“Go, go go!” Perry said, hauling open the door and shoving Breaker through before diving into the bulletproof can himself.

“It’s extra for daring escapes.” The cabbie said, angling his rear-view mirror to assess Perry, eyes narrowed.

“He’s good for it, Carl.” Tung-Stan said.

“Yeah, I’m good for it.”

“Who’s that, daddy?” a little girls’ voice asked over the phone.

“Hi…” Perry glanced at Tung-Stan.

“Millie,” Tung-Stan whispered, holding his hand over the receiver.

“Hi, Millie! I’m Perry, I was having your dad help me this evening. I’m really sorry about hogging your time with him today. We’re gonna get him right back, okay? I tell you what though, your dad is really good at helping people.

“Why, just today he helped me escape from a bunch of Mafia monkeys with tommy guns.”

“That’s silly.” Millie said.

“Less silly than you’d think in person,” Perry said, glancing at the windshield, where a fedora-sporting monkey was attached to the window, snarling at them, it’s canines fully bared, spittle flying out of it’s mouth as it slammed it’s head into the glass.

Strangely the hat stayed on.

“Drive, please?” Perry asked as he spotted Monolith exiting the building, approaching them ominously. They were outside Monolith’s short range blasts, but that wouldn’t last much longer.

“You got credit with my company?” the cabbie asked, completely unperturbed. “’Cause you don’t look like you’ve got chits on you.”

“Just put it on my tab,” Tung-Stan said. “I’ll get it back from the kid later.”

“Yessir,” Carl the Cabbie said, pulling out of the parking lot, sloughing off monkeys as he accelerated.

Quest Complete!

Escape Monolith’s Lair:

Reward: (500XP), Reputation up with Locust, Monolith, Nexus, Parents, Natalie, Heather. No Ransom.

Perry heaved a sigh of relief and leaned back into the cushions of the oversized cab as they pulled away from Monolith and co.

As Perry relaxed into the seat, a thought occurred to him.

He glanced over at the pale Breaker, who was shivering in his seat.

“Did you say fifty thousand dollars?”

***Reginald AKA Barrel of Monkeys***

Reggie was nursing another cigar, wishing his fingers would stop shaking.

“Shit, man, your face,” Snake said, losing his hissing. It wasn’t the hissing that bothered Reggie, it was the inconsistency.

“You forgot to hiss.” Reggie said, knocking off the ash and shoving the cigar back in his mouth before clenching his hands tight to conceal the shakes.

The acrid, foul-smelling smoke was comforting.

“I’m not working right now,” Snake said, winding along the floor until he was directly in front of BoM. “He messed you up pretty good.”

“I know, I was there,” Reggie said. Talking hurt less than smoking, so if he could manage one, he could manage the other. He could only see snake through a sliver of one of his slightly-less swollen eyes.

“I guess Monolith had to blame someone, and Breaker wasn’t there.” Fish said. “And you did kinda wreck the office.”

“Probably for the best the kid bailed,” Reggie said, taking a deep draw on the cigar, his hardened lungs ignoring the familiar pain.

The shakes were starting to go away.

“Yeah, Monolith was screwing him out of forty k. Did you see how much Locust paid for Tung-Stan?” Fish asked.

“Nah, I didn’t.” Snake said.

“I…eavesdropped a bit. They settled on five million dollars. Real quick too, like they’d done it before.”

“Shit, man, he could’ve afforded to give the kid the amount he promised him.” Snake said. “He’s the only reason Monolith caught Tung-Stan in the first place.

“Yeah.” Reggie grunted.

The three henchmen were quiet for a moment.

“Do you think Monolith would pay five million to get us back from Locust?” Reggie asked around his cigar.

The mood turned darker as they sat there in the wake of that question.

***Perry***

“You wanna hire this guy?” Heather asked, pointing at Breaker. “No offence, but all you can do is dance.”

“Some taken,” Breaker said with a shrug.

“I mean, can you actually, I don’t know, fight MONSTERS?” Heather demanded. “Because that’s kind of a requirement.”

“First of all, he’s not gonna be an official teammate yet, I just want to hire him for some special jobs here and there. The thing you’re not getting is that Breaker here is a perfect sandbagger.

“He’s not a trump card, but he can take any trump card out of a fight, and that has some serious value. I mean, he could probably tie up Solaris for a while. His value isn’t in how many monsters he can kill, but who he can take out of play.”

Heather crossed her arms.

“Prove it.”

“It appears a demonstration is in order,” Perry said, stepping away from his work on his skin-computer and heading for the Gym, Heather and Breaker trailing behind him.

He stood at the edge of the mat and motioned for them to begin.

“I challenge you to-“

Heather stretched her arm across the distance and socked Breaker in the jaw.

