Villains Don't Save Heroes!

by Mia Archer

  “You know I think that sounds like a grand idea now that you mention it Night Terror,” she said with a wink that didn’t belong on someone who was dying of a massive lack of internal organs.

  I didn’t even bother to try and puzzle out how she was able to say that considering her lungs were cut halfway off and cauterized shut. Maybe there was just enough air left in them for her to say her last words. Then her eyes closed and she fell to the ground.

  And we’re talking a hard fall. Not an antigravity assisted fall. The kind of fall that looked like it hurt. Though then again she already had the pain of having her entire center being destroyed to contend with. Even if she did regenerate that couldn’t be a pleasant experience.

  I wanted to walk over to her and finish the job I’d started, but I saw another readout on my display that told me there was another set of missiles coming in hot. Maybe they decided they hadn’t taken out the robots entirely. Maybe they figured if Dr. Lana was taken out in a convenient accident they wouldn’t have to pay for all the designs she’d sent them.

  Or maybe they’d decided they were going to start taking shots at the Queen again. There’d been an informal truce between me and the government ever since they realized they couldn’t take me out, but maybe they were taking advantage of the opportunity that had suddenly and nicely presented itself.

  That was going to be a huge mistake on their part getting back on my shit list, but I had to survive this to put them on that shit list.

  Whatever the reason. We needed to get the hell out of here and we needed to get out now. My only hope was that the resulting explosions from whatever they were firing would be enough to finish off Dr. Lana once and for all, though I had a hard time believing that would actually be the case.

  So I wrapped an arm around Fialux and shot into the air. It was a good ten seconds or so before explosions started going off again from Uncle Sam either trying to do a cleanup or trying to take me out. Either way, we got out with time to spare. That’s what matters.

  “I totally screwed that up,” Fialux said.

  I set my jaw. If I opened my mouth then I was going to say something that we might both regret. Something that was the absolute truth, but there was nothing that said the truth couldn’t be regrettable.

  So I figured it was better to say nothing at all rather than lay into her about how stupid she’d been in that fight. How she’d put both of us at risk with her stupidity.

  “I don’t have my powers and I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have tried to get in the middle of a fight when I don’t even know what the hell I’m doing.”

  Again I didn’t say anything, but my silence seemed to say more than any words I could’ve come up with. Fialux didn’t say anything else. Instead she started to quietly cry.

  I knew I probably should’ve said something. I should’ve tried to comfort her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  Not after the way she’d royally screwed up. Even though it was as much my screwup as it was hers. She was the one who’d gone off using a tool she didn’t understand to try and fight something that was beyond her without her normal powers, but that was nothing compared to me being the idiot who gave her that tool in the first place.

  We’d both made some pretty big fucking mistakes, but instead of crying I was just angry. Angry at her. Angry at myself. And unsure of where the hell to go from here since I’d gotten in yet another dustup with Dr. Lana and I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had come out as a draw.

  So I flew off to a safe location far from prying eyes and activated my emergency teleportation protocol to get us back to the lab. Where we went our separate ways, her back to her room and me to the firing range to blow off some steam shooting at holographic projections of Dr. Lana’s face, but that was just fine with me considering the mood I was in.

  35

  Depression

  I sighed as I checked on the log for this morning. It’s not like I was spying on Selena. Not exactly.

  It was all about her health. At least that’s what I told myself. And her health wasn’t all that great ever since we had that incident where we watched two robots double teaming downtown Starlight City in a naughty rendition of Robot Does Downtown.

  Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the best joke. Work with me here. I’m dealing with a depressed former goddess who wasn’t all that happy about her situation, and I was at my wit’s end.

  It didn’t help that we’d been in the middle of that unfortunate metal sandwich. Or that Fialux had done exactly the wrong thing at multiple wrong times because she was following the right heroic impulses that had gone terribly wrong since she didn’t have her powers these days.

  I guess she’d skipped a couple of her seven stages of grief. From the readouts it looked like she’d gone from denial straight to depression and I was trying to figure out a way to get her out of her funk.

  The only problem was I had no idea how I was going to do that short of getting her powers back, and I still didn’t have the new weapon Dr. Lana was using to toy with so that was still a big zero.

  Leaving me with trying to handle this the old fashioned way.

  Take this morning, for example. I was getting breakfast in bed ready again. Well I was instructing the automated systems to get breakfast ready again and then I was going to take it to her room personally to make sure she ate it.

  Because she wasn’t eating the stuff that was delivered to her room via robot, and I’d learned the hard way a couple of days ago that even without her superpowers she was able to really beat the ever loving shit out of one of the automated butlers that came to her room to be more insistent about feeding her breakfast.

  Okay, so now that I thought about it maybe she’d had a gone through little bit of the anger stage too. She just took it out on the robots in the lab rather than on me for some reason.

