by Mia Archer
Not when I was the greatest villain this world had…
Well you get where I'm going with this. I didn't care what Fialux said. I was the greatest, and that was that.
"What the hell just happened CORVAC?" I asked.
"It would appear that Fialux got in front of you and the blast was close enough that it reflected back and hit you," CORVAC said.
"Damn," I said, my eyes running over my readouts more out of habit than anything. "Looks like I'm still in good shape at least."
"For the moment," CORVAC said.
I didn't bother asking him what he meant. I'd long ago learned exactly how to translate my megalomaniacal supercomputer’s more cryptic responses. I wheeled around and dove for the deck before whatever was coming at me had a chance to work its evil magic.
Considering that Fialux was back operating at full power I had a pretty good idea that she was the reason for CORVAC’s dry observation that I was only in good shape for the moment.
Only I was too late. I dove, sure, but something grabbed me by the ankle and no matter how hard I pushed my antigrav I wasn't moving.
Whatever had a hold on my ankle was relentless. Inexorable. She wasn't letting go.
"Damn it," I asked. "Can I just have like one fucking month where I'm not going up against anything that's a credible threat to my dominance?"
I got thrown with enough force that if I didn't have my suit doing some of the heavy lifting vis-à-vis protecting me from those pesky laws of physics then I probably would’ve gotten a broken ankle.
I righted myself and turned to see Fialux. She gave me a little wave. More a wiggling of her fingers than anything. She smiled a wide smile that almost looked like the kind of smile she used to give me when we were dating.
Almost, but there was an undercurrent of menace to that smile that I didn't like.
"Did you really think I was going to let you get away?" she asked. “You couldn’t keep firing those bubbles at me forever, you know.”
I shrugged. "I figured I’d keep firing those bubbles to keep you out of the fight and hope for the best. Maybe pray this was one of those times when you had trouble."
"Liar," she said. "You're not the praying type and we both know it."
"You've got me there," I said. "So what do we do now?"
"What we do now is present you to the new ruler of this world," Fialux said.
"I'm a little confused on that point," I said.
I looked around to see if this "new ruler of the world" was anywhere to be found, but it would appear she’d skedaddled back to her Skeletor throne thingy the moment she realized Fialux was back in action.
Fialux frowned. It was a look of worry I'd seen on her plenty of times before. A look that said she was trying to think things through in her own journalism major way of looking at the world.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Well I thought you were going to be the ruler of the world and all that," I said. "You're the one who's doing all the heavy lifting in this operation, right?"
"Well…"
"It just seems to me that someone like you who's doing all the real work in a duo should be the one who's doing the ruling. I know when I was in a duo like that I had some trouble with a partner getting too uppity. You were there," I said.
"I would like to remind you that I am listening in on this channel and can hear everything you say mistress," CORVAC said.
I didn't respond. It looked like I was maybe actually getting through to Fialux. That was hardly the time to go having a conversation with my megalomaniacal supercomputer and ruin the moment.
"So are you going to let her push you around?" I asked. "Or are you going to do what needs to be done? What I think you've always known needs to be done?"
Slow clapping ruined the moment. It’d been a good moment. I'm not saying it would be in the top five villainous speeches I'd made, I'd pulled a Kirk and talked at least a couple of robotic types into killing themselves for violating the internal logic of their programming after all, but it was up there.
That slow clapping told me someone had come along to ruin that moment of imperfect logic. Maybe it was imperfect, but it seemed like it would be more than enough to get through to a journalism major.
Maybe.
The humanities, philosophy aside, weren’t exactly known for their grounding in things like logic after all.
"Bravo Night Terror," that bitch’s voice rang out. "You almost had me convinced there. There's just one little problem with everything you're saying.”
"And what's that?" I asked, raising my voice to be heard but still keeping my eyes locked with Fialux.
"Simple," she said.
There was a pause. An awkward moment that stretched out. I waited for her response, keeping my eyes on Fialux the whole time. Finally she let out a frustrated growl.
"Would you please look up here for half a second so I can finish this?"
I finally tore my eyes away from Fialux. It was difficult. On the one hand I was pretty sure I’d been getting through to her. I'd seen a flash that almost seemed like the old Fialux. My Fialux.
I also enjoyed looking into her eyes. It was one of life’s little pleasures that I’d missed while she was off on her sojourn on that strange irradiated planet.
Sure she was trying to take over the world and take me captive, but it wouldn't be the first time we'd played that kind of game.
Though usually the ending was a lot hotter than where I figured this was going.
I turned my attention to the raven haired bitch. She was back on the throne and had moved the thing down so she was close enough to gloat without amplification. She tapped at her head.
"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked.
She blinked. "What do you mean what's that supposed to mean?”
"Does that mean I'm not going to get through to her because of some plan you've hatched? Does it mean you're using mind control on her? There are a lot of possibilities and you're not being very clear. This is Starlight City, after all.”
