Ikor flipped off the whole group of fuckers hanging behind him as he stepped out of Footprint’s Fall. The glares from the locals told him they thought that bird was meant for them. They were a bunch of grade A fucking idiots, but at least they weren’t dumbass punks like the guys Over Seer had him wrangling for this little display.
Those chucklefucks were currently poking the bear thinking that the League was gonna take their side once Victory’s villains finally had enough. It was amazing that people got so used to places like Victory and Seasmeet being full of crooks that played with the kiddie gloves on that they’d forget that at any point they could toss those off and get just as bloody as shit gets in Orion or Crowns.1 Or maybe they just thought that the big guys would come to their rescue the moment someone snapped? Whatever… They’d learn soon enough that the League only really gave a shit if you were sitting in one of their fancy chairs, a lesson he’d been reminded of the past couple weeks. He’d spent the time slumming it in a cardboard fort, hoping that no good-natured prick would swing by and try and pull his green ass away to get him help. That shit would end with the Arrestors slapping a collar on his neck he couldn’t slip out of. The whole thing left him quite disillusioned about where he stood.
When Over Seer had needed him, she’d shown up out of the blue right on his fucking doorstep, but gods forbid she pick up any of his fucking calls to have someone portal him away. No, he’d had to try begging Vandal for two weeks for a ride out of here. Okay, it wasn’t like he had the cash on him for that. So actually he’d been trying to get her to help him throw together a team for a quick job first, then he’d toss that shit her way to sneak him out of this city.
She should’ve been honored to take over where The Broker had, yanking some chains to get shit done, but apparently she’d had some kind of beef with the League which she decided to take out on him. Ikor knew the feeling but fuck her for leaving him with his balls hanging out in the breeze.
Well he was laughing in the end. Over Seer had been gentle, all things considered, but Vandal had learned what it meant to be top of the small pile and refuse League jobs after the magician had paid little Miss Eyes a visit. Still, Ikor couldn’t even really take pleasure in that, much as he wished he could. The brat had been nothing but annoying as shit, but she wasn’t the real reason he was trapped here.
That was Maniacal’s stupid plan and the rest of the League hanging him out to dry all because he had the smarts to not try and fuck around when the heroes got their second wind. If either Stormfury or Baron Zen had just kept their shit together, someone might’ve figured the risk for pulling two midlevel asses out of the fire would’ve been worth it.
But no, Ikor, despite having a clean fucking record with the League and even helping Maniacal out with some of his crackpot experiments, got left out to fend on his own while the top brass figured out such a brilliant strategy as “attack everywhere at once”. Three fucking weeks of living like a fucking sewer rat so the guys at the top could showboat.
He glanced back at the speakeasy in the crater left over from a kaiju attack a couple decades back, feeling nostalgic. He wasn’t a native of this shitty little town but the only reason he’d been able to dodge the heroes for three weeks was thanks to how long he’d spent here. Over the years, he’d picked up work for the overcooked doctor to help fuck up some heroes so the egghead could pick fights with the Aurora Champions. Spent a lot of time in bars like that one – hell that was nicer than most of the ones he usually slummed at – palling around with the geeks and freaks here. More time than he’d spent with any of these little shits that had been shipped in to piss them off. Ikor couldn’t help but feel like he was on the wrong side of this particular pissing match.
Plus, Over Seer hadn’t bothered tossing him one of those teleporter belts either. Fucking bitch… So what if the last couple voice mails he’d left were a little… less than professional. Wasn’t like she didn’t cuss him out sometimes. Ugh… at the very least he wasn’t going to be sleeping like a fucking vagrant anymore.
Ikor slipped into an alleyway to get off the street. With the safehouses now up and running, this way of navigating the city no longer felt like he was scurrying around like a frightened mouse. It was more like dodging in the shadows like a ninja or some shit. He was being stealthy because he was on the hunt, not hiding! This was about being powerful at exactly the right moment.
Still, for someone supposedly on the winning side, he was still left longing for an actual bed at the end of his walk, rather than the shitty cot they’d set him up with. He noticed that none of the big guys Over Seer had told him would be running around were crashing at a repurposed mattress store like he was. Actually, neither was she to his knowledge.
