There was a moment of silence as the Knights just stared at me in shock. After all, I did just appear behind them, in their own base. However, such a moment was not to last.

“DON’T FUCK WITH ME!”

Mechana’s Attack Roll (Iceblade): 3d6 = 12 (Hits DCV 6) (Miss)

Mechana’s roar broke the silence, as she reared back her hand to try and put her mech suit’s fist through my face. However, I had been prepared for something like that, and easily dodged to the side. The crack of lightning as she struck the wall told me that she’d improved those gauntlets on her suit, since the last time we fought.

“Mechana, stop!”

Iceblade’s Attack roll (Prohibition): 3d6 = 9 (Hits DCV 11) (Hit)

Grab Successful.

Firebolt tried to intervene, but Mechana was clearly not having it. I briefly considered fighting her, but that would just make things even worse. With a roll, I got under Mechana’s arms, and sprang to my feet next to Prohibition. With a flourish, I spun the superheroine around like a ballroom dancer, so that I was now holding her in the classic hostage pose, with her between me and Mechana.

“Sorry, my dear,” I whispered in Prohibition’s ear, “but I’m afraid that I’m going to have to take you hostage for a moment. Your friend is being terribly unreasonable. Especially since, if I was going to attack you, I would have taken out Firebolt in the first attack.”

I smiled as Prohibition shuddered, and turned my attention to Mechana. “Really, Mechana. Are you still sore about the last time we fought? You should learn to let it go. Especially since I came here specifically to talk to you. Now, would you please just listen to what I have to say?”

“NEVER! I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY! IT IS JUST LIES, TO TRY AND GET INTO MY PANTS LIKE LAST TIME!”

“Oh, come on! We had some fun, yes, and I may have taken advantage of your mental state, but surely that was a small price to pay for my help in recovering the Sunbreaker Device from Doctor Night? I would think a night of passion was a fair trade for keeping the world from falling into eternal twilight.”

Firebolt sighed. “Iceblade, maybe you should stop talking, for a moment.” Turning back to Mechana, he said, “Look, I understand you’re upset, and still carrying that grudge. But you need to look at the bigger picture. Don’t be some two-bit thug out for revenge. You’re better than that! You know you are!”

Prohibition nodded. “Listen to him, Mechana! If Iceblade had come to attack us, would he have let Firebolt just stand there? You know fire is one of the few identified weaknesses he has!”

“AAAARGH!” Mechana screamed, her voice amplified by her mech suit. “Fine. I’ll listen. But this had better be good, or I’m going to tear you into pieces!”

I smiled as I released Prohibition, and took a couple steps away from her, to make sure that there were no misunderstandings. “Excellent. Well, to start with, I have a probable reason for why the Negator Collars used at Blackreach are no longer working.”

“Does it have anything to do with how I’m no longer completely immune to fire?”

I nodded at Firebolt. “Yes, exactly. The System does not like absolutes. Absolute immunities, absolute power negators, and so on. There are a few things that slip through, but most of those are life-support things, like immunity to diseases and toxins. But for all the major stuff? No absolute immunity, and nothing that can absolutely cut off someone from their powers.”

“So, it is as I feared,” Prohibition said. “My powers will not be the safety net that they once were.”

“Yes, and no,” I shrugged. “Under the System, there are three main ways of disrupting or negating someone’s powers. This isn’t counting cases like where a water-user sprays a room down to stop a fire-user’s attack, of course. I’m talking about things that aren’t relying on other interactions to counter the powers involved. These powers are Disrupt, Suppress, and Drain.”

Prohibition frowned, and looked off slightly to the side, in the same area her vision where the blue screens were appearing for me. “My powers list a Suppress effect. What would that do? And how do you know all this?”

“For now, it will suffice to say that I have knowledge that you do not. At any rate, since you have Suppress, we’ll start with that one. You’ll have noticed that all of your powers have something called ‘Active Points’, yes? Suppress, whether it works upon a target or an area, effectively reduces the number of active points the targeted creature has available for a power. If the active points drop to 0, the power doesn’t work until the Suppress effect ends.”

Prohibition nodded once. “That’s basically like how my powers worked before, but now you’re saying that they won’t automatically be effective?”

“Correct. Suppression effects will reduce the points available for a power, but it is not a sure thing. Also, there’s a power called Power Defense, which works to prevent someone’s powers from being altered or suppressed. Some of the more powerful types will likely have some of that, making them even more resilient against suppression.”

Mechana seemed to be finally calming down a bit. “So, the reason the collars at Blackreach and other places stopped working is because they weren’t fully suppressing powers anymore?”

“Exactly. Suppress seems to be the closest parallel to what the collars did before. The weakness in Suppress is that people can keep using their abilities, albeit at a reduced level, until you manage to shut them off. And with some of the problem children you’re dealing with, that is a potentially fatal situation for any normal human guards in the mix.”

“What would happen if multiple ‘Suppress’ powers were active at the same time?”

