Perry flew back to his lair, Heart hammering in his ears.

He needed to turn on the spellframe designed to cast the scrying spell and locate Heather, PRONTO.

This could be significantly more difficult if Karnos managed to destroy my lair. It could take as long as half an hour to commandeer a robot arm and program it to interface with the spell-disc properly.

Perry didn’t think he had that kind of time.

He landed directly in front of his lair and hauled the flimsy metal sliding door open.

Smells like C-4 in here.

BOOOOOOOM!

HP:2

The concussive force from the explosion traveled straight through his armor and threatened to mush his internal organs had he not had HP.

As it was, Perry was flung violently backwards, bursting through an old lady’s furniture in the neighboring unit.

“What a jerk,” Perry muttered, removing a doily from his visor before climbing out of the pile of shattered hardwood.

A way to resist internal damage from pressure waves, Perry added to his mental notebook. Yet another problem that could be mostly mitigated by making his suit airtight.

Grumbling to himself as his heart continued to slam in his chest, Perry climbed through the door to the old lady’s storage, and took a look at his lair.

“Hah! Eat that sucker. Using non-Tinker explosives, what a putz.”

The walls and ceiling of his lair were completely gone, leaving nothing but a scorched CNC machine, a desk full of tools, his fridge, welder, and the rest of his dozens of handmade tools, as pristine as the day they were made. Save for the scorching

Perry found his scrying spell-frame halfway embedded through a concrete wall, unblemished aside from a bit of concrete dust.

Perry pried it out, grabbed the latch for his secret compartment and opened it up.

The secret compartment was a simple hatch he’d cut in the floor and placed all his magical ingredients. When not in use, it blended seamlessly with the floor and wouldn’t open for anything. The handle was a strong neodymium magnet that would catch the little metal latch and disengage it, allowing the panel to pull out.

He’d gotten the idea from baby-proof cabinets.

It was made of plastic painted to look like the concrete, and it was at least as strong, thanks to Perry’s Perk.

In fact, the secret panel was fairly easy to locate, as its shape was outlined by the damaged concrete around it.

Perry unlatched the panel and check the giant’s cornea for damage.

Its clarity had worsened from the pressure wave, and it had a worrisome crack, but hopefully it would still work.

Perry picked it up and turned to his fridge.

The blood bag was shredded, and Heather’s blood was pooling in the bottom of the fridge, doubtlessly contaminated.

Like my perk cares about contaminants, Perry thought, slamming the spell-frame down on the ground, lifting the entire fridge up and pouring its contents into the funnel on top of it.

Perry pulled the spell-disc out of its home in his armor, prayed the nerve cells survived the explosion in their padded housing, and jammed it into the spell-frame.

The local power grid was a bit…C-4’ed, so Perry had to hook the spell-frame up to his suit before he could run the program.

Here goes nothing.

LetsspyonHeather.EXE

The spell frame looked a bit like a kitchenaid mixer as it began pouring water into the bowl and painting the sky giant’s cornea edges with words in the creature’s ancient language, activating the Sky Giant’s Essence.

A slightly tinny chanting echoed through the wrecked storage facility as the spell-frame began adding Heather’s blood to the bowl, giving the Giant’s visual Essence something to adhere to.

A moment later, the ritual was done and the mixer-looking robot pulled itself away, revealing the bowl in its entirety.

There, crystal clear, as if he had used all the best ingredients, was Heather, being laboriously cut out of her suit.

I recognize that place.

In the blink of an eye, Perry was airborne.

***Heather***

“So my problem here, is that my daughter, an unpowered civilian, is making me into a joke. So my idea is this: why don’t I just give you powers?” Karnos said, his smile widening. “Then I’m not being humiliated by a teen girl: I’m being opposed by a cape. Huge difference. Plus, I always wanted to my girl to continue the family business.”

“You can’t just give someone powers,” Heather said, her skin turning cold. She also knew what the most common cause was: Near Death Trauma.

“High tide is almost in full swing. There’s no better time.” Karnos said with a grin before his face crumpled into a sneer.

“What’s the holdup with the suit!?” He demanded of the minions.

