by Mia Archer
I’d demonstrated ways for normals to survive every moderately nasty trick in my repertoire and it did nothing. So in desperation I decided to be more direct with a demonstration of beam weapons which was moving into the slightly more than moderately nasty trick category.
If that didn’t work I still had a few really nasty tricks up my sleeve. The kind of stuff that even I never broke out because it brought out the specter of escalation which was never good for business.
I started by setting up a cement block roughly as tall as a man at one end of the room. I stood on the other end of the lecture hall with another prototype beam weapon never before seen outside my test lab, pointed, and let loose with a blast of pure high energy light.
Sure using something like this always raised the danger that Dr. Laura would find out about it and copy the design, but that was a risk I was willing to take in service of getting her to admit who the hell she was.
I swiped the rod quickly and the cement block that had been one giant cement block just moments before split and became two cement blocks. I turned to the class.
"This is a beam weapon. Beam weapons operate on one simple principle. You cannot outrun the speed of light."
I gestured for one of the students sitting in the front row to come down and stand next to the cement blocks. He hesitated, glancing around the room as though hoping somebody might come to his rescue, but no one said anything. No one wanted to put themselves in the firing line if this unlucky bastard was next up.
Miss Solare certainly made no move to stop me. The poor increasingly sweaty bastard moved in front of the bisected block and stood there quaking in his shoes as I pointed the rod at him.
I glanced up to where Fialux/Miss Solare sat with her arms crossed, but still she did nothing. I shrugged. If this wasn't going to draw her out then I was running out of ideas.
I pressed a button on the rod and another blast of light, this one far less high energy, lanced out and hit the kid. He screamed in terror, and then he screamed in relief as he ran his hands down his middle and realized that he was still in one piece.
"What's the number one lesson I've drilled into you so far?"
"Get out of the way," the class recited back at me in singsong unison.
"Exactly," I said. "And what did our terrified friend who has now wet his pants not do?"
"Get out of the way."
"Also right. Only in this case getting out of the way is trickier. The problem with beam weapons is the light travels at, well, the speed of light. You aren't outrunning that unless maybe you're that new Fialux chick that’s been causing so much trouble for the honest villains in this city lately."
The class murmured. Most of the tricks I'd shown them had a way of escaping that at least gave a fifty/fifty chance of survival. This was the first super weapon I'd shown them where that fifty/fifty chance went down to zero.
Time to give them a little hope.
"So what do you do?”
They looked around. As always no answers were forthcoming. Not that I was surprised at this point. It was a miracle any young journalists survived long enough to become old journalists. The newsrooms around here must all hire their gruff rapid talking senior editors from other cities.
“Right. As always I will spoon feed you the answer. If you see somebody using a beam weapon, you get the hell out of the way the instant you see it pointing at you."
The demonstration continued in much the same vein. I went over the various types of beam weapons they were likely to run into while they were running straight into the middle of a super powered war zone.
At no point did Selena make any move to save anyone, though I didn’t really expect her to after the first demonstration failed to draw her out and it was clear I wasn’t going to actually hurt anyone.
Then again it’d probably been clear I wasn’t going to actually hurt anyone after the second day when I hadn’t vaporized anyone.
I was starting to wonder if I was making a serious mistake and wasting my time at the university. I was starting to dread the prospect of going undercover at SCNN which was the second most likely place for Fialux to be lurking given the Roth connection.
Not to mention I’d be leaving the intoxicating Miss Solare behind.
Speaking of. After class a familiar perfume wafted across my desk. I looked up from the paper I was pretending to grade while waiting for Selena to stop by and smiled at her.
This was the best damn part of the day.
“Miss Solare,” I said.
“I’ve told you, you can just call me Selena,” she said.
“And what did you think of today’s demonstration Selena?” I asked.
“Very impressive! I’d never think of trying to dodge a beam weapon like that.”
Of course she wouldn’t think of dodging a beam weapon because she didn’t have to. All she had to do was let the damned thing smack into her invulnerable hide, or if she was feeling particularly showy she could make a big display of holding out her hand and absorbing the beam weapon with her hand as she walked towards whatever poor son-of-a-bitch was trying to defeat her with it.
I didn’t say that, despite how therapeutic it’d be. I just thought it and smiled at her.
“So do you have any plans after class? I was thinking…”
I never did find out what she was thinking. The hope that had been rising in me as she mentioned plans after class was dashed by the sound of her damned ringtone echoing through the empty lecture hall.
I’d been leaning forward in my chair anticipating her next words, hoping but never quite daring to dream that she might be asking me to lunch or something, but I crashed back into my chair, and reality, at the sound of her phone.
