by Mia Archer
“Just fucking great,” I muttered.
“Hey, on the bright side you managed to take out the two leaders of the alien invasion and destroy a good chunk of the alien invasion fleet,” Nancy said. “That has to count for something, right?”
I sighed. I suppose I should’ve felt good about that, but the victory was ashes in my mouth. I’d captured one crazy ex-girlfriend, driven another to craziness by capturing the first one, and then I’d taken her powers away from her just in time for her to walk into a portal that probably killed her when it blew up.
I looked up and around the city as well. At the portals that were still open all around the place. This was one instance where killing the big bad hadn’t taken out all the other aliens, and I could still see a steady stream of materiel pumping through those portals.
“No,” I said. “We might’ve killed the leaders, but hitting the head doesn’t take out the rest of the snake.”
“Fuck,” Nancy muttered, looking at all the stable portals around the city and no doubt coming to the same conclusions.
“Something tells me this isn’t going to be the end of this,” I said. “Not close to the end of it.”
I sighed. Things were about as bad now as they’d ever been, but at least I’d blown something up. Sure I’d taken a good chunk of Starlight City University along with that explosion which wasn’t great. It meant my part time job teaching the next generation of reporters how to stay alive was kaput.
I just hoped those future reporters had been listening to some of the lessons they’d learned from old Night Terror over the past couple of semesters. If they were then they wouldn’t be anywhere near any of the shit that was going down at Starlight City University.
And if they hadn’t listened? Well they just got the ultimate failing grade.
“At least things couldn’t get…”
I put my hand over Nancy’s mouth, and Technomancer looked at her like she’d gone insane. She seemed affronted and moved a super strong hand up to bat my arm out of the way.
“What the fuck was that all about?”
“You never say things like that,” I said. “That’s asking for trouble!”
“Are you still on that kick?” Nancy asked.
“It’s not a kick,” Technomancer said. “It’s totally true. You don’t tempt the narrative fates like that.”
“You two are ridiculous. I mean you…”
A low rumbling that was coming from out of the massive explosion rising over the city shut her up. I squeezed my eyes shut. Fuck. She had to go tempt the fates. I turned back to the explosion, though I didn’t think I was going to see what was happening by checking the thing out with the good old Mark One eyeball.
Only there was something weird going on there. I figured there was something going on deep in the Applied Sciences Department to add to the destruction, but something else was going down. It was as though the explosion was going in reverse. As though everything was being sucked down into the crater that’d just been created.
“Fuck,” I shouted. “Something’s absorbing all that energy!”
“What does that mean?” Nancy asked, as a wind picked up around us. A wind that was pulling things towards that rapidly diminishing fireball with hurricane force winds. Technomancer stumbled forward before activating her own antigrav, and Nancy went flying until I caught up with her.
“We need to get out of here!” Technomancer shouted over the wind. “If there’s something in there sucking in all that power then we don’t want to be near it if there’s a backlash!”
“You won’t hear me arguing!” I shouted. “CORVAC! Get us out of here!”
The world flashed white around me just as the fireball disappeared. When I reappeared I looked down at my body and realized I had what looked like flash burns on all my exposed skin.
“What the ever loving fuck?” I shouted.
I looked to Nancy and Technomancer. They looked the same. Not that I had long to think about them looking like something straight out of a textbook picture of Hiroshima or Nagasaki circa summer 1945. No, a sound like the world ending hit me and knocked me off my feet.
When I got up I saw something even more impressive than the fireball. There was no fireball this time, but there was a column of dust and debris rising over Starlight City University, and the crater was even larger now.
“What the fuck was that?” Nancy asked.
“Something sucked up all that power and then released it again,” I whispered.
“You think it was the portal recoiling after the first collapse?” Technomancer asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “We’ll need to get down there and have a look around at some point to figure it out.”
Though I felt something rising inside me. Terror mixed with hope. Hope because if there was something down there that was capable of sucking up the raw power of a portal collapse like that, a portal that was powered in part by the strange radiation from that world Fialux had been stranded on, then it was Fialux.
Terror because if that was Fialux, and she was still was out there pulling a Godzilla vs. Destoroyah with that explosion, then it meant the world was still in trouble.
But nothing came out of that explosion. Everything was as still as a grave. Because that’s what it was. A grave.
“There’s nothing alive in there,” I said with a sigh.
“You were expecting something to be alive in there?” Nancy asked, incredulous.
“Stranger things have happened in Starlight City,” Technomancer said.
“I believe I have something that might make you feel better about your current circumstances mistress,” CORVAC said.
“Yeah?” I asked, seriously doubting that. “What’s that?”
“Preparations are finally complete on the new lab,” he said.
“The new lab?” Technomancer asked. “You mean the one you totally promised I could see if we made it out of there alive?”
I glanced in irritation at the still smoldering orb that was CORVAC. He pulsed a couple of times. I wasn’t sure if he knew he’d done something wrong and was only now realizing it because he still wasn’t all that great with the hu-mon emotions, or if he’d done that on purpose and he was supremely satisfied that he’d created this moment of awkwardness.
“Oh come on,” Nancy said. “You know she wasn’t serious about that, right?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
Technomancer started to giggle, and very shortly that giggle turned to a full on laugh.
“You should’ve seen the look on your face! You actually thought we were going to hold you to that!”
I looked at each of them in turn. They’d gone crazy. That was all there was to it. They were laughing because they’d had a near death experience and were coming to terms with the fact that they’d survived something that should’ve killed them.
I was well aware of what it felt like to have one of those moments. After all, I’d been through cases of the shakes and the giggles discovering I was still alive after enduring a situation that should’ve killed me. I was used to it, but I could understand these two losing it just a little on their first time surviving a seemingly impossible situation.
“What are the two of you on about?” I asked.
“We figured when you told me I could go see your secret lab that we were done for,” Technomancer said. “Any time a villain starts agreeing to things they’d never agree to under normal circumstances you know it means they think they’re gonna bite the big one.”
I blinked a couple of times. I was having trouble processing what they were saying here.
“Wait, so you knew we were probably going to die and you went into the depths of the Applied Sciences Department anyway?”
“Well yeah,” Nancy said, reaching out and punching me.
It was probably meant to be a light punch, but it was heavy enough that it caused all my indicators to go into the low greens. Not the kind of power that Fialux could put out, but…
&nb
sp; Actually I wasn’t going to think of Fialux. It was still too new, too painful, for me to contemplate a world without her. A world where there wasn’t even a chance she was still alive on another world.
“Y’know what?” I said. “Maybe we should go check out the new lab together.”
Now it was Technomancer’s turn to blink a few times in surprise.
“Seriously?” she asked, looking more excited than I’d seen her since all this craziness started. “You’re really going to show us your secret lair?”
I shrugged. Looked at CORVAC and then to the two pretty ladies who’d helped me sort of halfass save the world.
“Yeah, why the hell not?” I asked, linking my arms into theirs and turning away from the massive crater behind us that my Fialux wasn’t stepping out of and the alien invaders who were still streaming into the city despite my best efforts to stop them. “We’re a bunch of villains united, so why not check out the new digs?”
The world flashed white around me as CORVAC activated the teleporter. We still had a lot of work to do, but I wouldn’t be doing it alone.
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