“Okay, when I said I was in before,” Turnaround awkwardly chuckled, “I might’ve spoken too soon.”

  Lyn fought the urge to massage her temples. This meeting had already been a mix of herding cats and enduring the full force of Sand Devil and Turnaround in the same room, so Turnaround’s jokes were beginning to grate on her. It had been almost a year since their last team-up so Lyn had forgotten that just about every single planning session where Turnaround sat in on involved a lot of her poking and prodding for attention. However, there’d been more than a couple jobs the two had been on together which had been heading south that the villainess managed to, well, turn around with her quick thinking on her feet and the creative use of her powers when it mattered. She was actually worth putting up with her buffoonery to have her on your side when the chips were down. Lyn had needed to remind herself of that fact a lot for the past half hour.

  “I’m not one to shy away from a fight,” Sand Devil delicately picked through her words, “but I do believe the Starlight Squad is a little… out of our league.”

  Val hastily nodded along while Cras- er, Riftmaker simply sat in silence, unreadable behind his mask. Lyn felt like she still had this in the bag, but the immediate lack of enthusiasm was a little disappointing to be honest. She’d at least expected Sand Devil to leap at the idea of tearing the Starlight Squad off its pedestal, and Turnaround had just, not even half an hour ago, been bitching about feeling like she got no respect in this town these days. She should be chomping at the bit to prove herself, not meekly backing off like a scared D-lister the first time they saw a hero.

  “Seriously, I know Rifty there is ambitious and honestly I kinda respect that,” Turnaround said with as much levity as it sounded like she could manage, “but the Squad’s kind of a big deal. Cutting our teeth on them might be a little… uh, suicidal? They’re, like, cosmic level, you know, fighting aliens and stuff? Like they probably should hang out in Orion, right? I mean, if you wanted us to fight the Elemental Aegis, or the Wild Warriors, or the Shielders that would be one thing, but you’re basically talking about six of Victory’s strongest heroes all at once.”

  No! Lyn watched as the mood of the room began to dip with every word that idiot was spouting. Sand Devil’s reluctance alone had been a major blow, but the multi-color villain’s hesitance was pouring gasoline on this fire. It was like her timidness was oozing outwards and visibly infecting the rest of the room. If she kept talking, the other three might seriously walk away before Lyn could hook them back.

  Frustrated, Lyn slammed a hand on the coffee table next to the tablet, startling everyone in the room. Good, she needed them focused on her and not on the class clown. Lyn needed this.

  She might’ve originally laughed off Riftmaker’s ambitions, but the earnestness of those had gone on to light a fire in her as the ripples started to form. Even before his ill-fated heist, the lab had started to transform, with a large machine starting to emerge from a pile of metal and electronics at the back of the room behind the stacks of servers as Celeste snuck away from her usual workbench to get a headstart on the villain’s eventual plans (before he was even aware of them). While Lyn had been almost bedridden for the first day after getting her new body, she had stared at that skeleton of steel and wires whenever she’d managed to leave her room, and slowly her initial plans to just do a smash and grab with a random group of villains had started to feel too small.

  She’d spent the rest of that day plotting and picking through the larger teams of Victory, carefully picking out who was famous enough for their fall to shake the foundations of this city. Then she sifted through what she could find about each of them, hunting for her victims. The pieces had begun to fall together as she trawled through online stories which led her towards the Starlight Squad, and then she’d found the perfect target in P.H.O.T.O.N.’s facility. It was the perfect bait, the perfect prize, and the perfect battlegrounds all in one.

  The final details had come together slower than she wanted as she tweaked and refined the plan every day for the past week and half, worried the entire time that the bounty would be posted and she’d be too late to execute it. Now, everything was in her grasp with all the pieces in place even if the villains in front of her didn’t realize it. If she could just have them listen for five fucking minutes and get them on board, then even if someone else walked away with that future bounty, Terrorantula would go from just another member of ArachNed’s villain gallery to a legend of Victory City.

