Meta drugs suck. They really, really suck. We can outlaw them, ban them, and get them off the street the moment that we find out what they are doing, and according to the accords we can even backdate it to the moment someone was harmed, but they use weird ingredients or no ingredients at all, which kills the biggest bust producer, tracing the chemicals.

The worst part is, the moment you outlaw one, another one appears, often from the same meta or at least the same supplier. In a month or two, the new stuff is just as bad if not worse than the old stuff. To paraphrase a movie, human nature will find a way. There is a bright point, though. Meta producers always leave behind a power signature.

The DEA has some new helpers I’d like to introduce you to. They work for Proteus but are officially assigned to us for as long as these meta substances take to track to their sources. They are capable of reading the energy, and in some cases tracking it to its source.

Sergeant David Mahoney, on introducing project clean sweep participants to the DEA special units.

3 years later

Do you know what the biggest problem with being a supervillain is? The hours.

I mean, sure, you can go for a big score, but then you have to spend the rest of your life, every waking AND sleeping moment, looking over your shoulder for the guy that’s faster, tougher, and much smarter than you to make you pay for your sins. And that’s just the hero types. Your fellow bad guys are way worse since every single one of them thinks that they need to either eliminate you as potential competition or turn you into their sock puppet for what you can give them.

I had dealt with both. Well, dealt with was sort of an overstatement. I had gotten my ass kicked for both reasons. I had no intention of becoming a super villain, but I had been part of the one percent of the one percent that had pulled an ace… or in my case, a joker.

Which is why I was in a bare cell. By bare, I mean, butt-naked in front of your entire class bare. They would not let me have anything I could possibly use to escape. Not that I had the slightest interest in escaping. Every single time I was on my own, sooner or later, someone decided I was better off under their thumb, using my gifts for their betterment instead of mine. In here I had a nice warm cell kept at a constant 78 degrees, 5 chemically-neutral ceramic walls, a fresh air vent, a toilet/shower/sink combination, 3 carefully-balanced protein mush meals a day, and a screen with a laser keyboard that gave me access to the prison database for entertainment any time I wanted it. Sure, the screen was set up on the Other side of the clear ceramic wall, but it was better than just my own mind for entertainment.

No bed, no real food, nothing but water. I usually just went ahead and drank water and ate the mush rather than chemically converting it to anything nicer, but that’s because the guards who watched through the bars on the roof got really nervous when one of us supervillains dared flex our powers. I got enough flack just using the overhead bars for pull-ups and other gravity exercises. Tasers couldn’t kill me unless they wanted to reactivate the old electric chair, and even that might be enough… but they really hurt. It wasn’t as good as Jim’s Gym, but convicts can’t be choosers.

The reality was, I could have probably escaped if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. I wasn’t too worried about getting shot unless they aimed for my head, and keeping anything I could use chemically out of my grasp, even interesting food, was sort of ignoring the fact that my body could produce chemicals I was perfectly capable of using as waste products if I didn’t mind getting my hands really dirty. My lawyer had told me that if I was careful and friendly I could go on rehabilitation watch in less than two years, and being watched by the supercops was vastly better than getting kidnapped again.

I leaped up to my bars and started doing pull-ups while my screen was playing a movie I loved, the original 1954 version of Sabrina. The sound wasn’t great, a single speaker through a grill in the ceramic wall, but it had subtitles and I loved watching Audrey transformed, and I still chuckled about the wine glass. I had an agreement with the guards, I didn’t use the bars to exercise when someone important was watching, and they didn’t run high voltage through my body until I was a quivering mess when I tried to exercise.

I know, prisons are full of innocent men. Technically, I was completely guilty of the crimes I was in here for. The mitigating circumstance was a great excuse for making drugs when you had an explosive collar around your neck, but using superpowers in the commission of a crime, even if that crime was determined to be forced on you, still carried a mandatory 5-year sentence in a meta penitentiary. I was just glad that they hadn’t had any evidence of my other crimes or I’d probably have been put away for good.

Certainly, drug-dealing gangsters were scum and most cops were just fine when a bunch of them wound up dead, but if the crooks hadn’t been so meticulous about cleaning up my messes I would have probably had a couple of counts of power-assisted murder on my head, as well as possibly the aforementioned electric chair’s cap. Self-defense was not an acceptable excuse for killing using meta abilities, since federal and international law had decided that if you were able to kill people with powers, you were also able to get away from them without killing them. That was strictly untrue, but there had been a LOT of vigilantes that regularly claimed self-defense after cutting their way into a den of iniquity and slaughtering all the bad guys that shot at them.

