He wore many figurative hats. To the well-intentioned members of the Foundation for Humanity, he was plain vanilla human Mr. Night, doing his bit to save the world from the growing Neo threat. To the vast Neo conspiracy that sought to rule the world by seizing control of the source of parahumanity’s powers, he was a trusted operative, using his strange abilities to carry out the orders of his putative masters. And to his true masters, Mr. Night was a man who had sought knowledge and found it, terrible knowledge that had flensed off his humanity and left him only with a somewhat twisted sense of humor and an overriding purpose. He very much looked forward to the time when he would reveal who and what he really was to his purported employers.
Mr. Night returned to the world he despised, the world of harsh lights and sharp edges where the teeming plague of humanity crawled and sweated and spawned. He longed for the day when the whole planet would be cleansed of the plague of life. There was still much work to do before that blessed event, but the day was creeping closer, very close indeed.
He emerged from a shadowy corner in an office, startling a man working at a computer. The flunky jumped in his seat, spilling coffee all over himself. “Holy shit!” he shouted. “Mr. Night, sir,” he went on more respectfully. Everybody at the secret facility had been exposed to Mr. Night’s eerie comings and goings for some time now, but nobody had gotten used to them.
“Has the girl been found?” Mr. Night asked. So many things revolved around the little girl from another world. He had caught a brief glimpse of her during the extraction operation, when she had been dragged into this plane of existence. She was a thing of bright light and colors, hope and power made flesh. He could hardly bear to look at her. Only the knowledge she wouldn’t survive the uses the plan had in store for her made her presence tolerable. But he hadn’t had to endure said presence for long; the cursed girl had managed to fight off the summoning process and ended up relocating elsewhere.
The flunky visibly hesitated before delivering the bad news. “She was taken from the hospital, but something went wrong. Archangel is still trying to sort things out.”
Mr. Night’s smile didn’t waver. It rarely did, mainly because it was no more a reflection of his actual moods than the flesh and bone he hid behind were representative of what he really was.
“Place a call to Archangel, would you?” he said. The Russian troubleshooter might need help in finding the girl, and Mr. Night would make sure he got it.
The girl was proving to be rather troublesome. If time permitted, he would have to put some effort in making her demise a memorable experience for everyone concerned.
Chapter Eight
Christine Dark
New York City, New York, March 13, 2013
“No way! That’s not just impossible, that’s ridiculous!”
It turned out that the first weird machine Face-Off had made her get into was, among other things, a scale. A scale which had promptly declared Christine weighed... a lot more than she had. “I’ve gained forty pounds? WTF!”
Christine had never been a Weight Watcher, and she had been blessed with a darn good metabolism, which had earned the sincere hatred of most women around her. She could eat pizza and other forbidden foods and not gain a pound. Sophie cordially detested her for it, and Christine could understand why, since she’d seen Sophie literally agonize over taking a second bite out of anything with a higher caloric content than a celery stick.
While she didn’t indulge in threesomes with Ben and Jerry except when terminally depressed, Christine didn’t really watch what she ate. She also didn’t care about her weight and appearance as much as most of her friends did. But she still wasn’t thrilled to hear she’d somehow put on over forty pounds in the last twenty-four hours. She didn’t feel bloated or fatter. Stupid scale.
Bad enough this whole testing thing was giving her flashbacks of P.E. class back in high school. Her P.E. experiences had consisted of equal parts embarrassment, pain and discomfort, with excessive sweating added for good measure. The fact that before the test they’d had her change into a padded gray bodysuit that felt a bit too tight for her taste didn’t help, either.
“Ah, I sort of expected that,” Face-Off said.
“So what happened? Did I grow two feet? Are my boobs the size of basketballs and I somehow missed it? Is my butt the size of a car?”
“Remember what I said about your bones getting denser and stronger? That also makes them heavier. Neos are usually twenty to fifty percent heavier than a human of the same size. Some are even heavier.”