“Sorry, one second,” she said.
I waved a hand. One second would turn into several minutes if every other phone call she got at the end of class was any indication.
Sure enough she picked it up, put it to her ear, and then she was gone. It took about half a minute for her to get to the video chat phase, and once again her expression tickled something in the back of my mind.
I shook my head to get out of my funk. Whatever. I had far more important things to worry about than how ridiculous she looked when she was talking to her stupid boyfriend.
Like how I was going to prove definitively that she was Fialux. I’m not sure why I didn’t just use the stasis field on her now and get it over with. She was distracted enough, but she was also on the phone which meant there was someone out there who would know something was wrong and potentially call the authorities.
Or maybe it was because I was starting to enjoy our little conversations after class every day. However brief they were before her phone started ringing.
No, that wasn’t it. I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t blasting some poor innocent college girl who may or may not also be moonlighting as a hero. My strict rules about collateral damage were yet another reason I was being so cautious.
I definitely wasn’t hanging around because the five minutes of flirting we got in after class kept me going for the rest of the day. I definitely wasn’t capturing first and asking questions later because she was so damn cute in those tight shirts and tighter shorts and…
No. Definitely not. I had plenty of good reasons that had nothing to do with my deep and abiding attraction to this woman.
I packed my prototype blaster in my bag and started up the stairs towards the exit. I learned early in the semester that there was no point trying to talk to Selena once she started on her phone, and I had to get to a nice private spot with no witnesses before I could teleport up to my office and then off campus entirely.
I sighed at the top of the lecture hall stairs and looked down at Selena. I’d pulled out all the small and moderately sized guns. There was nothing for it. I was going to have to pull out the really nasty stuff for class next week.
29
Really Nasty Tricks
I didn’t want to bring out the big guns, but she le
ft me with no choice. So at the start of the next class I fished inside my desk and pulled out a small orb.
I let go and it floated into the air. Up into the middle of the room where a red light started to run around its equator.
“Does anybody know what this is?” I asked.
Blank looks. Of course. I shook my head. I figured at least some of them would have tried to hazard an answer at this point, but apparently I’d stumped them with this one.
Some were looking up inquisitively, others were staring up in terror as though they were wondering what fresh hell Professor Terror was bringing to the classroom today.
I smiled. Hell certainly had come to the classroom.
Also, Professor Terror? I really liked the sound of that.
“What you see floating before you is a wide area matter dispersal bomb.”
I paused to let that sink in. To enjoy the pregnant silence that settled on the room. To wait for the inevitable gasps as they realized what fresh doom was floating just above their heads.
Blank looks again. Damn it. I shook my head.
It really was my fault, after all, expecting a room full of journalism majors to understand regular science let alone the super science required to realize exactly why every single one of them should be soiling their drawers right now.
“It’s an offshoot of teleportation technology. A rather nasty offshoot of teleportation technology, I might add. Most teleporters work on the principle of taking matter, scrambling it down to its constituent atomic parts, transmitting those constituent parts, and reconstituting them at a new location,” I said.
I figured I needed to start at the most basic level even though most of this room looked like the type to watch enough science fiction to know what a teleporter was.
Only science fiction became science reality when Night Terror was in the room.
“This little device works on a similar principle, except it skips the second part about reconstituting everything at a new location. Saves a hell of a lot of power that way too. No, instead this takes every piece of matter in a given area and just disperses it on the wind. Reduces it to its atomic constituents and then sends it floating everywhere and nowhere.”
They were starting to get the idea. Some of the more terror-prone students, and there were a lot more today after all my demonstrations than there were at the beginning of the semester thank you very much, were starting to glance nervously towards the door.
Especially the idiots in the back who seemed to think that a few rows of stadium seating would be enough to save them from yours truly.
Amateur hour. And it really galled because of how much I’d taught them. How much I thought I taught them.
I knew this was an intro survey course that a bunch of checked out seniors took on their way out, but seriously. This could save their life and they were sneaking glances at their phones under their desks?
No wonder the mortality rate for recent graduates from the journalism program was so high at this school.
On the bright side it meant the school boasted the highest employment numbers for a journalism program anywhere in the country considering dead students couldn’t technically be employed anywhere.
“You might want to put the phones down for this one kiddos. I’ve set this particular wide area matter dispersal bomb to go off within the confines of this room,” I paused for a moment to let that one sink in. At least something was starting to sink in for a change. “Why would I do that, class?”
The real answer was that I was trying to lure out a superhero. I was trying to flush a goddess out from the sea of normals she was hiding in.
Though I didn’t expect anybody in the room to get that answer. Except maybe Fialux herself.
