Rocko’s studio door wouldn’t open.
That alone was odd. As far as I could tell, the two Ilneats were always available whenever I’d bugged them. They kept odd hours. So, for their door to be locked when I knew they were back on Earth felt wrong. And I needed to get them the scrap of Vigilant Vow’s Costume. Would it probably be some redundant Costume I didn’t need? Yes. Did I still need to know for sure? Absolutely.
So it irritated me that I couldn’t talk to them.
But Bee and I had been ignoring their calls. Maybe they were still enjoying their Episode-less vacation from Heroics 101. Maybe this was some passive-aggressive way of showing that they were annoyed. Or maybe they had a big meeting and didn’t want us wandering around.
Either way, I needed to get the scarf molt to Pataki, so I taped it to one of the camera drones and pointed it toward the Hot Zone. With the door shut, a manual delivery was my best bet at making things happen reasonably quickly. As the chrome machine disappeared, I took a deep breath. “Okay, what’s on the schedule here?”
Bianca smiled. I’d seen that smile before, on Su-Bin when she tutored me in math. And I didn’t like it. Then she rolled out my friend, my nemesis, the stolen whiteboard. “The Agent. I’ve been thinking about him and 3V1L, and I refuse to believe he just vanished like that. So, let’s go over what we know, try to put a battle plan together, and take it from there.”
She started scribbling on the board, dividing it into three sections. “Okay, let’s go over The Agent’s retreat during ‘Back With Avengeance.’ Was he ever under Dr. Mays’s effect? If so, when did he break out? And what happened after he shot Dr. Jackson? “
The media and investigating heroes were focused on the murder attempt. It wasn’t that supers never killed each other. It was Jackson specifically. She had a disgustingly high win rate, and this might have been her first trip to the hospital—ever—so the powers that be were digging into it. So was the media. That left the rest of the Episode as our problem, not theirs.
“I’m not sure Mays’s power ever affected him. He didn’t seem to shrug it off. He just ignored it. It reminded me a lot of how Eustace Bagges ignored Monologue’s power, but Dr. Mays is a lot stronger. After The Agent shot Dr. Jackson, he said something about an emergency teleport. So, either he has a teleporting villain in his toolkit…”
“Which is really likely,” Bee said. “We’ve seen several teleporters. Tele-Portal, Warp Tennyson, and that SSS villain last semester. One of them may have contracted with The Agent. Or the alternative is that he got bailed out for story purposes. But how would he know the bail-out was coming?”
We pondered The Agent’s new powers for a while, but nothing made sense. Eventually, I shrugged, popping my shoulders pleasantly. “Let’s move on. We don’t know what’s up with The Agent, but we can focus on 3V1L, right? Maybe they’ll have a clue about his whereabouts. Are they still doing vil shit?”
Bee nodded. She wrote ‘3V1L Poudre Operations’ and ‘3V1L Other Operations’ on the whiteboard, then set the marker down while I walked to the two screens that had been for our rogues’ gallery. Theseus was still active, and so was Sister Sly, although neither had done much over Winter Break, and Livestream wasn’t anywhere to be found. Had he taken time off? A quick phone search showed no new episodes on his site, so maybe.
But the biggest change was the Poudre District map, where 3V1L’s crimson had a massive gash, splitting it almost in two between North and South Poudre. Only a thin knot of red connected the districts, right where a new chemical plant was being built. “Who’s pushing them back?” I asked, staring at it.
“No idea. Could be The Triad, could be the In-Your-Endos, could be a local hero making a stand. Either way, they’ve lost a lot of territory, and from what I can see, they’re not retaliating against their attacker.” Bee’s eyebrow furled. “That’s really out of character for them.”
“It is. They were hyperaggressive about fighting us whenever we showed up—at least once we proved we couldn’t be negotiated with. And they decimated the Mutual Assistance League last year, just before Golden Goose…” I trailed off. Without Golden Goose, the whole Power War had gone screwy, and I wished Stella-Lunar was powerful enough to step into that role. But so far, she’d proven just a little too inconsistent, her power’s phases too unreliable, so the pressure was on local heroes like us.
“Yeah.” Bee returned to the whiteboard. “So, we have a mystery attacker who’s winning against 3V1L, a surprisingly passive organization, and no known sightings of The Agent. That’s ominous.”
“Is it? If The Agent’s done with 3V1L, would he really stick around and help them?” I asked. “Is 3V1L a dead end now?”
“I don’t think so,” Bee said. “If it was, they’d be acting tougher and trying to hold on to what they have. I think the One L is still giving orders, and they’re still following them.”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
She scribbled ‘Poudre Districts are a trap?’ below ‘3V1L Poudre Operations,’ then kept writing. ‘Trigger the trap intentionally,’ ‘Contact 3V1L’s opposition,’ and ‘Avoid Poudre districts’ filled up most of the space, but I erased the last one with my palm. “We’re not bailing out on Poudre. 3V1L is our rogue, and we need them defeated.”
----------------------------------------
The planning session ended after almost two hours; we’d start our campaign against 3V1L in earnest in the next couple of days, but today, we needed more information. So, as much as it pained me, Fursona and I were suited up again on my roof. She’d chosen to run the Roo-sona fursuit, which meant I’d fly us to the giant wound in 3V1L’s territory. But just to be sure, I sent a quick text before I took off.