Honestly, except for the part about choosing to get shot at, I sort of understood the vigilantes. Cleaning up the neighborhood was a goal I could get behind, and who wants to give all of their vital statistics to the government or Proteus? Hell, Proteus had had their turn at me too, and even though I had come up as completely human, if I were on death row I am pretty sure that my brain would have wound up in dozens of little dissecting jars somewhere. I was not a chemical genius like the prosecutor claimed, but I was very attached to my brain and had no idea if I could grow it back.

The movie abruptly stopped and was replaced by the orange screen with the hand holding a wave, the Proteus logo. I dropped back to my feet and sat down cross-legged on the floor, leaning forward with my arms on my lap so I didn’t go displaying my junk. I had considered growing my body hair out to conceal myself, but again, people got jumpy when you showed them that their security didn’t work. They didn’t give me clothes for the same reason I didn’t get a mattress, but frankly, a little chemical assistance and a lot of exercises had given me a body I could be proud of. I missed clothes and decent food, but mostly I missed girls and Callie. Maybe Brandi. Heck, I would have settled for Sif

Unfortunately, the unlovely face of my public defender, while technically female, did nothing to assuage my lack of female companionship. I am pretty sure that she had pushed for a guilty plea specifically because I had offered to fix it for her.

“Alchemyst” she spoke loudly, a smoker’s rasp completing the image of a woman with a face like a hammer that thought every problem was a nail.

I sighed and shook my head. “Why do you have to use that name? How about Louis or McCarthy. Those are my names. Alchemyst was the label that that idiot from the Star Channel came up with. I never used it, and I never cackled gleefully over turning dish soap into gold or anything.”

Karen shook her head. “The law is very clear. While you are still alive, we cannot unveil you. That means using your supervillain name instead of your real name. No matter how many times you tell me to use it, I can’t do it and risk your enemies going after your friends and family.”

“I don’t have any friends or family,” I growled, irritably.

“I know you hate your brother, but you do. If anyone ever uses your real name, or it comes up on any papers or recordings anywhere other than from you, someone could use him to get to you. If I call you… that name, and he winds up dead, I could be charged. Even if you want him to wind up dead.”

I shrugged, “No one cares enough about me to kill him, more’s the pity.” My brother had sold me to one of his contacts. When he found out I could create drugs from just about anything, he had traded me to a cartel that he owed money without hesitation. He had even visited me while I was in an explosive collar to apologize and explain that as his little brother, I owed it to him to allow myself to be enslaved indefinitely and forced to create drugs since they would have killed him. I told him I should have done it for them, and I would if I ever saw his face again. That was the last visit.

The problem is, that metahuman physiology was fairly well understood, and I didn’t qualify. I didn’t qualify for a lot of different things, since I knew quite well that I wasn’t particularly bright. I knew Human and metahuman physiology inside out, from an energy point of view, and I knew how the substances I created would influence them, but the feelings I got from substances didn’t match any known chemical reactions and couldn’t be reproduced. Whatever it was my brain did with chemicals, if it was even my brain, didn’t correspond with any known science, which is why they called me Alchemyst instead of like… Doctor Reactor or something cool like that. In a very real way, what I did was pure magic.

Karen’s not-so-lilting tones, which more resembled someone who regularly gargled cleaning solution instead of a dulcet songstress, continued. “The DMA has extended another offer.”

I shook my head. “Like I said last time. You have to have a special talent to become a meta, not a badge. All I can do is help awaken those who probably would have awoken anyway the moment they were in danger. If they want to parade their agents past me again I am fine with letting them know who has meta potential, but I refuse to just hand them an elixir and let them randomly try it out. If you don’t have the trait, you melt, explode, burn, fold, or spindle from the energy release, even just a little of it. Trust me, I made the stuff, I know way better than they ever will how it works.”

She shook her head, and I wondered again if she’d been born female. I mean, she didn’t appear to have an adam’s apple, and she was supposedly married with three natural children, but while I didn’t think of myself as particularly shallow, the idea of facing her over the breakfast table every morning and listening to that voice was terrifying. I regretted not taking my case to trial, because I think a jury would have ruled in my favor just to avoid her scowl and the inevitable change of underpants it would require.

“No, Stevenson was no-contested when a video of him with an… underaged boy got out. Roman got appointed to DMA oversight and there’s been a change of focus.”

“Max Roman? The guy from Utah? Geez, he’s worse than Stevenson.”

