“Yes, they can’t have troublemakers walking about, can they?” Teacher asked, with a note of irony.
“The people staying in the level one security area get chaperones when they want to go somewhere, and cameras keep an eye on them… usually.”
Teacher glanced around. Where there had been offices in the previous area of the complex, this area was residential. Some of the doors here were open, showing clean apartments with everything neat and in order, waiting for an occupant.
Some, though, were inhabited. Each resident had made the space their own. One appeared to be layered in a crusting of junk – bottlecaps and glass shards arranged in kaleidoscopic patterns. Another was all black leather and chrome, smelling faintly of an expensive aftershave.
They stopped at the doorway to another room. There was little doubt in their minds after they saw the interior. A folding screen with a dragon print and women in kimonos on it was below iconic pin up images, modern and dated. 50′s pin up girls alongside recent celebrities. The way they were organized and clustered, it seemed somehow less like decoration and more like… character studies?
From their vantage point, the corner of a four-poster bed was visible.
“Ingenue,” Teacher called out.
Feet swung out over the side of the bed, and she was standing in a moment. She stopped short when saw him, pouting, one fist against her hip. Dramatized, artificial. Even the way she dressed, it was the same, a silk bathrobe that was short enough to be borderline indecent. Always putting on a show, and not in the sense of showing skin, but acting, putting on a mask.
“You got my hopes up. It’s you,” she said. “Dressed up like a wizard, maybe, but it’s not that good a disguise.”
“Doesn’t have to be.”
“Shame on you, not even calling a girl before you show up unannounced… but you were never very classy.”
“No, I’m afraid not. If you’d like to talk to Marquis, I’m sure he could oblige on that front.”
“He switches from the aristocrat to the low born commoner as it suits him. Split personality. Is that what this is all about? Are you planning on gathering us all together again? Clinging to the past, Teacher?”
“I was planning on visiting him, but not for the past, and not to gather anyone. Not in that sense. I’m touching base with certain people, nothing more.”
“Why?”
“Getting the lay of the land,” he said. He saw her put on a shocked expression, then cut her off before she could speak, “Assessing the situation, Ingenue. There’s a great deal going on, and I’d rather work with known quantities before I start interacting with foreign ones.”
“Should I ask why now?”
“For someone who is feigning disinterest, you’re asking an awful lot of questions.”
“I’m bored, Teacher. I’m even losing interest in Chevalier, and he doesn’t find time for me, unless it’s to make sure I’m being a good girl.”
“Do you fancy a trip, then? A walk outside?”
“My jailors, who seem very invested in declaring they aren’t actually jailors, might take umbrage.”
“I’ll have you back by curfew, if you’re still interested by then.”
“You’re planning something,” she said.
“Of course.”
“Tell me,” she said. She put her hands into the pockets of her dressing gown, which were too small for her whole hands. “And maybe I’ll go on this field trip of yours.”
The viking leaned in close to Teacher, “Time. If they did notice anything…”
He trailed off. There was no need to spell it out.
Teacher nodded a little, but he continued, unruffled. “I’m looking to put together something bigger.”
“Bigger than?”
“Than any of the teams currently in operation. Than any of the powers we’ve seen yet. Call it megalomania, if you will.”
“Why? Before you say anything, you should know that ‘because I can’ isn’t an answer.”
“It was never the answer.”
“You’ve done a lot of things, and everything indicates it was for that very reason. Cas Raul?” Ingenue asked. She was relaxing now, the guise dropping.
“I’ve done a lot of things, agreed, but there were always other motivations. I admit, I was younger then, the plans were cruder. But the plans still worked and there was a goal involved. For some time, I’d been gathering information and putting pawns in place, starting to get a feel for how the dynamic was all put together. The connections between people and groups, the powers at play, the choices being made and why those choices were made.”
“And this leads to the murder of a vice president how?”
“Killing a man that prominent sets everything into motion. That motion lets me see things from different angles, filling in the blanks. I needed to do something big to disturb the dynamic enough that I could glimpse the real big picture and fill in the blanks.”
“Big picture. You’re talking about significant things, again. On par with killing a vice president and a prime minister.”
“This is a little more impressive. In any event, I got the information I wanted with my play, first the national death, then the international one, to see the effects and plot things out on the global scale. I was all set to act on it when I got arrested. I was left with years to think, to study and improve myself. I plotted our release to keep myself sane, and to keep things in motion. You are welcome for that, by the way.”
Ingenue shrugged.
“I got free, then I took action, equipped with my new knowledge. It didn’t take long for opportunity to present itself, and now I’m very well set up. I found the missing puzzle piece and I made it my own, mystery and all. Some of their assets are my assets now, and I have the footing to do something else entirely.”
“A subject you’re dancing around.”
“Nothing particularly criminal, believe it or not. But it would be silly of me to tell you everything if you were going to refuse my invitation and then tell your chosen boyfriend at the first opportunity.”
“We know each other, Teacher. You don’t really think I’m that one-note.”
