“This is…” Darryl was at a loss for words to describe exactly how bad things were. Nobody knew who was a mimic and who wasn’t. The streets were rife with paranoia. Nobody went outside. Nobody let strangers into their house. Nobody even let friends and family in. Not if they were smart.

After the public service announcement pointing out that the mimic could copy vehicles and other nonliving material, it got even worse.

Public trust hadn’t been this bad since the Minder witch hunt in the 80’s, and that was only a handful of confirmed cases. This was…way worse.

The only saving grace was that the generational trauma of living in the post-Tide world gave everyone a survivalist mindset. You’d be hard-pressed to find a family that didn’t have a hundred pounds of rice or potatoes set aside for a rainy day.

Especially after the food shortage a few years back.

The one Darryl’s son solved with unicorn poop.

That meant people were able to lock themselves indoors and curtail the spread of this plague…but they wouldn’t be able to do it forever.

“I wanna help.” Darryl said. Sure, Darryl was a professional supervillain, but that didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy the occasional philanthropy. He just couldn’t do it without diluting his brand.

So he made another ‘brand’.

In times like this, where The Mechanaut needed to render aid to the good people of Franklin City, but it was a bit politically inconvenient, given the many pending lawsuits and warrants for his arrest…

Paladin was there.

“Whaddya think, babe?” Darryl asked, waggling his eyebrows as he turned to Claudette.

“I think you would’ve made a much better superhero than you think.” She said, kissing him on the forehead before motes of swirling light surrounded her, transforming her appearance to Glamour Girl.

“Bah, I’m evil to the…core…” Darryl swallowed, his gaze dragged downward by the sheer magnetic force of –

The skimpy outfit nearly made Darryl forget why they were going out, but he quickly recovered, raising a triumphant fist to the sky.

“Paladin and Glamour Girl ride again!”

Together they dove into the secret tube leading to their sub-base.

Darryl shifted his consciousness over to the ‘paladin’ armor, and the two of them broke out onto the street halfway across the city from their home.

“We’ve gotten reports that the city is rife with shapeshifting monsters waiting to lure people to their deaths,” Paladin exposited, scanning the surroundings suspiciously.

Gotta exposit when you’re playing a dumb-ass superhero. It was like…the rules. Especially if you’re playing one who represents the ideal religious zealot with a stylized rising sun on their chest-plate.

“Indeed, Paladin and Glamour Girl are on the case!” Claudette said, posing back-to-back with him.

“Now watch as we sniff out the root of this infection!”

Or at the very least, trim a few branches, He thought. He was entirely unconvinced that there was ‘a root’ to sniff out. Real life didn’t work like that, but Superheroes thought that way. Superheroes liked a single identifiable cause of all evils that they could punch. Decentralized evil drove them crazy.

“According to the reports, they could be lurking anywhere, looking for unsuspecting victims, posing as ordinary objects, animals, or even family members.” Paladin Exposited some more.

“We must be suspicious of everything!” Glamour Girl said, peering around the empty street suspiciously.

Darryl’s uncontrollable impulse for property destruction got the better of him as he eyeballed a nearby news-stand.

“They could even be disguised as an ordinary news stand!” Paladin shouted, punching a hole through the side of the stand, piercing several tabloids with the latest supers pictured on the front.

“Honey…” Glamour girl said, her hand on her hips, head cocked in disapproval.

“I know,” Paladin sighed, withdrawing his fist.

His blood-covered fist.

“Oh shit.”

The news stand exploded into a spring-loaded barbed cage that drew him into the unfolding mouth filled with teeth, nearly before he could respond.

Paladin’s hands swung aside on hinges, revealing the laser canons in his forearms.

BZZZZZZ

The news stand was neatly bisected, and Paladin emerged in the blink of an eye. A moment later, he found himself under fire as the two halves of the news stand coalesced into no less than a dozen humans with cybernetic enhancements folded out of their flesh, firing lasers up at him.

Paladin’s armor integrity began dropping precipitously, and he decided a change of scenery was appropriate.

He fired his jets and juked into a nearby alleyway.

Glamour Girl would come down on them like a sack of bricks now that he’d broken line of sight, and his job was to come back in from an unexpected angle and cover her back.

Paladin triggered his invisibility and jetted out of the alley, curving around behind Glamour girl, slamming into a street-lamp that was creeping up on her.