“Well, doh. I should have figured that one out. That’s cool, I guess. Nice to be all tough and resilient, but swimming is going to suck – if we are that much denser we should sink like stones.”
Face-Off nodded. “Yep. Can’t float, can’t do the backstroke.”
“Bummer. Do many Neos, uh, hulk out?”
“Hulk out?”
“Sorry, cultural reference from the completely fictional superheroes in my world. I mean, get bigger and bulkier than normal.”
“Gotcha. A few, yes, but not many. Most Neos look perfectly normal. A few are a bit freakish, like moi.” He patted his featureless face, but he was grinning underneath, so Christine smiled back at him. “You look perfectly normal,” he told her.
That sounded perilously close to ‘perfectly plain’ to her, but she set that aside. “Okay, got me weighted up and I’m all dense and stuff. What next?”
“If you can grab those handles above your head, we’ll see how much weight you can lift and press.” She did. “Okay, the machine will start pushing down; just push back against it,” Face-Off explained. “If it gets too heavy, just stop and the machine will automatically stop as well.”
“Not getting squished sounds good,” Christine said as the machine pushed down on her like a vertical version of the Death Star’s trash compactor of doom. She pushed back, and a digital readout on the machine started spitting out numbers. A hundred pounds. Pretty impressive, that’s like two dozen kittens. Two hundred pounds. Even nicer, I can bench press a football player. That sounded kinda dirty. Four hundred pounds, and she could still push back without even working up a sweat. At eight hundred pounds she was beginning to feel a bit of a burn, but she made it to over a thousand pounds before giving up. Half a ton. She could lift half a ton over her head! “So I can pick up a car and throw it at someone?”
“Not quite a car. The average car is about four, five thousand pounds. You could tip over a car, though.”
That didn’t sound as impressive as picking up a car and tossing it like a kitten, not that she would toss a kitten anywhere. “Bummer. I bet you can throw cars around,” she told Face-Off. Guys always loved to show off how big and strong they were. And since when had she started trying to flatter guys? Apparently since right after meeting this particular guy.
“Well, yes,” said the guy, not sounding particularly proud or flattered. “It’s trickier than it sounds, though. If you don’t pick up a car the right way, you usually end up tearing chunks off it instead. At least if you are super-strong but don’t have the ability to somehow pick up huge and bulky objects without destroying them. The heavy hitters like Ultimate can grasp things as big as a battleship and use some form of telekinesis to keep it in one piece while they pick them up. Middle-weights like myself, we have to be careful with the stuff we lift.”
“So how much can you lift over your head? If you don’t mind my asking, that is. Just want to get a feel of how much of a super-womyn I am.”
“Uh, about ten tons, maybe a bit more if I push it.”
Great. She was a total wimp. “I’m a total wimp.”
“Not really,” Face-Off replied. “You’re stronger than most Type One Neos, and much stronger than a normal human. You can break a normal guy’s neck without half trying, so you are going to need lessons on how to fight and manage your strength. If you get excited, you can easily smash furniture, pull doors off their hinges, and so on. No roughhousing for you until yo
u get some training. You could knock somebody out during a pillow fight.”
That didn’t sound wimpy at all. It sounded a bit scary, as a matter of fact. On the other hand, she had always been easily intimidated by even implied violence, let alone actual violence. Knowing she could pick somebody up by the throat in the inimitable style of Darth Vader was pretty good for her self-esteem, even if she would never do that for real.
“I’m kind of a klutz normally, so it’s going to suck if I’m a super-strong klutz.”
“We can test you reflexes and hand-eye coordination next. They should be a lot better than they were before your abilities manifested themselves.” He led her to another section of the Danger Gym.
Ooh, she was going to be graceful, too? She would love that. Her short stint taking ballet lessons had made her feel like a total Ugly Duckling. Anything that involved pirouetting, jumping and dancing had usually ended in unintentionally hilarious ways. “So how come I don’t feel super-agile, not to mention super-strong?”
