A voice boomed outside of Mark’s apartment, reminding him of what he was forgetting.
The Hero/Villain Program.
“I’m calling you out, dragon’s brother! Villain and impostor of man! Hidden dragon and ticking bomb! Mark Careed!”
… It took Mark a moment to realize what was happening, because it was so beyond imagining that he couldn’t believe it was actually happening. In the time it took him to set down his tablet, stand up, and walk to the porch windows, Mark felt the vectors of the people out there, and then saw Tartu Solari, standing there in the grass beyond the porch. Tartu’s team was standing behind him, at a distance, but within sight.
This was obviously a hero/villain thing happening right now, but probably just between Tartu and him… Maybe. All four of them looked like they had just come back from the field.
Tartu stood strong, wearing his white and blue warrior-mage costume/gear. Kardi stood behind and to the side, next to two guys Mark had never seen before. One of the guys was a warrior with standard light warrior armor, which was basically a breastplate and various layers of metal over a mostly leather outfit. Bracers and shoulderpads and greaves and such. That guy had a big sword strapped to his back. The other guy was a mage, for sure, and more of a mage than Tartu. That guy’s robes were brown and green; sensible for field work. He’d blend in to most environments, and though that wouldn’t work against most monsters, it worked well enough, as long as their warrior could hold aggro well enough.
Tartu was all bright white and blue, which was not very sensible at all. It made him stand out quite a lot. So he was the distraction for the group? Or… Or what?
Mark questioned Tartu’s clothing choices, but he was a hero, so… Well. Yeah. He was a hero. He needed to stand out for the cameras in all ways, at all times.
Mark took a moment to look back toward Eliot’s room. The guy was still asleep, and he’d probably stay that way for a while. Should he wake the guy? Eliot was pretty fucking tired and this was obviously a call-out for just Mark… And yet, if Mark had been where Eliot was right now, and Mark had been woken up after a fight, then he would have been pissed. They were a team. They were supposed to tackle things together, even though Mark would be telling Eliot not to step into the fight, no matter what.
So, with that in mind, Mark decided that Eliot would probably want to be awake.
Mark flexed a Union through Castle One, spreading around some sleepiness to people who were already tired, or sleeping, giving them a good rest, while pumping Eliot full of pure wakefulness. Eliot’s vector slammed back to himself and then outward as he yelped something unintelligible beyond his closed door. Mark caught the same sort of wakefulness as Eliot, his own heart slamming in his own chest.
And just like that, Mark smiled.
It was time to kick some ass—
Eliot burst out of his room wearing just boxers, eyes full of worry, yelling, “What the fuck is happening!”
Mark smiled and twisted his adamantium into a 10-point crown over his head and thin shield that was still a meter wide. A few long needles of adamantium completed his outfit. He wouldn’t be using his adamantium against people, but he would certainly defend with it. Mark said, “I thought you’d want to be awake for a hero/villain call out.” Mark pointed at the glass porch door, at the team beyond, saying, “Tartu and his party are here.”
Eliot had a moment, his vector rapidly flickering this way and that. He glanced at the porch door, and he couldn’t see outside from that angle, but the big screen in the living room turned on and showed a live feed from cameras outside. Tartu stood there, looking ready for a fight.
Eliot breathed deeply, blinked a lot, and then rushed back into his room, calling back, “I’ll be ready in— in 20 seconds!”
Mark stared at Tartu, beyond the glass, saying, “This is a fight between just me and him, I think, so—”
Eliot burst out of his room, pulling on a suit jacket while small drone cameras floated around him, saying, “I got it. I won’t interfere. Glad you woke me, though.” He glanced up and down Mark as he moved to stand beside him, and then he ignored Mark and looked out the glass door, saying, “Noel is gonna want to talk to you about your whole... aesthetic.” He studied Tartu while he spoke out the side of his mouth, “Did you take a shit in his cereal when I wasn’t looking?”
Mark burst out laughing. “What!”
“He hates you so much and it’s so weird. You’re very likable.”
“I am a likable fellow,” Mark said, grinning. “Thank you.” And then he opened the glass door and strode out onto the porch, onto the grassy land beyond, as he projected his voice, “When I win, I’ll cut off your feet and make you walk back home on your stumps!”
Eliot gave a surprised mutter, “Holy fuck, Mark.”
Mark tried not to smile too much. The cameras were watching.
- - - -
Noel Oliphant, the director of the Hero/Villain Program in the settlement, was not expecting to truly work today, or any other day, for about two months. Maybe he could stretch his ‘vacation’ to three months if he was lucky.
He still worked, though. Just not with heroes, villains, directors, camera men, local contractors, or anything like that.
Noel wrote, and that is all he had really been doing for a while, now.