Iceblade’s KS (The System) Check: 3d6 = 12 (14-, Success)

“They would ‘stack’ with each other, but each round of suppression would require you to pay the energy cost to keep them going, and so on.”

“I see,” Firebolt said. “And what about the other two powers you mentioned?”

“Drain can sap away a person’s powers, but those points will return over time. That’s not exactly a silver bullet in a lot of cases, but if you design things right, you could make something that continuously drained a target’s power, and just keep them unconscious until it was gone. The big problem with Drain is that it can only affect one thing at a time, but if you’re up against someone with a single big power, you can effectively lock down their biggest advantage.

“Dispel, on the other hand, is an all-or-nothing kind of thing. If you are able to meet or beat the number of active points in the power you’re trying to shut down, then it shuts down. Good for things like powers which take time to build up, or powers that might have big effects for low active points, like someone’s ability to fly, but it is an instant effect, not a continuous one, so the individual can just start again immediately.”

Prohibition looked at me, and said, “Why are you doing all of this? And how do you know all this information, anyways? It has been less than two hours since the System came online.”

I shrugged. “The answer for why I’m doing this is pretty simple. Take the current situation, and follow it to the logical conclusion. It has been less than two hours, and already you heroes were debating whether to do summary executions, like the Executioner, since the only options you saw were to either do that, or let me go, since you didn’t know if you could keep me contained, much less whether the courts and prisons could do the job.”

There was a bit of uncomfortable shifting of feet and people doing their best not to catch my gaze, but I ignored that, and pressed forward. “So, what do you think will happen when other hero teams start coming to the same conclusion, and start putting villains in the ground because they don’t have any other choice? Do you think that the villains are just going to sit back, and let that happen? Just watch as heroes start killing them wholesale, no matter what crimes they might have committed?”

The uncomfortable silence grew louder as I continued. “No, they won’t. They’ll strike back, and they’ll strike back hard. More importantly, they’ll strike at the places where it will hurt the most.

“Right now, things are fairly civilized, when you talk about how heroes and villains operate. The number of fatalities caused by members of the ‘other side’ are relatively low, and usually both sides try and police their own, to keep it that way. For the villains, we do it because that is simply good business. Keeps the heat off, and no one starts bloodbaths if they can be helped. For the heroes, well, you do it because that is part of the reason that villains don’t go after you in your civilian identities, or purposefully attack your friends and family.”

Their full attention was on me. Everyone knew that there was an unwritten, unspoken ‘social contract’ between the heroes and villains, a status quo that governed how they interacted with each other. When someone broke that social contract, they were ostracized. On the hero side, they would turn a blind eye if someone like Executioner got himself killed. And more than one villain had ended another villain’s reign when they went too far.

“Once things break down, there will be bloody war in every city around the world. And it won’t just be us supers fighting and dying. Collateral damage will stop being something that people try their best to avoid, and instead become part and parcel of ‘the way things are’.

“Eventually, the normal humans are going to stop seeing the war as a ‘heroes and villains’ thing, and instead as a ‘supers’ thing, blaming both sides equally for the terror they are inflicting on the ‘normal’ populace. Even before this, there were people who spouted shit like that, wanting to drive all the supers out of their communities. Those voices are going to get louder, and more numerous, and people are going to start listening to them. And, eventually, one side or the other is going to come up with a ‘final solution’ to the problem.”

I took a breath, and looked into their eyes, and saw understanding there. Each of the heroes knew that what I was saying was an all-too-likely outcome of the current situation. If things were allowed to spiral out of control, then everyone would lose, just so they could keep the other side from winning.

“So, that is why I risked my life, coming into your base, and wanted to speak to you, in particular, Mechana. Now that you know how things work, you can work on ways to restore the balance of power, and the status quo. Share the information with your other gadgeteers, artificers, mad scientists, and other types who are always making new creations. That is the only way you’re going to keep this world from falling apart at the seams.”

I paused, and then said, “Oh, and don’t bother trying to get in touch with the Doctor of Time. I know he’d probably get some ideas on how to fix all this, but it was a fight between him and the Master of Paradoxes that caused the System to come online, in the first place. The explosion took both of them out.”

“Wait, explosion? What explosion?”

I smiled at Firebolt, and said, “You probably haven’t heard about it yet, because of the craziness with the system, and the Blackreach escapes, and all of that, but yes, those two fought, only this time their powers interacted… badly, and there was an explosion that took them both out, along with making everyone see blue screens.”

“How do you know that, if it hasn’t been reported yet?”

“Because I was in Istanbul, watching the fight. They were about fifty feet overhead, so I got a good view as I went about looking through their time-traveling vehicles for anything valuable that I could haul off. So, you could say that I had a front-row seat.”

“Wait! The blue box that came up when the System went online said that there was no Local System Administrator, and listed the requirements, before saying a candidate had been found. One of those requirements was proximity to the initiating event!”

Mechana’s words got both the other heroes’ attention, and they all looked back at me. Hesitantly, Prohibition asked, “Um, Iceblade, does that mean…”

I just winked at her, and turned into an icy mist once more, disappearing from their view.