Ch09-Heroes & Villains [superhero, sci-fi]

I’m such a gigantic nerd that I was flipping through the print copy of my own book and was like, “Hey, this is pretty good.”

I think that once I write something, my mind completely shifts away to other things and I kind of blank out on what I wrote. So even though I have a general idea of the story, I forget the details.

Here’s Chapter Nine from “Heroes & Villains”:

CHAPTER NINE

Things were getting out of control. The number of Darksters running around was growing daily. It had become the new “cool” thing for the disillusioned youth of the world to don their Darkstar-type costumes and go out and cause havoc in the streets. It was doubtful that the bulk of them really knew or cared who Darkstar was, though some of the hardliners showed definite signs of obsession with the supervillain.

Though he would never have thought to say anything about it to anyone, the whole situation was giving Warrick a gigantic migraine, and if he could have he would have started to smash a bunch of the Darkster kids into mush, powers or no powers. But he knew that was the kind of thing heroes didn’t let themselves indulge in, not unless they wanted to be faced with career-killing sized lawsuits and a media backlash that would never end.

He really didn’t want to end up as the next Michelangelo Man. Even after the guy had changed his name and moved to Dubai, there were still the occasional flare-ups of comedians poking their fun at him. Caught once with his pants down and a nineteen year old prostitute giving him a jimmy, and that was the end of him forever. Though that was mostly due to what the girl was doing with the cucumber and the Ranch dressing.

Warrick shuddered just at the thought of it. Murder was probably a safer scandal than sex in this day and age, but he was just better off avoiding the whole thing completely.

“So what exactly are we looking for out here?”

He turned to his patrol partner of the day, Witch Fire. He didn’t really have any kind of problem with her, nothing that he could really complain about anyway. She was just one of those people that possessed a rather grating personality; it wasn’t like she did it on purpose, it was just an intrinsic part of her makeup to come across as a complete and utter bitch.

“With all the Darkster trouble, we’re supposed to be keeping a look out for the regular kind of stuff,” he said stiffly.

She glared at him. “I know that. I’m not stupid.”

“Then why did you just ask?”

“It was a rhetorical question,” she flipped her hair over her shoulder, “or are you one of those meat-heads that doesn’t understand what that means?”

“Whoa,” Warrick held up his hands, just barely keeping from strangling her with them. “What the hell is your problem?”

She sighed heavily, shrugging her shoulders so her cape would fall straight. “This is just so stupid. Why the hell are we out here doing this? Shouldn’t this be the kind of job junior members are for?”

“They’re doing the same stuff,” Warrick said mock-patiently, “it’s just that everyone has to take a shift to keep the state covered. We don’t want to have what happened to New Jersey happen to us, do we?”

A massive group of Darksters had gone on a rampage in New Jersey two weeks ago and a few of them had had some minor metability. By the time they’d been stopped, half the city was up in flames and one of the major hospitals was nothing but a pile of rubble and dead bodies. It had been a real mess.

When they’d been questioned, the arrested Darksters had only smirked and said, “We are legion. Where Darkstar goes, we follow.” They’d refused to say anything more after that, and even when the telepaths had been brought in, none of them knew anyone outside of their particular Darkster cell and there were no clues as to who had started the whole thing.

Some people on the news had suggested that maybe Darkstar was personally running the Darksters, secretly giving them missions of destruction as a way to prepare the world for his eventual power grab. Warrick himself thought–hoped–that Darkstar had nothing to do with the Darksters. They seemed more like a juvenile attempt at impressing the supervillain, and the man himself hadn’t made any announcements of support for the group.

In fact, Darkstar had been noncommunicative for several weeks, not that Warrick was feeling worried about him or anything. It was just strange that the supervillain had disappeared so completely off the radar.

“You know, for such a bitchy, stick up his ass kind of guy, you really don’t focus a whole lot on the job we’re supposed to be doing,” Witch Fire snarked, her dark lipsticked lips sneering in his direction.

He just looked at her for a long minute, raising a single eyebrow.

She huffed and crossed her arms under her breasts. “Don’t look at me like that. Everyone knows you think you’re better than everyone else. But you’re not. You’re just as fucked up as the rest of us. And when you’re on patrol, you let yourself be distracted too.”

“What are you talking about?” he growled.

She shifted a little on her broom and gestured down at the ground below. “You totally looked right at those Darkster losers busting up that shop and didn’t see them at all.”