  Not that she’d be the only one coasting on a massive win off this job. The goodies P.H.O.T.O.N. had stashed there added up to a bigger score than she let on, even if Lyn intended for most of the tech to end up in Celeste’s hands rather than fencing it. She had it on good authority that there was a collection of Junean alloys, Iota Isotopes, and more off-the-books projects hidden there too, though she’d held back on dangling the full manifest on the assumption that the team might balk at the risk but ultimately just need the nudge of a price tag with more digits than they expected.

  She saw now that she needed to adjust her strategy. The shock of this reveal had been too much, too quick and she couldn’t depend on their greed. She needed to get the plan in front of them ASAP and cut down the apprehension.

  Her biggest obstacle here was Turnaround. Sand Devil was addicted to fighting heroes, or rather, defeating heroes and basking in her triumph. The moment Lyn got started on crushing their foes, Devil would certainly 180 and jump into this feet first. On a similar note, Riftmaker would be easy as well. He was locked into this as long as it was a Starsilk thing but would definitely be on board if she showed him the full shopping list, even without the goodies she was holding back to pad the numbers. It wasn’t about greed as much as it was about the promise of upgrades.

  But both of them were veteran villains and that meant they were scared of a fight they didn’t think they could win. Devil wouldn’t risk letting a hero team get a win over her, and Riftmaker probably couldn’t afford to let his kit get ruined without a guaranteed profit after the fixes. Lyn had to make them believe they would win, and that meant selling her plan to Turnaround who seemed the most rattled by her choice of targets.

  “Listen,” she hissed as the sound of the bang from her fist faded. “We will be fighting with an advantage. They-”

  “How do you figure that?” Turnaround quickly cut her off before she could go into detail. “There’s six of them: Commander Cosmic, his brat, Reflecta, Wavelength, Orbit and Space Racer. That’s one more than the five of us. Just to count them off, that’s a budget Mr. Wonder and a half, a pro illusionist who doubles as a frontline blaster, a freaking telepath, some guy who can pick up a whole street of parked cars and chuck ‘em our way if he isn’t just scooping us off the ground, and of course a real speedster.”

  “Hey!” Val protested, reminding Lyn she existed.

  Right, need to get her on board too, Lyn remembered. Honestly though, I’m pretty sure I can just glare at her hard enough. For now though, I just stop this one from talking.

  Attempting to wrangle control of the conversation back, Lyn raised her voice, “Loo-”

  “I’m good. Hell, Devil and T are good,” Turnaround kept yammering over her. “But ‘good’ pretty much means that we can handle one of them each. Now, I’m fairly sure that kit Rifty listed can maybe handle one of these guys all on his own if he’s actually got the juice. But unless you’ve got a second one of those suits lying around for you or the shrimp scientist, I don’t see how you’re expecting Ocla 280 here to be worth two or three of them. Especially when half of them can lock down most of this team.”

  Val muttered, “The five hundred is the distance, not the speed…”1

  Okay, fine, we’re doing this then. Lyn opted to break out something she’d been practicing.

  The legs on her back swept down like scythes descending from above and smoothly lifted her out of the chair with clinical precision. Once aloft, she swiftly leaned forward as though she was swimming through the air and let the legs glide her over the coffee table (carefully angling her human legs out of the way so they didn’t bang into the table edge). This left her hovering over the seated Turnaround, inches from her face. She swore she saw the faint red reflection from her own ruby irises on the villain’s mask, a soft glow bathing the woman beneath her as she glowered down. She put all of her facial muscles to work attempting to turn her eyebrows and forehead into a battlefield of angry lines to sell the anger her hidden scowl couldn’t at the moment.

  “Be silent,” Lyn warned. “Quit your blabbering for a moment and listen.”

  She hissed the last word for almost a full second and a half, the mask’s modulators screeching it into the villainess’s face. Turnaround gulped and nodded.

  Lyn didn’t want to talk about how many times she’d fallen on her face while in her room attempting to figure out how to move like this and definitely didn’t want to talk about which spider supe she’d stolen this from. But she knew full well the effect it had on the members of the Evil Eight (though with a different effect on Wither Wasp and probably Sir Squid, the Cephalopod Socialite) when said supe had been a little pissed off one time, and figured “Starweaver” needed to weaponize that for herself. Judging from the trembling lips she spotted on Turnaround’s exposed lower face, she figured it had worked.

