“And if you’re working with scum like Bloodnight, I’ll be doing this city a favor.” Before you can respond, Catherine adds, “Choke.”
And you obey her command. Your windpipe closes, cutting off your air supply. Baxter rushes in to help, but Nick lunges forward and proves his moniker by punching a hole through your robot companion, right at center mass.
Your vision greys, then fades to black as you suffocate. You’re vaguely aware of the undercover cops rushing to help, but Nick takes care of them while Catherine takes care of you.
THE END
There Can Be Only One!
Your legs propel you toward Nick with such fury as to be almost incomprehensible. In route, you rip a stop sign out of the ground—a ball of concrete coming up with it—and charge forward.
Once in range, you leap high into the air, swing the metal post, and bash the concrete ball against the unsuspecting college student’s chest. He falls to the ground, and before you know what you’re doing, you swing the stop sign section with blurry speed. Nick’s head rolls across the pavement.
You land in a crouch, having efficiently killed the kid in only a few seconds. When you rise, you see all eyes in the crowd are on you, with some people holding up their smartphones. This is bad.
• Rush back to the warehouse!
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
The Third Musketeer?
You sit at the kitchen bar in Catherine’s trailer, waiting as she prepares coffee. Her small home is piled high with gadgetry in various states of disrepair. Everything except the television and Xbox console (with which her son presently occupies himself) has been taken apart and rebuilt. Several shipping boxes labeled PrimaTech sit in the living room. In the back corner of the kitchen leans a futuristic-looking rifle. Every available inch of available counter space houses strange liquids that percolate in beakers and test tubes.
Catherine sets a steaming mug down for each of you, then steps back to hover near the rifle. While she waits for you to drink, she adjusts a circuitry-laden elbow-length glove on her left hand.
“Christ, this is good coffee,” Nick says.
“Thanks, I improved the process. And watch the language in front of the kid.”
“You’ve been busy,” you say, noting the stacks of gadgetry.
“So have you. It’s ‘WMD’ now, right?”
You give Nick a look. “I’ll cut to the chase,” you say. “We want you to join us.”
She shakes her head. “I have no interest in fighting crime.”
• “What about helping your country? This is the opportunity of a lifetime, Catherine. It’s a new super-power arms race and you can be on the forefront.”
• “There’s a lab just waiting for you, with every major development since the 1950s sitting idly. Hell, we haven’t even turned on the supercomputer!”
• “Truth is, we need your help. We’ve made some very powerful enemies and I’m afraid Nelson Bloodnight’s money will go farther than Uncle Sam’s.”
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
This Is The End
Once word gets out that Planet Mercury is throwing the be-all, end-all, this-is-the-apocalypse of parties, people flock. Playboy Bunnies, meat-slab Aussies from Thunder from Down-under, sports stars, models, and movie stars. Now it’s a room full of celebrities and sea foam; hard-bodies and hard-core drugs. The party to end all motherfucking parties.
Music pumps so loudly, you don’t even hear the pounding on the door until Mercury PD breaks in to bust up the party. Wait, can’t these people be bribed? Su-Young must’ve sold you out.
While those with reputations to protect rush away from law enforcement, you move forward, ready to put a stop to the interruption. When you fling the first cop across the room, handguns come out. When you steal a handgun with your telekinesis, the rest of the police officers open fire.
You put up a hand to stop the bullets, but gunshots move faster than thoughts. You’re already riddled with bullet-holes before you can attempt to slow the slugs.
Nice try, Neo.
THE END
Tiger Trapped
“Therein lies our problem. I need to study her to discern a weakness, but the longer she’s out in the public eye, the more problematic she becomes. Classic catch-22.”
“Then we get her alone, set a trap, and throw everything we’ve got against her.”
Nick strokes his chin. “There are three ways to quickly and efficiently kill a human: Stop the heart, stop the lungs, stop the brain. And the classical method—by poking a hole in them—seems to be ineffective against her.”
Nick paces back and forth through the lower-level of the penthouse suite, and you concentrate on the news bulletin. The crowd erupts with cheers as hostages stream out of the bank’s entrance and into the arms of EMTs and crisis-relief personnel. Then there is a deafening tidal wave of applause when Catherine drags out four bank robbers—two in each hand. She tosses them in a heap, then dusts off her hands. With an enormous grin, she double-fist-pumps the air and the crowd goes wild.
“Nick, you’re gonna want to see this,” you say.
Despite the love of the crowd, Mercury PD seems unimpressed. Threatened, even. They regard her with weapons drawn, and the lead policeman—a hostage negotiator, perhaps—approaches her with a palm raised in supplication and a megaphone held in his other hand.
Catherine snatches the megaphone and addresses the crowd: “No need to thank me, fair people of Mercury City. I am Diamond, and I am here to protect you!”
The cheers from the crowd strike like an earthquake. But the celebration is short-lived when a canister of tear gas bounds over the police barricade, the first shot accidentally fired by some trigger-happy rookie. Catherine covers her mouth and backs away. You turn to Nick.
“If it breathes, we can kill it.”
