“I call it Widowsilk. It’s insurance.”
“And you’re not going to say more than that, are you?” Nick asks.
“Nope.”
“Well, if you’re willing to see Bloodnight brought to justice, you’re in,” Agent Droakam says.
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“Okay, with that settled, we’re in luck. When Bloodnight’s goons transported stolen U.S. Government property to The Son of Jupiter, he opened himself up. We have a warrant.”
“So we’re headed out to his yacht?” you say.
Droakam nods. “I’ll stay here and coordinate, and you may call me Shadow-hand.”
“You’ve waited your whole career to say that, haven’t you?” Nick says.
“I highly doubt he’s there,” Catherine interjects. “That’s the whole point of being boss. I say we kick down the front doors of the Planet Mercury Casino, and drag him out. Make it public.”
Agent Droakam looks to you, and you say:
• “We split up, hit both targets at the same time.”
• “I’m with you—straight to the casino. Our first outing was public enough; now it’s time to cement that reputation.”
• “No, we try the yacht first. If we hit the casino and he’s on the boat, he might spook. You can’t flee from justice in a building.”
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
Twilight
Without another word, you make for the nearest emergency exit. When the cool of evening hits you, you leap out into the sky. Twisting your path around to the back of the casino, you come to land above the entrance to the parking structure, where you wait patiently like a gargoyle tucked among the pillars.
The sun wanes on the horizon, casting brilliant gold light that glimmers across the mirrored skyscrapers. An auspicious sign of your fortunes to come, perhaps. Then a growling car engine brings your attention back down below, where a black SUV comes from the bowels of the parking structure.
The license plate reads US Government—Official Use Only.
That’s gotta be him. Either that or you’re following Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, so either way, it’s a win. You hop off the ledge and fly above the car, staying high enough so that no one could see you in the rapidly darkening sky.
The SUV leads you toward Mercury Bay and the warehouse district. Security lights illuminate the docks as the last shift locks up and heads home. The agent parks outside one of the warehouses and looks over his shoulder before heading inside. Most people don’t look up to see if they’re being followed.
You float over to a high window, just below the roof, to peer inside. The warehouse is wide open, as long as a football field and tall enough to be three stories high, though it’s all one floor. An enormous room, stacks of crates filling the periphery, with an impressive super-computer terminal spread out near the entrance. Seated at the center of the terminal is a small, unassuming man in a lab coat.
Enormous cables snake out from the computer and connect to three telephone-booth-sized glass pods. The man rises, turns to greet the agent, and his lab coat swirls open to reveal an “Ex” emblazoned on the shirt beneath. The Experi-mentor—he’s alive!
They greet one another, but you can’t hear what they’re saying. If only you had super-human hearing. Instead, you lean in, trying harder to listen.
Something flashes on the computer terminal and The Experi-mentor returns to check it out. He taps a few keys and several spotlights suddenly flare to life inside the warehouse. Then they all swivel on their bases and come to point at you!
Even in the harsh light, you see a wide smile creep across the Experi-mentor’s face. “Well, don’t just float there, come on in,” he says.
• Go on in. You don’t know what they’re planning, and you’d better find out.
• Run away! Run away! Run away! Go tell Nick; he’ll know what to do.
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
Underestimated
You’re not sure what’s more insulting, the idea of being cowed into submission, or the idea that such an act is believable. Like you’re some kind of pushover, who, after the slightest threat of violence, just rolls over and capitulates. Well, that makes you the underdog—the sleeping giant—which gives you the advantage.
You bought yourself a week with the ruse, but that’s plenty. After a day to cure cancer, a week to secure your mine has made it the most formidable stronghold on earth. Though your surveillance drones tell you Catherine and Nick have met up on several occasions, they’ve also told you far more useful information.
Nick, despite his strength and durability, can’t tolerate tear gas. Catherine’s telekinesis is limited to what she can see, and in weight proportional to her physical strength. The drones presently tell you the pair is on the way. Ready battle-stations!
When they arrive, you’re there at the entrance to greet them with a cup of tea and two enormous battle-bots at your sides. The humanoid robots stand eight feet tall, nearly filling the tunnel with their bulk. “Welcome to my not-so-hidden base. Tea?”
“Listen up,” Catherine says, lowering her hood. “Just because you’re a super-genius, don’t go thinking that makes you better than us.”
“Yeah, Brainiac,” Nick adds.
“No one said anything about better. Just more capable of decision making. If you’d left the mental heavy-lifting to me, imagine what a team we’d have made.”
“Not in this lifetime,” Catherine says.
You nod.
Nick growls. “Are we gonna fight or what?”
“Automatic protocol initiated, primary threat elimination active,” you say, suddenly stiffening.
In response, your battle-bots splay out, allowing you to duck behind them. The first one delivers a two-stage kick; the foot grasps the college student and the servos throw Nick out of the mine and back into daylight.