  Lyn let the legs carry herself back to her seat, carefully lowering herself back into it. She made a conscious effort not to look over at Turnaround. You had to act like you didn’t care after you postured and trust that you were so intimidating, there wasn’t a single doubt people would listen to you, or it just came off as desperate. Unfortunately, she really, really wanted to bask in whatever face Turnaround was making right now after having finally quieted her. Instead, she made due with sweeping her gaze over the rest of the villains and observed the reactions from the two whose faces she could make out.

  Sand Devil had forgotten her illusion of aloofness and a slight tinge of actual worry crept into her eyes. She was so distracted that she almost spilled the remainder of her cup’s contents as it drooped forgotten in her hands. Meanwhile Val seemed to have tried to burrow backwards into the couch while keeping her eyes locked onto Starweaver the whole time like a prey animal hoping to meld into the background. Lyn was even fairly sure Riftmaker’s hands were clutching the arm rests tighter judging from the creases in the fabric around his fingers.

  Good, nailed it, she smiled behind her mask, now satisfied that all the bumps, bruises, and that hole in the wall that Celeste didn’t need to know about just yet were worth it.

  “As I stated, we will be holding the advantage over them. Starsilk has designed specific countermeasures against these heroes utilizing gadgets, strategy, and the selective use of your superpowers,” Lyn explained in a calm voice. “We’ll start with a broad overview of how we intended for this team to deal with them. Here.”

  She fished into a bag she’d placed beside her chair and withdrew three curved metallic objects shaped like large, incomplete rings. She lazily tossed each of the three C-shaped objects on the table in front of Turnaround, Devil, and Val.

  “These are a series of anti-psychic bands which Terrorantula obtained some time ago,” she explained as the villainesses picked them up. She looked up at Riftmaker whose thoughts were incredibly transparent even with his face hidden. “Calm down: yours is already installed in your helmet. Please read your manual when we’re done.”

  “You rushed me here before I could,” he grumbled but seemed satisfied as he reclined back in the chair while the others began poking at the bands and trying them on experimentally.

  “Terrorantula really stole four psych blockers?” Sand Devil asked with clear bemusement.

  “Twelve actually,” Lyn bragged, though she tried to keep her voice aloof to stay in character.

  She managed to snag them from Cyclono when he’d been in town for one of those times Dr. Maniacal brought in outside help to fight with the New Aurora Champions, roughly a year and a half ago.2 Apparently Cyclono regularly butted heads with a hero called PsyBer, some guy who was half robot but still packed potent psychic powers, and the villain had brought along a couple crates of these for his minions out of habit. Unfortunately for Cyclono, he’d stored them at the same warehouse Terrorantula had been lifting smuggled artworks out of and she’d stumbled across them while looking for a missing painting. Half a crate of those felt like a bigger score than yet another landscape piece and not likely to be noticed for quite a bit so she filled a bag and split. The villain wasn’t important enough in the League for Lyn to worry too much about someone seriously trying to track down his missing stuff, but she’d still been incredibly reluctant to pawn these off, even through Fencer. It felt great to finally have an excuse to break them out.

  “Alright, that takes care of Wavelength for the most part,” Turnaround mulled it over and set the psych blocker on the table as the others did so, her greedy fingers reluctantly leaving it behind. “But that still leaves Reflecta and Orbit running interference, not to mention a speedster.”

  “Oh no…” Lyn replied in the most deadpan voice she could muster so that enough of the sarcasm could get through the voice modulator to broadcast the intended level sass. “A speedster! What ever shall we do…?”

  She lazily turned to Sand Devil who laughed and gingerly held up a hand with a dancing tornado of sand on it. Devil had a history fighting a few of Victory’s speed freaks. Whirlwinds, sand traps, and outright blinding worked wonders against people who depended on keeping up momentum in a fight.

  “...Okay, point taken,” Turnaround conceded.

  “Yes, Orbit and Reflecta are powerhouses of their own,” Lyn calmly admitted. “It’s a good thing we have someone with the tech to deal with them.”

