Mastermind

by Steven Kelliher

  Starshot: 92% HP

  Seeing the way I stared at her, and seeing how Axel smiled at his small victory, Starshot got angry. She put some more power into her palms, rose a few feet higher, and brought her hands together again.

  I expected another solar flare and shielded my eyes. Only, it wasn’t a harmless flare this time. It was a beam like the one she’d used to shatter the bank’s windows.

  Sebastian tried to shoulder me out of the way, but the blast took me full in the chest and sent me flying back. It didn’t feel hot – at least, not yet. If I had to describe it, it felt like being kicked by a mule, or a Clydesdale horse, to be more precise. Of course, this being a game world, I didn’t feel true pain on the level of reality, but the physics engine accounted for it in other ways. I felt my avatar’s bones crack, my chest heave, and before I shattered the windshield of the car behind me with my diminutive frame, I saw the red stats flashing up in my field of view.

  Despot: 8% HP

  “Wow.”

  I was prone. Utterly helpless because I’d fallen below the 10% HP benchmark to end a fight in a knockout. I saw the thirty-second respawn counter start up in my UI.

  Encounter Ends

  Despot vs. Starshot

  Winner: Starshot!

  Infamy Reward: Low Value

  Rivalry started! You have begun a rivalry with hero Starshot. Continue to clash and develop your story with her to gain larger Rivalry multiplayer bonuses to Infamy rewards from fighting her.

  Respawn Counter: 30 seconds

  You have fallen below 10% health and will be respawned at your home point unless your health is restored before the counter runs out.

  Starshot would be seeing a similar set of notifications, except she would have gained far more Fame points for winning the encounter. That, and she wouldn’t be threatened with respawning.

  This was embarrassing.

  A shadow passed over me. At first, I thought it was Starshot come to finish the job, which would have quite surprised me. Killing me would tier her down or, more likely at her level, it might be enough to flip her into being a villain. In any case, this shadow was too large, and the gold atop its crown wasn’t magical in nature. Good old Sebastian, my loyal NPC dock worker, took a long look at my sorry state and raised his own gun. He reached to his right and snatched another firearm from a now-cowering Mickie, and leveled them both at Starshot, who I couldn’t see.

  “Die, witch!” he screamed as he fired. I heard the guns clicking the way they did when they were empty, and hoped that Starshot’s next blast would kill him quick rather than let him play at suffering the way NPCs often did.

  Guess I was starting to go soft.

  Respawn Counter: 3 seconds.

  Sebastian’s last stand seemed to be quite the spectacle, but I faded out before I could see the rest of the exchange.

  Ten

  Limbo

  I came to – rather, Despot came to – in darkness. I blinked, touched the place where my mask had been, and felt skin. I sat up, hearing more snaps and pops than I did getting out of bed in the real world, and looked down to see my bare chest wrapped in cloth and supported by wooden splints that looked to have been ripped from the docks themselves.

  I was lying on the tactical table in my secret base. I prompted my UI to pull up my HP and saw it hovering in the orange at 20%. On the road to recovery, then.

  “Welcome back, General.”

  I looked to my left and saw B5 considering me from his perch. He was sitting in the chair in front of the great black slab that was the supercomputer, tapping his finger against his opposite arm. There appeared to be security footage behind him. It was in color, and I recognized the intersection of 22nd and 31st outside of the bank, along with the glowing golden nugget at its center.

  “Quite the scene you caused,” he said.

  “Looks like it all worked out,” I said, looking around. “Where—”

  “You should get into the habit of pulling up your Sphere of Influence directly preceding or following a fight,” B5 said. “Axel and Alex were taken into custody shortly after you went out. Kayde and Sascha escaped with the help of Madam Post, who must have been monitoring the situation closely. As for Mickie, he was gunned down by local law enforcement.”

  “Damn. We knew he was a wild card. And Sebastian?”

  “Unaccounted for,” B5 said.

