by Jamie Hawke
“Oh, shit,” I said as a realization hit me. “You realize what this means?” The others stared, waiting, so I continued. “That power was exactly like paladin skills back home—or in games and books and stuff, kinda… so not exactly. What I’m trying to say is, it kind of ‘healed’ you, though you’re not seeing it that way right now.”
“The fuck is he talking about?” Andromida asked, turning to the others.
“Hear me out,” I said, not sure if it was the amped-up morale and other effects of my skill making me talk, or actually me. “If I’m a space paladin and my heavenly light just healed you, that means that whatever had you, the powers or whatever, they were evil.”
I beamed, hands on my hips and chest out.
Only to be met with laughter.
“Your heavenly light?” Charm said, holding her side to stop from losing it completely, then laughed more. “You’re serious right now?”
“And a space paladin?” Gale shook her head. “Honey, you’re the man and all, but… maybe that heavenly light got to your head. Maybe some kind of mind-altering drugs in it?” She glanced around, then shook her head. “I’m not seeing illusions, so I doubt it, but come on.”
Even Twitch and Shimmer were chuckling, all while Andromida glared.
“I don’t give two shits what you think happened,” Andromida said. “It doesn’t matter to me if you think you’re a space paladin or a space dragon. Hell, go ahead and call yourself a space dickhead, because that’s all I’m seeing right now. Give me, the fuck, back my powers or I’m adding you to my list of enemies.”
The other ladies had stopped laughing at least, seeing how seriously Andromida was taking it.
“We’ll get you fixed,” Twitch said, reaching a hand for Andromida’s shoulder, but then thinking better of it. “You’ll get this taken care of, have your justice—”
“Revenge,” Andromida said, then took a deep breath. “Fuck justice.”
“I don’t understand,” Charm said, frowning. “If the gold mist stuff healed her, why’s she being all pissy and still obsessed with revenge?” The look she got for that was a dangerous one, but Charm was too playful to care. She just gave the woman a broad smile and said, “No offense meant. Sometimes I’m a raging bitch too.”
“Don’t use that word,” Shimmer said, cringing.
“What, ‘bitch?’”
Shimmer looked like she was about to strike now, but then relaxed, nostrils flared, and said, “Did you just call me a bitch, or ask if that was the word I was referring to?”
“Oh,” Charm laughed, “I can see how that’s confusing now. No, the word—why’s that annoy you?”
“Used to put down women for far too long where I’m from. Or used to be.”
“Huh.” Charm thought about it, then shook her head. “Nah, fuck that. I’m definitely a bitch sometimes.”
Shimmer licked her lips, looking about to argue, but at a motion to back off from Twitch she let it go.
“You never are to me,” I said.
Charm threw her arms around me and planted a kiss on my cheek. “That’s because we haven’t known each other long enough yet. You’ll see.”
“Are you all serious right now?” Andromida asked, motioning to their surroundings.
“I’d almost forgotten,” Gale admitted, then nodded thanks to me.
“You’re right, of course,” I said to Andromida. “I should be more careful until I understand my powers, and we need to get moving.”
“Seconded,” Twitch said, and had just pulled up another screen to try something when a clanging sounded, an echoing through the passage ahead of us. The noise caught all of us off-guard, giving me the creeping fear that my morale boost had also made us overconfident and not cautious enough.
“Thought you’d be able to sit around forever?” Daos’s voice said, and then we saw the source of the noise. Scurrying toward us were enough mechanical spiders to make the walls look like darkness, little red eyes glowing.
“Got it,” Twitch said, and she made an adjustment, so that the first wave of spiders was hit by the laser. “It’s like a Rubik’s cube. Or at least, this part. It’s not about finding a way around the lasers, but moving our surroundings so that the lasers aren’t an issue.”
“Fuck all that,” Andromida growled. “You took my powers… I want my revenge. Go in there with everything you’ve got and fucking kill him! No dawdling, none of this caution bullshit! Open a black hole for all I fucking care!”
“You came here for revenge, we came here to find the Tier One supers,” I said. “Meaning, the last thing we want to do is blow this place to hell.”
Her eyes were furious, boring into me in a way they never could have when covered in a veil of blue.
“We have to give it a try,” Gale said to her. “If we let this go on, if we don’t find them… the enemy will continue to do to others what they’ve done to you.”
More robot spiders were closing in, but Twitch grinned and made some adjustments, then pushed on the nearest wall—a large metal block, turning it. It moved away from us, and she was able to push until it stopped. Checking her screens, she walked halfway back to us, then pushed on another block.
I was lost between fascination and seeing the next wave of spiders moving for us, scurrying around the lasers and other fried robots. Not wanting to take any chances, I pulled out my tempest, energy flowing between my hands and forming a ball, and then let it loose. That was before Andromida’s shout of warning processed, and before Shimmer managed to grab my arm, pulling it down.
Electricity made contact and, instead of taking them down, the spiders absorbed it, glowing with blue and white streams of electricity between them.
“This whole place was built around the idea of stealing powers from supers,” Andromida scolded me. “Do you really think we’ll be able to blast our way out?”
“How then?” I asked.
