The day started out innocently enough… the mid-week status meeting had just wrapped up, and the Vanguard lingered around the conference table discussing the upcoming launch of human-kind’s first self-made manned interstellar ship, the Jove Project’s Argos 2, which had just been announced on the front page of the day’s paper.
“Wow, that Penelope Ulysses is smoking’ hot,” Jonny said, squinting at the group photo that took up a third of the page. “I think…”
“I rather doubt her physical endowments were what led to her inclusion on –” began Artemis, before being cut off by the beeping of the comm alert.
Evan Barnard, the lead specialist in the Comms Center, popped up on the main screen when JJ hit the accept button. “Sorry to interrupt boss, but we’ve got an incoming call from Special Agent Stark at SHADE… not flagged as urgent, but all SHADE calls are considered priority calls, so…”
“Thanks Evan,” JJ replied, “go ahead and put her through.”
“Good morning Captain Astor, Vanguard,” Agent Stark said as her face appeared on the big screen. “Good to see you all again. I’m glad I caught you all together, as I was hoping to ask the team for a favor.
“As you know, Astoria has not had any much in the way of meta-human criminal activity over the years – or at least not any that made itself very visible. The Astoria Incident changed all that, a fact you know better than anyone, and the local authorities are still scrambling to catch up. The new detention center at APD HQ was built with metas in mind, fortunately, but the funding for actual power-dampening technology was never approved… so, in the aftermath of the recent disaster, SHADE loaned out as much containment technology as we had available while the City Council attempts to come up with the money for a permanent solution.
“Unfortunately, our tech is being pushed beyond its intended limits, and I just received an urgent report from our senior technician based in our liaison office at 500 Police Plaza. His job is to monitor the loaned equipment and keep it operating within spec, but it seems that some of the equipment has begun to fail. As of early this morning several bands of energy-suppression have dropped out of play – mainly in the psychic spectrum. Unfortunately a huge number of my people are at a team-building retreat this week, as mandated by the new Regional Director – she’s very big on team building…” She pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed, but didn’t elaborate.
“Anyway, a tech team will be flying in from Portland later today, and in the meantime the psychic-powered metas have been isolated in an area with still-functioning units. But both the APD and I are concerned that a total failure is possible, and that could lead to disaster. They request, and I strongly back that request, that the Vanguard get over to the detention center ASAP and essentially babysit the facility until the equipment is repaired.
“Hopefully this is just an over-abundance of caution, but when it comes to super-powered threats I’d rather err on the side of caution. Can we count on your help with this?”
A brief glance around the table assured Scion that the team was behind the idea. “Of course Agent Stark. You can inform the APD that we’ll be there shortly.”
“Thank you Captain,” Stark smiled, a certain tension leaving her features that was only obvious when it was gone. “I’ll keep you informed of the repair effort, and please let me know if you need anything from me. Good-bye.” The screen went blank and everyone rose to their feet.
“I shall travel ahead to scope out the situation and inform the police of the team’s imminent arrival,” Artemis said, tapping out the code to allow her to teleport out of the building and simultaneously polarizing the windows to darken the room. “Will Quanta be teleporting the rest of the group, once everyone is ready?”
“I could,” Quanta agreed, “but it seems to me that intimidation is a big part of keeping order, if worse comes to worst. Criminals are a cowardly and fearful lot, and I think arriving in the Interceptor might make a more… commanding statement.”
Artemis nodded with a slight smile, and stepped back into the darkest corner of the room, seeming to melt into the shadows as she vanished. Everyone else headed to the Flight Ready Room on the hanger deck, except for Scion, who detoured to his lab to grab a specific module to attach to his wrist comp.
“I’ll be able to do my own analysis of the dampening equipment wirelessly with this,” he explained at Quanta’s enquiring look as he came up the Interceptor’s ramp and headed for the cockpit, tapping the device. Settling in to the pilot’s chair he began his pre-flight check…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Artemis appeared in the seldom-used storage room that she had found on her first visit to the new detention center shortly after it opened. The single dim night light near the door left plenty of shadows for her to work with. But her small smile faded before it had fairly begun – something was wrong. She could smell smoke, faint, but if it had penetrated even here…
She cautiously cracked open the door and peered out. A thin cloud of smoke hovered near the ceiling, and the power seemed to be out, with only emergency lighting casting its harsh white light over the hallway. No alarms were sounding, but she could hear distant sounds of gunfire… and closer by, shrieks of laughter and screams of fear and pain. Pulling her escrima sticks from their holders, Artemis moved quickly down the corridor toward the sounds.
“This is Artemis,” she said quietly, tapping her comm unit. “I am in the administration portion of the facility and something is very wrong. There is smoke, gunfire and a great deal of screaming. Emergency power only, but no alarms sounding.” Only a hiss of static greeted her words. Signal jamming… which implied an outside threat, not just failed power dampeners. Damn.
As she reached the first cross corridor Artemis finally found someone – unfortunately, he was clearly a prisoner given the orange, numbered jail uniform he wore. Probably one of the dangerous ones, too, given the mad gleam in his eye and the maniacal grin that flashed when he caught sight of Artemis. He brandished the two police batons he wielded, and motioned her to come on.
“Let’s have some sweaty fun, baby,” he yelled, and then he leapt at her. “Beating people to death is so much fu–”
His words were cut off as Artemis blocked his blow at her head with one escrima stick while jabbing the second into his solar plexus, then sweeping his legs out from under him with her right leg. She came down with one knee on his chest, then clocked the dazed, wheezing inmate with a precise blow to the temple. She left him unconscious and zip-tied in the corridor as she moved further into the building.
The next people she came across, near the lunch room, were three office workers and a uniformed cop… and they were being menaced by her old friend Stretch Armstrong. His powerful, rubbery appendages were easily deflecting the shot’s from the officer’s service weapons and he was backing the group into a dead end with a gleeful laugh.