  I frowned. That meant he hadn’t been gunned down or arrested. I pulled up my Sphere and smiled to see his name still occupying the top slot. He was out there, then. Just had to find him.

  Sphere of Influence – 7/15

  Single-Slot Members

  1) Sebastian 2) Hobb 3) Kayde 4) Brooks

  5) Sascha 6) Axel 7) Alex

  “So…” I started. “What happened while I was respawning?”

  “Madam Post sent a clean-up crew,” B5 said. “They snatched Kayde and Sascha in the chaos, tossed them in the back of a van and took off with two decoy trucks, one of which was run off the road by a local hero called Impulse, who found himself overtaken by the sudden urge to intervene. So, yes, if you’re keeping track, you owe her a van and a pair of crew members, for starters.”

  “Starshot didn’t pursue?” I asked, remembering how brightly she’d shone when she’d laid me out.

  “Not that I’m aware, sir. The other van made it over Silver Bridge. Post’s men don’t think they were followed.” He paused, watching my reaction or waiting for my command.

  “Scale was sniffing around for you,” B5 said, his voice somehow managing to mix gravity with ‘I told you so’ panache. “He caught wind that you were in a bad state, and since Post’s men were busy covering tracks and making sure none of the authorities, Blackstrike or any of the rival gangs would take advantage of the day’s failure, she took it upon herself to ensure that you recover in the safety of your own nest.”

  “So, she hasn’t made a house call,” I said flatly.

  “Not at this time. More to the point,” B5 continued, tapping a metal finger on the supercomputer screen, “not a single golden coin made it back to this fine establishment, nor the warehouses of Madam Post, which means the only thing you managed to do out there was get yourself gravely injured, and shrink your Sphere of Influence in the process. Oh, and that van and personnel you owe to Madam Post.”

  I groaned, knowing full well my precarious position with her had just become a lot worse. Gingerly, I pulled up my Reputation tab to find out the specifics.

  Reputation

  Madam Post of the Doom Docks

  Alignment: Strained (1043/5000)

  Titan Dominion

  Alignment: Hated (0/5000)

  I sighed. Bungling the bank job, failing to deliver the gold and even costing Post men and money had lowered my reputation to dangerous levels. Another blast of negative reputation points like that and I’d drop from Strained to Unfriendly, and from there it was a quick step to Hated and all-out War. And every second I was on her turf, that bar would move steadily in the wrong direction.

  I could not fail with Post again.

  Closing the Reputation page, I returned to examining the footage of my own catastrophe. Now that I looked closer, there was too much gold reflected on the screen to be coming from Starshot’s powers alone. Gold littered the street—actual gold—along with shell casings and shards of broken glass.

  “Sebastian?” I asked, surprising myself that I cared.

  B5 seemed to share the feeling. He shook his head.

  “I don’t… I don’t understand,” I said, staring down at my bare feet. “Starshot was a tier six, but there’s no way…” I looked at B5. No answer. “Her blasts were more like something from a tier three?”

  If B5 could smile, I think he would be right then.

  “What makes you think she’d need tier-three power to take you down?” he said.

  That didn’t make me feel much better. She must have a mind stat that was off the charts. Maybe a mix of that and brawn, given how much power she was
absorbing and putting out.

  “She is a tier six,” B5 said as if he could read my thoughts. “Same as you. She just has a power that’s a bad match-up for you.”

  “Styles make fights,” I said, nodding. Still didn’t sit comfortably, given the ease with which she had won our encounter.

  I had a brief urge to rage quit then and there. A tier six just pantsed me in front of my crew, and in front of at least one viewer bot. I knew it was unlikely that our little dance on the south side of town had made it into any of the daily highlight packages or bigger industry blogs, but there were a few niche boards that dug into every PvP encounter. The memes would flow, and Despot’s first introduction to some small portion of the masses would be on the receiving end of a thrashing by a tier-six girl scout.

