by Mia Archer
The rumbling got louder and louder. A couple of people shouted about an earthquake. I rolled my eyes. There hadn't been an earthquake in this part of the country in a long time, and even then it’d been a minor tremor and not the kind of rumbling they were hearing now.
A few more astute observers started shouting about how it had to be a hero and a villain duking it out. At least one of them looked to the top of the former bookstore and pointed at me, but most people were more interested in the column of nuclear fire that suddenly erupted out of the ground where their houses were.
Correction. Where their houses had been. I didn’t think many of those houses were going to come back from that damage.
I probably should’ve worried about the side effects of that nuclear fire erupting out of the ground, but honestly I couldn't be assed to care about it. After all, giant chunks of Starlight City had already been reduced to semi-radioactive rubble, and it seemed only fair that the suburbs should take some of that damage as well.
The mushroom cloud rose higher and higher. I frowned. I shouldn’t be seeing a mushroom cloud. I should be seeing a column of nuclear dust and debris being funneled out of the atmosphere where it couldn’t do any damage.
"Do we have the containment protocol ready to go CORVAC?" I asked. “I shouldn’t be seeing a mushroom cloud right now. Mushroom clouds make people nervous.”
Villainous PR 101. I don’t know what it was about the psychology of your average person, but years of nuclear imagery had drilled into them that mushroom clouds were terrifying things that meant the end of the world. Which made it a pain in the ass to deal with the PR fallout of setting off a low yield nuclear explosion like the one that was eating up my former neighborhood and lab.
Change the shape of that cloud to something people weren’t familiar with, though, and suddenly they were surprisingly okay with the fact that a chunk of real estate had just been incinerated in nuclear fire.
People were weird, but I wasn’t above taking advantage of their weird psychology.
"I believe so mistress," CORVAC said. "Enough of the shield generators have survived that…"
CORVAC paused. In my experience a pause never meant anything good.
"What's the problem?" I asked.
"I am detecting something moving up through the explosion mistress," he said. "Something in addition to the seismic activity caused by the chain reaction.”
"I'll bet five hundred quatloos who that is," I said.
"I am no longer taking that bet, mistress," CORVAC said. "Though if you would like to get involved in an arena fight with one of my robots and take bets on your performance in…”
"No thanks CORVAC," I said.
Sure enough, a moment later, streaked out of the mushroom cloud rising up over the suburbs like something straight out of Nick Meyers’ worst fever dreams when he put together that terrifying docudrama back in the ’80s. The streak of fire shot through the air in a massive arc, and when I zoomed in I saw none other than Fialux streaking through the air.
"I'll give her this," I said. "She still knows how to make an entrance and an exit.”
"That she does mistress," CORVAC said.
I watched that streak of fire move off towards the city. Good. I didn't think she’d be able to see me down here, but she might be able to see the massive crowd and decide something weird was going on down here that was worth investigating.
"Where's she headed?" I asked.
"I took the liberty of moving Sabine to the Starlight Lounge," CORVAC said. "I figured that was thematically appropriate given the circumstances."
I allowed what I hoped would be a suitably devious smile to pass across my face. Imagining the good folks at the Starlight Lounge, including the good garçon who always walked around like he had such a stick up his ass, or Steve the waiter who was always putting on his thick French accent to get bigger tips from the movers and shakers in Starlight City, dealing with another superpowered showdown in their vaunted culinary institution was worth a laugh.
"I'm sure they're going to love that," I said.
"I can assure you that the staff seem quite confused and befuddled to have one of the co-rulers of the world suddenly materializing in the middle of their restaurant. They aren't even open at the moment. The chef is having an epic shouting match with Sabine right now, and Steve has lost his French accent and gone full hillbilly.”
I snorted. It was always fun to see those stuck up assholes losing their composure.
"Yeah, well you're going to need to move her out of there soon. It's not going to take Fialux long to get there."
"Of course, mistress," CORVAC said, sounding insulted that I’d insinuate that he wouldn't do something like that.
"Right. Keep bouncing her around the city for the moment. Make Fialux play musical chairs with hiding spots around the city. I'll deal with her as soon as I take care of business here."
"What business would you possibly have to take care of here?" CORVAC asked. "The shields are working quite nicely."
I looked over to a shimmering cylinder that had appeared around the mushroom cloud and squeezed it in. Now it was less of a mushroom cloud and more an angry roiling column of smoke, dust, and debris.
It was impossible to contain a blast like that, even a low yield meltdown, but it was possible to funnel all of the nasty little atomic particles that were currently attaching themselves to bits of dust and debris to create fallout up and out of the atmosphere where it wouldn't do anyone any harm.
Unless the International Space Station happened to be passing over that exact spot at the exact moment I was funneling stuff up there, but that was a very small chance, and a risk I was willing to take.
I didn't have time to put anything like this in place when I’d destroyed SuperMax, but I’d had this in place for a long time around my lab on the off chance something went terribly wrong and I needed to protect the people in the surrounding ‘burbs.
