AN: 28k words. This went a little off-topic, not sure how it turned out. Some creative liberties were taken with the interpretation of a certain powerset, as you'll see.
As a side note, I've been promising to update my Harry Potter story for way, way too long now - so I'm going to be rushing out updates to that over the duration of the christmas break. After I've reached a good point to stop with that, maybe at the end of a school year or when my muse runs dry in new material - Duellist and a second chapter of MAD will be the next chapters to come out after that.
---
Morning comes with the scent of bacon and eggs wafting into my room and a distant argument that I can't quite make out.
Rise and shine, Greg.
I'm not even halfway-dressed before the door opens, Emma barging in with a plate and looking mildly disappointed at the sight of me. Whether that was because I was already awake, or that she'd just barely missed out on catching an eyeful - whatever the case, her disappointment couldn't possibly match mine as Sophia appears behind Emma with a resolutely murderous expression on her face.
"Good morning!" Emma cheers at me. "I come bearing food. I thought this might be a good way to wake you up."
"Good morning. And you're right, of course - that is a fantastic thing to wake up to."" I wave back, then slide my eyes to her apparent bodyguard. "Might have been an even better way if it was just you and me-"
"I know, right?" Emma murmurs slightly too loudly.
"Which is precisely why I'm here." Sophia scowls at both of us darkly.
"Killjoy." I stick my tongue out at her.
"What are you, twelve?" Sophia gives me a level look.
"Inches?" I grin at her. The grin is not returned.
Emma doesn't applaud my sense of humour either, moving the subject on with practised ease. "She's been following me around all morning, I've tried telling her that I'm perfectly capable of making my own decisions - but she still seems to have an issue with it."
"Jealousy, I bet." I shoot a smirk at Sophia.
"Could be." Emma agrees blandly, fighting the upwards quirk of her lips as Sophia's expression turns even flatter.
The snort of derision is expected, but still rude all the same. "Keep dreaming. I still have my self-respect, and once Emma comes to her senses and remembers that she used to have standards - she'll be thanking me for this."
"You do realise that you aren't really stopping anything here, right? The moment you turn your back-" I make a crude gesture with my hands.
Sophia turns to Emma. "You see what a pervert this guy is? Obsessed with sex. He's just using you, you know?"
"I wouldn't say that." Emma protests. "I mean, I enjoy it too. Like, I really enjoy-" Sophia interrupts with a mock gagging sound. "Right. Sorry. Wouldn't want to defile your virgin ears."
"Don't start that again." Sophia warns.
"Don't start what? Pointing out that there's only one virgin in this entire house right now?" I probe.
"Greg! She's sensitive about that. You've really got to tip-toe around the subject. You know, Madison and I were talking last night - and she was sitting in the corner pretending not to-" She breaks off, almost dropping the plate as Sophia tickles the back of her neck.
"We are not talking about any of that. Especially not with him." She states bluntly as Emma puts the plate down next to my makeshift bed.
"Where is Madison, anyway? I would have thought she would be the first one up for another session of bullying Sophia."
"Sleeping in./Sleeping in." They both chorus in sync. A moment later, Sophia speaks again. "And I am not being bullied."
"Madison isn't exactly a morning person." Emma leans against the doorframe. "Don't worry, she'll sort herself out before we need to leave. She wouldn't miss a shopping trip for the world."
"I wasn't worried." I respond drily.
"Whatever. If we're all done here, then-" Sophia puts both hands on Emma's shoulders, steering her back around to point out of the room. "Time to leave."
"What are you, my mother?" Emma gripes back at her. "Admit it, you just feel left out-"
"I'll admit that you couldn't have picked a worse guy to mess around with in the entire school. Really. I mean, Greg? Really, Emma?" Sophia spins her round to face me as if that would prove a point, somehow.
"I object to that." I wag a finger at the pair. "Apart from just being generically awesome, I'm easily clear of most of the school even without trying. Not in a gang, not addicted to drugs or alcohol, not a complete dropout, not fat, proud owner of a complete collection of the limited edition 'Armsmaster Advances!' figureset - and, I mean, even I liked in the mirror the other day and thought: 'Damn, I'm kind of hot. I'd fuck me, if I was a chick.' In a no-homo kind of way, to be clear. That's at least better than ninety percent of the school. Admit it."
Sophia just gives me a disgusted look.
"There. You see!" I jab a finger at her. "No response. She knows it's an inarguable fact, but she's just too stubborn to back down and admit that she was wrong the first time." Sophia's mouth twitches. "And here comes the barrage of insults and minor death threats, as if whining will make everyone forget that I won the argument. News flash, Sophia - everyone knows that I won the argument. You're the only person still seething that a guy can't possibly change for the better."
"Choke on your food and die." Sophia encourages me, before firmly steering Emma out of the doorway and back down the way they came.
"Rude. No wonder you're single." I land one final petty snipe before she disappears around the corner. "Challenge."
No sense in wasting the cooldown, after all.
My feet settle onto solid ground once more. "Now then, was it up and to the left? Or up and to the right?" Two seconds. Three seconds. I step back sharply. A crossbow bolt embeds itself in the floor off to the right. "Left side it is." I hop up onto a nearby desk, then leap straight up - the majority of my body turning into a smoky, weightless mass while my legs provide the boost - then my entire body phasing out with the second charge as the original expires. "Oh-" I give a pleased hum to myself. "-that feels so much smoother." There's something viscerally satisfying in feeling my mobility get even better. I might need raw power more right now, but I couldn't be upset at the upgraded version of my shadow state given how reliant I was on the weakest form of it.
I wasn't entirely sure that this was the correct floor, but I couldn't exactly afford to take it slow and find out. I already knew that Sophia would run if I gave her the breathing room to get away, so my only choice was to blindly rush in the direction of the bolt and hope that I found her.
Fortunately, my reaction and subsequent movement had been both fast and unexpected for this version of Sophia. Without the CONT modifier, she likely hadn't expected me to come up through the floor - something she herself would be very reluctant to do. It wasn't something I minded doing, the risk of death because of one lucky wire running through the ceiling was significant - but not actually that devastating for me. I could afford to lose ten times in a row if it gave me an advantage, while she couldn't even afford to lose once. Even if her power didn't have the same limits, she couldn't afford to be as reckless with it as I could.
I race into the next room across, not finding anything that might indicate Sophia's presence. Next floor then. I zig and zag for a few seconds, hoping to dodge a second bolt while waiting for a second charge to appear. No such luck. I copy my previous trick, jumping off a nearby table and soaring up to the next floor.
I get plenty of warning for what happens next. Ignoring how my senses work within the shadow state given my lack of physical eyes and ears, the fact remains that I'm taking stock of the situation on this floor before my upper body has even cleared the carpet. I can see Shadow Stalker, hunched in the corner and aiming at me. I can hear the distant, muted click and twang of her crossbow - but for all the flexibility that I've gained with the upgraded version of the Shadow State, I'm still locked to one-second intervals. I can't stay in the state for a bit longer to dodge an incoming bolt, or cut it short and collapse to the floor as my power kicks me out of the ceiling.
Sophia probably doesn't even realise I have a limit like that, it just happens to line up well for her - it pretty reliably takes a full second for my momentum to take me through the ceiling and land. She's probably just thinking that I shifted back to move around last time, and I'll do it again this time - which isn't even wrong, but for the wrong reasons. So as the smoky, wispy projectile dashes towards me - my active power still locked into my shadow state for a few fractions of a second more, I fall back on the only defensive power that I have left to me that can activate in time to help once I finally turn physical once more.
And then sink to the ground in a heap as Glory Girl's forcefield fails to do anything to stop the bolt from materialising in my guts and then erupting out the other side of my torso. "Fuck!" I send a hate-filled glare to Sophia as she dives through the nearest window, a misty cloud gliding through the air and out of sight before I can even start to crawl and stumble my way towards it. "I'm so going to tell that idiot on PHO that I was right." I swear under my breath. "Invincible forcefield my ass."
I breathe in steadily, and push myself up into a standing position. Still alive. Going to die at some point. Gut wounds always seem to kill me painfully in the end - but that wasn't a reason to just keel over and wait for it to happen. It wasn't like this scenario was some impossibility that was impossible for me to advance. The last challenge was easy for me, and honestly, this one shouldn't be all that different. Sophia wasn't impossibly strong, she didn't have foreknowledge of my powers and aside from the initial opportunity for an ambush-into-escape it just wasn't likely for me to lose in a fight or a chase. I could do almost everything that she could do, and more. I just had to keep eyes on her and not allow her to escape.
That was a bit much to ask for now. I'm probably a little faster than Sophia in a dead sprint, but not with a hole in my stomach. But I don't need a working stomach to walk. Or run.
"Come on, Greg." I hiss to myself, inching towards the window - the third and slowest of the three charges coming up just in time. "You've taken worse than this." I half-walk, half-fall through the window in pursuit of the Ward, yet another shift into smoke working to secure my landing as the fastest-recharging slot lights up mid-fall. This new flexibility really was great, even if it was a little hard to appreciative right now. At least Sophia had stopped shooting at me. Probably not for altruistic reasons. She was almost certainly trying to create distance and work her way towards one of her caches, then ambush me again when I'd completely lost track of her.
But again. She can't walk through walls that easily. I can still see her, drifting towards a distant rooftop with casual, serene grace. Sticking to the skyline is safety for her, even though finding her way into a building would make it near-impossible for me to ever locate her even without the HUNT modifier making it trivial for her to avoid my search. Going into a room that might be surrounded by electrical wires might be the smartest move, but it's also potentially dangerous - one that might leave her with no way to escape me if I did somehow find her.
And it's also distinctly un-Sophia-like. Running like this was one thing, I'm sure she would justify it as 'Not being a fucking moron' or 'Getting better equipment and then using it in an ambush is just common sense, idiot' - but the fact is that it was still fighting. Fighting later, under more ideal circumstances, sure - but fighting all the same. Sophia didn't run for the sake of running. She didn't hide, fearing for her life. Even if that was the smartest move, she'd rather die on her feet. And while personality didn't always come across well in these simulations, fighting style and behaviours often did.
Which was all a long-winded way to say, she was probably making a bee-line directly for her tinkertech bolts again rather than simply trying to get away from me - even if just getting away was enough to win if she was being completely sensible. There was no reason to assume that any caches or stores would move around between challenges, so finding out where she was heading now would probably also tell me the direction she was likely to take next round as well. Only one of them could be the closest, after all.
I shift to my speed-state. I might be limited to lurching and staggering after Sophia rather than a proper sprint, but I could at least make it a very fast lurch. The reduced mass would help me scale to the rooftops at a decent pace, and Sophia probably wouldn't even realise that I had a speedster power active until I was already level with her.
The world spins briefly as I put one foot in front of the other. Right. Blood loss. Which I could do... absolutely nothing about. Just gotta grit my teeth and follow Sophia across the city, or it's all for nothing. Another foot. Progress. I hurtle myself towards the nearest wall in the direction Sophia left, ignoring the uncomfortable flashes of pain and the distinct sensation that something important was ripping in my intestines with the hurried movements. Parkour is kind of easy in this state, and it only takes a few wall jumps to start bounding between rooftops in the approximate direction that Sophia had glided off in.
But not fast enough. I've jumped at least twenty buildings before I'm forced to concede that the only smoke in the distance now is from a chimney, and that Sophia has gotten away from me this time. Maybe she took a turn somewhere, maybe she slipped into a window or a building - maybe I've already overshot her cache. Some combination of being too slow and losing sight of her for too long.
I couldn't be too upset, really. I knew what Sophia's preferred strategy was going to be in those opening moments now, stalling for a little bit longer - or making my first jump a little bit faster so that I could switch to Vista and screw her timing off-course, then block the solid bolt with Glory Girl's shield... there were options, throwing together a workable sequence for getting up to that floor quickly without getting crippled wasn't impossible at all. At that point, keeping up with her in my speed-state would be a more reasonable ask. Still difficult, not knowing where she was going - I couldn't just glide after her like she could, so temporarily losing sight of her was inevitable. But I could progress. Keep a little closer each time. It wasn't like Sophia could really avoid me today, I had plenty of challenges yet to come.
I sink to my knees. Kind of impressed that I haven't lost consciousness yet. Could be adrenaline, could be that I'm just a complete bad-ass that's hard as nails. Whichever it was, the reason was starting to lose steam now. Sometimes I'd get stabbed by something and still be walking around hours later, but this wasn't one of those times. My limbs are practically buckling at the idea of keeping up my body-weight, even in the speed-state - and the only thing keeping my eyes open is pain and the promise that I won't actually die if I just curl up and wait. I'll sit there in pain long enough for Sophia to come back and execute me.
I should probably just kill myself. No point torturing myself for little benefit.
I crawl closer to the edge of the rooftop, slipping out of my speed-state once I can grip the edge. "I'll be back, bitch-" I promise the empty air as the paralysis wears off.
And then another crossbow bolt plants itself into my shoulder.
"Fuck!" I howl, a mix of shock and anger granting a burst of clarity and energy that I'd been sorely lacking. "What the-" I blink as a second bolt skitters against the side of the building, I follow the source back across the street. Multi-storey car park. Fifth floor. Shadow Stalker, decked out in her Wards gear. Slightly different outfit compared to what I had seen her in a few minutes ago. Different helmet, additional belts and padding. More ammo. "Why would you even show yourself? You'd literally won already-"
Ah.
I've been fighting the version of Sophia with the CONT modifier for so long, that I'd almost forgotten what a normal fight was like. This version didn't care if I knew where her stashes were, because it didn't affect her odds of winning this round. She didn't care if I would fare better against the next attempt or not, she didn't even realise that this was a simulation. All she cared about was winning now. She hadn't made an attempt to obscure her caches, because as long as she got access to them in the end - she didn't care to hide it. And now, once she was certain that she would beat me - she had come back to execute me without delay.
"Big mistake." I tell her, uncaring about the fact that she couldn't hear me at this distance. "Big fucking mistake! I'll be seeing you soon!" Because now, it didn't matter if she got away from me temporarily. I knew where she wanted to get to. She could have survived five, ten more challenges simply by waiting a bit longer every time she got away from me - hiding that small bit of extra information. But she'd come back too quickly. Not enough time had passed for her destination to be far from where she was standing now. Factor in her likely unwillingness to phase through a potentially electrified wall, and the search area just got narrow indeed.
I don't register the feeling of the bolt that kills me, only catching a brief flicker in the air before I stand in front of the failure screen once more.
FAILURE
"Yeah, yeah." I roll my eyes at the notification. "Speak for yourself." I flip off the screen. "I'm winning, no matter what you have to say about it."
Light seeps into my vision as the real world comes back into view.
"-s if it's some grand achievement. Who'd even want to be in a relationship if it required lowering their standards so much that they'd end up with you?" Sophia nearly spits.
Emma raises her hand, Sophia looks pained as I smirk at her.
"You have no idea how much I'm looking forward to the messy breakup." Her tone turns grouchy, the push on Emma's shoulders becoming insistent as the pair finally start to leave.
Emma winks and forms a heart with her fingers before she is escorted out of sight. Cute. I pad over to the plate. Heart-shaped eggs too. Double-cute.
Was Sophia going to become like that? Probably not. It was hard to picture her being lovey-dovey. Hell, I wasn't even sure what I should expect from winning the next challenge. With my recent conquests, I'd grown a lot of confidence that - in the right circumstances - I didn't need to clear someone's challenges out entirely to get my dick wet. How exactly that would translate to Sophia's ever-abrasive attitude still wasn't clear.
I check PHO for new drama. Nothing worth talking about, but I take a few minutes to work on my online brand - just to make sure that nobody forgot about me. A few messages from Taylor talking about potential locations for our next 'meeting'. GStringGirl bragging about hitting the level cap on World of Capes. Parian sending a picture of her progress on my costume, which seemed... fine? I wasn't exactly an expert on textiles, but it looked... costume-like. I guess. A going-live-soon notification from Uber & Leet, but I already had my day planned out - I'd have to watch the VOD later.
