Hench for Hire

by Skyler Grant

  Someone landed with a thud next to us. "You found a way to get light? I've been trying hellfire for the past ... however long it's been and got nothing," she said. The woman wore a ragged red cape and boots, and her skin had a distinctly reddish cast that—along with the tail—pointed to a demonic heritage.

  "We did. You're welcome to accompany us, but try anything and we off you," Jules said.

  "I know you! I helped you out once. You probably don't remember. You're Kleo's friends, right? I'm Demonica." She flashed an awkward smile.

  After Patriot had invaded our base Kleo had shown up with a small demon army. Demonica must have been a part of all that.

  "We were on DTV too," Niles said.

  "I don't watch it. Too much reality TV. I kind of like angelic soaps, even if I'm not supposed to," Demonica said.

  I once again had to wonder at the business possibilities of providing entertainment across the borders. People were always looking for the forbidden fruit.

  We picked our way along the street. The lantern wasn't that strong and we had to take it slow. Along the way we gathered a few more lost villains. Our group already looked formidable enough that no one lurking in the shadows made a play for the lamp, and each new arrival made us seem that much stronger.

  We were headed towards the sounds of battle, and the center of this disturbance.

  When we arrived we saw the source. Glimmerdust was facing off against a few of the lesser members of STRONG, including her new husband. Clone wasn't able to compete with an S-Class, but he still had her captured abilities of light and it must have been enough to push her new darkness abilities back somewhat.

  "This isn't like you, babe. Whatever's going on, we need to get you locked down and into containment," Clone said.

  "Yeah, no," Glimmerdust said, tentacles of darkness writhing around her. One lashed out as a woman wreathed in vines tried to get close.

  There were four heroes in total. All B-Class from the looks of them. I knew who Clone was, and I took a moment to scan the others.

  First there was the woman in vines, green-eyed and well-muscled, and wearing rather little. She looked tired though, her posture slumped.

  Jungle Jane

  Registered Hero

  S.T.R.O.N.G.

  Science

  Power Level: 34,000

  Abilities: Photosynthesis, super strength, super agility, limited plant control.

  Biography: Jane Scriver was a biologist and explorer focused on discovering new planet species. One she found had unusual properties at cellular manipulation, and upon experimenting on herself she gained powerful new abilities.

  Then there was a man who looked wiry and nerdy to a level that he might even challenge Niles. Dressed in jeans and a tee with some absurd eight-bit-era video game emblazoned on it.

  Rustbucket

  Registered Hero

  S.T.R.O.N.G.

  Technological

  Power Level: 37,000

  Abilities: Rapid Oxidation, Regeneration

  Biography: Jack Bo was an engineer working on mastering machines that could break down used metallic waste. Instead they tried to feed on the iron his blood. While efforts to save him were successful, they continue to exist in his system becoming a sort of symbiote within him.

  Then there was a young brunette in a yellow sundress and who was looking very serious.

  Feast

  Registered Hero

  V.A.L.O.R.

  Mutant

  Power Level: 21,000

  Abilities: Food Materialization

  Biography: Ruby Day is a mutant with the unusual power of materializing food products out of thin air. While the quantity she can summon each day is limited, they are generally regarded to be of high quality and she has some control at choosing the recipes.

  Well, they were quite the useless assortment. The one was so weak she was obviously there mostly as the STRONG caterer, and the others weren't terribly impressive either.

  Rustbucket was the most dangerous of any of them, at least to me and Niles, given that my drone was metallic and so was Niles' power armor.

  Jungle Jane must be far weaker than normal right now. If her abilities worked off photosynthesis the lack of sunlight had to be weakening her. Since heroes were generally weaker than villains, they often worked in pairs, and if I had to guess Jungle Jane was here to feed off Clone and Glimmerdust. With them both putting out light and pumping her up, she could likely punch well above her weight limit.

  They might not have attacked us yet, but I didn't trust they wouldn't.

  I said, "Niles, handle the brunette. Jules, you'll want to take out the nerd. I've got the bad jungle movie reject. Other villains hang back unless it looks like we're in trouble."

  "Or I could just, you know, handle all of them," Glimmerdust said, sounding bored as she looked over to us. "Oh crap. You're the losers my dad sent before. You really know how to crash parties where you aren't welcome."

  "Story of my life," Niles said, raising an arm and snapping off a shot at Feast. The energy blast was interrupted by a ham materialized in the air. The scent of roasting meat wafted across.

  "Huh," Niles said, before being buried under an avalanche of chicken wings.

  Right, maybe she wasn't just the caterer.

  Jules called to Glimmerdust, "We've got a way to control your power, and a place you can live above a girl who has pretty much all the alcohol, drugs, and loud music in the world. If you're going all bad, we're your new best friends."

  Clone gestured in the air. Barriers made of shining light flickered deeply as they tried to form a cage around Glimmerdust. She dismissed them with a negligent wave.

  Glimmerdust considered a long moment and grudgingly said, "Fine, you can help. Get in my way and I'll drop you into an eternal pit of darkness or something. Oh hey, I think I can do that now!"