"Keep it up CORVAC," I said. “I’ll be back with you in a moment.”
I stepped off of the building and floated down until I was over all the confused suburbanites staring at the shimmering shield enveloped cloud that had been their homes until just moments ago.
No one seemed to notice me floating there. They were all too busy looking at their underwater mortgages going up in smoke and wondering how they were going to recover from this. Well this might be a bad day in terms of losing all their shit, but I could at least make sure they were taken care of. Sort of.
I cleared my throat. Still no one turned to look at me.
"Excuse me," I said.
A few of them looked up, and when they realized Night Terror was in their midst they started elbowing each other. Soon I had everyone's attention.
Even that couple who were obviously married to other people who’d been busy trying to explain why they’d suddenly appeared in the middle of the parking lot mid-coitus stopped their staring to look at me.
I would've loved to record that conversation and listen to the aftermath. It would appear that even with all of my attempts to avoid collateral damage in destroying my neighborhood I hadn't been completely successful.
"Yes," I said, amplifying my voice ever so slightly. "If I could get everyone's attention please? Pay attention to the nice super villain up here?"
5
Emergency Teleportation
I was getting more and more attention. Finally I had all eyes on me. Some of them looked pissed off, but honestly most of them simply looked confused.
Heck, that was a feeling I could identify with. I’d just been in the middle of a fight and lost my precious lab, and I honestly had no idea where I was going from here.
Basically I identified with the Starlight City normals a heck of a lot more now than I ever had before during one of these destructive emergencies.
"So you might have noticed that your neighborhood just got blown sky high by a low yield nuclear explosion," I said, chuckling just a little. Though from the looks on
everyone's faces they didn't appreciate the humor. Tough crowd.
"Okay then," I said. "So your neighborhood just got blown up because my lab happened to be deep under it, and as a result of the whole alien invasion thing and some complicated stuff with a couple of exes and… You know what? That's none of your business, really. You can all rest assured that there will be a significant amount of money deposited into all your bank accounts compensating you for the loss of your houses. This is above and beyond any claim you might get from your insurance, but if you're smart about this and keep your big mouths shut you’ll get a nice double dip. How's that sound?"
There were nods all around. Good. They knew when to shut the hell up. I mean it was only fair that the insurance companies pay out their Villainous Destruction riders, but in my experience insurance companies were the real villains in Starlight City. They’d look for any reason to avoid paying out what they owed their clients.
Up to and including a villain paying off their clients before they got a chance to.
"Right. Sorry for the inconvenience. You're welcome for saving your lives. Now I have to get going, but if you'd like a little piece of advice. Get the hell out of Starlight City. I have a feeling things are about to start getting bad."
That was good for some wide eyed stares and some more muttering. They realized what that meant.
An alien invasion powered by a couple of superpowered women declaring themselves empresses of the world was bad enough. How bad were things going to get if Night Terror, the villain who was usually causing a good chunk of the destruction Starlight City faced on the regular thought things were only going to get worse from here?
At least I could imagine that's where their minds were going as they thought through the implication.
"Right," I said. "Now get going. So sorry about the inconvenience, but the homeowners association was run by a bunch of assholes anyway."
There were a few angry looks. Most likely from people on that homeowners association. What the fuck ever. I wasn't in this business to make friends, and especially not with that group of sanctimonious assholes who went around finding fault with people for having blades of grass half a millimeter above the tolerance set out in the HOA covenant.
Yeah, come to think of it, blowing up the neighborhood with a low yield nuclear meltdown was actually kind of an improvement.
I looked down to my wrist computer and remembered that the thing had been smashed into pieces. Right.
I sighed. Smashed my hand against the busted screen around about where the teleportation controls had been more out of a fit of pique than anything else. So imagine my surprise when the thing actually worked and the world disappeared around me in the familiar white flash that meant my body was being disassembled at the atomic level to be beamed at the speed of light and reassembled somewhere else with all the original parts.
No Ship of Theseus transporter suicide for Night Terror, thank you very much.
I only realized my mistake after I’d rematerialized in a couple of different locations. Shit. I must’ve accidentally hit the emergency teleportation button when I was mashing at the broken screen.
Which was a problem considering the random locations I'd chosen for my emergency teleportation protocol were locations that’d undergone a bit of a change since I'd scouted those locations.
I re-materialized in the middle of a bunch of very confused looking blue aliens who stared at me for a long moment before reaching for the weapons at their side, but I was gone before they had a chance to use those weapons. Then I materialized in a skyscraper that had clearly been knocked down by a one attack or another, because one moment I was fading into existence, and the next moment I was plummeting as gravity reasserted itself.
I managed to engage my antigravity before I got impaled on some of the structure that was still left. I was pretty sure even if I'd hit some of the rebar sticking out of the thing my suit and shields would've saved my ass, but better to not find out at all than discover I'd been wrong about the stabby tolerances for my suit.