“Thanks!” Glamour girl shouted as Paladin whipped by, laying down cover fire and forcing the enemies in her periphery to duck their heads. Glamour Girl seized the opportunity and brought down lightning on the mimics.

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In a matter of seconds, the fight was over, with nearly a dozen crispy corpses littering the street, nearly indistinguishable from civilians save for their home-made cybernetic enhancements.

“That was…more involved than I was expecting,” paladin said, landing beside Glamour Girl, who was panting with exertion.

Her uniform was still in tip-top shape. It was designed to strategically tear based on how much protection it had remaining, for…reasons irrelevant to their current situation.

Nothing had managed to land a clean hit on either of them, pros that they were, but it hadn’t been easy. Many other supers might’ve fallen victim to an ambush with that amount of shock and awe.

“You know what this means, right?” Glamour Girl asked.

“I get to destroy a large sample of the city’s infrastructure?” Paladin asked, already warming up his Mechanaut armor and his disposable minion-bots.

Right now it was looking like a rampage from The Mechanaut was just what the doctor ordered.

“Let’s patrol a bit more before you get carried away, honey.” Claudette said, rolling her eyes. “You can’t solve everything with a rampage.”

“As you say,” Darryl replied.

Activate Mecha-rampage.exe

Glamour girl gave him a long…quiet look, her eyes narrowing.

“Alright, let’s go.” She said, shaking her head as she walked.

They patrolled the empty street, poking holes in mailboxes, street lamps, parked cars…

Only about 2% of the things they poked turned out to be man-eating monsters. Not quite enough to justify a massive rampage. Enough to justify staying home and locking your doors, but not enough to justify destroying everything indiscriminately.

Cancel Mecha-rampage.exe Paladin thought with a sigh.

“I’ve never seen the streets this empty before,” Glamour Girl mused, scanning the empty streets. Occasionally they saw a flicker of movement in the windows of the street-facing apartments, but generally, the city was dead.

“You hear that?” She asked, cocking her head.

Paladin amplified his hearing, and turned toward the sound. A car.

Who on earth was still driving around while the lockdown was in effect?

A fleet truck, some eight feet tall and sporting a large box-like back with a familiar face painted on it, puttered by, weaving around the charred remains of discovered mimics, only able to do so because of the complete lack of oncoming traffic.

“Is that…Perry’s friend?” Claudette asked, cocking her head.

“The one we rescued from the auction, right? Brendon!” Paladin said, snapping his fingers.

“Hold up there!” Glamour girl shouted, stepping in front of the truck, waving her arms.

The driver, a large young man with a placid demeanor, rolled the window down and leaned out with his elbow resting on the sill.

“Can I help you?” Brendon asked. “You guys need some cleaning or something?”

“Why aren’t you in quarantine?” Glamour girl asked.

“Well, it’s a partner quarantine, right? Shelter in place with whoever you meet first until further word? I’d do that if I could, but my shelter-in-place partners keep disappearing.”

Brendon snapped his fingers for emphasis.

Darryl and Claudette shared a glance.

“Wait a minute, you guys are people! You’re my quarantine buddies! You guys interested in coming with me to –“

Paladin extended a small blade from his fingertip and stabbed Brendon in the shoulder.

“What the – OW! What the heck dude!?” Brendon demanded, clutching his shoulder.

“Just checking,” Paladin said with a shrug before poking a hole in Brendon’s car door.

“Seriously?” Brendon asked, leaning over to peer down at the hole in truck.

“The good news is that you’re not driving a mimic.” Glamour Girl said, healing Brendon’s shoulder with a delicate weave of essence. “The bad news is that your story about your quarantine buddies ‘disappearing’ is really suspicious.”

“It is?” Brendon asked, idly poking his healed-over shoulder. “Isn’t it more suspicious of them to disappear on me like that?”

“…No. that’s not typical mimic behavior. This particular one will seize any opportunity. As soon as it’s got a victim alone, it’ll attempt to consume them. It’s not as patient and crafty as Abun’zaul, although it has many of his talents.” Glamour Girl said.

“Hey, aren’t you the guys who rescued me a few years ago, from that place with the big room and all the seats?” Brendon asked.

“The auction house?” Glamour Girl asked.

“Yeah, that’s the word.” Brendon said. “You guys were fighting The Mechanaut.

