Scene 13 - December 19th

Interior MLED Compound, Continuous

Dominic Könberg

Viv took a deep breath, and a fresh wave of white smoke rolled off of her helmet as she, presumably, took advantage of the superintelligence it gave. “Okay, you guys start fighting your way out,” she said after an instant. “Take at least ten minutes - that should be long enough for me to get a sizable data dump from the secure servers. We already knew that it was unlikely we’d be able to do this completely undetected - our best strategy now is to do it without the purpose being known. Just remember the cover reason you’re here.”

“Remind me what that was?” Tristan asked.

Percy sighed. “You’re too hyper, bro. We’re pretending that we came to steal items from secure storage, rather than data, so they’ll look in the wrong place. We accidentally set off an alarm, so we’re running.”

“...there’s no alarm though,” he said.

“It’s silent,” Viv told him, pulling her up hood up.

“...wait, what’s silent?”

“Time to go,” Mom declared. “There will be more guards coming...”

“Soon?” I asked, pointing down the hallway to where MLED agents were already appearing.

“Unidentified intruders, you are surrounded!” one of them shouted to us. “Sit down and place your hands on the ground! Do not use any metahuman -”

I cut her off by stomping on the ground, causing the tiles of the floor and walls to curve into a wall that blocked us from the guards.

“What about from the other directions?” Percy asked. “If we’re surrounded...”

I leaned around the corner and saw that yes, guards were appearing from the lower level - the two that Tristan had knocked out were being pulled to safety. I had to jerk back as an agent fired a high-tech pistol that shot some kind of electrical charge through the air, close enough that I could smell ozone.

“Yup, definitely surrounded,” I said, generating more purple mist as I closed off that path.

“Wait, where’s Vivian?” Mom asked, sounding a little panicked. “She’s hurt!”

“No, she’s...” my mind skittered away from whatever I had been about to say, and I frowned. “Uh, she’s not here, so how could she have been hurt?”

“...right.” Mom sighed. “I forgot.”

“It’s that stealth cloak,” Percy chuckled. “Works a little too well, it seems like. How could you forget that Viv is... at home with Morgan?”

“No names, Sir Ardent,” I reminded him. “Now, we can’t just bunker down under these walls -” There was a loud thud and the sound of tearing metal from down the corridor, and I almost absentmindedly reinforced that barrier. “They’ll tear them down at some point, after all. They’ll call in heroes, if nothing else.”

“Who could get past them, though?” Tristan asked. “I mean, if you keep rebuilding the walls...”

“Journey could teleport through. Vulcan could melt through. Anima turning them into a golem might trump my control - she never went up against dad, so who knows how that would turn out. Canaveral could probably tear through them faster than I could rebuild. Loki might be able to-”

“Okay, you’ve made your point,” Mom said. “No need to go overboard. What’s your plan?”

I nodded to Tristan. “I’ll open up a hole for Sir Alacrity. He zooms out for a few moments and then back to start knocking some of them out so we can make a path. You and Sir Ardent guard the hole to make sure the guards don’t get through to me.”

Percy nodded. “It’s a good plan, Sir Amethyst,” he said, probably trying to remind himself to use the codenames we had chosen - I knew that I was. “Dame Adamant’s invulnerability can block any shots they make, and I can throw back anyone who gets close.”

“Exactly. Let’s get to it.”