  Everyone turned to look at Riftmaker. He quickly held up his hands, “Uh… the gravitor gauntlets won’t do much against Orbit.”

  Lyn paused. A few moments ago, she’d been mentally celebrating when she learned that Riftmaker had a pair of those. According to Menace, they were relatively easy to make and she’d been impressed with how the villain had managed to use his in their shared jobs so she’d assumed Riftmaker’s would function the same way.

  “Don’t they alter gravity?” she asked, trying to make sure. “Shouldn’t that allow you to counteract his abilities?”

  Orbit’s own powers were based around gravity rather than being a traditional telekinetic, a common mistake people would make when describing him. He could create localized gravity wells and gravitational anomalies allowing him to float things, yank them around and toss ‘em like your bog-standard variety of levitater. From Riftmaker’s explanation of his gloves and Menace’s before him, she thought that by using those to hit the spots Orbit made, the villain would be able to counteract them, or at least mess with them.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “That’s how they work,” Riftmaker began to explain, “but it’s a small beam between the emitter and the target and I’m only affecting it between the two points. Sure, if I nail it dead center, I’ll probably overlap everything in the entire well and could potentially knock it out, but the problem comes down to getting the right aim and uh… ‘direction.’ Orbit’s wells are small and even with the new targeting software, it’s going to be a shit show to hit them unless you give me time to aim in the middle of a fight. Plus I’d have to know how he’s altering gravity to counteract it and it’s not like he has to announce it. His powers have a little more nuance than the gauntlets do, but even if he’s keeping it simple and just trying to attract or repel from the points, I need to know which he chose to pick the same. If he throws out a well intended to pull us in by increasing gravity and I also pick ‘pull’ then I’m just making his job easier, and that assumes the beam manages to cover the full center of the well when I fire it.”

  “Is your beam that narrow?” Val asked, reminding everyone she was still here.

  “I can overcharge it to widen the beam while maintaining the strength,” Riftmaker admitted. “That would make the effect large enough to guarantee I hit the target. But also that's gonna quickly overheat the glove. With the new gel layer added, I can maybe manage three or four of those big shots per arm in quick succession. Orbit’s got a lot more than eight uses of his power though, and can make those wells pop up all over the place.”

  “Alright then, we’re not going to depend on that,” Lyn quickly took back control of the conversation before Turnaround could butt in. “Instead we’ll have you use the one thing that Orbit can’t deal with: your beams.”

  Hypothetically the gravity hero might be able to bend the light, but only if he was willing to risk a lot of collateral. In a team fight and in the warehouse he was supposed to be defending, there would be no chance Orbit would even think about it and would try to just dodge.

  Riftmaker chuckled and several small hatches opened to expose swiveling turrets, “Works for me.”

  “Oh shit, are we killing them?” Turnaround’s voice went on a journey from excited to hesitant as she finished her question. Meanwhile Sand Devil just grinned at the prospect.

  “I can adjust these down,” Riftmaker shrugged, the lasers all quickly disappearing back into the suit as he did so.

  Lyn nodded at that, “We really don’t need to kill Amberheart’s bigwigs at the moment, just bloody their noses, especially since there’s rumors floating around that someone from Orion is visiting right now. We really don’t need to get the Protectors feeling like they need to help put a stop to everyone right now just because a hero or two eats it while Amberheart is playing host, so please keep it to nonlethal. We’d lose a lot of friends in this city if we ruin everyone’s fun and then be forced to eat the fallout ourselves.”

  “Nonlethal or not,” Turnaround interjected again, “it’s kind of a shit strategy to depend on lasers when one of our marks uses mirrors, right? I was hoping I wouldn’t have to point that out. If Reflecta drops one of those in front of the beam, it goes where she’s pointing it.”

  With great exaggeration, Lyn rolled her entire head over to fix Turnaround with a stare.

  “What?”

  Lyn couldn’t believe she had to point out what the plan was for that so she just pointedly asked, “What do you do again?”

  “I…” Turnaround trailed off as she understood what Lyn was implying.