Noel tapped away at his keyboard at his desk in his apartment, writing screenplays for heroes and villains back home, at Crystal Tower. He also maintained a presence at the tech room of the settlement, in South Castle. If stuff happened then he would be among the first to be notified. Mostly, those notifications passed him by. Mostly, he brainstormed storylines regarding Addavein, just in case they needed to be used. General Aurora Valen demanded to know everything he envisioned regarding Addavein. She wanted to be prepared for what the Hero/Villain Program would say, if Addavein pressed the issue.
No one wanted to invite a dragon into the Program, but ‘needs must’ and all of that.
… Noel was having trouble, though.
So far, he had written 17 different ideas for plots, all of which incorporated into the major storyline happening back on Earth, between Glorious Man and Credenza. Weekly Brawl was the big, 59-season-strong show back home, and though the people would change, the main idea of it all would not. It was ‘fights because reasons’, and sometimes those reasons were very thin.
Noel and others still had to come up with those thin reasons, though.
They were doing a rather mundane story on Weekly Brawl this year, because all of the worldly events were rather ‘too much’ for a lot of people. It was a bunch of interpersonal drama leading to fights and stuff like that, and Credenza was eating up the charts. ‘The Unlucky Villain’ had gained a whole lot of popularity when the world’s eyes went to Memphi, when it was announced that this twin city thing was actually, really happening. Credenza was fun to work with, too. She and Glorious Man had hit it off in private, which made writing for their public personas fun. So far Credenza was causing a bunch of misunderstandings between a bunch of people, leading to a bunch of fights, and everyone seemed to love that.
It was like improv comedy with her, since she could make ridiculous things happen by lucky chance.
There was a meme going around with Credenza taking a coin from a bank she just robbed and then flicking it at Glorious man, only for the coin to go right down his throat and him choke on it for long enough for Credenza to get away. Of course, in a real fight, Glorious Man could control where things were on his person, so he would never choke on a coin, but in the video, and in that hilarious first take which they kept for the actual show, the coin went right in there and it cut him off from saying his usual lines about how disrespectful it was to rob banks.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
So writing for those two was fun.
But writing for Addavein?
Noel sighed and pulled back from his keyboard. He read what he had written, went back to a turning point in the storyline, which was about 50% of what he had done, and then highlighted it all, copied it, deleted it, and pasted the copied text into a dump file. The dump file was named ‘Unused plotlines – Addavein’. Simply deleting work was a bad idea, because maybe one of the other writers could do something with it, or maybe Noel could fix it up into something workable later, but no, he was not going to ‘have Addavein get kicked in the face and then roll over like a beaten dog.’
What the fuck was he thinking when he had written that?
“They’d say I was guilty of ‘dragon assisted suicide’,” Noel muttered, as he thought about that plotline actually happening in reality.
… Noel stared at the screen for a while.
“The problem is you’re too strong to write for,” Noel said, to himself. “What plots can I write for you? Superheroes are all action, but you’re a fucking dragon, so the action would be… rather one-sided. Or too serious, really. Way too damned serious. Heroes can’t win all the time, after all, but you’d be one of those ridiculous heroes who never wanted to lose face in public at all.”
Noel hated working with those guys.
As for dragons...
Dragons and archmages and warriors who killed things… who killed anything at all, were not supposed to be a part of the Hero/Villain Program. Sure, the baseline idea of the HVP was to train heroes in safe environments so that they could not straight-up die against the bigger threats. When the going got tough, real battle experience was crucial to a successful hero. And it wasn’t like they could send these young heroes out into the wilds for training. There were so many strange monsters out in the wilds. So many of them would straight up murder you if you were out of position or unable to fight back.
Kaiju were, paradoxically, a lot easier to work around than random shitty monsters, because every single kaiju was strategized against by the best AIs and Minds around. Vast amounts of resources went toward killing those massive city and society-ending threats. Smaller monsters got much less screen time because they were just too fucking dangerous, too often, when things like Power Level comparisons and weaknesses were magnified to massive levels.
A monster with Shaper of Water, or anything of that nature, could practically delete most Mage-type people, and the same was true in reverse. Body against Natural, Shaper against Arcane, Mind against Arch; those were always the most dangerous of matches. The outcomes of those battles usually came down to who moved first. When it was one human versus countless monsters the humans would win for a while, but the end result was always the natural outcome of playing a simple numbers game.
One human would eventually fail against one lucky monster, and since there were always more monsters and never enough humans…
Noel returned to his screen.
… Individual humans would always eventually lose against random shit. Humans in parties lost a lot less.
Heroes couldn’t afford to lose a real battle at all, which is why Noel always sent young heroes against overwhelming odds in the beginning. Young shits with strong Powers always needed to be humbled in the beginning, lest they get overconfident and splatted by some big monster while they were still monologuing—
A memory.