He sighed and continued slipping through the shadows, using his body’s unnatural movements to stretch and compress. The slime comprising him allowed him to dodge out of the sight of some cameras set up throughout the alleys and back lots as well as slip through some fences that tried to block his path. The most difficult part was making sure his clothes could make it through with him. More than a few gaps were just too small unless he wanted to be a nudist, and godsdammit he’d already dealt with enough shit in this fucking body. Sure, if he actually wanted then he could just walk straight through a chain-link fence, but only if he was willing to walk around without his pants. In a fight, he might be willing to do the whole “amorphous blob with a head and hands” thing but strolling down the street? Nah, that shit was too weird. So what if he could make it so that he was smoother than a fucking doll below his waist, he’d take the extra walking if it meant he could keep his specially tailored digs.
Course, that meant a few routes back to the safehouse didn’t pan out. He could only stretch so far and not lose his shoes if he wanted to make it over a fence. Though after the third time having to double back to find another way when some alley dead ended into someone’s shitty fucking fence, Ikor’s already soured mood was beginning to curdle.
So of fucking course it started raining.
He grumbled and threw his hood over his head, feeling his viscous body already beginning to absorb the dirty water as it splashed against him, sapping his body heat as the frigid liquid made its way through him. Tons of things bugged him about this body he’d gotten courtesy of standing too close to a bunch of colorful liquids on a badly assembled shelf when he’d been a janitor at some lab or another, but the worst part out of all of it was dealing with the fact that it would slurp up whatever water it touched. The fact that he could feel the temperature difference under what should be his skin bugged the shit out of him.
He paused at the edge of another alleyway, watching some civvies bitch and moan as the storm started to come down harder. The villain considered for a second. If he waited a little longer, most dipshits would be off the street in this downpour. That meant he could abandon the backroads and just dash to the safehouse. He eyed the sky to judge the clouds, wondering if he’d be willing to put up with this.
Where the fuck were the clouds? Yeah there were a few overhead but not enough for th-
He was slammed against the wall hard enough to lose his form. He had to reform his face just to figure out what fucker had the gall to-
A glowing spear hissed against the raindrops, fingers of electricity leaping off it to sting Ikor’s exposed chest.
“Fuck me, it wasn’t Tempest Team…” Ikor sighed. “Why the fuck are you here?”
The Stormdaughter said nothing, just casually held the pointed stick near enough to him to keep fucking zapping him. Despite her easy stance, her golden eyes were fixed in a glare while her teeth ground against one another.
Finally, she spoke up, “Tell me everything the League knows.”
“Easy: Jack and shit,” Ikor rolled his freshly reconstituted eyes.
The bitch stabbed him.
Not like his body cared about getting cut these days, but her fucking Unending Storm bullshit really didn’t agree with his body and he hit the ground gasping for air that he shouldn’t fucking need.
She quickly retracted it. Far quicker than she’d done so in any of the fights they’d had in the past.
Got it, we’re playing “nice,” Ikor realized and tried to match her as a courtesy.
“I’m being honest,” Ikor wheezed, not for the first time wondering what his body was doing with the air he bothered to breath in. Apparently he just passively absorbed what he needed from the air or even water around him, so as far as anyone could tell, this shit was just a lifelong habit he’d yet to break. He continued before Stormy got to round 2. “Over Seer’s special informant dropped the ball and she’s pissed about that. All we got is an old number and some fake ass name. Robert something.”
“Roger. Stevens,” she hissed.
“Bitch, if you already know-” was all he managed to say before pancaking into the wall. That didn’t hurt but it compressed all the air out of his… whatever he had instead of lungs. Made it fucking difficult to talk.
“Who are you about to go after?” she asked as he reformed on the ground.
“I’m just here to cause trouble for a bit,” he told her. No use trying to keep secrets this damn obvious. “It’s the big guys that are going around and poking shit.”
She took a step towards him and he held up his hands, “Look, Seer’s hitting up her buddy tonight. Getting some last things ironed out. Location’s need-to-know and I ain’t on that list. Everyone else who isn’t a fucking grunt’s gonna be chatting with the people who know things: the Nightmare Cult,2 sewer people, Fencer, even the fucking mayor if they can get to him.”