She shrugged a little, “Probably, but the difference is he’s got the majority religion backing him and has to look clean or lose his slot in re-election. That means that the Department of Metahuman Affairs has to look squeaky clean under his watch. I am pretty sure he’s making money like he has a printing press in his basement, but the DMA has changed its focus to enlisting registered heroes and coercing vigilantes instead of trying to make homegrown heroes and enforcing registration. After Raven brought down Overwatch, vigilantes are the new shiny. The DMA is willing to offer you early parole if you are willing to play consultant for the new teams and get a profile on the unregistered vigilantes they are trying to get a handle on.”

“So basically Proteus and the DMA want to me to play spy and give them a list of every Meta ability I run across? What do I get out of it?”

Karen shrugged, “Besides getting out of here? I am not really sure. They contacted me just to do the initial work and if you said you were interested, they’d send someone to negotiate.”

I nodded slowly, “I will negotiate, but on one condition.”

She shook her head. “Jesus. Don’t tell me you want to be put in normal pop? There’s no way. I don’t have that kind of pull. The DMA will bend rules to get what they want, but there’s not the slightest possibility that they are going to let you into pop when meta dampeners don’t work on you.”

She knew I didn’t appreciate her using the J-word and I think she did it knowing it would bug me. I wouldn’t call myself religious, but I tried to respect other people’s beliefs. I knew how people’s energy worked better than most, and the typical explanation of ‘there was nothing, and then nothing exploded for no reason, and filled nothing with nothing and created time and space and then there were dinosaurs’ made a lot less sense than some kind of superpowered being creating the universe. Call me weird, but I dealt with superpowers every day, they made a lot more sense than random chance.

I shook my head, my overlong hair brushing my shoulders. “No. I know that won’t fly. I have been a good boy. I refuse to talk to them unless I get to wear a pair of pants.”

I did get to wear a pair of pants. Heck, they gave me a whole set of orange coveralls to wear, as well as an explosive collar and a set of warnings to not even think too hard about using my abilities or I’d get to see if regenerating my head was an option.

I hadn’t seen much of the prison. Most of it was… well… fairly typical. The meta wing was very small, supposedly there were only about two dozen metas, as usually those who were actually caught breaking laws either got away or didn’t survive apprehension. It disgusted me, but most metas that chose to do bad things thoroughly enjoyed adding murder to their list. In a very real way, even though most people looked at the meta wing as the worst of the worst of criminals, they were damned close to the white-collar criminals of the supervillain world. Most of them were non-violent or only lightly violent and were in for technicalities or minor crimes. The real bad ones? They either disappeared into a Proteus black site or were put on the fast track on death row. Death row in the meta wing was very swift judgment with no chance for appeal, as it was far safer to drop a murderous meta in hours or days rather than give them the time to plot an escape. Metas, especially the bloody kind, have proven again and again that they are very good at escaping.

I was marched towards the high-security visitor's wing and was a little disappointed. I had expected screams of ‘meat’ and burning rolls of toilet paper, maybe a shivving or some badass crime lord with his loyal followers holding court in the cafeteria, but I hardly even saw a facial tattoo or swastika anywhere. Mostly it was just a bunch of guys talking, leaving each other alone, watching TV, napping, or exercising. All those movies were full of crap. Maybe the fun stuff only happened during prison riots.

I was not too worried. One of my earliest discoveries unlocked my ability to regenerate. It was something any human could do, heck, it was right there in some of our more ancient genes, it just took a little tweaking to get right. I had pretty good control of my body, enough to greatly improve my musculature when I worked out, as well as unlocking my ability to regenerate from a lot of stuff, but the human body only has a finite amount of energy. If I had endless resources there were a ton more tweaks I could have done, but being able to heal rapidly from most damage and my secret get-out-of-jail-free was about all I could support at one time. I was not a meta, with their endless well of energy, and if I tried to do too much tweaking I would melt just as disgustingly as some poor bastard that was forced to drink elixir. Right now I was running at only 60% of my energy, with the rest tied into my freedom plan and my health/regeneration.

That meant I wasn’t immune to bullets even though I could mostly heal them, I couldn’t throw cars even though I was pretty close to Olympic levels of strength, I couldn’t outrun a locomotive even if, with enough concentration, I could probably outrun most famous sprinters, and, while climbing walls was possible, I’d rather just take the elevator. With several hours of preparation, I could probably form a big flap of skin between my arms and legs and glide off of a building, but it would be disgusting and it would hurt, human skin is not really made to support our entire weight in flight. A squirrel suit would work a thousand times better.

