Chapter Sixteen — Blacktime
“What, he’s the one being reasonable?”
Isaac stared out at the tower, where somewhere inside Mechaniacal was, by tone of voice, annoyingly smug about the situation. Worse, he seemed to have some way to tell that Isaac was using his power, no doubt thanks to some esoteric tinker invention. Normally that kind of thing was considered fiction, but so were general-application depowerment effects, and Mechaniacal had those available to him.
“Dad always said that supervillains were a lot more pragmatic than the heroes,” Sarah remarked, her fingers tapping against Astoria’s neck in a way that betrayed her anxiety. Admittedly, the fingers looked like talons thanks to the ikiski disguises, but anyone who knew how Sarah moved would see her gestures underneath. “Since villains have to actually deal with the real world more. They don’t have the benefit of doing things the nice way like heroes can.”
“Could be,” Isaac said, his mind returning to the ikiski that he’d killed. He was trying not to think about it too much, especially since they were still in the middle of a crisis, but it still felt like a massive, bloody weight on his shoulders. What he’d done, killing someone, had left a permanent mark, and changed him in ways he had never wanted. Virtually all supervillains were killers — among their own kind, if nothing else.
He continued to lean into the inertia of the standoff, given that he had no more desire than anyone else to see four sovereign level powers fight. It was one thing when it was a show on television, but quite another to see and feel the immense scale of forces even at a distance. Even a simple flourish of Zys’s sword had boomed like thunder, and despite being well away from the front lines the blasts of Mechaniacal’s drones had sent gales of freezing and burning air gusting around them. For the moment that had halted, but could resume at any time.
Part of him was surprised he still had the contact to influence the situation, but then again Mechaniacal had made it clear he was deeply involved. Isaac couldn’t believe that his power was worth everything that was going on, not by itself, but he could believe that Glorybeam was another matter. Restoring that particular sovereign to her former self was practically a national emergency. And Gratin, at least, knew that Isaac could help in that regard, so he wouldn’t be surprised if it had filtered back to higher powers.
Isaac was going to have to deal with that someday, that was certain. He had, if not a strict obligation to help, at least a need to do so for his own conscience. It would have to wait for a time and a place when he wasn’t being harried from all sides, though at this point he could hardly imagine such a thing. Especially when one more force joined the standoff, a familiar black dome appearing near Mechaniacal’s tower and sweeping toward the amethyst mountain.
“Blacktime.” Sarah said it before Isaac could, and Savage hissed. Lia tilted her head, and Gratin whistled softly. The two kaiju spoke at each other; not in the reality-bending proclamations that transcended language, but in some rapid-fire musical scale that sounded like a duel between the worlds biggest pipe organs.
“I wonder if I can…” Isaac trailed off, thinking for a moment. Blacktime’s most terrifying ability was that he could simply stop time for anyone, which made any attempt at defense or dodging moot. Or offense, for that matter. It seemed unlikely he could completely counteract such a power, given that Blacktime was sovereign, but if he gave their movement through time more inertia, perhaps he could at least make it more difficult for the supervillain to simply freeze them. Not that he was sure what could that would do in the end, but it was always better to have the option.
“Okay, gather ‘round, I’m going to try and give us all enough temporal inertia to resist Blacktime’s power,” he said aloud.
“You think you can?” Sarah asked, a little skeptically. Not that he blamed her. “Wouldn’t it be better to just keep the illusions up and let him search for a needle in a haystack?”
“I can try, and I think I’d rather have the option,” Isaac said, though he had to admit Sarah had a point. With their disguises, it was possible that Blacktime would overlook them. “I mean, we could just hide in plain sight, but wouldn’t he have a way of finding us if he came all the way down here?”
“Guess he would,” Sarah grumbled. “I dunno what, but he’s got his own tinkers and stuff. And he probably knows who all is down here so he could be tracking any or all of us.”
“We could go out there, get Endymion’s attention,” Savage suggested. “It is a journey, though.” The sheer scale of the beings in question made distances hard to judge, but there were probably miles between them and the giant mecha. Though Blacktime himself was moving rapidly that they wouldn’t have been able to make it even if Endymion were merely a block away, even if the supervillain wasn’t precisely aimed in their direction.
“I would prefer any insulation against Blacktime’s power,” Lia said, and after a moment Sarah nodded.