He saw her face flicker. She was thinking something behind those golden eyes, but whatever the fuck it could be was beyond Ikor.
“Which of them would know something?” she demanded.
Ikor shook his head, “I don’t fucking know! Fuck, I mean, Fencer probably. At least he’s probably gonna be the most cooperative. Fucker’ll be honest if he knows shit or not. Everyone else might play pretend to get the League off their back if they think it’ll help, but Fencer’ll only say he knows shit if he actually knows shit.”
For some reason that set her off. She howled in rage for some godsdamn reason and Ikor was flying down the alley once more. Slamming off some debris, he rolled himself upright and prepared for whatever fight was about to occur.
However, when he looked around, the massive Vikor god lady was gone. A scorch mark on the ground was the only evidence that she’d been there.
---------------------------------
Fresh out of his shower, Ned plopped down into his trusty old chair and stretched backwards to grab his ham and cheese out of the toaster oven he really shouldn’t be keeping in here. He smiled as he took a bite, now the perfect temperature after just enough time to cool in the still-warm box. He realized as he placed it on the plate he’d tossed down before the shower that he missed Baxter. Sure, he could leave food around without worrying the furry menace would steal it while he was busy, but the cat had his moments when he’d snuggle up to you in the most naked attempt at begging for whatever you were eating in times like these. He sighed and assured himself that the furry critter was in a better place, but it still kind of hurt.
He shifted his attention to the mass of computer monitors that totally didn’t read as the virtual equivalent of owning a corkboard and string. His leg bounced away like crazy as he relived the day’s events. From the near fight with Cosmic over Terrorantula to the League’s big power play. He sighed. Should’ve been prepared for the League to do something like this, but darn, he was at least hoping that they’d leave the heroes enough room to radio backup from Orion.
Gods, some days he truly wished the Spider Spirit had bestowed its magic powers upon a different youth on the eighth eclipse of that fateful year. Still, there was no use bemoaning his fate. Time to start up some preparations. That would be especially important with half the Starlight Squad in medpods for the next few days. Heck, Orbit might be a few days more given his babbling.
There came an itch at that thought, stopping him as he was preparing to open up some files on the League. It was something Ned couldn’t quite place as he plugged in his mask to upload the footage from it.
Like with every night, he needed to run this through a couple automatic redaction programs he’d gotten set up to make sure that even if his hidden servers were ever found, no one would learn any of the true secrets he carried with him. That would take care of most of it, but he also input some special directions based off a few of the things he remembered which needed to be addressed. Nix the faces off his injured coworkers, scramble any audio when someone used a real name, straight up delete the part where Azure chewed him out over hacking Amberheart, and go ahead and track down that moment where he was fairly sure Reflecta did something that might out her as not being human. If she really was a Junean, it wasn’t like there was anything wrong with that, but maybe this was like a whole extra level of secret identity?3
Ugh, this was tedious but it sometimes paid off. Keeping records like this let him pull up conversations he’d overheard and really ponder those in these quiet moments. It also let him bring up Orbit, clearly high as a kite, and laugh a little as the other hero was barely making it through his sentences. This was a lot funnier when you weren’t trying to sneak out of the room before a teenager tries to rope you into propaganda for Azure’s run for class president.
That itch returned as he watched the footage. He paused it after Orbit’s second time telling the story about this new villain, Riftmaker.
“...actual gods[bleep] gravitors…”
This was it. Whatever little clawing feeling was tickling his brainstem was about this. Why did Ned remember something about gravitors? Was it something to do with how Orbit got his powers or…?
Ned plopped open his archive and tabbed through video files to see if anything jogged his memories. He paused his redactions to let another program run to try and search for mentions of “gravitors”. This setup was good, but it wasn’t quite built for running two simultaneous processes scouring through this much video data. He got an immediate result from a few weeks back but let the program continue to run just in case while he pulled up that night.
