Two days after tagging Ezekiel’s car and tracking its nighttime trips, Mason had a positive on the club’s location. To get in however, he needed a codeword for the guy at the door.
Super strength would’ve made short work of this obstacle, however the goal was not to draw attention, so he found a backdoor and applied his strength there instead.
Hidden in the dark of the alley pressed against the target building, he peeled off his cap to reveal his dyed hair. The domino mask came up from his neck and covered the upper half of his face, and he checked his ensemble one last time.
It was a white dress shirt and pants with shoes to match, with a long coat thrown on top. He was good to go. Before he stepped into the light though, he fired a tiny ball of flame at the camera standing watch over the door.
While it sparked and smoldered, he hurried forward and grabbed the door handle, twisting and pulling. The rusted metal bent in a way it shouldn’t and disrupted the silence of the evening, as if the camera feed getting cut off hadn’t already done that.
Guessing that someone was probably on their way, he made quick entry and closed the door behind him. The heat sensing radar spread out at his command and he got more than a couple of pings.
A lot of testing in the past few days had shown him the limits of this ability.
Enclosed spaces yielded vague results when he stood outside them. Take this building for instance. Before entering, he couldn’t single out a heat signature and confidently say it belonged to a person. It all felt jumbled up into one mass of heat to his radar.
This had changed now that he walked the dark, crowded halls of the building’s closed off parts. He could sense every person in it and if they were moving or not. He could even guess what most were doing, if their elevated temperatures and the venue told him anything.
Hurrying toward the largest congregation of people, he kept watch on everyone, most importantly the lone signature that started moving right about the same time he entered.
The security guard, most likely.
It was hard to navigate the dark, winding corridors without tripping or shoving something. He had to resort to using the torch of his phone and bringing down his weight in order to keep his movements quick but silent.
Still, dodging the unending noise traps inevitably slowed him down long enough for the guard to reach the end of the last corridor he had to enter and cross before he could reach where most of the signatures had gathered.
He looked around for a hiding spot and stopped suddenly, looking right up. Three more steps and the guard would be at the door.
He turned off the flashlight, stored the phone and threw himself up, flying to the ceiling like a spider retracting their web. His arms and legs served as supports to keep him still while he pressed himself flat against the ceiling.
A cone of light flashed past where he’d been a moment earlier, illuminating the darkness. Instead of the quick strides he used to arrive here, the guard entered the room slowly, waving his flashlight left and right.
Apart from floating dust and cobweb ridden furniture, bottles, crates and other things, he found nothing that pointed to an intruder. Nevertheless, he didn’t stop and proceeded onward, going the way Mason came.
Right above the man who could ruin it all for him, Mason watched him navigate the messy storage and noted how the guy barely made a sound, probably in order not to alert whoever had broken in.
Slowly but surely, the distance between them increased, the rays of the powerful flashlight getting more distant.
Maintaining his current height, Mason pulled himself forward while keeping an eye on the guard’s heat signature. He reached the doorway in seconds and went low, pulling himself through without issue before returning to the floor on the other side.
Instead of bringing his weight back up to its normal baseline, he kept it at 100 pounds. This way, his steps would be light and his movement swift when the situation called for it.
It was smooth sailing from here. He emerged from the last corridor into the main area, putting eyes to the origin of the weed scent saturating the atmosphere and the unrestrained moans and gasps playing on repeat.
Right in front of him, he caught sight of a naked woman laying spreadeagle on a couch, being fed a drink by another naked woman and on her lower end, another woman—you know what, not important.
His first instinct was to close his eyes and look away, or raise an arm to shield himself from the depravity, but he fought it and kept things natural. He simply looked away and kept doing so, each subsequent thing his eyes fell on somehow more amoral than the last.
A bar appeared at the end of the long, arduous journey and saved him from this peril. It was a good place to wait for the guard.
Waving away the weed smoke out of his face on his way toward it, he sidestepped a flying trio lost in the throes of lust and had to stop and let some suspicious liquid shoot past.
Rather than look directly at the source, he kept moving and let his other eye satisfy his curiosity.