“I’m gonna enjoy pulling your limbs off, pig… just like pulling wings off a fly, only lots more fun! Bet it makes your ladies there squeal, too…”
Artemis‘ escrima stick struck the demented villain a solid blow to the back of the head, and he staggered forward, almost going to one knee. The hand on one flexible arm felt his head and came away bloody as he turned to see what had attacked him. His eyes widened in rage when he realized who it was.
“You!” he screamed. “I’ve been dreaming of payback, you shadowy bitch! And you ain’t got no super friends around to save your ass this time, do you?”
“You know, Marty, orange really isn’t your color,” Artemis said, smiling… and leaped into the writhing mass of stretching limbs, her black cloak swirling around her like smoke as she dodged and jinked…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The Interceptor screamed in over the jail, Scion making sure their arrival was both sudden, loud and impressive, and made a quick pass to survey the situation. There had been no word from Artemis since she’d teleported away, and none of their comms had been able to get through to either the jail or the adjacent police headquarters – which meant things had already gone south, an assumption that was quickly confirmed.
The L-shaped jail facility was five stories tall, wrapping around two sides of a two-story administration section. The top floor was windowless, the Meta-human Containment Level, and half of the short part of the L on that level was open to the sky – an exercise area for the superhuman prisoners, surrounded by 15′ high walls, six guard towers, and a powerful force screen that made escape impossible… as long as the power was on.
It wasn’t.
Orange-clad prisoners were pouring out of the gate from the holding cells, spreading across the exercise yard… and grabbing at a dozen high-tech looking drones, which were lifting them off the roof and ferrying them down to a large crater in the parking lot. As they reached the crater a prisoner would let go and drop down, disappearing into what was obviously an escape tunnel, and the drone would rise up to head back to the roof and repeat the process with a new escapee.
At least two non-prisoners seemed to be heading up this obviously well-planned and coordinated jail-break – an armored man hovering above the roof and a large copper-skinned man with long, wild black hair, dressed in some sort of vaguely Aztec-warrior costume, on the ground. As Scion set the Interceptor down on the helipad atop the admin section of the building his Threat Assessment Computer flashed up probable identifications.
“OK,” Scion called out as the ramp lowered and the team prepared to move out, “TAC says the one in armor is Gerald Greer, aka Dominator, a military deserter turned mercenary with ties to E.V.A.L. Those drones are his Air Cavalry units – able to lift a fairly substantial weight, and they may or may not be weaponized (apparently it depends on the job). His armor also packs a variety of ranged and explosive weapons.
“The Jaguar Warrior wannabe is probably Seismic… supposedly the last of his race from some lost kingdom of the Hollow Earth… blames the surface world for his people’s destruction, blah, blah, blah… the usual. Anyway, he has some pretty strong earth-shaping powers, skin like stone, and massive strength. Concentrate on taking down those two first, then we can focus on rounding up the prisoners. But if you see a chance to take down a powered escapee – use your judgement!”
Scion and Quanta dropped down to deal with Seismic, while Phantom Ace, Blue Flame and Chillz headed up to the rooftop exercise yard to take on Dominator. Totem, positioning himself at the edge of the admin roof where he could see the action below, immediately began to prepare his Sleeping Mists spell.
Teleporting into the exercise yard, the first thing Phantom Ace noticed was the familiar figure of Ocelot, slipping away from the crowd of other prisoners and heading for a section of the east wall out of Dominator’s line of sight. She began to scale the wall, her claws having no trouble finding purchase on the smooth stone… but nearing the top she found her way suddenly blocked by a pair of black-and-white high-top sneakers and two jean-clad legs.
“Trying to sneak out without paying the bill?” Phantom Ace inquired sweetly, smiling down at the furred (yet strangely attractive) young woman. “I don’t–”
Before he could complete his opening quip, however, Ocelot was on him – a blindingly fast leap and she landed on his shoulders, claws digging into the leather of his jacket, unbalancing him. By the time he went insubstantial, she had already kicked off, launching herself over the wall and tumbling him back into the exercise yard. He just caught her feral grin as she vanished.
“You’re sorta cute… maybe next time, lover boy!”
Ace slowed his fall before he sank through the pavement of the yard, and reversed direction to make his walking-up-a-sand-dune climb through the air back to the top of the wall. It was five stories to the parking lot, she couldn’t survive that sort of fall – could she? But there was no body in the parking lot below. White scores in the dark granite of the jail showed how she’d slowed her fall… and there she was, darting between cars, keeping low, making for the chainlink fence around the facility, and freedom…
Before he could teleport ahead of her, though, a blinding flash of blue-white light behind him washed out everything for an instant. He whirled to see Blue Flame hovering in the air near the armored figure of Dominator. Although a dozen of the would-be escapees were screaming, on their knees or staggering around clutching at their eyes, the villain seemed unfazed by the dazzling burst. Chillz, just riding a column of green ice up over the west wall from the roof below sent a blast of Arctic air at the hovering figure, and a film of frost and ice began to coat his armor. But the mercenary shrugged, and the icy shell cracked and crumbled harmlessly away.
Phantom Ace took in all this in an instant before turning back to track Ocelot… aaaand she was gone… no doubt through that new hole torn in the fence. Damn! He considered going after her anyway, but she was small potatoes compared to that armored asshole… he turned back to the exercise yard with a sigh of regret.
Dominator was tapping something on a pad on his left forearm, and his Air Cavalry units began to change direction. Instead of carrying their meta-human hangers-on over the south wall and down to Seismic‘s subterranean escape tunnel, they now began to spread out in all directions…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
While the others went high, Scion and Quanta went low, coming in hard and battering Seismic with alternating streams of armor-piercing rounds and blasts of quantum matter. The large man staggered back under the assault, but his stone-like, coppery-colored skin seemed to shed the projectiles like water. They did seem to cause him some discomfort at least, Scion noted, if not any actual damage.