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Yet you won’t tell me. You’re a tease, Teacher.”
“I’m-”
His phone beeped. Two high notes, in quick succession.
“An alert?” the viking asked.
“I may have overestimated my collective’s ability to keep us out of sight,” Teacher said. “Miss?”
The woman in white raised an eyebrow. “No immediate threats. But it’s hard to tell.”
He nodded, glancing at the door. No police officers in power armor, he mused.
“We’ll go,” he said. “Ingenue-”
He stopped. He’d turned, and she wasn’t there. Invisibility wasn’t one of her powers, but-
The dressing gown flew into the air, draping itself over the top of the dragon-print folding screen in the corner. She was on the other side.
“I see you’ve decided that you’re coming.”
“I’m bored,” she said, from behind the screen. “They can give me my art, good food, entertainment, chaperones to plays, but I want one thing, and they won’t give him to me.”
“If you’re leaving to kick up a fuss, so he has to come after you…”
“I’m done with him,” Ingenue declared. She stepped out from behind the screen in a dress with a high lacy collar. “His loss. You know, I’m aware my boyfriends have had a run of bad luck. I’m not oblivious.”
“You’re cursed,” the viking commented.
She smiled, leaning over her dresser to peer at herself in an oval-frame mirror, snatching up some lipstick to touch herself up. “I wouldn’t say that. A good love story ends in tragedy, doesn’t it? Outcome aside, isn’t it glorious in its own way? I’ve had more than a few of these stories. I’ve suffered heartbreak, even, but I’m tougher than I look.”
“So Chevalier has slipped the noose
?” Teacher asked.
“More apt to say he’s stepped out of the frying pan,” Ingenue said, running a brush over her jaw-length hair, “The only ones who end up worse than my boyfriends are my ex-boyfriends. It’s so sad.”
She turned around, hair and makeup done, and there was no warmth in her eyes.
“His loss, as you said,” Teacher commented.
She frowned a little, but her eyes didn’t waver or change in how cold they seemed.
“They’re coming,” his student said. “Two. Same way we came.”
“Shall we?” He indicated the door.
They left. The moment they were in the hallway, the doors at the end opened.
Dragon’s Teeth. Civilians with power armor and training.
His power was a problem, here. He produced thinkers and tinkers, but they were low level, limited in scale. A precog that warned of danger a few seconds before that danger arrived wasn’t so useful.
Still, it meant the Dragon’s Teeth were more surprised than they were. A chance to bolt for it.
“I worked so hard to get down to security level one,” Ingenue pouted. “Dashed in a moment.”
“I didn’t think you were planning on coming back?” Teacher made the statement a question, leading the way around a corner. The stairwell will be locked down, but if we can find an apartment to duck into, we could slip out.
“A girl likes to hold on to her reputation,” Ingenue said. “Even if that reputation is merely ‘dangerous’ and not ‘cataclysmic’.”
With those doors and the stairwell barred, we have nine escape routes.
“While I was scouting the area,” the viking said, “I heard a few people making noise about you. Word was out you’d scuffed the ground with your toe while batting your eyelashes at one of the jailors, and they wanted to raise you to back to ‘cataclysmic’. Well, they said ‘level two security’, so maybe something less severe. What’s between dangerous and cataclysmic?”
“I think it would be unwise to say, for fear of offending our colleague,” Teacher said.
“I think so too,” Ingenue agreed.
“If it makes you feel any better, I think they’re badly underestimating you,” Teacher said.
“Kind of you to say so, but I’m not dangerous. Mere slander and lies.”
Obession and self-delusion. Her particular madness? Or is she better at acting than I suspected? Is it merely that she’s told herself these lies so often she believes them?
They found an empty apartment and eased the door closed.
Teacher reached into the front of his robe and withdrew a disc of metal. He tossed it to the ground.
The lights fritzed out. It wasn’t merely a blackout, but a momentary, violent crackle that traveled throughout the apartment and across the floor.
The teleportation device didn’t activate. The armor around the man in the viking outfit fizzled and disappeared, panel by panel, revealing itself as the hologram it was. He wore only knee-length, skintight shorts.
“They’re more on the ball than we anticipated,” the near-naked viking said.
“Run interference?”
The man nodded, and His flesh began distorting.
Osmosis of a full human being.
“I hope that wasn’t the full extent of your escape plan,” Ingenue said. “I’ll be peevish if I get moved up to another security quadrant because of this embarrassing little stunt of yours, an escape attempt lasting all of five minutes. I hate being peevish.”
“There are… seven options left,” he said. “I did plan for this. This is an incomplete shutdown, so we have some freedom to-”
The windows began closing. Metal shutters. The apartment was plunged into darkness. No lights, only the light that slipped through slits in the metal walls.
“This is a complete shutdown,” he revised his statement. “Still seven options left.”
“You knew about this, I hope,” Ingenue commented.