“Old-school fighting and problem solving, I imagine,” Twitch said, pushing the other block away and gesturing us to follow. “Hurry now.”
Andromida was the first through, the rest of us following with Twitch and me at the rear, ready to fight those robot spiders if needed. They came and she was kicking and clawing, bursts of electricity throwing us back in turn, but then the others were through the opening and we scrambled in after them. Twitch quickly pulled the block back into place, squashing several of the robots with a crunch, and we were left in relative darkness.
“So you have a cheat sheet there?” Charm asked once she’d caught her breath.
“Not exactly,” Twitch replied. “But it helps me see abnormalities. For instance,” she turned around in the room, her screen giving off a soft glow that allowed us to see where we were, partially. It was a larger room than before, with sloping ceilings and patterns on the walls. “This place isn’t reading as a normal room. It’s a test.”
“How does something read as a test?” Gale asked.
“It’s how the pyramid works,” Andromida said, running a hand through her hair. She turned to me, then the rest of them, eyes more full of worry than frustration. “This place, I’d… I’d forgotten so much about it.”
“And which part is relevant right now?” Charm asked.
“The whole place is a test, of sorts,” she said. “I remember that much. It’s like, not completely theirs, either, these supervillains, though they know how to get through it better than most.”
“I’m not following,” I admitted.
“They’re able to use the powers at the center of the pyramid to steal the powers of other supers, but they didn’t make this place, even if they’ve been changing it, designing it. It was around well before them. All of the so-called pyramids were, and some think they were the creation of an ancient alien race.”
“But the enemy doesn’t control it?”
“Not exactly. They have access, but wouldn’t be strong enough to control it… That would require a super with an awful lot of mental power.”
&n
bsp; “So what you’re saying is that some powerful mental super is down there, controlling this place. I still don’t see how that changes anything.”
“Not just controlling the place, but developing it, expanding it, molding it. We are an invading force right now, but so are they, in a sense. They have access to whatever super it is, probably trapped below, but—”
“My father,” I said, blurting out the first thing that came to mind.
“Not if he’s in the Nihilist world,” Twitch said. “Perhaps we’re about to find out.”
“I… it was just an idea.”
“But someone as powerful, regardless,” Gale said, looking around with interest. “And they’ve basically made all this?”
“From what was here before, no doubt. It could’ve even just been about reshaping it, but yes, even the monsters like those spiders will be said supervillain’s creation.”
“Damn,” I said, shaking my head as I tried to comprehend this.
“What she’s saying, if I’m grasping it correctly,” Twitch said, “is that we’re invaders in this place and that the dungeon—sorry, pyramid—is going to fight to keep us out?”
“Keep us out and kill us,” I said.
“And it’s somehow connected to the mind of a super,” Charm added.
“With the blue gone, more of this is returning,” Andromida said. Her eyes went wide. “I—I was one of them, I was the pyramid master, as they called us. That’s why they slaughtered my people, to get to me. To set this up—and when the temple feeds on a super, it collects their powers, which the enemy has learned how to harness and control, feeding into technology they call supra tech. Holy shit, all of this… Holy… shit.”
“It’s fucking insane,” Charm said.
“This whole galaxy, everything I’ve encountered since meeting you all is fucking insane,” I pointed out. “This is just one more smear in a giant diaper of shit.”
“That’s… gross,” Shimmer said, and everyone but Charm was looking at me like I was a freak. She wore her typical, adoring smile, which I was extremely grateful for at that moment. Maybe the analogy was horrible, but whatever—we were in a dark pyramid that was trying to kill us. It wasn’t my finest hour.
“Moving on,” Twitch said, guiding us by the glow of her screen.
A click, followed by an almost blinding explosion of light. Everyone pulled back, preparing for a fight, waiting for the glare in our eyes to clear. And then the floor gave out from under us.
13
We didn’t fall far, because Twitch’s powers allowed her to manipulate the code and turn our plummet into a slow descent. As powerful as this pyramid might prove to be, we were betting on our ability to weather the storm.
“On my mark,” she said, “be ready to surf. Gale, we’ll need a push.”
“What?” I asked, but then the floor burst into flames.
“Now!” She threw pink shields beneath us while Gale grunted and caught herself, then thrust her hands out to create wind. We were pushed so that the energy fields—solid enough to hold us and keep off the flames, but deteriorating fast—swept along the top of the fire. Charm nearly lost her footing, but Shimmer lunged out and caught her, balancing on one leg to do so. They continued like that until we hit the wall… and stuck as if we’d just hit the floor.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Adjusted gravity?”
Twitch nodded, glancing around and trying to orient herself. “It’s all I could think of.”
“Better than I would’ve done.”
“Wonderful, brilliant.” Charm pulled free from Shimmer but gave her an appreciative nod. “Now what’s the next step?”
“How should I know?” Twitch asked, pulling up her screens again, but shaking her head. “We’re in a room of fire, stuck to a wall.”
“Well, shit.”
Andromida attempted to pull at the metal, but nothing happened.
“What was your power before all this?” Shimmer asked.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s gone.” Andromida looked hopeless. They were all starting to lose heart.
