Fiasco Heights

by Zack Archer

  “I’m not even sure that’s a word, but I knocked your ass down back there, didn’t I?” I replied. “I smacked you down during the test.”

  Her face screwed up in anger. “Beginner’s luck. Besides, all you did was react. Reaction and diffraction are for bitches.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means you haven’t initiated the energy. You’ve simply absorbed and redirected what somebody else threw at you, which almost any of us can do.”

  “Yeah, well, I can do it on my own, lady,” I said. “I can initiate the shit out of energy when I want to.”

  “Prove it.”

  I sucked in a breath and squeezed my eyes shut.

  “Wait. What the fuck is that?” Lyric asked.

  My eyes flipped open. “What? I was trying to focus.”

  “It looked like you were trying to pass a kidney stone.”

  “That’s how I summon the energy.”

  She shook her head. “Summoning is like reading music or fucking, Quincy. You have to lose yourself in the moment. You have to master the ability to relax while simultaneously focusing and riding the rhythm, otherwise, you’ll blow your load.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  She grabbed one of the sticks with the thick, round pads attached to the end and tossed it to me. Then, she grabbed the other stick and clobbered me over the head.

  I dropped to the ground like a sack of trash.

  “Okay, that’s it,” I said, rising, pissed. I shook off the blow, and she swung at me again.

  The padding glanced off my chin, and I bent my legs and swung my stick at her.

  She parried my blow and kicked me in the stomach which hurt like hell.

  Then she swung her stick at me and this time I blocked it.

  “Ha!” I screamed, sticking my tongue out at her.

  Lyric sprung at me, throwing martial arts combinations along with swipes of her stick. I fought off her blows and then she punted me in the stomach.

  I flew back and feigned injury, clutching my midsection. She dove forward, and I dropped low and brought my stick up in a slashing movement.

  The end of my stick whacked her across the chin, knocking her back. She fell in one graceful motion, and I swung out and grabbed her.

  We were locked up, sweat-slicked, nose to nose.

  Her face and body were pressed against mine.

  I could taste her breath and felt her heart beating, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I was aroused.

  “How are you going to beat the galaxy’s most dangerous villains if you can’t even beat me?” she hissed.

  She reached into my pocket and pulled out my psych totem, Mister Chops. “What the hell is this?”

  “Mister Chops,” I said.

  She stuffed the totem in her pocket, and I grabbed her arms and tried to pin them back, but she was incredibly powerful. It took every ounce of muscle in my body just to hold her in place.

  “Say Uncle, and I’ll let you go,” I whispered.

  “Aunt,” she replied through bared teeth.

  “What?!”

  “I’m a female, so it’s ‘aunt,’ you idiot!”

  I peered into her eyes, she licked her lips, and for an instant, I thought we were going to suck face…and then it happened.

  Her jaws unhinged and the sonic bullet that exploded from her mouth hit me like a fist in the gut.

  I flew back several feet, and she grabbed me and powered me to the ground. When I looked up, she was straddling my groin. She grabbed my cheeks and squeezed them.

  “What are the names of Damnation Man’s brothers?” she asked me.

  I plumbed my memory, searching for the names, realizing Aurora had mentioned them to me earlier.

  “The Showstopper and…Dash Cam!” I shouted.

  “Madcap,” she replied, smacking my cheek softly. “The Showstopper and Madcap.”

  “I was close.”

  “Close isn’t good enough.”

  She torqued my head sideways so I could see the metascreen. She lifted a finger and circled it in the air, and two of the images became highlighted on the screen.

  Two thick-necked men.

  One appeared to be in his thirties, balding, with a goatee, and the other seemed to be younger, with a platinum crewcut.

  “The Showstopper is on the left,” she said of the man with the goatee. “He’s such a dick that he capitalizes the ‘T’ in ‘The.’ He can also harness the powers of the wind to create cyclones and contained air disturbances.”

  I nodded.

  “Madcap is on the right,” she continued. “He can manipulate materials, to change one substance into another.”

  “I’m not scared of them,” I said.

  A ghost of a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. The images changed to another figure, a man in his thirties with a mane of golden hair. “Who’s the pretty boy?” I asked.

  “The Barrister,” she answered. “He’s their bodyguard. He lifted his name from your system of justice and carries a weapon, a self-steering gavel made from Akash.”

  The images flashed again, and I saw the outline of a woman’s face which was blurred, the features obscured. “That’s the shapeshifter, Wench,” Lyric said. “She rules over the Swamp of Stygia and can bring the dead back to life.”

  The faces of two black women appeared. “That’s Rockets Redglare and Dolly Dagger. They’re thermal resonators…fire-conjurers. They can create incendiaries out of thin air.”

  “They sound like hot chicks,” I quipped.

  Lyric glared at me. “Do you remember the moments before you killed Damnation Man?”

  “I…no…I mean, not really…”

  “Think hard, Quincy. Your life might depend on it.”

  “Okay, yeah,” I said, trailing off, trying to buy myself some time before Lyric slapped me around again. “There was a sound…”

  “What kind of sound?”

  I squinted, and slowly it came back to me. “It sounded like tuning forks,” I said.