“By all our readings, it should be aluminum, but it’s harder and stronger than tempered steel. The diamond bits are having a hell of a time getting through it. It’s gonna take hours.”

Why can’t I move, then? Heather wondered, trying to tear her arm off the platform. Perry’s suit should still be running.

“Damnit,” Karnos said, running his hands through his hair.

“Getting nervous?” Heather couldn’t help but let a bit of the pent-up sass flow.

“Not at all.” Karnos said, directing his attention back to her. “You think this is the first time I’ve had to disappear some young punk in the middle of the night? This is practically my weekend.”

“You gonna kill me?” Heather asked, her heart skipping into high gear.

“Maybe,” Karnos said with a shrug. “I don’t want to kill you but forcing a Trigger isn’t without it’s risks, and if we’re being honest, I’d rather have you dead than free, when it comes down to it.”

“I’ll be free if I have powers. That doesn’t make any sense.”’

“Is that what you think?” Karnos laughed. “Oh my god, you’re so naïve. You think Nexus would let you be free if you got powers? The system is even more corrupt than I am. They need ‘supervillains’ to act as boogeymen to keep the taxpayers lining their pockets. You know, over eighty percent of the locations that Mechanaut hit were without super insurance, despite those demographics only being twelve percent of the population? He’s a glorified kneecapper for the government.

Heather had heard this jealous rant before, but she’d never really thought about her place in it.

“You know what they would do if they saw a young girl with powers, with a history of violence and a less-than-reputable dad?”

“No.” Heather said, despite knowing exactly where this was going.

“They’d start to push. Maybe only a little at first, a comment here and there, maybe not covering your damages quite as often as the girl from the goody-two-shoes family with the squeaky-clean reputation. They’d study you. Figure out what sets you off. Who you don’t get along with. Then they’d use it against you. Keep poking you until you explode on someone on camera.”

“Then the blackmail starts rolling in,” Karnos said with a wistful smile. “And before you know it, you’re sitting here with your daughter strapped to a metal table. Mark my words.”

“I tell you what, though,” Karnos said, glancing over at Heather. “Those kids they used to get under my skin? They no longer exist.”

He glanced down at the cutters straining to put a dent in the armor.

“Right now Perry Z is getting under my skin. Jesus,” He said, shaking his head. “I guess it’s a small consolation knowing he blew himself up this evening. You know how Tinkers are, always trying to make stuff explode.”

Heather’s heart went cold.

“I’ll kill you.”

“D’aww,” Karnos patted the cheek of her helmet. “That’s cute.”

A minion ran up to Karnos and whispered in his ear.

“Damn. Will the thing crush the armor too?”

“Yessir.”

“Then toss the whole thing in, This obviously isn’t going to be done fast enough.”

He glanced down at Heather. “It’s a shame I didn’t get to see your face again, before probably killing you, but I’m confident you’ll make it.”

He gave her a thumb’s up with a smile as the minions unlatched her limbs. Heather tried to break out of their grip, but without the suit, she had all the powers of a teenage girl, which were infuriatingly concentrated in her boobs instead of her muscles.

Once again, Heather cursed puberty for being such a bitch as she lamely thrashed in the grip of the minions.

They hauled her up to a massive steel door, unceremoniously tossed her in, then slammed it shut behind her.

Then the walls began to move.

IIIIIII

There was a nearly inaudible, high-pitched whine as the ceiling began to close in.

Dear lord. If I Trigger, let it be something allows me to wipe that smile off his face. Please and thank you.

Heather stooped down as the ceiling became too low to stand, continuing it’s inexorable path downward. Karnos was always retelling the story of how he’d been nearly crushed to death in a car accident, which had caused him to Trigger.

He was trying to recreate history.

***Paradox***

Paradox tossed aside the cell phone just outside Karnos’s lair, where he’d hung out with Heather a couple times when they were children.

I can’t believe this jerk’s babysat me before.

Now that he was older, Perry recognized the smell of gunpower and the faded blood of snitches. It was strangely nostalgic.

Gunpowder and snitch-blood potpourri. For the legacy supervillain of taste.

Paradox wasted no time in triggering Blades.EXE.