“Yeah, that was us,” Paladin said “You-“

A sudden bolt of realization shot through him.

“Glamour Girl, can I speak to you over there?” He motioned with his head.

“…Sure. Don’t go anywhere,” She said to Brendon before following Paladin off to the side.

“Can you disguise our conversation? Never know if a parked car or mailbox is listening…” Paladin said, eyeballing the street suspiciously.

“Do you know why he was up for sale at the auction?”

“Honestly? No. Villain auctions aren’t my wheelhouse.”

“He was up for sale as a universal constant. It was hypothesized among villains that he was immune to Tide-based influence, and could be used to operate or calibrate high-level instrumentation that needed perfectly baseline humans. I got a newsletter about him in the days leading up to the auction.”

“And you didn’t warn Perry his friend was being targeted?” She demanded.

“Well, I don’t read all my junk mail,” Paladin said with a shrug. “Anyway, it was a sting operation, because Nexus was always going to be the highest bidder. Paradox and us just messed it up, and Nexus ran with it.”

“That’s what Mass Driver was doing there.” Glamour Girl mused. “So why is this important?”

“That boy isn’t exactly immune to tide-influence.” Paladin said, pointing at Brendon. “That boy has a power. The power to always be himself. 100% authentic Brendon at all times. He resists and reverses change to his being. Especially supernatural ones.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“The mimic can copy POWERS. We know this.”

“So you think…” She glanced at Brendon. “Noooo waaaay.”

“Way.” Paladin said, nodding. “I think Brendon got eaten, then when his copied power came back online, ‘Brendon-ness’ reasserted itself, and, for all intents and purposes, returned him to 100% human again. If the mimic still recognized him as one of it’s own after the first time, his partners wouldn’t’ve disappeared multiple times. Whatever signal it uses to self-identify was broken or suppressed.”

“How on Earth would we test that hypothesis without feeding an innocent boy to a mimic?” Glamour Girl whispered.

“Normally I’d be down for that, but since you’re here too…Can you turn him to a frog or something? That could at least give my ‘Brendon power’ theory some credit.”

“There’s no offensive transformation spell convenient enough to be easily reversable, they were designed to be difficult to reverse. I could make a reversible one, but it’d take a few hours to design it.”

“Do that. I’ve got a hunch.” Paladin said.

“You wanna tell me what it is?”

“The less people know, the better,” Paladin mused. “You trust me?”

“Eh,” Glamour Girl said, waggling her hand.

“Alright, get to it. I’ll keep an eye on Brendon.”

“You promise not to feed him to a mimic to test a theory?” Glamour Girl asked.

“Scout’s honor,” he said, giving her the Girl Scout salute.

Glamour girl shook her head and flew away, towards Hexen’s base of operations, where she could tinker with spells on the fly. Not quite as unbelievable as what Paradox could do, but compared to the average mage…pretty legit.

“Hey Brendon,” Darryl said as he approached the side of the van.

“Yeah?”

“I need you to do something. It’s pretty important. Like…fate of the world important. Capiche?”

“Umm…sure. Okay.” Brendon nodded.

“I need you to find Paradox and tell him what you told me.”

“Uuuh, Paradox is in Chicago.” Brendon said.

“Paradox is in Australia, actually, but he’ll be back in Chicago each morning. I need you to skip town and head on over there. Drive on the tracks if you have to; The train’s shut down for quarantine. And most importantly: don’t tell anyone who’s not Paradox about all your ‘disappearing’ shelter-in-place partners. Think you can do that?”

“But I have a work order for-“

“Is that work order more important than the human race?”

“...No?” Brendon asked.

“Correct.”

“I guess I’d have to pack for a road-trip…” Brendon said, head cocked in thought. “But I’ve wanted to see Chicago for a while now, so this seems like a good time.”

“Excellent. Get to it.”

“Okay!” Brendon said cheerfully as Paladin waved him off.

If it were me, I would dedicate a lot of time and effort into having moles at the highest levels, Paladin thought, reviewing his spotty memory of the last couple days. Even if that meant killing some of the disposable ‘civilian’ mimics with aforementioned mole.

The only person he was sure wasn’t a mimic was Paradox. Not even himself.

Which was why he didn’t allow himself to believe that Brendon might truly be the solution to everything.