As the heroes came down between the building and the crater in the parking lot the dozen or so prisoners who had been making for the escape route came to a sudden stop, warily eyeing them. Besides the ones dropped by the Air Cavalry units, Quanta could see that many had come from one of the three large doors on the loading dock, which had been blasted open.
“Do not fear, my comrades,” Seismic bellowed in a deep and unidentifiably accented voice. “Your freedom from the oppressors will not be stopped by these lackeys of the corporate overlords!”
And with that he stomped a foot down hard on the pavement, causing a seismic wave to ripple out from him, cracking the asphalt and knocking both heroes onto their asses, momentarily stunned. Unfortunately, it also knocked more than half the escapees off their feet as well. A handful who had remained standing, and had the guts, dashed around the downed heroes and dove for the hole and freedom.
Unfortunately, before more than a few could make good their escape, a green mist began to fall over both Seismic and the inmates. A jaw-cracking yawn split the villain’s face, but he shook his head and quickly shrugged off the somnolence; his “comrades” were not so lucky, however, and most of them fell to the ground in a deep sleep, a couple even sliding down face-first into the crater. One, however, was fast enough to avoid the green mists, managing to get to the far side of the crater, where he crouched down out of sight…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Artemis released her chokehold on Marty Armstrong once the mutated rubber-man stopped his futile struggling and sank into unconsciousness. As she stood over him, pondering the uselessness of zip ties on this particular criminal, a small sound behind her made her turn quickly, prepared for another assault. But it was the officer who had been protecting the three workers, hands raised placatingly.
“Hey, it’s just me,” he said, smiling uncertainly. As soon as Artemis had drawn Stretch’s attention, he had herded his charges out the nearest door, and she’d assumed he would have sought shelter with them. But he had returned, and in one of his raised hands was a black nylon bag. “I thought you might need these, once you put the prisoner down.”
At the hero’s nod he set the bag down and pulled out a set of standard ArgonLok™ leg restraints, and three larger, more complex-looking dual restraints. Cleary made by the same manufacturer (they were the industry leader in meta-human restraint technology, after all), they were nonetheless unknown to her.
“These are specialty restraints,” the officer explained. “Designed for the more, um, elastic types of meta. Once in place, if the prisoner tries to stretch or change the shape of the restrained limbs, it sends 50,000 volts through ’em – enough to knock out a bull elephant. May I?”
Silently Artemis stepped away from the downed villain, and the officer stepped forward. Kneeling down, he pulled Armstrong’s upper two arms together behind his back and fixed the first pair of restraints on them. He clearly found touching the man repulsive, but he didn’t flinch from the job. As the restraints clicked into place a thin ring of green light appeared around the cuffs, and a low hum of power could be heard.
“I assume you can handle things from here, then Officer… Rankin?” Artemis inquired as he began on the next set of arms.
“Yes ma’am,” he said, looking up with a sudden grin. They all looked like children to her, of course, but with that smile this one looked about 12 years old. “And thanks for the save – I really didn’t see how I was going to stop this maniac.”
“You’re welcome, officer. Now, can you fill me in on the tactical situation here?”
“I’ll try,” Rankin replied, his grin disappearing. “Unfortunately, I don’t know much, really. I was just coming on duty, which is why I was in this part of the building… jeez, has it only been ten minutes? Anyway, the power went out, but no alarms went off, so we didn’t worry too much… until the shooting and screaming began.
“The Lieutenant order me to get the admin staff out, and he and most of the others headed into the cell block. I evacuated most of the front office, and was rounding up strays when this bad boy” – he patted Stretch on the head – “suddenly appeared, coming up from the loading dock. How the hell he got there, from the Meta Detention Unit on the fifth floor, I don’t know. I assume the power suppression equipment has failed, but I don’t know for sure what’s going on up there – all I get on my walkie is static…”
“Yes, my own communications are jammed as well,” Artemis replied, frowning in thought. “This is clearly an organized escape attempt, with outside help–” At that moment a faint but sustained roar echoed down the corridor from the front of the building. “Ah, I believe the rest of the Vanguard have arrived. Once you have Mr. Armstrong fully restrained, I suggest you continue your sweep for other innocents, and get them, and yourself, out of the building.”
Before the young officer could reply she was already vanishing around the corner, heading toward the loading dock. He shook his head in bemusement, then set to work hobbling his prisoner’s legs…
As Artemis neared the double doors to the loading dock area she was suddenly faced with half-a-dozen regular city jail inmates barreling through them. They pulled up short as they saw her, thirty feet away, escrima sticks in hand, blocking their escape.
“Well shit, it’s just one chick,” said the inmate in the lead, after a long moment. He was a tough-looking gang-banger, sporting Russian mob tattoos. “C’mon, take her down and lets get outta here!”
With a growl of agreement most of the others moved forward… except for a Latino kid near the back. Artemis recognized him as one of a gang she’d taken down when they’d try to extort protection money from certain denizens of the Undercity a couple of months ago.
“Fuck that shit!” he cried, eyes widening in fear. “That’s Artemis… no way man!” With that he turned and fled back out to the loading dock. His companions ignored his outburst, and rushed the black-clad woman…
Less than a minute later Artemis burst through the doors herself into the loading bay, five unconscious and zip-tied men scattered along the corridor behind her. Another dozen orange-clad men were milling around in the cavernous, dimly lit space – no emergency lighting here, only morning sun pouring in from a blasted open bay door. And correspondingly dark shadows.
The change in lighting and the milling men may explain why it was that Artemis failed to spot Cannon until a split second after he spotted her.. or maybe it had just been the Latino gang kid running out screaming “Artemis!” who had heralded her arrival.
