Paul-

Ultimately, it was very weird to have someone actually understand what I was doing and going through. Whatever it was that made people not believe me, Lauren was apparently immune to it, at least for the time being.

She claimed she was not dead, which was incredibly strange since I could see and interact with her spirit. When she touched me, however, she didn’t immediately see whatever it is people needed to see to move on, and she stayed. Usually, even if the day replays, once a spirit moved on, it was gone… even if the person returns to life, once I had touched them, the body that remained and played out the day until they died was curiously empty, whatever the spirit was that had moved on was gone once I was done with them. This was probably a blessing since their memories seemed to be immune to my rewinds, and who wants to move on to the afterlife only to be forcibly returned to die again and again?

I seemed to be singularly blessed in that I got to relive my own death over and over. I didn’t ever really get used to it, but there came a point where the pain of dying just didn’t seem to matter anymore. Call it pain tolerance, call it intentional ignorance, call it shock, but after a while, something stupid like getting your head lopped off and the seconds you are conscious and waiting for your body to die just didn’t seem that agonizing anymore.

Take this time, for instance. I awoke (again) after seeing my guts getting spilled by a gyrojet round, and watching my blood and viscera spilling towards the rip in the station wall that the idiot guard had blown out. He was going to be dead also, but who the hell lets a guard carry a pistol on a space station that is capable of ripping a giant gash in one of the bulkheads? He didn’t have to die, but whoever allowed him to carry AP spindizzy rounds should have been used to plug the hole instead.

I understood why the guards in Stronghold were armed, unlike traditional prison guards. I even understood why they used dangerous weapons, weapons capable of harming metahumans. But most of the guards were not wearing space armor. Depressurizing was dangerous.

The old standby of depressurization ripping everything towards the exit turned out to be a complete crock of shit, though. Generally, when a chamber lost pressure, there was a sudden quick puff, it felt like all the air was ripped out of your chest, a few loose items got tugged towards the exit, and then the light suddenly changed, and reflections no longer glowed.

Soon your eyes stopped seeing, and the pain started, mostly in your face, ears, and chest but then your whole body. Death followed very quickly, but I had gotten the chance to count down exactly how long it took until I lost consciousness, and 50 seconds seemed to be the cap for how long I held on. Most of the guards seemed to conk out less than 10 seconds in, though, so I guess I was considerably tougher in some ways than an average human.

The idea of an orbital prison made some sense, especially when you had teleporters available, but I could think of a lot better places, such as deep underground. Why keep people in a fragile soap bubble that the slightest exertion of power could damage? In fact, every once in a while apparently debris or micrometeorites would cause damage or a hole of some sort. It’s not like the inmates were even conscious to escape.

I get it. No one wants someone coming to break people out of the prison. By the time most people made it to Stronghold, they had done some pretty terrible shit, or at least that was the story.

A bullshit story, apparently.

No, the real monsters tended to get aced right down on earth. When a team goes after a super-powered serial killer, for instance, they generally had more important things to worry about than keeping the guy alive. Even the most pro-law metahuman, after watching someone tear a bunch of innocents to pieces, will be hard-pressed to insist that they be turned over to the rightful authorities.

I couldn’t really even say that I blamed them, I had been exposed to some of the worst of the worst, and honestly believed that the moment you intentionally took an innocent life, you should lose the protection of innocent until proven guilty, a fair trial, or even protection from cruel and unusual punishment.

Fuck them. You kill a child, you deserve to have all your bits cut off and shoved into your own asshole until you rot to death. Law was designed to keep the innocent from being punished, not to protect some bastard you just watched murder an expectant mother, even if that mother was a part-time vigilante before she got pregnant.

It had been a week that Lauren had been following me around. After the last attempt, I had gone ahead and gave it a couple of days before I tried again. Lauren was… odd. She was very strong-willed, but almost aggressively submissive after she made her will known. I could understand why Louis liked her. He was not particularly proactive, but once he had a direction, he pursued it fanatically until he’d extracted everything he could from it. The two of them had been an odd match but suited each other perfectly despite it.

