***Sweeper-Class Minder, Margery Hammond***

“What. The. Hell. Was. THAT!?” Marge’s handler shouted, the eerie mindless robot punctuating each word with a strike from a janitor’s bottle of cleaning agent. It’d been the closest thing at hand.

The plastic bottle didn’t hurt that much impacting against her head and shoulders, but Marge wasn’t going to point that out. It wasn’t about the pain anyway. It was about control. If she acted like it wasn’t painful, the bitch might grab something heavier to teach her a lesson. Or worse.

“Do you want your daughter to die? Cuz’ That’s what it sounds like you want.” Teresa muttered, taking a step back and pulling out her phone.

“Wait! He was too strong! His mind was like a bunker with razor wire and guards!” Marge exclaimed.

It had been…weirder than that. Amorphous. Flowing, folding in on itself…looking back at her with hunger. Marge didn’t say so. She only gave an explanation her handler would be willing to buy.

“That’s not what it says in Chase’s report.” Teresa said dismissively, her phone making soft clicking sounds as she texted their superior, likely spelling trouble for Marge’s girl.

Marge decided to take a risk, distracting the miniature tyrant from her daughter with back-talk.

“Did it occur to you that maybe Chase failed and lied about it?”

Teresa glanced up, her fingers pausing as a deathly neutrality passed over her features. The blank void in Marge’s mental senses lifted the phone to her ear.

“Charles, we need an exfil team for Chase Currant for debrief. He may have misled us about Paradox. And sic Serenity on Spangle in case he needs a little extra encouragement.”

She hung up a moment later, eyeing Marge up and down.

“Could you still do it?”

“Do what?”

“Control Paradox. You’re a Sweeper class Minder. You made an entire city block into your playthings. I don’t believe there’s a human being you can’t control.”

“I’m not entirely sure Paradox is human.” That mind was…strange. Paradoxical even. Like an ouroboros, it felt as though it was trying to…eat itself.

Teresa picked up the broom from the nearby janitor’s shelf, hefting it thoughtfully.

“By myself, I don’t think so. he would slip out of control. If I had a team of Minders to help keep him under, Probably.” Marge said, spurred on by the wooden implement in Teresa’s hands.

“Alright,” Teresa said, grabbing Marge’s hand and leading her out of the janitor closet. “But if you’re lying to me, I’ll personally break your daughter’s kneecaps.”

They entered the train station, receiving the occasional glance from nearby civilians at a grown woman being hauled around by a supermodel.

She felt their dull minds press up against hers, and she knew it would be so easy to simply cause them to enter a mindless fury, tearing Teresa limb from limb before stapling her face to the train.

But no.

Four more of those mindless freaks were guarding her daughter every moment of the day, acting like friendly nannies and teachers, garnering more love and credibility than the girl’s own absentee mother, all the while the monsters were willing to snap her neck at any moment.

Not to mention the bomb in Marge’s head, held by an undisclosed android in an undisclosed location.

No, not today.

Teresa tugged Marge into her car, coordinating the intercept of Paradox’s bus as she drove, meeting up with a team of three other, lesser Minders and their handlers.

They arranged to intercept a block away from the final destination, climbing out of the car and waiting for the bus.

The massive lumbering vehicle marked #83 pulled off to the side right next to where they waited, brakes releasing pressure with a hiss as it stopped.

Marge couldn’t get over how creepy it was to see a bus filled to the brim with people, but only one mind visible to her senses: the bus driver.

Wait. What?

“Just gonna check the engine for a moment to see what the problem is,” the driver said, stepping off the bus with his scripted excuse.

“Let’s go,” Teresa said, shoving Marge in front of her.

“W-wait,” Marge said. “Something’s wrong.”

“What is it this time?” Teresa hissed quietly, her face a mask of civility. “We don’t have time for hesitation, do your job or your daughter has an accident again.”

“There’s…” Paradox isn’t on the bus. I could I.D. that mind from a block away. It’s nowhere near here. Just as she was about to turn her head to scan the surroundings for him, a suit of black armor stood up from the middle row and walked to the front of the bus.

“Oh, fancy seeing you again here.” Paradox’s modulated voice spoke from the bus’s door as the light-devouring black armor stepped out onto the street. “Is something the matter?”

“There’s no one in that suit,” Marge whispered, causing Teresa to pale.

“Shit,” Teresa muttered, pulling out her phone.

***Paradox***

It was a tricky proposition, using Melt.EXE on himself inside his own armor, but he’d made it work, squeezing down through the opened toe of his armor and then the hole in the floor paneling of the bus.

A moment later, Perry had re-formed, dangling from the undercarriage of the bus as it sped along the streets of Washington.

All he had to do was wait for a sharp corner and throw himself into the turn, landing on the sidewalk, hopefully out of sight of the bus following behind.

HP: 12

Thank god for HP or there’d be some road-rash to go with my daring escape.