  Yes, idiot. If she drops a mirror down to redirect the beam, you turn it. Did not think I needed to spell that one out.

  “Riftmaker has gas weaponry to deal with the rest of Reflecta’s abilities,” Lyn explained. “Her mask may or may not have in-built filters but she depends on line of sight which he can easily take away from her.”

  Her explanation earned an affirming nod from the tech villain.

  “It sounds like we have ways to deal with most of the Squad, but that still leaves Commander Cosmic and his daughter,” Sand Devil brought up. “And we’ll still be fighting six on five. These countermeasures aren’t exactly whipping out a chunk of zeronite in front of Wonder either. More like evening the playing field, which won’t matter if we’re still outnumbered and on the back foot ourselves.”

  “Which is exactly why we won’t be fighting them six on five,” Lyn laughed, earning a series of confused looks. She let the statement hang in the air there for a moment to let them ponder what she could possible mean.

  Riftmaker spoke up unexpectedly, “It’ll be five on three, won’t it?”

  She was just as impressed that someone had stumbled across the hidden homework assignment as she was frustrated to have the reveal snatched away. She rolled with it however, and affirmed, “Exactly.”

  “Mind sharing with the rest of class?” the class clown asked.

  She eyed Riftmaker who nodded at her but made no move to steal the stage. Alright, she could overlook his spotlight stealing this one time. Her time in the Eight had taught her not to hold too big a grudge over things like that or you never got anything done.

  “Earlier this year, Kid Cosmic changed her moniker to Sun Light,” Lyn began. “That led a lot of speculation that she had planned on quitting the Squad to join up with, and probably lead, the Young Guardians but officially everything’s still fine and dandy over there.3 Even so, the word over the intranet are that Sun Light and her dad aren’t seeing eye to eye at the moment.”

  “We’re not trusting online rumors, are we?” Sand Devil frowned, her brows knitting together in clear disgust.

  “There were a lot of credible ones that went up,” Riftmaker backed up Lyn, “from some sources that are usually right about this.”

  Huh, he follows this stuff too. Good to know.

  “No, we’re not trusting online rumors. That was just what got me to go searching for a better source. My information comes from Victory City’s new star info broker: Vandal Eyes,” Lyn stated plainly. That seemed to assuage Devil though she noticed that Riftmaker seemed to clench his fist at the name. That seemed like a story but it would have to wait. “One of many things I learned from my dealings with Vandal was that the online rumors are actually understating how turbulent things are for the Starlight Squad at the moment. It’s gotten bad.”

  She let that linger in the air, watching as the villains around the room leaned in, savoring the weakness of their enemies. She continued, “According to Vandal’s information, things got so rancid on patrol that Reflecta had to split the team for any and all of their assignments to keep daddy and the brat separate, which only helped to piss off Cosmic something fierce since it’s supposed to be his team. In public, they’re always one big happy family, but when they’re actually out and about, it’s only ever a trio together in one place. Two patrols in two separate parts of the city.”

  “Do we know who’s on which team?” Riftmaker asked. “And do we have an idea on which ones we’ll be facing at the lab?”

  Yeah, if anyone would want to know what hero was going to be showing up for a fight, it would be the guy who had the rug pulled out from underneath him a week ago. He wasn’t going to like the answer.

  “It’s not fixed so we won’t know until the day of the job. Reflecta threw Cosmic a peace offering after splitting everyone up, meaning he’s in charge of who’s on what team, and he apparently keeps everyone rotating around. What we know is that we’re going to get either Cosmic or Sun Light heading up the trio along with two randos until Vandal calls. It’s why I bothered with strategies for the entire rest of the team.”

  “Circling back, what’s your plan for those two?” Devil leaned even further forward, her eagerness naked on her face.

  “Terrorantula will be running interference on them,” Lyn explained, carefully avoiding speaking in the first person. “Her webs and relative strength should be enough to keep either of them under control in an enclosed space like the lab where they can’t go crazy with any of their beam abilities. She has experience with fast and strong capes in warehouse fights after all. With some occasional back up from whoever isn’t busy for a moment, Terror should be able to keep whichever shows up locked down.”