She definitely was not my type in the slightest, even if she hadn’t been a walking spirit. Yes, it was gratifying that she believed me and remembered every single day that passed, reset or not, but she was always there. Every waking moment, she was right there looking at me expectantly unless I told her to buzz off so I could get some rest, and while she tended to keep quiet, the first time I hit some echo in order to get a night’s rest she gave me this helpless, judgmental look that made me want to tell her to go to hell.

Still, she had been right. The third time she had ported me up to Stronghold, I had managed to get a look into the actual holding facility and had seen the ranks of stacked bodies in suspended animation. Many of the individuals held like that were flat-out odd looking, and I had to wonder if their disappearance was as much due to their unpleasant appearance as it was to whatever dangerous powers they possessed.

Would you trust a vigilante that looked like a velociraptor crossed with a pterodactyl? Was there the slightest possibility they could lead anything resembling a secret life? Proteus and metahumans in general had certain appearances to maintain, would humans that had drawn a bad card, who had rolled snake-eyes in the metahuman game of chance, really be welcome on earth? And here they were, stacked up like cordwood, ready to be used for… whatever they were being used for.

I had yet to get to the emergency life support ward, where her body and those of several other badly damaged metas barely clinging to life were being kept because every time I tried someone intercepted me or ended me before I got the chance. The sheer horror of the situation, of people being stashed away like meat just because the lottery had left them looking less than human, was not lost on me, but I had seen a lot of horrors in my life, and this was just one more horrible thing to be laid at Proteus’ feet, right along with the destroyed families, the murdered opponents, and the monster factory.

I mean, I got it, Proteus was trying to keep metahumans under control, to prevent the world from turning into a rapacious murderworld where the strong and powerful ruled the weak with an endless iron fist, but where did you draw the line? At what point did stopping the monsters by any means necessary turn you into one?

“That’s it.” I declared when I woke up to see her hovering over the motel bed where I had spent last night, several days ago. “I just cannot get through the acquisitions ward. That was the third time security was mobilized. I have tried everything I possibly can to get through, short of just shutting the whole damned thing down and decompressing everyone, I cannot do it.”

Lauren looked at me hopelessly, and then nodded, “You are giving up?”

I shook my head, “Don’t be stupid, girl. Of course, I am not giving up. I mean, your powers still work, sort of. You can get me to the station, and while your shock doesn’t have much punch, it’s still there.”

“I am just saying I cannot do this without some help. So let me ask you this. Who can we get to help?”

Lauren looked thoughtful and then worried. “I don’t know. There’s a small chance that we could get Akiko to help, but she would be on the ship with Louis, and I don’t know if there is a way to convince him.”

I nodded, “There was one other.”

“One other?” she asked curiously.

“Yes,” I stated simply, “There was a woman, standing outside of the tent where you… died. She knew who I was, and what I was there for. Tall, spiky blonde hair. Her name was Sif, like the Norse goddess. She actually saw me and didn’t ignore me. Could she help? She seemed to know you.”

She nodded, “She could help, but I don’t know if she would. She is a member of the East Coast Protectors, and unlike the Defenders, they are sponsored directly by Proteus. I don’t know if she would help you survive breaking into Stronghold since she has put several people there herself.”

I nodded, “Still, it’s worth a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? She kills me, and I try again. After all, that worked for Louis. How many times will I have to experiment before she believes me?”

She smiled a little, “If I hadn’t seen it, I would have had a tough time believing how… casually you take the idea of failure and retry.”

I shrugged, “Believe it or not, it was not as big of a problem once I got used to it. After all, I used to play Doom Eternal on Ultra Nightmare mode.”

Lauren looked at me in confusion, brushing her hair out of her face instinctively, “What do you mean?”

I grinned, “Doom Eternal is a first-person shooter game. Ultra Nightmare mode is unbelievably hard, and when you die, instead of restarting at the beginning of the level, the current playthrough is over, and you have to restart at the beginning of the game. Not very many people have managed to finish the game at all, but I was able to speedrun it. I wasn’t the fastest ever, but not many people can brag about that.”

She nodded, “So basically your entire life has become an Ultra Nightmare mode run?”