In any case, she took the brunt of Cannon’s one-two concussive blasts full on, and was hurled backward, vanishing through the massive, smoke-filled hole in the wall, into the cell block beyond…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Up on the roof things had only gotten more complicated. Phantom Ace was teleporting after inmates escaping by the Air Cavalry units, reaching in to rip out the guts of the flying devices, then teleporting the escapee back to the yard. He had a pocket full of zip ties, and his practice under Artemis‘ watchful eye meant he’d gotten pretty quick at securing a prisoner… but it still took a few seconds, and in that time more of the damn drones were vanishing into the urban canyons of the city. He’d only managed to stop three of them so far… at this rate he might be able to nab two more…
But as he prepared to ‘port after the next of the fast-receding felons his attention was caught by the latest crowd of meta prisoners to burst out of the cell block into the exercise yard – two in particular made him freeze. He instantly recognized both that moronic Neanderthal Tommy “Gargantua” Fitzgerald, from the attack at AzTech, and the illusion-generating, laser-blasting woman Bennie “Holodeck” Wilson, who had almost tricked him on the day of the Astoria Incident.
But as it turned out, it was the unassuming blond woman he barely noticed that would prove to be the real problem…
At the southern end of the yard Chillz and Blue Flame were hurling alternating blasts of superheated plasma and subarctic ice at the armored form of Dominator, apparently to little effect beyond keeping him occupied and on the defensive. Phantom Ace tried to alert them to the potential threats behind them, but the comms still seemed to be jammed.
Before he could ‘port close enough to give a verbal warning, however, Gargantua saw who was battling their would-be rescuer, and in a matter of seconds he had shot up to his full 60′ height. With a roar of rage he ripped up a section of the yard’s pavement and hurled it at Blue Flame. The 300 pounds of concrete hit the flaming hero in the back, and while it mostly vaporized on contact, it was enough to stagger him momentarily.
“Shit!” Chillz cried, seeing his teammate almost knocked from the air. But when he saw he’d recovered almost instantly, he grinned. “Go ahead, buddy, roast that ass-hat! I’ve got this guy!” And with that he poured on a redoubled surge of freezing cold, encasing Dominator’s torso in a thick shell of ice – the same area that only seconds before had been bathed in blue plasma…
Blue Flame soared up, getting above the giant who was trying to pry up more pieces of the yard, and let go with a blast of azure fire. Instead of hurling the piece of pavement in his hands Gargantua raised it as a shield and the flames splashed against it, turning the asphalt soft but shielding the meta-criminal.
At almost the same instant, a bolt of green energy flashed up and struck Blue Flame, once agin in the back. He recognized the weird feeling as his nonexistent guts seemed to coil around themselves – magic! Pulling up from his dive on Gargantua he scanned the inmates below, most of whom were running for cover…
There – he’d only seen her briefly during the SHADE ambush, and she was out of costume, but that was definitely Mystic… or Ms. Mystical, as she was calling herself since her arrest… some male magic user back East already had rights to the name Mystic and had threatened to sue for infringement…
She’d gone down easy the last time, and he hoped it would be a quick take down again, so he could get back to the real threat, the 60-foot tall psychopath tearing up the place. He formed his flaming katana, and swooped down to the attack… and missed! Damn, she was fast, and –
Her next blast of mystical energy hit him full in the head, just as he reached apogee, and it felt like he’d hit a brick wall head-on at 100 mph. He barely had time to feel surprised before the world went black…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
In the parking lot near the loading docks, Scion and Quanta continued to batter away at Seismic, keeping the villain off balance but apparently doing no real damage to him. Armor-piercing rounds and electric stun bolts were shrugged off, immense blocks of matter dropped on him were shattered to dust by his vibratory powers, and if any of it even bruised him, it was hard to tell.
Then Scion decided it was time to get up close and personal – he’d been hovering, to avoid the seismic shockwaves the Terracavan occasionally blasted outward, and now he dove in to land a pile driver punch to the man’s jaw. This actually seemed to stagger him somewhat, and Quanta prepared to follow his lead…
“Quanta, we need you up here!” Chillz voice suddenly blared in his earpiece, the jamming static abruptly gone. “Blue Flame is down and injured – can’t tell how bad, but he’s not moving! We’ve got Gargatua, Holodeck, and some magical chick right on top of him, and I have my –urgh!” the sound of explosions sounded both in their earpieces and from the roof above them – “I have my hands full with Dominator! Hurry!”
“Go!” yelled Scion. “I’ve got this guy.” He dodged a blow from Seismic‘s massive fist and landed another of his own upside the stoney head. As his silvery teammate twisted gravity and hurled himself up to the exercise yard 100 feet above them, Scion slammed his knee into a rocky groin. It didn’t double the man over, as he’d hoped, but it was enough to leave him open to a double-fisted upper cut to the jaw.
Seismic staggered back, shaking his head and rubbing his jaw. Then a grin split his heavy features, and his black eyes seemed to glow. “At last, a blow worthy of my attention!” he cried, and with a staggeringly fast backhand sent the armored hero flying into an already overturned police van.
Head ringing, Scion pulled himself from the mangled wreckage of the vehicle, and leapt into the air just as a tremendous seismic wave hit, blasting the remains of the van back ten feet. Before he could renew his attack, he was struck by a beam of violet energy from his left. It slowed his forward momentum a bit, but otherwise just flowed off his gleaming metal shell.
“Now it’s two against one, in our favor!” a rather high and nasal voice cried out triumphantly. Standing on a pile of rubble near the crater was a tall, thin inmate… it took Scion a moment to recognize the neurasthenic git from the day of the Astoria Incident, the one Totem had put to sleep… what the hell was his name… oh, yeah…
“Danforth, get yourself back into the jail, NOW – before you get yourself hurt,” he yelled, hurling his tangle net at Seismic, who was charging him. The villain caught the net and tore it in two, the electrical charge not slowing him at all.
“That’s Necron, you miserable metallic moron!” Danforth Carlyle whined, and he hurled another of his “mystical” bolts at his foe. He’d given this one more punch, but it still just seemed to ripple off that damned bronze armor. And it didn’t seem to even slow down the punch Scion landed on Seismic‘s head… the shockwave from that blow would’ve knocked Danforth– Necron– off his feet if he hadn’t gone ethereal just then!