This was the night Maniacal died… That was a little ominous but Ned struggled to remember anything of note happening then. Nevertheless, he opened it up and found the highlighted segment. He leapt the replay to a few minutes before that.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Right… he was sitting outside that corner store watching that guy, Iron Menace, botching his robbery while the thickset Atlanthean was doing what a lot of Victory’s citizens did when low level villains came knocking. Ned had plugged into the security cameras to see what he was working with and had listened through their crusty audio as the guy announced his weapon.
“It’s a gravitor gauntlet!” the crunchy recording of Menace shouted petulantly and Ned was amazed that his program had actually recognized the word through the dirt poor sound quality. He’d need to pat himself on the back for that.
Ned paused the video as a thought seized him. Leaving his search program running, he did a quick search on gravitor generators, feeling like he remembered something. Sure enough, a few minutes of casual web browsing (ha!) explained the odd feeling while rewatching that. Apparently, miniaturizing these things was an absolute nightmare that hadn’t actually been figured out officially.
“‘Cyclical Draschev fission compounds as the coils are condensed,’” Ned read the dry paragraph over just to see if he understood it correctly. “‘…causing meltdowns which ruin the internal components.’ Well, clearly, someone figured it out, because we’ve got two villains running around with them.”
He looked at the dummy on footage and immediately dismissed the idea that he could’ve somehow solved a major hurdle in particle physics. No, this read as the kind of thing where some new tech head is trying to show off how smart they were by really getting their name out there. Maybe some lab?
This was a longshot but Ned decided to look up some old footage of Menace, wondering if he could figure out when this guy had started using these things. If he could nail a timeframe, there was a chance he could maybe figure out if anyone had moved anything through Victory and try and find the supplier. Heck, Ned figured he could probably request access to the glove that he’d sent the Arrestors a note to grab from that night when he’d mistakenly stuck Menace to the wall and see what was inside it. That could help narrow the search.
Both of these things required using one of his backdoors into Amberheart’s files. Azure had given him the third degree today and he’d agreed to shut down the one intercepting comms that the tippy top used, but the one he had set up to go through old case files had paid too many dividends of cracking cases late at night for him to give it up. Besides, the link was secure enough. He was even using his own logins for this, so it wasn’t really hacking. Just… remote working without authorization.
The moment he was connected, Ned threw out a quick search for the villain in question and tapped his fingers as the connection took a bit to get the results back to him. Despite the hardware over there being better, this patch job meant he was moving at the speed of the actual communication between his setup here and their servers there. Once they finally came in, Ned threw the results to another screen and started to zip through it, not looking for anything more than whatever archival footage would pop up.
Huh… It kind of looked like he’d been using these for awhile. Like… a long while. Like… a really, really, really long while? What the heck?
Ned frowned and watched one instance of the man firing off a huge blast with one of those, throwing himself off balance. He watched the footage a second time and then quickly opened a new window to look up the footage from the P.H.O.T.O.N. warehouse.
The two villains could not look more dissimilar. Menace’s red and black outfit was mostly spandex, the most interesting thing that goofy, kinda skull like mask, while Riftmaker was decked head to toe with green power armor and looked more like something out of a mecha anime. And yet, if you ignored Menace struggling with the recoil, the way the two leveled their arms before a shot…
Ned looked back to the collection of files on Menace and noticed that there was nothing tagged after the date of Maniacal’s death. Then he chuckled, remembering the last thing Menace and him had been talking about.
“Well, looks like you and Terror managed to patch things up,” he shook his head. “I’d say ‘good for you’ if doing so didn’t involve you two beating up my coworkers. Looks like I need to teach you two a lesson before someone else does.”
Lyn’s sudden escalation had been a rather unpleasant cherry on top of an already rancid crime wave. Of all his antagonists, he’d thought she had actually been the closest to reforming after getting her new body. He’d actually been proud to see her wandering around, living her Delf dreams. But now, instead, she’d gathered up a whole new super team and put Sun Light and the others in the hospital. He needed to thump this on the head as soon as possible or she really would be carted away by the Arrestors the next time she lost a fight. They might be able to get her help, sure, but he’d spent ten years trying on this and it felt wrong to let someone else step in now. Besides, he’d seen how she tried to stand up for the people she cared about. There was something good buried in her, even if Ned had his own bitemarks and a stockpile of antivenom to prove that whoever had buried that had definitely used an excavator.
