The gym door swung open slow, the soundproof slab easing in on a hydraulic hinge to let out a wall of cold recycled air and rubber-mat smell the moment the mechanism responded to Sky’s simple push.It was almost enough for him to miss the scent of sterile lemon disinfectant and floor wax for all of a second. That second lasted as long as it took for the familiar heavy grit of lifting chalk, old sweat and vulcanized rubber to punch him in the chest like an old friend. Breathing in just a bit deeper to hold the smell under all the aggressive air conditioning, Sky stepped through the threshold and immediately paused with just a foot in.
Yo.
His eyebrows crept up toward his hairline as he took in the actual gym in front of him — the same one nobody had bothered to inform him was here a day before. Not in the handbook or nothing. Not apart from some random mention of ‘free use of approved facilities during work hours’ but this was a little more than just a ‘facility’.Unlike their ice packs and their computers, the SDN apparently didn't skimp when it came to something like workout equipment. He wouldn’t have minded getting lost so much his first day here if this was one of the places he’d found in this maze of a building. The space was sized like a real gym, nothing that you’d just shove into a regular work building or even one of those useless apartment gyms with maybe like two or three machines.
Racks were lined all up along the far wall, in front of mirrors he wasn't about to look in, all of it set up on top of absorbent black mats a good several inches thick. Nice. His eyes tracked up the loaded bars as he walked past a rack, a set of blue landing on the numbers stamped into the plates.
Both eyebrows climbed on their own as he carefully tracked the stenciled white numbers on some of them.
Not pounds.
Tons.A lot of it far past what he could clean on a decent day, and there were whole racks of stuff just sitting there under the lights, waiting for him to grab and go. Better than a washing machine, that's for damn sure.
And it wasn’t just barbells either, rows of custom-machined dumbbells sitting around made from blocks of solid dark-gray metal that seemed to have numbers stamped on them in the triple digits. Hell, some of this stuff looked like it belonged in a shipyard, not a gym.
Not like he was gonna complain either way.
Okay, then. Sky’s jaw clicked as he nodded slow, finding it hard to be all that annoyed with all this tonnage waiting here for him to use and nobody in i-
"Over here, blue guy."
Sky’s head snapped to the left, eyes going a little wider as he remembered what — who — he was supposed to be here for.
Pupil-less white eyes stared at Sky, one hand raised in a slow wave. Oh, yeah.
The man-bat in question sat parked on a weight bench a good thirty feet off, that oversized gray bat head tilted in his direction. Red tie done in a proper knot tight at his throat, black suit, the whole thing — the way the guy was sitting there dressed up, it was almost enough to make you ignore how one long arm was up and out, a simple handcuff pinning his wrist to a racked barbell.
“Yeah, you can stop mapping the perimeter, Soulja Boy.” The suited bat drawled his way, white eyes blinking over. “I am securely attached to the furniture.”
Sky let out a long breath through his nose as he started over towards the anthro, sneakers squeaking loud against rubber flooring. “...yeah, I can see that.”“In my defense, I was told there would be boobs.”“Nah, that ain’t true.” “Huh?”Sky stared back as he slowly made his way over. “I only known Coupé eight hours and even I know she not sayin’ boobs.”
“Well… you bring anything to cut with?” The bat seemed to skip right over the fact that he’d been tricked without even being tricked, the change of subject relevant but obvious as his giant bat head. "Bolt cutters, a saw, something. There's gotta be a first-aid station around here with a pair of scissors at least. I've been running my options and they are…”
Big bat lips smacked slow. “Well, they are not great, is the situation I'm in."
"Nah. Nothin’ like that, big bat." Hands loose at his sides, Sky just kept on walking. "Didn't think I'd need 'em."
"'Cause I already tried dislocating my own thumb, which…” He shrugged one shoulder with a sigh. “Turns out, way harder than they make it look. Also I'm a coward, so that fell apart pretty fast." The bat rotated the trapped wrist as far as the cuff would let him, which wasn't really all that far. "Been sitting here like forty-five minutes. Started narrating it to myself for a while. It got kinda weird. A little meta, too. I like an audience."“...yeah, I can tell.”
Sky stepped in close enough to Sonar he could smell the anthro’s breath — nothing at all pleasant about it — and reached up to grab the cuffs.“So, your powers come with laser cutters or…”He didn’t answer the non-question, Sonar still rambling to himself as Sky dug two fingers into the little gap between cuff and fur. Steel cold against his bare fingers, it didn’t stop him from getting a solid grip on the metal.
He pulled.
Metal shrieked.Metal gave.