She threw her head back and laughed. It was a melodious laugh. It was the kind of laugh that made my stomach twist and, once more, seemed to tickle at a memory I couldn't quite grasp. Then it was over.
"Oh Night Terror," she said, shaking a finger at me. "You almost got me to give something up. Almost, but you're going to have to try harder than that. I think you've gotten a little lazy being here on earth all on your own without any true challengers."
I bristled at the insult. No true challengers? Was she serious? Because Fialux, Dr. Lana, giant robots, giant irradiated lizards, and then Dr. Lana again had sure been a hell of a challenge. Sure the cats being possessed by alien worms weren't exactly up there on the challenge rating, especially compared to what I usually went up against, but they were still an unpleasant diversion.
I was going to show this bitch who was the real villain on this world. I was going to make her regret the dark day she decided to insult me. I was going to…
"Could you please stop with your interior monologue for a moment?" she asked. "I have something important I have to tell you, and I wanted you to hear it from me directly."
I stuck my chin out. "Whatever. Get it over with."
"Come now Night Terror," she said. "Don't you want to hear the introduction of the new ruler of your world?"
"Already heard it a few years ago when I made my declaration of intent to the world,” I said. "I could send you a recording if you'd like. It sounds like you’ve been off planet for awhile."
I was starting to get an inkling of who this person might be, but it was impossible. It was impossible, but if all the evidence fit…
Who did I know who’d been thrust through a portal? Aside from Fialux, that is. She’d obviously been marooned on an alien world for years. She knew me intimately. She knew all my buttons and how to push them. The only problem was the gender was all wrong.
And yet…
It made sense in a twisted sort of way. I wouldn't
put it past Dr. Lana to be so lazy in copying a bit of technology that she didn't even bother to change the coordinates the teleporter had been pointed towards when I did that first test that resulted in someone I knew, the jury was out on whether it was that amorphous dude in my memory or the woman floating before me, getting shoved through.
If Dr. Lanah slavishly copied what I'd done then it’d be just like her to slavishly copy the coordinates too.
It was looking more and more likely that the boyfriend I thought I'd consigned to the inky blackness of space and certain death had come back, and it turns out that boyfriend was actually a girlfriend all along.
It would certainly explain some things. Like, for example, why the sudden attraction to women via Fialux’s arrival came as a surprise to me after I'd had zero interest in dating for so long.
What if it wasn't a matter of me discovering something new about myself when I laid eyes on Fialux so much as it was the sight of her and her beauty was enough to finally break through a mind control barrier that had been worming its way through my brain for who knew how long?
It was a chilling thought. One that I didn't particularly care to consider for too long, except here was evidence that there was someone out there who may or may not be a long lost girlfriend.
And she had my new girlfriend in tow and seemed pissed off about something I’d done to her. Though admittedly tossing someone through a portal to their almost certain doom and then never bothering to mount a rescue because I hadn’t been able to reactivate the teleporter would be a pretty good reason to hate my guts.
Why hadn’t I been able to reactivate that teleporter? I’d always assumed something went wrong, but now that I really thought about it I realized my mind was sliding around that memory as much as it was sliding around everything else I thought I knew about that day.
Which meant mind control, damn it. One last middle finger Dr. Lana was sending me from beyond the grave.
“If you're going to be difficult then I don't see the point in playing anymore," the girl said, crossing her arms and jutting her lips out in a pout.
I tried to ignore how enticing she looked when she did that. Unlike Fialux she’d gone full villain in something that looked like an early draft of one of my suits. Which meant it clung to her body in all the right places.
If it turned out she really was an ex girlfriend then I could totally understand finding that outfit compelling. It didn’t make me feel any less guilty about checking her out, but the feeling was what it was.
Of course it seemed that Selena had made her own acquaintances with this bitch, so maybe I shouldn’t have felt bad about checking her out at all. That angry thought brought me back to reality and the work that needed done here today. This woman seemed eager to give something away, and I needed to convince her to give that something away. I needed every bit of information I could get about this woman, damn it!
"Wait," I said. "Are you at least going to tell me the name of earth’s new ruler?”
"I know what you're trying to do," she said. "You're hoping I give you a name and that jogs something loose in that faulty memory of yours, right?"
I hit her with a grin of my own. I knew I probably shouldn't go revealing things she was revealing to me, but the opportunity was too delicious to pass up.
"At least you've revealed that there is something to be revealed," I said.
Oh yes. That seemed to get her attention. Her face went from a self-satisfied smirk to a frown in record time. She glared at me, and it wasn't a pleasant glare. Though, come to think of it, I don't think that any glare could ever truly be said to be a pleasant glare. Just varying degrees of unpleasant.
"Sabine," she said. "The name of the person who is going to conquer your world and accomplish everything you couldn't be bothered to do over the past few years is Sabine."