I sigh. No obvious way to waste time without access to my computer. Madison was apparently asleep. Sophia's cooldown was notably longer than I had gotten used to - so I couldn't expect to just immediately hop back into a fight the moment I found her again. And finally, Emma was being guarded by an irate Sophia to an extent that I doubted I was going to sneak anything past her before we left.
Nothing for it. I'm just going to have to socialise. Like a normal person. What a pain.
On the plus side, winding up Sophia alongside Emma wasn't exactly an unpleasant time. I whistle to myself in anticipation as I make my way towards the kitchen, mind already racing with what particular entrance will irritate Sophia the most.
Because today is all about her, after all.
--
Sophia scowls at me as I make my way towards the back of the bus, imperiously pointing to the seat next to her and leaving the rest unsaid.
"You really do think the worst of me. You think I'm the kind of menace that can't handle a single bus ride without trying to get laid? I might be a guy, but I do think about things other than sex sometimes." I protest, but not too loudly. Despite my complaints, it wasn't like sitting next to Sophia was a bad thing. She was hot too, if admittedly less likely to be down for a blowjob in public. Which was probably a bad idea anyway, but Sophia was the one that put the idea in my mind in the first place so it was kind of her fault that I was even considering the merits of it.
"That's exactly what I think." Sophia replies shortly.
"Ladies, ladies. Let's all get along. We've got plenty to do and not much time to do it in." Madison interjects. "Now, Emma. You know that superstore Julia showed us last time? I was thinking we drag Sophia there. Raid the place from top to bottom. Every bit of clothing that we can carry, and then we sweep the rest of the town. And if you have something that you want for a birthday present, make appropriate cooing noises and I'll get it when you're not looking."
"I really don't need clothes. I have plenty." Sophia interjects.
"Doesn't it defeat the point of getting something for my birthday if I already know what it is? If I'm doing the same for you, we may as well just buy it ourselves at that point." Emma ignores her.
"It's completely different." Madison denies. "And it's only if you happen to see anything you like. If not, I'll have to take a guess - but I'd rather get something that I know for sure that you want, right?"
"I suppose we'll have to see." Emma concedes. "And it will depend on how much money we have left afterwards. Sophia might be penniless at the end, and I'd feel bad if we just kept shopping despite that."
"I'm not broke." The only person here with an actual job and stable salary grouses. "Which isn't to say that I actually intend to buy anything, I'm only here because Emma wouldn't shut up-"
Emma rolls her eyes. "Because you would only start complaining about stupid things like 'Nooo, I don't need a cute swimsuit' or-"
"Of course I don't." Sophia gripes. "What would I even do with some flowery crap like that?"
"See?" She shares a nod with Madison.
"No helping it. At least she has us." Madison agrees.
"It's practically winter." Sophia changes tact.
"Well into Spring, and the point is that you have everything before the perfect weather comes around." Emma shakes her head. "And its not like that's the only thing we're going to get, so stop nitpicking and just accept that we're going to fix your wardrobe."
"There's nothing wrong with my wardrobe." Sophia insists, even turning to me as if I would even consider supporting her after she so vindictively spent her morning cockblocking me.
"I don't think the wardrobe is the problem." I adopt a thinking posture. "I think it's the personality. You can't fix that with a splash of colour and the right hat."
"Oh, fuck you." Sophia leans back into the seat. "Let's just get this over with and get back. We'll pick the first thing that you two approve of, and we can leave."
"Two?" I half-heartedly protest at the exclusion.
"Two." She confirms. "Your approval is not - and will never be - required."
"Harsh." Is it just me, or has the level of tsun gotten higher lately? Maybe I'm completely delusional, but between our little scuffle in the bathroom and an extra relationship upgrade - I feel like she gained a little bit of respect for me and completely hates that fact. All of this mock outrage and general abrasiveness is just overcorrecting from someone that doesn't want to admit that we're besties now. I mean, she was definitely checking me out in the shower last night - and honestly, it would almost be weird for her to be only two steps away from being as much of a cockslut as Emma and not once to have thought about what it would be like to fuck me right now. And Sophia was exactly the kind of person to blame me for the thought even crossing her head.
Before I had powers, that would have rubbed me the wrong way. Now, seeing her fully commit to being in denial was kind of cute compared to getting outright murdered. That, and seeing her actually come to terms with reality after saying all of this so loudly was going to be sweet indeed.
"Deal with it." She replies shortly.
"Dealing with it." I affirm, eyes flicking to her countdown as it reaches the final few seconds. Three. Two. One. "Challenge."
The same countdown as before. A quick backstep to dodge the first attack, then up to the next floor in the same, fluid motions as last round. There was nothing wrong with jumping up the final floor last time, the timing just left me locked in the shadow state for a moment too long. So I repeat it, almost exactly - not wanting to take a chance on Sophia reacting differently if she saw me move around in a different way. Except this time, I slip into the shadow state a little earlier - I push off a little later. A difference that sees my shadow state deactivate with my body halfway through the floor - meaning that I'm violently ejected instead of my usual, graceful landings. I'll bruise, I always do when I get thrown out of a wall - the sensation of being hit by a hammer was penance for not ending up in a position where my body could easily reform.
But the pain was fleeting. All that mattered, was that I was no longer in my shadow state. And Sophia hadn't changed her method or angle of attack. This time, space starts to stretch between us from the very instant the state drops - and as the bolt is fired, I give up on Vista's power and fall back on Glory Girl's forcefield.
Timing. That was what Sophia had said not too long ago. She couldn't phase in her bolts at will, she had to decide when they should do it at the moment she fired. The precision that she had needed to materialise it precisely inside my body last time, without being blocked by the forcefield - that was flawless timing, and any small deviation would have thrown it off.
A small deviation like, for example, almost doubling the distance that the bolt had to travel through to reach me. This time, the bolt takes its physical form early. This time, Glory Girl's forcefield and the bolt cancel each other out - sending the bolt skittering uselessly to the floor, and Shadow Stalker diving through the window instead of attempting to reload. And this time, I don't have a single injury as I dive out the window right after her.
I still can't glide, so following her exact path is impossible - and this time, Sophia makes an attempt to shoot me as I land. The bolt goes wide, the pressure of shifting back mid-air, trying to aim and fire then needing to phase out before hitting the rooftop proving to be too much - but it's another threat to be aware of. Last time, I was so far behind her that she never felt threatened - this time, that wasn't quite so true. But it didn't really matter. I wouldn't lose her this time. I shift into my speed-state again, racing up to the rooftops as if I was attempting to chase her - but that wasn't quite true. In fact, I wasn't even going that fast. I was just keeping her in my sights, looking for the ideal way to strike.
Which was harder than it sounded. I couldn't rush to her destination ahead of her, the HUNT modifier ensured that she could see my exact location at all times - she would just turn around and go somewhere else. I couldn't attack her in this state, I hit like the wettest of wet noodles and in return took an ungodly amount of damage unless I could literally roll with the punches and avoid everything. I couldn't shift out of my speed state too close to her, otherwise she might just kill or cripple me in the three seconds of paralysis - while doing it too far away from her gave her the option to just keep running.
Fortunately, her rooftop antics provide the solution for me. Either she didn't care if I saw her reaching her stash, or simply not understanding exactly how fast I could go in this state after I'd been doing the equivalent of jogging for so long - Sophia starts the long glide across the road towards where I saw her last time. And like a rocket, I shoot past her - overtaking her on the left and dropping out of the speed-state the instant my feet hit the ground. Three. Two. One. Brief paralysis over, just in time for Sophia to make her own landing.
"Gotcha." I wink, already on top of her. If she went through the floor, I could follow - but other than that, this was no different to any of my many previous scraps with Sophia. Except this time, I eat the first few blows in return for grabbing her weapon and bolts. Sophia is confident in her hand-to-hand, for good reason - so she doesn't fight me for it, just opting to hammer me with blows without realising that my aim was to deprive her of the ability to physically grab a bolt and phase it into my head. When I'm done, both weapon and ammunition tossed aside down to the street below - she rapidly realises that I'm not a pushover in melee either. She tries to run, at first, but I'm slightly faster. She's smarter at evading with her power, but it's just that - evasion. She's not quite as good as the Sophia with the CONT modifier had gotten over time. A few light blows clip me, but pound for pound - blow for blow - I was winning every trade.
To her credit, that wasn't exactly unreasonable. She'd worked out my ash clone fast when it became evident that it fucked with her shifting, and was dispersing it almost as soon as it could finish reforming - which, ironically, made the cooldown to reform it almost instant. Glory Girl's shield had saved me from a punishing blow to the head twice now, the act of slipping that power back into my active slot to recharge in between lulls in the fight was already second nature to me. And then between my Echo and Vista's powerset - my own offensive was hard to deal with and adjust to on its own. If I could freely use the shadow state, I would probably have already won - but I need all of the charges active in case she runs, it's not like I have any other way to follow through a wall or the floor.
Even with the advantages, it's still like fighting smoke from a bonfire. Twenty strikes in a row finding nothing but air, but without a time-limit - that doesn't matter. I'm getting tired as the minutes wear on, but so is she. The evasions getting slightly more sluggish, the counterattacks lacking the threat that they had before. I had more endurance. The clone didn't get tired. And above all, she was the one that needed to be fast enough to avoid me.
I hurl Sophia to the ground, her temporary helmet long since discarded - an expression of desperate hate on her face as she shifts again, but I already have a grip on her as she reappears - the telltale eddy in the smoke now slow enough that catching her isn't merely an exercise in guesswork and reaction time, but a methodic series of movements to reliably catch her again. The shift in her expression after the third time in a row clues me in to the level of desperation - and I'm already braced for her to risk phasing through the floor. A floor where we both know there should be wires feeding the overhead lights.
But she doesn't go through the floor.
She goes through me.
Twin howls of agony light up the empty streets as my body starts screaming its objections to the arm lodged deep into my chest. From the agonised, half-lidded expression on Sophia's face and the cry of pain that easily matches mine - I'm guessing she wasn't enjoying the feeling either.
Sophia shifts again, drifting slightly to the side - slower than a crawling pace, before reforming again. Her arm is in pieces, literally. Wounds cover every inch of her skin, and any semblance of armour or clothing that once covered it falls to the ground as she moves - some pieces looking like they had been shorn with scissors, others like they had been shredded. Everything below her elbow hangs on by a thread, bloodied tendons and bone visible as blood soaks the ground around her. No, it wasn't even fair to describe the remains of that limb as an 'arm' anymore. There was too much missing. Chunks of flesh and bone falling away like diced meat.
But if she looked like that- I look down. On the face of it, it barely looked like I had a wound. An almost indented, spider-web pattern across my stomach and what almost looked like a series of puncture wounds - but nothing on the scale of the devastation that Sophia's arm had suffered. But the agonised feeling from inside my body told the true tale. My insides were in approximately the same condition as her arm right now. And I was willing to be that I needed whatever organs were in there a lot more than she needed that arm.
Sure enough, Sophia is already limping away. Not with her power, but on her own two feet. I send my ash clone to harass her as it comes off cooldown again, but she understands the trick well now. Her left hand swings into oncoming punch, and scatters it to the wind once more.
"Fuck." Ah. I can still talk. Guess she didn't get my lungs. But judging from the rapidly weakening sense of feeling from the rest of my body - she'd hit plenty of other important things instead.
Lesson learned. I'd obviously known that her objects weren't Manton limited, but I'd assumed that the reason Sophia had never ripped my heart out before was because she couldn't. Evidently, I was wrong. She could phase herself into organic matter, but it was the other end of the 'Manton limit' that was the problem. The original meaning, before PHO had started abusing it in the powerscaling sense once Narwhal had shown the world what it meant to not have that limit.
It wasn't about not working on other people, it was about safeguarding herself.
When she phases an arm inside me and goes solid, nobody wins when her power starts trying to make the body work again. If something took priority, things would be clear and it would be a useful strategy - but when both sides are equally important, both sides lose. Her arm reforms in, around, on both sides of my skin. My veins. My heart. Whether that means that her arm gets bisected, or if it means that every curve and twist of my intestines has a tiny bit of Sophia's arm and gloves in them for a brief moment - the results are immediate and catastrophic for both of us. The things that get broken don't get fixed again once she shifts and pulls back. What exactly the logic was to define what got phased back with her, and what stayed lodged inside of me - that was a question I didn't know the answer to. But there was an answer, certainly.
It wasn't just pure pain that I was feeling now, it was the mix of the other sensations that was throwing me off the most. The faint feeling of static and fuzz spreading across my body, the sudden feeling of emptiness as my limbs simply stopped responding to me.
As an experiment, I try to shift into my shadow state. Nothing falls out the bottom of my smoke cloud, and when I reform my body makes its protests known at the idea of the shadow state trying to jiggle everything back into place again. It makes sense, I suppose. It's internal now. No different from the food in my stomach, as far as power interactions go.
I send my ash clone after Sophia again as she struggles to retrieve a rucksack from a hollowed-out section near the top of a nearby pillar. She pulls it away, rummages inside, but instead of prioritising her crossbow or ammunition - the first thing she pulls out is her Wards helmet.
I watch with some curiousity as she fits it on, looks down at the floor, takes three steps to the left and phases through the floor - rucksack and all.
"It's in the helmet." I make an 'o' of understanding. "She can see electricity with it. That makes-" my vision spins.
FAILURE
"-makes a lot of sense." I finish.
I take a moment to relish the feeling of my body feeling 'right' again. I think I would actually have preferred it if she had just ripped out my heart. I was used to violent and sudden deaths by now. The unpleasant sensation of my body telling me that something was very, very wrong but unable to truly highlight what it was, followed by the slow, creeping shutdown as things just stopped responding to my will - that was unsettling. And that said a lot, coming from me.
Although, now that I was out of the simulation - what I found most annoying was how quickly the fight had switched from a steady, convincing victory to a painful, drawn-out defeat in the span of a second. Oh, it was easy to see why it wasn't part of her usual repertoire. The shock and blood loss alone would probably have knocked her out, if not outright killed her, not too long after I had perished. Unless she limited it to her fingers, it was basically a suicide technique with catastrophic consequences if she didn't immediately win with it - and certainly not anything the real Sophia would be willing to use in standard combat.
The only question was why she didn't try to do the same with a fist through the brain. Objectively, it didn't feel that different. My power didn't work in the same way, but if I based it off of her previous demonstrations - perhaps it was as much about denying secondary options for her power as anything else.
On the face of it, she hadn't needed to commit her entire arm to the attack like that - did that mean that it was a requirement? That her power would have forcibly recreated the arm in another position in the cloud if it had the option? It ejected her out of walls safely, or at least, without turning her into soup - so that implied a certain level of autonomy in resolving collisions that was left up to the power. If she tried to aim for the head of a struggling target, perhaps it would simply turn the offending limb physical outside of the skull a few inches to the left. That would explain why she had committed so hard to attacking me centre-mass, why she had needed to so carefully guide the bolt into the wall - and my head - as part of her demonstration. Because her power would avoid the interaction if she gave it the option.
That theory sounded valid. And it helped me... not at all. There wasn't an easy way to stop her once she decided to use that attack, I didn't have ranged options - and it would still be her absolute last resort anyway.
Actually, that was a lie. I did have ranged options. I could just get her into the same position, wait for her to falter again - and then set my ash clone on her until she keels over. I can sit at the back and throw rocks or something.
Or just grab her weapon, her tinkertech bolts and start shooting or stabbing. Yes. That was a real plan. Hell, I should have done that the first time. Not that I really blame myself, I was pretty confident in victory at the time - trying to get too fancy was a likely way to lose, but with the benefit of hindsight it would have been a good idea. Her crossbow wasn't anything special, there was no reason that my power might force it to misfire like all of the guns. She still couldn't outrun me, and she still couldn't adjust her strategy to mine without the CONT modifier. I just had to mirror my exact strategy up until the point where she started to get desperate - and then play it safe and slow. If the fight went on long enough, she would get tired faster than me - that would give me enough of an opening to get away and ahead of her, loot her supplies while she was fending off my ash clone and then chase her down when she runs.