Before he could carry out his next attack, which was going to involve manifesting a fucking dragon – see how the high-and-mighty Scion liked fighting that – he noticed a fine green mist beginning to fall all around him…
“No!” he gasped. “Not again!” He’d known that damned Indian – Native American– what the fuck ever – was around, of course, but he’d hoped he’d gone off to fight on the roof. He felt himself getting drowsy, and he fought against it… and to his surprise, he actually managed to throw it off! Mostly. He still felt a bit woozy, true, but he definitely wasn’t going to fall asleep this time! Oh, how he remembered the ignominy and shame of his defeat on what should have been his greatest day, the day of his ascension… but it would be different this time!
He was still too out of it to summon his manifestation, true, but if he just had a few minutes… with a smile he slid to ground and arranged himself in an artful sprawl across a tilted piece of asphalt, apparently once again in a magical swoon. Ha! Give him just a little time to recover, and then he’d show them all the true power of Necron, Master of the Unliving!
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
On the roof of the admin section of the jail Totem had watched the battle below and weighed his options. His Sleeping Mists had stopped most of the escaping inmates, even if he’d been unable to effect Seismic, who’s will seemed as massive as his physical form. He had watched his teammates’ battle carefully, and was just coming to a decision as to how he might best aid them, when he heard a cry behind him.
He turned to see Phantom Ace kneeling on the rooftop between him and the Interceptor, the still form of Jonny Osaka cradled in his arms. “He’s hurt, that Mystic girl blasted him with some green energy… it turned him human and he fell a long way, and he isn’t waking up!”
Totem moved quickly to his two teammates, and gently pulled the injured one away from his friend, laying him out flat. His own mystical senses reached out as he ran his hands over the injured youth, a blue nimbus growing to surround them both.
“He will be fine,” Totem assured his other teammate. “But I will need a few minutes, and concentration. Perhaps some of the others could use your particular talents just now?”
Phantom Ace took the hint, and with a grateful nod to the shaman he vanished with a “pop” and that disturbing visual warping of his. Totem set to work repairing the damage to Jonny… it was not too severe, actually, just two fractures, some contusions and bruising, and a mild concussion. No internal damage, fortunately, and no serious head trauma. He must have been in transition for much of his fall, and so didn’t hit the ground as hard as might otherwise have been the case.
Totem knew he could quickly heal enough of the damage to get Jonny back on his feet, and once he converted to Blue Flame, any residual damage would vanish in the forge of his energy form; when he next returned to this human form, all damage would be healed, as if it had never been.
As the blue nimbus faded from around them, Jonny opened his eyes, and looked blankly up at Totem for a moment. “What happened? I was fighting that Mystic girl…”
“Yes, and she blasted you out of the sky my friend. I suggest you not take her attacks head-on in the future. You are obviously vulnerable to magic, yes?”
“Maybe,” Jonny said, looking pissed off as it all started to come back. “But let’s see how well she does in the middle of a pillar of plasma!” With that he scrambled to his feet and, stepping away from his teammate, burst into azure fire. “Thanks, Totem, I owe you one man!” he said, rising on a pillar of flame.
As his friend flew up and vanished over the wall into the jail yard above, Totem turned his own thoughts to the battle still raging below. He had a theory about how Seismic‘s powers might work, and he was anxious to test it out. Looking back down, he saw that Quanta had apparently left the battle, and one of the inmates had joined it… on the side of the villain, of course.
Who… oh, it was that foolish would-be wizard from the day of the Incident… Danforth something. With a slight smile, Totem once again cast his spell of the Sleeping Mists, and watched as it settled down over the pretentious… what had Quanta called him? Oh yes, “twit.”
Once the would-be “wizard” slumped to the ground, Totem decided it was time for him to join the battle more directly himself. Leaping up onto the parapet of the roof, he paused for just a moment before falling forward…
… but it was Eagle whose wings brushed the ground, pulling up at the last instant to glide up and hover over the on-going slugfest between Scion and Seismic.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Artemis pulled herself up from the wreckage of a… pool table? Ah, she must be in one of the recreation rooms for this cell block. Clearly, Cannon had blasted out the wall between this room and the loading bay to facilitate the escape of as many non-powered inmates as possible. No doubt simply to add to the confusion; she was quite certain he couldn’t care less about actually helping anyone else.
Half the furniture in the room was smoldering, and the smoke was billowing out of the hole she’d half leapt / half been thrown through… she’d leapt back just as Cannon had fired his concussive blasts at her, rolling with the punch as it were. While she had been momentarily dazed, even now her incredible metabolism was clearing her head…
Wrapping her cloak about her, Artemis faded into the shadows, and vanished. She reappeared only a few yards away, in one of the may shadowed areas of the loading bay. A dozen inmates still milled about, apparently too afraid to go out where Scion and Quanta were battling Seismic… she could see another dozen orange-clad figures laying unconscious between the loading dock and the crater, and smiled as she contemplated how she was about to become the “rock” to her teammates “hard place.”
The smile vanished as she caught sight of Cannon… the E.V.A.L. heavy was lining up to hurl one of his massive concussive blasts into the back of Scion, who seemed unaware of the danger lurking in the shadows behind him. Her escrima sticks were out and flying for the back of Cannon’s head instantly – since he was so fond of sneak attacks from the rear, she’d be happy to give him a taste of it herself.
Cannon staggered forward, collapsing to his knees and clutching his head. “What the fuck?!” he screamed, scrambling up and turning to see where the attack had come from. Catching sight of Artemis in the shadow of a stack of pallets, his eyes narrowed in rage, and he sent a blast of energy at her. But she vanished, and the crates blew apart, sending slivers of wood flying, injuring several of the would-be escapees.
Artemis appeared from a shadow behind and to the right of the villain, and before he could do more than begin to turn, looking for her, she was on him. Her slim but powerful arm encircled his neck, the other held his head like a vice, and she applied pressure. He struggled for only a moment before the lack of blood flow to the brain rendered him unconscious.
