Bedevil looks down onto the office building she and Gabe raided only a couple of weeks ago. Thunderheads flash and growl as they roll over the swampy city she hates. The only good thing here is Gabe, and maybe that one gyro joint not too far from the Shrine.
Sweat drenches her clothes. She transmutes it away, but she’s sweating faster than she can clean it off at this point.
Bedevil hops down into the lab near the vats of acid, trying to ignore her stomach twirling around and around like a carnival ride. She tries to land gracefully, but she stumbles. The withdrawals are getting to her.
Mateo floats back in. “Man, you’re not very good at this, are you?”
Bedevil snaps a glare at him.
He snickers. “You remind me of Gabe, actually.”
That flusters her a bit. “Shut up.”
“So this is where y’all last fought Panda?” Mateo asks, looking around the room. He inspects the vat where Gabe welded Jean Jacket’s arm to the metal shell. He whistles at the bits of metal leftover from where the capes freed him from Gabe’s improvised cuffs. “Yeah, looks like his handiwork!”
“Enough gawking,” Bedevil says, climbing to her feet. There has to be something here that will guide them to Pandahead or reveal PK Resonance’s plans. And she has a strong hunch that if they follow that trail, they’ll meet up with Gabe again somewhere along it.
“Right. You said you lost him on the stairs?” Mateo asks. She nods, and he jumps onto one of his nifty little hardlight boards, this one orange like the sunset, and floats over to investigate. After a few seconds, he comes back and says, “I’m guessing you didn’t look up, huh.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” she asks, glaring at him.
There’s a loose panel in the ceiling above the landing. Mateo pops it out of place, revealing a passageway. He grins at Bedevil and says, “I know something about that rat bastard’s little tricks. He had me as a slave for months, remember?”
What a sobering thought. If only it could actually get me sober.
The passage leads them to a ladder going all the way to the ground floor. Bedevil slowly lowers herself with tendrils rather than using her arms and legs, But she still wants to vomit by the time they make it down and she’s on her feet again. There aren’t any lights in this liminal space inside the wall, so Mateo conjures a ball of light to guide them. It reveals a tunnel, just wide enough for two people to walk side by side. The walls are made of cement and reinforced with metal beams. The air smells sterile.
“Guess we find out where this goes, huh?” Mateo asks. He conjures up a surfboard length hardlight disc and pats it for her to get on. She climbs up, expecting it to wobble like an actual surfboard in the water, but it behaves like any other solid surface. That is until Mateo gives it a little wiggle and she almost falls over the side.
Mateo grins at her. “Sorry.”
“Gabe ever threaten to beat your ass?”
“All the time!” Mateo climbs up onto the board. “And I only would have deserved it once or twice.”
The board lurches forward, taking Bedevil by surprise again. She uses her tendrils to stay steady as they zip down the tunnel. It’s not the fastest she’s ever gone - Gabe’s much faster - but they fly at a healthy pace, maybe twenty miles per hour.
The tunnel winds on for a very long time, until it terminates at a metallic door locked by a familiar access panel. Bedevil inspects it, and sure enough, PK’s logo is stamped above the keypad. “Hmmm.” She’s beyond caring about stealth at this point. It’s time to flex her strength.
“Guess we’re just gonna face whatever’s down here head-on, huh?” Mateo asks.
She puts a hand on his shoulder, half to reassure him, half to steady her own legs, which are still trembling from withdrawals. “Don’t worry, you’re with the greatest cape alive.”
Bedevil dissolves the door away at a touch. She’s still withdrawing, it still makes her head throb, but she can do it.
The chamber behind the demolished door is a cathedral of a command center, with rows of computer desks instead of confessionals and pews, but otherwise completely vacant. They step into the room, Mateo right in front of Bedevil, an orb in his hands to light their way. He sweeps it over the desks. The thing that stands out to Bedevil the most is that each station is utterly devoid of any human touch. No sticky notes, no personal art, no desk decorations.
On one wall, a large glass window looks out onto a larger, darker vault. They make their way toward it to see inside. Doors on either side of the window open onto this larger space, with metal stairs that lead down. At the bottom, Bedevil sees what looks like more than a hundred people all standing stock-still. They wear armor that resembles Danger Close’s gear.
“What is this?” Bedevil feels very small, like she’s stumbled on an ancient horror that’s been sealed away for all time.
Mateo also seems scared, and yet morbidly curious. He presses his face against the window. “They look like robot zombies.”
Behind them, a light turns on. Bedevil whirls around to see Park Dae-Song standing in a smaller room on the opposite side of this command chamber from them. He wears a strange helmet with ridges and valleys much like a human brain. Park seems pleasantly surprised to see Bedevil and gives her a nod of respect. He speaks, and his voice comes through speakers hidden in the walls. “Amazing. I thought you were imprisoned, but then again, you are Bedevil.”
