[End of Act One: Act Two in Three Minutes]

Space wasn’t anything like I thought it’d be.

Every movie I’d watched about space fell into one of two categories. Sometimes, ships all had onboard gravity, and it was just like being on board a real ship on Earth, with everyone walking and oriented the same way. The rest of the time, it was more ‘realistic.’ People floated in zero-G or climbed ladders and oriented their bodies however they wanted. I’d always thought artificial gravity was a myth.

I’d been wrong about so much before that it didn’t shock me to be wrong about this, either.

Still, the view from the massive windows in the circular room we’d landed in was breathtaking. I could see the moon and all of North America at the same time; from here, the Earth looked like a tiny marble I could almost reach out to touch.

A computerized voice said something I couldn’t quite understand, even though I’d taken some Ilnean. “I think it said it was equalizing pressure, and that we had like five minutes,” I said. “But I’m not sure.”

“Great. Help me get changed,” Fursona said. She was already halfway out of her Eagle-Sona fursuit, wearing a one-piece swimsuit underneath and pulling out the Kaiju-Sona suit from her backpack. I was jealous—she could dress for the temperatures inside that thing, while I still had my winter jacket on—at least as Anika.

My stomach wouldn’t stop rolling as I worked, though; were Gourmet and the professors alright? There was no way we had cell phone service up here, right? I checked my phone—sure enough, no bars.

I strapped her into her helmet, working quickly while Lady Lockless sealed the teleporter behind her. Then I thumped the plushie dinosaur on the back of the head. Her eye stalks wobbled a little. “You’re good to go,” I said.

“Thanks.” Bee got ready and faced the teleporter room’s hatch as a bar of light slowly filled up.

[The Last Power War: Act Two in Progress]

The door opened into a shockingly wide corridor with slightly rounded walls; I had no idea what the Ilneats’ cruiser looked like from the outside, but it almost seemed like a thin neck between the teleporter room and the rest of the vessel. A flashing red light silently spun in alarm, but aside from that and the hint of smoke in the recycled air, I couldn’t find so much as a hint that an Ilneat was on board.

Theseus was already halfway down the hall—he was really hoofing it on the half-dozen multi-jointed legs he’d equipped, and his rearming drones were struggling to keep up. Fursona gestured for me to go, then hurried along behind, with Lady Lockless riding piggyback.

The hall stretched on and on, but after a disturbingly long time, we burst through the door into the biggest conference room I’d ever seen. There had to be a hundred empty seats around the massive table, and the stench of cigars stung my nose. I coughed once, and the moment I did, a gigantic Rocko appeared in the center of the table from the shoulders up.

“DuPont, Marino, Brown, and…um, Fitch. I see Andonte didn’t make it, and neither did Mays and Jackson,” Rocko said. “You’ve put on a great performance, one for the ages! Do you have any idea what this has done to our bottom line?”

Theseus narrowed his eyes, leveling a laser cannon arm and putting a shot into the receptor. But Rocko only laughed and waved a virtual cigarette the size of my arm in the air. “You think you can hurt this ship? It’s got the same protections we do! Don’t worry your little head over it, though; I’ll let your producers talk to you two when we’re done with our chat, and you’ve remembered whose side you’re really on. DuPont, Rocko Studios is the best-selling studio in the whole Network right now. Your rebellion storyline’s been gold. Pure gold! And I didn’t even have to coach you on it!

“Now, listen up. I’m prepared to offer you a raise of half a percent. That’s unprecedented for Earth supers. And I’ll throw in a non-binding veto clause on three Episode ideas a year.”

“No,” I said.

“No? Listen up, DuPont!” Rocko’s teeth bared, and they lowered the cigar out of the hologram. “You and me—and Marino, of course—we’re going places. The sky’s the limit! What are you, mid-minors? And you’re handling major-league threats like it’s no problem. I told you [Adaptive Armoire] was an investment. A slow-burn investment. That you’d have to work on it, and you have!

“You’re gonna be a star, kid. Number one! We’ll strap one of Marino’s eye-stalks onto a Costume, and you’ll be fifty feet tall. Get Stella-Lunar to give you one piece of her halo, and that pulsing power’s all yours! The possibilities are endless, and you want to say no?”

“Yeah, I do want to say no.” My eyes narrowed, and my throat felt tight. This alien—this scumbag—had been using me as a profit engine, and the whole time, their coworkers were abusing Jasmine Saxton, my mom, Vigilant Vow..the list went on and on. Stella-Lunar had taken bullets because of the Ilneats’ greed. Golden Goose—and Haze-Matt, and who knew how many other people, Extras and supers alike—had died to make them a profit. And now they wanted me to forget all that —for half a percent?

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“You don’t know what you’re throwing away, kid,” Rocko said.

“Actually, we do,” Lady Lockless interrupted, sliding off Fursona’s back and sitting in one of the undersized chairs. “We’ve put together a pretty good idea of how much money the Ilneat Network makes from Earth, and half a percent of one studio’s average income is the same amount as North America’s GDP. It’s an unfathomable amount of money.”

“But the cost is too high,” Bianca said. She wasn’t using her modulator—in fact, I realized that her modulator had been off since last Episode. “You did a great job of cleaning up Earth after Launch Day, but according to Pennyworth, we paid that cost back in the first three years of shows. It’s time to renegotiate.”

Rocko blinked, their black eyes locked on us. Their cigar dipped up to their mouth, and a cloud formed around their head. The hologram flickered, and Rocko cleared their throat and clapped a pair of their hands. “Alright, now we’re getting somewhere! Let’s negotiate, already! What do you want?”