  She nodded. “Good.”

  “And then it changed. Yeah, it became more like…metal on metal.”

  “Better,” she said, grabbing my arm, lifting me to my feet.

  A moment passed between us. “Do you understand the significance of that sound?”

  I shook my head.

  “The human ear is shaped in such a way that sounds which lie between two thousand and four thousand hertz, precisely the sound an approaching Morningstar makes, triggers panic.”

  “It’s kinda like a built-in danger meter.”

  She nodded. “What will you do if you hear that sound?”

  “You mean after I run away and hide?”

  I smiled, she didn’t.

  “I’ll stand my ground and fight,” I said, trying to will enough emotion into my voice to make her believe it.

  “We’ll see about that,” she whispered.

  She waved her hand, and the lights in the room went out.

  And then I started screaming.

  16

  Lyric proceeded to ambush me from every possible direction in the dark room. She’d cue that metal-on-metal sound and then bum-rush me, the idea being, she was training me to hear and react to the echo of an approaching Morningstar.

  This continued for a good thirty minutes as Lyric beat the holy hell out of me, shrieking at me, scolding, telling me that I had to digest weeks’ worth of training in little more than an hour.

  Then she transitioned into barking out orders, telling me that I needed to practice acting like a sponge, sucking up the ambient energy in the darkness to use as a weapon. While kicking the shit out of me, Lyric revealed that every world is constantly bombarded with invisible forces: including planetary magnetic fields, ambient environmental radiation, and cosmic rays. There are a handful of people, apparently including me, who are magneto-sensitive, meaning we are capable of harnessing this immense power, sucking it in and expelling in the form of plasma for insta
nce.

  “You’re a sponge!” Lyric shouted. “You need to suck in everything I’m telling you just like you do with the surrounding energy!”

  “How the fuck do I act like a sponge?!” I shouted into the darkness.

  WHACK!

  She hit me again, and I clammed up and did my best to follow her orders, but it’s a damned difficult thing to focus when you’re getting shit-kicked in a room that’s as black as the bottom of a well at midnight.

  After a while, I realized that was probably the point.

  That I had to stop focusing so much and lean on my intuition and instincts.

  By the end of the whole ordeal, after grappling and battling it out with Lyric, my clothes had been ripped and my muscles were aching. Just at the moment when I felt like I had no more energy to expend, the lights flashed on.

  Twenty feet separated us. Lyric stood there, appraising me, her chest heaving. Her hair was oily and matted and her outer garb had been tugged down, nearly exposing one of her breasts, her upper body pearled with sweat.

  “If you want something in this city, Quincy, you have to earn it,” she said.

  Then, mouth unhinged, she unleashed a primal scream and charged forward, pulling her club back over her head, ready to knock the shit out of me when I dropped into a crouch, and for a moment it felt like I was on the outside of my body looking in.

  I’d taken Lyric’s training to heart and found a way to drop down into a zone where time seemed to slow.

  Sounds muted, but the colors all around me suddenly became brighter. The air shimmered with iridescent color and then assumed a glassy, almost liquid-like quality. My line of sight was fringed with chromatic aberrations, and it felt like I was clutching an object of enormous weight, fighting to hold it back.

  Looking back, I call this my “pose,” and I adopt it every time I’m about to release some energy and kick ass.

  I planted my feet and pressed forward, and in so doing, I conjured balls of blue energy up out of thin air and directed them toward Lyric.

  “Shit!” I shouted, waving my hands, trying to direct the energy away because I was worried I might kill her.

  The energy balls blasted forward like bottle rockets and Lyric deftly slid under them at the last second, executing a kind of flawless drift-slide that allowed her to come up on the balls of her feet a few inches away from me.

  I stood there shaking, sweaty, begrimed, and if I’m being completely honest, a little scared of what I’d done.

  A few seconds of awkward silence followed.

  “Do you understand why I’ve tested you?” she asked.

  “You get off on beating the crap out of people?”

  “You needed to find a way to become who you were meant to be. And the next time you call me ‘girlie’ or anything else demeaning like that, I’ll take you across my knee.”

  “Promise?”

  “You’ve got quite a mouth on you, Quincy.”

  “So do you. A bow-shaped one with plump, pouty lips. Not that I’ve noticed or anything...”

  She cocked her head to the side. “Look at you,” she said, brushing back a lock of my hair. “You’re absolutely filthy.”

  “You have no idea, Lyric.”

  She smiled. “What do you think we should do to get you clean?”

  Before I could respond, Lyric took my hand and circled a finger in the air. A door opened at the back of the room, and she led me out of the training room and down a pathway that was no wider than a man’s shoulders.

  “But Atlas said not to expose myself,” I whispered to Lyric, worried that we’d get busted for exiting the training room.

  “Do you always do as you’re told?”

  “I do when the guy telling me what to do can benchpress a friggin’ house.”

  She stopped and leaned in close to me. I don’t know how she did it but even slicked with sweat she smelled like freshly cut flowers. “Nobody will ever know we left.”

  “We’re not going to be gone for long then?”

  She grinned. “That all depends on how long you can keep it up.”

  17

  “Penthouse Forum.”