He brought up the warehouse footage and began to study it more, making mental notes on what “Riftmaker” could do. About eight minutes in, he had to pause and start moving frame by frame, something itching his brainstem again.
Ned bit his lip and paused his search program, realizing he’d need the full power of his operating system if he was going to be juggling this many tasks. Besides, he already knew which video he needed from the archive. He was intimately familiar with this footage. Clicking on the folder he’d pinned to his desktop after realizing he’d be spending hours rewatching it, he found the video in question, along with a couple more he’d smuggled a copy of off Amberheart’s database. If Azure was mad at him for eavesdropping, the man was going to blow a gasket if he discovered this particular breach of protocol. He queued those up in their own little viewers and shoved them to the side, instead opening up the recording he’d salvaged out of his suit before having to rebuild it.
Tech Crash flipped an arm around and nailed his leg with one of his cables with a blind fire. That was the same one that Energy Lad had been wrapped up in. On another screen displaying more footage from the depot, Riftmaker tangled up a security guard in a similar trap. That didn’t prove anything. After all, Ned had clocked all of Tech Crash’s kit that was left behind as the type of stuff that you could find available from various suppliers around this city. Still…
Ned pulled one of those videos he’d hidden on screen over top of his chase footage. It was from the armored car Crash had robbed. Officially he didn’t have this and once again imagined Azure’s reaction. Shaking his head, he started it up while moving the P.H.O.T.O.N. footage up.
In it, Tech Crash approached the armored car and a set of four lasers sprang from his torso and carved apart the 284 Ironwheel’s rubber. On another screen, Riftmaker continued to nail Orbit with beams of light, tiny emitters coming out of hatches on the man’s chest plate. Again… not conclusive. This literally could just be the same supplier. Just…
Ned closed the armored car footage, revealing the chase video behind it. He cautiously fast forwarded up to that one moment he’d kept coming back to with every rewatch. It was the one part of that particular night that haunted him, where everything had gone wrong. As he did so, he moved the other screen’s action to the point where Riftmaker had tossed blue gel all over himself and started bouncing around all over the gosh darn place.
In the first footage, Tech Crash suddenly vanished sideways in the direction his arm was pointed, when Ned had expected him to instead recoil away, throwing off that chase. He’d studied that moment obsessively, trying to figure out the trick. It was too fast for a grapple hook and the man had shot sideways so quickly. It hadn’t made any sense! On the other screen, Riftmaker navigated the air with gravitor gauntlets, sometimes to bounce away, while other moments it looked like he was grappling through the air as he recovered from an attack on Orbit. Then came the moment where Orbit tried something as the villain sailed towards him. The two both abruptly flew towards one another, clearly disorienting the hero.
Ned moved the footage around and paused both as he saw the villains extend their arms outwards and he looked at the bulky bracers. He had the footage play in slowmotion and watched the “barrel” of both of the large gauntlets begin to take on a slightly purplish hue. The same one.
It wasn’t conclusive, but everything was screaming one thing to Ned. He looked at the hoverboots, the smaller gas cans that Riftmaker was throwing, even the visible underweave that he could make out from the gaps in the armor. It was all the exact same gadgets.
Ned bet if he ran the few voice samples he had of both of these two and threw in Menace’s from his other recording, he knew what the results would be if he adjusted things even slightly.
Looks like Riftmaker wasn’t the first redesign for Menace! Turns out, Ned owed him quite a bit more than just a stern talking to on behalf of the Starlight Squad. Man… talk about a funny coincidence that almost everyone in that hospital room today had unresolved business with this “new” villain and no one knew it. The guy had dodged Ice Hawk and Ned, ruined Aegis’s museum contract, and throughly ruined Azure’s week, and here he was doing something like this again.
“Lyn, you sure know how to pick them,” he muttered. “I think he got the name right the first time. What a menace…”
He brought up the one video of Tech Crash’s he’d readied but hadn’t bothered playing just yet, figuring he might as well add it to his homework for tonight. It looked like most of the guy’s new gear was based off this iteration rather than his Menace costume, so it would probably help him figure out if there were any other surprises he had to be ready for as well as any weakness he could exploit.
