I am Doctor Roxanne Updyke, I'm a freshly-minted Research Fellow at the Institute of Applied Transhumanism, and a few hours ago, I got isekai'd into a world where superheroes are real.
"Ah, there you are!" I heard someone say behind me while I was buying groceries.
And considering I'd gotten isekai'd in the middle of a gunfight, that was an absolutely terrifying thing to hear in the produce aisle. So I did what I did best: ignore the problem and hope it goes away.
"Excuse me, ma'am," that someone said, coming closer and ignoring my desire that they go away. "Do you have a moment to talk?"
"About what?" I said instead of 'no, go away.' I don't know why. I definitely wanted to say the latter.
"About, um..." I finally turned around, and laid eyes upon a college-aged East Asian woman. She was alarmingly pretty, and fairly tall, in a cute but mostly unremarkable sweater and long skirt in dark colors. She was also holding, in her hand, a very obvious piece of mad science with knobs, dials, and buttons laid out as if by a propmaker who didn't have much to go on. "You know. Special abilities."
Crap. This girl was one of the local demiurges. Ever since the portal to B-944 was first opened back in 1966, Inspiration started to... leak. The treaty was meant to prevent cross-contamination, but it wasn't completely successful, and everyone was more or less okay with that. The vampires were the biggest concern, and as long as those didn't cross over, B-944 was okay with a few of its people becoming demiurges.
"...Okay, if I agree to talk shop over coffee, will you put that thing back in your pocket before it explodes?" I said quietly. What she was holding was very likely a scanner tuned to detect other demiurges- why she brought it to the goddamn grocery store was beyond me, unless she was good enough to track me from outside the grocery store. She probably wasn't, though; she seemed new, and B-944's demiurge population underperformed like hell without the shared knowledge and institutions we had on A-510.
"Explodes?" she asked, frowning and tilting her head.
"I've been doing this for years," I said. "Our tech goes haywire when normal people so much as touch it. Put it away. Please."
"Huh. Learn something new everyday." She put her scanner away in her purse. "I'm Akane Sakurai. You?"
"Roxanne Updyke," I said. "Listen, this is... probably pretty sketchy, so feel free to say no, but we should probably talk somewhere private, or maybe over email-"
"Your place or mine?" Akane asked.
I blinked. "Good lord you are too trusting."
"No I'm not," Akane said, frowning and tilting her head again. "If you wanted to hurt me, the scanner would've picked up on that. You're a perfectly harmless nerd who's just kinda cranky because you got isekai'd earlier today."
"Haha hey let's not talk about that in public please," I said with forced cheer. "Let's actually not talk shop at all until we get back to my place, yeah?"
"Sounds good to me!" she said cheerily.
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"Motel. Smart," Akane said, seating herself on the bed. "So! We're both the same weird flavor of superhero, yeah?"
"Not really," I said, setting my groceries(a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a roll of paper towels, and a box of plastic knives) on the tiny table, and trying not to bristle at the way she casually made herself comfortable in my space. She might trust me, but I didn't really trust her, because I didn't have the ability to read minds... well, I couldn't at the moment; I'd built telepathic scanners before, I just didn't have one with me. But, I had to keep her from telling the authorities that someone crossed the border from A-510, so... "Do you... not know what a demiurge is?"
"Normally, a term from Gnosticism," Akane said. "Contextually, it's something else, isn't it?"
"Yeah, it is. Also known as mad scientists, demiurges are a kind of supernaturally-enhanced human native to Earth A-510," I said.
"Which is where you're from," Akane said. "How'd you get here?"
"It's a long story, full of details that don't really matter to you," I said. "Suffice to say I can't go back whenever I want, but I should be able to find a way back sometime in the foreseeable future."
"The details totally matter!" Akane protested.
"No they don't," I said flatly.
"Come onnnn, I'm curious!"
"What a shame," I said. "Take the fucking hint."
"Oooh, I know!" Akane said, reaching for her purse. I closed my eyes behind my sunglasses, and focused on the bit of mad science I did have on me. Or, more accurately, in me.
Mad science could take pretty much any form, and implanting mad science within one's body or even brain was... not straightforward, but neither was it a rare, esoteric technique. For my part, I'd earned my Fellowship with the Institute of Applied Transhumanism with implanted brain-mods in the form of autohypnotic procedures.
The central brain-mod, the scaffold upon which all others were built, was something I called the Virtual Machine- a computer emulated by another, larger computer, which in this case was my brain. And a key functionality of the Virtual Machine, besides being a fully-featured computer with internet access, was mad science-powered technopathy.
"Yeah, mad science does that sometimes," I said, opening my eyes to see magic smoke pouring out of Akane's scanner, which she was still in the process of withdrawing from her bag. I was a little worried- what I'd actually been trying to do was lock it in off mode, or maybe fuck with the firmware to brick the whole thing. She was new, though, and upon further consideration, letting go of the magic smoke is hardly the worst failure state of a new mad scientist's gadgets. "So, anyway, you thought you were a superhero? Why would that be?"
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"Oh! Right, right, that," Akane said, discarding her broken scanner and seeming to completely forget about it. "See, it all started a few months ago, when my college roommate finally moved out. We were really close friends, and I was there when her powers finally awakened and became a superhero, one night when she was working on an overdue project. Well, we were hanging out one last time before she left, and the conversation turned to superheroes.