Reality slowly filters back into my eyes. A lengthy cooldown timer appearing next to Sophia as I pretend that I wasn't staring.
Overall, that was fine. It wasn't an unreasonable challenge, if only because Sophia's personality limited her most powerful options. This result wasn't as bad as I had feared, although not quite as good as I had hoped either. I could easily have gotten stuck trying to navigate the opening moves - if Sophia's response had been different to the minute changes that I had undoubtedly made in my movements, that might have screwed up everything. My entire plan relied on her attacking in the same way, from the same direction and then retreating towards the same spot - and honestly, I was pretty lucky that nothing had changed on that front between attempts.
If anything, it highlighted the power of the CONT modifier. This Sophia felt weak. Dumb. Even though, objectively, she wasn't any worse off than most of my usual opponents - I'd been squaring off against someone that knew my tricks inside and out for long enough that starting from a blank slate that wanted to try the most obvious, lowest-risk tactic had become easy. The other Sophia would have recognised my plan, strategised around stopping me from gathering information between rounds - forced me to stick close to her because she would rather swallow her pride and hide than let me get an advantage.
Kind of wish the other challenges talked to me now. Maybe some of them do, but certainly none quite so early and enthusiastically as Sophia's. Was something different about her? Or her power? The connection between the two of them? Or was it just a coincidence? I mull over the likely options, while keeping half an ear out as Sophia and Emma huddle over a phone together - something apparently attracting both of their attention. I catch a glimpse of a headline and a warning, and pull my own phone out to get straight to the source. PHO.
PHO was always the source.
"Is that something we should be worried about?" Emma murmurs in a stage whisper.
Madison peers over their shoulder. "Ooh, anything exci- oh. Who cares about the gangs fighting among themselves? Lame."
"Some of us have a mild interest in things that might set the entire city on fire." Sophia snarks. "But, you're also right. It's just a brawl between criminals so far. Hopefully, they all kill each other."
"But the heroes are there, right? If it all gets out of control, well - we could delay this another day if we really needed to..." It was interesting how much of a difference simply knowing that Sophia was a Cape and that Emma knew about it made to my perspective here. Without those facts, I'd just assume that Emma was spooked by a potential threat to herself - but now, it was obvious that she was offering Sophia an excuse to abandon her commitments in her civilian identity to go and fight without arousing suspicion.
But that wasn't how things worked. Maybe that was how Sophia wished that they worked, and certainly, that could very well be how things worked for her secret night-time excursions - but the Wards couldn't simply deploy themselves like a vigilante or independant hero group could. Making a decision to call up the Wards to a Cape fight wasn't one that was taken lightly. A sign of desperation, or of a threat that wasn't deemed overly dangerous. I was somewhat doubtful that Sophia would be summoned in any capacity for this... whatever it was.
I find the thread on PHO. An Empire attack on two sides of the ABB territory. A few storehouses on fire, a few pictures of dead gang members being added to the thread before swiftly being deleted by the mods - and a brief clip of a giant rage dragon barrelling down the street in pursuit of Stormtiger and Rune retreating at their top speed.
I flick through the thread. Honestly, this makes sense. Lung was just one guy right now. Losing his only other Cape in Oni Lee had hurt him to the point where the Empire smelt weakness, at least enough to score a minor victory - I had no doubt that they had little interest in actually trying to kill the man. The Protectorate couldn't beat him, and the Empire would be putting all of their eggs into the Purity basket in any fight - and she'd already failed to kill him once before.
I was pretty confident in that assessment, the Empire and ABB were usually fairly predictable when it came to engagements like these. But I wasn't 100% sure. And Sophia wasn't either, if the intense look in her eyes as she scrolls through the thread herself is any indication.
Now, if Sophia wasn't here - I'd certainly be able to entertain myself dicking down Emma and Madison together, and that certainly had its own appeal... but fundamentally, I could do that at any time. This weekend was supposed to be about Sophia. I couldn't just let her run off, get in trouble for doing so and then probably not see her until I was back in Winslow. I wanted to be there just as much as she did, but I needed to be realistic. The fight was over. Lung was never going to catch Rune, the PRT would issue the rest of the Empire an ultimatum to back down or fight them - and the Empire would back down, having already achieved what they wanted. The PRT wouldn't fight Lung, so he'd start to shrink back down and eventually go to ground to avoid an ambush from a heavy-hitter taking him out. The odds were good that neither of us would make it there in time to do anything.
Sophia probably knew that too, but just needed that fact framed in the right way. A gentle light shone on the facts that lined up with her worldview nicely.
In other words, shitting on the heroes.
"The heroes won't even try to start a fight, given the situation." I respond to Emma, gesturing at my phone as they turn to me. "It's in the best interest of everyone to go home without fighting once the heroes show up in enough force. The heroes don't want collateral damage, the gangs don't want to weaken themselves compared to the other gang. Nobody's expecting an actual fight. Otherwise, they would have dropped Dauntless on the Empire right from the outset and called up the Wards for support, the fact that neither of those two are around means that they just plan to sit around and look good for the cameras."
Sophia snorts. "Sounds about right." She glances at Emma, and her expression loses a bit of its restrained tension. "Guess if it becomes serious enough, we'll hear some more about it. If not, it's a fancy photo op while the Nazi's walk over the city like it's theirs. Either way, nothing we need to care about right now."
Emma hums a note of assent, and doesn't push the point any further - returning to her previous conversation with Madison as if no time had passed at all.
Sophia was still following the news on her phone, but judging by the growing lack of derision on her face - my words had been completely prophetic in this case. By the time the bus has stopped three more times, Sophia has long since put her phone back into her pocket in disgust.
I don't know every detail about Sophia's situation with the PRT, but I'll admit that I'm glad to see the relationship between the two is obviously poor. One day, when I'm more established as a hero - it will just make it easier to lure her into my team in the future. Once I was at a level where I could handle the natural consequences of that, at least. I needed to be friendly and stay friendly with the PRT right now, so Shadow Stalker's partnership with me would have to remain an off-the-books affair.
Movement stirs me from my thoughts. "Stop gawking, loser. We're going." Sophia interrupts me as the three girls stand up as the bus pulls up to our apparent destination. "Actually, nevermind. You can stay right there. We might come and fetch you in a few hours."
"You would miss me too much if you left me behind." I drawl. "But it's fine. I won't force you to admit the truth."
"There's no truth to admit." Sophia snorts. "And please. As if you could force me to do anything."
I let the pause hang for a moment. "Right." I drag out the word as I follow in Madison's footsteps as she makes her way down the near-empty bus. "I'm sure if I tried anything weird like that, you would jump at the chance to beat me up. And that would only ever go one way." I send a gaze backwards over my shoulder to take in Sophia's murderous expression.
Sophia falls in behind me, leaning forward with a hiss. "Listen, if I really wanted to-" Her eyes flicker over to the oblivious Emma behind us. "-whatever. Just keep walking, do you plan on keeping us waiting here all day? What are you even doing?"
"Too busy quaking in fear at your intimidating presence." I respond drily, letting the sarcasm do all of the work for me. I was absolutely sure that being on the losing end of our little scuffle yesterday was eating away at her, but for now - she was telling herself that it was fine because she was holding back. Because she was secretly a Cape, and I wasn't. Supposedly.
I'm saved from another attempted kick from behind as Emma glomps Sophia from behind, driving both of us forward. "That's enough of that!" She breaks us up, apologising to the bus driver for the delay as we get insistently pushed past. "I really think you two could be friends if you stopped being so prickly to each other." She directs us towards Madison, who's already standing in front of our apparent destination across the street.
"It's just restrained sexual tension." I suggest, causing a random civilian walking past us to do a double-take.
"You could cut it with a knife." Madison nods in agreement as we catch up with her.
"It is nothing like that." Sophia lies effortlessly. "And Emma, you are my best friend - but you are both obviously biased and completely incapable of judging the situation anyway. I just don't know what I did wrong to deserve friends with such bad taste. One person having a complete disaster of a love life I could understand, but Madison - you of all people I would expect to know better." Sophia waves a hand in the air around her. "Let alone attempt to drag me down with you as well! What is it, let's gang up on Sophia day? Week?"
"Only because of how easy it is to get under your skin about it. Who would have guessed you would get so sensitive over something so trivial?" Madison smirks at her. "I mean, nobody's saying you have to become his bride or anything - but what's the harm in trying him out? It's not like anyone would ever believe him even if he did try and tell people, and neither of us would be in any position to judge if you wanted to try a... small sample of the goods-"
"You're way too into this." Sophia accuses. "What's your angle here? Don't lie to me, I know that look."
Madison whistles, entirely failing to sound innocent. "Just thinking about the potential girl-talk we could have later if you weren't the odd-one out. We could compare notes. And, hah, if we're all in the same boat, then does it open up some potential for some fun and games to do as a group later-"
"Madison!" Emma's gasp is one of delighted, scandalised shock.Sophia fares no better, taking a moment to reboot after processing the shameless statement.
"Somehow, you're coming off as more perverted than him." Sophia glares at me. "He's probably dreaming of exactly the same thing, but at least he's got the common sense to keep it to himself."
"Who needs a filter around best friends?" Madison responds without a trace of shame.
"You, apparently." Sophia sounds aggrieved. "Let's just get inside already. If nothing else, you'll have to tone your nonsense down in there if you don't want to get kicked out."
I flick my eyes ahead, a series of challenge boxes for regular civilians and staff popping up into my vision. "We'll see about that."
Sophia's suspicious look is interrupted by Madison half-dragging her deeper into the store.
"I think they have rooms at the back to try clothes on, but they're mostly split up by gender." Emma hums. "We need you to help judge the outfits, but we might have to settle for a photo review or three for this store - unless there's nobody around to complain about an extra guy poking his head around the curtain."
Perfect. "I'll come with you. Worst case scenario, I sweet-talk the supervisor to let it slide this one time."
"That would be quite the feat." Emma drawls. "Worst case scenario, we group up on the girls side and send you the photos - but it would be nice to see things up-close before we buy them. Just for a second opinion, of course. I'll see if there's anything cute for me along the way as well."
The opinion wasn't really what mattered, they were just here to show off and look good doing it. I was here as both moral support and an extra pair of hands, a designation that is confirmed when the first bags are thrust into my hands without a blip of communication required.
Usually, this wouldn't be my kind of thing at all - but the three of them seem to be enjoying themselves and it lines up with my own plans enough for me to not complain. Sophia was just as stuck here as I was, and without this activity on the agenda - this would probably have been a single-night affair rather than something that took over the entire extended weekend. That meant more attempts on Sophia, and that could never be considered a waste. Not when it was so hard to find and track down Capes without being really, really obvious about it. It wasn't like you could just download a patrol schedule.
No. There were two parts to it. You had to wait for the news of a sighting or fight to break out. And then you had to be there. It didn't matter if I found out that Armsmaster had an epic standoff with Krieg and Hookwolf. I couldn't teleport. Even my speed-state would take at least twenty minutes to reach Empire territory, Cape fights are usually over in mere minutes - and when you factor in the time it takes for the confrontation to land on PHO, it's just impossible to catch events like that live without already being somewhere nearby. Especially if I wanted to stay incognito. An excuse for my civilian identity to disappear in the chaos, a way to grab my usual costume or some other disguise and then a way to get back again without causing a scene... it just added up. Being a shameless villain or someone that didn't care about my identity at all might have been easier in the long run. Maybe if I hadn't accidentally turned my family into people I actually liked along the way, that would have been more of an option for me.
Alas. Such was life. It was a similar story with patrols, unless I wanted to walk up and down the Boardwalk all day - I was probably just going to miss the heroes when they showed up. There'd be other opportunities, but it was still a bit frustrating.
Still. It wasn't like I wasn't enjoying some 'downtime'. Fighting every Cape I could find on cooldown like a maniac was certainly the best way to get stronger, but there's a certain need to shore up my mental resolve and willpower before committing to several hours of constant battle, defeats and painful deaths. Taking some time out with some attractive girls doing their absolute best to flaunt it? That was a great way to remind me what I was doing all of this for.
I take a moment to split off from Emma, approaching the lone staff worker monitoring the area with a smile on my face.
This should be quick.
---
The three girls emerge from behind the curtain.
Scratch Sophia from that last bit. She was definitely not doing it to get a reaction out of me. "What?" She half-snarls at me as I glance over her first, daring me to make a negative comment. Or a positive one. Some kind of punk-rebel outfit that oddly suited her. "Go on, out with it. We can't wait for you to start laughing."
I raise my hands into the air. "Why would I laugh? You look good."
"Told you." Emma smirks at Sophia. "You should trust me with these things."
"Excuse me if I don't want to take the word of the worst person I know." Sophia dismisses her. "If he likes them, they can stay here."
"Except we like it too. That means everyone thinks it looks good on you." Emma argues.
"Including the pervert." Sophia deadpans.
"I thought you said that you weren't going to let his preferences dictate what you picked?" Emma blinks up at Sophia innocently.
The Ward splutters at that. "Whatever. I don't even care about any of this stuff anyway." She leans against the wall. "You were the ones that actually wanted to come out here, why don't you focus on yourselves?"
Madison and Emma share a smug look. I let out a low whistle at the ease with which they puncture holes in Sophia's arguments. And at the fact that Sophia let them - she wasn't dumb enough to somehow not notice the blatant coercion and manipulation, but evidently trusted the pair enough to just take the social defeat with some small amount of grace rather than her usual method of threatening violence.
"I think this one is a winner." Emma shows mercy, striking a pose as the summer dress settles around her.
"Definitely your colour." Madison agrees.
"Isn't it exactly the same as the last one?" Sophia doesn't.
"They are pretty similar." Emma concedes. "But look, the other one was more flowy. This one is tighter, it hugs the waist."
Anything that might have been said in response to that is cut off as a familiar voice speaks over the intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen!"
"What the hell?" Emma staggers as the floor shifts minutely before settling again, a flashing blue panel appearing in the middle of the doorway leading back to the main store.
"You cannot be fucking serious." Sophia swears.
A distant roar accompanies the shaking of the store around us as a notification buzzes on my phone. I look down at it.
>Uber & Leet just went live!
The voice echoes throughout the building and beyond again. "Thank you all for waiting. Welcome, one and all, to a very special treat! The dynamic duo, Uber and Leet, are proud to present today's challenge - a fiendish maze in the heart of Brockton Bay!" Their theme tune plays momentarily before the voice resumes speaking. "But not just any maze, no! This one is a real mind-bender. In every room and every doorway, all across this mall - you'll find glowing panels that will teleport you to a new destination. You might think that you were moments from stepping outside, only to find yourself admiring the view from the rooftop! The only way out? Find your way to centre-stage and disable the maze via the big red button at its heart. The warp pads have now been engaged, and the challenge begins!"
The intercom cuts out.
Then back in, Leet's excitable voice sounding a little sheepish. "And there's a cash prize for the winner. Forgot to mention that." It cuts out again.
"A villain attack? Here?" Madison seems a little white-faced.
"Uber and Leet are barely villains, to be honest." I attempt to defend them.
"Only because of their incompetence." Sophia growls. "Just wait for the whole thing to blow up in their faces again."
I can't entirely refute that, but I got the sense that explaining to her how failing made the entire viewing experience better would be wasted effort. Nor would I be particularly convincing doing so with this grin on my face. This was great. This was better than great. Awesome. Not only were Uber and Leet here as potential challenge targets, but I'd ended up involved in one of their videos! I'd been trying to do that ever since their debut.
Sure, one random guy out of a few hundred or thousand wasn't very 'involved' - but that only applied long enough for me to disguise myself and let Void Cowboy out to play.
"I guess they mean this thing." Madison murmurs, face regaining a bit of colour as things fail to start exploding around us. She nudges the edge of the large blue tile blocking the exit.
"So, do we just-" Emma gingerly pokes her toe onto the flashing blue tile. Then disappears in a flash of light.
"Emma! Don't-" Madison swears and immediately runs after her. Another flash of light.
I look at Sophia.