I nodded, “Kind of a mixture between that and Deus Ex Nightmare mode. Hell, if I could afford some armor and weapons or I had some kind of superpowers of my own, I probably would have already succeeded on the Stronghold Invasion level. The thing is, I screw up again and again, and I die or get captured, and then the day restarts. Again and again, it’s like being in hell.”

Lauren looked at me a little disbelievingly, and then shook her head, “I don’t understand you.”

“What do you not understand?” I said curiously.

“You have the most powerful superpower imaginable. I mean, sure, it’s painful and comes with lots of downsides, but you are functionally immortal. You can do anything you could possibly imagine. Yes, it has its drawbacks, but you can just keep trying until you get it perfectly right, every single time. I saw the movie groundhog day. It’s like that, except that if you finish whatever tasks you have, or just have a less exciting day, you can move on to the next day and start all over again.”

Holy Mother of Christ.

My life was a fucking video game. All I had to do was finish the level. When I did, I got peaceful sleep as a reward.

If I needed to improve my skill with something, I literally had all the time in the world to do it. Moving on to the next level wasn’t even generally that difficult, there was almost never any guesswork involved. I was trapped in a video game, but it was potentially the coolest video game on the planet.

“Let’s go find Sif. Begin world 1-1. How do we find her?”

Finding Sif was supposedly easy. Apparently, there was a place where the East Coast Protectors accepted walk-ins. Her team, her HQ.

I walked into the old church that had been restored, and immediately saw a young lady behind the desk. She was dressed in sparkly orange and black costume, with short blonde hair in a pixie bob, and smiled brightly at me as I entered. Fortunately, I had gone ahead and splurged before Vectress had teleported me. I wondered if the fact that I knew the names of those who died would be considered a security breach, but honestly, who was going to complain?

I was wearing a fairly decent summerweight suit of dove-grey cotton and a nice pair of patent shoes, which were uncomfortable but the shiny black depths definitely helped to project the look I was going for. Young professional, neatly-cut hair, late 20’s, well off but middle class working his way up. A power tie and a leather backpack carried by its straps instead of a briefcase completed the look. By the...I guess… super-powered secretary’s sudden look of interest, I imagined that the suit and look had completed its assigned task.

“Hi, can I help you?” Somehow despite her outfit, she was wearing a small name tag that said Oriole.

“Yes, I would like to arrange a meeting with one of the protectors, specifically with one Sif?” I asked her, putting down the pack and holding out my hand to shake hers.

She reached out and took my hand. Since she wore a costume, I assumed she was one of the team members on duty, although I hadn’t heard about anyone named Oriole. She squeezed my fingers, and I folded as if she were crushing my hand. “Ow ow ow ow.” Although she had done nothing of the sort.

She jerked her hand back and said, “Oh no! What? Are you okay? I don’t have… what?”

I grinned at her, trying to lighten things up, “Oh nothing, I was just preparing to do that in case I ran into some super strong team member. Hi Oriole. My name is Paul. Paul McCarthy. I met Sif up in Siberia, and while I am sure she is not expecting me, I have high hopes she can take a little time to talk to me about something.”

She scowled for a moment at me and then chuckled. “Mister Paul McCarthy. That’s like, the Beatles singer, right?”

I shook my head and politely said, “No… His name is McCartney. But you aren’t a boomer so I guess you are forgiven for the mistake. Let her know that the chooser from Siberia, Mister Alchemyst’s brother, would like to speak with her?”

She nodded, “I will talk to the team leader. If you would like to have a seat?”

I nodded, expecting absolutely nothing. If I were a superhero, I wouldn’t exactly pay attention to every person that wandered in off the street with a problem, even if I was the sort that would stop and get a cat out of a tree. Surprisingly, however, after waiting for about half an hour, and several assurances from Oriole that someone would be right with me, another man in a costume stepped out from the back.

This guy was, to put it bluntly, huge. Unless he was an ex-wrestler he probably was an actual cape of some sort, since his muscles were clearly defined under his outfit, with an incredibly broad chest and extremely narrow waist. He was wearing a skin-tight suit that was slashed diagonally across his chest, with the lower half of his body and legs and left shoulder white and the upper right shoulder and arm in blue. He had the badge for the protectors displayed prominently in the center of his chest, right in the middle of the diagonal line, a shield with an eagle over the word Protectors.