“Besides heat,” he chuckled as he looked back at the warehouse fight, realizing why the villain had dumped a bunch of cooling gel all over himself. “Don’t need to cause him to blow up like Blazeshot did.”
He idly noted as he compared the video of the museum to the depot that the villain had clearly ditched the gas launcher. No doubt his gravitors were still running too hot, even without a fire heroine smacking on them, for the man to feel comfortable with having explosives in them. Ned would need to keep that in mind and pick a place for their fight where the inevitable meltdown wouldn’t damage anything important or hurt anyone.
He brought up the articles about the gravitor generators again to figure out what kind of blast radius he could expect, figuring he’d probably need to do some napkin math from that, minus the missing gas cans, to get a better picture.
Something about the verbiage these were using bugged him, and he decided to see if there was any videos online of these things failing. People really liked recording and watching expensive explosions so there had to be something. And sure enough, there it was! A video of an attempted miniaturized gravitor generator sparking up, catching on fire… and melting.
Ned frowned and looked for another video. The name, “Why We Can’t Shrink Gravity Rays”, had aged poorly, but this one was a little more informative as it discussed the exponential increase to heat as the coils used to excite particles and form gravitors were shrunk ended up with the device eventually becoming so hot that it melted the coil and any electronic components nearby. The video itself displayed a prototype device without its casing slowly beginning to glow white hot and turn to toxic sludge.
There were a few sparks but they looked like…
Ned turned back to the chase footage and moved it to the point right before Crash, or Menace, had managed to give him the slip. The villain was slamming his hand against his remaining glove and it was letting out some sparks in response. Not nearly as drastic as the ones from the last video but the type of thing that Ned had learned from years of working on his own suit was definitely evidence that something under the hood was not going to be working the next day.
Then he realized that the sparks were white, not red.
Ned must’ve looked at half a dozen videos of expensive tech going up in flames after that and with each gravitor generator that met its end, a pit in his stomach opened wider and wider.
He remembered going through every single analysis of the infamous explosion he’d been able to get his hands on and as far as any expert could be sure, it had to have been Tech Crash’s glove that blew up. The footage had vindicated Spelljam even if the residual magic from the blast had painted a grim picture. And analysis of the few cans of Retch Gas on the scene had mostly exonerated Blazeshot from accidentally igniting it herself. That meant it had to be the gloves…
But the gloves didn’t work that way… and they didn’t spark red.
He pulled up the footage of that blast one more time from the file he shouldn’t have. He watched the electric discharge from the gauntlets and tried to see any evidence that there was a telsa shot or something there to explain it, but nothing stood out to him. And unfortunately, Tech Crash had left with most of the remains of his unlucky gloves.
Wait! Ned suddenly realized, almost standing up out of his chair with the revelation. We don’t have Tech Crash’s glove, but we might have Menace’s!
He’d sent the Arrestors a tip the night the two of them had crossed paths and he’d accidentally glued the villain’s arm to the wall, giving the man enough time to wiggle away if he did what the hero said and left the chunky tech behind.
Ned pinged Amberheart’s servers once more to see if he could get access to the evidence records from that night. He didn’t remember if he’d mentioned Menace by name, but the Arrestors should still have logged it as villain tech if they’d picked it up.
He got something back but it was not what he was expecting. A note from an overworked Arrestor who arrived on the scene to report that the only thing they found was half dissolved webbing. Ned frowned and checked the timestamp, initially quite upset that the villain containment agency had taken their time getting over there if they missed it by that long. His webs took hours if not almost a full day to disappear. They were enchanted by the eight legs of The Weaver of Justice, the giant spider from the ethereal plane who had blessed Ned’s bloodline after all.
No… the report was made just forty five minutes after Ned had logged it?
Ned swallowed as a tingle ran up his spine and he checked Menace’s records once more.
No arrests. Only warnings and no actions to follow up on by the heroes. No one had ever bothered to make this guy their problem, instead opting to treat him as a training tool for newbies.