My best, and most useful talent right now, was changing the flavor of the vitamin-infused slop I ate and making sure it provided the nutrients a growing boy like me needed. I had bitched heartily about it missing B-complex vitamins when they first started feeding it to me, and someone paid attention, adding ground-up pills to it. Chemically creating B vitamins was a nightmare, and when I occasionally got tased by a testy guard the charge tended to strip out the vitamins. Not that I ever really earned the shocks, especially after the exercise agreement, but some guards enjoyed shocking the crap out of people with superpowers, and prison guard was a very traditional occupation for sadistic bullies.

I was very careful to act meek. Since they were taking me through genpop territory, the guards were not permitted to wear lethal weapons, just PR-24 tonfas, tasers, and a complement of nonlethal grenades. One of the guards was even carrying what looked like an automatic grenade launcher loaded with bean bags. If I were interested in escaping, I was pretty sure I could be out on the road in minutes, and I know that the guards knew that too. But I was a good boy and was willing to hear what the new, more humanitarian Proteus had to say.

I was escorted to a small room with a table with a steel ring in it, and my handcuffs were locked to the table while my legs were locked to the heavy, mounted chair underneath it. I smiled and gave the guards, both large men wearing face shields, a friendly wave. Karen Anchorface, her real last name was something like Anchorage or Perth or some city outside of the east coast area where I grew up, was sitting to the side of the table I was attached to, well out of restricted reach.

Across from me was a woman I would not have minded getting close to under other circumstances. She looked to be in her mid 20s, with slightly darker skin implying Persian or Greek heritage and nicely full lips that would have looked right at home on a model. She was wearing a short off-the-rack female business suit in a quiet charcoal, and her only real flaw was slightly uneven ears, her left ear being perhaps an eighth of an inch higher than her right. This was obvious due to the severe bun savagely pinned behind her head, and she had a laminate on one breast pocket and a pair of Gargoyle glasses hanging from the other. Her top beneath the suit was unbuttoned rather than having a tie, and while she had a very nice neck she didn’t show anything resembling cleavage, just a little gold cross on a chain next to a tiny pendant that said ‘Michael’. Her laminate had a picture of her with her hair out, and it was frizzy but long in the picture. That and the name Special Agent Antonia Andropolis confirmed both that she had Greek heritage and that her parents were every bit as sadistic as the local law enforcement. Imagine naming some poor kid ‘Special Agent’.

Beside her was a guy that probably really was named ‘Agent’ by his parents. He looked, under his badly-fitted suit, nearly as muscular as I was. His laminate had an actual federal badge impression on it, and all I could make out was agent Baldwin. With his over-the-top jaw, shaved head, and gritted teeth I couldn’t imagine him having a last name that was not Baldwin. The fit of his suit also implied that while he was not currently armed, he probably carried around a cannon that would have made Dirty Harry blush with envy.

I used to be shy in college and built like a 6’5” beech tree with arms, but after the death of my mom and my little brother, my stint with the cartel, and two years of power-assisted self-improvement I figured I could be intimidating if I tried. I didn’t try, though, cracking a big smile and saying “Hi There!” as if I were ready to write their names on a coffee cup.

I thought that the two diametrically opposed agents were there to do the good cop, bad cop thing, but Agent Baldwin started talking first while laying several folders out on the table in front of himself and Special Agent Andropolis.

“I understand you are willing to negotiate for early parole. We cannot grant complete parole, but are willing to give you partial parole for your agreement to participate in certain law enforcement actions as a designated informant and active resource.” Then he looked at my slowly shaking head. “What?” he asked.

“You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I want early parole. I am actually fine with normal parole, for which I have prepared. Sure, Proteus can be a bunch of dickheads and block it, and I sort of expected them to because I wouldn’t hand over the formula for making poor agent’s heads explode, but if I spend another two years here I will still be content. Right now I am safe, fed, entertained, and being rehabilitated from my life of crime. Early Parole would be an interesting development, and will probably be part of whatever deal we make, but it is far from the reason I am negotiating and it is not the ace you think it is.” I started.

“What I understand is that you are going to be employing a bunch of vigilantes to help clean up some of the problems the prior administration allowed to develop. Some of those vigilantes are well-known for being heroic types, some of them are little known and might be a bad camera angle away from winding up in here with me. You want to scope out their abilities and attitudes so you can keep an eye on the dangerous ones before they do something that will kill Max’s chances for re-election next year.”