"See, nobody really knows how superheroes work, or where their power comes from, or anything like that. And obviously, people would really like those answers. So there's a lot of theories that haven't been panning out and nobody knows for sure... except, maybe, for Princess Vega. And this friend of mine, Veronica, she's Princess Vega's daughter, and so I was wondering if maybe she knew, and just wasn't talking. And Nicky said she didn't know either, but that she had heard some interesting theories-"
"Hang on, back up," I said. As comforting as it was to indulge a fellow mad scientist's friendly monologue, Akane wasn't quite experienced enough yet to do so unaided. "Who the hell is Nicky?"
"It's short for Veronica."
"The fuck it is. Anyway. Go back to why you thought you were a superhero."
"Right! Right, see, after she moved out, I got kinda bored and really fixated on the question, and I started looking into things more and more, and then yesterday I kinda woke up at my desk, realizing I'd spent a whole week devouring articles and books and some electronics and somehow made that scanner that just broke? Anyhow! This morning, I decided to get out of the apartment for a while, take a walk, and bring the scanner with me, in case it found anyone with powers compatible with mine, so I could ask them for help!"
I closed my eyes behind my sunglasses. Okay, well, time to distract her before she asks me for help, and I feel obliged to help on account she's pretty and has been nice to me.
"Okay, so... tangent, but who the hell is Princess Vega, and why would she know anything about where superpowers come from?"
"She's a space alien from Vega," Akane said.
"Vega is perhaps the second-most important star in the sky, preceded by no less august a star than the fucking Sun," I said. "It is twenty five light years away, and is one of the most-studied stars by astronomers. It is so important that it defines the zero point of the Johnson-Morgan scale. I submit to you the simple fact that, given all of this, there is no way in hell there's intelligent life in the Vega system without us knowing about it."
"But we do know about it," Akane said. "One of them came to visit."
"I- th-" I pinched the bridge of my nose. "...So, where I'm from, the upper echelons of power among mad scientists can build spaceships that can travel at superluminal speeds, and even travel through time. Even the middle echelons, which is where I am quite firmly situated, can build giant scanners capable of searching the entire observable universe. So, Akane, I have ample evidence to hand when I say, where I'm from, there is nothing living in the Vega system that we didn't bring there ourselves. There isn't anywhere for life to develop. Only a big red gas giant with a few small rocky moons."
"Vega has two gas giants, though," Akane said.
"What? No it doesn't."
"You know you're from another universe, right?" Akane asked.
"Yeah, but things are similar enough that we're both speaking English," I protested. "Whatever. I can learn about the fifth gas giant you assholes probably have later. You were talking to your college roommate who is a space alien-"
"Half space alien," Akane corrected me.
"Biology does not work th-" I stopped myself, taking a deep breath. "...Princess Vega looks like a perfectly ordinary adult human woman, give or take a rubber forehead or pointed ears, doesn't she?"
"She's really pretty, but otherwise, yeah, just an ordinary human woman who can fly," Akane said, nodding. "But, considering the tech she brought with her from Vega, who's to say she naturally looks like that? Maybe she looks the way she does so humanity would accept her. And, bringing this aaaaall the way back around... She's from an advanced civilization, with advanced technology, and hereditary superpowers, something that we haven't been able to observe happening on Earth."
"And... has she said she understands superpowers?" I asked.
"Not publicly," Akane said, shaking her head. "I don't know for sure what the case is, and... Well, Veronica doesn't know anything either. Or if she is, she's not telling. But with your help..."
"Which is not a given," I said, really hoping to avoid agreeing to anything. "You're asking me to help you read your friend's mind for secrets she's kept for the past twenty years, and considering said friend is apparently the heiress to an alien princess with all kinds of bullshit superscience at her disposal, that is an incredible risk."
"Actually, I was thinking you could use your scanners to help finally crack this nut," Akane said. "You said you could scan the whole universe?"
"...Kinda. I'm still restricted to lightspeed, so anything outside the solar system would be literal years out of date."
"That's still more than I've heard of any mad scientist here being able to manage," Akane said. "Honestly, Roxy, you're probably the most powerful mad scientist on the planet right now."
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"You can't stop me, Roxanne," she said, a grin on her face, her portal gun resting easily in her hand. "Surely you know that."
"You've found so far that I very much can stop you," I said, my gun trained on her far less easily. "That's the deep tragedy of we demiurges, isn't it? The best-laid plans of our greatest geniuses, laid low and ripped asunder by a lucky idiot with a gun. Now. Drop yours, and I won't have to use mine."
"Oh, child, if only it were that easy."
So I shot her.
Her knee burst like an overripe tomato, in a messy spray of gore. Her eyes went wide, her face went pale. Her leg folded like origami paper and she hit the floor, and I cocked the hammer again as I lined up my second shot.
I wasn't quick enough on the draw, though, and she shot back with her portal gun.
My next shot hit the brick wall of the alleyway I now found myself in. The only solace I had was that I hadn't screwed with her settings, and neither had she; this was the only known universe that fit her plan's requirements, and we both knew it. It was only a matter of time before she came here too.
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"Iunno about that," I said, rubbing the back of my neck. "There's always a bigger fish."
And here I was, a girl with a fishgig and no boat, hunting a great white shark in the ocean.