"I'm not stepping into that." Sophia tells me bluntly. "Don't be stupid. We have no idea if it does what he says it does or not."
"Shouldn't you be worried about your friend?" I peer at the panel. No obvious sign of a theme or any exposed compartments. We wouldn't have missed this on the way in, with the way it dominates so much of the floor. A holographic display? Or had the pads themselves been teleported here once the action had started? Both of our phones buzz in sync, our group chat lighting up with messages.
Emma: We're fine. Seems safe enough.
Madison: Can't go back the same way you came, I tried to step back onto the nearest pad and ended up on the ground floor of the café next door. Some people here have broken a window and are just walking out.
Sophia shoves me forward, and I'm swept away in a flicker of light - instantly reappearing in what I would guess were the men's toilets.
Well. Rude. But that was good of her. I needed an excuse to get away from everyone.
Madison: Do you think we can just keep the clothes we took? Nobody could really blame us for not running back into a villain attack.
Emma: Priorities, Madison.
Sophia: Just leave. The panel changed after you guys left, so I might be a while. We'll catch up later.
Emma: I left my bag in the stall, if you want anything in it.
Madison: I mean, they have insurance - right?
Greg: Ended up somewhere completely different. I'll catch up with you guys later.
I avoid the nearest panel, a pulsing tile guarding the exit - and instead veer towards the faint glow from the disabled cubicle in the back of the room. I didn't want to take the same path that Emma and Madison had taken, I needed to get away from everyone and take a moment to transform myself into Void Cowboy. The cubicle is locked, but I simply phase through - my shadowy form meeting the terrified eyes of a man frozen on the toilet next to his wheelchair, before I'm whisked away again.
Dangerous. I don't think he could really have made out any details though, I'd still been in the shadow state by the time I'd hit the warp pad - and that was enough to make me unidentifiable.
Back in the clothing store. Bingo.
Despite the suddenness of the 'attack', the store is pretty much deserted already. A small trickle of people were crowded around the elevator, which apparently didn't count as a 'door' - but with a few exceptions of excitable people teleporting in and racing to pads at random, most people seemed to be avoiding the panels entirely and leaving the buildings via smashed windows instead.
Unbelievable. This was probably the most exciting thing to happen to them in years. Did they even have any idea how lucky they were to be part of an Uber and Leet video? These things went viral.
Well. Maybe not this one. It would take an impressive amount of editing to glaze over the fact that the majority of the people that were supposed to be 'trapped' had found a way to effortlessly escape in the first two minutes - to the extent that the streets outside were practically clogged with people leaving, and a fair few fighting the flow of traffic as they realise the potential to loot their store of choice blind.
That was typical Leet. Fully functional local teleporting system to trap all of the doors. Forget that windows exist. The livestream chat was probably roasting him right now, but I didn't have the luxury of wasting time joining them.
I race around the floor, trying to stay discrete and not like a blatant robber. Scarf. Baseball cap. New hoodie. A pair of loose trousers that could only be salvaged by a belt. I sweep them all from the shelves in record time. I was too far away to get my 'standard' patrol costume, but until Parian was done - I wasn't exactly missing much apart from a more recognisable look. All I really needed was to disguise my face and get out of the clothes I got here in - and also make a note to come back here and get rid of the security camera footage. No sense in relying on the common sense of whatever schmuck got left reviewing the footage later to both not out me and also not accuse me of robbery.
New costume in hand, I dip away from the crowd to find another panel. The other two girls went straight to the ground floor by presumably taking the one I had come here in again, so perhaps... I sprint into the girl's toilets. Another flash of light. Top floor. I jump on the nearest panel. Another flash. Kitchen. Again. Flash. Bottom floor. Too many cameras. Jump. Flash. Grocery store. Too busy. I have to explore a bit to find an employee entrance that other people hadn't seemed to be using yet. I jump onto it. Another flash.
I look around. Back in the changing rooms, right where I started. That would do. Most of panels must just form a circuit around a certain set of buildings, with one or two points that eventually just throw you into a hub of panels to navigate around. Of the few shops that I recognised on the way around, they were all very close to this building. If they had the range to throw you across the entire mall in one shot, Leet would have done that just to show off the scale of the tech - but that wasn't important right now. This was a great place to get changed. No cameras inside here, for obvious reasons. I duck inside the nearest cubicle.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Sophia had thought the same thing. Sophia freezes under my gaze, a simple mask sitting in the bench next to her, a disassembled crossbow just on top of it and the lower half of her costume halfway pulled up her legs. We stare at each for a beat. Then two.
I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. "You really just carry all of that around with you all the time?"
For a moment, Sophia seems to contemplate lying. The moment passes. Sophia knows I'm a Cape geek. She grits her teeth. "Of fucking course I'm this unlucky. Listen to me-"
"Challenge." I quietly hiss the word out before she can continue the tirade. Not just to get my next attempt in, not just because she would probably be a lot more understanding after I won - but because I needed time. Time to think. Time to breathe. Time to plan out what the hell I was going to say once I was done here.
Backstep. Go up one floor. My legs practically move on their own this time, my mind in another place entirely.
I wasn't stupid. It had been obvious, right from the moment I got shoved, that Sophia was planning to confront Uber and Leet. I had assumed that would take the form of linking up with the PRT and getting her costume from them, or perhaps sneaking away to some other stash nearby and handling that herself. I don't know what the usual procedure is for a Ward getting called up to a fight, or what the standard procedure is when they find themselves on the scene in their civilian identity - but I'm sure that just pulling her own costume out of a hat and getting ready to charge into battle wasn't something that they were ever expected to do.
And yes, this was Sophia. I never expected her to just meekly start following rules and regulations, I never expected her to meekly run and hide and eventually link up with the PRT once the adults had reached the scene. That would have been delusional.
But I hadn't expected for her to have everything she needed right there and then, let alone decide to get changed right where I had left her.
Did she really just have a cut-down variant of her entire outfit just sitting in her bag? Weapon included? What if she got searched? What if someone stole her bag? I couldn't be the only one who saw all the reasons that it might be a bad idea, right? I already knew that she was a battle-junkie with a hair-trigger, but there had to be limits to it. How did all of that even fit-?
Now that I think about it, that must have been what Emma's random comment about her bag was about. Sophia didn't have her costume. Emma had it instead. Somehow, that seemed worse. I shake my head, ascending another floor. The bolt falls short and falters against my shield again as the same combo from last time throws off her timing.
Sophia leaps out the window. Once again, I follow just behind her - but not too close. Things seemed to work out great last time, so I just retrace my steps as best as I can - narrowly avoiding a perfect headshot as my speed-state kicks in. Point. Need to watch out for her aim, just because I made it last time - doesn't mean that I'm guaranteed to not get shot this time around.
I land in the multi-storey carpark ahead of Sophia once again, an exact mirror of last time - Sophia gliding down to meet me, seamlessly reforming out of shadow with a steady confidence that I knew wouldn't last if I did this right.
And I can do it right. Compared to most of my fights with Sophia, I had every advantage. Every mistake against her had been beaten into my body and bones with gleeful enthusiasm. I knew exactly how dangerous she was, I wouldn't underestimate her skill - and now that I knew that her desperation move was not to risk transporting herself through electricity, but to mutually destroy our bodies - I knew how to stop her from snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
Easier said than done, because aside from the initial charge to knock away her weapon - the fight can't be copied from last time so effortlessly. I can attempt the same ideas and strategies, but we both land hits on the other that we didn't last time. We both dodge differently, block differently, abuse terrain differently. Last time, I'd been able to go all-out hunting for the victory, but I couldn't be sure when she would lose hope of a clean victory or when she would see no hope of winning or escaping in a standard fashion - which meant I couldn't just blindly enter close-quarters without fear. Not now that I knew that an attempt to grapple her could genuinely end in death for both of us if she forced the issue.
So I have to exhaust her instead. It takes longer than last time, but there's no threat of a TIME modifier over my head to stop me or force me to adopt a more aggressive stance. I couldn't take the risk. I needed this win. I needed Sophia to like me enough that, at the very least she wouldn't-
I pause. Mentally, at least. Physically, I was still trying to gauge her eyes out while she did her best to break my arm while my ash clone kicked her in the stomach. Small details.
But... should I really be worried? About Sophia? The only concern about her knowing my identity was her handing it off to the PRT, but realistically - was that ever going to happen? On the flip side, it would be kind of cool for someone to be in on the secret. Her relationship with 'Greg' would improve as well. We could cooperate better, cover for each other if our civilian identities were under threat, talk about our other lives without needing to wait for slow responses on our other PHO accounts... It wasn't all bad. In fact, most of it was good - as long as I could trust her not to spill the beans to someone else.
And I think I did trust her. Hell, I think I would trust her enough to do that even without the extra boost from winning here.
The realisation, and the accompanying surge of resolve to do something that was probably quite stupid, comes alongside an eruption of smog from Sophia. Except this time, the fog rushes towards me - her body reforming from the waist-up, the cloud still filling my vision and passing through me, a faint outline of her own arm holding her other arm in place-
"No you don't!" I shift into shadow myself, rushing backwards as my ash clone finishes reforming and attempts to punch her in the face - with its arm getting nearly torn off an instant later to disperse it. Heh. That was my trickiest power to work out in a situation like this. Nobody ever seemed to work it out the first time they fought it. It just wasn't intuitive, far easier to assume that I could always regenerate it at will.
We circle each other warily. One step matched with another.
And then I step backwards, the distance between us doubling, tripling in an instant thanks to a twist of warped space. And I climb up the pillar behind me. Up to the stash where her bolts and equipment could be found. She twigs my motive a second too late, momentary indecisiveness - to attack me or use the distance to flee - costing her a precious second. She opts to attack, but it's already too slow - by the time she dismisses my ash-clone again - I have the bag. This time, she's the one lunging at me - she knows that I can outrun her, she knows that I can follow her through any walls she runs through. And now, she knows that I have the tools to break her out of her shadow state even if she can keep my ash-clone out of the picture. She needs to kill me now, before I can put the tools in the bag to use.
A grasping tendril of smoke lunges for the bag, a hand containing a handful of bolts reappearing a moment later as my clone hammers down on the arm just as I swing up - the limb snapping in half like a twig, pressured in directions it was never supposed to handle - and the bolts scatter limply to the floor as her hand goes loose. She doesn't give up, scattering into her shadow state again to regather the bolts with her other hand - but she hasn't dismissed my ash clone yet. It may not have any real durability to speak of, but it hits just as hard as me. Another hammer blow hits her from behind, and her last, desperate lunge - an attempt to phase a bolt directly into my neck - fails to get any results as I turn to shadow myself, then land a clean kick to her head as she falls, overextended.
Slow. Just like last time. It almost feels strange landing a hit like that after fighting with the seemingly invincible other versions of Sophia, but all of my old fights with her had a strict time-limit - and even in real life, they were never exhausting to this extent. In some ways, it was good to know that she had real limits. Limits that I could reach, and exceed.
My ash clone is dispersed with a kick from the ground, the most effective shut-off of the power so far thanks to her temporarily ignoring it - it would stay down for thirty-seconds or so, but it was too late for that to matter now. Somehow ironic, that she manages to discover the weakness of the power right as she loses.
I reach into the bag, testing one bolt after another. After a few tests, I work out the mechanics behind the first few 'special' bolts held in their own compartment. A brief click of a hidden button at the end of the shaft to prime them, and then a pressure sensor at the opposite end to activate. I take a moment to identify the most likely to be the taser-lite variant that she's used against me before, then slam it into centre mass of the girl below me.
She turns to smoke, and goes through the floor. And then emerges, a half-second later - forced back into physical form, the crack of electricity and the stench of burned flesh highlighting the exact reason that she'd been so reluctant to do that before. It was just the wrong type of building. At least in houses and offices, you could take a good guess about where cables should be. The odds were good that you would avoid them even if you just guessed. But in an area like this, there were powerful lights all over the floor and ceiling. Taking a blind leap was dangerous, and I had her helmet that she'd used to grant herself that confidence last time.
No messing around. I stab her in the throat with a normal bolt, getting a weak, twitchy gurgle in response - no doubt still recovering from the effects of phasing into a cable.
SUCCESS
Reward: Sophia Hess+
As expected. Reality rushes back in.
Time to be stupid.
My victory doesn't seem to have interrupted her speech, her tirade of threats and intimidation continues. "-but you're in for a world of shit with not only me, but the entire fucking PRT if you even dream about-" Her jaw turns slack as I dissolve my arm into smoke in front of her. She looks down at the bundle of clothes that I'm carrying, taking it in for the first time. "That's-"
"We can talk about it later." I agree cheerfully. "Got some ass to kick first, right?"
And with that, I start tossing my old clothes into the corner and slip into my newly-looted outfit. Slightly uncomfortable, I must have missed a few labels - but no harm done. I looked different enough to my civilian self, and that was all that really mattered. Hell, some Capes would probably have satisfied themselves with just the scarf and the helmet - but if I was going to get outed by a wannabe internet sleuth, I'd at least make sure it was someone that hacked in-store footage rather than some random pointing out that I was in the background of some kids photo thirty minutes ago and matching it with a video of Void Cowboy in action based only on my clothes.
All the while, Sophia stares at me - a blank expression of incomprehension on her face.
"Going to stare all day?" I raise an eyebrow at her. "You'll make me blush."
"I fucking knew it." Sophia recovers from her shock. "Nobody changes that much that quickly. Nobody! You fucking triggered. Of course, you did."
"I could have changed naturally." I defend my old-self. "With some encouragement, maybe."
"Bullshit."
I reluctantly concede the point. "Maybe."
She shakes her head, a keening sound of frustration escaping her throat. "I thought it might be you the other day. The same shitty attitude. The same garbage jokes. Similar voice and build. I just decided it couldn't be you because you were so, fucking, stupid." Sophia rants. "Gotta admit, pretending to be retarded actually worked-"
"What do you mean pretending to be retarded?" I protest. "We're supposed to be on the same team here, and all you're doing is insulting me."
"You're actually serious." Sophia looks pained. "I can't believe that I actually thought that Void was somewhat competent."
"Void Cowboy." I correct. In my personal opinion, such insults were uncalled for. "You know what? Fuck you. I'm going to go and beat up Leet and Uber while you're stuck here trying to build your shitty lego crossbow." I flip her off.
She flips me off back. A return to normalcy. Despite my taunt, or perhaps because of it, Sophia's ready even before I am - and apparently content to shelve the accusations and arguments for a later date, now that a fight was in the cards. Oddly enough, she seems content to wait for me - rather than rushing off on her own immediately.
"Hey." She starts, a minute shift in her voice almost making her sound awkward.
"Hm?" The hoodie flies over my head, and I wrangle with the scarf to settle it around most of my face. "What's up?"
"Why did you out yourself? You could have played it off, probably." Sophia probes. "It's just stupid. What's the benefit for you? People die from doing shit like that."
"I mean, it stopped us from arguing - didn't it?" That was true. But I was already very sure that she wasn't the kind of person to betray that trust, and I was only a few minutes away from her challenge being up and therefore becoming even more secure in that feeling. "I mean, I didn't mean to jump in on you like that - I was just running around looking for places without people or cameras to put this crap on - but it was pretty obvious from one glance that you were Shadow Stalker, even in the dollar-store costume you have there. And, I mean - we're cool. Right? I know we've been fucking with each other as Greg and Sophia lately, but I figure we've got a pretty good vibe with each other as Void Cowboy and Shadow Stalker. Why not just rip the band-aid off and let things shake out?"
"I guess it's marginally better than you fucking it up randomly because you can't keep my identity a secret without motivation." Sophia scowls.
"Hey, I kept my identity secret just fine from all of you." At least judge me on things I've actually done wrong.
"By acting exactly the same in-costume and out." She glares at me as I murmur 'says you' under my breath. Whoops, not quiet enough. "I can't believe nobody else pieced it together before. There's nobody else in the school who could possibly be that-" She pauses. "-has anyone else figured it out before?"
"Hm? Oh, no. Not really." I wiggle my hand in the air.
