Supers - Ex Heroes 2

by Jamie Hawke

  “They have him in there?” I asked. “What is it?”

  “Shimmer mentioned that they were likely holding Wendlor captive in some sort of prison,” Twitch said. “This must be it. Lucky for us, we’re now experts at breaking out of those.”

  With that lovely thought of having to break out of another prison-like situation, we ran for the pyramid, knowing it was our best bet.

  8

  Standing at the base of the pyramid made its size even more intimidating. Twitch cursed at the fact that she didn’t have working powers here, as she would have loved to be able to analyze it, see how the thing worked.

  “Maybe after we’ve brought the planet back,” I said, trying to be helpful. “Then your powers will work.”

  “If,” she pointed out. “We could fail at all this and I’d die, never knowing.”

  “If we fail and you die, we probably all die, and then the universe will have much bigger problems than you not knowing how something works.”

  “Right, sure.” She pouted as we worked our way around, examining the structure. I tried moving blocks, looking for patterns, and even going around the edges on the ground to see if there were any disturbances from the blocks having been moved lately. Nothing.

  Twitch tried looking at her screens, but swiped them away in frustration, instead joining me. We climbed up, carefully peering over the top of it while staying down, trying to keep a low profile. Twitch nudged me and pointed to a ship in the distance. It looked like it was flying toward us, but then it turned and started its decline past where I guessed the villages we’d come through were.

  “If we came all this way for nothing, I’ll sure feel like an idiot,” Twitch said.

  “Not something to worry about,” I replied. “Worst case scenario, we wait them out. First sign of movement, we head in for the kill and save this guy. He’ll get us to the other side, where we will save Charm.”

  “You have it all figured out, don’t you?” She sat on the edge, looking out at the hills and rocks, and I joined her. Gale was still going at it, oblivious to our decision to take a break.

  “What then?” Twitch asked. “I mean, after we save her, maybe this planet… after it’s all on track and you’re at the Citadel. What will you do with us then?”

  “Do with you?” I asked, and a few images came to mind. “I imagine, as an Elder, I’ll have a very large room with an even larger bed. You can take it from there.”

  She laughed and hit me. “You know what I mean.”

  Rubbing my shoulder, I said, “Not exactly, no.”

  “Will you still… want us?”

  I turned to her, caught off guard by that very un-Twitch thing to say. In my mind, she was always the confident, composed one. “Twitch, of course. I’m frankly surprised you’re all still okay with this. I mean, sharing me…”

  “That?” She laughed. “Maybe anyone else, or with a different group of women. But I don’t know, it just all seems to fit. As far as I’m concerned if we find more women that are right for the team, bring ‘em on. For me, it’s all about doing what I can to make up for my past, and being part of the team. This thing between us? I love it, and I don’t see how Charm or Gale puts any sort of negative spin on it.”

  “I…” My gaze found hers and I nodded, not knowing what to say.

  “Hell, if anything I think one woman would have a hard time keeping up with your libido.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It must be the genes, that super-powerful super in you.” She put a hand on my leg, smiling. “I’ve never met someone able to bring it like you do. Most guys’ dicks would be raw by now, but you just keep on bringing it.”

  I had the grace to blush as I looked away. “Yeah, well, my brother said to me, ‘if you ever meet a woman you care about, you bring it like it’s never been brought before,’ and I guess that stuck with me over the years. I appreciate you all and want to show it. When we’re not kicking the enemy in the face, pleasing you in the bedroom is the way I know how.”

  “Well keep it up, soldier.” She gave my leg a squeeze, then a playful caress, before standing and getting back to work.

  I had just stood to join her when Gale let out a gasp. She looked up with excitement in her eyes and said, “I have an idea.”

  “Well?” I asked. “Out with it.”

  “Here, the wind I call upon acts in an opposite way, right? Kind of pulling toward me, no matter what. Well, what if that could be used here?”