“What can I get you?” One of the bar tenders asked after he sat down, her ahem, “overly generous” chest babies enjoying the breeze of the air conditioning and sucking any eyes in the vicinity toward them.
“Ahem…” Mason pulled his head up to look at the deviously smiling woman’s face. “Whiskey, with ice.”
“Whiskey with ice, coming up,” she smiled and turned around, revealing shoulders and a back so straight he wondered if he was seeing things.
When she finally faced him again and poured his order, he confirmed with his eyes what his radar picked up in the brief moment she turned her back to him. Her chest had grown at least two more sizes, making them even look more ridiculous.
‘Her spine must be made of titanium…’ He offered a fake smile and grabbed the glass with his drink, ice clinking.
Her naked bits wobbled so much he thought he was seeing double. Prying his eyes away with great effort, he took a sip and gave all his attention to the bottles behind her.
Being happy to be alive by itself was enough for most people. That didn’t mean they did not enjoy things that amplified this sense of worthwhileness, and boy, did the waves of the magnificent babies stir up something fierce within him.
Mason could sense his own temperature rise a little bit as he fought off his lust. It was right to say the infectious nature of the atmosphere was getting to him. The loud, unrestrained sounds of intercourse behind were like kindling soaked in gasoline.
He was stuck between a rock and a hard place. His eyes flicked over to the topless bartender for a split second and he scoffed. ‘Rock and a hard place. Right.’ He lowered the drink. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have come here.’
The guard had started heading back, so he took solace in that and savored his drink, alternating his stares between the inside of the glass and the shelved bottles, taking a small sip every few seconds.
Out of nowhere, he got one of those random urges to simply look in a certain direction.
A pot-bellied man with shaggy blonde hair locked eyes with him, and the latter simply raised his drink. Confused, he responded a noticeable moment later by tilting his, noting down the strange guy’s appearance.
That suit looked expensive.
‘Took you long enough.’
The guard finally reached the main area. Unlike Mason, he didn’t break stride and went straight for one set of the large speakers placed in the corners of the hall.
That was his cue to move, so he gulped down the rest of his ineffective drink and stood up. Still keeping up appearances, he waltzed like he owned the place, glass filled with melting ice cubes in hand.
He would’ve set it down but he thought of his DNA. There would most likely be an investigation once he left with his prize, so he’d rather trust his paranoia. As for fingerprints, the gloves dealt with that.
His eyes were elsewhere as he followed the guard returning to his post, his radar offering precise guidance. He made his steps brisk when the guard disappeared behind the speakers, vanishing behind them as well not long after.
Heat sense told him it was all clear on the camera front upon entering the little hideaway, so he covered the glass in intense but controlled flames, heating it up and evaporating the ice in seconds.
Slow, methodic beeping entered his ears as he stepped through the steam and turned the corner in front of him, finding the guard thumbing a keypad. He waited till the door hissed open before making a move.
With no hesitation clouding his movements, he closed the distance and leaned down, locking his huge arms around the shorter man’s neck. The rear naked choke hit the guard out of the blue, and the way he struggled showed it.
It took him five seconds—way too long—to stop trying to pry the logs around his neck free and go for his gun.
A pained gasp left the dude’s mouth as his hand recoiled, the red hot pistol burning him. That was the last sound he made before his arms slackened and ultimately flopped, his whole body following suit.
When his mental count reached ten, Mason uncoiled his arms and carried the guard into the unlocked room, leaving a gap in the door and blocking it with the guy’s foot.
There was no time to waste, so he went to work immediately, retrieving the freshly bought phone and cable from the inventory. He connected it to the computer and started the search for what he needed.
Ezekiel didn’t make it hard. He frequented this place like a pastor would his real church, so finding footage of him living his best life took a single, sped up look at the previous day’s logs.
Mason started the file transfer and heard a faint groan. He looked to the side at the guard stirring in his chair and reached over, tapping him in the forehead with as little strength as possible.
That stopped the awakening in its tracks and he brought his attention back to the transfer. The seconds ticked on as the progress bar crawled forward.
