don’t have to sign it now, and in fact I’d rather you didn’t. While page 43 maintains the stipulation that this contract is only valid if we succeed here today, it reflects better on both of us if you read over this and fully understand the terms of the contract, as well as make any modifications you need. You’ll then need to finalize any of my counter offers and we’ll need to finalize in synchronicity.”1
“What do you want me to do with this right now?” he asked incredulously. “We’re about to go into a fight!”
Sand Devil rolled her eyes, “Like all infernal contracts, it’s bound to you for the next thirty days upon touching it. You can just fling it away and recall it at a later point.”
Alex turned his head over to Turnaround who mimed flinging her hand outwards. He decided to mimic her and let the brick of papers scatter into the air… only for all of them to kind of just end up shuffling around near their feet.
He looked back over at the villainesses, hoping his confusion was understandable even through the mask.
“Give it a second,” Sand Devil assured him. “It’ll disappear.”
The four of them watched the papers as a few tumbled in a soft breeze that came through.
“Um…”
“Just give it a second.”
“Hey, D, did you do it right?”
“Shut up, of course I did it right.”
A few more seconds passed.
Right as Sand Devil was about to say something, the pages all began to fade into curling wisps of smoke, which earned a cheer from the four villains watching. Alex turned back to look at the others.
“So you guys are really on board?”
“Once you get something truly running, sure, give us a call,” Turnaround told him. “If Terror is vouching for you, I’m willing to try out working on something like this for a bit.”
“I… uh, haven’t met Terror yet,” Alex lied. “Just Celestial. She’s signed on as my mad scientist.”
“Eh, still works,” Turnaround seemed nonplussed. “From what I’ve heard from T, that short one is trustworthy enough, so it’s more of me trusting T to trust her to trust you.”
“I, however, will be trusting to words of the contract,” Sand Devil piped up. “I’m no fae when it comes to contracts, so what is laid out will be the exact terms expected.”
“Okay, but why are you doing this?” Alex wondered.
“The same reasons as Turnaround,” Sand Devil seemed confused by his question. “I agree with your ambitions and feel my schedule is open to accommodating them, for the right negotiated fee. I feel that your vision of a conquered world is quite interesting to imagine, as it would involve the defeat of several of this world’s supposed champions and the acquisition of a large amount of material wealth. As I stated, I am no fae, so my reasoning here is quite sound. No moon logic here.”
She suddenly took on a serious expression, “Ah, sorry, I don’t know if you’re a Junean or if that phrase would be offensive if you were.”
“I don’t think it is,” Alex shrugged.2 “And no, I’m human.”
“Good,” Sand Devil seemed satisfied.
Alex still wasn’t sure he was entirely on board with the two of them forcibly joining his party but he assumed the more allies early on the better. Probably? He could at least see why they were joining up, even if Alex got the feeling that both of these two seemed the type to go with the flow of things. That didn’t exactly bode well for whatever happened when the League figured out who he was and put a very public bounty on his head, but maybe their antipathy towards the old villain country club was enough to keep them loyal?
No… better get more flush with cash and make sure to buy that loyalty outright.
As Alex stewed on all of this, the four villains gradually let the conversation slowly die out as they waited around.
--------------------------------------------------
It hadn’t even been twenty minutes of waiting and yet Turnaround had already pulled out four of the most bizarre attempts at conversation starters Alex had ever heard in his life. He checked his clock as the conversation fizzled away once more after being forced to awkwardly tiptoe around whatever the fuck kind of question her last attempt had been. Her attempt at playing “Would you rather?” went into some truly bizarre places with incredibly creative superpowers with horrific drawbacks matched against each other. Alex didn’t think he’d ever look at shapeshifting the same way again.
Sadly, his clock still read thirty minutes until the expected meet up. Too much time for someone as creative as her.
“Hey,” Turnaround began once more.