  “Like finding the wind blowing from the outside,” I said, “only opposite”.

  Twitch cocked her head, eyes not showing much confidence in the idea, but said, “Better than what we’re doing now.”

  Gale tried, but nothing happened. She started moving along the structure, trying to pull at different points. I’d almost given up, when she yelped, covered her mouth, and pointed. It was at a point where the blocks on each side were symmetrical and, now that we were paying attention, had the look of an entry way. Twitch and I joined her there, assessing the gold circuitry in the green stone, seeing if we could find a way in. What made sense here, I asked myself? The others who would come here wouldn’t go about some elaborate scheme every time they wanted to enter, but they might have someone on the inside who would let them in. That, or some sort of sensing mechanism.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, noticing that there was a section of the stone to my left where the gold patterns didn’t cover a specific area of about two square feet in each direction. Looking around, I noticed it was a pattern that was elsewhere, too. But here it was on the inner side of the stone. There also seemed to be even less here than two blocks over.

  This gave me an idea, so I told them to stay where they were while I made my way down, grabbed some dirt that I had to chip out of the hard ground with my blade, then made my way back up. Once there, I crumbled it and blew it across the position on the jade. As I’d expected, the outline of a hand showed up.

  “How does that help us?” Gale asked. “We don’t have that hand.”

  “Don’t we?” I asked, and then used the illusion power as I held up my hand, doing my best to mimic the pattern of the imprint revealed in the light layer of dust that stayed behind. Two clicks and the stones moved apart, creating an opening large enough for several people to walk in together.

  “You never cease to amaze me,” Twitch said, grinning.

  “Call it a mix of intuition and experience from playing video games,” I replied, following her in, with Gale following close behind.

  “Nerd,” she said but smiled when I glanced back. “In a good way, of course. Sexy, strong, well-hung nerd.”

  I rolled my eyes, turning to focus on the passage ahead of us. The stone had lit up, making the way forward a green hallway. We kept on in this direction, hesitating a little at a couple of passages that broke off to the left and right, but only pausing when we heard voices coming from ahead. Then we ducked back into the previous passage to our left, where we waited until the voices had passed.

  “Keep going?” I asked.

  Twitch nodded. “Let’s see where they came from.”

  We checked to ensure the passage was clear, then kept on moving as silently as we could down the main hall.

  “You all have movies on your planet?” I asked in a whisper.

  “They’re more of a middle-class thing, not something many supers are part of,” Twitch said. “Why?”

  “Just thinking, if this were a movie, we’d likely find laser beams cutting us in half, maybe some crazy A.I. kid come and threaten us, or zombies appear that would try to eat our brains.”

  “What kind of stupid-ass movies are those?” Gale asked, shaking her head.

  “Yours are better?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, mostly attempts to understand what Earth life was really like. There’s a very popular one on the fall of America in the early twenty-second century, and there’s this unicorn lady who—”

  “Wait, what?” I looked to Twitch to see if this was seriou
s.

  “Yeah, farts rainbows,” Gale said. “Really funny.”

  “I think your movies didn’t quite capture our history accurately. Sorry to be the one to tell you.”

  Twitch held up a hand and we stopped, all moving to the corner of the hall. She was leaning forward, risking a peek, and then turned back to us. “People,” she whispered, even quieter than before. “But they’re… sleeping. Maybe.”

  “Or?” I asked.

  “Or dead.”

  I’d never really liked the idea of finding dead people. Whenever I’d gone swimming in lakes I had always imagined some dead person’s hand brushing against my leg, or stepping on a face and feeling its rotten eyes with my toes. Now I’d been thinking about movies, and a room full of dead people in a large pyramid gave me all sorts of thoughts—most of them going back to that idea of zombies.

  “No better way to find out than by simply finding out,” Gale said, and she carelessly strolled forward and turned the corner. Nothing happened, so we followed.

  It quickly became clear that the men and women in the room weren’t exactly dead, but still, they were barely alive. All of them were in some state of shock, staring off at the walls or ceiling with looks of confusion and horror.