Perry sucked in a breath through his teeth.

“See?” Heather asked. “It’s a terrible ide-“

“A dance battle,” Breaker finished.

Thick, bassy chords began booming through the gym.

Heather tried her best, but she passed out in under a minute.

“Rematch!” Heather shouted the instant her eyes opened again.

“No. Follow me, you guys.” Perry said, motioning for them to follow.

“Why not!?”

“Because we both know you would just wrap yourself around his mouth and choke him out.”

“Damn right I would,” Heather said, glaring at Breaker.

“You gotta keep in mind that Breaker’s power works best with a few gimmicks to shore up his glaring weaknesses.”

“First, he needs the element of surprise. People who know what’s coming have a huge advantage. He needs a series of disguises to get close to an enemy without them guessing who it is and having one of their disposables challenge him to a dance battle.”

Perry lifted another finger.

“Second, he needs protection. Something that can prevent people from insta-K.O.-ing him in order to bypass his power activation.

“Third, he needs backup dancers to enable him to win every time against multiple opponents or talented dancers without taking too much damage.”

“That sounds expensive.” Heather said.

“I’ve got an idea for the disguise, backup dancers and protection. We can probably commission Lightshow to make a custom holographic projector for him. She sells advanced light-based tech on the Tinker marketplace. Hardlight constructs and such. It could do all three.”

“But, since we don’t have that yet, we’ll need a temporary disguise, along with some protection. I think I have a spell for that.”

“Why?” Breaker asked. “I’m not stupid enough to go back out into that shitstorm without protection.”

Perry sat down and glanced up at him from his desk.

“Because Monolith might try to kill you. I’ve gathered that it’s generally taboo to kill a rookie super within a year of their debut, but you were kind of instrumental in making him look like an idiot. Accidents happen, and sometimes people get away with murder.”

Breaker paled.

“Yeah, okay, a disguise would be good.” Breaker said, nodding.

“Anyway, the spell.” Perry said, motioning them toward his skin computer. It was finally big enough to support the large script he would need to manifest all the pieces of Paradox’s Magical Computing permanently.

This is exciting, Perry thought as he checked and rechecked the measurements. The tolerences were razor-thin. Smaller, even. The components had to be exact, because they were going to be larger when they manifested, any flaws would be grossly magnified.

“Is that…skin?” Breaker asked, staring at the skin suspended by hooks and stretched tight in the glass tank. “Did you skin somebody?”

“Don’t worry, it’s my skin,” Perry said as he hooked in the Terry brain cell relay to make sure his System wouldn’t interfere with the magic.

Breaker frowned, looking Perry up and down, seemingly wondering where the skin had come from.

“How’s it going you guys?” Brendon asked, tugging out his earbuds as he walked by, mop gliding across the floor in front of him with practiced ease.

“Good, man, how’s the job?” Perry asked.

“Not bad, Sophie just gives me a list of jobs, then I jam out while I clean. Go home with a hundred bucks. It’s a good deal.”

Brendon still thought Sophie was Perry’s manager, despite the fact that Perry had a lab in the basement.

“Cool,” Perry gave him a thumbs up as he switched on the skin-computer.

A slightly translucent rubik’s cube about the size of a fifty-five gallon drum appeared outside the glass enclosure. It had thousands of individual cubes sliding back and forth across its surface at high speeds. It was an ugly amalgam of analogue and digital computing, and it had about the processing speed of a desktop from the early nineties.

At least, prior to Perry’s Spendthrift perk boosting the crap out of it.

It wasn’t going to win any awards, but it was a magical, floating computer. And there weren’t a ton of those floating around.

Perry stuck his arm under the brush and the machine drew matching symbol on Perry’s arm and the stretched-out piece of skin.

“Whoah…”

It felt like an army of ants had suddenly taken up residence in Perry’s brain. Ever so gradually, Perry was able to mentally locate the input-output section of the floating computer, and push the rest of the swarm of bits and pieces to the side, shrugging past the sensation.

“So…Is that the spell?” Breaker said, eyeballing the floating self-rearranging Borg cube. “Looks kinda ominous.”

“Nah, that’s just a side project I’ll use to help me make the spell.”

Perry drew the cube closer to himself and hooked it up to his computer.

It took him a couple minutes of troubleshooting to get his computer to accept magical controls, but when he was done, he was able to set aside his keyboard and mouse and just think about what he wanted.

It was clumsy, like learning to walk for the first time. It would’ve been faster using the keyboard and mouse, but Perry persisted. He needed to get plenty of practice with this so he could expand it to casting spells on the fly and controlling his armor remotely.

“Alright,” Perry said, opening his mom’s spellbook to Wayward’s Defensive Disguise.

