The chants to the Elysian goddess reached a crescendo as unnatural winds began to swirl around the summoning setup, nearly putting out the blue pilot lights he’d substituted for candles.

Perry figured if the spell called for maximum purity from the candles and minimum smoke. That meant perfect combustion. Perfect combustion=pilot lights.

Well, I guess we’re gonna find out.

In the middle of the summoning circle was a flattened chunk of lead, the bullet he’d taken to save that woman from Dave. Or visa versa.

Hopefully that counted as a token of a selfless act worthy of acting as bait for an Elysian Attendant.

Naturally Perry didn’t use the mordite chain, because it wasn’t worth being denied an afterlife in the most debauched of the good heavens. I mean, who would think that was a good idea?

Perry’s eyes widened when he saw a misty figure beginning to form, seemingly investigating the bullet in the center of the circle. Reality seemed to bulge around it, warping the light that traveled through the air, revealing a shimmering, stretched curtain.

Now!

Perry took control of the spell-disc, which was basically just a living relay for his actions, controlling a mechanical arm to carefully sever the veil between worlds using the glowing crystal blade.

The veil parted seamlessly around the Elysian attendant, who coalesced from glowing mist into a beautiful woman of fantastical proportions. Creamy skin, brilliant blonde hair, well-rounded…everything.

“Greetings,” she said, picking up the flattened bullet before hopping over the pilot lights, a mischievous glint in her eye as she stood inches away from him. “Elysium has recognized your selfless act and wishes to reward it with a hint of the joy and pleasure of our realm. My name is Sophie. How can I…reward you?”

“No time, they’ll be here in two hours!” Perry said, slapping a spatula and an apron into the naked angel’s hands. “I’ve got some spare pants and shirts upstairs in the closet. Get dressed and help Brendon with setting up tables and chairs and the grill.”

The inhumanly attractive creature frowned, her plump lips downturned in confusion.

“What are you waiting for!?” Perry demanded. “Go, go GO!”

“Eeek!” Sophie bolted as Perry shouted at her, sprinting for the stairs, clutching the spatula to her chest as she ran.

“It’s so hard to summon good help these days,” Perry said with a sigh, shaking his head.

The Ordenn had escaped on a technicality, because Perry wasn’t the summoner, the spell-disc was. It had taken his gold piece and disappeared, giving him the demonic equivalent of the finger as it disappeared.

The Elysian angels looked more favorably on bending the rules if it was for a good cause, which was why they had no problem with Perry summoning indirectly due to his…limitations.

I just don’t have very many tokens of selfless acts, Perry thought. It wasn’t like you could go out and make more at will, either. Trying to make them on purpose invalidated them.

Well, we’ve got one helper, at least.

Perry picked up the phone and dialed up Titan.

“’sup?” Titan asked.

“If I pay you back, would you mind picking up a pallet of booze and showing up a little earlier?” Perry asked. “I’m underage so I can’t do it myself.”

“Sure, man, but I’m only getting light beer.”

“I don’t know this for a fact, but isn’t light beer like…awful?” Perry asked.

“Do you want supers getting shitfaced at your barbecue, Paradox?”

“No,” Perry said. “No, I do not. light beer it is. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Perry hung up and glanced at the whiteboard where he’d calculated the amount of food he’d need to feed everyone.

For Manic alone, he’d calculated one burger every five minutes of the party. Two hours = 24 burgers.

And that was just one speedster. Who knew how many more might be there?

I relish the challenge, Perry thought, crossing off ‘Booze’ and ‘Supernatural Labor’ from the whiteboard.

Oh, I forgot about relish, Perry thought, adding that to the shopping list.

An hour later, Perry got back from the store, carrying a literal ton of food over the shoulders of his suit.

The look on the face of the clerks with a power-armor in their checkout lane had been priceless.

Perry spotted Hardcase’s armor parked around back, along with a weathered truck and an oversized pallet of beer that had already been cracked open.

Landing beside the pool, Perry saw that most of Titan’s crew were in attendance, with the exception of Jetset. The massive bruiser was sipping on a beer and chatting with Perry’s Grampa, who was standing beside the gradually heating grill.

Perry’s Grampa was mostly bald with a crown of wispy white hair. He was six foot four, a bit shrunk by age, but still rather large. He wore a faded blue button up shirt with the elbows nearly worn through, and pants that were likely older than Perry himself.

He was a self-styled ‘Pennsylvania farm boy’, which was his way of obfuscating his intelligence.

“So Brett’s a straight shooter,” Grampa’s story faded in as Perry approached.

“The kid heaves a sigh, fishes around in his pocket and pays me the twenty bucks. Then when he wasn’t looking I cut the pole to match the rest of ‘em. Later in the day, Brett loses another twenty bucks trying to pull the same scam off on the corporal.”