The floating armaments fanned out behind him as he landed, and Perry smashed through the thin steel of the warehouse’s door.

Secret elevator…here, Perry thought, consulting his childhood memories of the place. It had seemed so much grander and more exciting when he was eight.

He cut through the wall of the elevator and dropped down the shaft, wrenching the doors open with the suit to reveal Karnos’s true lair, complete with truck and crates full of guns, and a doomed shapeshifter with some sort of shiny tinker-tech gun leveled at Perry’s chest.

Click. The gun gave a whisper quiet report as a strangely cold, ghostlike sensation passed through him.

Perry’s suit powered down and it stayed powered down.

“Perry Z, your suit doesn’t run on electricity, does it?” Karnos asked gleefully.

“It’s Paradox,” Perry said, using the Floating Armanents to wrench the elevator doors the rest of the way open and shove himself forward.

“Wha-“

Perry caught Karnos with a right cross, and the man’s face deformed around the punch, crawling up his arm with the speed of a striking snake.

Perry aimed his blades at the man’s off hand while Karnos’ face climbed into Perry’s sinuses and tried to force its way back out through his skull.

HP: 1

HP: 0

CRUNCH!

Perry’s suit whined to life as his blades destroyed the supervillain’s Tinker-tech. Perry immediately turned his jets to opposite directions and began spinning violently.

Karnos was wrenched out of Perry’s face, just as Perry was beginning to get the mother of all sinus infections.

Karnos stumbled backward, his face reforming to show his confusion.

“How the hell-“

Perry pinned the supervillain to the wall with a dozen knives and bolted to the side, aiming for Heather.

Perry skidded to a halt at the empty steel table, where Heather had been moments ago.

Where is she!?

‘IIIIIIII’

Perry’s ears picked up a faint whine, like the kind you’d hear from a garbage crusher.

Crap!

Perry began sprinting toward the sound until a flicker of movement caused him to dodge wildly out of the way of one of Karnos’ tentacles.

Perry winced as his ankle flared up in pain while he stumbled aside.

Add that to the list of suit improvements.

Karnos was free of the blades already and was navigating the ceiling like a meat-octopus-monkey, moving in unfamiliar ways as he grew and retracted tentacles to swing himself from industrial pipe to industrial pipe.

Well, that’s creepy, Paradox thought as he turned on his jets to sub in for the rolled ankle.

Perry flew up to a massive crushing machine, whining as its hydraulics force a massive cube of steel down. It didn’t matter how strong Perry’s suit was, there was simply too much mass and pressure to ignore.

Where on Earth did he get this, and what the hell does he use it for? Perry thought, asking the real questions, because the one thing he knew for sure, was that Heather was in there, and she was on a timer.

Priority 1: Disable the machine.

Priority 2: Remove Heather from situation

Priority 3: Kick Karnos’ balls into his mouth. Failing that, delay until Titan can do it for me.

Perry whipped up his forearm, aiming at the guts of the machine.

Melt.EXE

The tiny disc of silver popped out of his forearm, the plastic cup slapping a thin coating of –

A meat-tentacle whipped past and smashed the spellframe.

Sonofa-

Perry ducked another tentacle and was forced to back away as Heather’s dad, looking nothing like a human, dropped down from above, a mass of writhing tentacles, teeth, eyes, and vaguely humanoid faces.

He couldn’t afford to let that booger into his face again.

Perry backpedaled while simultaneously sending the blades around Karnos toward the machine.

Karnos spread out like a slime mold, attaching to every corner of the building and catching each of Perry’s blades with his own flesh.

The blades struggled inside the meat-monster’s flesh, twisting and contorting it, but ultimately failing to extricate themselves as the creature built up hard keratin shells around them.

“That all you got, Perry Z?” a massive mouth split out of the abomination’s front, giving Perry a snaggletoothed smile.

Perry cocked his head to the side.

“Not really.”

BFS.EXE

After his first outing, Perry had realized that sometimes, you just need a really big sword. There was no shame in it.

Perry’s back tickled cold as the printer ran down his spin, printing the massive symbol he’d designed for his buster sword in the deep violet mind-taker ichor.