  “Like me?” Val asked. “You never said what I would be doing.”

  Lyn hadn’t forgotten about her. Well, she’d forgotten she was in the room again, but she had a place for her in this heist. Perhaps Turnaround did have a point about the bell...

  “That’s because you’ll be focused on cleaning out the place. If you have an opening for a cheap shot, take it, but you’re primarily going to move the loot out the moment we take out Icon,” Lyn told her, noticing Val’s face shift rapidly from relief to disappointment to eagerness. “We’ll be going over exact specifics of the fights and what to expect in a second, but there’s the broad plan for everyone.”

  “What happens when we start winning and they call in team two?” Turnaround asked. “Icon is going to be a breeze and I’ll admit that I think we’ve got the right stuff here to knock half of Starlight on their asses, but I don’t want to end up like Tech Crash and get caught sputtering along after round 2.”

  Lyn watched Riftmaker flinch. Yeah… sorry, but your heist is the hot topic right now, and a lot of people ran the numbers on what they think you took home after blowing up Reddins. Gotta say, it really doesn’t look good from the outside even if you’re not lying about accomplishing whatever secret goal you had in mind. Rebranding was smart.

  “He wasn’t that bad,” Sand Devil unexpectedly defended the other villain, earning her the entire room’s worth of confused looks. “He managed to hospitalize three heroes and evade another. Who cares about the profits? That’s the true nature of villainy.”

  Lyn had to stop herself from breaking character as Starweaver to cackle at that. She had the video of Ned’s crash saved on her phone and had probably watched it at least thirty times by now. Admittedly, she’d almost been concerned watching the first time and seeing him barely manage to come out of that roll in a limp (or perhaps jealous? It didn’t feel right that Ned might’ve been done in by someone who wasn’t even in his rogue’s gallery), but they got his ass to a medpod so he was fine. By the fourth loop of it she’d watched, she’d been laughing hard enough to hurt her ribs. Some unknown villain who happened to be her roommate’s boss had actually stressed Ned hard enough while he was swinging around on webs to fuck up that bad. Oh, she almost owed Riftmaker her cut on this job for that alone. Almost.

  “Anyways, it’s a valid concern but the good news is that it’s a moot point,” Lyn got her thoughts back on track after one last visual of Ned hitting the car played out in her mind. “First up, Starlight Squad is an Amberheart lapdog and that means team two is covering just about every third call coming in across town according to Vandal. While the team babysitting the P.H.O.T.O.N. lab is stuck nearby, the other team has to be out and about ready to assist elsewhere. Which leads into point two: we’ve actually seen a few times where one of their teams landed in trouble, even before this mess started, and something interesting happened each time.”

  Lyn glanced around conspiratorially, “Regardless of whether it was Commander Cosmic or Sun Light’s team, whenever things went tits up, they refused to call the other team for help, going so far as to argue with their teammates about it. Apparently, neither of them want to appear weak to the other and would rather retreat, or, in the most desperate circumstance, call for backup from another team entirely.”

  “Which takes awhile even in normal circumstances, especially since Amberheart has to find a team strong enough to backup the Starlight Squad,” Riftmaker pointed out.

  “Yep, on paper, they’re still reporting back as the full team,” Lyn laughed. “Amberheart assumes they’re either all together or have already called team two back and they only called for aid because it’s something the whole team couldn’t handle.”

  Sand Devil almost leapt out of her seat, “Meaning that if they do call for help, everyone thinks we’re strong enough to crush all of them at once and runs scared! How delightful to see those false champions flee rather than come to their comrades’ aid!”

  Turnaround barked a laugh of her own while Riftmaker rubbed the chin of his mask thoughtfully. Good, it looked like everyone was understanding now. The job only looked bad on paper, and actually had a massive rep payoff in addition to all those shiny toys and cash P.H.O.T.O.N. had squirreled away.

  “Of course there’s one last bit of assurance that we’ll only be fighting half the Starlight Squad,” Lyn spread her hands, “and it’s all thanks to Tech Crash.”