  “They were drained,” Twitch said.

  “Like, of their life force?” I asked. “Pits of insanity style?”

  She glanced back with confusion, but then said, “No, like their powers were drained.”

  “Oh, shit.” I watched my step, moving along the passageway and looking at them, then looking at the gold along the walls. It seemed to be glowing brighter here, especially around them, and pulsing up and away. “This temple, it’s like it feeds on them.”

  Twitch gulped, and I could see by the look in her eyes I was right.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Gale said. “Leave it all behind for that beach I mentioned. You know, the cocktails and blowjobs?”

  I was definitely feeling her on that. Both sounded a thousand times better than getting my powers zapped out of me and being left as a near-lifeless husk like these poor bastards.

  “All right, my babies,” a man’s voice said, coming from around the corner and causing me to jump. “Let’s see if any of you have any powers left.”

  I didn’t know what to do. My legs wouldn’t move to run, and my mind wouldn’t even process that there were options, let alone what they were. In that instant, I thought for sure this was my end, trapped here in this strange pyramid to end my days as a vegetable. Smoke blew out around us, and only when it started to clear did I realize that it had been some subconscious utilization of my illusion powers. I wish my subconscious had thought to keep it long enough for us to run out of there, but it was already clearing.

  When the smoke was gone, we saw a man standing in front of us. He was tall with wild, gray hair flowing out from his head, his eyes intense. It was him, I was sure of it.

  “Wendlor?” I took a step toward him, reaching out a hand as I pushed my fears aside. “We’ve come to save you.”

  His frown deepened, then he laughed and thrust out his hand as if to accept mine. Instead, a pulse flowed out, and when it came back to him our weapons shot out from our hands and at our sides, falling with a clatter at his feet. Next, he thrust his other hand forward, and before we could react another pulse hit and I felt the room spinning, saw the ceiling, and then the floor… and then darkness.

  9

  Although I was unconscious for most of it, I was dipping in and out, only vaguely aware of people fastening us to a wall. I struggled to process what was happening, losing consciousness and trying to fight, but unable. I finally came to, we were alone, a ticking noise coming from behind a slightly-ajar door on the other side of a control panel of sorts. The circuitry in the walls was glowing and buzzing. Gale stood strapped in on my left, Twitch to my right, both now starting to wake.

  Gale’s first reaction was to try and use her powers, but Wendlor appeared through the open door, waving a hand that instantly stopped her power. I shared a look with Twitch, begging her with my gaze, hoping she’d unleash hell. She shook her head slightly—still unwilling to try something she didn’t understand.

  When neither of us tried anything else, Wendlor said, “Good,” and started pacing in front of us. He stopped before me and grinned. “You seem to have the strangest powers of all…” A screen hovered next to him, black. No letters or numbers appeared, but he seemed to be reading it. “It’s almost as if you have no powers at all, but at the same time it shows you as being more powerful than any super we’ve ever drained.”

  “You’re behind the draining,” Twitch said, voice groggy but full of malice. “You?!”

  “Only here,” Wendlor said. “I take what I can get, to better serve the masters.”

  “Did I miss something?” I asked.

  “Your little friend here,” Wendlor said, walking over to Twitch and running a long-nailed finger along her brow, “knows all about it. She was there, fighting them, trying to stop it from happening.”

  “Stop what from happening, Twitch?” I struggled, but the bonds wouldn’t give.

  Twitch glared at the man as she spoke. “The rumor was that the Nihilists had set up some sort of machines that they could use to take powers from supers to transfer to the mundane, those who had no powers of their own but who could be of use to them in one way or another. Once Ranger takes over, which may well happen if we die here today, he’ll use this to redistribute power as he sees fit, doling it out to his cronies.”

  Wendlor laughed. “It’s so much larger than him, but yes, that’s the gist.”