A horror.
A feeling of loss, deep in his soul. Noel had touched a ‘hot stove’ part of his memories, and he burned himself all over again as he thought about That Kid. It had only been four years, and the pain of Dale’s death was still fresh.
“Gods,” Noel said, interrupting himself and looking away from the screen. “That stupid fucking kid…”
His hero name had been Dazzle. His real name had been Dale Hammond.
The guy had been on the spotlight track, destined for a starring role in the drama scene of the Californian market. Dale’s Power had literally been Distraction, but he was also incredibly attractive and good natured. In screen tests, in the one season of New Blood, and for his two years of prior work on Days of Our Past and especially for his work in Capes and Cowls, Dale had been the brightest star of the last few years; the best actor around. He had been so fun to work with, too. Always joking, and then turning completely believably serious on camera, or even still joking on camera, he brought all of his characters to life. His portrayal of the fictional Hero, Shelvington, in Capes and Cowls, had propelled that movie to supermovie status within 3 months of its release.
And then Dale had been on vacation with some friends in Orange City, and Addavein had been born.
Thousands had died, and Dale Hammond had been among the dead.
“… And I’m supposed to write for that fucking dragon.”
Noel stared at the page for a while longer, but nothing would come to him. Even when he tried to slam words out in an order that might, eventually, cause a plot to happen, he was coming up with nothing. Just gibberish.
So he stopped.
He looked at his new house, because there wasn’t much else to do right now. His apartment was stone with rugs on the ground and a couch over there, and everything was mass-produced by the Cybersong kid, or by the few others who had smaller Manipulation powers. It wasn’t Basic Income stuff, but it was close. The BI factory was still getting up and running. Basic brown clothes and such would be available for the taking starting next week. From there, the settlement would truly start to grow.
It’d be a while before Noel got a private house, though, which was fine by him. They were in the wilds right now, and being in a central, single apartment, surrounded by armed and strong people, was fine by him. Noel didn’t have a party, so this was necessary. In this way, there was more stuff between him and the wilds…
Suddenly, Noel felt like a fraud.
He was a writer and organizer of the HVP, and he worked with high Powered people all the time, but those storylines were just stories. Entertainment. A happy-sort of entertainment, too. Sure, there were stories out there about war and death, but Weekly Brawl was slapstick at the worst, and high emotional drama at the most.
Noel had signed up for this settlement project because he wanted to be here, seeing history and writing for Mark and Tartu and a bunch of other heroes in the city. There weren’t any villains in the city aside from Mark, but that would change… eventually. Maybe. General Aurora Valen had promised Noel the use of her training squad to act as villains on a case-by-case basis, but she didn’t want That Dragon coming in here until he made himself a problem, and she didn’t want the Program doing anything at all, if she could help it.
Noel’s very presence was just a fig leaf on the indecency of this whole scenario.
Aurora could point to him and then tell Addavein at the same time that she was working with him, but she’d deflect if Addavein ever showed up, and if Addavein pressed the issue, she would fight him… Maybe. No one was quite sure what would happen if push came to shove.
… Noel sighed.
Noel should have had a whole team of people working with him, but Aurora had stripped those people from his group, and so, Noel was the only one—
A notification popped up inside Noel’s own mind as his Tech Soul caught on an event happening right now—
His eyes went wide as his Power told him what was happening, what Castle South and all the Tech Minds had seen, right alongside him.
“Oh fuck!” Noel grabbed his personal camera while he also set his Tech Soul to record the public cameras outside of Castle One. Those public cameras wouldn’t capture the best angles, but for that, Noel had his own camera— Should he get his second servitor, too? It was stuck in a briefcase right over there— “No! No time, no time!”
Noel rushed out of his apartment and slid down the emergency-use-only evacuation pole, down past other floors of Castle Five, the Castle furthest from Castle One, where all the heroes and singular villain were living. Aurora didn’t want Noel collaborating with his people—
Aurora’s voice came to him, stern and from somewhere far, far out of sight, ‘But it seems they’re collaborating without you, huh?’
Noel smiled as his boots struck the ground floor, near a bunch of people who were suddenly wondering if they should be worried because someone had just come down the emergency pole. Three warriors in armor, coming in the front tunnel of the castle, all took out their phones and looked for notifications. They weren’t the only ones looking for answers.
Noel spoke both mentally and actually, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I didn’t expect a hero battle so soon, either, Aurora! I didn’t even have time to grab my servitor!”
‘Bah!’ Aurora spoke into his mind, from wherever she was.
Noel rushed out onto the grasslands between the Castles.
A few curious people followed.