“What the hell are these things?” she asks, glancing back at them. They look an awful lot like those horrible gaunt people that Pandahead’s cronies were putting into the vats. “What have you built?”
“I suppose I’d like to indulge in a bit of gloating before I change the world. There’s no harm in telling you now about the Homunculi program,” Park says.
The what?
Park smiles at her, still the same slimy businessman she met that day after the dampener attack. “Homunculi: Affects, with a body to host them, but without a mind to guide them. At least, not until I activate this helmet I’m wearing. For years at Lilac, before it was destroyed, I researched the idea of the one-mind-in-many. The ability for one Affect to influence many bodies. When I handed them this, they let me continue with token projects for a little while, but it was clear I’d only been the first runner in a long baton race. I seethed and moved on, but I never stopped believing in my research. I built PK Resonance from my experiments, using the one-mind-in-many to share my talent for Affect engineering with my workers. We built and built and built, and I oversaw a buzzing hive mind of workers that grew from city to city, right under the Vanguard’s nose. Because whose mind would Oracle read? They were simply hollow shells until they clocked out, released from my control. They wouldn’t remember anything from work and all I needed to do was make sure Oracle never read my mind. That’s easier said than done, but with my capital and the distraction of external war, I managed it. My perfect little worker bees made PK Resonance the most important organization in the Vanguard. Even greater than the Templar networks. And I thought, if I have worker bees, shouldn’t I also have soldier bees?”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Bedevil’s legs threaten to give out.
“I got back in touch with a smuggler who’d worked at Lilac, brought us subjects. I got him installed into a nice cushy position here at a major port city, with a larger than normal mask population and a healthy influx of refugees,” Park tells them. “Tim Prince was an excellent tool, I’ll admit. When people finally noticed, they started chasing him, instead of looking too closely at what PK Resonance was doing. Your mother sent you to investigate, and you went looking for Danger Close’s killer and then also for Pandahead. The one time you came close, I neatly redirected you. I admit, though, you were onto me. But now, it’s too late. The system is built. The soldier bees are ready.”
Above them, distantly, the world rumbles and shakes, like someone set off a nuclear bomb in the city above. Park looks up, apathetically. “The Homunculi are my masterstroke. Each one of them still carries their original power; an armory of superpowers at my disposal. And you, Bedevil, and all those masks upstairs, are going to be the test run.”
All the horrifying soldiers suddenly spring to life. Bedevil cries out, flexing her power to try and stop Park by transmuting the air around him into fire or acid or anything, but her power hits a wall and bounces off. Of course he’d have some kind of shielding in place.
The next second, the window explodes behind her. Mateo yells and falls back, conjuring discs to shield himself.
Seven Homunculi come crashing into the command room. They move with astounding grace, floating through the air effortlessly, and they move in unison. Bedevil, on instinct, wraps her and Mateo up in her invisible sheath just as they unleash their powers on her. Seven unique abilities come crashing down against her invincible shield - a blue beam of energy almost saws through her power, another tries to vibrate its way through the invisible material, a third sprays acid against it. Super strength, lightning.
Something plucks Bedevil and Mateo up into the air, like an unseen hand pulling them upward. One of the creatures has its hand outstretched, and it motions upward as they rise. Telekinesis.
She tries to resist by hooking tendrils into the walls and floor, even into the Homunculi themselves, but this thing doesn’t care. It uses its power to pull them out into the vault with the rest of the Homunculi.
More lightning and colorful saws strobing with power - Mateo’s trying to fight back, too, but his blades can’t seem to pierce these things’ armor. An invisible giant’s fist slams them down, trying to grind her into bone meal and crush them within her protective bubble. Not telekinesis - gravity manipulation? Something to bypass her shield? She screams, forming a cushion around herself to keep from being crushed.
The buzz of lightning, the whispers of these constructs as they move with perfect grace, her own screams. Her ears pop, it’s awful, awful, Metis almighty, awful. “Gabe,” she thinks at the last miserable moment, “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it back to you. I’m sorry you’ll never know I died here.”
Then comes another explosive rumble from above, but this time much closer. The Homunculi all look up.
The vault’s ceiling erupts.
#
The air shimmers, laden with heat as if they’ve been dropped into the Sahara. Bedevil looks up, ecstatic. He’s here.
Gabe floats twenty feet above the vault, observing them. Like a lab technician staring at a rat, like a shitty kid ready to torture his pet turtle. He grins down at the whole scene. He descends, slowly, properly levitating like she’s never seen him do before. Energy flows from him, giving him a pale white aura. Not just the heat and light that she’s used to seeing radiating from his skin, but electricity, and other forms of radiation, too. All of Megajoule’s power.
Bedevil stammers. Something’s wrong, but she can’t put her finger on it. “G-Gabe?”