“I said I knew about their safety measures,” Teacher snapped. “Not an issue. I suppose my plan for a surprise shutdown is the clearest at this time.”
“Just what is this working plan of yours?”
“We need to avoid capture for…” he looked down at his watch. It had stopped. “…An indeterminate period of time. Less than five minutes. Not an issue.”
“Not an issue? When we’re in the heart of a complex that houses the largest group of heroes from the largest city in the known worlds,” Ingenue said.
“Not an issue,” he repeated himself.
“Forgive me if I don’t believe you. I could use my power on you,” Ingenue said. “But I don’t even like you.”
“I would offer my power, if only to streamline this process,” Teacher said, “But anyone acquainted with me tends to misconstrue that as more insult than anything.”
“It implies we’re stupid,” she said. “Or desperate.”
“I can see where it might.”
“If we get arrested, we get arrested,” she said. She was watching as the ex-viking split off another copy of himself. “I’d rather play nice and get moved to a smaller cell than get shot pushing things too far.”
“We’re not going to get shot, nor are we going to get arrested. I do pride myself on having plans that work. Any contingency plans are more a matter of flexibility and convenience than a belief that my core plan won’t work.”
“You sound annoyed.”
“You spend over a decade as a supervillain, put plans in motion, great and small, with a flawless rate of success,” Teacher said, “First bump in the road, and you get questioned.”
“You were arrested.”
“I was between plans,” Teacher said.
The viking’s clones changed. One man, one woman, Asian and black in appearance, respectively. The third began to alter, his flesh swelling and contracting as he took on the form of a larger man.
His original self held out some discs, checking the front and back, then frowned.
“Problem?”
“No power. If we’re fighting, then I’m fighting naked,” he said. But even as he said the words, the individuals began sprouting clothes, folding them out of flesh. The color began changing.
“Against armored foes?” Teacher asked.
“Probably won’t put them down, but I could distract.”
Teacher nodded.
“A shapeshifter,” Ingenue said. “Do I know you by another face?”
“I wasn’t in the Birdcage,” the viking said. “Satyr.”
“Charmed.”
Nymph and satyr, Teacher thought. He didn’t dwell on the thought.
“The pair are getting closer,” the woman in white said.
“Good,” Teacher answered. “Come here.”
She did. He could intensify his power, scale up the strength of the ability with the effect on the subject, but hers was minor at best. He’d wanted assistance from a person, rather than an invalid. It had been good that her spirit had been broken when he’d found her. It meant she was more compliant in general, without being useless.
She’s happier now, he thought. She had been lost, and now she had direction, even if it was his.
That the precognition was barely set in made it easier to undo. His awareness touched on countless abilities, arranged in grids and rows in the background of his mind
There were caveats. Issues. He could grant a kind of specialty in a particular field, a mastery over a given subject. This was how he found his expert teachers, ironic as it was. It was also how he made his tinkers, pushing that mastery to the point that it went just beyond the normal limits of theory and knowledge. Doing it with enough people, putting them all on one task, and he was effectively a tinker himself, in a roundabout way. There were tradeoffs in needing personnel, and a lack of reliability in the end product, if he didn’t carefully check every step of the way, but he was a low level tinker in every field.
He could also grant a wealth of mental powers. Perception powers, powers t
hat gave perspective, or peculiar forms of genius that operated by different rules.
It was this type of power that he gave to her.
The D.T. officers drew closer. They could see through walls, they were strong, tough, and they would win a fight by virtue of the computers they wore. The suits couldn’t be hacked, and there were no convenient weak points to target.
Through his maintained contact, the woman in white changed, her power adjusting. Clairvoyance. Seeing everything in a small radius, inside and out.
He finished, then drew a notebook from his robe, handing it to the woman in white. “Map. Mark out people and anything else that wasn’t on the blueprint I showed you earlier.”
She set about drawing, her face an inch away from the paper in the dim.
“Sitting in the dark, armored suits converging on us, in the middle of superhero central,” Ingenue said. “I find myself concerned.”
“You said you weren’t worried.”
“I’m not worried about them. I’m worried that you’re as invested in me as you are. You expected something along these lines.”
“I did.”
“That means you want me, you want my power, or both. Badly enough you’d take this risk.”
“The word ‘risk’ implies the outcome is in doubt.”
“The outcome is always in doubt.”
He shook his head. “Let me assuage your worries with two words.”
“Two words?”
“Stockholm syndrome.”
“Where a captive falls in love with the captor. Beauty and the Beast,” Ingenue said. “I always did like the princess movies.”
“I give people power, and I think there is a submissive kind of appeal to being a slave. To being numbed. Some fall for me like an alcoholic falls to drink. Love, after a fashion. In your case, that’s almost a defense mechanism.”
“A defense mechanism? I fall in love with you, you get the benefit of my power…”
“Things don’t turn out well for your boyfriends, as a general rule,” Teacher commented. “Psychosis or a kind of obsession. No. I’m not aiming to capture you. That’s the opposite of what I’m trying to achieve.”
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