Mastermind

by Steven Kelliher

  Just when it looked inevitable that Scale would be torn apart, the gun clicked rapidly, and no more bullets screamed out, just a whirring sound filling the echoes in the garage.

  I stood and dusted myself off, trying to see through the shelves and racks and twisting chains where the tinkerer had gone, wondering if Scale had been perm’d after all.

  Scale roared again and tossed the table aside as he rose. He was covered in green blood, but seemed to have plenty left in the tank, and took one angry step toward the back of the workshop. The tinkerer was there, standing at attention, and looking calm once more. He held a strange-looking gun in his left hand. It was black and looked like a gun in every way but for the barrel, which opened up in a cone shape, like a police megaphone. In his right hand, he clutched the little metal ball I saw him scoop up moments before.

  “No more tricks,” Scale snarled. He paused for a brief second, and the tinkerer smirked and smashed the silver ball onto the floor. It exploded in a bright flash and released a plume of smoke.

  “Really?” I asked aloud. “A smoke bomb in a cramped workshop?” Scale and I couldn’t see where Smith was, sure enough, but we could see where he wasn’t. All Scale had to do was wait for the smoke to dissipate, or risk wading right into the thick of it.

  He seemed primed to do just that when the tinkerer darted out of the cloud and angled toward the front of the workshop. Scale reached out for him with a growl, but then paused as another Smith darted out of the opposite side of the plume. After a second, dozens of Smiths ran out of the dissipating cloud, climbing over tables and chairs and retreating toward doors and windows. Looking closely, one could see that the images were just that, as they didn’t disturb a mote of dust or a hanging chain, even though some of them did their best to appear as if they were avoiding the physical obstacles.

  Scale growled in frustration, looking from side to side like a cat suddenly afflicted by a swarm of mice, unsure which to pursue. He noticed a figure standing in front of him, another Smith, and the one I wagered to be real. He was still standing in the same spot he’d dropped the grenade, smiling with his cone-shaped gun pointed at Scale.

  Scale didn’t care. He flattened himself to the floor and leapt up higher than I’d have thought possible, the knobbed crown of his reptilian head brushing against the rafters above.

  The tinkerer discharged the weapon, which released a semi-translucent blob of amorphous matter which floated up and met Scale on his way down.

  The lizard’s eyes lost a bit of their Rage as he stopped his descent suddenly and hung there, suspended in blinking animation as the blob enveloped him completely. I walked toward Smith, and together we stared up admiringly at the hovering lizard. I saw bright flashes out of the corner of my eye and looked around, expecting some new attack, but it was only the other tinkerers winking out of existence.

  As Scale and I were allies, I could see what was holding him in place.

  Stasis Effect Successful!

  Scale held in Stasis. Immune to damage for the duration. Any attack on him will break stasis.

  Countdown: 60 seconds.

  “Impressive,” I said, meaning it more this time. The turret gun stopped its annoying whining whir at the tinkerer’s button-pressing command, but the place smelled of sulfur and burning... and a little bit of blood.

  “Can he breathe?”

  Smith nodded. Seemed he wasn’t the talking type, even when the threat was past, and judging by the loose manner in which he stood, he didn’t consider me much of one. Couldn’t really blame him, seeing how easily he’d dealt with Scale.

  As for my brave companion, his face was locked into a toothy grimace, though the power seemed to have left his eyes, which had faded in color.

  “What is it?” I asked, pointing at the gun in the tinkerer’s hand.

  He looked down at it and then at me and frowned like it should be obvious. “Stasis gun.”

  “So, you can speak,” I said. His voice sounded just as Scottish as I had imagined. Not the most imaginative dev putting this one together, but what the character lacked in originality, his toys seemed to make up for.

  “Aye,” the tinkerer answered on a delay. “But not much.”

  “I noticed,” I said, distracted as I pawed at the black ash stain on the ground with my boot. “And that… thing?” I asked. “The grenade?”

  “Swarm grenade,” he said, smiling at that one. That one made him proud.