A moment later, one foot planted on the ass of the now zip-tied criminal, she smiled at the crowd of inmates who stood staring at her in varying degrees of fear, anger and uncertainty. Cracking her knuckles, she smiled her slight smile again. “Come on boys, I missed my usual workout this morning…”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The shocking sight of his friend taking a green blast to the head and then dropping like a stone, body shifting from flame to flesh as he fell, had momentarily distracted Chillz, and his Arctic attack on Dominator had faltered. Which was enough to give the armored mercenary the few seconds he needed to break out of the ice-shell encasing his torso. But as he did there was a ping of fracturing metal as well as the crack of shattering ice.
Suddenly, the static disappeared from the comms.
“Quanta, we need you up here!” Chillz yelled urgently. “Blue Flame is down and injured – can’t tell how bad, but he’s not moving! We’ve got Gargatua, Holodeck, and some magical chick right on top of him, and I have my –urgh!”
Dominator had launched a barrage of rockets from his shoulder racks, and they’d caught him right in the chest. His ice form had cracked and starred under the impact, but almost instantly began to reform
“– I have my hands full with Dominator!” he continued, sending another arctic blast at his opponent. “Hurry!”
But even as Chillz finished his call for help he caught a glimpse of Phantom Ace appearing next to their fallen teammate… and, surprisingly, he saw Holodeck launch a beam of ruby laser energy at the eyes of Gargantua, who had raised his enormous foot to stomp on the two heroes. The giant had staggered back, bellowing more in surprise than real pain, and Phantom Ace and Jonny had vanished.
Chillz attention was quickly drawn back to his own battle, and he just had time to throw up an ice shield to block a second rocket barrage from Dreadnought. Quanta sailed up over the wall from the south then, and blasted the armored villain in the head with a stream of buckyballs. The return machine-gun fire merely pattered off the hero’s silvery shell, and with a gesture Quanta summoned a massive block of matter directly over the mercenary.
A rocket barrage blasted the block into several pieces, but the mass nonetheless drove Dominator to his knees… and something made a sparking, hissing noise in his armor. Staggering back to his feet, he stood as if at attention.
“Well, this has been fun,” his rough voice suddenly boomed out, amplified to almost painful levels. “But I think this party is about over!” With that his boot jets flared white-hot, charring and cracking the cement beneath him, and he shot into the air, arcing eastward. He accelerated at an unbelievable rate, and was out of sight almost before the heroes could react.
Everyone on the roof was momentarily distracted as the remaining Air Cavalry drones suddenly exploded, sending shrapnel everywhere. This provided a brief respite for Holodeck, who had been dodging both giant feet and green energy blasts from her fellow inmates, while returning laser fire of her own.
“Holodeck attacked Gargantua,” Chillz quickly filled Quanta in as they turned their attention on the remaining villains. “She probably saved Jonny and Gideon’s lives!”
“Good to know,” Quanta replied. “But remember to stick to code names in the field, Chillz, even over our own comms.”
“Oh, right, sorry… but listen, I have an idea…”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Phantom Ace had decided to check out the ground battle after being told to skedaddle by Totem, and he had popped in on the loading dock to get the lay of the land first. Behind him, the sounds of breaking bones and groaning men drew his attention… inside the loading bay he could dimly see a dozen or so inmates getting their asses handed to them by a whirling shadow that he assumed was Artemis.
Since she clearly had that situation in hand, he turned to watch the slugging match between Seismic and Scion. The two seemed evenly matched in strength, while their powers seemed ineffective on each other – Scion easily evading Seismic‘s ground attacks by staying in the air, and the villain apparently grounding the hero’s electrical attacks with equal ease.
Well, Phantom Ace thought with a grin, let’s see how the Big Bad likes becoming as one with his good friend the earth! He ‘ported over behind the villain, dropping down to get get an arm around the massive, stone-like neck, and attempted to take them both insubstantial…
It was like hitting a stone wall, and he was actually hurled back, hard. He barely had time to go insubstantial himself before slamming through a car 20 feet away, rather than into it. Phasing back out through the metal and glass, he shook his head to clear it, and considered his next move.
It was at that moment that Eagle joined the fight, swooping in from behind Phantom Ace. His majestic wings spread wide to check his flight as he stooped on Seismic, his talons digging into the stone-like flesh… then one… two… three mighty flaps and he was lifting the self-proclaimed revolutionary off the ground and into the air.
“Let us see how strong you are when you are not in contact with the ground, mortal,” Eagle’s harsh voice laughed arrogantly, as he climbed ever faster into the sky.
“You foolish bird-man,” Seismic laughed derisively in turn. “My power is over the earth, not of it! I am as strong in your elemental as I am in my own!”
With that he made a surprisingly limber move for so massive a man, kicking his legs high and catching Eagle in the chest with his booted feet. The avatar was knocked back, losing his grip on his opponent. Already 200 feet above the ground, Seismic plummeted earthward, twisting to aim his head and arms forward, as if diving into water.
Eagle recovered quickly, and dove himself to try and catch the fool before he splattered all over the parking lot. Scion raced forward as well, but before either could intercept the falling man the ground beneath him rippled and then tore open into a small sinkhole. Seismic vanished within it, and even as the two hero’s met above it, the hole began to fill again.
“Well, damn!” Scion growled. “That was a good idea, getting him off the ground, too bad it didn’t work.”
“Indeed,” Eagle agreed, obviously chagrined at his failure, and not wishing to discuss it. “But the battle continues above. We should join your comrades.” With that he launched himself up toward the rooftop exercise yard. After contemplating the again-solid ground where his opponent had vanished for a moment, Scion sighed and began to follow him… until a sudden movement caught his eye…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
In the rooftop yard Chillz formed a coating of slick ice underneath the feet of the lumbering Gargantua, and then blasted him with a cone of arctic air, causing the behemoth to stagger backward. Trying to catch his balance, feet slipping and failing to find purchase on the ice pavement, the giant didn’t see Quanta’s quantum matter block coming until the last second – he tried to raise his arm to shield himself, but it slammed into his head. Dazed, his feet flew out from under him, and he went down – and over the wall, which hit him in the back of the knees. He impacted the ground 100 feet below with a crash that shook the building… and didn’t move.