  She flashed a grin towards Riftmaker, not that anyone could see it, “Given that the Knuckledusters and Aegis did their little swap without formally going through Reddins only for Crash to manage to slip Ice Hawk and ArachNed of all people, P.H.O.T.O.N. and half the places that have contracts with heroes have basically been shouting at Amberheart to do things by the letter of their contracts and not send any other heroes they didn’t ask for that day. So no Aurora Champions, no Shielders, no Wild Warriors, no Wardkeepers or Crimebreakers or anyone. If the Starlight Squad really can’t handle us, they’ll have to do what they haven’t done yet and call for backup from the other team.”

  “And if they do?” Devil was once again the one to ask and still way too eager about it.

  “Then we’ll be gone by then,” Lyn said to Devil’s obvious disappointment, tapping away at her tablet to display the shopping list and a small map, feeling confident enough that she had everyone onboard now. “Val, how much time would it take for you to move all of this with a hovercart to a drop point here?”

  Turnaround and Sand Devil turned to look at the speedster, who started at being addressed directly. Lyn noticed Riftmaker’s head didn’t turn away from the tablet and all the tempting technology and resources on that list. Her hidden smile grew. Yep, got him hook line and sinker.

  Val chewed her lip in thought before finally saying, “Assuming it’s all packed up and ready to go, twenty minutes? Maybe fifteen?”

  “Cosmic takes five to make it from Amberheart to Middletown,” Lyn tapped on the map to show that the P.H.O.T.O.N. lab was almost that distance away from the hero’s tower. “And I’ll bet that team two will be further than that considering they’ve been trying to keep to the north side these days. In fact, I also bet it takes more than ten minutes for whoever we’re jumping to fully realize they’re in over their heads and admit they can’t win on their own. With those numbers, the only one we’d need to worry about making it across town in time before we’ve cleaned the place out would be Space Racer, assuming he’s not there when we start. With the ripcord, we’re gone before team two gets within twenty blocks of us.”

  “And the drop point?” Riftmaker asked, clearly concerned about the prizes.

  “A member of Starsilk will arrange transport there,” she explained. “Safer than trying to flee with everything ourselves after kicking the beehive.”

  “Alright, I’m sold,” Turnaround finally caved.

  “Y-yeah!” Val nodded along.

  Lyn didn’t need to confirm with Riftmaker and Sand Devil. Both clearly wanted what this job was offering and seemed satisfied with the odds judging from their posture and Devil’s bloodthirsty smile.

  “Alright then, here’s the boring details…” Lyn began to detail the plan step by step, from how the initial heist would go down to exactly how she wanted the team to work together for each member of the Starlight Squad should they show up. The others commented and made suggestions, even coming up with some strategies for various combinations of heroes. Riftmaker hijacked her tablet at one point to bring up videos of a few of the Squad’s fights to point out some of their special moves.

  As the meeting stretched on for over two hours more, Lyn called a break, stretching her normal legs and strolling out. She caught sight of Celeste already busy on some of the software updates she’d be patching into Riftmaker’s targeting systems before the fight and let her be, instead choosing to stare at the tarp-covered machine in the back of the lab.

  This was it. She had a new body, plans to start dating again, and a heist that would see her finally free of being shackled to the first hero who foiled her plans. She was finally in control of her own destiny again after years of wallowing.

  She felt the presence watching her from some reflection in this room but didn’t bother to look for it. Then she almost laughed as she felt it do something it hadn’t before.

  Whatever it was, wherever it was, however she could possibly know this… she could tell it was kneeling before her.

  1. The Ocla 500, short for the Oclahatu 500-Mile Race, is an annual automobile race, though the event also has a few contests for speedsters.

  2. Since the first fight between the New Aurora Champions and the doctor 5 years ago, Dr. Maniacal has personally led incursions into Victory City no less than twenty times, often bringing League members to fight with him, making him the most common League threat that Victory City has faced.

  3. Leadership of the Young Guardians is officially appointed by the groups overseeing the team, all of whom would definitely look at Sun Light’s history on the Starlight Squad with a lot of favor. Considering that it’s well known that Phantom Foil only reluctantly accepted the role to lead, it’s highly likely he would step down and welcome the change in leadership if offered.