  “Impressive again,” I said, nodding. The tinkerer nodded along with me, but his mood dropped when I spoke again. “Then again, catching an overgrown gecko is hardly an accomplishment worthy of the tech, or the builder. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  He stood slack-jawed for a second and then pointed up at the floating Scale, who had managed to twist himself enough to cause the whole bubble to rotate. He was now upside down, his eyes attempting to track us as he went.

  “Yes, yes,” I said, waving Smith’s gesture away. “I’m not trying to knock it. It’s just…”

  He watched me with a dubious, disbelieving expression, imploring me to continue. When I didn’t, he said, “Just what…?”

  “When you drew up the designs for the stasis gun, and the swarm grenade – hell, everything you’ve got in this magical toy shop of yours.” I spun in a circle, the bottom of my trenchcoat brushing at the dust atop the cement. “Did you really intend to use it on folks like that?”

  I jabbed a thumb over my shoulder at the hapless Scale, who was now floating aimlessly toward the front door.

  I looked back at him and frowned. The tech seemed a little overpowered if it could hold a player – tier six or not – for upwards of a minute. But then, it was balanced by the fact that Scale couldn’t be attacked while in his floating ether.

  Speaking of, the ether popped like an electric bubble, and Scale hit the cement floor with a dull thud. He got up shakily, whirling on the two of us, but I held up a hand to stay him. I knew his stats were at half of their base for the next little while due to his Rage cooldown. He was truly all bark at this point.

  “You attacked me,” the tinkerer said, returning to my previous point. He pointed at his own chest. “I only used my tech this way because you attacked me.”

  “Well, technically,” I said, “he attacked you. I only egged him on. But the larger point I’m making is, do you really build all of this stuff just to watch it go to waste in random encounters you have no stake in? You like selling to criminals and gang members, lowlifes and villains?”

  “You’re a villain,” Smith pointed out, to which I shrugged and nodded.

  “True enough. Still, I have what many of them – dare I say, all of them – lack: something that might make me a compelling ally. Nay, a compelling sponsor, for someone like you.”

  The tinkerer sank back into his off-kilter stance, crossing his arms over his chest. He didn’t look convinced, but he looked like he wanted to be convinced. At least the cone of the stasis gun was no longer pointed at me.

  “Did Post send ye here?”

  “No, Mr. Smith. I have come of my own accord.”

  “Ye got gold?”

  “No, I have something better.”

  The dwarf just blinked.

  “How would you kill a god?” I asked him.

  The tinkerer simply stood there, frowning again, his eyebrows drawing so close together this time I thought they’d start knitting a shawl. Maybe I’d frozen the AI, stumped this one’s code a bit by invoking a religious term in-game.

  “I don’t believe in God,” Smith said.

  I smirked and started to pace before him. I was doing that a lot lately, I noticed. My first true villainous tic.

  “There is a god, Luther.” He looked at me with unconcealed suspicion. “Or rather, a man who considers himself to be a god. But he is a meek and meager thing possessed of small ambition to go with an overabundance of power. Not like me, who is quite the opposite… for now.”

  The tinkerer now looked intrigued. I thought I even s
aw the beginnings of an icon cloud coalescing above his head.

  “Who is this god?” he asked.

  “Leviathan.”

  I thought the programming inherent in all tier-one-fearing NPCs would take over and laugh me out of the place. Instead, the icon above dear Luther’s head began to take shape, the vapors forming together. There was a hint of pink in the mist, which meant I was playing a dangerous game, balancing on the knife’s edge between Influence and failure.

  “You mean to kill him?”

  “We,” I said, rolling my eyes toward Scale and nodding before the question came. “My associates and I, those who believe in this mission, plan to kill him. Leviathan is a scourge on this world. He is a vain, greedy, pompous destroyer. He is power incarnate, and he is not benevolent. Killing him will bring about change, and change is, as you know, dear Luther, art.”

  “And why would I help?”