Ms. Mystical, meanwhile, seemed very focused on her enraged assault on Holodeck. She blasted away at the other woman relentlessly, as Bennie dodged and jinked and hurled her own laser blasts back in return. Ms. Mystical only sent half-distracted blasts at the heroes when they actively got in her way, at least until they began to really gang up on her.
For someone who went down in the first seconds of her first super fight, Amber Reynolds was proving to be a surprisingly difficult enemy to put down this time, Quanta thought, as he sent streams of high-velocity buckyballs at her… the attack was deflected by a glowing green shield. Less than two weeks in the local jail could hardly have hardened her that much… maybe they’d just really lucked out the last time?
He was relieved to see Blue Flame rejoin the flight, apparently little the worse for his injuries. But though he seemed determined to roast the little blond inmate alive, she managed to avoid his plasma blasts even as she landed a couple of mystic whammies on him in return. Chillz sent blasts of arctic air at her, which she ignored to continue bombarding poor Holodeck, who in turn continued to try and penetrate the mystic’s shields with her lasers.
It wasn’t until Eagle arrived and blasted Ms. Mystical with a bolt of lightning that they finally began to get some traction… but even as she staggered under the electrical onslaught she managed to get in a solid blow on Bennie, who was slammed back into the wall near the door into the cell block, slumping to the ground, dazed.
Another bolt of lightning kept her from following up to finish off her erstwhile fellow inmate and, momentarily bedazzled, she almost failed to see one of Quanta’s signature large blocks descending on her. At the last instant she got a mystic shield up, however, deflecting the mass enough that it left her merely slightly dazed. Shaking it off, she dodged a blow from Blue Flame’s plasma katana to send a lethal blast of magical force at Holodeck, who was struggling to get back on her feet.
She was completely taken aback when the blast appeared to pass entirely through the woman’s body, splashing harmlessly against the wall behind her. As her form began to fade away Amber suddenly realized she’d been tricked. Too late – Bennie was behind her, and her laser blast took her in the back of the head just as she began to turn.
Holodeck turned the power off before she cooked the other woman’s brain, but the smell of burning hair was strong in the morning air. The purple mohawked woman then sank to her knees, holding her side with one hand and wincing. “I think she broke some ribs with that last blast… or maybe it was when I hit the wall.” She laughed, then grimaced in pain.
“We appreciate the assist, Bennie,” Quanta said, kneeling down to examine the injured man. “But why did you do it? Why didn’t you escape when you had the chance?”
“Hey, I never wanted to escape,” Bennie said, eyes widening in surprise as the hero touched her side and the pain began to recede. “Hey, thanks man, that feels much better… anyway, I was just dragged along once everything went to shit here this morning. But when I saw that goon about to kill your friends… well, I couldn’t let that happen…” She looked a little sheepish, then shrugged.
“Besides, I’m getting out tomorrow… the DA decided they didn’t really have anything to charge me with, except maybe malicious mischief… and with so many more serious meta crimes to prosecute, and the very popular “I was driven temporarily crazy” defense my lawyer was floating, I guess they figured it just wasn’t worth the trouble or expense.”
Quanta’s response to this news was cut off by the sounds of screams and gunshots from inside the Meta-Human Detention Unit cell block.
“Oh great, what now,” he sighed, as Scion appeared over the roof, carrying Artemis in a wrist grasp. As they touched down Quanta turned to Phantom Ace. “Pop in and scout out the situation, will you? Report back as soon as you have the lay of things in there.”
With a wave, a “pop” and a ripple Phantom Ace was gone…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The movement that had caught Scion’s eye had been Danforth “Necron” Carlyle, getting into position for his final, devastating attack on his hated enemy. Even as the so-called hero spotted him, Necron raised his hands in a dramatic gesture, and a great violet dragon sprang into being above him. Its great translucent wings beat as it swooped in to attack, swallowing the armored foe in a single gulp!
Yes! He knew he could so it! Now they’d have to take him seriously, and it was only a matter of time before others would begin flocking to his banner! Soon he would –
His dragon blew apart in a spray of violet light and blue electricity. Scion hung in the air, somehow managing to look annoyed even with his face hidden behind his helmet. He scanned the area looking for Danforth, who decided that maybe this was indeed an instance when discretion was the better part of valor… but next time, for sure, he’d show them!
He slid down the dirt slope into the crater Seismic had made for the fleeing inmates… Scion hadn’t picked him up again yet, if he could just make it into the shadows of the tunnel, Necron would yet make his escape, to fight another day…
Artemis had been watching from the shadows of the loading bay as Seismic had made his escape. Nothing she could do there, so she had continued to secure the last of the non-powered inmates. As Eagle took off, no doubt for the rooftop jail yard where she could hear the sounds of continuing battle, she stepped out, preparing to ask Scion for a lift.
She’d been as surprised as he when an enormous dragon of translucent violet light appeared in the air above him, and swooped down to swallow him whole. Not terribly worried for her teammate, she had scanned the devastated parking lot for – yes, there he was, that idiot poseur Danforth Carlyle, slinking around near the lip of the crater.
The look of transcendent triumph on his face had turned to one of utter horror as his magical construct had exploded under Scion’s bioelectric surge, and it brought the biggest smile of the day to her lips. Scion spotted the little twit as he tried to escape into the tunnels, of course, but Artemis touched her comm link before he could move after him.
“I’ve got this one, Captain,” she said, amusement clear in her voice. She stepped back into the shadows and vanished… to appear in the deep gloom of the escape tunnel at the bottom of the crater. Danforth, hurrying along with furtive glances backward, failed to see her until he almost ran into her, jerking himself back with a shriek at the last second.