“Yeah, I know him a little bit, and I do not trust him at all,” she said, gesturing in the direction of Blacktime’s dome. “Might as well give it a shot.”
Isaac nodded and started with himself, flexing his power and pushing it in the direction of time. He knew that messing with anything temporal was only slightly less stupid than fate or luck, but in this case he thought it would be fine. He just wanted their motion through time to remain the same, unaffected by any external forces. The same way any ordinary person not dealing with magic or superpowers would live their life.
Once he felt that he had the proper state of mind and his power was touching the right things in the right ways, he applied the same push to Shay, patting her neck and trying to send some idea of what he was doing across the wristband. He wasn’t sure how much he succeeded, but she seemed to appreciate he was trying to help anyway.
The others got the same treatment; Sarah and Astoria first, then Gratin, Lia and her mount, and finally Savage. Part of him wondered if he should feel tired from plying his power so much, but it wasn’t like he was doing anything of great magnitude. The effects might be different, but the actual changes weren’t too much in absolute terms. Merely in directions that were generally left unmolested.
“Now, I hope this won’t have side effects,” he cautioned them, casting a glance at the dome which had more than halved the distance in less than a minute. It wasn’t coming straight for them, but it was broad enough that they’d be caught in it anyway. “But we’ll see if it works soon enough.” He wasn’t going to try to go toe-to-toe with Blacktime, as even without the time-stopping power the man was practically a speedster. Not to mention the weapons; Isaac had no desire to be carved up the way Greg had been, the memory of that gory mess rising unbidden to his mind.
They weren’t the only ones keeping an eye on Blacktime. A number of bolts, beams, blasts, and more physical projectiles reached out to touch the black dome in defiance of Isaac’s investments, but also without any apparent effect. Even Zys’s armor projectors didn’t do anything, a few beams reaching out to touch the dome in passing, but such was the domineering nature of control over time itself. It didn’t matter how much physical force there was if it couldn’t reach Blacktime. Isaac suspected the Great Kings might have been able to suppress the supervillain if they exerted themselves, but the two kaiju were eyeing each other warily and Endymion was squaring off with Mechaniacal’s tower.
The wave of stopped time approached them, and Isaac braced himself, the four of them grouping up together by a wall. He couldn’t help but think back to the one time he’d encountered Blacktime’s stasis before, back when he was first masquerading as Ravdia. How there was just a blink and everything was different. This time when the blackness swept over him, it stayed.
He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t smell anything. All he could feel was Shay shifting uncomfortably underneath him, sending alarm and uncertainty through the psionic link the bracelet provided. His power might have allowed them to resist Blacktime’s power, but not the rest of the world. Isaac groped blindly for Sarah in the darkness and complete sensory deprivation, mind racing but not finding any useful plan to improve their prospects.
The power of a sovereign was not so easily thwarted.
***
Sarah could only sense things through her smoke.
Isaac had done the impossible in making her immune, or at least resistant, to Blacktime’s power, but that by itself wasn’t enough. In the absolute darkness, her eyes started to play tricks, flashes of color and hazy shapes flickering through while strange and distant voices echoed in her ears. Mom had once had her try sensory deprivation therapy to help her focus on her powers when they’d first manifested, and it was impossible to forget the hallucinatory weirdness of the experience.
Even her smoke didn’t really help, since it didn’t see or hear either. Her smoke gave her something like proprioception, her body stretched out in a cloud around them, a sharply constrained understanding of the world. She could even feel the drag of Blacktime’s power, a faint hint at the edges of her smoke. Resistance to change wasn’t immunity, as her boyfriend kept insisting, but it was damned close, it seemed. Together the two of them were able to contest a sovereign, something neither of them could have managed alone.
Something to capitalize on, and get out of there while Blacktime was busy looking elsewhere. Isaac had done his part, so she would do hers, as she doubted Blacktime would expect anyone to be able to sneak past him out of the city. The near-invisible smoke she kept surrounding them meant that there was enough unfrozen air to breathe, and with it she could speak to everyone directly. Trying to juggle everyone’s stifled voices to the rest of the party would be difficult, but she could at least try. She reached out to take Isaac’s questing hand and squeezed it before focusing on reaching out to everyone else, banishing the useless ikiski illusions in favor of better control.
“I’m going to project what I can sense, or try anyway,” she said through her smoke, resonating in the ears of their little group. “We’ll get out of here while Blacktime’s busy in the actual city. Circle around behind him.”