  Now it was his turn to smirk, and the mists above his head verged closer to red, quickening my heartbeat.

  “I have facilities, Luther. Private, hidden, where you would be funded and unbothered by house calls and criminals. Free. Appreciated. Your work fully expressed.”

  Now the cloud began to shift back to gray, even to white, and I knew I had the thread.

  “If you pledge your services – your talents – to me, Luther Smith,” I said, crossing my right hand over my heart. “I will see your visions realized. You will have my full backing, and that of my men. You will have your laboratory, and your funding. You will have protection. Most of all, you will have what all artists truly crave.”

  He chewed his lip. “What’s that?”

  I smiled. “Recognition, Luther. And what better way than to see your tech play a role – a vital one, no less – in bringing down the most famous hero Titan City has ever seen? What better way to become an immortal than to craft the bolt that slays one?”

  Of course, I didn’t tell Luther that I needed his allegiance to secure that of another NPC. In that moment, it was quite beside the point.

  The tinkerer’s eyes almost sparkled.

  I was close, and so pushed for the result. “I ask you again. How would you kill a god?”

  The icon flashed and brightened, emblazoned above Luther Smith’s visor-covered crown. He reached out and shook my hand, and in the place of a dragon’s roar, Scale offered a tired sigh from the back of the shop.

  Twelve

  Prep Time

  For the first time since starting my new build in Titan Online, I was feeling accomplished.

  Sure, I had been soundly defeated in my first hero encounter, which I owed to some combination of the overconfidence my victory over Scale had brought and perhaps a slight underestimation of precisely what Starshot was capable of.

  Still, I’d licked my wounds and powered on through to the next step in this grand, Leviathan-killing scheme of mine. The tinkerer was mine. I hadn’t even had to engage him in combat to get a nice addition to my growing Sphere of Influence. The AI must have appreciated the scheme I’d enacted to get him on the squad, as the check that had failed miserably with Madam Post seemed to have passed with flying colors on the inventor.

  And as soon as I’d given him the keys to my subterranean kingdom, he’d run with it.

  I still marveled as I took the iron staircase down from the tunnel to the obsidian platform in the underground chamber, seeing how much of a difference a few more bustling bodies made. Without Sebastian and my dockside thugs, the place was a lonely, brooding cave. With them – lifting construction equipment and carrying the latest crates of raw materials for Luther to do his work – the place was really starting to look like a proper villainous lair.

  B5 had said that I’d need a few more recruits. I knew it was the Ythilian in him, but I quite agreed. A trip down to my favorite docks had provided the opportunity to convince a few of the more disgruntled folks in Madam Post’s employ to make for greener pastures.

  Sphere of Influence – 15/15

  Single-Slot Members

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

  5) Kayde 6) Spooks 7) Damon 8) Greek

  9) Vincent 10) Carlyle

  Multi-Slot Members

  1) Luther Smith (5 Slots)

  As for Luther, he was nowhere to be found, which is to say, he had immediately discovered a host of hidden chambers, catches, buttons and levers that operated the base.

  When I asked B5 why he hadn’t informed me there was an underground chamber beneath the underground chamber – one dug into the obsidian platform itself, and which was replete with all manner of tools, cubbies and alcoves – he informed me, quite simply, that I hadn’t asked him.

  I suppose I wouldn’t have known how to make use of the additional space anyway. Luther, on the other hand… well, let’s just say my gold was the last thing that mad scientist was interested in.

  “What’s he up to now?” I asked as I stepped through the natural gate onto the obsidian dais that was my grand, floating throne room above the foaming abyss.

  “You’ll need to be more specific, General,” B5 said.

  “Luther,” I said, stepping aside as Hobb, my particularly burly recruit, trundled past with a crate of… was that coal?

  “Luther is in his workshop,” B5 said, pointing at the bedrock below our feet with one metallic digit.

  “Working on the vests?” I asked.

  “He completed those some time ago,” B5 clipped, indicating a dozen of the black kevlar-looking pieces that hung from the racks.