  Back when my grandfather was a kid, there was a magazine called “Penthouse” that was specifically designed for men. It featured naked ladies and had a section, what was called a Forum, that contained dirty stories written about improbable sexual liaisons in the craziest of places.

  What was improbable back on Earth appeared to be an everyday occurrence in Fiasco Heights.

  Lyric grabbed an oversized assault rifle from the wall in the pathway, slung it over one shoulder, then led me, rucksack slung over my shoulder, down the semi-darkened artery. Soon I felt the air change, becoming more humid. I also heard sounds up ahead, laughter, cheers, and the splashing of water.

  The artery ended at the showers I’d seen earlier, the ones where the inhabitants of the city were frolicking in the golden water.

  It’s a cliché, but as I stood at the edge of the grotto watching the golden water splash the nubile bodies of the bathers, the entire scene resembled a Penthouse Forum story come to life. I’m sure Lyric was saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear her. It felt like my eyes had widened to twice their normal size as I watched a delegation of breathtakingly beautiful women cavort a few feet away from me.

  I’m gonna stop right here for a moment and let you envision what it was like for me standing at the edge of the grotto.

  It was the same kind of sensation you experience that first time you slip into a strange girl’s bedroom. Times a million.

  I was ecstatic and terrified at the same time, worried that I, a mere mortal, was seriously out of my element.

  I also didn’t want to be one of those guys I used to read about in sci-fi books, the ones who find themselves in unusual situations with hot women but don’t have the stones to do anything about it.

  I swore an oath to myself at that moment that, if given the chance, I was not gonna end up like those guys.

  Nope. Quincy X. Fletcher was going to sack up and enjoy everything Fiasco Heights had to offer.

  My eyes slowly traced the outlines of the kidney-shaped pool that appeared to be formed from a smooth alloy that glowed like a candle inside a cave. The half-light caused strange shadows to dance across the walls as the oil-like water poured down from the waterfall.

  I knelt at the edge of the grotto and felt the water. It was slick and warm, creating steam that hovered over everything like a veil. The air was thick and slightly sweet, smelling like fruit left out in the sun to ripen.

  I saw that the others who were already there, the men and women with impossibly beautiful bodies who were engaged in all manner of activities, didn’t seem to notice Lyric and I (or care even if they did).

  I turned to her, and she was holding up Mr. Chops in one hand and her two sock-puppets in the other. She mimed the dolls having sex.

  “That is just all kinds of wrong,” I said.

  She set the puppets down, along with her assault rifle, and grabbed me. “It’s time for your final lesson.”

  Before I knew what was happening, her tongue was down my throat, and her hand had pulled my Pythia security slacks down as I kicked off my boots. She ripped off my shirt and kissed me hungrily, tonguing my nipples, while stroking my dick.

  She stopped and took my face in her hands. “What are you d-doing?” I stammered.

  “What do you think?” she whispered breathlessly. “I’m a woman, and you’re a man.”

  “That’s right,” I replied, nodding. “I’ve got hair on my arms and clip-on ties to prove it.”

  Lyric giggled. “Did you know that I’m over three hundred years old?”

  “How is that possible?”

  “The mutations of certain genes and an enzyme called Tet2.”

  “Well, you don’t look a day over a hundred,” I replied.

  She smirked. “With age comes wisdom, Quincy.”

  “So I’ve heard…”

 
“I’ve been given a body and skills best suited for pleasuring some people and killing others. In our culture, it’s customary for the older women to teach the younger men in the ways of fighting and love.”

  “I think I’m in love with your culture.”

  “Do you want me to show you the way to bliss?”

  My lips were suddenly as dry as the fucking desert. Like the old song says, at that moment I knew she was the right kind of sinner to release my inner fantasy. I managed to nod and croak: “Yes, please…I want to see the way to bliss.”

  She disrobed in one swift movement, dropped to all fours and went down on me. Her mouth suctioned onto my cock, and she worked it over until it was fully engorged. Then she stood and scooped up some of the oily water and smeared in on my lips. It was salty and sweet, tasting like honey and when Lyric kissed me, it melted and slid down the back of my throat, creating warmth in my nether regions.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She smiled seductively. “Something unique to this world. It helps with stamina. You’ll thank me later.”

  Lyric turned and as if on cue, the water bubbled down below us and up popped a woman with vaguely Asian features.

  The woman grinned, and Lyric grabbed my dick and led me down into the water, which was warmer than a hot tub.

  Lyric whispered something to the other woman that I couldn’t hear. They laughed conspiratorially, like girls sharing a secret, and Lyric stroked the woman’s hair, wringing the oil from it. Then they began kissing and fondling each other as I stood there, naked as the day I was born, ashamed, embarrassed and—

  Who am I kidding?

  I was loving every second of it!

  It was as if I’d died and gone to heaven…heaven envisioned by Hugh-Fucking-Hefner.

  I waded fully down into the water, operating purely on instinct, energized by the liquid Viagra I’d been given. I hesitated for a moment, however. I’d been with my share of ladies, but I’d never experienced anything like this.

  Lyric had her hand between the other woman’s legs, inserting several fingers that she manipulated, causing the woman to moan in delight.