"What do you mean, not really? It's a yes or no question." Sophia stares at me as I try and fix the scarf in place over most of my facial features without it potentially falling down. More knots required.
"I mean, I kind of told Taylor my PHO username ages ago - before I spilled the beans to everyone that I was a Cape." I tell her in a stage whisper.
"You fucking idiot." There's a sense of morbid amazement in her voice, as if she was dumbfounded at what she was hearing.
"What? No, we were getting kinda close at the time - I figured, hey - she usually just ignores any invitation I send her, let's try and link up outside of school. Shoot my shot. And then she completely ghosted me. Online, I mean - we were still buddies in real life." I make a cutting gesture through the air. "Never ever came back to me, never mentioned it again - even after my big reveal a few days later. Never mentioned it in real life, even before her little breakdown. Straight in the spam like all the other game invites, I guess."
"Unbelievable." Sophia seems to have momentarily forgotten about the villain attack.
It's nice to see a sympathetic soul exists in the world. "I know, I think girls just like to be difficult sometimes. I would have been perfectly happy with a polite refusal and a statement that she wasn't really into online stuff, but completely ignoring a guy like that? I thought she was better than that, really." I shake my head to express my disappointment. "We were basically besties at the time as well."
"I didn't mean her. You mean to tell me-" Sophia leans in. "-that your secret identity may or may not be known to the girl you had crying and screaming at you just the other day? That your secret identity is in the hands of someone who genuinely hates you right now?"
"You can make anything sound bad if you frame it like that." I wave her off. "I mean, it's Taylor." And halfway-magically controlled to be mine. It sounded crazy to Sophia for obvious reasons, but I knew that Taylor wasn't over me. Couldn't get over me. I mean, that logic hadn't applied at the time - but Taylor throwing a fit over Emma to the extent that she had was a little unexpected, so things sounded worse than they really were. "She's not even really that angry at me, it's just easier to shout at me than fix the whole thing with between her and Emma. And like I said, she completely ignored it so it isn't even an issue anyway. I wasn't even really that upset about it, I mean - complete technophobe that she is, I don't know what I was expecting. Did you know she didn't even have a mobile phone until last month?"
Sophia stares at me as if I had just revealed that I was an alien from outer space.
Don't get me wrong. I get why she's in disbelief. It wasn't too smart to throw my identity around, but if I had to draw up a shortlist of people I honestly felt I could trust with it - Sophia and Taylor would both stand at the top of it. Sophia wasn't the kind of person to weaponise it against someone, not as a black teen living next to the heart of the Empire - and, try as she might to deny it, she liked me. She liked our interactions as Void and Shadow Stalker. She liked what we were doing for the city. She just wasn't the type of person to go behind my back with something like this. I wasn't going to lose sleep at night knowing that those two knew who I was. They were known quantities. It was the people further away, out of my area of influence, that were the worry. Thinkers. Precogs. Criminals, without the morals that these two had.
That was why it wasn't an issue to me.
And seeing Sophia's brain break in real time as she tried to process that the cool, suave Void Cowboy was also the cool, suave Greg Veder was pretty funny too.
"That's dumb. And I mean you, not her. Everything about what you just said-" Sophia turns away, newly secured mask hiding her expression. "-no. I don't even know what I expected, it all starts to make sense now that I know it's you. So much just clicks together."
"You know, I can do this too." I wave a hand in the air. "Oh no, how could I not see this before? The violent, power-obsessed Shadow Stalker is secretly the violent, power-obsessed Sophia! I can't believe the person who mopes about predator and prey all day like an edgelord in school, is actually an edgelord out of school as well! It's all so clear now! I knew that there couldn't be two people in the world that choose violence as their first, second and third solution to all problems. How could I not have seen it?"
"Fuck off." Predictably, Sophia can't take what she dishes out. "In case you've forgotten, we have stuff to do right now."
"Don't pin this on me, the first thing I said was 'Hey, let's talk about this later.' You were the one who couldn't stop talking about it." A growl emerges from her throat. I roll my eyes and acquiesce. "We do appear to be the only heroes on the scene right now." I agree. "So. Are we cool? With all of this? Or is there going to be a problem?" There wouldn't be, but the question needed to be asked.
Sophia exhales slowly. "We're cool. I'm still pissed off at you, but we'll hash it out later. There's a lot to say. But not now."
"Uber and Leet first." I nod.
"Uber and Leet first." She agrees. "I got a callout to respond to this, so the on-duty Wards will arrive at some point - but it will take a while. The PRT seems busy, but these jokers are a pushover. We just need to find them."
I adjust my hat down. "Should be pretty easy. The warps sound complicated, but I think I've worked it out - each warp can't go too far, if can only take you into the next building if you were already close to the wall. So if you imagine a circle that indicates how far the warp can throw you - there's only going to be so many warp pads that will even reach far enough to take you into a different building. If we avoid pads near the centre of the building that are only likely to go directly up or down through the floors, we can slowly work our way in any given direction by simple elimination-"
Sophia - or, Shadow Stalker right now - stares at me levelly.
Then she walks through the nearest wall.
I reluctantly follow her. "Hey, that's definitely cheating."
"They're villains." She explains, as if trying to teach something to a particularly slow, stupid child.
"They must have worked hard on all of this." I protest on their behalf. "It feels rude to just ignore it."
"They're villains. Idiot." She repeats. Sophia doesn't go through the next wall, casting her gaze around and heading towards the window instead.
"You say that, but I definitely heard you call me competent earlier." I don't glide down to the ground level like she does, I just plummet full-force into the floor and let my shadow state save me from the consequences of momentum.
"Almost competent." She corrects. "And you immediately let it go to your head."
"You're just insulting yourself. Remember the multiple times I've kicked your ass? If I don't even qualify as competent, what does that make you?" We round a corner together. Evidently, she has a better idea of where the centre of this place is than me.
"That's not how I would have described it." She denies. "But enough of that. Look."
I look.
Two slick, white-clad mechsuits guard an elegant red button on a raised platform. Warp pads ripple outwards from the floor in a spiral pattern, whilst a comically large toy gun points at the sky erratically - as if searching for targets.
I drool. I want that. I want all of that. "Leet didn't hold back this time. Haven't seen him do robotics like that since the Transformers stunt."
"Hopefully it will take both of them out for good when it explodes this time." Sophia mutters darkly. "The PRT is miles out, and these losers probably have something lined up for them anyway. Whoever is on duty for the Wards will be even slower getting here, so it would be best if we can just clean this up ourselves."
"Dibs on Leet." I quip.
"Do what you like. As far as the world is concerned, this is the first time we've met. I don't know you, you don't know me." She warns. "Got it? Our meetups before, they were never a thing."
"Mhm." I agree laconically. "The only question is, which one is Leet?"
The right one definitely seemed to have more of Leet's colour scheme on it, but with how small these suits were... why wasn't I getting a challenge box for either of them? I didn't need to see skin, I could target Gallant and Armsmaster just fine within their power armour.
Simple question with a simple answer. "Actually, nevermind. I don't think that's them at all." I click my tongue in annoyance. "It's not really their style to completely avoid the action in their videos, so if we want to find them-"
"Don't." Sophia groans.
"-we'll have to use the warp pads after all." I conclude with a pleased grin.
"Absolutely not." Sophia hisses. "If you think I'm playing along with their games for a single second, you've got another thing coming. If you want to try and find them, do whatever. I'm ending this right now. You think that button will really work?"
"It probably will, knowing them. But an obvious answer like that is probably bait at the same time. It's only put there to get people to try and fail doing so." I tell her honestly. I'd watched all of their streams. I knew bait when I saw it. I wasn't going near that thing, it would only end in personal embarrassment. I'd be better off roaming around and trying to find the villains themselves.
"Then this is already over." Sophia growls.
I slip into the shadows to watch as Sophia ascends the nearest building. I don't see her shooting directly, but the sequence of events is obvious as the twitching gun at the centre of the installation twists around with impossible speed and zaps the bolt out of the sky mere inches away from hitting the red button.
"Oho!" A voice calls out over the intercom. "And we have our first heroine on the scene! It looks like Shadow Stalker really thought that conquering this challenge would be as simple as shooting it from afar! Chat, can you really believe that? In a city as full of fliers and blasters as this one, does anyone really think that we'd have overlooked something that obvious? Well. Shadow Stalker did. Let's all have a good laugh at her." A fake laugh track plays out over the speakers. Both mechs turn as one to face her, then jet towards her position - flames emitting from their backs to propel them forwards.
Or, they try to. The first one takes off fine, intent on chasing Sophia away and doubtless creating a few great shots for the livestream and the ensuing video - but the second falls flat as it tries to do the same, weak bursts of flame and fuel bursting out at an angle before it cuts out. I watch as it rights itself, and then, instead of returning to its guard position - it retreats to a closed-down store off to the side, the entrance opening up just enough to allow it entry before closing behind it again.
I shift into my speed-state and dash around the edge of the square, getting as close as I could to the sealed building. The dull, muted flash of a warp pad activating is enough to make me confident in my initial assumption - that the robot was being recalled back to the only person who could repair it. Leet.
I drop out of the speed-state and prod the entrance. Was this electrified? I inspect the sides. No. Hydraulics. I shift through, only needing to take a few more steps to touch the only warp pad in the otherwise empty room that I find myself in.
And then there was Leet. Inspecting a tablet with one hand, hammer in the other - completely oblivious to my presence. No sign of Uber.
Leet
Discarded 0/0
()
I stare in horror at the challenge screen my power gives me. 0/0, there wasn't even an option to begin a challenge. Nothing. No chance at additional powers, no chance at turning him to my side. Had my powers hit a limit? Or was this something unique to him?
Before I can continue that train of thought, the challenge screen is replaced.
(NEGOTIATING)
I've never seen that before. Ever.
...negotiating what, anyway? With who? Not with Leet directly, certainly. His power? New words replace the old, a more familiar screen entering my vision.
Leet
Villain 1/5
(ALRT)
"Challenge." Better get an attempt in before it decides to change again. This modifier, in theory, shouldn't be anywhere near as hard as Armsmaster was.
That thought goes out the window as Leet appears twenty metres in front of me, in a wide, featureless plain. In his hand, a gun ripped straight out of Halo - already pointed directly at me. I've seen it before. Energy weapon. I switch to Glory Girl's forcefield as he pulls the trigger-
-and watch, dumbfounded, as the weapon explodes in his hands. Violently.
Not just to the extent that I was used to seeing for myself. Not just a regular misfire. Both of his arms had been consumed in the explosion. His face was missing, a horrified expression of tortured agony barely visible through the blood and viscera.
Leet collapses to the ground less than three seconds into the challenge, without me even lifting a finger.
SUCCESS
Reward: Tinker Slot (1), Tinker: Prototype (1)
Leet
Villain 2/5
(ALRT)
"...challenge?" I don't know how to feel about that.
A death ray misfires, a distant explosion killing Leet before I even see him.
SUCCESS
Reward: Leet+
"No way I'm this lucky." I half-whisper to myself. "What's the catch?"
Leet
Villain 3/5
(ALRT)
"Challenge." I'll found out afterwards. I don't know why my power was content to let me speedrun this, but I certainly wasn't going to complain. If I could just become a real Tinker in mere moments... I'd take it. I didn't tend to get handouts from my power, but I figured that really - this was the least I was owed after all the bullshit it puts me through.
A teleportation device leaves half of his torso behind.
SUCCESS
Reward: Tinker: Prototype (2)
(ADDITIONAL DATA REQUIRED)
I frown at the notice that takes the place of the next challenge. Another new one. A refusal to let me attempt the remaining two challenges until I had gathered data on... what, exactly? Was this more of the weirdness I had encountered with Leet's challenges already, or was this a general feature of my power that I had never encountered for... reasons. Thinking about it, I'd never gone that far down any other Capes challenges other than Sophia and Taylor - and I worked with both of those pretty often. I patrolled with them, I hung out with them - was this an indication that I needed to interact with Leet more to progress further?
That was... fine. It would be better if I understood the exact nature of what my power wanted from me here, but I could deal with it. Even if I got completely walled here, I still had three power improvements out of the bargain. That was better than I'd have even dared to dream, and I hadn't even found Uber yet.
So. One tinker slot. One tinker power. A cursory inspection of the first one reveals nothing, a faint sensation in the tips of my fingers as if an energy was attempting to grasp the space in front of me and do something - but whatever it's searching for, it doesn't find it. Shifting the second power into my active slot I-
-I need to fix this.
That's the thought that fills my mind. The broken down mech- no. It wasn't a mech. Not in the traditional sense. It was power-armour first, except the idea of a person inside had been crudely replaced by a motion-control system that was accepting commands from a remote source. It wasn't the intended design, but it was easy to see why - because this power wasn't just telling me all about this design and what went into it, it was also labelling the misfire chances of each individual part.
And the reason that this wasn't used as power-armour anymore? A 15% chance for the sensor monitoring the structural integrity of the coolant system to throw a false reading, forcing a hard-shutdown mid-flight. A 5% chance for the sword to retract with too much force, piercing its own sheathe within the arm and likely any fleshy arm inside it. All across the machine, small chances to fail in specific, dangerous ways in the middle of operation - the majority of them neatly side-stepped by the presence of the remote-controlled machine in the centre relaying motion controls from a position of safety. That wasn't Tinkertech.
But it's not how its supposed to work either. It's a patchwork job, and my hands are itching to fix it.
Maybe I should.
I step forward.
"Oh, hey Mark." Leet doesn't turn to face me. "Did yours break too? I've sent the drones out to take over for us, give me a second and you can have this one. And pass me the wrench."
I wordlessly pass him- no, her - the nearest wrench. There was no mistaking the slight shift in Leet's voice, and definitely no missing the ample changes in the chest area either.
"Don't give me the silent treatment. I get it. My bad, I fucked up. I thought we could get a little more use out of these, but a job is a-" She peers at me owlishly as she turns back around. "-um." No mask, aside from the goggles that did little to hide her face.
I wave. "Hi." I take a screwdriver out of her toolkit and set to work. "Don't mind me."
"You're not-" She almost sounds slightly put-out as I start running my hands over the machine. "You're not going to try and arrest me?"
"Nope." Aside from actual gang members, who were pretty terrible people, it was smarter for me to let people escape and stay on the streets for me to run into again. It wasn't like I could come and see them in jail. I had to keep up appearances, of course - but I wasn't going to be working as seriously as an actual cop would.
She processes that for a moment, then settles in to watch me work - apparently liking her odds of watching me play with her toys than actually beating me in a fair fight. "Void Cowboy, right? One of the vigilantes who beat Oni Lee?" She still doesn't move, wary even as I start dismantling her work right in front of her.
"Am I really that recognisable without my usual outfit? I feel kind of flattered." I inspect the broken jet. The failure wasn't the problem. The design was the problem. The initial design had worked, and then the failure chance had been introduced. And then an extra system had been added to shield the pilot from that becoming fatal. And then another safeguard, once that also gained a chance to fail. And then those changes synergised with other issues, causing other unrelated parts to fail. What we needed was to rip all of this out, start at the initial design - and build the chance to fail in.
"My goggles have image recognition in them for every Cape in North America. Ninety-percent odds that you were the same guy." Leet crosses her arms. "And did I say that you could touch that? It's not safe, that thing will spew superheated water at you like its nothing if you don't watch yourself. N-not that I care if you are safe or not. Walking into a Tinker's lair like this. I could be about to shoot you. Turn around already!"
"I'm fixing it." I call back at her.
"I was already fixing it!" I can hear the faint stamp of a foot behind me. "I'm the Tinker here, where do you get off just ignoring me? I'm a big deal, you know?"
"Mhm. You know about my powers, right?" I probe.
Her voice becomes a little more sombre. "Trump, right?"
"Something like that. I tend to get weak variants from the powers of people I hang around with." I reveal.
She lets out a low whistle. "No wonder you weren't advertising it much. And now you've got mine?"
"A variant of it." I confirm.