  I was still trying to figure out if that incident was because she went into a violent swing in her depression or if it was because she saw a robot, albeit a much smaller scaled down robot, with a humanoid body and decided to have a little flashback that ended with her standing over the thing beating its metallic head in with the arm she’d ripped off.

  For one shining hopeful moment I’d thought maybe she got her powers back. That ended up being so much wishful thinking though. The service bots weren’t hardened for combat like the monstrosities we’d faced out in the city, so it was within the realm of mortal strength to rip them apart.

  It still took someone who became violently unhinged to do it, but it was possible.

  “Rise and shine!” I said as the doors to her room slid open.

  I’m not sure what I was expecting when I walked into her room. It’d been awhile since I was down here, to be honest. I was so busy with doing research and trying to figure out what the hell made those stupid weapons Dr. Lana put together tick that I hadn’t had time for a personal visit.

  No, whenever Fialux came to talk to me it was usually her visiting the breakfast nook. Though now that I thought about it maybe it’d been awhile since she’d even been to the breakfast nook.

  I was losing track of time. It wasn’t a good thing that I was losing track of time. I needed to be more on top of things. Especially considering the way she’d acted the last time the city was under attack.

  I don’t care what kind of stress she was under or that she was once a superpowered goddess who could do whatever she wanted without fear of getting hurt. Jumping off of a building was not normal behavior. Overriding my suits and throwing herself into combat was not the sort of behavior you saw in someone who wanted to live.

  As soon as I stepped through the door I found myself wishing I was wearing my suit, and not for the usual reasons. My suit was a precision engineered piece of technology that was designed to protect me from all sorts of potential nastiness I could run into while I was on the job trying to take over the world.

  There was a laundry list of things that could ruin my day while I was on the job. I co
uld get hit by something powerful. Not good. Also something the inertial dampers took care of. I could scraped by something with a sharp edge or pierced with the front of that something if someone was going old school and using swords and knives. The carbon fiber weave took care of that. Someone could stab me until the cows came home or shoot me with all the piercing rounds they wanted and it wouldn’t leave so much as a scratch.

  Then there were things like sound and vision, which were things a lot of your typical heroes and villains didn’t think about. Let’s just say there were a lot of people left this field with a lot of hearing loss because they never stopped to think of the cumulative effect of working in a high decibel environment that would make your average factory worker or OSHA compliance expert wince.

  Not that OSHA had much to say about villainy as a career. Naturally anyone who went into villainy as a profession didn’t have much respect for the government. No, anyone who wanted to follow the rules and pursue a villainous career typically got a job at a place like the CIA or NSA instead.

  I was getting away from myself though, because there was one other sense that my suit protected. A sense that was so rarely ever in danger of being ruined that I almost didn’t add it to my suit, and now the one time I might actually need it my suit was on the other side of the lab.

  Sure I could teleport it on, but that would only make Fialux curious as to why I suddenly felt the need to wear my suit and the last thing I wanted to do was draw her attention to the terrible smell permeating the room. A smell that I’m sure she couldn’t smell anymore because the receptors in her nose had probably gone straight past nose-blindness to nose-death considering how much it reeked in here.

  Seriously. It smelled like a teenager’s room in that magical time after biology decides it’s time for the body to start putting out fun new odors that have never hit before and before said teenager realizes there are entire industries dedicated to keeping that smell from assaulting the nostrils of every other living creature around them.

  Oh yeah. There was one hell of a smell going on in here. I looked around at the disaster area.

  “What happened in here?” I asked.

  “Go away,” Fialux growled, though it was a muffled growl because she was a series of indistinct lumps buried under the comforter on her bed.

  Maybe sh was hiding from the smell.

  Well then. Here we had another similarity with a sullen teenager. She refused to eat, she stayed in her dark room, she obviously wasn’t cleaning up after herself, and it was clear I’d let things go for far too long.

  I stepped into the room and set the tray down on a table that materialized out of the wall at just the right moment. Good. At least some of the systems in this room were still working correctly. Though this time it was a system she couldn’t destroy directly because it didn’t pop out until it was needed.

  I turned. Stepped over the smashed carcass of one of my cleaning bots. I frowned. Those things weren’t exactly expensive relative to everything else I had going in this lab, but considering “relatively cheap” in my lab could still constitute a budget that would keep the Coast Guard solvent for a year that meant the things were still pretty damn expensive to replace.

  I was going to have to do something about that.

  “So, um, did you decide to destroy my expensive cleaning robots for a reason?”

  “They were making little chittering noises,” Fialux growled. “I don’t like little chittering noises when I’m trying to sleep.”

  Huh. That was an annoying habit the things had picked up. They didn’t need to make noises that made them sound like mice, but they did. I wasn’t even sure how they’d figured out how to sound like a mouse considering I had autonomous biological hunter killer units patrolling the lab on a regular schedule to make sure no rodents ever made it past the front entrance.