My troubleshooter skill basically told me that if we went in the fire, we’d die, so that wasn’t so helpful, I thought. But then I wondered. A glance around and I frowned at Twitch.
“Can’t you make a hole in the walls?”
She shook her head. “I tried a few times, but there’s a force pushing against me whenever I do. It’s like trying to manipulate code but someone else is in the same system simply deleting my changes.”
“But whatever you did here worked,” Gale pointed out.
“Maybe that says something.” I kept checking my screens and even tried a few manipulations. “Yes, like this. If I try making changes to the walls, I can’t. But anywhere else, simple resistance only.”
“And before, with pushing the walls around?” Charm asked.
“Part of the puzzle,” Twitch replied.
“You ask me, the damn pyramid sounds like it doesn’t know what it wants.”
“Actually, you might be right,” I said. Turning to her, I continued, “Like there’s the will of our enemy, but something else is in there working against it, even if only now and again.”
“How does all of this help us get out of this predicament?” Gale asked.
“Damned if I know,” I admitted. “But it’s entirely possible we’ll find ourselves in situations where we can find roundabout ways of making it through, as some small part of this thing wants us to win.”
“It’s too bad my illusion powers can’t make things actually happen,” Shimmer said, glancing over to the flames. “Otherwise I’d make those flames appear not to be there, and then we could simply go through the holes where they come through the floor.”
Holy shit. Pulling up my screens, I remembered that before, when I’d taken on an altered version of Charm’s illusion and Twitch’s coding, it allowed the werewolf illusion to actually take hold—or was it that I needed a higher level for it to work? If I overlapped Twitch’s powers on top of Shimmer’s and tried getting rid of the flames, it might work in the same way.
Trying it, the flames vanished. The heat too!
“Shimmer, you’re a genius,” I said, beaming. Then I noticed the bar on my screen that was moving from one hundred to zero, fast. “But we only have about thirty seconds, I’d guess.”
“And if the flames are actually still there?” Shimmer asked. “If you just convinced our minds, but it’s not the reality?”
“One way to find out. Twitch, change my gravity.”
Twitch looked hesitant, but at a nod from me, she went ahead. I was instantly falling toward what had seemed to be a wall of fire a moment ago but was now a simple wall with several holes in it, and then I was in, moving through layers of metal that might ignite again any minute.
“MOVE IT!” I shouted back and turned to help them through. Gale had the most curves and had to maneuver carefully, but soon we were all in, working our way down.
“How long?” Shimmer asked, giving me a worried glance.
“We’re at three percent remaining,” I replied, and then pointed ahead to what looked like igniters. “And I’d guess we have to make it past those.”
Everyone started running, but apparently my focus shifting to the increased speed left us with even less time than I’d assumed. A red glare warned us the fire was about to return, but Twitch hurriedly threw up shields to cover the ignitors.
“That won’t hold,” she admitted, sprinting at my side. “But it might give us a few extra seconds.”
“It’ll have to do,” I replied.
We were running along a lengthy metal corridor, like a massive air duct, not one meant for people, so we had to crouch when we were nearing the end.
The fire roared to life. Gale threw her powers against it so that we were caught in a bubble of wind protecting us while the fire moved around us, and then we were through, diving into the next opening and rolling to safety.
Charm was yelping, as th
e end of her tail had been caught by the flames. Gale was able to put that out quickly, and we all sat there, taking in our new surroundings.
This part of the pyramid felt like an old temple, with the metal interior looking much less pristine. It was a long corridor, easily big enough to fit a small army of a couple hundred. Some walls were faded and scratched. The ceiling arched up, and a glowing light worked its way down through several openings here and there, giving us a view of what appeared to be people ahead, about halfway through.
We proceeded with caution, wary, ready for those people to jump up and attack. Only, as we drew close we saw why they weren’t—these weren’t the supervillains we were fighting, but skeletons. Along one wall we could now make out equipment and computer screens similar to what we’d found in the last pyramid where the enemy had been sucking up superpowers.
These skeletons had been supers, once, before their powers had been drained and they’d been left for dead.
“Are they the Tier Ones?” I asked, moving back to the skeletons to have a better look.
Twitch was already assessing them with her screens, so I tried my screen that read supers’ abilities. While it worked, it showed regular supers, mostly with small powers like speed, strength, the ability to absorb energy from certain kinds of attacks—the typical stuff.
“I’m showing Tier Three at best,” Twitch said.
A glance over to Andromida, and I pulled up the screen for her. The screen flashed up and I caught a glimpse of it briefly before it inexplicably vanished. I blinked, confused, and then saw her glaring at me, nostrils flared, chest heaving.
The rest were investigating the room, but she came my way, voice lowered as she said, “Stay the fuck out of my head.”
“I wasn’t in your head,” I replied, confused.
“You used your power to assess me, same deal. What’d you see?”
There had been two words that stood out as interesting—portals, and latching. The latter didn’t make sense to me, but the former was very interesting. I hesitated, debating whether to be honest or not. But no, that wasn’t the team I was trying to make here, and it certainly wasn’t how I wanted to be around these ladies. Even if Andromida wasn’t one of them, she’d earned better.