Stabby tolerances is totally a scientific measurement and not something I pulled out of my ass to judge whether or not something would be able to poke through my suit and get at the soft gooey center inside.
"CORVAC!" I shouted.
I re-materialized again. This time it was in a group of people huddled around a fire. Glancing out of the window I saw skyscrapers all around, but there were no lights on in any of them. The people had put together a makeshift fire of some sort, and it looked like they were burning bits of cubicle walls they'd scavenged from the office that’d once existed in this building.
I frowned. That stuff couldn't be very safe to breathe. There were usually lots of nasty cancer-causing agents locked up in things like that which weren't good to aerosolize by introducing them to fire. I was on the verge of activating my filtering shields when I dematerialized again.
I appeared among a bunch of bums. None of them even looked up. Apparently their lives hadn't changed all that much with the addition of alien invaders to their world, and Night Terror materializing in the middle of them as a part of my emergency teleportation protocol was hardly anything new for these guys, at least.
“…get me off this…"
I dematerialized again in a flash of light. Re-materialized in my lab. My dummy lab, that is. A dummy lab that hadn’t been cleaned up since the last time I was here and Dr. Lana met one of several unfortunate demises that’d come her way while we were tangling with one another.
“…crazy thing!"
I stopped. Stumbled forward. Looked around at the dummy lab and took a moment to breathe it in. Right. I guess there was no point in asking CORVAC to interrupt the emergency teleportation protocol now if the damned thing was over.
I immediately regretted the decision to take a deep breath. Apparently there was plenty of stink left over from the last time I killed Dr. Lana, and sitting in the middle of my dummy lab for a couple of months slowly decomposing hadn't made that residual nastiness smell any better.
Sure most of it had been teleported offsite, but I guess there were enough chunks of her that’d been broken off and started rotting to cause one heck of a nasty stench.
"My apologies mistress," CORVAC said. "But you deliberately kept me out of the emergency teleportation protocol. No doubt as a failsafe should I go rogue again."
"Oh," I said. "Right."
I brushed myself off. I wanted to get rid of any of that smoke from whatever those former office drones were burning in that office building. It said a lot about how far Starlight City had fallen that the city's office drones were burning their former economic prison walls in order to get a little bit of warmth.
And had they been cooking something over that fire? It’d looked small and four-legged with a tail, and whoever had cleaned the tiny mammal obviously wasn't all that great at it. After all, they were former office drones trying their best in a bad situation.
I shivered. Yeah, the less I thought about that small creature with patches of fur still on it and a very ratlike tail the better.
"Okay," I said. “New safety tip when it comes to using my equipment. Don’t hit anything near the teleport button on my wrist computer when it’s been busted for any reason.”
“An astute observation, mistress,” CORVAC said. “And might I say how happy I am that you weren’t the victim of an unfortunate teleporter malfunction?”
I looked down at the thing with slowly dawning horror. After all, that could’ve gone a hell of a lot worse. Like we're talking that dramatic moment where the non-Nimoy Vulcan science officer who was going to exit, stage left, somehow bit it at the beginning of Star Trek The Motion Picture in a creepy transporter accident. The screaming sound effects still haunted me all these years later, and I hadn't watched that movie since I was a little kid.
I quickly disengaged the busted wrist computer and tossed it to the ground. Held my hand up.
"Could I get another one please, CORVAC?"
> A new wrist computer materialized over my wrist. Though I was going to have to be careful with supplies for a little while. No lab meant no way to manufacture new ones, though a quick glance at my stocks told me CORVAC got enough stuff out of there while I was fighting Fialux that I wasn’t in immediate danger as long as I got a new lab fast.
I booted it up and entered the password in sequence, then let out a relieved sigh. I felt like I was whole again.
"Remind me to never teleport on busted equipment ever again," I said.
"Let's hope that never becomes a problem," CORVAC said.
"Right, so how close is Sabine to being teleported to a new undisclosed location?" I asked.
"I was about to do the honors," CORVAC said. “Fialux has been bouncing around the city trying to catch up with her, but she’s not fast enough to outrun a teleporter transmitting at the speed of light. Would you like me to wait before I move her to the next location?”
"No," I said. "But if you could teleport me to wherever she’s going next that would be helpful."
"Affirmative, mistress."
The world flashed white around me again and I found myself in a lab setting, but not my lab unfortunately. That was an aching hole in my heart that was going to take a lot of time to get used to.
"Okay CORVAC," I said. "Where the hell is that bitch? I'm going to rip her to pieces when I…"
"You will have to wait a moment mistress," CORVAC said. "She currently is in several billion little pieces. I will reassemble her molecules in a moment and then you can proceed to rip her to tiny shreds.”
I grinned an evil grin. “That sounds wonderful CORVAC.”
6
Evil Ex-Girlfriend
The world flashed white around me and I was in a nice park with blue skies and white fluffy clouds overhead and grass and trees all around. I recognized the park because I’d come here a couple of times with Fialux as dates back before we both realized we were more interested in staying in and having a little fun out of the public eye.