  The nice thing about the autonomous biological hunter killer units was all I had to do to keep them happy was give them the occasional cat treat and scratch them behind the ears and I didn’t have to worry about them suddenly learning to think for themselves and turn on their master.

  Though there was the occasional moment when a belly rub turned into a vicious mauling. That was a risk every cat owner had to take from time to time, though, and it was totally worth the visit to the medbay in my opinion because purr cuddles were irresistible. I don’t care who you are.

  I looked at the floor. Yeah, there were a lot of cleaner bots that had been coming in here and getting destroyed. It looked like the aftermath of a giant irradiated lizard attacking the city, minus the radiation.

  Or maybe not. I’d have to double check whether or not I’d made the little guys run on nuclear when I got back up top. The last thing I needed was for Fialux to get a nasty dose of radiation poisoning because the cumulative dose of radiation she got from the minuscule power cells in all the cleaner bots was enough to do some damage.

  I walked over and took a seat on the bed. Then frowned as I sat on something hard. I popped up and looked down. Frowned even deeper as I saw a hardened husk of something that may or may not have been a fruit once upon a time.

  No, scratch that. It was the remains of one of the unfortunate cleaning bots that had tried to gorge itself on a fruit of some sort that Fialux refused to eat, and either eating the fruit had killed the bot in the process or Fialux had smashed it while it was in the middle of trying to clean up.

  Poor little thing. It never had a chance.

  Then again I could understand why she had a healthy hatred for anything even remotely resembling a robot considering everything that had happened to her recently.

  Hell, I’d been betrayed by my megalomaniacal supercomputer recently and I was still reluctant to pull the trigger on giving my new computer system anything approaching actual intelligence as a result.

  Every time I thought about it I felt like CORVAC was reaching from beyond the grave to flip me the digital bird one final time. I could even imagine it up on the screen. He would’ve done it like old ASCII art on an Apple II or something. Put some real old school flare into his middle finger art.

  “I said leave me alone,” Fialux said.

  “And I’m not going to leave you alone,” I said. “Not a chance. I said I’d take care of you and…”

  “What part of get away don’t you understand?” she growled.

  “The part where I love you and I’m going to make you better no matter what it takes. No matter how much it hurts me or how many times I have to fight an archnemesis I’m not sure I can beat. That’s the part you don’t understand, and I’m going to make you understand it even if it kills me damn it!”

  36

  Extreme Measures

  I looked at the messy room. Felt frustration building inside me. I said I was going to take care of her, and this wasn’t taking care of her.

  I came to a realization as I looked at the mess she’d made. As though she was some slob of a college kid who’d had mommy picking up after her all her life and she didn’t know how to actually clean for shit.

  Which was entirely possible, now that I thought about it. The only thing I knew about her past was she lived in an apartment off campus. An apartment that always looked like it’d been given a quick once over before I arrived for “date night.”

  I’d always been so focused on watching a movie and chilling that I’d never given much thought to it beyond encouraging her to come to the lab more often. I told her it was because the lab was a massive underground complex with more square footage than she could ever imagine, but mostly it was because I had an army of cleaning bots keeping the place spotless.

  Only now she’d fixed that, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was partially my fault it had happened in the first place.

  I’d been so worried about trying to figure out how those weapons worked so I could reverse whatever it was Dr. Lana had done to her that I’d forgotten to take care of her. I’d forgotten to spend time with her.

  Or maybe it was
that I was afraid to spend time with her considering I couldn’t get over what I’d helped do to her. Dr. Lana might’ve pulled the trigger on that weird raygun, but I was the one who put Fialux there in the first place. I was the one who let her come out with me in the middle of a giant robot attack which seemed like a recipe for a bad flashback now that I thought about it.

  Obviously watching those robots rip up the city had done a number on her. Maybe it was the stress of watching the creatures that had helped to rob her of her powers rampaging through the city. Maybe it was the impotent feeling of knowing she couldn’t do anything to save the day.

  Maybe it was simply the frustration of being locked up in a room in my lab that was made to look like a guest room at some fancy lodge out west somewhere.

  The point I’m trying to get at here is obviously she was suffering from depression, or at the very least she’d gotten into a funk, and it was time for me to do something about it.

  “That’s it,” I growled. “We’re doing something about this, and we’re doing something about it now.”

  Fialux let out another growl that might have been disagreement. Then again she might have been giving me the recipe to a really nice steak, for all that I could make out what she was saying.

  Maybe she was even saying something in the language of whatever strange new world she presumably came from, though the way she acted like a second-generation immigrant who’d gone completely native had me thinking she’d been raised here in the good old US of A even if my suspicion that she was from somewhere much farther away turned out to be true.

  “You’re not going to sit around here anymore Miss Grumbles,” I said. “I’m doing something about this.”