Mateo, instead of shouting for help, jumping to his feet, or calling for his friend, snarls. “I don’t know who the fuck that is, but it ain’t Gabe.”
“Who else would it be?” she asks, even as she pulls herself and Mateo away with her tendrils.
Park Dae-seong’s voice sounds over the speakers again. “Home Run! What a pleasure it was to meet the fruit of Lilac’s research. I’m sorry that my own has surpassed you.”
“Ha-ha,” Gabe says, a spoken mockery of a laugh. He looks up at the command theater. “That’s so funny. That’s so cute.”
The Homunculi all turn on him in unison. In perfect harmony, they bring their powers to bear. So many Bedevil can’t tell what’s what through the haze of Affect flux.
Once, when she was younger, Bedevil saw an eclipse. She had taken a helicopter out to the path of totality, which wasn’t far from Denver. She’d watched in amazement as the moon had blocked out the sun, plunging the entire world into night and creating a diamond ring of fire in the sky. It had lasted just over two minutes, and she’d never forgotten the sun bursting out from behind the shadow of the moon again, filling the sky with fire.
Gabe unleashes his power against the Homunculi and she is transported back to that cosmic moment of awe. She hears him laugh above the din of battle, but good god, she can’t see a single thing through all that light pouring from him. The world shakes, groans, and grumbles, as if it’s about to vomit, as if it’s about to die.
A Homunculus crashes into the wall next to them, splattering into gore. Another hits the floor ten feet away, its entire face plate and head crushed and burnt to a crisp. Lightning arcs out, slicing through the walls like a knife. The writhing, blue-white whip twists and dances, a snake of pure energy, eating everything it touches. It buzzes like an alien trumpet.
The deadly rope just misses Bedevil’s shield, and she feels that, if it hadn’t missed, it would have burst through and melted her and Mateo alive.
The light clears. Gabe stands atop a hill of Homunculi corpses. A few, clinging to life, crawl through the gore. Gabe laughs and rises into the air, shouting, “Look at this, little brother! Look at all this potential you’ve wasted! Because you were afraid of yourself.”
This… this beast wearing Gabe’s skin squeezes its hands together. A wild, feral grin splits his face. “No escape from a black hole.”
He opens his hands and an impossibly bright point of light shoots down into the massacred Homunculi. Their bodies revolve around this point suddenly, sucked in by intense vacuum energy. Bedevil creates hooks in the wall and latches her tendrils to them, trying to save her and the kid from being sucked in, but even the wall starts to crumble under Gabe’s power.
She can’t hold on much longer.
But then it ends. The Homunculi have all been crushed into a single mass of flesh and metal, reduced to inert gore.
The beast’s eyes turn on them, and he grins. Bedevil feels the fear of a rabbit caught in the sights of a wolf. Instead of leaping toward them, however, Gabe warps into the command room upstairs. An eyeblink later, and Park Dae-seong is launched out into the vault. Segmented armor spontaneously generates on his body as he flies through the air, but when he hits the floor, there’s a sickening crunch followed by a scream. Either he was flying too fast or hit too hard for the armor to fully protect him.
Bedevil comes to her senses. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she whispers to Mateo.
“No duh?!” Mateo hisses. “I thought that’s what you were working on this whole time!!”
Gabe moves so quickly he simply appears in front of Park, chuckling and tutting as the entrepreneur tries to limp to safety. “So what was that again? Something about surpassing me?”
“Ev-ev-even if I die… my work… my mind… will still-” Park stutters.
“I don’t give a shit about your work or whatever contingencies you have in place. I’m gonna melt everything here down to nothing. What I do give a shit about is that it was your research that made me. You gave Lilac the power to do what they did,” Gabe says. He kneels down. “Really, all of this is your fault.”
“W-what are you?”
“I am Gabriel.” The beast leers over its dinner. “And I am your one-mind-in-many.”
Gabriel places his finger on Park’s head. An explosion rocks out from this touch, utterly dissolving Park Dae-seong, his armor, and the helmet that gave him control over the Homunculi.
The dust settles, and Gabriel looks up into the sky. He slicks his hair back, sighs, and smiles. “That felt just as good as I hoped it would, Bedevil.” Then, his gaze turns to them, crouched into the corner.
Bedevil slaps the ground. She and Mateo sink, falling into the earth away from the madness. Gabriel hits the wall just behind them, causing the earth to tremble. She almost loses control of their path, but manages to keep steady. More quakes come as Gabriel rips through the earth after them. His voice reverberates through the rock: “Run, little sidekick!”
And then the rumbling stops – Gabriel seems to give up the chase.
She doesn’t stop pulling them through the ground until they pop out in the middle of a used book shop. The single cashier, a girl no older than fifteen with pink streaks in her hair, screams as Bedevil and Mateo slip up out of the floor, hyperventilating.