Alex braced himself but made no move to respond, wishing he had whatever ability to vanish from conversations that Val seemed to possess. He reflected that he was truly worried at the prospect that she might drive away whatever minion group he’d manage to recruit in the future if he left her loose in the breakroom he’d allocate to them.
“Yeah?” Sand Devil answered.
“You ever wonder why we’re here?”
Mercifully a honk interrupted this thrilling addition to the topics they’d been discussing and the group looked up to see Celestial driving a thoroughly used and abused moving van slowly towards them.
“Okay, that’s Starsilk,” Alex noted. “Now we’re just waiting on Val.”
“I was here a few seconds after you,” the speedster spoke up for the first time since she’d arrived.
“FUCK!” came three separate voices as they all jumped.
“I rang this bell and everything…” Val gestured at the tiny object attached to her neck, a new addition to the costume.
Turnaround recovered quicker than the rest as she guffawed, “I said we should stick a bell on you, not a collar! Girl, did you have that lying around?”
Val’s face went bright red and it looked like the speedster was about to bolt before the van came to a stop and Celestial disappeared below the dash. Alex peered around but didn’t spot Terror swooping in from nearby. Granted she could be incredibly stealthy when she wanted to be, and he wasn’t the only one with a spotty record of actually noticing her when she was trying for a stealthy approach. It was part of the reason she was in charge of handling either Sun Light or Commander Cosmic on this job.
There was a flash of emerald light from the back of the van and Alex heard the doors back there open.
Unfolding out from the rear doors was Terrorantula in all her glory. Her brilliant white hair gleamed in the late morning sun, forming a halo around her masked face as she fluidly moved over to them. Her slender legs carried her across the distance of the van in a few steps, moving in perfect motion as her sable eyes flowed over the assembled villains, drinking them in. Her upper body glided through the air as the spider form below carried her forward, her dark costume hugging her humanoid curves. She smiled at the group, her lips parting to reveal dangerous yet enticing fangs as her taloned fingers absently played with a few strands of hair that danced in front of her face.
Hey, brain or whatever organ we’re thinking with right now? It’s Alex here. Could we not fucking do this right now? We’re trying to both be over her and not be a creep after she rejected us. Keep this shit professional.
He nodded a greeting to her, still not sure there was a right moment to come clean on who he was but one hundred percent sure now, right before this mission, was not it. He had wanted to talk with Celestial about this whole crazy coincidence as soon as possible and maybe let her pass along the news, but she’d basically pushed him out of the lab the moment the previous meeting at Starsilk’s lab was over to do last minute adjustments and hadn’t let him get a word in edgewise this morning. She’d practically thrown his gear at him in her rush to load up the van in front of them and Alex hadn’t seen Starweaver around on his way into the lab, dodging Terrorantula while he didn’t have his new suit on just in case she recognized his civilian outfit even with the bandanna over his face.
“Alright, you’re all here,” Terror noted. “I’m sorry that means most of you had to deal with Turnaround for however long you were waiting.”
“Hey, Riftmaster here is my bestie now!” Turnaround protested, slinging an arm around his shoulder. That prompted a lot of guilty feelings for some reason but Terror just rolled her eyes and moved on with barely any acknowledgments it had happened. Meanwhile he corrected the villainess on the name and extracted himself from her grip.
“Right, so, first up, let’s go through some last minute details,” Terrorantula immediately launched into the plan with the professionalism that he knew from her, reminding him a lot of Starweaver. Alex imagined those two were probably friends behind the scenes at Starsilk.
“Starting out,” she beckoned them all back to the van she emerged from. “You’ll notice that we brought along a linked teleporter to the lab. Celestial just got it set up and that’s how I got here, so we know it works.”
The back of the van was a spiderweb of cabling, metal framing, and assorted technology all spreading out from a large circular platform bolted to the van’s floor, barely large enough to accommodate the large spider villain. Lights built into it glowed ominously, bathing the whole van in toxic green light.