  I still didn't like her, but as long as it wasn't us being dropped into wells of darkness we'd get along.

  13

  A flicker and suddenly the pile of chicken wings was shifted and Niles was at the back of Feast with an energy cannon pointed to her head.

  Niles said, "Listen, we can do this. But you seem cool and not really a combatant, so we don't have to."

  The words turned to a bit of a blubber at the end and with a hiss his helmet opened. What appeared to be custard started dripping out as he gasped for breath.

  Feast was pretty good.

  My predictions about Jane were right. She seemed sluggish and I advanced and blasted her with a stun charge. My laser was normally the deadlier option, but a laser was based around the amplification of light and that seemed the wrong choice for the moment.

  Jane took the blast and then grabbed hold of my drone with a spent sent it soaring through the air. This was what I had hover controls for, and after a moment I stabilized myself and came back for a second pass.

  Jules was busy putting arrows in Rustbucket. With his regenerative abilities a standard bolt didn't do much to him and her specialty heads, made of metal, were dissolving on contact.

  "Hit him with something organic, or plastic," I sent to Jules, as I swooped in on Jane again blasting her with a second stun blast that sent the woman sprawling.

  Niles slid on the pavement, crashing down after stepping on a grease puddle created by a widely scattered mess of fried chicken.

  If I were recruiting on this trip, Feast would be high on my list of priorities. Not only would we save on food costs and improve employee morale, she seemed talented. Feast had turned her apparently benign powerset into something combat-oriented.

  Niles was struggling, and Feast wasn't expecting the yellow ball that bounced through a grease puddle to catch her along the jaw line with a resounding thud.

  Feast's teeth clamped together and she fell backwards, knocked unconscious.

  Jane had done the same, and I put a few more stun blasts into her just to be sure. Even lacking sunlight she was well above my power level.

  Jule
s fired an acid arrow into Rustbucket. The tip held a delicate glass vial filled with highly corrosive liquids. Rustbucket wasn't protected against something like this and he began to scream violently as his chest dissolved away—well, at least until the acid reached his lungs, at which point he sort of gurgled.

  Clone was fending off Glimmerdust as she walked towards him, light-formed shackles fading away before they could even get near her.

  "Enough. Ugh, how did I ever think you were cool?" Glimmerdust said, raising her hand in a gesture. Oily darkness pooled around Clone's feet and started to drag him down.

  "Babe, you don't have to do this," Clone said, a little desperate.

  "If you live, I'm not going to see other people," Glimmerdust said.

  Clone was almost totally consumed by the pit of darkness when Glimmerdust took the wedding ring from her finger.

  I'd originally stolen it, they bonded two souls together. With a scornful look and a shrug Glimmerdust tossed it into the pool of darkness and both ring and her new husband vanished.

  That was unexpected. I really had to wonder what was going on here. Mastermind had once been a hero, and I gathered his becoming a villain wasn't entirely willing. Somehow he'd obviously maintained his affection for his hero daughter, so he couldn't be all bad.

  Whatever evil was in Mastermind, it hadn't totally transformed the man. It had totally transformed Glimmerdust.

  Rustbucket had gone silent. Two of the heroes were dead and two unconscious.

  Jules tossed Glimmerdust the bracelet. "That will help you control your powers so we're not trapped in eternal darkness. What do we call you, by the way. Glim? Glenda?"

  Glimmerdust looked up at the sky and frowned. "Eternal darkness? Well, seeing things isn't a problem for me, but fine I guess. And neither name fits. They're all old me, you know. Gloom ... is Gloom taken?"

  The bracelet was slid onto Gloom's wrist and immediately the surrounding darkness faded. There was still an aura around Gloom—because she was just a bit darker than everything in her vicinity.

  Jules pulled out her phone and started tapping at the screen. "Name's taken, but we have that backdoor in Mastermind's systems which means I can do a lot. I'm assigning you provisional S-Class status, which means you can be anyone you want. And the previous Gloom is now known as ... Gloomless."

  Given how much heroes and villains took their name as their whole identity, that wouldn't go over well. Still, if Gloom here really was a new S-Class nobody was going to complain. I thought she might be, I'd never been able to get a clear read on Mastermind's power level and now that I tried to scan Gloom I couldn't get one on hers.

  "Did you say S-Class?" Demonica asked.

  The other villains also looked interested.

  I told her, "Mastermind and anyone S or A-Class has been abducted away from this dimension. That means the inheritors of their powers, if they have one, are going to start powering up. This is Mastermind's daughter. Feel free to pillage and rampage while you can, until she blows holes in you as she takes this town over, or join up now."

  "You're doing a lot of talking for me for some stupid drone with delusions of grandeur," Gloom said.

  "Do you really want to be dealing with these people all day or would you rather have people to do it for you?" Jules asked.

  Gloom looked around and her shoulders slumped. "Man, being wicked is supposed to be way less of a drag. Fine, do the boring stuff. I'll do the drugs and drinking. Oh, and bad boys? Know any bikers?"

  "We have hog riders, but they're literally sort of pig mutants," Jules said.

  Gloom considered that a long moment. "They'll do."

  "And I'm in for the signing up," Demonica said.