I felt dizzy again. I was tumbling through the air, only this time it was because I'd completely lost all mental control. It was as though my entire body had gone spastic. Limbs flailed this way and that. I shook my head to try and clear the fog, but it didn't help. It just made the world spin even faster.
I had a vision of a portal. Only it was safely contained inside a research lab rather than over the city spewing out an invading alien army. I had a vision of a shadowy figure standing in front of that portal, and then I saw something coming at me.
No. That was wrong. Something hadn't come at me in that memory. That something was coming at me in the real world.
"Mistress!"
A flash of green. Fialux. I'd missed her so much, but this was like a terrible twisted memory of times best forgotten.
It would seem those days were back. Something hit me. The hit was impossibly powerful, and the world went black around me.
5
Jailbird
A status readout appeared in front of me. I felt a moment of blind panic in the darkness. After all, that status readout was telling me I was dead.
That presented me with an interesting conundrum. Because on the one hand there was the clear evidence of my eyes seeing that status readout on my heads up display that would seem to indicate that, all indicators on my suits biometric probes aside, I was still very much alive and well.
Not to mention I'd never found any evidence of an afterlife worth speaking of. That was one of the reasons I’d been working so hard on the ability to upload my consciousness to a computer before I checked out for good.
As such it seemed a little odd to me that my disembodied consciousness would be taking a gander at any sort of status report rather than going back to whatever nothingness I’d happily existed in before my parents had a little too much to drink and got freaky one fateful night years ago.
Besides. If there was an afterlife, unlikely, I seriously doubted it looked like the user interface I'd put together for my suit.
"What the…"
My head pounded. It’d been a good long time since my head pounded like this. Since back in college, come to think of it. Back before I had access to the kinds of prescription strength stuff that made all the bad feelings go away on the rare occasion that all the technical marvels I’d built into my suit to give the middle finger to physics failed.
College was the wrong thing to think of though. It jogged loose another memory, even though in my disoriented state I had no idea why memories should be jogged loose or why it should be a bad thing to begin with that they were going for a jog.
A flash. A portal opening. Someone being shoved into that portal. It brought to mind what had happened to Fialux in my ultimate final battle with Dr. Lana, but the positioning in this vision was all wrong. I was looking at it from the wrong angle. I was…
In a cell. The unwelcome vision cleared and I looked around. There was no doubting that I was in a cell.
It's not like I was a stranger to the inside of a jail cell. Far from it. It was sort of an occupational hazard of being in the villainy business. Only it’d been awhile since I'd been in a jail cell like this. Since my last fight with Fialux, come to think of it, and that made no sense considering she'd been shoved through that portal and…
Something was missing here. Clearly I was suffering from a bout of temporary amnesia. I wondered if maybe there was something else going on here. Had I been in a medbay?
But no. That made no sense. If I'd been in a medbay then I'd have a nice multimedia presentation from CORVAC letting me know all the wonderful things that had happened to necessitate going into a medbay in the first place.
That I was waking up with a touch of amnesia and minus CORVAC's usual multimedia presentation of recent follies told me something had gone terribly wrong. Even more wrong than usual, that is.
Going into the medbay in the first place and then being forced to watch a highlight reel of all the screwups I’d made that forced me into that medbay in the first place was never ideal, but this was even worse.
I tried to pull myself up, but felt another wave of dizziness wash over me. Not fun. I put a hand
to my forehead and held it there until the room stopped spinning around me.
It's not that I thought my hand on my forehead was doing anything particularly useful, but it did make me feel better. It was a throwback to some of my time in undergrad when rooms had gone spinning around me with far more frequency than they did these days.
"Waking up finally?”
That voice pierced through the haze and it only made the pounding in my head that much more insistent. I didn't like that pounding in my head becoming that much more insistent. That pounding in my head could go fuck itself.
Why weren’t the automatic happy medicine deployers set in various places under my skin doing their thing, damn it?
"What the hell happened to me?" I asked.
I squeezed my eyes shut. The outside world wasn’t all that pleasant right about now, and the other side of my eyelids seemed like a nice alternative.
Besides, this didn't seem like a time to have more sensory input from the outside world than I absolutely had to.
"Looks like you got your ass kicked Night Terror," the voice said.
There was something familiar about that voice. Something I almost recognized. But as with so many other things that’d happened to me lately, the voice slipped over my mind with a feeling like I should know the guy it was attached to without my mind actually making the connection.
Likely because of severe blunt force trauma that wasn’t being fixed by a medbay. Great. My greatest weapon was my mind, and it was operating on a handicap right now. Just what I needed at my moment of greatest need.
I was intimately familiar with the toll a head injury could take on someone. I'd spent a great deal of research and development time creating things that would make it so that a head injury wouldn't cause me permanent injury even if I did take a hit.
That I was suffering from those effects now was merely more unwanted evidence that something really bad had gone down.