  I sat in morbid silence for a while. I’d say it hedged closer to fuming than brooding, but then, I was still wearing a trenchcoat, hood and villain garb, minus the mask which was hung on one of the rack pegs across the obsidian floor. I suppose it would be difficult to tell the particular manner of my displeasure.

  “Punked by a tier six,” I said, shaking my head.

  B5 must have heard a subtle shift in my tone – the sort that meant speaking wouldn’t result in me booting him into the foam-and-spray abyss down below. “You are a tier six, Despot. No shame in losing to a peer.”

  I turned a withering look on him, but the tone of his voice wasn’t as deadpan as it had been before, and it was a good sight less told-you-so.

  “I know that you are possessed of great foresight,” he said, “and cursed with grand ambition. These are admirable qualities, and dangerous in the right hands—”

  “But you don’t think these are the right hands?” I asked, holding up my gloved hands. There were still a few bits of glass stuck into the stitching.

  “I do,” B5 said, dipping his chin. “You are a danger, Despot, or soon will be, and no doubt you’ll threaten the greatest heroes and villains in Titan City and War Town. But…” He seemed to expect an interruption, but I felt as tired as my character should be. “Right now, if you continue to leap without looking, the only one you’ll be endangering is yourself. If you truly want to accomplish your mission, if you truly want to bring down a Titan-threat hero like Leviathan, don’t do him the favor of screwing up again.”

  By the time B5 had finished, I’d swung my legs over the edge of the table nearest him and regarded him with my arms crossed. I smiled.

  “B5,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe you’re not so bad after all.”

  “Likewise, General.”

  I smiled. “Now,” I said, bracing my hands on one of the planning table’s projectors and lifting myself over it to stand on the floor, “what’s our next play?”

  “We must re-curry favor with Madam Post,” B5 said. “Or get far enough away from her that our Strained standing with her faction doesn’t matter.”

  “We also need to fill out the crew,” I said, nodding. “I may as well cut the twins, since they’re in the ol’ slammer.”

  I brought up my Sphere of Influence again and removed the two caught crooks. My sphere shrank to 5/15 and looked pretty pathetic.

  “I’ll have to Influence a few more of Post’s underlings before the next job.”

  “The next job?”

  “Gold, B,” I said. “We still need that if we’re going to get back into Post’s… Neutral graces.”

  B5’s metal face wasn’t capable of shifting to accommodate a range of emotions. His mouth was an emerald light bisected by the same black lines as his eyes. Instead, he seemed to display his emotions more through pitch and time between blinks, or flashes. His eyes dimmed for a few long seconds as he judged me a hopeless fool and then brightened when he’d made peace with the fact that he was ostensibly chaperoning a dullard rather than one of the Ythilian Generals of yore.

  “Despot,” he said, as if preparing to attempt to enlighten a simpleton, “Madam Post controls the weapons at the docks. You need weapons to execute another job like that, and even then, you failed. Now, you’ll be hard-pressed to avoid open conflict with her, never mind convince her to partially finance another one of these—”

  “Let me deal with Madam Post,” I said, not knowing exactly how I would. Maybe I’d try to get her alone, take Scale along with me and let her know that I didn’t really give a damn about her van. The good cop approach had only resulted in me getting egg on my face. Maybe it was time to switch roles. Of course, the move could result in her rallying every rat and dock boy within six square miles to perm me and my green friend, but that was a bridge I’d cross tomorrow.

  For now…

  “More important than the gold or the jobs or even crotchety old Madam Post right now,” I said, coming to stand in front of the supercomputer. “We need to figure out just how we’re going to improve this operation before tiering up.”

  “Which aspect of our operation are you referring to?” B5 asked.

  “Computer,” I said, “access Ythilian core.”

  “You shouldn’t talk about someone as if they aren’t here,” B5 said.