He was wearing a sort of high-impact barbute of blue plastic with a white line down the middle, although oddly, what I could see of his face looked considerably slimmer than the rest of his body. Were the outfit and musculature some sort of armor? He certainly looked the part of a superhero, although in my experience, except for the very toughest of the tough, armor was almost always obvious. Even the bulletproof masks liked to have a little extra protection, and if you could toss around cars with ease, an inch or two of graphite-layered composite metals would hardly slow you down and could make all the difference if you met someone who could put out more damage than you could easily absorb.

I noticed that both sides of the helmet, right around the base, had the words Magnum Steel etched as if the helmet were a flight helmet and that was his call sign or something. Beneath the T-shaped opening, I could also see a bristly mustache, much like an old highway patrol lip decoration. Magnum Steel? Really? This… refugee from a 70’s porn was the team leader for the protectors. You couldn’t actually see his religion beneath the skin-tight costume, but whatever sort of athletic support he was wearing had clearly been designed with size in mind. He was either a human tripod or seriously compensating for something. Was this guy family-friendly?

I stood up. This guy already rubbed me the wrong way, and I smiled as I held out my hand. “Captain uhh… Steel?” I asked him curiously. Mission accomplished, he was clearly some sort of a strong type. I was in decent shape, not like Louis, of course, but considering the suit, he didn’t seem to feel the need to prove his strength with his grip. I would get over it, of course, but having your fingers mulched was not fun for however long it lasted.

He nodded, “You are Paul McCarthy?” he asked. His voice was artificially deep, as though he intentionally lowered it, although I guess I was glad he wasn’t using a hoarse rasp. That got so old among the mask set. His barbute and outfit were probably more than enough to conceal his identity, and unless he was some sort of celebrity his voice probably wouldn’t be recognizable anyway. As much as I respected some of the vigilante types, the ones that decided to go the gargling-Drano-to-talk route were incredibly hard to understand on television. Most, fortunately, preferred voice alteration electronics, and at least sounding like an extra from a transformers movie left your words clear.

“No relation,” I stated, smiling slightly.

“No relation to who?” he asked, “Louis McCarthy? I thought you were supposed to be his brother. You don’t look anything like him, though. I expected you to be taller.”

I shrugged, “We cannot all look like we spend 14 hours a day in the Gym, right?”

He grinned, his teeth visible through the helmet. “What can I say? Some of us are just naturally the biggest and the strongest. I don’t even exercise.”

I chuckled, “Ahh, Fezzic.” Maybe this guy was okay if he quoted the Princess Bride.

“Who?” He asked curiously. Ugh.

“Nevermind. Hey, I needed to talk to Sif, is she available?” I asked.

He shook his head, “No, she’s very busy. When I heard the message, though, I figured I could possibly help. Is your brother wanting to turn himself in? I know things got a little weird last time, but if he is willing to come in off of his violated Parole, I can assure you that I will take care of everything. We know he’s very cooperative, and while handcuffs might still be necessary, I can assure you that we will treat him well, assuming he doesn’t do the giant monster thing again.”

I shook my head, “No. He’s not even in the country. This doesn’t have anything to do with him, it’s strictly between me and Sif.” I leaned forwards conspiratorially, and whispered, “My wife set up a nanny cam, and Sif was in her god of thunder outfit, you know, with the breastplate? She got some footage, and I need to talk to Sif about maybe running a little damage control, especially when she found the whip marks. Maybe she could put a little fear into her, so it doesn’t have to be a media or a lawyer thing. I broke the DVD I found, but she said she had another one, so I figured I’d talk to her personally.” I shrugged. “I mean, it won’t hurt her rep any. You know, Sif’s rep, but she also said she found the other stuff we were messing with, and that kind of exposure could be a very bad thing.”