"Well. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there's some pretty severe drawbacks to my power you should know about." Leet admits. "You might feel like you've got the whole world at your fingertips, but you only get one-shot at things before they start-"
"3% odds that the engine flow here is reversed at twice the usual speed." I tap one pipe. "40% chance for this cockpit to slam down at full speed when the 'open' lever is engaged." The failed jet. "15% chance for the ignition sequence to superheat the flames and blast straight through the first turn in the pipe it finds. Your stuff has increasing chances to fail. I get it. I'm not sure if I can actually design something this complex on my own, but I can understand everything that's going on here."
"Three percent-" She echoes. "W-wait a second. You can see the failure chances? You can see what's going to fail? Say all of that again, I need to write that down." An insistent, needy tug on my hoodie highlights the urgency of her requests - but I had things to do. "Are you making that up, if you're just teasing me-"
"I'm busy." I decline. "I've got to set this right. I can fix it." I need to fix it. This power is craving it. An unnatural hunger that I know isn't entirely sourced from my own feelings. Not that I needed the encouragement, I'd have wanted to work on something cool like this anyway - but I wasn't so blind that I couldn't notice the urges that simply having this power active was pushing on me.
"If it was that easy, I would have done it." Leet grumbles. "That thing that you're ripping off stops a power overload from wiping out the control systems. It was never part of the original design, but there's like - six, seven different issues that are solved by that one thing."
"We don't need it." I toss it aside, much to her dismay.
"Where's Uber when you need him." She frets. "Hey, hey! Not that! That's needed to keep the gyroscope stable!" She tugs on my hoodie harder. "Why are you breaking my stuff, couldn't you just beat me up instead?"
I give her a strange look. "Are you a masochist?"
"N-no?" She coughs. "But it would take less time to heal a bruise or three than reattach all of the things that you're breaking off! They aren't supposed to bend like that!"
"Listen." I spin around, bringing my face close to hers - the sense of manic glee temporarily frozen as I pull myself away from the machine. "I'm really, really feeling myself right now. I know what I need to do. And what I need from you, is to help. And together? We're going to make something amazing."
"R-right." She squeaks. Her red face, inches away from mine, bobs up and down in tentative agreement. "I-I'm just feeling a bit- well. I worked hard on that-"
"And it's brilliant. You're brilliant." I tell her. It's true. The flaw here wasn't in a lack of effort or talent. It wasn't a lack of intelligence either. "The workarounds that you've made, the possibilities you've all accounted for - nobody apart from me can truly appreciate how hard you've worked on this. How much of a miracle it is that it even moves on its own at all. Don't think for a second that I don't respect you for that."
"O-oh." For some reason, her voice sounds a little shrill - a hot flush running across her face. Probably heat from the still-cooling engine off to her side. "W-well. If you say it like that, at least you understand-"
"What went wrong here, the reason I'm pulling things out, is because your powers didn't come with a manual. They didn't tell you what they wanted from you, and nobody knew any better. But I do. It just, clicks together in my mind." Clearer than any other power I've ever copied. I just know. It practically screams at me, telling me what to do - no need for experimentation or guesswork. I turn both of us to face the machine. "Your creations don't just break down entirely at random. The failures are chosen. Artificial. You're not supposed to stop the failures from happening, you're supposed to iterate on them. The failures should be part of the design. Something breaks down, and that should already be accounted for in the overall design."
"That doesn't make sense." She protests. "We- some of those breakdowns have nearly killed us. You can't call that an intended design feature."
"Cascading failures are a problem, certainly. But I think that comes from the patchwork fixes that had been applied over time were part of the problem here, honestly - it would be better to start from scratch with a clean understanding of what needed to be done. A second version that fixes everything at once. Too many moving parts, too many potential things that can fail. But if we make it simpler, if we reduce it to something that's easier to understand-" I heave away the last extra system attached to the engine. "We see that there's only a few things that can go wrong. Every now and then, the first time you give it the juice from rest - this thing throws an error. It spits out superheated fluid at a level far beyond these metals can handle safely. But what if you didn't treat that as a problem? What if that was a feature?"
She stares at me.
"What if, when you had designed the second prototype of the design, you'd looked at all of these small errors and issues that happened with the first one... and just assumed they would happen again." I don't know enough about the design to make the perfect adjustment, I'd need more time. More material. But if I take the feed to the weapon system here, and plug it in there... "This time, it's not a random chance that your thruster gets completely destroyed - but a random chance that your weapon systems can spit molten slag out at your target. And once you've made that into a good thing, what does it matter if that particular failure starts to happen more often? So what, you can fire your napalm launcher more? And, yes - your second model would introduce its own failures over time. Things that you'd have to solve in the third model. New features. New versions. But that's just the life of a Tinker, right?"
Hearing no response, I turn around - finding Leet looking completely lost in thought. "Not a chance to fail, but a chance to get a critical hit..." She looks a little listless. "Would that really work?"
"I've never been more sure of anything. I'd stake my life on it." I grin. "In fact, I will stake my life in it. We're going to fix this thing up to how it was always supposed to be, and I'm going to go and smash Uber's suit while he's chasing Shadow Stalker."
She starts to nod along, then catches herself. "Hey - we're partners-in-crime you know!" The protest is weak, and both of us know it. "Why would I want to help you? Or let you run off with my work?"
"The only thing I want to do more than build this thing, is to ride around in a kickass mech. You get to see if I'm telling the truth about your power, and I get to fulfil my childhood dreams. Everyone wins. Just say that I threatened you, or something." I grin, pulling her close to me to so that she could see the changes I'd already started making to the engine. "And besides, you want to build this too - right?"
"I-I do." Her voice has gone slightly tinny again. "I-I need to get the blowtorch." She scrambles back out of the tight confines of the cockpit with some difficulty, and then starts searching through the powertools littering the temporary base.
The work, such as it is, goes fast. I rip things out, tell Leet what the exact issues are with what is left - and Leet cannibalises what we've ripped out and a few spare materials to create something useful out of it. Leet's set of tools are honestly more impressive than most of the inventions I see on the stream, a few simple commands have a half dozen robotic arms doing the work of ten men. Some issues we just can't fix in time. The landing system is unsalvageable, I rip it out to stop it from damaging other parts when the single-percent chance to fail spreads the impact of landing up to the delicate electronics in the control panel - so landing again is basically impossible, meaning that this suit will fly everywhere until it runs out of fuel and then I'll need to evacuate sharpish. I can't re-enable the gun, the loading mechanism is too delicate to be easily fixed - but it was already non-functional anyway.
Leet takes a moment to program some warnings into the cockpit, while I do my best to make sense of the hastily-scribbled design she'd come up with for the sword attachment.
Just looking at the design, my fingers itched. That power I'd unlocked earlier - Tinker Slot (1), almost shivered in anticipation. On a whim, I activate it - the schematics in my hand lighting up in a flash of flame and dissipating into ash, even as the slot in my mind is replaced with a crystal-clear image of every aspect of the weapon. Every resource I would need. Every attachment it would require.
Most of which, I already had here. It wasn't necessarily about adding new material, it was just about moving it around - allowing parts to misfire without destroying anything around it. And if everything was already in place... I place my hand against the current weapon, and mentally push - trying to replicate that same feeling I had the first time I tried it. After a moment, the energy builds up - but falters a moment later, the schematics in my head detailing everything that it thought I was missing before I could try it again.
Including half the blade. No, including just about everything that appeared more than a few hand-widths away from where my fingers had touched. I retract the blade fully, earning a strange look from Leet in the process - then stack up a handful of discarded parts on top of the 'hand' where my power still thought that I was missing resources. Even after retracting it, not everything could fit inside the rough sphere that my power seemed to be measuring resources in. The final additions of a few screws, some copper wiring and a discarded safety lock is enough to satisfy my powers checklist of demands for materials, and finally, I feel something shift under my fingers.
A silver and grey orb, reminding me of the cubes my power initially constructs my simulations from - flows out from my fingers and around my gathered materials, the materials outside of the area falling to the ground as if sliced by a blade. Then, as quickly as it arrived - the orb recedes. And in it's place-
"No way-" Leet is already by my side, so fast that I didn't even see her leave the cockpit. "-is that really-" She reaches out and connects the loose wires into the machine, locks clicking into place a moment later. A press of a button later, and the blade rockets out to its full length in a flash. "-just like that? You're a better Tinker than me. Just look at it, it looks like it just rolled off of a production line."
There's no hint of envy in her voice, just a giddy sense of shared glee as she sets the weapon to engage and disengage repeatedly. After the tenth attempt, the weapon catches mid-unsheathe - and then slams through the sheath and out the other end, the added momentum from the misfire being absorbed by the support struts Leet had attached earlier. In a more complete design, that energy could have been stored and used somewhere - but we didn't have that kind of time to iterate.
I check my power. "I wouldn't say that. I was just copying your design and copy pasting it into the world once the resources were in the right place. A kind of, instant-build option - at the expense of not getting access to the designer." I still have that same design in my head, implying I could make it again - but aside from the limited amount of materials I could 'select' for any given design, the main limiting factor was going to be... "And it seems that power is on cooldown now. Twenty-four hours of downtime." And, presumably, the side-effects of Leet's power would emerge if I recreated it multiple times. New flaws that would need adjusting and accounting for.
"That's still amazing." Leet takes in the sight of the greatly-stripped-down mech. I match her look. This time, my version of her power thrummed with a sense of approval. Not entirely content, but my hands no longer itched to fix what was wrong.
"Time to take it for a test-drive." I announce. "Unless you have any objections? I'm kind of looking forward to this."
"I get it. I was salivating at the chance the first time around too." Leet smiles. "If this all pans out, maybe I can get back to some of those old designs."
I tilt my head. "You're still not going to make an attempt to stop me? I was half-expecting to be backstabbed by now."
"I wouldn't do that! We're kindred spirits! Bonding over making an awesome mecha!" She crosses her arms, seeming offended at the implication. "And-and you seem nice. And having a mecha fight would look great in the videos - and, really, we've stuck around for long enough that our job is done anyway."
"Job? I thought this was for one of your videos?" I blink.
"Why not both? It's not a huge secret or anything. Everyone knows that there's someone in Brockton Bay that will pay out the big bucks if you can put on a big enough show at a certain time and date. Never really saw the point in it, but we were going to do it all anyway - so what's the harm in working to a schedule?" Leet waves a hand in the air. "Some people just have more money than sense, and I certainly won't complain about that."
I nod in understanding. Honestly, I didn't really know much about what went into being a villain. My research was always into the heroic side of things. Maybe having shady people wire you money for unknown purposes was just standard fare when you fell on that side of the law. "So basically, you don't mind if I trounce his robot? I won't apologise when the livestream laughs at his skills."
"I really shouldn't be cheering for you against my own teammate." Leet fights a grin. "But..."
"But the shiny new toy needs a chance to show off." I complete the sentence for her.
"If we worked that hard just for it to blow up, or just for you to lose with it in twenty seconds flat-" Leet warns. "-I'm not going to be happy. You better win!"
I throw a mock-salute, and practically leap into the cockpit - the remote-piloting box already ripped out - while Leet removes the straps and supports holding the mech in place. The cockpit slams down and the control panel - which was to say, several labelled levers and a playstation controller - slides up towards my hands.
I fiddle with one joystick, the mech spinning around slightly faster than expected. Pull out weapon, left swipe. Right swipe. Stab. I couldn't try flight now, because we never managed to get the landing mechanism working - but everything else seemed as functional as expected. Leet lets out a cheery wave as I make back for the teleporter pad I started near, before making her way over to a messy corner with various monitors, game-controllers and microphones scattered around a few different desks. Doubtless to interact with the livestream.
The livestream which was actually playing directly in front of me, just above the controller. Was this already here, or did Leet take the time to load it up while I was trying to adjust the sword? Either way, it did provide a useful indication that Uber was still playing an extended game of tag between Shadow Stalker and Aegis as the livestream chat scrolls in the background.
>Complete flop. Why even bother with the maze bullshit if people just ignore it and leave?
>At least we got to see the mechs again. Kind of looks like a stripped-down version of the Transformers event.
>By which you mean, the good ones blew up and Leet pushed the remains together to make this crap.
>Doesn't matter, still looks cool. Even if Leet is washed.
>Aegis is a fucking chad.
>Aegis is a fraud. Shadow Stalker wrecked the last mech and almost ended the video fifteen minutes ago. Now Aegis arrives at the last minute and still can't outperform her.
The chase is interrupted as Leet, or rather, her upper body - appears in full view of the screen for a moment before she pulls away from the camera and settles into her chair to address her viewers, oblivious to the sudden surge in chat activity and donations at the sudden fanservice.
>AWOOGA
>Did this dumb, blonde bimbo forget about her actual mask again? Those goggles don't hide shit.
>As if anyone would recognise her face. You think she ever goes outside unless Uber drags her?
>Her face? I was looking elsewhere.
>The oil smudge on her neck. Hnnghh!
>Don't be a creep, she'd never even look at you - even if you are a Tier 3 simp.
>Stay jealous and poor.
She grins. "We've got an unexpected surprise tonight! A local up-and-coming vigilante, Void Cowboy, has snuck into our temporary base and commandeered one of our advanced prototype mechs! That can only mean one thing - it's a mecha battle for supremacy! Only one can come out on top!"
>Who?
>Never heard of him.
>'snuck in' yeah right. It's all fake. And you clowns watch this?
>Why can't I enjoy any of my favourite hobbies without this fucking cowboy moron showing up and ruining them? Hope he dies.
>Nice mech though. Clean design.
>Looks like the original. Poor guy is in a death trap and doesn't even know it.
>That's a good thing. Trust me.
"In the red corner - Uber! In the blue corner - Void Cowboy!" I engage the flight button as I emerge out of the fake storefront. The joystick controls weren't perfect, but they woud do. Thrusters were working, and I wasn't in any real risk of clipping the ground like this. In view of both the livestream and real life, Uber's remote-piloted mech breaks off from the chase and comes to settle in front of me. Shadow Stalker and Aegis both break off from their fighting retreat to lunge for the red button that he had been guarding - only for a set of drones to jump to life in defence of it, with the button itself sprouting wheels and careening down a ramp and along the street at a sprinters pace.
>Someone clip that.
>Fail Stalker.
>Does that button even do anything? If it was me, I'd just make it a dud.
Shadow Stalker must be hating this. It's a clown show, built to entertain and troll from the ground up - the exact opposite of the high-stakes combat she's yearning for.
But, for the moment, screw her. Glorious combat awaits.
Uber flickers to life next to the livestream. "Guess I'll have some questions for Leet later, but if you managed to find our base and - instead of trying to arrest her - you came out in that? I think that means that you're a man after own hearts."
"Hell yes I am." I mirror his grin with my own. "Albeit more handsome and successful."
"Fighting words! I'll be sure to remember them when I rip you out of there, motion controls are the future!" He adopts a fighting stance.
"Heretic." I swear at him. "You can't separate the mecha and the pilot. How can you even call yourself a fan if you won't even get in the damn robot?"
"Guys?" Aegis floats between us. "Can we stop it here? I think this has gone far enough. Some civilians are panicking and we're working on evacuating them. Uber, if you disable the Tinkertech and promise to retreat - we won't pursue-"
>Chad
>Bitch
>Where is the rest of the PRT? Velocity would have ended this in like, five seconds flat.
>Aegis is so boring. Does he even hear himself right now?
>Lung is getting clowned on by the Empire in the downtown area. All of the Protectorate heroes are trying to send everyone home.
"Piss off boyscout." Uber interrupts. "The real men are talking here!"
"Yeah, scram!" Leet cheers over the intercom. "We're doing something cool over here, if people want to leave - I gave pretty clear instructions, and the whole thing will run out of power on its own before long anyway. Nobody wants to watch you whining like a baby because you couldn't get past Uber in a 2v1. Git gud."
"Don't ruin this for everyone, Aegis." I join in shamelessly. "There's only one outcome when two mechas appear on opposite sides of the battlefield. It's destiny - don't try and stop us!"