Catherine rushes forward, so you fall back, ready for her attack. Several layers of thick steel—six, to be exact, each the size of a nuclear launch control center’s blast door—slam shut in quick succession. It won’t stop Nick, but it’ll slow him.
“Choke,” Catherine commands, one arm outstretched, hand pinched like a claw.
But you don’t. This was her obvious move, and thus you planned against it. She goes all out, trying to touch your mind and leave you with a massive brain hemorrhage. Nope. She squeezes your heart, but you don’t have one, not in this body, anyway.
Sensing the danger, she blasts all her power your way, putting every ounce of effort into a telekinetic shove. Thing is, this body is incredibly heavy.
“You” punch the exhausted woman, knocking her unconscious with a potentially lethal blow. With Catherine taken care of, the real you smiles from your position safely inside the battle-bot suit.
How’s that for a ruse? Create a life-like android duplicate of yourself so Catherine attacks the body-double instead, while your vulnerable, fleshy body pilots one of two seemingly identical robots. All it takes is speaking through the android before the action begins, only to release it into auto-mode at the start of the fight.
Now then, time to deal with Nick. “Initiate Olympus threat condition, attack plan: Styx and Stone.”
Nick peels off the last of the blast doors and rushes in. From the time it took, you can assume he initially tried to punch his way in, as his psych-profile predicted, but that only further clogged the tapered entrance. Eventually, he came to realize it would be better to pull than to push. It’s always embarrassing when you get one of those doors wrong, isn’t it?
“You” theatrically look down at Catherine’s limp form, then with wide-eyed fear (it took a ton of programming to get the facial expressions out of the uncanny valley), the android body-double sprints down the hallway after the pair of battle-bots.
Nick takes the bait like a shark in chummed waters. He closes the gap in exactly the calculated time, and the electro-magnets power up above. The android, the auto-bot, and your piloted battle-suit all get sucked up to t
he ceiling, while Nick is left to fall into the pit below.
The electromagnets “treadmill” the three of you out of the way, so a mouth can open and spit a river of concrete onto the hapless college student below.
The pit is far too deep for him to leap back up at you (with inverse-canted sides to prevent climbing) and narrow enough to make digging his way out problematic. All that displaced rubble has to go somewhere, and he’d just help burying himself. But it’s actually his greatest strength, that incredible density, which will be his undoing.
Rather than swim or float above the specially-designed quick-dry concrete—enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool—he sinks straight to the bottom.
You walk out to the main living area of the mine and trigger the hallway ceiling to close over the pit, further sealing him in. Time to strip off this robo-suit, have a stiff drink, and celebrate your victory. And what an epic victory it was!
Makes you wish there were some other genius, a scientist as mad with power as yourself, to share it with. Maybe you should clone yourself? After all, who else could appreciate the intricacy of your planning, and the simplicity with which it was executed?
Be careful what you wish for.
A slow clap draws your attention. Then a voice says, “A well-deserved celebration, but I’m afraid I must interrupt.”
Your mind scrambles. You know that voice.
• Turn to face the new threat!
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
Unforgettable
“Hey now, we’re all friends here,” Agent Droakam says, his palms raised in supplication.
“Friends? I don’t know you, you don’t know me, but it’s obvious—you want to use me. It’s not happening, Bub. Plain and simple.”
“Excuse me, but you’re disturbing the other—” the store manager starts to say.
Before you even know what you’re doing, you lift the man off the floor by his shirt, as easy as picking up a sheet of paper. You could crumple him just as easily too.
“Disturbing the ‘other’ what? There is no other like me, only me.”
In a quick, practiced move, the FBI agent has his handgun drawn and trained on you. That’s when you start to laugh. A hearty, boisterous laugh.
“Put him down!” the agent shouts.
“You want him?” you say.
Then you fling the manager at Agent Droakam with such incredible force that you incapacitate both men in the process. You turn, fling the table out of your way and send it careening into the pizza bar. When you look around, you see the entire restaurant staring at you in stunned silence.
“WHAT?!” you cry.
Shocked at your own outburst, you flee from the shop. Even now, as you pound the pavement with incredible speed back to your apartment, you know ravenous hunger isn’t far off. Using your strength comes with a price, it seems.
You can’t do this every night, can you? And with that FBI agent breathing down your neck, looks like you can either take what you want, or people will take it from you. Not much of a choice, is it? Well, tomorrow, you’re going to take the world head-on. You’re going to:
• Head to the Casino buffet. Then I’d “wager” that I can break into the money cage. Get it? Wager? By that, I mean I’m going to rob the place.
• Easiest thing to do: Punch open the back wall of the bank and make a withdrawal.
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
Unlimited Government
“A government should fear its people,” she chastises. “Do you think our civil rights will still exist when there are superhuman cops roaming the street? Or an IRS that can read your mind? We’re looking at—at a Minority Report future if you help them!”
“So come with me! Don’t let them get too powerful. Let’s be that oversight, you and I. I’ll be Checks and you can be Balances,” you say.