A huge, one-sided blade half again longer than Perry himself manifested.

Est. $150 of areonite, $40 of Mind-taker Ichor.

Blanket.EXE

Hands.EXE

A blanket made of delicately linked floating panels of areonite manifested in front of him, as well as about four extra hands, made of dozens of interconnected articulating pieces, each individually printed with ichor.

With a mental nudge, the buster sword began spinning, aiming directly toward Karnos’ center of mass, rapidly picking up speed as it began to vibrate the air itself with its rotation.

“You wouldn’t.” Karnos said.

Perry flipped Heather’s dad off with all six of his hands.

Paradox wasn’t aiming for Karnos. He was aiming for the machine behind him, mentally overlaying the machine’s position on the supervillain’s wall of flesh.

The buster sword rocketed forward with impressive force, piercing the supervillain and the crushing machine’s hydraulics behind him, resulting in the whining drone of the hydraulic press coming to a halt.

Karnos reformed to the side with a rather large gash across his stomach.

“Ow, you piece of –“

Paradox charged forward and used the blanket to shield himself from Karnos’s reflexive tentacle grab as he passed by the man.

Once the tentacles had been deflected, Perry smothered Karnos in the blanket and squeezed.

It probably wasn’t gonna hurt a shapeshifter, but Karnos needed something else for his mind to fixate on while Perry got Heather out.

All four summoned hands clutched the massive turnwheel on the vaultlike steel door and began spinning.

When the door swung open, Perry’s heart sank as it revealed the massive steel piston, lowered all the way down to the floor.

“No Trigger, huh?” Karnos asked, coming to stand next to him, his wound already sealed. “Shame. I guess she had too much of her mother in her.”

“You still have my knives in you.” Perry said, feeling the keratin-coated knives distributed about in Karnos’s body.

“Wh-

Perry whipped Karnos to the side, smashing him through the nearby heavy machinery, using the knives the supervillain had assumed were neutralized as leverage to thrash the man back and forth like an angry toddler with a ken doll.

Floor. Ceiling. Wall. Wall. Floor. Table Saw. Pressure tanks. Wall. Ceiling. Floor. Truck.

This went on until Titan’s grip brought Paradox out of it.

“He’s not conscious anymore, dude.” Titan said.

Perry blinked the tears out of his eyes and perceived that Karnos was hanging limp, bleeding from every conceivable inch of his shredded clothes.

“Oh. Right.”

Perry glanced over his shoulder at the crushing machine. His guts seized by an icy fist.

“Can you,” Perry’s voice broke. “Can you help me get it off her?”

Titan’s gaze followed Perry’s, an instant of acknowledgement and sadness crossing the bruiser’s expression.

“Of course, man.”

Titan walked over to the disabled crusher and levered his fingers under the steel slab. The veins on the massive bruiser’s neck stood out as he groaned, the crusher grudgingly lifting up.

Under the steel slab was Heather, still wearing Perry’s armor, crushed to the thickness of a pan pizza.

Perry was working his way down a comprehensive list of self-recriminations when the armor-shaped pan-pizza spoke.

“Took you jerks long enough,” Heather’s modulated voice echoed through the underground lair.

“Buh…” Perry frowned, doing a double take. There was no blood. There should’ve been blood.

“Melted myself,” Heather said, her flattened right arm twitching to highlight the squished Melt.EXE spellframe. “Power came back on an instant before I woulda died.”

“Heather, you’re alive!”

“Yes! Yes, I am aware that I am alive, Paradox, Now get me out of this suit before I revert to normal and it crushes me like a grape!”

Perry jolted in place and got to work. Inanimate objects didn’t revert to their prior shapes, but people did, so if she was still wearing the armor when the spell expired, she was going to be…a little uncomfortable.

Quest Complete!

Assist Heather in distancing herself from the supervillain Karnos!

Reward: 300XP, team member.

****Later****

Karnos sat in his recliner, brooding. It was ridiculously easy to escape from the Nexus prison transport, but that wasn’t what he was thinking about: It was the kid.

Little Perry Z had taken C-4 to the face, and trying to burst his skull from the inside had felt like trying to lift a freaking mountain.