The vocal replies were weird and muffled, almost incomprehensible since she had to translate from diffuse smoke inside their mouths. One of those things she tried not to think about too much, since it could get weird, but cousin Chester – Columbuzz – had admitted it was just one of those things anyone with super-senses had to get used to. She just hadn’t used her smoke for much in the way of sensing before.
Between Columbuzz and Blacktime’s intelligence feeds, there hadn’t been a need, and besides which, she just had never cared much about stretching a point to help the gang. She’d always known there was no future there, so there’d never been a reason to invest that much effort. Now, there was, and she was working on new ways to apply her power since she did have a future worth investing in.
She carefully projected a sort of scrawl of what she was sensing. While she’d gotten better at ad hoc illusions, it was still easier to just recreate what she saw or heard than conjure it from her own imagination. Translating something weird like her smoke senses took some skills she hadn’t practiced, but she had to do the best she could. Making illusionary light right in their eyeballs wasn’t generally safe, so she kept it as feeble as possible. Additionally making it so they could focus on it at such a short distance was another challenge, especially since she hadn’t practiced, but she kept at it and adapted as she went.
They started creeping along the wall, moving with the slow clumsiness of someone in the dark. Ikiski and mounts stood frozen where they had been caught mid-movement, and even things like bolts from the artillery or spilled water hung suspended in the air. All this, while being distracted by hallucinated sights and sounds despite her best efforts to ignore them. There was nothing concrete, but lights and shapes and noises, a babble of half-familiar voices washing in and out like waves on a beach. Below her, Astoria made unhappy vocalizations, which Sarah could more feel through the barding than even sense through her smoke.
“You and me both,” she told Astoria, running a soothing hand over the scales of her raptor’s neck. “You and me both.”
They didn’t make it very far. Not for lack of trying, but progress was slow and Blacktime was fast. Very fast, as there was maybe an eyeblink between when Sarah felt him approaching, a shockwave that pushed aside her smoke, and when the time-stop fell away to leave the five of them in a bubble illuminated by the glow of their raptor’s crystalline barding.
“Well, well.” Blacktime’s deep voice boomed out as he approached, apparently completely unworried what any of them might do. Sarah had to bite back the reflexive response she always heard from Dad. That’s a deep subject. “It’s not every day that I find someone – or someones – who can resist my power. It takes deep magic, powerful tinkers, or, it seems, you.”
A click and a whir heralded Savage unlimbering his weaponry, cannons and blades extending from his armor. Sarah glanced sideways and waved him down, since she was entirely certain that they’d do nothing against Blacktime. Even if Isaac had managed to render them immune to the time-stop, Blacktime still could accelerate himself, and she had heard from Dad that he had a lot of other defenses stacked behind his power. He still needed to hold discussions with people, and that wasn’t possible under frozen time.
Dad had attended a few interrogations, and had told Sarah that he’d seen people try to attack Blacktime after he unfroze them from time. Which was incredibly stupid, but there were more than a few talents where even a fraction of a second would be enough to kill most people. Supers like Combustion Man or Entropica had very destructive talents, and were exactly the kind of people Blacktime preferred to recruit.
“Blacktime,” Isaac said from next to her, his voice strained and fingers gripping the fabric cord he’d included in his clothing. Almost as much of a threat as Savage’s guns, but less obvious. The fingers of his other hand still gripped hers, and she squeezed back reassuringly.
“The elusive Mister Hartson,” Blacktime said, strolling forward casually, ignoring Savage’s weaponry and Lia’s runes. “And Smokeshow. With your powers back, I see. Exactly what I was hoping for.”
“Not Smokeshow anymore,” Sarah said. That name was for a different version of her, a younger one that had only gang life in mind. In hindsight, she was glad to be rid of it, especially since the new her was more Sarah than the old. She puffed on her kiseru, affecting more calm than she felt. Without having to keep up the disguises, she could keep her face on properly, which made her feel far more secure. “Sheherazade, if you must.”
“A bit of a mouthful, but if you insist.” She had seen Blacktime like this before, all courtesy and politeness until the knives came out. “Crash has always been one of my best lieutenants, so I can’t be surprised that you have become a person of interest yourself.”
“Thank you.” Sarah wasn’t sure what to think, but as Sheherazade she drawled the phrase. While she wasn’t as much into the whole alternate identity thing as Isaac, she still knew how to act. Her illusions had given her plenty of practice. “What brings you all the way down to the Deep Kingdoms?”