I didn’t expect to hear from her right away, so I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t message me back that exact second. Instead, I passed my phone to Fursona, who pocketed it. “If that goes off, let me know what it says. We’ll be careful in our approach, just in case it’s them or Stella-Lunar.”
“Got it,” Fursona said.
I summoned my sailboard with [Solar Wing] and took off, Fursona tense between my arms. She still didn’t love flying, so I made sure to give her a calm, relaxing ride. That is to say, I stayed relatively steady and didn’t throw any loop the loops. The University District’s brick-facade apartments and businesses gave way to the industrial wasteland of South Poudre—3V1L’s home territory—and I felt my own stress levels rising.
We slowly circled the district, looking for 3V1L activity in the fuel plants and warehouses, but couldn’t find a thing. Had they gone this far to ground? I needed more answers, and an aerial fly-over from three hundred feet up wouldn’t be enough. So, after twenty minutes, I ducked down toward the street that marked the easternmost point in the gash.
Two heroes stood there, talking to each other and staring at a chemical plant. I hadn’t seen either of them since the job fair two Octobers ago, but the angelic one turned and waved like we were old friends. “Hello! Are you the reinforcements we asked the Council of Heroes for?”
“Uh, no. Magical Girl Understudy and Fursona. We’re getting back to our rogues’ gallery after winter break and noticed that 3V1L’s had some setbacks in the last couple of weeks. So, we thought we’d come down and see what was happening.”
“Oh.” She looked dejected for a moment—almost Honeycomb-like—but pulled herself together. Her halo seemed to glow brighter, and her wings spread for a moment. “But if you’re fighting 3V1L too, maybe we can make an alliance. I’m—“
“Tranquility, right?” Fursona asked. “We met at the job fair.”
“Yeah. The Mutual Assistance League is back in business and pushing 3V1L hard. Or at least, what’s left of us is.” She pointed at the armored, bear-skin-wearing gunslinger next to her. “War Bear and I survived 3V1L’s counterattack against us last winter, and we’re finally rebuilt enough to fight back.”
“What? They killed your teammates?” I asked.
“Not quite. They did convince a bunch of us that the Poudre Districts were the wrong place to make a stand, though, and then the Power War set War Bear and me back even more. But listen. You want 3V1L gone, too, right?”
I nodded.
War Bear cleared his throat and spoke, his voice soft and rumbling at the same time. The gigantic gun over his shoulder looked like something a hero shouldn’t be using, but here he was, with the Mutual Assistance League. “One or two of the Vs are holed up in the chemical plant and the construction around it. We’re trying to split the district and take South Poudre, but we can’t do that as long as their fortress here’s in the way. And the MAL doesn’t have the firepower to root them out anymore.”
“So you asked for reinforcements, and we showed up?” Fursona asked. She shivered in the January cold, and I copied her. It was psychosomatic, like yawning. But also, it was cold!
“Yeah. There aren’t reinforcements available—not with how the Power War’s going—so War Bear and I tried ourselves yesterday. We thought that with the holiday, the henches would be at home getting drunk, but we had no luck. And they’ve been reinforcing since then.”
I nodded slowly. “Tranquility, what’s your plan for the district?”
“Oh, the five-point plan!” Tranquility looked thrilled, though War Bear rolled his eyes. “Okay, first. Housing. Gotta fix the housing situation here and get it price stabilized. Then, green spaces. I don’t know if you noticed, but it stinks here. Plants would help, but we need a lot of them—city parks, vegetable gardens, and so on. Once we’ve got that, diversify the local economy with different, new jobs. It’ll be—“
I held up a hand. She had a better long-term plan for South Poudre than I did for finishing school. “I’m sure you’ve put a lot of thought into it, and it sounds good. Why so much investment in Poudre, though?”
“I grew up here, and in real life, I have a degree in urban planning. It seemed like the right place to fight that battle after we win the superpowered one.” Tranquility smiled brightly below her halo and mask. “It’s one thing to win, but it’s another to make the world better.”
The angel hero had a point, and I nodded. “Okay. This is perfect. Fursona and I have the firepower to clear that plant, and they’re not expecting us. We’ll get them out, you two can take over the district, and we’ll support you while you get your five-point plan running. Agreed?” I stuck my hand out.
Tranquility grasped it firmly, and I felt her energy flowing through me like an electrical shock. My muscles relaxed, and I felt less tense than I had in months. She said, “Agreed. We’ll provide support and make sure 3V1L doesn’t retreat west or south. They’ll have to leave through the east side. What was it that Sun Tzu said?” That last bit was aimed at War Bear.
The gunslinger clipped his weapon onto his armor and held out his hands, t-posing. As Tranquility picked him up and flew toward the nearest roof overlooking the construction, he said, “Always leave your enemies a way out. A cornered rat is a desperate rat.”
[Casting Call]
[Episode: Power War: The Righteous Cause - PG-13]
[Role: Heroic Helping Hand! Do you accept the role? (Yes/No)]
[Role Focus: Grit+Flamboyance]