  Around half of the other villains that had been following us agreed.

  We escorted Gloom back to our hover carrier, which was surrounded by a gang trying their very best to steal it. Fortunately, Mastermind had invested well and the crowbars they were using to try prying open the doors were bent and distorted with the strain.

  Niles shot off a few energy blasts at them, the air filling with the scent of burning custard, and they scattered.

  Niles told Gloom, "I'm usually better in a fight than what happened earlier, I want you to know. Not, you know, taken out by food."

  "Losers going to lose," Gloom said with a shrug. "Don't worry, man, nobody expects you to do better."

  That wasn't really true, I expected him to do quite a bit better. While I agreed that Feast had an unusual powerset and utilized it well, there were still certain standards to meet. Niles in particular was one of the brains of this outfit and if someone came at him with an unconventional attack, then I'd expect him to have an equally original solution.

  "I should have just shot her. It just ... seemed rude," Niles said.

  "You give someone an opening, and if they have any training at all, they're going to take it. You know she had life insurance, you should have just taken the shot," Jules said.

  Niles had never shown much hesitation in killing before. Then again, he could be sentimental. Perhaps he'd felt attracted to Feast? That usually stopped humans, at least until they had problems, at which point Gloom's recent behavior with her new husband was a lot more common. With humans it was all not shooting each other in the head—up until the point it was throwing each other into pits of eternal darkness.

  There was the sound of weapons fire everywhere in the city, and far more vessels in the sky than usual. Mastermind had always kept strict limits on airships, but with him out of the picture it seemed word had quickly gotten out. Plenty of villains had them stashed in bunkers for hitting across the channel and weren't afraid to use them now.

  "So are we going to take over the whole city now? Is that the plan?" Bouncy asked, excited.

  That wasn't my plan, although it might be best to let everyone think that it was. At least, those outside of our inner circle.

  Gloom was the one person who might keep this city from tearing itself apart, and whatever Mastermind thought about the benefits of natural selection and power struggles "winnowing out the weak", as Glenda put it, it would probably take firepower to free him. The more the city was torn apart, the harder rescuing Mastermind would get.

  Gloom took to the air, her wings fluttering. They'd taken on her new aspect too, threaded with purple highlights and the essence of darkness. "This place is kind of a dump."

  We hadn't even gotten to our neighborhood yet. Our district had a lot of real estate available cheaply, because a curse had left it feral for so many years.

  "We'll figure out a plan later. For now we're just going to get home," I said.

  I was already thinking about plans, of course. I was no Mastermind, but I couldn't help myself. We needed to come out of this alive and ahead.

  Gloom wasn't a long-term solution for anything. I'd always hesitated to even do business with Disaster, because Disaster destroyed everything around her, and I was already getting the impression that Gloom was like that too. Lots of villains did—they tended towards the highly destructive and lacked anything that could really be called a redeeming virtue.

  I'd work under Mastermind, and happily so. The man was dependable, especially when he threatened to kill or destroy you, but his daughter wasn't. I'd help her because he'd ordered it. Still, keeping her around made me nervous.

  Our goal had to be to get Mastermind back. There were a few opportunities to do that. In fact, he'd even provided leads in his final moments.

  Mastermind had said we'd need to take Patriot. That had been our goal for a long time anyway, and I could see the logic behind it. Patriot was able to convert energy into matter.

  If we needed an army, Patriot would provide one if we could take control of that matter-converting system. Mastermind also mentioned that there were no dimensional rifts in the ocean.

  That was telling, because there should have been. Voltara was somewhere near Mastermind Isle in her submarine base, and Voltara was another S-Class, as well as another of
the brainy ones. If she hadn't been abducted, it might be because the water naturally interfered, or it might be she had some way to shield herself. Either way, we needed to find her.

  Then there were these invaders themselves. They had technology and resources unlike anything else I'd seen, except for perhaps Emmatech, and that was interesting.

  We needed to learn more about them, and to seize some of their resources for ourselves.

  I didn't quite know how to put all those pieces together just yet, but I thought they did fit somehow. Mastermind was brilliant—meaning S-Class level of brilliant—and even though he'd only had a few moments to think things through, I was convinced that must be enough.

  There was enough here for us to act, if only we could see and understand it.

  "We're going to need to talk when we get back to base," I said to Jules.

  "You trying to put all the pieces together too? I've got an idea."

  Of course she did. Jules wasn't an S-Class, but her tactical mind was fantastic. Her bloodline didn't just out-power opponents, they out-thought them. I really needed to find a way to get her some more ambrosia. Whatever was going on, we needed Jules at full strength and at her most brilliant. Whatever addictive properties ambrosia might have would have to be a worry for another day.

  I scanned Villainet looking for ambrosia listings. As always, I hated the price, and it had already gone up given recent events. I put in an order anyways.

  14

  Once we returned to base we set Gloom up with a room. I didn't want her on the main floor with us, so I set her up in the clothing workshop. She wasn't really a client and tucked away in the workshop Gloom was less likely to send anyone spiraling off into darkness if she got upset.

  I called a meeting of employees, including Bouncy. I thought she'd earned her place.