“You very well know,” Blacktime said, coming to a halt in front of their little group. Perhaps he had to look upward at them, but the darkness shrouding his head completely concealed it. “In fact, I suspect the reason you are so far from Star City is that very reason. Mister Hartson has a very peculiar power, one that has been used in a very concerning way.”
“Not by me,” Isaac objected, his voice sounding more like Chains than Isaac. “I have more sense than Greg did.”
“Nevertheless, it is quite a talent,” Blacktime said. “Surely you understand that it cannot be allowed to be so abused. Besides which, it’s clear you can undo what those drones did since Sheherazade here certainly has her power back. Perhaps it is even improved, if it can contest my own.”
Sarah almost denied that she was the one doing the resisting, but she caught herself in time. Better to keep any details to herself, and if he had drawn the wrong conclusion so much the better. Unless he had drawn the right one and was being purposely obtuse. She stopped herself from going down that twisty path, since it wasn’t relevant. No point in trying to puzzle out Blacktime’s mind.
“You didn’t need to come all this way, surely,” Sarah said, then gestured outward to the darkness surrounding them, where the other sovereign powers were still active and probably doing something. “Especially not with such company.”
“Of course I needed to.” Blacktime’s arms moved, as if he were lacing his fingers together behind his back. “Someone else might get here first, and that is not something I would allow.”
“Allow?” Isaac asked, his voice still flat.
“Let me try to handle things first, I know him,” Sarah sent to everyone with her smoke, knowing that Isaac might say something rash to Blacktime. Or Savage might to blast him, or even Gratin might try to do something. They couldn’t fight him directly, but she was starting to think of a plan to at least deflect him. Fool him. Make him think something else was happening, and set him off and away in another direction entirely.
“So you’ve found us,” Sarah said, waving her kiseru in a circle to indicate the group. “And, what, you want us to come back to Star City with you? Endymion is right there, and I have to say I’ve never gotten a ride on a mech before.”
“Your father would appreciate it, certainly,” Blacktime said, strolling closer. Astoria growled, and Sarah hastily sent her a feeling to keep it under control. Clearly the supervillain was as disturbing to the raptors as he was to everyone else. “But I also have a personal offer for, well, two of you.” Blacktime’s suit swiveled just slightly to imply he was regarding Lia, Savage, and Gratin, and dismissing them as he turned back to Sarah and Isaac.
“I have a great need of new lieutenants. People I can trust, who are competent, who have the ability to think for themselves and operate in a reasonable manner. Not thugs or legbreakers. Those are easy enough to find.” The arms of the suit spread wide, as if gesturing at the two of them, the cloth colored oddly in the soft light of the gem barding. “Which is something I am willing to offer both of you.”
Even the part of Sarah that still felt like the girl in the gang wasn’t really that tempted. She had played her father’s right hand, but she hadn’t actually enjoyed it much. It was just that it was the only opportunity she had, and the best one to use her power. The thought of having to deal with more people to lead for real, egotistic villains with no future and nothing at all like her boyfriend, wasn’t appealing.
Of course she couldn’t say that. If they rejected the supposedly generous offer, he’d move to more aggressive actions. Like simply abducting them, if not outright murdering them. Well, maybe not her, since Blacktime needed Dad, but everyone else, perhaps.
“Got a plan,” she sent through her smoke, the idea coming from the various exercises she’d tried with her boyfriend over the previous week. “I’m going to try and fool him, since attacking won’t accomplish anything. Even if we could kill him he’d just pop back up. Isaac, I need you to put everything you’ve got into making my illusions more real when I start.”
“That’s very flattering,” she said, speaking aloud even as she gave instructions through her smoke. It was only possible to juggle things that way when they involved her power, where she could do many things at once. When it came to normal stuff, she could barely do more than walk and chew gum. “But surely you don’t think we’d just walk off with you?”
She martialed her concentration to do two things at once; begin construction of very, very detailed illusions for herself, Isaac, Astoria, and Shay, and begin sending her smoke tendrils as far as she could. They would have to move quickly, leave the area, and it couldn’t simply be a few feet. They’d have to be practically out of the city, and she pushed her smoke without any restraint so she could act on that idea.