“We want you gone,” I said.

“Well, that’s on the table, DuPont! We can do our jobs from somewhere else. It’ll be more complicated, and the extra cost would come out of your salaries, but we could do it.”

“No, not working from somewhere else,” Theseus said, aiming a rocket pod toward Rocko’s hologram. “Gone as in not controlling what we do. Gone as in no more Episodes, at least not produced by Ilneats. That’s what we mean by gone.”

“Ah. That’s not negotiable,” Rocko said. “A shame. But if you can’t work with us, then we’re at an impasse. And when impasses happen, and strikes drag on too long, they need to be broken. Fitch, Brown, Marino, and DuPont, we’ll talk again real soon, yeah?”

The hologram shut off, and red lights flicked on all around the room. At the same time, the conference table and chairs started to retract, dumping Lady Lockless onto the steel floor. “Shit,” she said, rubbing a shoulder.

“Yep. That went well,” Fursona said. “I expected Rocko to throw security measures at us right away. If they’re negotiating, it can only be for two reasons.”

“Either they’ve got the weaker hand and they know it, or they don’t understand how you could turn down that kind of money,” Theseus interrupted.

I groaned at the limb joke, but Theseus was right. Rocko had never cared about anything but money, and they probably couldn’t understand how we’d turned down their offer. That felt right. But it didn’t feel like the truth. Not the whole truth, anyway. “They were stalling. Get ready.”

A second later, the doors on the room’s far side blew inward like massive steel bullets, and two robots stomped in, boots clanging magnetically on the ground. They stood in the doorways as smoke billowed into the room behind them, identical red capes waving in the breeze. Then the first one’s eyes glowed a brilliant red, and a second later, a laser swept across the room—and across us!

[HP 9/15]

Theseus was already returning fire with his own laser, and a split second later, Fursona hurled toward the second robot—whose arm swelled to an incredible size. When the two met, it was like watching two icebergs hit. Neither moved for a moment. Then Kaiju-Sona went flying back.

I didn’t waste any time, starting up a [Power-Weaving] combo and firing a [Limelight Barrage] right into the second robot. The first shot hit, but it didn’t stop moving; the thing shrugged off my stun and started weaving back and forth on its hip joints to dodge the rest of the rays.

[Dramatic Damage! +1 Drama Point]

“You were always replaceable,” Rocko’s voice echoed over the ship’s loudspeakers as the first bot fired a rocket out of its fist. The shrapnel rained down onto Theseus, shredding arms and legs alike. A rearming drone dipped in as Rocko continued. “You were just the cheaper option. We’ve been studying what the System did to you, and we haven’t just replicated it. We’ve improved on it—controlled it, even!”

I [Quick-Time Changed] to dodge the second bot’s punch, but even as [Freeze Frame] activated and the bot’s fist froze in place, I watched its soulless eyes follow my movement. The moment time sped up, its fist changed direction and hit Lab Assistant Panic right in the chest. I felt something crunch, and hoped it was just superhero damage.

It didn’t feel like just superhero damage.

[Flashy Fitting-Room! +1 Flamboyance Point]

[Steel Yourself! +1 Grit Point

[Floating Points: 3 Drama, 1 Flamboyance]

[HP 6/15]

My vision went black, even though the blow had hit me in the chest. TA-1LZ opened up with her [New Head Cannon], tasers streaming from the Gatling gun like a party streamer going off. And the shocks to the bot’s system saved me; the bot’s blow went just an inch wide, and I rolled behind it.

I needed something—anything—to use as a weapon. The bot whirled, and Fursona slammed into it, roaring flame across its still-twitching frame. As they fought, I ran toward Theseus’s pile of destroyed arms; they’d have to do.

As I slid into the mess of molten limbs, I realized that not only would they do, but they’d be perfect. “Using Alkirk’s proprietary prosthetic plans and fissile-reductive material, I am become Her-seus, destroyer of bots!”

[Pseudoscientific Mumbo-Jumbo! +1 Drama Point.]

[Power-Weaving! +6 Drama, +3 Flamboyance, and +1 Grit Point]

“I told you the extra arms would give you a leg up!” Theseus yelled. And this time, I didn’t groan. Instead, I flexed the extra two arms I’d slapped together for myself. The first spun like a circular saw with three massive blades that beat the air with a whumping, humming sound. The second looked a lot like Theseus’s laser cannon arms, but bigger. Much, much bigger. Unrealistically large.

I fired the unrealistically large cannon.

BWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEM!

BOOM!

The cannon vaporized. So did all the air between me and the bot. As the air collapsed inward, a shockwave rippled out, and every window in the conference room shattered. For a moment, the room was airless, and I started panicking as the air got sucked out of my lungs. It burned like fire in my chest, and my ears popped painfully.

[Pseudoscientific Mumbo-Jumbo! +1 Drama Point]

[HP 5/15]

Then, the ship’s emergency systems took over, sealing it off and pumping air back in. I took a desperate breath to refill my suddenly empty lungs, thanking the system for superhero damage, and I looked at the damage I’d done.

The laser hadn’t even scratched the ship’s hull. There was a little black spot where something had been smudged on the shiny, curved wall, but aside from that, it looked as good as new.

But the bot was gone from the waist up. Its legs toppled over, one to the left, the other to the right.

“I’ve gotta get me one of those,” Theseus said.

Fursona snorted. “In your dreams, Theseu-ass. She’s all mine.”