“It’s a Neo thing. Unless you consciously push your body, it somehow restrains itself to the speed and power of a normal human being. If you get startled or angry or scared, though, all bets are off. That’s when doors and necks get broken by accident. With some training, you can also learn to turn off your strength consciously, but even then it’s still not a good idea to startle a Neo.”
“So people really shouldn’t throw me any surprise parties,” Christine said. “I’ll have to mention that next time I update my Facebook page.”
The agility testing equipment looked suspiciously like a gymnastics set. Pretty soon Face-Off had her jumping around like it was the Olympics.
One of the first things she learned was that she could jump really far. So far, in fact, that the first time she tried a long jump she overshot her target and smacked into a wall, hard. Which was embarrassing, but didn’t hurt as much as it should have. Those extra-heavy bones were paying for themselves already. Once she got used to it, though, she discovered she was graceful like a cat. She could even do jazz hands while prancing on a tight rope, which she’d never been able to do before, much to her shame and sorrow. Her klutz days were over.
“Not bad,” Face-Off commented. “Okay, let’s take a short break.” Christine followed him to a snack and drinks area, and gratefully slurped on some ice tea. Condor appeared from a sliding door on the wall and joined them.
“I’ve been monitoring your biometrics,” Condor said. “Trying to figure out what kind of powers you have.”
“Any luck? Am I a healer, tank or DPS? I like playing rogues, so if I can turn invisible and stuff, that’d be awesome.”
“DPS?” Face-Off said dubiously, but Condor smiled.
“Damage per second,” Condor explained. “Which makes you a gamer chick,” he said, eyeing her appreciatively. “They are about as rare as unicorns around here. Kestrel thinks that stuff is for losers. What do you play?”
“Well, mostly World of Warcraft – do you guys have that in this world?”
“That’s my game too!” Condor said, surprising her. “That’s what I usually play when I’m waiting for something to happen – or I did before Kestrel started hanging around. It’s not the most popular game around, but I like it. Most people are into City of Heroes, which as you can guess is all about costumed freaks like ourselves.”
“I guess with people flying around and throwing lightning bolts for real, playing elves and mages isn’t all that special. That sucks.”
“It’s got some appeal. Some people like being in a world without Neos, even if it’s only a game.”
Christine thought about being a normal person in a world where a select few could throw cars around or fly. It probably wasn’t all that great.
“Anyways,” Condor said. “As your adrenaline levels went up, I got some interesting energy fluctuations. And when you hit that wall, there was an energy spike. Electro-magnetic and kinetic I think it could be a protective aura of some kind. I’d like to explore that a bit further.”
“Okay. Explore it how?”
“Here, let me show you.”
Condor led her to a blank section of wall. A bunch of what looked like guns, hoses and those tennis and baseball things that shoot balls at you were lined up facing the wall, some twenty yards away. “Er, this kinda looks like an automated firing squad,” she commented, feeling a little nervous.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Condor said. “Don’t worry, we’re not firing anything lethal at you, not until we are sure you can handle it. If you can stand over there – yeah, right there is fine. We’ll stand over here.” Condor and Face-Off walked out of the line of fire and stood by the assortment of missile launchers.
“I’m getting a bit anxious here,” Christine said, only half-joking.
“It’s okay, Christine,” Face-Off said. “Condor did the same thing for me, a while back. He’s going to start with things like beach balls and water balloons.”
“Yeah, I just love getting smacked with water balloons,” Christine muttered. She stood her ground, though. Time to grrl up, grrl.
“Feel free to dodge the attacks if you want to, but try to concentrate on defending against them with your mind.”
“How the eff am I supposed to –“ A foam ball with something heavy in the middle bounced off her head. It didn’t hurt, but it startled her into silence. Another one hit her left boob. “Hey!” She sidestepped the next ball. Now that she was paying attention, she saw they weren’t all that fast, at least not at first, and she could duck away from them. But the rate of fire of the ball-launchers started going up. She got smacked on her shoulder; she dodged a couple of shots but walked right into a few more. And they were flying faster now; they were starting to sting a little when they connected. “Hey!”