  I pulled one of them over my head and shoulders, careful not to jar my mask out of place, and pulled up its stats.

  Item: Basic Body Armor

  No Tier Restrictions

  No Stat Restrictions

  Armor Bonus: +10

  I equipped the body armor and brought up my character stats to see how they looked with the new bonus applied.

  Despot

  Tier 6 Villain

  Threat Index: Minor

  Superpower: Influence

  Mind: 15

  Brawn: 5

  Agility: 10

  Armor: 5 (+10)

  Charisma: 30

  “Excellent,” I said. “Now Sebastian and the others will be able to stand up to a bit more physical damage with these on.”

  “Quite,” B5 said, not sounding convinced. “They may even remain standing through a half-powered blast from Starshot, assuming she hasn’t tiered up—”

  “She hasn’t, has she?” I asked, only catching my frantic tone after I’d let it out.

  “No,” B5 said. “Not yet.”

  “Good,” I said. “So, if he’s done with the vests, what’s ol’ Luther working on?” I was virtually salivating.

  B5 wasn’t capable of smiling, but I had grown used to judging his moods based on how bright or dim his eyes glowed, and how rapidly they blinked. Despite his best efforts to remain stoic and boring, he was excited.

  “Your request is being fulfilled, as near as I can tell,” the droid said. “Luther says he should be done within the hour.”

  “Music to my ears,” I said, patting B5 on the shoulder as I passed by him. Physical contact seemed to make him mildly uncomfortable. It was just my way of showing comradery while, I admit, also making him mildly uncomfortable in the process.

  I had asked Luther to make improvements to the base as he saw fit. He’d spent the first few days down here doing exactly that. Of course, I’d had turrets, traps and all manner of lethal surprises in store, anything to ward off potential intruders, make Madam Post think twice about challenging me. I was already planning to have Brooks and Vincent take some vests over to her as payment. She may not have gotten the tinkerer, but I was willing to share his tech if it meant improving relations with the dangerous old hag.

  I also hoped the heightened level of activity around the dam and the Doom Docks would discourage rather than encourage Blackstrike in making a visit. I had yet to come across him in War Town, but I knew the days were ticking d
own toward our inevitable encounter. My operation was growing too quickly, and I was far from the only ambitious one on this side of the bay.

  Luther hadn’t only given me turrets and body armor. He had also shown me quite a few things I didn’t know the base was capable of. I walked by the center planning table and stared at the blue flickering holographic map on display. Luther had pulled it up with a few button presses and had reluctantly instructed me on how to do the same. Gallant Tower loomed above a real-time replica of the city skyline. Useful for upcoming missions, certainly. With a few minor adjustments, Luther had programmed the planning table to lock on to members of my team, which could come in handy as my Sphere grew.

  Other than that, Luther had discovered that the various stone mounds and stalagmites that littered the platform were covers for various chutes, compartments and… thingies. Luther had inspected each and every one. Some seemed to be escape shafts that led into lower levels, while others hid power outlets. Some were merely extra storage units, like oddly-shaped lockers or compost bins, and a couple in particular even had the NPC tinkerer excited. I stepped up to one of these now.

  Luther had tripped a latch that had caused the tip of the obsidian mount to flip open like a toy mountain, exposing a silver rim and a cylinder that looked to be a housing unit for… something. Luther guessed the mound was meant to be outfitted with a ballistic missile. The idea of having my very own doomsday button at my disposal was exciting indeed.

  Of course, B5 had quickly poured cold water over the idea, telling me that a ballistic missile would hardly be enough to take down Leviathan. Still, it was a handy thing to have available in a pinch, as long as we got the resources and materials needed for Luther to arm it. We’d get there, eventually.

  As a companion to the missile silo, B5 had decided to inform me that the cavernous celling above was not entirely natural. In fact, with a few commands to the supercomputer, I could open the entire chamber to the cloudy skies above. Not the best thing for inviting unwanted attention, but perfect for getting my eventual tomahawk into the air.