There was more to the kid than could be reasonably explained by being a Tinker. An insulative field-generator, normally the bane of Tinkers everywhere, had slowed the kid down as much as sneezing on him.

What the hell did Mechanaut do to his kid? Was he even a Tinker? Was he just a brute or an energy type wearing armor he’d borrowed from his dad?

It doesn’t matter.

He couldn’t beat the kid in a stand-up fight, and he couldn’t beat him with a trap. His reputation was in shambles. All that was left was to cut his losses, ride The Train to Washington City and start again.

He had a respectable nest egg, and contacts in the city. He might have to push some of the locals out, but that was how business was done.

There was a brief flash of light that caused Karnos to squint and shield his eyes as he leapt to his feet. When he opened them again, there was a man sitting across from him in a chair that hadn’t been there a second ago.

Not a man.

Solaris.

A cold sweat broke out across his skin.

“Sit down.” Solaris commanded.

Karnos sat down.

“Karnos. Do you know why supervillains exist? In the form they’ve taken, anyway.”

“Because you need someone to scare the sheep into paying for protection.”

“That’s part of it, but it isn’t the whole story, or even most of the story.” Solaris steepled his fingers and leaned back in his chair.

“Did you know that if the High tide before last had gone for three days longer, Franklin city would have been destroyed? It was that. Close.”

Solaris held apart thumb and forefinger.

“The last High Tide wasn’t much better. And every other High Tide on record, we suffer devastating losses to keep the civilians of Franklin City safe.”

“Tinkers make weapons and put them up on the wall, but High tide tends to mess with tech in unforeseen ways, and sometimes you end up with robot revolutions and guns turning into fish.”

He leaned forward.

“The only thing you can really count on is boots on the ground. Supers. You. Me. Those rookies you kill to stop them from ‘taking your business’.

“I-“

“Can I show you something?” Solaris asked over Karnos, fishing in his pocket and retrieving a phone with a video loaded on it.

“We saw something interesting today.”

Solaris pressed play.

It was a scene fixated on Heather in that suit, with Karnos peering in from the side. From yesterday evening.

How did they get that video!?

“I tell you what, though,” Karnos said on the video, glancing over at Heather. “Those kids they used to get under my skin? They no longer exist.”

“I wasn’t-“

“Here’s another one.” Solaris say playing the next file.

““You think this is the first time I’ve had to disappear some young punk in the middle of the night?” Karnos said over the video. “This is practically my weekend.”

“Those two sentences concerned us over at Nexus, so we did some research and wouldn’t you know it? Several supes who lodged complaints against you back at Nexus went MIA a few years after you quit.”

“We also spotted a handful of rather suspicious disappearances of rookie capes in your ‘territory’.” Solaris made quotation marks.

“That doesn’t mean anything.” Karnos said. “You can’t prove anything.”

“I don’t have to prove anything,” Solaris said. “Once again, I ask you, why do supervillains exist?”

Karnos kept his mouth shut.

“DEFENCE! STABILITY! Supervillains exist so supers can get a handle on their powers and grow them before they get sent out against the prawns, or the Replicators, or hostile foreign supers, or any of a thousand other things that are constantly threatening to tear this tiny insignificant speck on Earth to tiny little pieces!”

“They also exist to keep the underworld under control and keep an eye out for people like you, actual psychopaths who undermine our ability to defend ourselves as a city by killing those with the power and will to do so.”

“As long as supervillains fulfil their roles, we overlook tons of infrastructure damage, even the occasional loss of civilian life…but intentionally killing rookie supers? That I cannot abide.”

“Please-” Karnos said, his skin cold.

“It’s simple math.” Solaris said, shaking his head. “If we’d snuffed you out twenty years ago, how many more supers would be on the wall right now? How many prawns would those supers be able to hold off? HOW MANY!?”

Karnos didn’t answer.

“I thought so. That begs the question. If I snuff you out right now, how many more supers will be on the wall next High Tide?”

Karnos leapt to his feet.

A blinding light filled the room, and a moment later, nothing was left of the supervillain but a smudge on the recliner and a few bits of burnt upholstery.