  It was easy to forget that the droid I’d been speaking to all along wasn’t conscious. It was the core stuck into the guts of the machinery in front of me that gave it life and powered this whole base.

  The supercomputer – B5 – raced to comply, and a green border surrounded the black space in the center of the screen.

  “Research tier-six hero, Starshot,” I commanded.

  I tapped my foot as the core delved into the Ythilian archives. Scores of hero faces flashed across the screen like a deck of cards. After a few seconds, Starshot appeared, and now that she wasn’t reciting corny lines from 1960s superhero comics, she looked more striking than I remembered. Golden hair framed a bronze face that looked to have flecks of gold trapped within it, like freckles swimming in amber. Her eyes were brown in the still profile image, but I’d seen them shine like the midday sun.

  I became conscious of B5’s attention. He was waiting to see what I would do.

  “Bring up stats and superpower breakdown,” I said, clearing my throat in the process. “Play footage of her most recent encounter at the bottom for reference.”

  As the computer set to fulfilling my request, I turned to B5. “This is the wake-up call I needed,” I said, pointing at the screen. “Not losing one of Madam Post’s damn vans, or freeing up a few spaces in my Sphere of Influence.” I swallowed down the persistent guilt at lumping good ol’ Sebastian in with the rest of them. He wasn’t dead, but I didn’t know if he’d show up again. I’d have to strike out and look for him soon, before his loyalty wavered. Even a good dog bites given the right circumstances. “Tryhards like Starshot litter that city, and Leviathan is the worst of the lot, though, admittedly, he doesn’t do a whole lot of trying lately. If I can’t beat this one, we’re porked before we turn the oven on.”

  “I quite agree,” B5 said, and I couldn’t tell if he was mocking or sincere.

  “I take your point about my tier, B,” I said, frowning as the supercomputer began populating Starshot’s stats, “and I know I’m not quite as hardy as I was in previous builds. Still, this one hit hard. Much harder than most tier-six players.”

  Once the stats populated, the computer set to outlining a brief description of Starshot’s superpower. I stepped back to take in the whole package, comparing what I was seeing on the stat sheet with the encounter I didn’t really want to relive down below.

  Starshot

  Tier 6 Hero

  Threat Index: Neutral

  Mind: 30

  Brawn: 5

  Agility: 15

  Armor: 5

  Charisma: 10

  “Wow,” I said, focusing on the top half. Her mind stat had a prime roll, just like my charisma.

  “Indeed,” B5 nodded along with me. “Quite the spread for a tier six.”

  “And with scaling, Starshot here might just end up being the hero she always dr
eamed of.” I caught myself and shook the pleasant thought, turning it sour. “Of course, that’s if she doesn’t get in my way again.”

  “Naturally,” B5 chipped in.

  I scanned down, delving into her superpower, which was connected to her high mind stat to suit Starshot’s archetype; an Energy Projection hero made famous in the Silver Age of comic books, when cosmic adventurers and intergalactic heralds patrolled galaxies near and far, and tipped the scales in wars beyond human reckoning.

  Superpower: Righteous Rays

  I resisted the urge to gag, but it was all in keeping with the character Starshot had portrayed.

  Description:

  Starshot harnesses energy from the sun, merging it with her cells to power projected radiation, causing damage and significant concussive force. She may release energy however she pleases, in short bursts or one massive attack, so long as she has energy to do so. This allows the hero to fly, hover, release defensive or offensive bursts, all through the same energy source.

  Starshot may focus all her energy into a single blast. Doing so grants her a 30% damage bonus, but saps her energy reserves to zero, leaving her vulnerable.

  Current Energy Capacity – 60 (Scales with the mind stat)

  Base Regeneration Rate – 10 energy regained every 15 seconds

  Regeneration in Direct Sunlight – 20 energy every 15 seconds

  “Well,” I said, nodding and swallowing all at once. “That explains that.”

  “Explains what, General? How Starshot was able to defeat you?”