She shakes her head. “That’s how they get you. They make you think you’re friends, that by helping them, you’re actually helping yourself. We must draw a clear line in the sand.”
You hesitate, thinking of a response.
Catherine suddenly rises, filled with passion, and says, “Stay here with me! Together we’ll save the city. Just don’t go back. If Nick has any sense, he’ll defect too.”
• “You know what? You’re right, I’m staying! What do we need them for, anyway?”
• “Your heart is in the right place, Catherine, but I honestly think I’ll do some good working with Agent Droakam and Nick. Let me leave this phone with you, and you can call anytime.”
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
Up in Smoke
You bound away with inhumanly long strides and Nick flies through the sky to keep up. After a few blocks, you peel off and catch your breath. A few moments later and you’re calm once more, but police sirens wail in the distance.
“Great, we’re running from the cops. What now?” you ask.
“How about you surrender?” a woman says. You turn with Nick to see Catherine Woodall. Though she’s in plainclothes, she has an odd circuitry-laden glove that extends up her left forearm and wears a futuristic-looking rifle slung over her right shoulder. Two RC-drones fly near her head and three more robots roll along the street around her alligator skin boots. She’s been busy.
“Nice costumes,” Catherine says. “I saw you attack that—”
“We’re not enemies!” you cry. “Superpowers gotta stick together, right?”
“You’re a public menace, and you’re going down,” she says.
“Let me handle this,” Nick says. “My friend here is bulletproof. As in, more or less invincible.”
“I’m betting on less. Swarming Hive, attack! Parasite!” She taps commands on her tech-glove and something latches onto your back. You didn’t even notice when one of her minion bots rolled around behind you. Now, unfurled like a centipede, it grips onto you and drives several spikes against your spine.
The spikes break against your impenetrable flesh and you slam your back against a building, mercifully freeing Parasite from your back. You take hold of the robot and slam it against the pavement until it breaks apart into several pieces.
“Stinger, Venom!” Catherine cries and the two flying robots deploy weapons and attack.
Nick flies into the air and grabs the two bots with his telekinesis before smashing them against one another. They fall to the pavement.
“Starting to get it?” Nick asks. “You can’t beat us.”
“You forgot one thing,” Catherine says. She unslings her rifle and it hums to life. You rip out a light pole and charge in at her, ready to end this once and for all. But you’re stopped in your tracks when an energy beam blasts into you—sapping your strength. All that delicious energy from the experiment flows out and is absorbed back into her rifle. You can feel it; your powers are gone. The light pole, suddenly heavy, drops from your grasp and you fall to your knees.
“Paper beats Rock,” Catherine says. “And then Scissors buzzes off if it knows what’s good for it.”
“Wait!” Nick calls, hands up in surrender. “Do you need a sidekick? You can go by Queen Bee, rebuild your Hive. I’ll be your Drone!”
“Coward!” you cry.
Her rifle hums to life once more and Nick rockets into the sky, fleeing from the super-genius. “Now then,” Catherine says, turning to you. “Hope you like prison.”
THE END
Up, Up, and Away!
You fly from the street, up to the highest levels of the burning building. The man at the precipice either takes you for a hallucination or is too overheated to bear it any longer, because he leaps out at you. With the power of mind you grab onto him the same way you make yourself fly and he stops falling.
But you drop.
You focus on your own body once more and hold steady in the air, but the man starts to plummet once again—you can’t do both at the same time. Thinking quickly, you swoop in and physically grab ahold of the man. The two of you drop toward the earth at a terrifying rate. It’s not that you can’t focu
s on two things at once, it’s that you can only lift so much weight.
The ground approaches rapidly; time to choose.
• Try harder! You’ll just get a nosebleed or whatever, right?
• Drop the guy. You tried.
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
Vaporization Commencing
You go around to the side of the lab and peer in through a window. It’s not long before the scientist returns with a homeless man (guess he took your suggestion literally) and introduces the vagrant to the other two test subjects. A college student with short black hair, and a woman in her thirties. Dirty blonde, wears a tank top.
Though you can’t hear what’s being said, you get the gist.
The scientist pulls back the tarp to reveal three glass tubes, each about the size of an old phone booth. After a game of rock, paper, scissors to determine who goes where, they enter their pods. At the control panel, the scientist seals them in and begins the experiment.
But something’s not quite right.
It looks like the platform is overloaded. Black smoke signals the beginning of an electrical fire. Then lightning cracks, arcing between the three pods. You stumble back from the window just as the lab explodes.
An area the size of a city block instantly incinerated, you included.
THE END
Vessel for the Soul
The robot takes a step forward and splays out its mechanical fingers. It brings the hands up to its face for closer inspection under mechanical eyes. “Based on your intelligence metrics, if an accurate measurement, I do not understand why I was given a humanoid form. This ‘body’ is very limiting. Surely a more logical form presented itself.”
SUPERPOWERED: Are YOU a Superhero or Supervillain? (Click Your Poison Book 3) Page 39