Chapter 185 – Planning
With that meeting out of the way, we turned our attention to the real reason we were in the area. If Globalview took over a factory that had once been used by Stepford, then I knew without needing to look that any public records or plans for the building’s layout and what was on site were going to be garbage. Supervillains did not file proper permits before upgrading lairs, and neither did secretive quasi-legal human supremacist organizations.
That meant the best ‘research’ we could do would be to take a visit to the site. However, given the reports of some impressive weapons on turrets, it was clear that Globalview had already prepared for unwanted visitors, so dropping in unannounced would be a little too hazardous for my liking, at least until we got more information. Which is why we were currently in the digital landscape, with Web Mistress hunting, and me following.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t so easy as just slipping through the phone lines and getting right into their mainframe. Even if they weren’t concerned about Web Mistress in particular (and, after what we did to their Tokyo branch, I knew they would very much be concerned with her), secret organizations rarely enjoyed opening themselves up to hackers. Especially since hackers were often curious types, and would go poking their noses into things that ordinary people wouldn’t look twice at. A normal user might see a boring business website, but hackers would datamine the site itself, looking for vulnerabilities in the code, and anything else that they could exploit or turn to their advantage.
Which is why we were not entirely surprised that there wasn’t a network open to the public inside the building. There was a company website for the new subsidiary going in, Evolution Solutions Incorporated. The website was full of buzzwords and things that sounded impressive, but told you absolutely nothing. That much was standard for ninety percent of businesses out there, honestly.
However, if we needed any further confirmation that the factory was being used by the SDI, the nature and tone of those buzzwords would have been the final nail in the coffin. From the company name on down, the website was full of dog whistles and catchphrases that the vast majority of the populace would never catch on to. Even most in the super community wouldn’t recognize them, honestly, because, unless one dealt with the right (or wrong) types, you wouldn’t hear those dog whistles explained.
The thing about racists is that, unless you are in a room full of racists, most people don’t want to let their racist nature out in full view. Because racists, as a rule, were cowards who wouldn’t do anything without the expectation that they could get away with their actions and not suffer consequences. Which is why they hid behind symbols and slogans that didn’t mean anything to most people, or sounded innocuous, but when you heard them talk about things like ‘pure human engineering’ or ‘keeping humanity great’, and things like that? Yeah, those who knew about such things knew exactly who they were dealing with.
Of course, having a website full of human supremacist bullshit wasn’t exactly a crime. Businesses were allowed to be racist all they wanted, so long as they didn’t discriminate against the people that spent their money there. However, it did mean that no one in the hero or villain community would shed a tear if this group ceased to exist.
Unfortunately, the website was not hosted on site, but from a server in Topeka, Kansas. There were a few computers and electronic devices connected to the internet on site, but they were not connected to the internal network. The turrets had no connectivity that Web Mistress could see, which meant that they were using wired connections. Impossible to hack without physical access.
Honestly, I had to respect the thoroughness of it. The air-gap approach to network defense was a simple thing, but it was hard to make it work in practice. You had to make sure that every external connection did not have a link to any internal systems, which meant that if you wanted to transfer a file to another site, you’d need to use physical media to transfer it from a computer on the internal network, and onto one connected to the outside. Depending on file sizes, that could be a big problem. Worse, depending on how you thought about things, was that it made transfers between sites of your own organization more of a headache. But the tradeoff was that your sensitive material could not be hacked, even by world-class hackers like Web Mistress, unless they (or a proxy) were physically on site.
That was a problem, since I had no idea what sensors and defenses that they had in place. I was good, but part of being good meant knowing your limits, and I knew I was not invincible, and that there were sensors that could detect me, even while I was in my mist form. The question, then, was how to mitigate the risk, and keep things from getting too hairy before we figured things out.
“Hmm. Master, I think we should wait until after nightfall, when the night shift is in place. I can spend the time using the GPS on the different phones in place to get a rough map of the ground floor, at least. That should tell us where the stairs and such are. Maybe even a break room, or the security office, if we’re lucky. With a stand-alone network, they will need to have night shift security on site, even if they rely more on turrets and sensors than guards walking the perimeter. No external connection to the internet means everything needs to be done on site, after all.”
“Yes, I think that’s probably for the best. A night attack will also have more civilians out of the way. While I don’t doubt that the construction workers are linked to the SDI in some way, if only because they have human supremacist tendencies, to the outside, they would be civilians. And even if we weren’t doing this job for the Knights, limiting civilian casualties and collateral damage is simply good business.”
Web Mistress chuckled. “Yes, as you’ve said before, not causing collateral damage is how you keep from getting put on someone’s ‘to do’ list. Which is inherently unhealthy, even if you’re one of the top supervillains in the world.”
“Especially if you’re one of the top supervillains in the world. Because more people are going to be looking to take a crack at you. If they can take you down, then their stock rises dramatically.”