“This is how we’ll be offloading the loot, but in the worst case scenario, you can make your way back here if the ripcord fails. Like we covered, it’s way cheaper to port you back this way than it is to use the ripcord but way riskier. I’ll say this once: If you lead a hero back with you, I will kill you myself.”
She glared at the assembled villains, none of whom visibly quaked under her gaze but all knew the stakes. Not even Turnaround cracked a joke at this. Someone trailing them back here would no doubt mean the end of Starsilk itself, either by capturing Celestial or gaining access to the lab and being able to trace them, so Terror would absolutely not be kidding about wanting revenge for that. This was risky but honestly probably the best way to move half a warehouse full of tech, science projects, and off the book funds across the city. Alex noticed what appeared to be a jury rigged cloaking device bolted to the van’s ceiling, so it wasn’t as though the van would be immediately obvious to any onlookers from afar but if heroes got too close then the jig would be up.
The villainess grabbed a tablet hanging against the wall of the van, previously camouflaged among various bits of tech creeping across every surface, and tapped away at it. A ping alerted Alex that he’d just received a message. Opening it in his heads up display revealed a sewer map nearby, clearly taken from the city’s administration. Turnaround and Sand Devil glanced at phones that seemed to be showing the same thing.
“If you have to flee on foot, here’s your way out,” she told them. “You can see there’s an entrance nearby here and one a little way from the job location. P.H.O.T.O.N.’s warehouse itself sits over a small maze you can use to shake a tail. Word from Vandal is that the staff actually know of a secret entrance to smuggle some things in and out of the facility itself, so that’s probably inside the damn base but unfortunately the exact location didn’t make it to her ears. All in all, that should guarantee at least three exits since we will be going with the funnel plan, assuming the heroes don’t make their own holes for us.”
The team had debated it and come to the conclusion that attempting to funnel in the Starlight Squad in through a small hole was probably the best way to kick off the fight, so the group was going to cut their way in through the side. It wasn’t a guarantee since heroes really liked to Chill Drink Man their way inside buildings that villains holed up in,3 but roughly half the time they’d take the bait. This was especially of self assured heroes who were overly confident that they could handle most threats.
The main entrance was a large set of hanger doors into the facility that they’d open up only after they’d lured in the heroes. They would be opting to leave it open at that point just in case they needed a quicker escape, and it would also let Val have two exits to keep moving their prizes out of the place while the rest tussled with the heroes.
“As for the heroes…” Terror bit her bottom lip. “Good news, bad news. Good news is that we got Sun Light.”
While both of them were your standard Flying Brick with Beams,4 Sun Light was the less experienced of the two and had a lot more anger issues the team planned to exploit. Well, allegedly Commander Cosmic was getting a lot easier to provoke these days but the team still was a little more confident they could outwit a teenager than her middle-aged dad. That also meant the funnel method was more likely to work since younger heroes with something to prove but under a lot of scrutiny tended to want try to avoid breaking down walls at places they were hired to defend, even if it was better for shock and awe tactics. Not a guarantee since young heroes were also hotshots who loved to make entrances, but with all the apparent fighting going on for the Starlight Squad, chances were good that Sun Light was less likely to crush walls to open the fight.
“Bad news is that we got the combination we didn’t want: Reflecta and Orbit.”
The team groaned. While they’d run through multiple hypothetical game plans quite a few times, the fact remained that their best defense against Reflecta was either Riftmaker or Sand Devil obscuring her. Both of those methods meant the hero herself wasn’t going to be visible to anyone else. Devil could apparently keep track of her if she was the one trapping the hero, somehow able to pinpoint her in the sandstorm she’d create, but a quick test had revealed that her demonic sand ran hot enough to mess with Alex’s thermal visuals in his helmet. Meanwhile Alex’s smoke grenades were a little too quick to disperse to lock her down for long, and no one else could see through the smoke unassisted.