* * *
Three days later, Alison Argyle appears onscreen once more, reporting another hostage situation. Only this time, it’s outside the Planet Mercury Casino.
“Showtime,” Nick says.
You nod. It’s all in place, ready to go. All you have to do is wait for Catherine to arrive and save the day. Nick hangs back in the security room, speaking to you through an earpiece borrowed from the guards’ supplies.
Two rows of hostages sit at gunpoint on either of the two walls to your left and right. Straight ahead, the front doors wait, locked and reinforced, ready for Catherine to burst through. Security personnel were told today is part of an elaborate publicity stunt, which, in a sense, it is.
The hostages are real enough (“This is gonna go viral,” you overhear one of the guards tell another), but strict orders were given that not a shot will be fired. Catherine has proven to be bulletproof, after all.
The doors explode with such an incredible force that the whole building shakes on its foundation. Catherine enters, as predicted, in her Diamond costume.
“You’re up,” Nick says through the earpiece. “Keep her attention.”
That’s when you float up, arms spread to embrace her arrival. “Finally, a worthy opponent!”
“Why are you doing this?” She cracks her knuckles, but doesn’t move.
The earpiece crackles. “Egg her on.”
You reach out one hand to the nearest hostage, and with the power of mind start to choke the woman. “A slot jockey, the world won’t miss her,” you say. “But if this casino agrees to give me one million dollars, I will let these people go. Otherwise….”
“You’ll never get away with this!” Catherine shouts.
That’s when you know you’ve got her.
She charges at you with an Amazonian battle cry and her eyes grow wide when she falls through the floor—and right into the trap! The holographic floor disappears, and you watch as Catherine sinks into the sandy pit below. The effect is instantaneous. She sinks rapidly, struggling, and takes one last breath before her head goes under. The sand continues to collapse down above her.
Nick had devised the plan almost immedia
tely, but the three days’ time was for digging the pit and building the hologram device. “It’ll be useful later, trust me,” Nick said.
Now he rushes out to watch the trap in action. You float back toward him, coming to land on solid ground once more.
“Quicksand,” you say, shaking your head at how easy it was.
“Technically, dry-quicksand. Puffed with air and delicate as a house of cards, nothing like what occurs in nature, but oh, so much more effective.” Sand shoots up into the air in response to the pressure differential from Catherine sinking to the bottom. “She’ll be trapped down there by the enormous vacuum pressure, and her flailing will only make it worse. She’ll suffocate in a matter of minutes.”
The floor starts shaking. Nick raises an eyebrow.
“It’s a pretty big pit; maybe the settling sand is hurting the foundation?”
He shakes his head. “The calculations are flawless.”
The sand drains, faster and faster. The level drops, twisting in a whirlpool. Nick cocks his head, watching the sand disappear down some unseen drain. “Inconceivable…” he mutters.
The ground rumbles, like the whole building’s going to come down. It looks like Nick forgot two things during all his planning—a diamond is strengthened under pressure, and, sometimes when you’re hunting tigers, they end up hunting you.
A geyser of sand explodes upwards as Catherine leaps out from the pit. She must have broken through the building’s foundation, sending sand into the recesses beneath.
She lands before you in a crouch. Sand cascades from her shoulders and hair, leaving a layer of dust that coats her costume and turns it beige. Finally, she rises and looks at you with fiery hatred.
Now it’s you who’s trapped. Trapped in this building, with that monster bearing down on you. You fly to the back of the casino. She’s not only incredibly strong and durable, but incredibly fast. You make it to the penthouse elevators, mashing the doors, willing them to open. But it’s too late.
When you look back, there stands Diamond. You slump to the ground and put out your hands, ready to beg for mercy, but she won’t listen to your pleas.
THE END
Trailer Trashed
You pull the phone, with your telekinesis, out of the kid’s hand and into your own, then bring it up to your ear. She’s breathing heavily on the other end, and there’s a lot of background noise. Sounds from outside of the bank? No, more like traffic.
“Catherine—Catherine, it’s me. I came back to check on your son.”
“I know who it is, asshole! If you so much as touch a hair on his head, I swear to God!” she screams into the phone.
It’s so loud you have to pull the phone away from your ear.
“Catherine, calm down. He’s safe. No one’s going to hurt Danny.”
“You’re goddamn right about that! When I get there, I’m going to tear your head off!”
“Please, calm down. I don’t know what you think is happening, but—”
“Don’t you fucking pretend to be my friend. Nick told me what you and that agent were up to.”
Your heart leaps into your throat. Your head swims with confusion. “…What did you say?”
“I said I know all about your secret plan, shithead. See you soon.”
“Wait, where are you?”
No response. No background noise, either. You look down to the phone—she ended the call.
“You stay back!” the tattooed man from outside shouts.
A shotgun erupts. You hear screaming, first a woman’s, then a man’s.
The trailer shakes and you fall back as the wall explodes. It’s like a car just smashed into the trailer home, but instead it’s the man from outside—he crashes through the wall with enormous force, dead before he hits the ground.
Catherine leaps in through the hole, her Diamond costume pockmarked by the shotgun blast, but she’s otherwise completely unharmed. She sees you and rushes forward.