‘Waiting’s the worst part.’ His uncle’s words came back to him.
To pass the time, he went through some of the other files to find anything interesting. He found nothing but more sex, more depravity, and more drugs, all being indulged in by people who were inspirations to millions, some—no, most of them, children.
‘What an absolute crap show.’
For a while he wondered if it was worth following the superhero path in this world, beause every single thing he had seen so far confirmed that it was all a bunch of horseradish. There were no real heroes.
‘Maybe…’ He started to think about what to do after clearing his name.
‘Naah.’ He shook his head, doing away with the fantasies and unplugging the phone. The transfer was complete. He had no more reason to stay in this place.
With brisk steps, he returned to the pot of depravity and went past it, straight for the main entrance. Before leaving, he took another glance at the ongoing debauchery and narrowed his eyes when the guy staring at him earlier was nowhere to be found.
He switched his focus to the heat radar and found the guy by himself, hidden in a corner and talking on the phone. Without super hearing, he would not be privy to the contents of that call. Besides, in the unlikely case it had to do with him, getting out of dodge was the way to go.
By stepping outside the building, he traded one hell for the other. Gone was the stench of weed and sweaty, discharge stained bodies. Manhattan’s urban musk had taken its place, wrapping him in its warm, stinky embrace.
He was free now though. Free to pay his target a long awaited visit.
‘To the roofs.’
.
.
.
.
As insightful as his deductions on supe culture were, Mason had not considered one thing; supes that for one reason or the other, stayed out of the spotlight.
Dustin Goss, supe name Peeper, fell into this category. He was the stout man who raised his drink after the former caught his prolonged stare.
With a codename like Peeper, inferring his superpower and why he had to keep himself out of the public eye was like putting one and two together.
Normal kids needed guard rails when they got new stuff, like toys, Ipads or kid shows. This way, they learned restraint, moderation and how to exist in society without becoming the opposite of what their parents envisioned when they had them.
For a kid who learned that he could see through walls at a very young age, guard rails became more than necessary but also quite impossible to implement.
Every kid learned to lie on their own at some point in their early years, and for Dustin, since his powers didn’t manifest any visual changes when he used them, he learned to lie like he breathed when asked if he was using them.
Since his parents had no way to actually determine the truth, they left the matter alone and took other measures. They lined their walls with zinc after Homelander’s weakness became public knowledge, but Dustin being the little liar he was, kept up the pretense.
So he grew up this way, into a fully fledged and unabashed pervert, a bold one not unlike Translucent. He never glanced at someone of the opposite gender, or sometimes the same one without looking deeper than no person should.
This all came to a head when someone at his high school ratted him out.
It looked and sounded like a foolish case at first, but when security camera footage of the school was examined, his room searched only for drawings he’d made of teachers, students, neighbours, his parent’s coworkers and even his own parents to be found, it turned into a massive debacle that shook the state he lived in.
Lawsuits were filed by the dozen, with more of them joining as the days went by. This happened when he was 15 years old, and though he and his family made it out in the end, their financial and social status took such a huge dip it took them years to recover.
They were even forced to move and start afresh, keeping a ridiculously low profile in the new town. His parents “officially” cut him off from the family when he turned 18, leaving him with a rented apartment and a job in Vought’s Analytics department as a parting gift.
He’d been there for nine years now, and not one of his coworkers was aware of his true past. They didn’t even know he was a supe, this anonymity allowing him to revert to his bad habits and indulge them with more caution.
No matter who you were, so long as you were of sound mind and body, spending nine continuous years at something would make you pretty good at it. Not the best, but good enough to notice when a unicorn only you knew was a unicorn walked right in front of you.
And Mason was this unicorn to Dustin.
The long years cataloguing every statistic on supes and monitoring and recording these changes had imbued the prolific pervert with the ability to put every supe he came across into well defined categories.
His mind did it on its own, requiring little conscious effort on his part. It helped somewhat with the ladies if he factored in his X-Ray vision, but even that was a hit or miss.
Point is to say, the instant he laid eyes on Mason, his mental categorisation system registered something it never had: A supe that was over 7 feet tall.