“Why not?” There was a sort of a smirk in Blacktime’s tone, even if there wasn’t one on his face. “You know who I am and what I can do. And who I have working for me. Nebula can take us back to Star City in an instant. Mister Hartson knows that as well, or should I say Ravdia?”
“I won’t deny I was Ravdia,” Isaac said, a little more relaxed now. “I’d say that was a necessary cover identity at the time. And I did lead you to Greg.”
“You did indeed, which is why I am willing to give you a certain amount of latitude,” Blacktime said. “But only a certain amount.” His voice hardened. “You cannot run around in my cities without supervision. Certain talents are too disruptive to be allowed to run free, and whether you intended what happened or not is irrelevant. Intentions are meaningless in the face of fact.”
“And what about everyone else?” Sarah gestured to the two members of Justice for Hire while she marshalled focus for the illusions she’d be sending with Blacktime. They couldn’t just be good enough, they had to be perfect. Normally her illusions vanished when the smoke cut off, but augmented by Isaac they might persist. Especially if he left by transporter super, as he usually did. They’d still only have a short window to escape, but at least it would be a window.
“We’d rather stay here,” Lia said in a cold tone. “We can return with Endymion.”
There was a long stretch of silence, and Sarah prepared to turn everyone into smoke and run for it. Not that she had any idea where they could run to, or if they could really fight Blacktime. The man was unkillable, but they might be able to set him back temporarily when it came down to it. One of the things she had practiced with her smoke was re-manifestation of objects, and while she couldn’t do it without her boyfriends help, she did have a few knives and darts from Savage that Isaac altered in exactly that way.
“Very well,” Blacktime said finally, and Sarah had to school herself not to sag in relief. “My goal here is hardly a secret. Everyone’s goals here have been straightforward from the outset. It is just their poor luck and lack of action that I arrived first.” Without any obvious signal, the blackness around them vanished. Light returned, and Sarah could see in the distance there was still a tense standoff between the Great Kings, while Mechaniacal’s tower lazily harassed Endymion’s mech with a small portion of the drone swarm. Isaac’s efforts at keeping things from escalating seemed to still be in place.
“Nebula, if you would,” Blacktime said, and a dark, star-filled hole opened in the air next to him. Sarah still didn’t know exactly how the transporter worked, but she had a hell of a range to be able to reach all the way down to the Deep Kingdoms.
“Okay, here we go,” Sarah sent through the smoke, and Isaac squeezed her hand to show he was ready. She had their phantom forms step forth while cloaking Sarah and Isaac’s real selves, and immediately felt Isaac’s power altering things. In just a moment the false Sarah and Isaac became more weighty, more real. The more she poured into them, the firmer the feeling became, until she felt almost twinned, smeared out between herself and the double.
In a way it was like when she became smoke herself, that uncertainty in her own location and existence. With each step the false Sarah and Isaac took, riding atop similarly duplicated mounts, the more it seemed like the illusion took on its own life, responding less to her puppetry and moving more of its own accord. She felt like she was losing control, and had to scrabble desperately to keep herself rooted in the here and now, rather than the created version of her that was riding toward Blacktime.
It wasn’t just her illusion that was the problem, either. Illusionary Isaac glowered at Blacktime, while illusionary Astoria and Shay grumbled, completely beyond what Sarah intended. The only thing that kept her grounded was Isaac’s hand on hers, an anchor in reality where she was otherwise smeared across multiple bodies and almost being led around by her own power instead of the reverse.
The starry hole in the air ripped itself open into a full portal, and Blacktime tapped the false Sarah and Isaac as he waved them through. The part of Sarah still in control winced, because she had never been able to make her illusions solid — but with Isaac putting power into their ontological inertia, as he put it, they seemed to pass. She could even feel the contact of Blacktime’s touch through them, a strange shivery sensation that was just wrong, or at least not something she had ever felt through her smoke before.
Blacktime stepped through the portal and the rent in reality snapped shut. Severed from her smoke, the helpless, out of control feeling vanished. She was sure the illusionary figures on the other end had dissipated as well — or rather, she hoped they had. The idea of an independent version of herself and Isaac out there made her stomach twist, but there wasn’t time to contemplate it. Blacktime would spot the swap in a matter of moments, so they had to get out of there.