Wayward’s Defensive Disguise (Intermediate Difficulty)

Ingredients: Lunt bone, Forming Slime, Scaled badger scale, subject’s blood.

Carve the Lunt Bone into the shape of the desired disguise. For best results hire a master carver, or become one yourself. Ideal size is one handspan tall.

Powder scaled badger scale and mix with Forming slime in a 1:8 ratio by mass. (1 scale to 8 slime) Mix thoroughly until homogenous and mixture begins to take on a dark metallic tint.

Once the mixture is ready, incorporate a drop of blood of the subject and then pour the mixture over the figurine.

If properly made, the silvery mixture will cling to the Lunt bone, and the subject will take the form carved onto it.

Lasts about 24 hours until the spell unravels.

If the subject takes lethal damage, the spell will absorb the damage and be undone, leaving the Lunt bone figurine unharmed and ready to be used again. The mixture of Slime and scale need only be re-mixed and applied.

Good for dodging I.D. checks in bars. Mom had written in the margin, and more recently crossed out. Doesn’t give off an aura of magic once it’s complete. I was able to prank mom, too. Perry, use this spell responsibly. Underage drinking is bad, and pranking your mother is not cool!

“I’ve been wanting to try this one.” Perry said, tapping on the spell. “We’ll make you look like someone else for a couple days while Monolith calms down. We can talk about hiring you later.”

“O-okay,” Breaker said, nodding. “Wait. Do I have to pay for this?”

“Nah,” Perry said. “I’m the one who screwed up your job.”

The hardest part of the spell was cutting a figurine with insane levels of precision.

Which wasn’t that hard for Perry. All he had to do was CAD up the disguise and program his robotic arms to cut it out of the Lunt bone.

So whaddya want? Fat guy, old guy? Old and fat? Scottish gentlemen?” Perry asked as the program booted up.

“Do they have to be naked?” Breaker asked, wincing as he looked over Perry’s shoulder.

“We’re changing your body, not your clothes.” Perry said with a shrug.

“Hey,” Breaker said, hesitating a moment. “Can I…Can I be a girl?”

Perry turned around in his chair and raised an eyebrow.

“Hey, I like being a guy, but this is supposed to be temporary and safe, right?”

“Yeah?” Perry said.

“So I’ve got the opportunity. Why not see what it’s like on the other side of the fence?” Breaker said.

“He’s got a point,” Brendon said with a shrug, leaning on his mop. “Being a girl for a couple days with the option to turn back whenever you want sounds fun.”

“As opposed to not having the option to turn back?” Heather asked.

“I mean, wouldn’t you like to be a guy for a couple days? Just to see what you’re missing out on?” Brendon asked.

“Mmm…Nah, being a girl is better.” She said.

“Alright then,” Perry said with a shrug, loading up the female blanks on his CAD. “I guess we gotta start with the most important question.”

Perry glanced over his shoulder at Breaker.

“How big do you want your boobs to be?”

Heather rolled her eyes. “I can’t be here for this. I’m gonna go patrol with Hardcase.”

Surprisingly, Breaker didn’t go crazy with the customization, settling on a slender dancer’s build with a low center of gravity. Perry set the Lunt bone in place and flipped a switch, and the delicate features of the figurine popped out of the bone in a matter of seconds.

He used a Terry-cell controlled blender to mix the other ingredients, and when it took on a metallic tint, Perry pricked the man’s thumb and added the blood to the mix before pouring it over the newly carved figurine of an athletic dancer girl.

The metallic mixture smoothed itself around the figurine, tightening down to match the features carved into the bone.

“WHOAH!” Breaker shouted as he shrank, his voice becoming higher pitched. “That felt really weird. Oh, my god, my voice is so weird!”

“This is so cool! Check this out!”

Breaker leaned forward and counterbalanced with one leg. “My center of gravity is so low! I never used to be able to do this before! This is gonna be great for dancing!”

“I’m so flexible!”

Breaker then tried to breakdance and collapsed into a heap.

“Ow.”

He pushed himself off the ground and brushed off the dust. “This is going to take some adjustment. I’ll be practicing in the gym.”

“He sure likes dancing, huh?” Brendon asked as Breaker muttered to himself about counterweights and torque.

“Yep. I guess he just wanted to dance as a girl. Most guys who ask for that get weird with it.” Perry said.

“That’s where my mind went, yeah.” Brendon admitted before he glanced at Perry, eyes narrowed.

“I’m not making one for you too.” Perry said.

“Nah, man, thanks for the offer though. I just realized something.” Brendon said.

“Oh?”

“You’re Paradox, aren’t you?”

“You got me.” Perry said.

“Hah. Man, when Sophie finds out you’re using her motel as a base, she’s gonna be pissed,” Brendon said, plugging his earbuds in and pushing the mop.

Ah, Brendon. Never change.