“Wait!” you scream.
Instinctively, you reach out and grab her mind, just like with the goat, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t give, you can’t feel it in the same way. You squeeze, but it’s impossible. Her fist comes at you with the force of a locomotive.
THE END
Tricks
“You don’t want to do that,” you say.
The pimp half-turns, the way someone glances back when they’re sure what they heard wasn’t directed to them. But when he sees your intense stare and your arm outstretched, fingers waggling, he does a double-take.
“Dafuck you say?”
“Move along,” you say.
You reach out with your mind, fingers dancing across the air, and touch his mind. His eyes roll back, and thick, black blood oozes from his nose. He falls to the street like a sack of meat.
The prostitute screams.
• Well, that didn’t work out as planned. Run away!
• “Change” her mind too—no witnesses!
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
Trump Card
“Yes! See, I knew you’d come around. Let’s call Nick. Maybe we can get him to listen to reason too?”
With a nod, you dial. Nick’s voice answers. “Catherine?”
“It’s me,” you say, setting the phone on the kitchen bar. “She’s here too; you’re on speakerphone. I’m… I’m done, Nick.”
“What?”
Catherine nods, you go on. “We, Catherine and I, we don’t think recreating the experiment is a good idea.”
“Well, neither do I!” he shouts.
“Then what are you doing helping him?” Catherine asks.
“I was sabotaging it from the inside. Okay, this will work. You two come back with me and together, we’ll—”
“We talked about that too, Nick. We’re not going back. If you want, you can—”
His voice is furious. “No, no, no. This ruins my plan. This ruins everything.”
“What plan?” Catherine asks.
“Errr, Droakam’s plan. That’s what I said. What I meant, anyway.”
“Isn’t that a good thing? You just said you were trying to sabotage it,” you say.
Nick goes silent, obviously shaken. Catherine’s jaw sets. She takes the phone and crushes it into dust. “Beware of villains,” Catherine says, an odd tone entering her voice.
You shake your head. “What?”
“It’s something my son said when I told him I was going to help protect the city. He said if I was going to be a hero, there would soon be villains.”
“Nick?” you ask.
She nods. “That little twerp is up to something, I can tell.”
You have to admit, you feel the same. The way he said that your defecting would ruin his plan…what plan? Nick was plotting something, there’s no denying it.
Catherine steps into the kitchen and takes a bottle of whiskey from the cabinet over the microwave. She pours the amber liquor into two glasses, and hands one to you.
“I think we should toast, to our new future as—well, I guess—as a superhero team. To us, the Amazing….Huh, what should we be called? My kid is usually the one who comes up with stuff like this.”
“Well, let’s think. You’re going to be called Diamond Skin, right?”
“Just Diamond. Wait! Holy shit, I haven’t shown you. I have a costume. Want me to try it on?”
You nod. While she’s in the back changing, you pour yourself another glass of booze. Sipping, you try to imagine a good team name, and a good costume for yourself. It’ll need to match hers, at least in theme. That’s the way it is in all the movies, right?
You almost drop the glass when she returns. She wears a tight, midriff-exposing black t-shirt emblazoned with a playing-card-suit red diamond logo, fingerless gloves, and black yoga pants tucked into crimson-red boots. It’s not just that she’s lost weight since the experiment, she’s incredibly fit—like a world-class athlete. Her abdomen is flat and sculpted, and those yoga pants are practically painted on.
; Her eyes are concealed behind a red domino mask, and she smiles coyly at you underneath.
“Do you like it?”
“You look…amazing.”
She steps closer, takes your glass for her own, and downs the liquid. Then she kisses you, deeply and passionately.
“I’m sorry,” she says, pulling away. “That was stupid. ‘Blame it on the alcohol,’ right? It’s just been a while since I’ve…let’s think of a costume for you, okay?”
• Kiss her back.
• Yeah, we need to be professional here.
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
The Truth Shall Set You Freedom Fighters
Catherine grows quiet, and a strange darkness clouds over her eyes. She steps back into the kitchen, then hefts up the future-rifle up over her shoulder. “If we’re going to do this,” she says, grimly tapping a few commands into her tech-glove, “Nelson Bloodnight is mine.”
Suddenly, the scrap piles of machinery come alive! It’s not scrap at all, but minion bots. Two lift up from the ground in flight, while three others tumble forward on gyroscopic tread.
“You know the owner of the Planet Mercury Casino?” Nick says, backing away from the robots.
“My husband did.”
* * *
“Welcome to the Freedom Fighters,” Agent Droakam says, extending a hand in greeting. “I understand you’re to be our Lady Liberty?”
“Does it come with a costume?”
“Unfortunately, there were only a few such supersuits, and those are spoken for.”
“Typical,” she says with a snort. “No matter. I’m only here long enough to kill Nelson Bloodnight.”
Droakam casts a concerned look your way. “Catherine has a personal stake in the mission,” you explain.
“Well, I can’t authorize a shoot-to-kill order…speaking of which, what the hell is that?” he says, pointing to her future-rifle.
SUPERPOWERED: Are YOU a Superhero or Supervillain? (Click Your Poison Book 3) Page 38