Chapter Sixty - The Frustration of Falling Apart

Spin-to-Win was, understandably, frustrated.

The mission was meant to be simplicity itself. Or... as simple as this particular kind of mission could go.

Capturing a rogue or villain or even just a hero with not-so-heroic inclinations was always a risk. Even if they thought they knew a person’s powers, it was possible they were hiding something away, or had purposefully obfuscated their abilities.

Worse, were people like himself, whose powers allowed them to literally have new powers at the drop of a hat (or the spin of a wheel, as it were). Unaccountable variabilities were dangerous.

It was why the interrogation was going to take place in a prepared location that wasn’t entirely fortified but entirely disposable, with only one member of the cabal’s powered forces and a couple of dozen unpowered men.

The capture had been textbook. He hadn’t been there, of course. His power today turned him into a man in his mid-thirties with one pained knee and the ability to turn anything he touched into salt, as well as a minor electrokinesis power based on the amount of power stored into nearby salt. It was a middling ability at best, and not one he wanted to take out onto the field.

The problems started when his men reported that they’d kidnapped not one person, but three.

That the two others were children was also an issue. It wasn’t that he minded grabbing children (hints suggested they were both powered as well) but he knew that many in the organisation, including the men protecting and working at the temporary base, wouldn’t appreciate them tying a pair of young girls to some chairs and duct-taping their mouths shut.

It was a headache, but he could figure a way around it, after the girls woke up.

Of course, just as they were starting to come around, one of them vanished.

He had reviewed the recordings of the room. One moment there was an unidentified powered girl in a chair, held in place at an angle so that her flat tail could flop down the side of the chair. She likely didn’t have any sort of power that made her tougher, but they couldn’t guess beyond that.

Then, the next moment, she was gone. The ropes holding her in place flopped down, proving that she hadn’t just gone invisible--which would have been its own sort of nightmare. The alarm was sounded, and they scrambled to search every room and secure every exit.

No sign of the girl.

Questioning the two remaining subjects a few minutes later had proved equally fruitless. The luck manipulator was either stupid or so smart that he played stupid convincingly. That was actually great for their plans. An idiot was easier to convince than someone clever, and fools didn’t hold grudges as long as the smart.

The other’s questioning had... well, Spin-to-Win had seen some nasty stuff in his day, he’d faced some real villains, and not just jumped up rogues or people with a darker-grey morality who decided to take on robbery and murder as hobbies, but actual, go-see-a-therapist-about-it, capital-V, villains.

The girl scared him more than some of those had. The way she smiled, her entire lack of care about her own mortality. It was deeply, disconcertingly wrong.

They’d left the girl and the luck manipulator to stew while Spin-to-Win considered his options.

Obviously, everything they’d gotten so far would be transmitted to the Cabal’s nearest headquarters, but he wasn’t going to send anything without putting his own spin on it, as it were.

He requisitioned a desk in the base’s main office area, a long room with four workstations where agents were poring over security feeds and plugging away at the endless paperwork that came with operating a clandestine black site, even one as temporary as this one.

“Anything?” he asked as he walked over to one of the stations. There was a woman there, though the only concession to gender in their normal uniform was a big space around the chest. The uniforms were meant to hide details about a person, and that included obfuscating gender where they could.

He knew how uncomfortable the uniforms could be. He’d worn them before, as a man and as a woman, and neither version sat well.

“Sorry, sir,” the technician said with a shake of her head. She tapped the opened case where a small compactable laboratory was aiming most of its systems at the tiny device the girl had spat onto the interview room table. “This... shouldn’t work.”

“Gadgeteer tech?” he asked.

She shook her head, then nodded. “I... well, yes, but it’s more than that. There’s a battery to power it, but it’s out of juice, but the device hasn’t stopped transmitting. It’s a high-frequency radio signal. I’ve managed to isolate and decode it, at least.” She gestured to a nearby laptop.

“Impressive,” he said. What kind of encryption had they been using to--he looked on the screen. The radio message was in morse, and it merely spelled out the word ‘HERE.’ “Not entirely subtle,” he said.

“The amount of power to boost a signal that strong would drain the average phone battery in a few minutes. This is running off a single empty double-A battery,” the technician said. “The antenna is a twisted up piece of aluminium foil, and the lights are all linked serially. They shouldn’t be blinking. Electricity doesn’t work that way.”

“Definitely a gadgeteer then,” he said. “Or someone with a power close enough that it doesn’t matter.”

To say that this complicated things would be a gross understatement. Spin-to-Win rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “We’re going to need to report this. And mark this location as compromised.” He raised his voice. “Alright everyone, get ready to pack up and move out, we can’t be sticking around here for long. I want everything stowed away for later retrieval. Start setting drives aside and get me a prisoner movement detail ready. We’ll knock the two out again to move them, so get the anesthesiologist. I want...”

“Sir!”

He turned. To interrupt him like that meant there had to be something important going on. They were professionals. That didn’t mean they didn’t act like children over the coms sometimes, but for the most part he didn’t expect needless buffoonery.

“Sir, caught a group moving towards the main entrance. Um, one of them is standing out in the middle of the road. Mask.”

He ran over to the security station and stared. They didn’t rely on grimey, low-rez cameras for their security. They could count the freckles on someone’s nose at low-light from a hundred metres.

So he got a perfect, high-definition view of the girl who was currently in the interrogation room standing in the middle of the little side-road leading towards their base. No one should have been out. It was an industrial area after most places shut down for the day.

She hefted a large object up onto her shoulder and grinned the same smile she’d given him when telling him that she would rather die than play any games with the Cabal.

“Volume?” Spin-to-Win asked.

The technician tugged off his earphones and brought the volume up. The rest of the room was quiet.

“Alrighty,” the girl said. She pulled out two pieces of... bread? Why did she have bread, and why was she loading it into her device?

There was a familiar-crunk, like a toaster’s handle being pulled back.

“What is she--check the interrogation room,” he ordered.

The technician brought that feed up.

The girl was in her seat, leaning forwards to undo the binding on her legs with... where did she get a knife?

“Guards to the interrogation room,” he snapped. “You, back on the one outside.”

The girl outside was fidgeting, shifting side-to-side while still holding onto her large... whatever it was she was wielding. “Aw, man, now I’m hungry,” she said just loud enough to be picked up.

Ding!

Spin-to-Win winced as the base shook. The camera pointing at the other side of the door was obscured as a cloud of smoke filled the entrance hall just beyond the main door. The door itself, which was a heavy metal thing meant to take a battering ram, was folded in half and shoved into the wall hard enough to crack it.

“Oh,” Spin-to-Win said. Then he jerked upright, adrenaline pumping into him.

“Sir! More masks are showing up!”

There were. He didn’t recognize them off-hand, some locals, no doubt. The problem was the number of them currently storming his base’s front door.

Spin-to-Win jumped to his desk and pressed a plain button on his laptop which had every agent in the room wincing as their earbuds buzzed the alert tone. “All agents to battlestations! We’re being attacked,” he shouted.

He was going to have to fill out so much paperwork once this was all done.

***