He shrugged and looked around. I was expecting the play not to work, but he nodded to me and growled, “Tell you what. I will go ahead and have her get a hold of you, but if you can find the evidence it would probably be best just to bring it here and give it to me. That way I can have the PR people get ahead of it just in case anything hits the tubes, so they can protect her reputation as well as yours. Do you live nearby?”

I shook my head, “Not really. I have to get back to New York tonight, which is going to be a long drive, and I was hoping to take care of it while I am on my little business trip. Tell you what, have her get a hold of me, and I will see what I can do about getting you guys in touch with Louis. She knows who I am from Siberia, so I am not too worried about the mask thing, but I cannot really go around telling you my secret ID. That’s the big reason I want to get ahead of this thing as soon as possible, because part of my rep is happy family man, and I don’t want it to explode. Is there any chance I could get in touch with her tonight?”

Yup, lying through my teeth, but I had dealt with this type before. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he was as crooked as a penny on a railroad track. People like that are always happier if they think that you are as dirty as they are, as long as it’s not anything that can fall onto their heads. I was pretty sure, though, that if I had a DVD of our supposed assignation that it would find its way into his private collection, and possibly hang over Sif’s head if he needed the leverage. It was the mustache. I just didn’t trust the mustache.

He nodded, “I think I might be able to do this, Tell you what, are you staying in town for right now?”

I shrugged, “I finished up with my clients before I came here. I figured it would be a bit of a wait since you guys are busy and all, and I didn’t want to come in here officially. I mean, it’s nice to come in out of the dark and be officially approved by the DMA, but you know we street guys are still on pretty thin ice. I especially don’t want my girlfriend to find out since she might turn me into some sort of a light fixture if she found out what happened. She’s fine with keeping things under wraps from the wife, but if she finds out I like a little extra leather in my diet things could turn bad quickly, and I don’t want to lose my spot on the teams just because the DMA wants to push the puritan thing.”

I grinned, “It’s nice to have official permission to kick the crap out of some mutated street trash, I don’t want to lose that just because of a little sweat and blood, you know?”

He nodded, “Yeah, I hear ya. I almost got busted because of nothing more than a stupid joke back when I first got started. I mean, we are superheroes, but we are still men, you know?”

I nodded, “Right? I mean, you’ve seen how they dress. There’s nothing wrong with occasionally stepping into the same line as the huge number of guys before you. Frankly, that’s the best part of being approved. Ever done it with your mask on? Now that it’s all legal, wearing a mask and showing a bit of muscle is like giving her fur and a Ferrari.”

He nodded and grinned, “I don’t do it any other way, man. Mask all the way. Hey, She doesn’t like to have her training interrupted but tell you what. Head over to the coffee shop, and I will let her know she needs to head over pronto and get this shit squared away before it bites us in the butt. To be completely honest, I sorta figured she was a rug muncher, which is why I didn’t make a play, but if she likes the D, I might go for it myself.”

I nodded and grinned back, feeling a little sickened. I wasn’t some modern kind of metrosexual bitch who was all in touch with his inner teenage girl, but Dad had very firm ideas of what was cool and what was not, and treating women like disposable sex toys was pretty firmly in my not category. Yes, I used prostitutes, but I never beat them up or tried to rip them off, although I had been known to slap up the occasional pimp that tried to roll a John. My job wasn’t to save them, although I had managed to help a couple here and there. I was just glad that whatever weird shit came with my gift also included a near-complete inability to pick up most diseases including the nasty ones that make your junk fall off.

I headed over to the coffee shop. If this didn’t work, I had enough Echo left to do a solid restart. I wondered if trying to play Magnum like the hero who needed to save someone would work better than playing the fellow jackass. I usually was pretty good at calling personality types, and the fact that Magnum didn’t exercise was not anything like a surprise. I knew that some metahumans just naturally grew these gigantic muscles, but I felt like if I had met him and he wasn’t a meta, he’d probably be wearing a fedora, smell like old piss, and be lying about how many bitches he’d scored.

I ordered a latte and after a quick sip decided it would be best to just sit there and pretend to drink it. It wasn’t exactly bad, but coffee snob ran in the family, and this particular cafe had never met a bean they hadn’t burned.