"You heard him, fuck off!" Uber paraphrases my words slightly differently, but honestly not too far from my real meaning.
>BASED UBER
>What is this chuuni bullshit?
>Let 'em know!
>Is Void Cowboy a new member of U+L now?
>Uber wins this fight. Look how much chunkier his mech is. Speed means nothing here. One clash and its over.
>Speed is always more important, but Uber is always nuts at piloting shit like this.
>Until they explode, you mean.
>True.
Aegis seems a little offended, but doesn't protest any further - placing his hand to his ear for a moment before begrudgingly flying off - leaving Uber's remote-piloted suit squaring off against me.
We hang there for a moment, then, as one - we charge towards each other.
Immediately, it becomes obvious that a direct clash favours him. Even if I'm faster, my range of movement with the sword is less flexible than his - the difference between attacking with a keypress and some arm straps versus more flexible body-tracking like he seemed to have.
But a few different angles doesn't matter against a fully-extended blade. I surge upwards, crashing down on him from above - fully extended into the 'stab' position, he floats backwards - but he's clearly unprepared for my speed, forced to block with his own weapon, but simple physics slams his mech into the ground during the clash while I pass over him. I circle around, looking to repeat the trick - only to find Uber zipping away down the nearest alleyway, doubtless looking to break line of sight.
I'll take that challenge. I surge after him. I'm faster in a straight line, but I can't cut corners in the same reckless way that he does - nor can I abuse my landing gear to kick off the wall and propel myself in a new direction around a tight corner. But he's not extending the gap between us, which means this greatly favours me. Because Leet's power was telling me the entire story of the meltdown his mech was going through. Every corner, another failure. Some harmless, some not. But as long as I kept forcing him to use different systems, kept forcing him to use every part and every feature - eventually he'd get an unlucky roll of the dice and be crippled.
He knew some of that, he just didn't understand it the same way that I now did. To him, Leet's backfires were random acts of god - and that there was nothing he could do about them. To me, I could see that he was rolling the dice every time. Every time he took that corner, a three percent chance that the foot would cling to the wall instead of push. When he cut power to the engines instead of braking, another chance of failure as he hits the ignition again. Every corner that he cut, made it a little more likely to blow.
In the end, he loses one thruster first - my viewpoint briefly filling up with smoke and debris, only clearing up for long enough to realise that Uber had already reacted to the loss, landing and spinning around - ready to meet my charge with one of his own.
Too late to dodge, and neither of us could engage our weapons in quarters as tight as these. I switch to Glory Girl's power and eat the charge head-on. Nothing breaks through the cockpit to break my forcefield, but it was a sensible precaution. Uber's managed to get a grip on my mech, but even if he looks larger - the two of us combined aren't actually heavy enough to completely stop against the full power of my thrusters. Slowly, despite his grip - his mech slides backwards, accelerating faster and faster - until he has no choice but to release me and attempt some kind of martial arts throw before I slam him into the nearest building.
I barely avoid touching the ground, the mech automatically righting itself after a moment of vertigo. Just as well, because Uber had recovered far faster than I had - and even with my backpedalling, it's all I can do to block his swing with my mechs non-sword arm - the momentary pause and tearing of metal buying me enough time to get away, at the expense of the less-important arm falling to the ground in my place.
>Told you. Never bet against Uber on equal footing.
>That arm wasn't even doing anything. That had a missile launcher in the old version, they never keep the cool stuff.
>Can someone clip Shadow Stalker chasing that button. I'm getting meme energy from it.
>Put the cams back on Aegis.
>Can we get Leet back on the cams? Two particular reasons...
It's a loss, but not a major one. If anything, I'm even faster now. His loss of a thruster vastly outweighs the importance of that arm. As long as I had the sword, victory was still within my grasp. I surge upwards again, diving back down in a mirror of my opening move - except this time, he knows better than to match my attack. He side-steps, allowing me to blitz past him. That's fine. I can just loop right back around, keeping all of my speed for a second runby. Again. Again. Again. The fifth time, I swipe to the right with the sword - sparks flying against his weapon and scoring a glancing hit on the 'head' of the mech. On the next pass, I cut off an attempt to retreat into another alleyway, this time cutting his sword off by slicing the clawed hand that held it in place.
>Common Uber L.
>Void Cowboy knows he can't win in a fair fight, so he pulls this bullshit instead.
>Why does Uber keep missing? Isn't the whole point of his power to be good at stuff like this?
>I think he's specced into piloting and movement, he was pretty shit with using the sword earlier too - but he pulled off some pyschopath moves when SS was trying to fill his mech with holes.
>Still got chased down.
>By a faster mech. Doesn't matter how good he is if the other guy is twice as fast.
Uber makes an attempt to make for the safety of the alley again, only revealing it to be a fake as I attempt to bisect his mech - just to find his remaining hand locked around my remaining arm. We both struggle, locked in place. With a wall to his back, I can't abuse my thrusters to drive him away - and equally, he can't adjust his positioning without losing his hold on me.
"Call this one a draw?" Uber offers. "I know the specs on these things, you can't break out of this."
"I've got this." I assure him. And I do. I had a way out of this. Maybe. It might also backfire and make me lose instead, but I wasn't stuck - at least.
I sheathe the sword. I unsheathe it. Sheathe. Unsheathe. I spam the button like a madman, ignoring the confusion of both Uber and the livestream chatters as I do so. I knew what the odds were for this mechanism to misfire. Leet and I had literally just tested it before I left.
Fifty seconds later, a momentary clunk indicates the failure of the weapon system. This time, there's no restraints in place to hold it back - nor am I already mid-flight and capable of accounting for the spin. My mech's arm wrenches back with impossible, unsafe speed - the entire arm rocketing back and around my own mech, wrenching away his arm clean from the robot entirely. The entire upper-half of my suit does a 360-degree spin, the legs detaching entirely as a consequence that we must have missed. But I was free of his grip. And armed.
Down slash. Down slash. Side slash. Down slash. My blade parts his mech like butter, Uber not even having time to respond to the movement before his transmission relay cuts out.
>Embarassing.
>Better mech wins. They should do it again with the same suits.
>What are those weapons? I thought they were just metal, but look at that cut!
>They should have put Aegis in a suit as well and made it a 2v2 against Uber and Leet.
>Can we just agree that this was the main event, and not whatever that trash was with the teleporting crap?
>How much more does Leet need to do to carry this bozo?
>You mean, how much more does Uber need to do to make Leet's garbage work?
Leet bursts back into the livestream. "We have a winner! Void Cowboy takes the victory - and that sounds like our cue to pack it up and leave. While we make our escape and recover our goods - including a certain stolen mech - we'll leave you with the plight of the plucky heroes still trying to disable our devious maze!" The theme-tune starts to play as Aegis doggedly pursues the off-button, while Shadow Stalker walks back the way she came from - broken drones scattered around her. Clearly, not interested in the doomed pursuit anymore.
>Shadow Stalker is hot.
>Best episode yet?
>Mid episode. The best part was completely unplanned.
>Unplanned my ass. The whole thing was so scripted you could smell it a mile off.
>Can anyone actually explain Void Cowboy's powers? His wiki page doesn't say much. How did he beat Uber?
>Better mech.
>Because Uber is a fraud.
>Because Leet is a brainless bimbo and let some stranger waltz away with the mech that was obviously supposed to be the final boss if New Wave or Dauntless showed up.
I shake off a few drones that seem intent on seeking out discarded materials and carting them away, instead using the last of my fuel to limp back to the abandoned storefront disguising the pad leading back to Leet.
"You won! I knew you could do it!" Leet is already there to greet me, pulsing blue every few seconds. Along with most of the rest of the workshop.
"Naturally." I leave the mech before it gives up entirely, the remaining frame crashing to the ground without a pilot to keep the thrusters engaged. "What's with the-" I wave a hand at my own face and then point at her. "Blueness?"
"Secret escape strategy." She smiles secretly. "But never mind that. It worked! It all worked! I haven't seen a flight that smooth in- well. In ages! Way back to some of my first creations! You have no idea how good it feels to see something like that again. I really can't thank you enough."
"I can't say I was being selfless. I mostly just wanted to play around in that thing, right from the moment I first saw it." I admit.
"As you should!" Leet nods firmly. "Shows you have your priorities in the right place. But that doesn't mean you didn't help me. If nothing else, you showed me that there's more to my powers than just an ever-increasing chance of death. I've got a future again. I've got designs I can go back to. I can be a real Tinker again!"
I peer at her. "Are you- are you crying?"
"N-no." She sniffs. "Maybe. Yes. They're happy tears. It doesn't count. Maybe you wouldn't get it, but this means a lot to me."
"Fair enough." I kind of feel a little embarrassed now. She's making me sound like a real altruistic hero, when all I did was get handed some powers on a silver platter and follow my own urges to get a joyride in her machine. Even if I don't exactly have the most noble of aspirations with other people either, at least I can argue that I earned their love and gratitude in blood, sweat and tears.
"Do you- Have you ever, by any chance-" She stumbles over her words. "What I mean is, we seem to work pretty well together-"
"I'm not joining your team." Her face falls. "But that doesn't mean I don't want to see you again." Her face brightens, and reddens, again. "We should definitely arrange a meet-up at some point. I'm guessing you'll have a bunch of Tinkering to do, now that you know what your power wants from you. And, naturally, you'll probably need me to inspect all of the parts and technologies that you're using and find out what is going to cause them to break."
"Yes!" She latches on to my words. "You need to come and visit. We can do some collabs together, hang out between jobs and- and I'm sure I'll have some cool projects that you'd find just as fun to get your hands on." We both watch as a drone drifts other to the fallen mech, spraying it with something that causes the entire structure to also pulse blue in time with Leet and the rest of the items scattered around the workshop.
"That sounds like a plan. You can find me on PHO, let's keep in touch." I agree easily. Perfect. Even if I hadn't met Uber in person today, a meeting would be nearly guaranteed if I ended up visiting the pair's Tinker workshop.
She nods, looking distracted for a moment. "I- hm. I've got to go now. The pads are going to turn off and follow us, maybe sixty seconds after we teleport out. That one over there-" She points deeper into the basement. "Will take you to any active pad that you like. It's something like the master version. Controls are simple, just tap the one you want on the map. Can't mess it up. Just in case you need to, you know, dodge the heroes before they start talking about silly things like property damage and stuff."
"Thanks." I respond drily. I wasn't so much worried about a lecture, but more about maintaining my civilian identity.
"Time for me to go, I guess." She still seems distracted.
Then she pulls me forward, yanks my scarf down and kisses me square on the lips. "Thank you." She whispers. Then she steps back.
A momentary silence hangs between us. It stretches. And then streches some more.
"...I-" I begin.
"I must have messed up the timing on that one." Her face turns beetroot. "Um. Listen, I didn't mean- um. I was hoping that I would just disappear dramat-" She vanishes along with every other item in a workshop in a rush of displaced air.
I touch my lips with one finger. Where had that come from? Maybe it was the reduced number of challenges at play? I had assumed that simply transforming Leet into a girl at all had been the extent of the changes, at least until I progressed further.
"Maybe I'm just a chick magnet these days." I nod to myself, turning-
-to face an unamused Shadow Stalker standing by the teleporter entrance.
Ah.
"...in my defence, that was not representative of how the whole battle went." I stress.
"Manwhore." She accuses bluntly.
I wince. "Out of interest, how long were you standing there?"
"Long enough to see that we have very, very different ideas on how to stop crime." Her caustic tone of voice betrays a flash of amusement. She was enjoying putting me on the spot, regardless of what had actually happened.
I feel the need to defend myself further. "To be fair, there was a whole thing - I got a bit of her powers, Tinker fugue, we kind of hit it off over repairing and fixing up the mech while you were playing tag for like, twenty minutes straight. Enough that she was completely chill with me just taking it for a spin to go and completely smash Uber in a fair fight. Even if you don't like my methods, you can't argue with the results."
"How noble of you, to pick the toughest of methods." The sarcasm is as biting as ever.
I give up. It wasn't worth the effort of defending, especially not when she alreadyd thought I was 'that' kind of person anyway. "Let's just leave before the pads shut off." I pace over to the device Leet had indicated.
"What's wrong with using the other one?" Sophia seems loath to follow me.
Ah. She must have arrived pretty late. Probably for the best, if she only caught the very end of the conversation. "Leet said that this will take us to any other pad that we want. In our case it could, say, take us right back to the changing rooms where we left our stuff."
"And you actually believed her?" Despite the condemnation, Sophia moves up to stand next to me all the same.
"Sure." I answer easily, tapping our destination on the map. "Hot girl like that, gotta give her the benefit of the doubt." Our surroundings shift in a flash.
"Do I need to remind you that you're already fucking Emma?" Sophia prods me off of the pad, the familiar changing rooms appearing around us. "And Madison." She adds belatedly as she pulls her mask off.
"No?" I give her a strange look, the first of the stolen items already tossed to the floor. "They both know the score. Hell, I think both of them would approve if they knew how things were going for me. Why do you care anyway?"
"Because Emma deserves better than a guy who treats her as an extra like that." Sophia gets up in my face.
"Yeah?" I lean forward back into her. "I think Emma wants, no - needs - a guy who treats her like that. Because someone put this weird idea of predator and prey in her head, and the only relationship she'll ever be able to get is a guy strong enough that she could never be anything but his prey."
"That's fucking bullshit and you know it." She hisses.
"I know it, she doesn't. Not really my problem, is it?" I throw the provocation into the air between us. I know what Sophia will do even before she does.
Sophia punches me in the face. I slam her into the wall. She knees me in the stomach. I sweep her legs. She shifts into shadow, and my ash clone body slams her into the ground before she can even start to move.
"And you know what?" I grin at her savagely. "She's not the only one. There's another crazy girl with a fucked-up head that thinks exactly the same way that goes to our school. And you know what? She's single too."
She tries to choke me. I drive a fist into her stomach.
"And she's going to stay that way. Until she finds a guy that she can actually admit is stronger than her. That actually deserves her. Or maybe, just maybe, she's already found that guy - but she's too stubborn and proud to admit it."
"You egotistical fuck." She spits. A hard stomp on my foot. A failed arm lock that she shifts out of. Directly into the echo of my last punch. She backs away, wheezing lightly. "You really think I'd even consider you? Not in a thousand years. Not if you were the last man on earth."
"That's exactly what I mean." I let her hit me again, without retaliating this time. "Listen to yourself. Last man on earth? Not in a thousand years? You're just saying that because I get under your skin. Who else is even in contention? Who else is even slightly in the picture. A fucking nobody, from Winslow? Take your pick. A no-hoper from the start, a drug addict beyond any hope of recovery or an outright gang member. You'd put any of those guys over me? Don't even lie to yourself. Someone without powers, you'd never accept someone weaker than you."
A punch for a punch. A kick for a kick. I'm not using all of my powers. She's not using all of hers.
"A Cape then. A villain? No. Already, the options are looking frightfully thin. The Wards then. Who is it going to be, Sophia? Which of them is your dream man - if not me? A goodie-two-shoes, perhaps? Aegis? Gallant?" We grapple for a moment. "Clockblocker? The class clown - a bit like me. Except he's never done anything to earn your respect, has he? I have."
"Never been asked out before by a guy that tried to list every other possible option as worse than him." Sophia spits blood at me. "Not feeling convinced."
"I'm not hearing any arguments, Sophia. What, you can't defend Kid fucking Win? Isn't he more your type?" I hold her against the wall.
"Don't be fucking ridiculous." She pants, not moving to break the stalemate quite yet.
"Then who? You hate to admit that it's me, because you never want to admit defeat. And I like that. I respect that. And I think you know that. I get you." I lock eyes with her. "We both have the same outlook on the city. On crime. On the fact that sometimes, you need to get your hands dirty. We are the same, Sophia." She slams me into the wall. I twist her arm back. "You think any other guy is going to see you start a fight like this, and think - that's hot. I like that in a girl. Can you even name a single person who would tolerate a relationship like that?"
