Chapter Sixty-Three - Pride Begets Fear

Athena was proud.

Not just of herself, though there was a lot of that too. She was helping her big sister and her other sisters break into the base of some competing villains where they beat them up and tied them down. There was nothing quite so villainous as what they were doing.

She was also really proud of the Boss. Emily had come a long way since Athena was born. Back then, Athena couldn’t read people’s minds, but she was as smart and observant as any owl ought to be, and she could tell--even if her less intelligent sisters couldn’t--that Emily didn’t always feel like being a villain.

Sometimes she came a bit closer, hatching plans and bossing her minions around as a proper villain should, but other times Emily was too worried about silly, unimportant things, like caring about the law or wanting to send her sisters to school.

Still, today was a big day for Emily, and Athena was proud of her big sister.

“Ursa Minor, push in,” the Boss said. She was standing among them, back straight and hat tipped back. She looked like a proper villain, though maybe not one who should be on the front lines. Athena made sure to stay close, just in case.

“Got it, Boss,” Teddy rumbled as she pushed into the next corridor. Trinity followed next, one of her holding a sock which she’d filled with rocks and the other had the toaster rifle up on her shoulders, a piece of bread in her free hand and another between her lips.

“Glamazon, when we reach the next room, Bandit will breach, can you light it up?” the Boss asked.

“I can do that,” Glamazon said.

Athena wasn’t sure how wise it was to bring the hero along. She was such an attention-seeking weirdo. Maybe if they were fighting paparazzi they could use Glamazon as a distraction, but they were working against proper villains here, and having a hero would just be a distraction.

The Boss wanted her along for a few reasons though. Like to give their operation some legitimacy when they pretended that it was very heroic of them to attack another villain’s base. Athena understood, but she felt it would have been better to leave Glamazon behind.

All it took was a glance at Glamazon’s eyes to tell that the girl was both afraid and a bit amazed. Afraid of the place they were in (which was just sad, Athena wasn’t afraid at all, and she didn’t have any exploding-light-balls power to keep her safe) and amazed at how cool the Boss was being.

As they reached a door at the end of the corridor and everyone got into place, Athena spoke up. “This next room is a big one,” she said. She hadn’t had a lot of time to poke around inside the heads of the mooks they’d captured, but she did have an idea of what the base’s layout was.

“How big?” the Boss asked.

“Uh, it’s pretty big? There’s stairs at the end going up and down. Up is where the control centre is, and the cells with Alea Iacta are below. The rest of this level is, like, bathrooms and break rooms and stuff like that. There should be lots of cover and boxes and stuff in this room. I think they have trucks too?” Athena said.

“How does she know all of that?” Glamazon asked with a gesture towards Athena.

Athena sniffed. “I know more things than you could ever imagine knowing, Sparkles.”

Glamazon recoiled a bit at that, and Athena grinned. She loved it when people thought she was scary. It made her feel nice and cosy and warm in her chest, like when the Boss was rubbing her head or when she woke up snuggled with all of her sisters.

“If they have cars... is there an exit in this room?” the Boss asked.

Athena thought back. It wasn’t easy. People didn’t think the same way as each other. Some people thought in images, others in sounds, most people had a weird mix of all of their senses. She’d read some minds that skipped around all over, and even that wasn’t the same from person to person.

Trinity’s mind was hard to read because it was constantly filled with so many sensations and feelings and images all at once. Teddy’s mind was much simpler. She saw something, she made a conclusion about it, she moved on.

The Boss, on the other hand, looked at everything a million times from a thousand angles, as if every little choice she had was super important and everything was in danger if she didn’t do the right things and every choice was as important as the last.

Athena imagined that with practice she’d get better at reading minds, but for the moment it was still kind of tricky. “Um, I think there’s a big door?”

One of the mooks they’d tied up had had a weird mind, filled with maps and room layouts. Everything in his head was really clear when it came to where things were, but at the same time, each room he imagined was also filled with memories that happened in that space. He had never used the big door, so it was a faint memory, and she wasn’t reading his mind at the moment, so it was more like the memory of a memory, which only made things a whole bunch harder.

“Right, so a loading area of some sort. Maybe we can use that as our exit point,” the Boss said.

“We’re not leaving from the same place we came in?” Glamazon asked.

“I don’t see why we should.”

“Because we have prisoners there. They could be untied and get away,” Glamazon said.

Athena could feel the million and one nervous ideas running through Emily’s mind before she made a choice. “It doesn’t matter. Our priority is saving our allies first, and capturing villains second. Is everyone ready?”

“Wait,” Athena said. The Boss turned to her. “I think there’s traps.”

“Traps?” the Boss asked.

Athena nodded. “In, uh, the corridor we need to go down. There’s like... a turret thing? There’s one in the corridor above.”

“How are they wired?” Maple asked.

Athena shrugged. She had no idea, and she said so to Maple without meeting her sister’s eyes. Maple’s mind was scary. Not that Maple herself was scary. She was probably the nicest of Athena’s sisters, it’s just she had so many ideas going on, all the time, and so many of them didn’t make sense.

If a normal person’s mind was like a billboard in the distance on a rainy day, then Maple’s mind was like being pressed right up against the billboard with a pair of spinning kaleidoscopes over her eyes.

“I don’t know,” Athena said at last. “They’re like, big boxes, with a gun in them, that unfolds and stuff.”

“That’s... really not good,” the Boss said. “Maple, will your... jammer have worked on those?”

“It depends on if they’re guns that can jam,” Maple said.

“I can just keep running at them until they run out of bullets,” Trinity suggested.

“That’s so messed up,” Glamazon muttered.

“We’ll clear the next room first,” the Boss said. “Then we’ll see what we can do. Ursa Minor, you’re up, Bandit, get in there fast too. Focus on anyone that looks dangerous. Glamazon, are your balls ready?”

“Please don’t... yes, I’m ready,” Glamazon said.

They reached the door and everyone tensed up, then Trinity slammed the door open and Glamazon tossed in three of her sparkly glitter balls into the room in quick succession. They exploded, and for a moment all Athena could do was stare at the bright, flashy lights before she shook her head and refocused.

Sometimes, Athena wished she was more of a brute like Teddy, so she could run in and beat people up and help that way, instead of being stuck in the back.

Teddy roared into the room, followed by one of Trinity who also roared, but a lot less impressively.

“Oh, there’s people here!” Trinity cheered. She hefted up the toaster, and before anyone could tell her not to, ran into the room while putting some bread into the toaster slots.

“Oh no,” the Boss said.

The rest of them rushed in to find the room utterly chaotic. There were some mooks hidden behind a cement barricade who were whacking on Teddy with pieces of wood, and more of them were off in the far end of the room, obviously caught in the middle of loading things onto a van.

That entire operation got disrupted by a very clear Ding! followed by the loud bang of the toastgun going off. The toast flew between the mooks and punched a hole through the van and out the front. Trinity cackled.

Glamazon tossed more of her balls around and then Athena saw one mook rushing towards them with a long baton. She laughed as she ran over and dove forehead-first into his gut.

He crumpled and she jumped on top of him and locked eyes with him. He was worried. “I’m going to eat your secrets!” she shouted. And now he was afraid.

This, this is what Athena lived for!

***