Warrick felt like a jerk, wondering how he could have missed something like that. But when he looked down and still didn’t see anything untoward going on, he was just puzzled.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

“What are you talking about? Look at them down there!” she pointed.

He looked harder, furrowing his brow. “Seriously, I don’t see anything going on.”

Witch Fire looked puzzled. “Do you think it’s some kind of metability keeping you from seeing those guys busting up that shop and loading loot in that van?”

“Huh,” he cocked his head, “it very well could be. Maybe that’s what’s been making it so hard to find the Darksters. If they’ve got someone with the ability to make us look past them while they’re committing crimes, that could be why we haven’t been able to catch them.”

“And since my powers come from the supernatural and aren’t a genetic ability at all…” She grinned at him, a flash of too-sharp carnivore teeth. “I can see them and you can’t. So what do you want to do about that?”

“Do you think you’d be able to handle them alone?” he asked musingly.

She looked down, biting her lip for a second. “My ego wants me to say yes, but my common sense says no. There’s…” she counted with a quick finger, “ten of them on the street, while there’s more moving around inside. I don’t want to get down there and have like sixty of them come bursting out. And since at least one of them has a metability…”

“We’re better off being safe than sorry,” Warrick finished. He raised his wrist to his mouth, activating his communicator. “Base, this is Blue Ice. We have a situation at…” he squinted down at the street signs below, “4th and DeVine. Witch Fire has identified at least ten perpetrators on the street and there’s as many or more inside an electronics store. Be aware that someone down there is using some kind of masking ability to keep anyone with metability from seeing what’s going on.”

“This is base, we copy and are sending you some backup. Are the perpetrators aware of your presence?”

“Negative, base. We’re at a high enough altitude and Witch Fire has laid down a layer of camouflaging spell cover. To anyone on the ground we just look like a couple of clouds.” Warrick bit his lip a second, really not liking what he was going to suggest next. “I think you might send out that experimental power dampener. These clowns would be a lot easier to handle if we could see them and if any metas amongst them aren’t able to use their abilities.”

“We copy. Captain Victorious has agreed with your suggestion and one package will be included.” From the tone of her voice even over the communicator, Masque wasn’t too thrilled.

There was just something dirty about the idea of taking away someone’s metability. It was one thing to go head-to-head against someone and use your superstrength to beat their superstrength; it was a whole other ball of wax to relegate them to being a normal, then beat the crap out of them.

Warrick hadn’t been too happy about the idea of power dampeners and suppression handcuffs from the minute they were first developed. They were so new that the public hadn’t caught wind of them yet, but there was a good chance that there would be a general outcry once they were used.

The only problem was figuring out what kind of outcry it was going to be. Were people going to be outraged that such technology even existed? Or were people going to be so enthusiastic about the idea that they would either want everyone relegated to being a normal, or to have the government use the suppression bands to control a brand new slave population?

Stop supervillains from terrorizing towns and cities by forcing them into using their powers for public works. Prisoners forced to labor away their sentences, only allowed to access their powers under the supervision of their handlers. And once people realized how cheap and easy it was to control a bunch of metahumans… how much of a step would it be to just forget about enslaving supervillains, and to just start collaring anyone with any kind of metability?

Warrick knew he was probably being overly dramatic, but the “probably” was what disturbed him and had left him leery of using the new technology at all. There were just way too many ways for people to abuse it, and there were already some normals out there promoting hate against metahumans.

It would be a nightmare of epic proportions if one of those hate groups managed to collar someone like the Golden Goddess. She was classified as an Omega-class metahuman, which meant she theoretically had the power to destroy all life on Earth. She was only one of a handful of Omegas, so if there ever arose a situation where she needed to be neutralized, there wouldn’t be a whole lot that could be done about it. And if she was being controlled by a group bent on racial cleansing or the wiping out of every metahuman on the planet…

It was the kind of thing he didn’t like to let himself dwell on. Except he had been the one to suggest using the power dampeners for their first live run. It made him feel dirty inside.

“They should be here in a couple of minutes,” he told Witch Fire.

She looked at him for a long moment. “Are we really going to use that thing?” she asked distastefully.

He sighed. “We don’t really have much of a choice, not when we’re dealing with a metahuman that can make it so we can’t even see him or the rest of his crew. This situation is getting way out of hand and these Darkster clowns need to be contained now.”