Perry was still connected to the armor by the the subdermal application of Mind-taker ichor routed through the massive shelf of skin he’d grown in his lair to allow high level processing. It truly looked like a horror show in that portion of his lair, with the skin of several dozen humans – Lab grown, of course – covered in bright red magical tattoos, linked together by shared symbols to make a complex web of sophisticated logic.

Did Perry have to grow them in the shape of flayed people? No. But it looked much more menacing.

Basically the setup was the software of a magical computer connected directly to Perry’s mind.

Perfect remote control was standard procedure in his armor nowadays.

From the armor’s point of view, nothing changed, the bus driver didn’t seem to notice, and no one contacted him immediately afterward.

Perry tucked himself into an alleyway, before too many people got the opportunity to get a good look at him.

Alright, let’s take advantage of our anonymity and see if we can get to Chemestro and Sin-Eater before they get got.

PPP.EXE

(5/6)

Paradox’s Pernicious Prison was an original, a direct upgrade of Kolath’s Floating Armaments and Threads Of Gintax, that allowed Perry to create a mentally controlled substance that he could shape into whatever form he needed, using it for offence, defense, healing or utility.

At the moment, he needed utility.

The inky black nodule burst in his hand, exploding outward in every direction, looking a bit like roiling ferrofluid as the spell gave it mass before it settled into a sphere, the tenets of Gintax and Astra floating to the surface in bone white.

At Perry’s mental nudge, the spell tucked itself under his shirt, sealing tight to his ribs and spine.

Gonna need a shower when this is over, Perry thought sourly before triggering Wayward’s Defensive Disguise.

WDD.EXE

Back in his lair, a single drop of Perry’s blood was mixed with a solution of Lunt bone, forming slime and badger scale before being poured over a figurine of a bland old man with a limp and a crooked back.

Out of the alley limped an unthreatening face, with a body to match.

Okay, Chemestro’s on bus #115, which is heading to the red district. Perry mentally reviewed the map, momentarily thankful for Chemestro’s paranoia,

By now, they should be…right about there.

Perry picked himself up with the inky tar wrapped around his torso, and shoved himself through the air to the southwest, toward the route Chemestro’s bus was taking.

He saw the convoy of buses heading through the streets and got ahead of them, perching on someone’s second story balcony, giving him a good look inside each of the buses as they drove past.

Bus #115 was the last in line, implying it’d stopped somewhere. It also didn’t have a Chemestro on it.

Well…damn.

Perry grunted, settling his old, achy body down before focusing on the connection between him and his magical computer, linking to Washington’s cell towers through his armor, and breaking into the surveillance cameras along the path Chemestro had taken.

He scrubbed through the footage until he found where bus 115 pulled off to the side, Chemestro walking off the bus with a congenial smile and entering a limousine.

God…damnit.

Chemestro was such a nutcase he would immediately turn violent if someone tried to transport him to a second location, and with good reason. This definitely wasn’t standard Chemestro behavior. Sooo….a Minder was involved.

Perry caught the side profile of one of the people in the limousine, recognizing the sickly man he’d seen beside the supermodel.

So. The sickly trio were likely Minders. They aborted while all three of us were together because they weren’t sure they could snatch all of us at the same time without causing a fuss?

The abort code was signaled before Perry and Co. chose not to ride the limousines, which meant there was something that had spooked them even before then.

…They were looking at him.

I don’t know if I should be happy or sad that Minders look at me like I’m radioactive, Perry thought. Obviously Perry was the sticking point. His mental stats had grown by a significant margin since the last time he’d visited Washington, and even then, he’d been a bitch to keep under, according to Chase.

Perry followed the limousine with Chemestro until it went into a tunnel conveniently lacking any sort of public surveillance equipment.

Hmm…

Chemestro and Sin-Eater weren’t in any physical danger. Their abilities put their value somewhere in the ten figures. You don’t put down a racehorse that good.

And if they mind-controlled him and turned him against Solaris, Solaris would squish Washington with his thumb.

The furthest Perry figured they’d go was brainwash them into thinking it was their idea to move to Washington. It was still a bit risky if revealed, though. The most reasonable, low risk course of action was to put him to sleep for a week or two and send him back to Franklin with a story about how everything went off without a hitch.

Both of those gambits would only work if they got all four of them….but did they get Role, or is his cover still good?

So what’s the play? Are they trying to steal our best and brightest, or are they planning on covering up something they’re doing with the Androids?

¿Por que no los dos?

Perry decided to prioritize the civilians. Chemestro would be physically fine, and as long as Perry or Role got away, Franklin could pressure Washington into giving him back.

Right now, I just need more information. Is the whole government build on Minders? Or do they just send them after particularly egregious cases like me.

I don’t have any contacts in Washington…Wait, no. I do have one…

Perry looked up the address Chase Currant.