She could smell the acrid odor as his bladder let loose, and Artemis just shook her head. Sometimes it was almost too easy she thought, as she rabbit punched him into unconsciousness. Grabbing him by the collar – she sure wasn’t going to sling him over her shoulder after his little accident – she teleported back to the shadows of the loading bay.
After using the special zip-ties that Totem had enchanted for her to restrain magic wielders she stepped out on to the dock and waved to Scion, hovering above the crater. “Would you mind giving me a lift up to the roof? I don’t think this is all over quite yet…”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Phantom Ace appeared inside the cell block where a hexagonal guard platform linked the central cat-walks of the long and short wings of the unit. Three correctional officers were trapped there, weapons empty, with bands of the metal railings wrapped around them – and apparently slowly constricting the life out of them. Hovering in the air nearby was Marius “Mag-Knight” Night, possibly the most powerful, and deadly, of those that the proto-Vanguard had captured the day of the Astoria Incident.
His orange jail garb was mostly obscured by the make-shift armor he had formed from the metal around him. He sneered in distain when he saw Phantom Ace appear, but at least the metal bands around the guards stopped contracting.
“So, the celebrated Vanguard finally shows up,” he drawled, sounding bored. “I suppose I should’ve gotten out earlier, but it was just so much damn fun tormenting these assholes – almost as much fun as I’m sure they’ve had tormenting me.” The bound guards groaned as their restraints tightened a fraction more.
“Let them go Marius,” Phantom Ace said. “It’s not too late to–”
“It’s Mag-Knight, you pathetic little ghost-boy!” he snarled, dropping his mask of boredom, and letting his full insanity shine through. “And it’s way too late – do you think these three are the first cringing curs I’ve dispatched today?”
With that he gestured and the metal bands around the officers contracted inward like a horizontal guillotine. But Phantom Ace had been prepared for exactly that, and he phased the two men and one woman, dropping them all down through the grating to the concrete floor below.
“Go!” he whispered. “I’ll keep him distracted, and the rest of the Vanguard are just outside.” Without waiting to see if they obeyed, he began climbing up the air again, and activating his comm link. “It’s Mag-Knight, guys, and he’s crazier than ever. I’m afraid he may already have killed… well, I don’t know how many guards.”
As he cleared the platform grating Phantom Ace was surprised by a sudden bolt of concentrated magnetic energy, which hit him full in the chest – and knocked him out of his insubstantial state! Falling back to the platform, his head spun and he felt slightly nauseous. How the hell had Mag-Knight done that?!
Before the psycho could follow up on his advantage, however, the rest of the Vanguard burst through the door from the yard. Chillz let loose one of his Arctic blasts, but the crazed villain just laughed.
“Supercooled just means superconductive, you moronic ice cube!” And he knocked the ice giant across the room with a metal pole. Eagle, hovering hear the ceiling, summoned his lightning. The bolt struck the metal pole, flowing down it to Marius’ arm and encasing him in a white nimbus – which flared back up as an EMP and into the winged avatar. With a shriek of pain he spasmed and dropped from the air, unconscious.
Scion sent a stream of ceramic bullets at the villain, and Quanta attacked with buckyballs, but both did little more than knock him back as his armor absorbed the damage. There was too much light in the cell block for Artemis to teleport, and her electrified escrima sticks, while non-ferrous, where no more effective than the lightning or projectiles had been.
Phantom Ace’s power was not constrained by the amount of light, of course, and as the others pummeled the man with attack after attack, he ‘ported up to him and moved to reach an insubstantial hand into his chest to shock his heart. Unfortunately, Mag-Knight chose that moment to rise upward — and whatever frequency his magnetic powers worked on, they seemed to block Ace’s intangibility… his hand penetrated armor and prison cloth, only to come to a stop cupping the man’s genitalia.
His eyes widened and his face turned red as he realized what had happened; Marius looked equally shocked and disbelieving, staring from his crotch to Ace’s crimson face, his own face beginning to flush with outrage. He opened his mouth… to say what exactly would never be known, as Quanta took advantage of the moment of utter distraction to form a massive block over the villain’s head, and it came down hard, knocking him senseless and slamming him into the floor before dissipating.
The block passed right through Phantom Ace, of course, who remained hovering in the air, not meeting anyones eyes, his face burning…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
It took several more hours to round up what inmates they could and to secure the jail facility. In the end, aside from whatever outside elements had planned and executed the assault, 14 powered inmates, out of 38, had escaped, and only three normal inmates.
It turned out that those outside elements, clearly members of E.V.A.L., had actually numbered three… besides Seismic and Dominator, a mysterious sword-wielding man in black, described by the survivors as “a ninja,” had made his way through the facility slaying guards, freeing inmates, and starting fires. None of the security cameras captured any sign of this man, although they did catch instances of guards being cut down by an unseen assailant. Aside from a large number of inmates and a few surviving guards who saw him in action, no physical evidence of this mysterious agent was found.
The security cameras did, however, show why the power went down – several corrections officers could be seen on the recordings moving like sleepwalkers through the facility, targeting the various switches and fail-safes and turning them off. The officers claimed to have no memory of their actions, and while SHADE planed to bring in telepaths to confirm it, no one had any doubt that they’d been mind-controlled, once the psychic bands of the building’s dampening tech had failed.
While the Vanguard themselves were not pleased that the E.V.A.L. operatives had escaped them, and that they’d been unable to prevent all the escapes, the APD and SHADE were both pleased enough with the team.
“It was a chaotic situation, and well-planned on their end,” Agent Stark assured them after the final debriefing. “You had five minutes warning, were forced to split your forces, and had little intelligence on who you faced – while they knew a lot about you. One of the downsides of being the public good guys, unfortunately.
“You saved a lot of lives today, and kept almost two-thirds of the powered prisoners where they belong. Of the ones that did get away (almost all of them before you were actually on site, I would point out), most are on the low end of the threat spectrum. The really dangerous ones remain in custody, thank God.
“So smile! You people did good today.”