  “And now you’re going to zap us of our powers,” I said, starting to grasp the severity of our situation, looking around at the people around us. “Just like you did to these supers?”

  “Not so super anymore though, are they?” he said with a grin and then stepped over to Gale, licking his lips as he looked at her. His eyes glanced at his screen, and he looked less impressed. “They were ones we’ve found along the way, some were on planet from before, trying to help in the battle that brought them here. Others, Nihilists brought. Some of their powers have been useful, others less so. Your powers, I already have… but that’s fine. We’ll find some minion to give them to.”

  “Let’s try them out, the ones you have against mine,” Gale said, tensing in her restraints.

  He laughed, turning away from her and moving to a machine on the far side of the room. It looked like a control panel, except that it only had a spot for a hand to be placed, nothing more.

  “I have the powers of at least one hundred supers at this point,” he said, caressing the machine, glaring up at us from it. “Adding a couple more really won’t make a difference to me… but it’ll make all the difference to you.”

  “Do it then,” I said, glaring. “Get it over with!”

  He shrugged. “As much as I’d like to, I answer to a higher power. But…” His eyes flickered to the screen. “Ah, yes, here they are now.”

  A portal opened up next to him, a small one with purple light, and out stepped the man with the purple trim, the one we’d fought to get the ship they’d taken here.

  “Lord Tarupis,” Wendlor said, bowing slightly. Not enough to show real respect, I noted.

  Tarupis had a new suit, one without the tear from the knife he’d received in our last encounter. The corner of his lip curled up at the sight of me there, but it wasn’t a smile.

  “Tell me, Wendlor,” Tarupis said, standing there with his hands behind his back, grinning at each of us with a malicious stare, “who exactly do we have here?”

  “Your worst nightmare,” I growled.

  Both of them stared at me for a moment, then burst into laughter.

  “At least he’s got a sense of humor,” Tarupis said. “My worst nightmare, son, is my mother-in-law tracking us down and coming to live with me. You’re hardly her.”

  “Mine would be dogs,” Wendlor said.

  “Dogs?
” Tarupis asked, and at least they weren’t mocking me anymore. I didn’t even want to see the expressions on the faces of Twitch and Gale.

  “Well, you know, they bark real loud,” Wendlor explained. “It’s terrifying. I met one once when one of Ranger’s scouting parties brought one from Earth. Horrific creatures.”

  “Dogs love me,” I said, not really sure where to go with this anymore. Except I suddenly had an idea. Not the best, but it was all I had. “In fact, I brought a bunch with me.”

  “What…?” Wendlor turned to me, confused. His eyes darted left, then right. “Bullshit.”

  “Dogshit’s worse,” I said, and then used my illusion power to create a dog. First came the sound of its barking, then more barking as other dogs came into my mind.

  Wendlor blinked, laughed, and then waved his hand—but it had been enough of a distraction. Twitch had used the moment when Tarupis had turned to look at him in disgust to pull up her screens, apparently able even when restrained. Instead of working on her screen, though, she simply made adjustments to his. Twitch seemed to be adding random code that wouldn’t make sense to his coding screen, but would cause his code to break. At least, that’s what I assumed she was doing, which she later confirmed.

  The result was that the wave of his powers to dismiss mine didn’t do a damn thing. He didn’t know that yet, though, and when the dogs kept coming, he mouthed, “Oh, shit,” and took off running. This could be fun, I realized, and before Tarupis had a chance to turn back to us, I imagined us free from the wall, running for the open door. He teleported over ready to give chase, and that’s when I gave the restraints all I had. They were strong, but I’d been leveling up lately and had some strength of my own.

  With a mighty heave and using my legs to push against the wall, I pulled free. I didn’t break the restraints but managed to yank a whole section away from the wall. It was still attached when I caught up with Tarupis so that when I smashed it over his head, the stone broke apart and he crumbled to the ground. Now my hands were separated at least, each connected to large slabs of stone. I could use that.