The cuff peeled open all at once, no different than popping a soda tab as the links snapped clean and the whole bracelet dropped off Sonar’s wrist to swing loose against the rack with a dull clank of metal on metal.“...Oh.” Sonar lowered his right arm, rotating his freed wrist slow while staring down at the busted metal still hanging off the bar. Those pupilless white eyes blinked once before looking back up at Sky. “Oh, wow. Okay. They weren't lying about you, then."
Sky blinked back. "...Hell you talking about?"
“Hell.” Sonar let out a choked little chuckle, the man-bat still working the wrist and rolling the joint out. “Funny, cause you’re almost as strong as Malevola.”Malevola… Flashes of the nearly seven-foot tall demon woman with the tail and red skin and everything else popped into his head before Sky forced that down to the back of his mind where it belonged. “...and? What’s that mean?”
Just from her height alone and the sword she swung around — that slab of giant stone and metal — he figured she couldn’t exactly be close to normal, but she wasn’t giving off any terrifying amounts of demonic energy or whatever. Honestly, Sky was pretty sure some decently high-tier Hellions could smack her around.“Well, I mean, that’s nothing too crazy but…” The sound of one-handed clapping interrupted Sonar’s explanation, the anthro doing one more test of his hand before he turned back to a still-waiting Sky. “Well — down here? That's rare, man. Not Blazer rare, but still up there. Most of us had money on you being a ringer.”“You…” Sky tilted his head. “You bet on me?”“Well, no. Not money.” Sonar clicked his tongue. “I tried to get a bet going but the aggregate consensus of the breakroom called it a ‘sucker’s bet’. But we figured it, is what I mean. That you’re a plant."
"A plant."
"Corporate plant, yeah.” Sonar gave him a knowing nod, like he was laying some wisdom on him. “Somebody with a little more gas in the tank than the rest of us sad sacks, dropped in to round out the roster, y’know? Force everybody to work a little harder, make the quarterly report look less like a crime scene. Solid C-Tier felt like an easy fit for that."
C-Tier. Sky's frown came up before he could catch it and shove it back down.
He knew the systems by now.
Even if the handbook hadn’t gone into too much detail, he knew enough of them to nod along at least. Rank, Tier, Role — it was a whole set of three separate ladders SDN ran everybody up at the same time, like one wasn't already enough paperwork for a job like this.
A letter for how good you were at gigs, a letter and a number for how strong you were, and a word for the kind of hero you were supposed to be. It honestly seemed like way too much but then again — back home, Paragon ran fifty-some security levels, over a dozen archetypes, a Threat rating for baddies slapped on top of all that, and a rank structure inside every single supergroup too.
Not to mention that Freedom Corps had its own thing and so did Longbow. At least these people only made you carry three ladders around in your head at once.
"Solid C-Tier?" Sky narrowed his eyes at the bat-headed guy sitting in front of him. "You turn into a giant bat, though. Last I checked. That not at least a C? On top of that…” He frowned down at the still-swinging cuff. “Why not just get out of these yourself?"
"Eh." Sonar shrugged again, with both shoulders this time. “That’s real conditional. I barely control the thing, bro, that's the whole entire problem.” “...what, you need a full moon?”“No, not even. Just random, I think.” Another shrug came with a hum from the man-bat. “Half the time I’m popped out of the big form, I'm honestly not much tougher than some guy off the street who skipped leg day." His head leaned over to the ruined cuff. "Wouldn't have gotten me out of that. Believe me. I did the math on it sitting right here."
"Fair." Sky glanced down at the half of the snapped cuff lying on the rubber. "But I'm not from corporate."
"Yeah, I can see that. You do not look clean enough." Sonar looked him up and down, white eyes trailing slow over him. "Scars don't really photograph well. And the whole burn-victim look wouldn’t do all that great on the recruitment page on top of that. Marketing likes the jawline-and-cape look.”
That bat head tilted again. “No offense meant. It's a numbers thing."
Sky didn’t blink and he didn’t say a word, seconds passing in silence as those blue eyes stared dead-on at the tall bat dressed like a stockbroker.It didn’t take all that long for the anthro to get the hint. "Okay — please don't kill me!”
Both of Sonar's hands came up off his knees at once, and the bat leaned way back on the bench as if he could put enough physical distance between them. “I'm being serious. Malevola says Hell is like, worse than the reviews, and she would actually know, she's from there.”
Sky held the stare a couple seconds longer, his jaw tight and a familiar itch crawling up the back of his neck. Let it go. He breathed out a slow careful exhale through his nose. He's not even worth the calories, man.
It only took a full second more before Sky rolled his eyes hard and turned on his heel.
"...place got a whole HR problem and a personality problem." Sky muttered toward the doorway in front of him. "Every last one of y'all.".
"Was that a no on the killing?" Sonar’s voice called after him. "'Cause I genuinely can't read your face. It's the scowl, it… it covers a lot of ground, tonally, y-kn—"