“Still, I really don’t like the idea of the power dampeners,” Witch Fire said.

“I don’t either,” Warrick said. “We just don’t really have much of a choice.”

“Whatever.”

They waited in silence for their backup to arrive, both of them uncomfortable with what they were going to have to do. It felt like a betrayal of some kind, which was a ridiculous idea considering the Darksters were a bunch of terrorist scumbags that liked to kill people for the entertainment value.

There was a WHOOSHING sound, then Mad Maybe appeared next to them. “The rest of the crew is meeting us on the ground,” she said, grinning her silly grin. It was the only expression she had, that wide spreading of the lips that had no happiness in it while her eyes silently screamed. “They’ve got the thing down there.”

“Great, thanks,” Warrick said, avoiding eye-contact. She was just too disturbing for him to be around. “Let’s get down there before we miss everything.”

Bringing his arms down to his sides, he just let himself drop, plummeting through the air at speeds that would have killed a normal human, only to pull up at the last second just enough that he hit the ground with a gentle hop rather than a pavement destroying impact. He saw Witch Fire following him down on her broom, twisting around in a gentle swoop and swirl until she came to a low hover beside a coffee shop, just out of view of the thieves only she could see.

He ducked down behind a car, waiting for the other supernaturals to arrive and handle the situation. It made him feel useless to have to let others take care of things for him, but being unable to see the perpetrators left him pretty helpless.

GlenDal the Good Bitch appeared with a “poof” on a rooftop across the street from the electronics store, a wicked looking dart gun in her hands. She was pretty adorable with her blond curls, short stature, and frilly pink dress. The fact that “she” was actually a man was just one of those things.

Warrick held his hand out where she could see, counting down on his fingers from five. She twitched into readiness.

FIVE. FOUR. THREE. TWO. ONE…

On ONE she fired the dart gun into the sky above the electronics store. There was a WHUMPH! as the missile went into the air, then a burst of blinking light followed by a bunch of shocked screams as the Darksters popped into view, most of them loaded down with big screen TVs, stereo equipment, and whatever else they were looting.

The dampener buzzed in its position in the air, a silver cylinder that spun around too quick to see, except that light pulsed from it with every turn. Anyone that happened to possess a metability in its perimeter found themselves as nothing more than a normal human.

Warrick didn’t quite understand the technology, though he knew it had something to do with magnetic energy fields and disrupting a metahuman’s natural body rhythm, basically switching them to OFF mode. Though what he did understand was the affect it had on a metahuman, and really, it wasn’t very pretty.

In the first few hours of use on a metahuman, the dampener caused an adverse physical response. It was as though someone running at full speed suddenly slammed into a brick wall… not only did they come to an abrupt halt, but they were also knocked on their ass and pretty hurt.

Most of the Darksters were normals, which showed in how they hurriedly dropped what they were carrying and tried to scramble into some kind of ready stance. And then there was the metahuman… a girl wearing black skintight shorts, a black crop top, and black ankle boots. On her head she wore a wig of red yarn and her makeup was done up in a creepy Raggedy Ann style or like she’d seen Sally on A Nightmare Before Christmas too many times.

When the dampener hit her, she dropped like a stone, convulsing on the ground. Froth bubbled up from her lips and her heels kicked fruitlessly while her eyes twitched and she made a frightening “Ah-ghah ahgh” sound.

Warrick shivered a little bit, glad that he was out of range of the dampener. Especially when he realized by the spreading puddle around her that she had lost bladder control.

He stayed in position until Witch Fire had cast a protection charm on DeMona, who jogged across the street to slap a HomingSticker on the girl’s chest, before rolling out of the way of one of the Darksters trying to shoot her with a machine-pistol.

GlenDal tapped a command into her remote and the power dampener plunged down through the air to stick to the target of the HomingSticker.

The three inch cylinder hit the target, then six bands shot out to surround the girl, locking the dampener in place. Two bands over her shoulders, two bands around her chest, and two bands looped between and around her legs. There was no way she was going to be able to get the dampener off.

Once it was secured, the dampener went into single contact mode. It no longer sent out a wide ranging pulse and instead focused energy through the bands to disrupt just the single victim.

Warrick raised his communicator. “All right, we’re clear to move in.”

He rose from his crouch and trotted toward the fight, though he knew it wasn’t going to be anything big. There were a bunch of them, but they were normal humans.

Easy prey.