“Try to concentrate,” Condor said, sounding a lot like Mr. Phelps, the d-bag of a P.E. teacher she’d had the misfortune to endure during her last two years of high school. This whole thing was bringing her back to the nasty dodge ball games he liked to organize for his sadistic pleasure.
Okay, concentrate. Smack. Dodging wasn’t working so well now that a dozen balls or more were being sent her way in each volley. Smack, smack. She slapped a few balls away, but one got through and got her in the eye. That hurt a bit, and now she was getting mad. Curling into a ball was an option, but if Condor was anything like Mr. Phelps, he’d just kept bouncing balls off her until she snapped out of it. Maybe – smack! She couldn’t think, she –
Three or four balls were flying straight at her face. She raised her hands, knowing she wasn’t going to get them all, and something appeared between her and the balls. Something like a circular wall: a semi-transparent wall that sparkled with energy. The balls hit the wall and bounced off, and the smell of ozone and burning plastic filled her nostrils.
“Holy crap!” she said. Unfortunately, the energy wall disappeared a second later and a follow-up ball hit her right in the mouth, pretty hard. “Ow! Dammit!” Her concentration was shot, and she got smacked a few more times. It took her a few seconds, and several more hits, to figure out what she had done. She flexed something within her, and a bigger wall – no, not a wall, a shield – appeared in front of her, and this time she stopped all of them.
After holding the shield up for a bit, Christine started learning a few things about it. First of all, she could feel the impacts on its surface, not as if the shield was her skin, but more like feeling rain drops through a jacket – distant and muted, but still there. The balls were not just bouncing off, but were getting burned a little bit – that’s where the smell was coming from. It was pretty awesome. Shields at ninety percent, O Captain! My Captain!
“Very good, Christine,” Condor said, and now he sounded nothing like Mr. Phelps. “I’m going to switch to something a bit harder. Let me know if it gets to be too much.”
“Okay,” she replied, and another machine started spitting baseballs at her, and these were pretty hard fastballs. She concentrated
on her shield, and the baseballs hit it and bounced off. The impacts felt different, harder and focused on a narrower area. She could feel the shield bend slightly as the hits increased in speed and power. As the impacts got harder, the shield drew more power from her.
After a while, the balls started hitting the shield pretty darn hard; if her control slipped those things were going to leave a bruise, or even break something. She looked at the machine shooting at her. Half of the shots seemed to be aimed right at her face, and that wasn’t very nice. She glared at it.
There was a loud crack like a gunshot as the machine flew apart in an explosion of metal bits and plastic shards.
“No way!” she shouted. Her concentration fell apart along with her shield and the last baseball from the doomed machine hit her right between the eyes. Things got blurry for a second or three.
“You’re okay,” Face-Off said when she could focus again. He was leaning over her. She hadn’t quite gotten knocked out, but she had ended up on her ass and spaced out for a bit. That fastball had hit hard. Yay for super-bones, or her brains would be leaking out of her nose and ears just about now.
“You’re supposed to ask me if I’m okay, not tell me,” Christine grumbled as he helped her to her feet. “My skull may be super-strong, but I think I got a concussion.”
“No worries, we recover from concussions in a matter of seconds, mostly. Although this guy I know got shot in the eye, bullet lodged in his brain. After a few hours the bullet came right out of the bullet hole, but he had trouble remembering stuff for a few days.”
“I can’t tell if that was a joke or not,” Christine complained.
“Must be my poker face,” Face-Off replied, startling a laugh out of her.
“Well, that was special,” Condor said as he walked up to them. “I won’t charge you for my pitching machine, mostly because I’m grateful you didn’t accidentally do that to me or Face-Off here.”
New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Page 15