Titan guffawed.

“Hey grampa,” Perry said, setting down the load of food into the oversized cooler beside the grill and stepping out of his armor. “LCC, park my armor.”

An invisible force snatched up the armor and parked it beside Hardcase’s. Grampa’s eyes narrowed as the armor floated away without any tangible propulsion.

“Huh,” he said, sipping his beer. “I could use something like that on the farm. My old ass is getting slower every year and child labor is getting harder and harder to come by.”

“I could make something like that for you,” Perry said. The LLC wasn’t terribly expensive.

“I may take you up on that. Darryl thinks his gizmos are too good for a potato dealer.”

Perry glanced aside. One of Mechanaut’s creations was probably worth more than the value of the farm itself. So technically…

“But that’s neither here nor there. Gotta wait out High Tide and see how bad the damage is before we talk about making fancy upgrades.” Grampa took a sip of his beer.

“You didn’t move in with us for the last high tide,” Perry said. “What changed?”

“When your gramma passed, I sold our place in town.” Grampa said with a shrug. “Figured I didn’t need it. I Honestly didn’t expect to make it to another High Tide.”

“I’m not sure dad would…let you die.” Perry said.

“I got a thirty-eight special in my truck that says otherwise.”

“On the topic of suicide,” Perry said. “I gotta get this party started,” Perry nodded toward the grill right behind his Grampa.

Grampa gave him a little salute and moved out of the way.

The ‘grill’ was one of Perry’s pieces of sheet metal that he’d shaped into a massive trough the night before. It was the surface area of about six normal-sized grills back-to-back, covered with more sheet metal cut into a grill-shape.

It might not be enough.

Perry unwrapped a massive package of veggie burgers and laid them out, no less than fifty patties began sizzling on the grill simultaneously as Manic began to hover around him like a hummingbird.

“Ooh, ooh, that smells good.” Manic said from both sides of Perry’s shoulders as he zipped around the motel’s backyard.

“No running around the pool,” Perry said.

“C’mon, man, I’m just walking really, really fast.” Manic said. “So like, is this quadrant here for me?” he asked, motioning to about fifteen of the burgers.

“You’ll get burgers when they’re done,” Perry said, glancing to the side where he spotted Sophie talking to Hardcase as they put drinks in the ice-filled cooler.

Perry did a double-take.

RX

Strength

Girlfriend

The T-shirt he’d made as a joke had been in the closet, too, and it had been somehow converted into a narrow crop-top, the words stretched almost to illegibility.

The jeans had been converted to Daisy Dukes.

“That’s what I get for conscripting an Elysian Attendant for a barbecue.” Perry muttered to himself.

“Manic, take over the grill,” Perry said. “I gotta do some damage control.”

“Sweet!” the speedster began flipping at blazing speeds.

“Don’t take anything off the grill until it’s cooked all the way through.” Perry said.

“But it’s not even meat.”

“All the way through!” Perry said, pointing at him as he walked away. good grilling habits were important.

I really shouldn’t leave Manic alone at the grill for long, Perry thought, heading over to the cooler, where Hardcase was giving the Elysian her complete attention and nodding subconsciously.

“So really, true love is fluid, and it happens outside of physical attraction,” Sophie said as Perry came into earshot. “Romance and physical companionship are nice, but they only comprise a tiny fraction of the time you spend together. Look for people who share the same interests. People you can depend on, who provide a supplement to your personality. Believing that one person can complete you is unhealthy.”

“Wow,” Perry said as he arrived. “I was half expecting you’d be corrupting the youth.”

“Oh, I already did that part,” the elysian said, giving him the sweetest, least innocent smile he’d ever seen. “I’ll take over the grill, your friend got bored and left it.”

Perry glanced over his shoulder and spotted Manic throwing a stream of darts at a target, his hands blurring. He glanced back over to where the angel had taken over the grill, flirting with one of the early-showers.

“I get the feeling she’s getting back at me somehow for startling her.” Perry mused.

Hardcase tapped her fingers together nervously.

“So…she’s –“

“Not actually my girlfriend and technically a minor subspecies of good-aligned extraplanar creature, colloquially referred to as angels, albeit not an angel in the biblical sense. I summoned her to flip burgers.”

“So she was seriously telling the truth?” Hardcase asked, eyes widening.

“Yeah,” Perry said, nodding. “They can’t really lie.”

Hardcase went crimson, her freckles showing up under her domino mask.

“Do you – um, want to check out the modifications I’ve made to my suit?” Hardcase asked, her voice breaking.

Perry scanned the crowd slowly beginning to filter into the poolside area. Now that Perry’s friends had already arrived, it was mostly mom and dad’s friends and their kids.

With the elysian manning the grill and Titan and Grampa working the crowd, there wasn’t a ton that Perry needed to do anymore.