Actually he popped up a fair couple times in some smaller team ups. A lot of times actually. There were so many villains he’d joined that went on to be important later on. And almost all the jobs being successful in some way. These were purposeful in-and-out missions that were more focused on grabbing something than fighting heroes.
At first, Ned sat there fuming, being proven right about how the heroes of this city’s refusal to focus on any villain “beneath them” had clearly come to bite them in the butt, just like he always knew it would. Sure, they couldn’t hold onto every Laser Badger or Wastrel if they wanted to still have the resources for keeping the big guys locked up, but this exact kind of oversight was exactly the kind of thing Azure was ignoring as he set his sights on trying to mimic Orion.
Sure heroes would be swapping notes and keeping in contact, but this was all about fighting big bads and being able to request back up when someone like the Starlight Squad got into a five on three. Nowhere in Big Blue’s plans was there anything about making sure that heroes check in on the small fries to make sure they weren’t escalating like Menace or Terror clearly were, and most heroes bristled at the idea that they’d be put on “babysitting” duties. Orion’s system funneled people to the top, but Orion had a reputation for its rough lower rungs. Heroes and villains with barely a mask and a name basically were free to duke it out as long as they were fighting each other “at their level”. You couldn’t have Maximillion stepping in to help stop a purse snatcher because he might be needed to help stop a rampaging Cyber Serpent across town.
Not to mention the system contextualized villains in terms of fighting them. Azure had been pushing all of this because of this looming fear that the city needed to be ready for a fight, but these villains, as flawed as they were, were still people! Ned had seen some of Orion’s files on its foes and not a single one listed anything about the person beneath the mask and how to try and help them. It was all “here’s what you need to fight them. They’re your enemy.”
No one would be asking “why did some guy like the Iron Menace spend ten years being hardly a threat to anyone only to suddenly start getting into big fights with heroes?”
Sure, Ned might be looking through these records, stretching all the way back to the middle of 2117, for hints on how to stop this guy. but only because he wanted to get to a point where he could talk to him. If he could knock the fight out of him, he might be able to get the guy help before someone else pointed out that the red lightning looked a little too familiar. If that happened, an Orion hero who was used to the system Azure was pushing for might prove Ned right on what that system encourages. All because the guy-
Ned looked at that early file again and froze. It was less than half a year since the OC3002116 incident. Then Menace appears on the scene.
“Why did some guy like the Iron Menace suddenly start getting into big fights with heroes… after Maniacal died?”
A picture began to form and Ned looked on in horror as all the windows on the screen formed a web with a single truth at its center.
He lacked anything approaching proof for this and lacked the courage to say it out loud, but in his heart he knew the truth that explained all the odd inconsistencies.
An overload that wasn’t a tech malfunction, but someone losing control of a newfound power.
Why Terror had suddenly escalated out of nowhere, perhaps even how she had a new body.
How some D-list villain somehow escaped his webs and left nothing behind.
Ned stared at this web and felt the face of an unseen mastermind at its center begin to form. If he was right, then this patient villain was enacting a plan over a decade in the making. One which could see all of Victory, if not the whole world, plunged into chaos.
pirates independent contractors who fly through space in dragon ships trying to rob liberate artifacts before a black hole dragon eats a planet, I'm writing as a warm up/cool down project, which has been especially useful this past week.
1. “Crowns” is a shorthand for “Crown Corinasus” the capital of the Atlanthean Empire. This city has remained the capital throughout dynasties for the last thousand years and is notable as having been made to allow the surface dwelling races to inhabit large swaths of the city. Political tensions have fostered a sizeable villain population in certain regions that are known to be significantly more violent than in most other cities.
2. The Cult of the Nightmare Wyrm is an occult organization that plagues many cities with particularly magic populations. Considered a villain organization by most hero guilds and governments, the cult tends not to get along with anyone due to their own nefarious goals.
3. Initially, the Junean’s ability to transform their oddly Cnidarian-like bodies into mimicries of the human form hatched many a conspiracy of alien invasion, leading to small stigma regarding Juneans who used less obvious humanoid forms. These days, as the Juneans have proven staunch allies against other extraterrestrial invasions, there is far less suspicion and doubt cast upon them for their shapeshifting nature.