Abandoning any attempt at disguises, she converted everyone to smoke and transported them along the tendrils she’d sent out to just outside the walls while they were talking with Blacktime, where they reappeared in midair, where she reestablished their invisibility. With their lower inertia, the fall was meaningless, and the raptors fairly bounced down the mountain slope in a headlong rush. Astoria transmitted her glee at the sudden freedom through the link, topaz wing panels extending as she transitioned to true flight.
The others followed suit, with Shay and Lia’s mount transitioning to fully winged, and small apertures opening on Savage’s armor as the sudden whine of rocket turbines preceded jets of flame propelling him forward. She gripped onto the holdfasts of the saddle, crouched down as wind whipped through her hair, barely able to keep the concealing smoke around their group. Between the wind speed and naturally spreading apart due to flight, her ability to hold the illusions was badly frayed.
Not to mention that she was still shaken from how bizarre the whole experience with the inertially laden illusions had been. She had found Isaac’s story of how he was almost stuck as Ravdia disturbing, but hadn’t fully understood it until it had affected her directly. She suddenly felt far more thankful for how careful he’d obviously been even when experimenting directly with her, since they’d never pushed her illusions so dangerously far.
She half-expected to see the black dome return, but it seemed Blacktime wasn’t wroth enough to try and come back down to the Deep Kingdoms after his foray — or the illusions were somehow still holding. Sarah wasn’t sure which one she would prefer, especially since she really couldn’t escape him in the end. He was Dad’s boss, and knew who she was outside of her super-identity. If he really pushed, she wasn’t sure how things would end.
Astoria interrupted her woolgathering by diving suddenly, the crystal wings humming as she juked left and right to avoid a platoon of Mechaniacal’s drones suddenly swarming in. Savage’s blasters sounded, the harsh bark of high-caliber munitions drawing sparks from the metal spheres but not actually puncturing them. Clearly they were a higher grade than the ones Isaac had destroyed before, as Chains.
But the drones didn’t actually attack, they merely buzzed by overhead before swooping around with ominously glowing weapons. The invisibility clearly wasn’t doing much, and she let it lapse as they flew downward toward the wilderness between the mountain and Mechaniacal’s tower. They alighted on the branch of a massive tree, similar to how they’d fetched up after fleeing the crystalline entity, with a clear view of the enormous out-of-place tower and the Great Kings, who were of almost the exact same size.
As if summoned by thought, a boiling cloud poured upward from a distant hill into the inside-out sky, a bulging thunderhead with long, crackling bolts of lightning illuminating a familiar shape. Sarah felt suddenly very tired; they hardly needed any more complications, or enemies. The crystalline entity streaked through the sky, a storm moving at an impossible pace, but it didn’t get far.
“You were not invited.” Mechaniacal’s voice rang out, sounding disapproving. One of the drones, no more than a silver speck at that distance, rose to meet the entity, and a grey-blue flash rippled outward from it. Just as the roaring and chiming of the entity reached them, a tide of delayed thunder to the thing’s lightning speed, the enormous mass simply stopped in midair. The clouds vanished, and the mile-long bulk of the entity fell downward to the ground, disintegrating as it went. Sarah watched, agog, as the massive thing collapsed into wind-blown dust before it ever reached the ground, utterly destroyed by a single one of those drones.
“Heck,” Isaac said. It was as strong a word as he ever used. “And he has thousands of those things?”
“Tens of thousands, maybe,” Sarah muttered, nervously tapping her fingers on the saddle as she looked around, glancing at the drones filling the air before studying her companions. Everyone else seemed more than a little concerned, but she was struck by the fact that Gratin’s focus was not on Mechaniacal or the spherical bots floating about, but rather the Great Kings.
“They have not fought why?” Gratin muttered, staring at the two titans. They were speaking to each other in an odd, rapid-fire stuttering tongue, nothing at all like normal ikiski language, sounding more hostile all the time.
“Why do we want the giant kaiju to fight?” Isaac half-asked, half-muttered.
“All ikiski test strength when they meet, if they are at all peers yes,” chattered Gratin. “Great Kings rarely meet but always peers. To not exchange blows is scary. Monstrous. True enemies yes?”
“…well, that would be my fault, probably,” Isaac said, sounding frustrated. “I’ve been pushing inertia into the standoff. I can pull it back, but will that make things worse?”
“It might!” Mechaniacal’s voice boomed cheerfully from his tower, clearly listening in via drone. “A fascinating ability you have there. Let’s see if we can stop this from turning into a disaster, shall we?”