“Sure,” Perry said, nodding. “I got time.”

The two of them spent the next half hour going over her suit and discussing her improvements to her mechsuit using Dave’s magical ingredients.

To be clear, she wasn’t creating spells. She was using magical ingredients for their extraordinary properties.

In the case of the homeward bone of the reticulus, it pointed unerringly in the same direction regardless of its geolocation. It allowed Hardcase to design a sophisticated autopilot for her suit which allowed it to calculate it’s global position within a few millimeters, without a GPS or compass.

Meza-man had beaten Metalloid by feeding him the wrong directions through his GPS, so suits with non-hackable locators were all the rage recently.

She’d included giant bone in her joints, not as a structural support, but to aid in the movement of the limbs themselves.

The ability of giant bone to manipulate momentum and gravity had made her mechsuit’s movements imperceptably smoother.

“And it saves electricity for simple movements like walking!” Hardcase said, practically vibrating with excitement. “Since the giant bone can boost momentum, I’ve designed the walk cycle to only provide a minimal impulse which is magnified by the giant bone, making the walk cycle eighty percent more efficient!”

”It must be a heck of an incentive to increase efficiency, having that battery,” Perry said. There’s a hint that infinite energy wouldn’t break the universe.

“I know, you’d think it would make me care less about efficiency having this constant supply, but I’m so tantalizingly close to dipping below the line that would allow constant operation!” Hardcase said.

“I mean, at a certain point, you’re gonna have to rest and recharge.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” Hardcase said, shaking her fist at the air as they walked back to the pool.

When they came around the corner, Perry came to a halt, his eyes widening at the spectacle before him.

It was a who’s who of big-name heroes and villains. Perry assumed.

He only could put names to about a quarter of the people present, but those were the ones who couldn’t hide their identity no matter what they did, and therefore didn’t bother.

The magical snake lady who could temporarily turn her enemies to stone, Gorganna.

The brain floating in a jar, Neuron.

The mad scientist with the hair that looked like it was in a plasma globe, Brain-Fry.

The eight-foot tall bruiser knocking back tequila like it was water, Andy the Giant.

Where did he get tequilla? Perry thought, glancing over at the pallet of light beer.

It was stacked up with beverages of all kind brought by the attendees.

Crap.

About three quarters of those present were wearing some kind of face-covering, while the rest presumably had strong civilian identities separate from their super career.

His dad over there, chatting with Neuron in his civvies being a case in point.

“You meet my boy, Chemestro?” Neuron asked, bobbing sideways to indicate a young man standing beside the floating brain. “I made him myself.”

The soon-to-be dead man was about Perry’s age, with blond hair, blue eyes, and that perfect chiseled jaw and symmetrical muscled body that spoke of gene-editing.

“Hi,” dad said, shifting his beer to his other hand to shake the doomed soul’s hand. “My name’s Darryl Zauberer.”

“Hexen’s husband, right? Minor Tinker powers?” Chemestro asked, a hint of derision in his voice.

“That’s me. I don’t have a taste for the running around and blowing stuff up, you know,” dad said with a sheepish grin. “I’m more comfortable just supporting my wife.”

LIES!

“Name’s Chemestro. I can isolate chemicals and make anything into semi-permeable membranes at will.”

He held up his finger and a blue flame sputtered to life above his fingertip.

“I just allowed only hydrogen to gather around my finger and persuaded it to self ignite where it recombines with the surrounding air.”

“That’s fantastic!” dad said. “Can you make anything permeable to anything? I can think of a million ways that would be awesome in a lab.” Now dad was playing humble and probing for trade secrets.

“Of course. Just the other day I-“

“Son,” The brain in a jar interrupted. “Let’s not show your whole hand right off the bat.” The brain glanced at Dad. “Some people are more dangerous than they appear.”

Dad’s glasses fell off, causing him to curse and snatch them off the wet ground, wiping the grit off with his shirt.

“Then again, some people are harmless. But over-sharing is never a good idea in our line of work.”

“Yes, father,” Chemestro said, his expression souring.

“Oh, Perry!” dad said, waving him over.

“Would you excuse me for a moment?” Perry asked Hardcase.

“I haven’t eaten yet anyway. I’ll be by the grill.” The tinker wandered away towards the grill and massive potlock that had sprung up around it.

Dad patted him on the shoulder as he approached.

“Neuron, Chemestro, this is my son, Perry. Perry, this is Neuron and his son, Chemestro.”

“Hexen’s son, Perry huh?” Chemestro asked, offering his hand. “Is that short for something?”

Paradox grasped Chemestro’s hand.

“It’s short for Paradox,” Perry said, eyes narrowing as his grip tightened.

Chemestro followed suit, his blue eyes becoming a pale sliver.