I pointed at the file that had my name on it. “I know you came in here preparing for negotiations with a hardened criminal, but if you examine my file closely you will discover that at every point when dealing with the authorities I have been as cooperative and even helpful as possible. I am a fan of law enforcement, and simply wish that they had been able to catch me before I was forced to do some objectionable things by some very bad people. I am not greedy, since I can very easily take care of my own needs after I pay back a little bit of a student loan. When I leave here, I guarantee that there are several corporations that would willingly pay me seven figures despite my criminal background. I have no blackmail material since before I was kidnapped I was basically a nerd with no girlfriends and I was smart enough to regularly clear my browser history.” I grinned. “And the criminal element has nothing that they can offer me that I cannot achieve without their help.”

I shrugged, leaning back as far as I could and opening my hands up. “In short, I am exactly what you want and need, and I am really easy to convince. So instead of playing bad cop, cute cop, how about we talk fairly about what you can offer and what I can accept? Look it over. You won’t have letting a monster walk free on your conscience. I just don’t want us to wind up enemies. You look like you have dealt with people caught up in a series of stupid situations before, trying to get out of them, so just treat me like someone that genuinely wants to never live a Breaking Bad episode again and we should get along well.”

Baldwin sighed and leaned back. “We aren’t playing bad cop, cute cop. I am the good cop. Special Agent Andropolis?”

She scowled at me, “Seventy-one people overdosed on the formula you created. Two agents died due to the meta formulation you created. I don’t blame you for the agents except that you created what they volunteered to try, thus it was your fault. I do blame you for the seventy-one deaths, and the tens of thousands of people that had to go through one of the worst rehabs I have ever seen. Yes, I consider putting you back on the streets the same as letting a monster walk free. You should have been in an electric chair, not a posh cell with your every need taken care of.”

I sighed. “Did you fail to read the part where I was in an explosive collar? I was enslaved, forced to make drugs with a gun pointed at my head for nearly a year.”

She yelled, “You should have died! You should have let them blow your goddamned head off instead of being a complete pussy and letting them put your crap on the streets! That’s what a hero would have done! Because you were a coward, you let seventy-three people die in your place. We couldn’t even trace any of the compounds you used, we had to follow the trail of bodies. Children without mothers. People’s sons and daughters. Normal Meth would have screwed them up, but your stuff? It couldn’t be cut without destroying it, so every person took a full dose. The moment someone got stupid and doubled up, they were another body we found.”

I shook my head. “Lady, I don’t know if you are lying to me or someone lied to you.”

She slammed one fist into the table. Uhh. Okay, she was a meta. I hadn’t checked, because the remote encephalographs in the wall would have gone off and I would have been minus a very important body part. It took her a moment to yank her hand out of the giant dent she had made in the thick, solid steel furniture. “What the hell do you mean?”

“I didn’t create a killer. My substance was mentally addictive, yes, it was intended to be so. But it didn’t cause physical addiction. You also could not overdose on it. I mean, it drew from your own energy and stimulated your pleasure centers, but you could literally chug that stuff by the gallon and it would always have exactly the same effect. If you took a smaller dose, it had zero effect whatsoever, which I was forced to do in order to stabilize the supply. The cartel distributed over a dozen designer drugs, several of which were meta-designed, but my drug was sold for almost ten thousand dollars a dose to actors and rich folks that couldn’t afford to look like a junkie, which was the entire point. A perfect high for half an hour a day maximum, no side effects, no danger, no missed casting calls or slurred public addresses. Hell, you could suck up a dose and 5 seconds later pass a field sobriety test, although with basically a half an hour full-body orgasm you probably wouldn’t want to. Hell, you couldn’t even really use it with sex, since you were already at the same level as a good orgasm. No hallucinogenic properties, no carcinogenic properties. It wouldn’t even mix with other drugs badly because it wasn’t chemically viable with other substances.”

I was pissed, not by her assertion that I had killed people, but by her assumption that I was incompetent. Even Drug dealers don’t like drugs with a high casualty rate, since dead customers don’t buy more drugs. I added, “I think it was really unlikely that it caused heart failure since it tended to relax instead of wire your nervous system. I guess it slowed your reactions a little, so if you drove a car and got into an accident it might kill you from being too relaxed, but it wouldn’t put you to sleep.”

Agent Baldwin looked back and forth between Antonia and me, and Antonia looked like she was ready to rip the table apart to get to me. “Liar.” she hissed through her teeth. “Murderer.”

Baldwin coughed, clearing his throat, “Agent Andropolis, can I talk to you for a minute? Outside?”

She glared at him, “What? Oh, am I being too goddamned unprofessional with this piece of human garbage? If I’d caught him he would never have even made it to trial, even with his friendly act!”

“Provisional Special Agent Andropolis! I need to speak with you outside, now!” He barked.

Provisional?