"Is that what you tell all of the girls you try and add into your shitty harem?" She snarls at me. "That you're somehow the ideal man of their dreams? Because that's absolutely hysterical."
I smirk. "Is that how you think I got Emma? Making some bullshit up about how similar we are? How romantic it would be? No. Emma started throwing herself at me to make Taylor jealous, and somewhere along the way - she found out that she liked it when I was in charge. When we did the things that I wanted to do. When she submitted to me, when she sucked my cock between classes. When she handed me her virginity the moment I asked-"
I catch her fist this time. Sophia looks pissed, but doesn't try again.
"No, no, no. She found her place in the world. And it slotted right into her worldview. Predator and prey, except - this time - she'd found a larger predator. And she found that this time, she didn't mind being the prey. Might makes right. The weak serve the strong. I should thank you, Sophia. You really delivered her right to me." Another fist reaches my face. I ward it off. "And now, the same question comes back to you. If might makes right, and I'm stronger than you - what will that mean for you?"
"Doesn't matter. You aren't stronger than me." She's breathing heavily. I'm breathing heavily. Her leg is pressed between my thighs, yet she doesn't take advantage of the position to strike. We both know what the other wants already. She just wants me to prove that I can take it. Because Sophia doesn't know how to lose gracefully. Because Sophia can't be honest enough to admit that she's interested in fucking now, after being so vocally opposed before.
"Want to bet?" My grin must look every bit as feral as hers.
She doesn't back down. "What's the bet?"
"Fight to submission. Every time we win a round-" I pluck at her shirt. "-the other loses a life."
"Fucking pervert." She catches on to the insinuation immediately.
"Is that a no?" I challenge her.
"And when you've lost all of your lives?" She cocks an eyebrow at me.
"Guess we'll find out what might-makes-right really means." I propose.
"Can't argue with that." She breathes.
And then she punches me in the face. She really is too enthusiastic about that.
One round. Two rounds. Five rounds. Six. We keep going, small frenzies of activity - neither of us using our powers heavily, opting to concede once the other side gains an advantage rather than use every last trick to weasel out of it.
I start out well, but I'll admit that once I had Sophia down to her 'last legs' I lost one or two more times than I needed to. In fairness, I had never seen Sophia's bare chest before. It was distracting. Especially the way they moved around in the middle of an intense fight.
It was worth a loss or two. Because it didn't make a difference in the end. In the eighth round, I slam her against the changing room wall - and both of us freeze in place. "Last life." I tell her. "Lose them." I loosen my hold on her enough to give her room.
Slowly, almost teasingly, Sophia wraps her fingers around her last item of clothing. Her panties fall down and away, kicked away as they pool around her ankles - leaving the ebony-skinned girl utterly nude before me.
"Now, tell me. Where do we go from here?" I ask the defeated Ward.
"Absolutely nowhere, because you're too chickenshit to actually touch me-" She cuts herself off, perhaps seeing something in my expression.
"Now there's an idea." I praise her thinking. "What if we didn't do anything? What if I just... left you like this. We all go back together. I fuck Emma and Madison, and you just sit by yourself in the corner - knowing that you want to be in their place, and knowing you never will be because you couldn't admit that you actually wanted it."
"Delusional." Sophia dismisses, a hint of something unidentifiable in her voice.
"Am I? Personally, I think there's a glimmer of truth in there. I think if we both leave now, we'll both be unsatisfied by how this ended." I trace finger up her stomach, around the curve of one breast and then the other. "If I were to just take it, as you seem to want me to do so badly - you'll still be in denial. You'll still dismiss the truth, tell yourself it was forced on you - and that you were just strong enough to endure and overcome it. Like some kind of trial. I won't allow that."
"Coward." The accusation lacks heat.
"Me? Or you? All I want, Sophia - is for you to tell me that you want it. You lost, after all. A penalty must be paid - and that penalty is that you have to be honest to get the things you want." She shivers as my finger ghosts across a nipple. "I can show you everything you've been missing out on. It's like Madison and Emma were saying earlier. You don't have to call it love. You don't have to swear yourself to me forever and ever. You just have to admit, that here and now - you want to get fucked. Maybe it's nothing more than that. A one-time thing, never to be repeated. But if you want it, you have to say it."
Sophia holds my gaze for a minute, then looks away.
I shrug. "Fine then." Sophia tenses, then adopts an entirely new expression as I kick her discarded outfit up into my hands - then thrust it into her bare chest for her to hold. "Let's go and find Emma and Madison, I'm sure they'll be looking for us by now." I turn away, pulling away the small remainder of my clothes that had survived the series of 'bets' against Sophia.
This time, I'm the one that's pressed against the wall. "Fucking seriously? After all of that bluster and bravado, you're just going to walk away?"
"Pretty sure I left that choice up to you. You think I'm not willing to sleep with someone as hot as you?" I throw it back to her.
Sophia pauses for a moment. "Greg Veder isn't my type. I know him. He's a loudmouth. A sheep. A coward. A weakling. Easily led, and easily cowed. I'd never tolerate a guy like that." Sophia whispers over my shoulder into my ear. "Void, you're right about that guy. I can tolerate him. I can work with him. I can respect him. As a fellow hero. Never as anything more."
"Those two are the same person. Don't know if I managed to make that clear." I drawl sarcastically.
"Then there's this new guy in front of me. Some fucked up mix of both of them. And you know what? Maybe you're right. Maybe I was focusing too much on the parts that I used to find annoying. Maybe I was too stubborn to start again with an unbiased opinion. I can admit that." Sophia doesn't let up, but the pressure isn't painful. "So. I'll give that guy a chance. Because you are right. As much as there are bits I really, really loathe about you - there's a spark in there that speaks to me. A glimpse of something I want more of. The kind of guy that I've just been talking to for the last few minutes, that's my type of guy."
"And that means, what?" I question.
"The way I see it, we never stopped our little bet. And I seem to have you at a disadvantage." Sophia's voice turns smug. "Lose them." She mirrors my previous words to her.
A rustle of fabric. And now, I'm every bit as nude to her. And visibly, obviously, aroused.
"Looks like I win. And it looks like you win." Sophia lets me go, a rare smile adorning her face. "For my prize, I want to see if you can actually back up all of that talk." She steps back, one leg hiked up onto a bench to expose herself with deserved confidence. "So come over here and fuck me already."
"I thought you would never ask." I respond with no small amount of relief. If I'd actually passed up on this today, I'd have been kicking myself for it all night. Right move or not, that would be a case of blue balls so big that not even Emma and Madison combined could resolve it. I turn and push her into the wall, my mouth searing into hers - and my fingers questing and verifying that her dripping, sopping slit was already prepared for me. The answer? Very much so. She'd been ready since before she even lost the last round.
There's no question of a tentative, gentle insertion here. No moment of hesitation and affirmation before going in. No sooner have I lined myself up, than her legs leave the ground entirely to wrap around my waist - halfway impaling herself on my shaft before we'd even started, and forcing me to adjust for her weight by pressing her into the wall hard. Which, knowing her, was exactly the way that she wanted it. Pinned into place, relying only on our mutual grip on each other's bodies and the wall behind her to stop her from slipping down - I'm the one completely in control of the pace from here, and all Sophia can do is growl an expression of need back at me and 'encourage' me in any way that she can. Her lips don't part from mine, and I'm certain that the nails digging into my back will leave a mark - but I don't need any encouragement to truly start fucking her. With a forceful thrust, I hilt myself inside her core - getting a hitched gasp in response followed by a light bite against my lips.
With no sign of protest in sight, I pivot both hands down to her ass - taking a moment to grope her assets before taking a true handhold, leveraging her back up the wall even as I pull myself back - extracting my shaft in a slow, steady movement. Again, I slam her down as I thrust forward. I'd been looking forward to a moment like this, the time when Sophia surrendered her body to me, for so, so long. I'd been dreaming of it before I even became a Cape, since the first caustic word of mockery that she probably didn't even remember. In truth, it was a distant memory even to me now. Far more present in my mind was the constant arrogance. The constant belittlement. The constant defeats, even if I had opted into them - a man can't help but yearn for the moment when the tables turn.
And now? They had. Sophia was hot, wet and willing. That last part was somehow the best of them all. The fact that she was allowing this because she knew that she had lost. Because her worldview said that the appropriate action now, was for the winner to take their just reward - and for the loser to meekly submit. That was why Sophia had positioned herself like this, a passenger along for the ride and offering blanket permission for whatever I wanted to do with her. A position like this wasn't one of equals exploring their first time together, each nervous for the other's sake. No. For me, this was about claiming my prize. For her, this was about finally getting a taste of what it meant to be a woman. Getting a taste of what it meant for a predator to claim you. A temporary taste of submission and defeat, for someone obsessed with violence and victory.
And she wouldn't admit it any time soon - but she was loving it. She thrusts her body back towards mine without even prompting in time with my long, hard strokes - her breasts heaving with each twitch and muted gasp as her inner walls clamp down on me from all sides. Our lips break apart for a moment, both of us momentarily free to speak and give voice to the hunger in our eyes.
"H-harder." Sophia seems beyond entire sentences, but she manages to force out one last plea. "Don't stop."
I don't.
I continue to fuck her, and this time - I get the rare treat of an aborted moan escaping from Sophia's throat, before one of her hands comes up to cover her mouth. A look of genuine embarrassment fills her expression.
I let out a wild smile. "Don't be afraid to be genuine. Get used to it, I'll be making you feel like this for many more times to come. You're mine now."
"I'm noone's." She bites back.
I don't immediately need to contradict that. A slight whimper racing through her body, the way her she bites down hard on her own lip, the way she tightens against me, legs turning from a loose grip into an immovable lock, the dark flush racing across her skin - I don't even comment out loud on her orgasm, but by the time her dazed eyes meet mine again - she flushes and looks away from my knowing gaze.
"You don't think so?" I ask the rhetorical question, never for a single moment slowing in my pace. "You think that there could be someone else out there for you? I won't allow it." To any other girl, that would sound like a red flag. Something a genuine, controlling psychopath might say. For Sophia, the domineering personality, the unwavering self-confidence, the arrogance and the ability to back it up... that was everything that an ideal partner should have. Sophia would never be satisfied with kindness and flowers. She might have more of a girly side than she wanted to admit, but at her core - she wanted someone who fit neatly into her philosophy.
And that someone was me. Apex predator, at your service.
"It's not up to you." Sophia asserts. Trying to wriggle and wrestle for any sort of control over the argument. The eager way she fucked herself on my shaft, the heavy flush across her skin and the shine in her eyes told the true tale. This wasn't a real argument. This was a play. This was dirty talk, to her. Except she didn't want to be called names. She wanted the victor to assert dominance over the loser. To tell her about her new place. About the way that the world was going to be.
"It's up to nobody except me." I correct her. "You think this is the last time we'll ever do this? Your body is mine now. You'll come crawling back for more, like it or not. No different to Emma."
"This doesn't mean anything." Sophia denies. "You think I'll just meekly play along because you got lucky in a fight a few times? So you lucked out with your powers, now you think that you're the perfect boyfriend? After today, you'll never have the chance to touch me again. One-time deal."
I slam her back into the wall. "You're right, in some ways. I know a simple little fight like this isn't enough. All this is, for now, is a bit of fun on the side - right? Experimentation." She doesn't respond. "Which is why you'll need to be reminded. And I will. Before our patrols. Before school. We can do the same thing we did here. And you'll lose, again. And you'll give your body to me, again. Until one day, you can't hide from the truth anymore. That you've long-since become my eager little fuckpet. That nobody else could satisfy you. That you can't help yourself anymore. My obedient little slut."
"Cute speech." She taunts. "Let's see you back it up one day."
"One day? I don't think so." I pant. "How about Tuesday? The first day back at Winslow. We meet up, same place we fought when we first met in costume. We fight. And when I win? You can show me how embarrassingly bad you are at sucking cock."
Sophia aborts a bark of laughter. "And why would I agree to that? What do I get in return?"
"If you win? Doesn't matter. It isn't going to happen." I taunt. "You can use your imagination."
"Cocky shit." She swears at me. "I'll be there."
"The first day of your training." I tell her.
A competitive grin finds its way onto her face. "The first day of your humiliation."
We seal the promise with another kiss. Tongues wrestling for dominance, even while her body does its best to match my pace. "I'm going to cum." I tell her.
"So what? Just do it." Comes the immediate response.
"I was going to. You think I needed your permission to breed my latest cum receptacle?" I smirk as her nails dig into my back at the demeaning taunt.
"It doesn't mean anything." She tells me. "What, you think I'm stupid enough to carry around some shitty baby for most of the year? Get over yourself."
"Not yet." She goes silent and a little wide-eyed at that, perhaps not expecting a serious response. But by the way her pussy tightens and no immediate denial comes back, the idea isn't as anathema to her as I would have expected.
"J-just get it over with already." She pleads.
Faced with the first genuine line I've heard from her in a while, any last resistance crumbles. I bury myself inside her, allowing gravity and her legs to sink herself down onto me in turn - every last inch, every last milimeter, filling the ebony girl up entirely. "Mine." I hiss into her ear as my cum erupts into her very core. This time, there's no answering denial. Just mutual panting between two sweaty, exhausted, bruised partners - one firmly lodged inside the other, unwilling to be the first to break away. Even after my cock is milked dry, we stay locked there for a moment longer - lost in a mutual satisfaction that neither of us can deny.
And that's how Madison finds us.
She blinks.
Sophia's face drains in horrified embarrassment.
Madison's expression turns into a salacious grin. "Nice."
"I'm not-" Sophia begins, separating from me with a wet squelch. "This isn't-"
"Mads? Are they there? I think they were evacuating people earlier, so they might have- Oh!" Emma comes into view, and stops dead at the sight of the nude, blushing Sophia trying ineffectually to cover herself or the trickle of cum leaking down her inner thighs.
Madison squees. "Two enemies, locked in a room via unknown Tinkertech - sparks start to fly as hateful arguments turn to passionate romance!"
"I knew you two would get along if you gave each other a chance." Emma adds, eyes alight with hidden emotion.
"What are you even talking about? Don't- never say anything like that again." Sophia tries to reassert some control over the pair. "This is nothing like that. We just-" She pauses. "-just, had some realisations." She realises her mistake as a fresh squee emerges from Madison. "Not like that! I-"
I raise an eyebrow. It's not like she can reveal that 'discovering' each others identities changed a few perspectives.
"It's-" She grits her teeth. "It's something like that." She reluctantly backtracks, acting as if the words were being forced out of her under torture. It's the easiest explanation to safeguard her identity, even if there would have to be a more convoluted explanation for Emma later that didn't involve Void Cowboy.
"That's so cute." Madison croons. "I'm so happy for you both-"
"We aren't together! We were just experimenting. Nothing serious." Sophia insists, clearly feeling that her message wasn't getting across.
Madison's grin turns sharklike. "That's right, Sophia. It's nothing serious. Just a bit of fun. And now that we all agree, and we all seem happy to include Greg in the fun - I have a few ideas about some games and entertainment for tonight..."
The implication is obvious. Whatever form it takes, it's doubtless going to devolve into an orgy if she doesn't deny them outright. I haven't fully cleared Sophia's challenges, but given the events of today - it wasn't entirely out of the question for her to allow it anyway.
Emma and Madison take turns whispering into an increasingly flushed Sophia's ear. A nervous Sophia that looked out of her depth. Cute. "W-we'll see what happens." The refusal doesn't come. "J-just let me - us - get changed already. Out!"
The two scarper, sharing equally wide grins and already talking amongst themselves.
We get dressed in silence for a moment. Sophia grabbing my stolen outfit and shoving it unceremoniously into her own bag without asking. It's not until we're both dressed, something approaching decent - that I break the silence.
"Looking forward to tonight, are we?" I probe. "Didn't even have to remind you of your situation before you agreed."
She spins to face me. "Listen, it doesn't mean anything-"
I pinch her ass on the way out. "Good girl."
"I am not-" I whistle over her hushed protests, reuniting with Emma and Madison - ready to leave this action-packed day behind us.
Leaving only an action-packed night ahead.