Bonus: the guy was a Minder that Perry had already broken the control of, giving him a natural resistance to his abilities, and Chase might know more about what was going on with the other Minders the government seemed to be leveling against them.

As Perry was soaring across town, A change in his armor’s tiny HUD in his upper right peripheral stole his attention: The bus was pulling over. Perry tuned into the audio from the armor.

“Looks like there’s a hiccup in the engine,” The driver said, muttering excuses before stepping off the bus.

Yep, this is where they’d take me out of the equation.

Perry directed the armor to stand up and follow the bus driver out onto the street, finding no less than four sickly people and their supermodel side-pieces staring up at it in horror.

“Oh, fancy seeing you again here.” Paradox said through his armor. “Is something the matter?”

“There’s no one in that suit,” the nearest stringy haired woman muttered to her supermodel thrall, easily picked up by the suit’s microphones.

“Shit,” the woman muttered, her hand darting for her phone.

Chainlightnign.EXE Perry directed a blast of living lightning to snake through the air, split into seven branches and catch the supermodels and the Minders in control of them in the chest, sending them reeling backward, body twitching and unconscious, but alive. Before the phone hit the ground, Perry had the suit blast forward in the blink of an eye and catch it before it broke against the sidewalk. The bus driver yelped and began sprinting off down the street while the androids on the bus stared on in horror.

Perry appraised what appeared to be the lead Minder, the one he’d kept awake in order to interrogate.

“Why are you mind-controlling my team?” Perry asked, reeling in the frail woman with a Kolath’s Floating Armament. She gave a strangled half-chuckle and a helpless shrug.

“I don’t want to ask any more forcefully than this,” Perry said through his suit, glaring down at the shivering woman.

“That won’t be necessary,” One of the androids said, stepping down off the bus. The skinny young man who looked like he had a meth habit pulled out his wallet and grabbed his driver’s license, tossing it aside.

Between one breath and the next the man’s face changed, he gained an inch of height, and his cheeks filled out. The sickly minder’s eyes bulged out of her skull as she took in Role’s shapeshifting.

“Wha…”

“Oh, Role, I was wondering which bus you were on.” Perry said.

“I figured since you’re my Boss’s nemesis I should keep you under surveillance, but it looks like we’ve got more important shit to do,” The young man said, rifling through the nearest Supermodel’s clothes before fishing out what appeared to be a government I.D.

Government ID? Are the Minders actually in charge? Do all of these supermodels work for the government? Wait. Why would a Minder need to use hand-signs in the first place…unless they couldn’t signal these men and women mentally. The government isn’t being controlled by the minders, it’s the other way around. They’re ‘handlers’.

In the space of a breath, ‘Role’ was the spitting image of the sickly woman’s handler, garnering further alarm from the Minder’s expression.

“Oooh, these people are into some shady shit,” Role said, absorbing his role’s memories before glancing back at Paradox.

“I’ll work this angle, you keep stirring up trouble.” Role said.

“Agreed,” Perry said through his armor as his real body arrived at Chase’s apartment. “I am good at that.”

“Can you do me a favor and knock me out too?” The Minder finally said, licking her lips nervously as she drew the two super’s attention to her. “I would very much like to not have my head explode.”

Role nodded and fished out a remote from the supermodels clothes and pressed a button on it. The last Minder’s eyes rolled back in her head and she passed out where she stood, prompting Perry to catch her and lay her down.

“Bonus: She’s not gonna remember the last five minutes,” Role said, waggling the remote.

“I’ll secure and interrogate the handler with the armor, you just do your thing,” Perry said deleting the street’s security footage while his real body stepped off the elevator to Chase’s floor.

“Roger.” Role said, stripping the prisoner’s clothes.

Perry understood Role’s need to have the right clothes, but it was still uncomfortable, especially because he was going to be kidnapping the naked woman for an extended period of time.

“You’re going to be rubbing elbows with a ton of Minders. Are you gonna be safe?” Perry asked.

“As long as I’m an Android, they can’t even see me. I’ve tested it.” Role said, waggling the supermodel’s I.D. at him, his ‘Prop’ for this particular transformation.

Teresa Fuller

“Excellent, I- wait a moment.” Perry muttered as he limped to a halt.

In Perry’s real body, he was approaching Chase’s apartment door as the door burst open, revealing Chase Currant being hauled down the hall by four beefy Calvin Clein models in G-man black suits.

“Let me go you brainless robot fucks!” Chase bellowed, wriggling fruitlessly before pausing his struggle, frowning like he’d heard something strange. His gaze was magnetically attracted to Perry’s disguised face.

Chase’s eyes widened in recognition, and he opened his mouth.

Perry held his forefinger over his lips and winked.

“Step aside, sir,” One of the big guys, six inches and a couple hundred pounds heavier than Perry said, casually shoving Perry aside with his forearm.

Paradox snapped it like a twig.