I wasn’t even sure if she suspected my game yet, or if she still just thought I was a good teacher. If any of them did guess that answer they’d get an A for the semester right on the spot.
A guy in the front row raised his hand. “To teach us how to escape it?”
“No, I’m afraid that’s not it,” I said.
I pressed my hands together behind my back and smiled, relishing the moment. “I’m afraid there is absolutely no escaping this one. It’s just like the speed of light, only worse. It could go off and you wouldn’t even know it was there as opposed to a laser weapon where you at least have a chance of seeing somebody pointing the damn thing at you before you die.”
“So what’s the point?” That was from a cute blonde girl about halfway up.
“The point of these last few demonstrations before your finals is to prove a point, and that point I’m proving is there are going to be times when you go out there in the world, when you try to gather information, when you try to cover the big story and despite what you do, no matter how good your training is, that big story might kill you without realizing you were ever there. You are subject to the capricious whims of gods and goddesses fighting around you. You could be squashed like an insect in an instant, your atoms dispersed to the winds, and neither you nor the hero or villain who killed you might ever know. The only thing that would remain is a nice little engraved nameplate on the Starlight City News Network memorial wall. A wall, I might add, that they had to recently expand for the fifth time since they built the thing twenty years ago because it keeps filling up. Seriously. Those wall panels are ten foot by ten foot. You can fit a lot of names on those things.”
I paused. This was one of the greatest villain monologues I think I’d ever delivered and no one realized that’s what it was. They all thought it was career advice.
“That sounds like a pretty depressing point,” someone muttered in the front row.
“Exactly my point,” I said. “This is a dangerous business, and you’re going to get paid pennies on the dollar considering the danger you’re putting yourselves in covering these stories. As you get ready to embark on this career, as you get ready to finish this program, you need to seriously ask yourself if it’s worth it.”
I couldn’t tell you exactly when I’d transitioned from using this class as an opportunity to get in a few not so subtle digs at anybody who decided to go into writing as their chosen profession to actually caring about my students.
Don’t get me wrong. I still thought they were a bunch of shiftless lazy good for nothing slackers who went with an easy major that allowed for a busy partying schedule in addition to setting them up for a horrible career choice. The suckers were also paying a crap load of money to the University for the privilege of making that horrible career choice, but at the same time I didn’t want to see them smashed by some villain who had fewer scruples than I did about collateral damage.
Especially considering the very literal meat grinder most of them would be fed into after graduating when they started looking for entry-level jobs at the local news outlets in Starlight City.
Of course even if I did care, I hadn’t forgotten my original purpose for being here. Even if we did share lingering glances after class, I hadn’t forgotten that my ultimate goal was to get Fialux to reveal herself so I could test out my anti-Newtonian stasis field on a non-mobile goddess. To try and capture her so we could sit down and have a talk about all those lingering glances she’d been giving me over the semester.
About what the hell it meant that she went from flirting with me to talking on the phone with this mysterious boyfriend and forgetting all about me every time she answered her phone. What the hell was up with that?
It was driving me insane, and if it turned out that it was all a big tease, that it was all part of some naughty professor fantasy, and it turned out that she was Fialux… Well let’s just say I was going to have a difficult time not testing out whether or not my matter dispersal bomb worked on her invulnerable hide.
But for now I had a part to play. I held up a remote and pointed it towards the matter dispersal bomb.
“This particular matter dispersal bomb was designed with a red light that travels around the center to show you how close it is to deto
nating. The faster the light moves around that band, the closer we all are to being completely obliterated. By the time it becomes a solid line you know you only have a few moments to make peace with whatever higher power you happen to believe in.
I glanced up at the bomb. It was going at a good pace now, but nowhere near a solid line.
“Whoever designed the thing obviously had a sense of style,” I said.
Of course I was tooting my own horn since I was the one who designed the damned thing in the first place.
I’d always been a firm believer that if I was going to go to the trouble of inventing a piece of technology that was decades or centuries beyond anything available to humanity currently then I was going to do it with style.
I was particularly fond of that red light moving around the equator of the orb. I thought it had a nice retro look to it. A look that said this particular piece of technology had broken free from its human masters and was coming for you.
I’m not sure why a moving red light gave me that feeling, but there it was.
Now time for a performance that would make those idiots over in the drama department go wild. Theatricality was the key to any good villainy career, and it was time for a command performance.
I held the remote up and clicked at the orb. I made sure to make the movement clear. Only the light kept swirling around the center. I made the clicking motion again, and the light kept moving faster and faster.
Students started to shuffle and glance around nervously. Even the ones who’d realized no one had actually gotten hurt so far and they were probably safe enough.