Speaking of thermal sight, Celestial didn’t even have the thermal visors to spare for the whole team to keep eyes on her regardless of which method they used, meaning whoever blinded her was the one responsible for keeping track of her. Instead, the team just had a few sets of night vision goggles which Starsilk was providing, all of which sported a small amount of built in blindness prevention so the two light based heroes wouldn’t instantly blind them. These were part of the ambush plan even if they weren’t going to do much good once the fighting began in earnest, hopefully earning their cost back.
As for the other hero, while Orbit would have a bitch of a time dealing with lasers, that whole plan assumed Riftmaker could keep pressure on him. That would’ve been a lot easier if he’d been paired up with Wavelength who the team could shut down more effectively. So someone definitely needed to keep Reflecta under control or else there was going to be a risk that Turnaround would need to deal with reflected lasers in addition to the hero’s own light based attacks, all the while Orbit would be free to harass the rest of the team. Oh, and this combination also meant that if anyone did call for back up, Space Racer was still a threat on the board to worry about.
The team looked between each other, all of them evaluating the situation. It was going to be risky and depended heavily on the villains getting the jump on the heroes in order to put as much pressure onto them as possible. Hell, it was almost worth scrubbing the mission over and trying again the next day.
Terror sensed their trepidation, “I still think we’ve got this in the bag and I’m worried that the roster won’t be any different if we come back tomorrow. Apparently this was what they ran with yesterday as well according to Vandal. All in all, Turnaround, this comes down to you. You think you can help Devil keep Reflecta contained?”
Everyone turned to regard the villain in question. Oddly, it looked like the pressure of being singled out actually seemed to relax her as opposed to piling on the stress. She grinned and gave a mocking salute, “Oh, absolutely.”
Reflecta’s battle strategies were heavily based around her mirrors. If Sand Devil could keep her blind and Turnaround could yank away her control, the two could probably take her out quickly enough. That made her the primary target, as much the weak link as the one who could cause the most damage if left unattended. Once Reflecta was down or at least battered enough, one of the two could peel off and help Alex with Orbit or even get in some good hits on Sunlight while Terror kept her busy. And if Reflecta turned out to put up a little more of a fight than expected, Turnaround could at least make sure that the blaster was just as dangerous to her allies as she was to Terror’s group of villains.
Alex was a little leery about having to trust so much of the plan to the villainess who barely seemed to take any of these meetings seriously, but his doubts began to evaporate as he saw her expression harden as she mentally prepared for the fight. It was like someone else had stepped into her costume as the woman’s steely eyes locked onto his faceplate.
“Alright, then. We’re going to go with the plan we came up for this trio then. Once we’re inside, I’ll set up things to keep Sun Light busy no matter the entrance. The rest of you will clear whoever didn’t bother to come greet us and get Val started on making her deliveries. Celest...ial, set up communications.”
The scientist appeared out of the window of the van and smiled, “Already done. I’m getting drones ready for monitoring now.”
She tossed a small fabric case to Terrorantula before disappearing again. The spider villain distributed the earbuds it contained to Turnaround, Sand Devil, and Velocity Val. Riftmaker blink-activated a flashing icon and was keyed into the communication band.
“Right,” Terror flashed a wicked grin. “Let’s go beat the shit out of Icon and start making money.”
1. Infernal contracts are literally living documents that are shared between those bound by its power. Before the document is finalized, both parties can make adjustments to it and it’s common for negotiations to happen without either ever meeting one another, communicating entirely through the contract.
2. It would be considered mildly offensive.
3. Chill Drink Man was a corporately sponsored hero representing the Chill Co product line with a propensity for property destruction.
4. Flying Bricks with Beams is a colloquialism referring to a rather interesting intersection of powers, of flight, enhanced durability, super strength, and some form of energy attack. Sometimes referred to as a Wonder Clone, Orion Lite, Classic Cape, or the Mr. Diabolic Special. Many theories abound about why this combination of powers shows up so often in the superpowered world.