There wasn’t really anything more to say, so Web Mistress went about compiling her data, and looking for the best way for us to attack. Meanwhile, I started strategizing about how I was going to do this. Last time I fought the SDI troopers, they proved that they had sensors to get around the common tricks I had, like creating icy mists. We never got to take apart one of the suits, so there’s no way to know whether they could pinpoint my mist form, but they had flamethrowers as part of their standard kit, and my vulnerability to Fire combined with the low defenses of my mist form meant I’d be in serious trouble if they decided to go ‘fuck this area in particular’.
The last time we fought had been disturbingly close to a fair fight, and it was only because Web Mistress managed to worm into their systems and force an emergency recall that things didn’t get very, very bad. I did not like fair fights. Fair fights were for training, sparring, exhibitions, and competitions. When the fights were real, and the stakes were live or die, then I never fought fair if I had any say in the matter. Cheat early, cheat often, and keep cheating until the fight is done.
So, with that in mind, how was I going to cheat this fight? My power pool had expanded since the last time I faced the SDI, which meant I had more options available to me than I did before. And the System really allowed me to game things more than I would have been able to before its initialization. So long as the powers I picked were ‘Ice or Cold’ related, each of them was less than 88 Active Points, and the Real Cost of the lot was 88 points or lower, I could do whatever I wanted.
The Frozen Armor power I’d been using for a while now was a must-have. An extra 20 points of resistant Physical Defense and Energy Defense (rPD and rED) was huge. More importantly, at 60 Active Points and 24 Real Cost, it left a lot of room for other powers, which was good.
What about some ‘aura’ powers? Area effects that would simply continue fucking with people until they were no longer in the area would be a good form of crowd control, allowing me to better act against groups, even when I was outnumbered. The question was, what kind of powers should I make?
First up was an area damage effect. Start with an Energy Blast, give it an area effect, personal immunity for me, have it cost END only to activate, continuous so it kept going, and penetrating, so that it did SOMETHING each time, no matter what the defenses other people had. Make it a 4d6 Energy Blast, and that would be 80 Active Points. Cut the cost by having a side effect that made it also freeze and damage the environment around me, make it take a full combat turn to activate, no range, no knockback, double the END cost. That brought it to a Real Cost of 18 points, and the aura was a ‘set it and forget it’ thing. I’ll call it ‘Frost Aura’.
Next, a general debuff. Change Environment, to make some bitter cold that saps their ability to hit me. It would have an 8-meter radius, and slap anyone in the area with a -7 penalty to OCV, which was basically guaranteeing they wouldn’t hit me unless they had the luck of the gods. Cost END only to activate, personal immunity, and it was 75 Active Points. Another Extra Time only to activate, No range, so it lit up on top of me, and an increased END cost put the ‘Hypothermic Aura’ power at 27 Real Cost. Not bad.
But I still had room for more. Another ice-themed debuff. I’d call it ‘Brittle Aura’, and it was a Drain that targets the Armor power, and drains 2d6+1 points each time it goes off. Personal immunity, costs END only to activate, Area of Effect, and continuous brought the Active Points to 80. Hitting it with a side effect that made it affect everything in the environment, cost extra time to activate, increased END cost, and putting a limit on it so that the application of heat reversed the effect brought the Real Cost to 19.
All the powers were under 88 Active Points, and 24 + 18 + 27 + 19 = 88. I could ‘preload’ the powers while in a safe area and recover the END spent easily enough. A minute’s rest would be enough, most likely. Probably less, since I would be activating the different powers one by one, instead of all at once.
However, in return, anyone who tried using their flamethrowers at anything but extreme range would be suffering, and hard. I knew from the combat logs of my last fight with them that the ‘stock’ SDI troopers had an OCV of 7, which was fairly typical for normal humans. The System made it hard to miss when you targeted a specific point when doing AoE effects, since the area had a DCV of 3, but if you dropped someone’s OCV to 0, they had to roll a 10 or under on a 3d6 to do that. That meant it was a 50/50 chance whether they would even be able to aim well enough to hit an area right in front of them with a flamethrower, all while taking constant damage from my Frost Aura, and having their armor degrade due to Brittle Aura.
There was the slight problem that I would need to be careful with how long I stood next to structural supports, water mains, and other such things. With the auras going, I would be constantly damaging the area around me. That wasn’t a terrible concern, in the long run, since I was basically going to shut down the SDI presence in Syracuse, but I was still allergic to buildings dropping on my head, and I was sure SDI would have expanded downward to build out their base, since they couldn’t change the exterior without drawing more attention.
That also meant that, if I did have to go through underground areas, I was going to end up either taking the stairs, or climbing down elevator shafts. Because riding an elevator that was actively being damaged around you was a really, really stupid idea. And that wasn’t even counting the fact that the last time I took an elevator in a supervillain base, there were mooks with bombs in their heads waiting for me. I’d rather not tempt fate again.