"Alright, everything's in order," I said. "Everyone's properly trained up with their implants and weapons."
"Locked, cocked, and ready to rock," Lisa said, nodding.
"It's hammertime," Nicky added, lovingly caressing the warhammer I'd given her. It wasn't anything too fancy, just a decently-reinforced shaft- in fact, I'd added armor to it just to make sure it wouldn't shatter in her hand- a power source and some high-voltage, low-current electrodes on the business end. The whole thing was just shy of three feet long, and intended to be used one-handed, making it much more agile and maneuverable than the typical six foot two-handed crow's beak or pole hammer. And while I couldn't make mad science weapons that did lethal damage... well, I definitely could put an entirely mundane crow's beak spike-thing on the back of the hammer head, which would very much do lethal damage. It wasn't as good as a lethal mad science weapon, in terms of stopping power, but Nicky's strength made that pretty much irrelevant.
"And we'll look after the house while you're gone," Haruna- Akane's bio-mom, in case you forgot- added.
"We'll be doing some baking," Tanya- another of Akane's three moms- added. "No dairy in the bread, don't worry; I've been having Thanksgiving with Silas for longer than Akane's been alive. I know how to cook kosher."
"Wouldn't 'no meat and milk at the same time' ban key lime pie from the same table as barbecue lamb?" Samina asked.
"It's a rule that gets interpreted a lot of different ways," I said. "I have a fairly literal interpretation of the text which means I'm just not allowed to cook meat in dairy- no sausage gravy, no butter on burger patties, et cetera. Silas, meanwhile, interprets it to mean you can't have them during the same course of a meal. And we both agree that you're allowed to have barbecued lamb for dinner and key lime pie for dessert. So, unless we've got a third, more orthodox Jew at the table..." I shrugged.
"Also, since the restriction is written as cooking a kid in its mother's milk, then it should be fine to mix dairy with animals that aren't mammals, like turkey," Lisa said.
"What kind of barbecue pitmaster disgraces his table with turkey?" Tanya asked, affronted.
"That interpretation is straight-up Karaite Judaism, rejecting the body of Rabbinical Law constructed atop the Torah. Obviously, as something that rejects the legitimacy of religious authorities, pretty much every Jewish religious authority considers it heretical. Personally, the only beef I've ever had with Karaites is that one time I joined a seder with them and brought some corned beef. But, uh. Anyway," I said, trying to bring us back on track. "Those of us who need it have gotten a crash course in using the flight module Akane made for the Virtual Machine." This provoked a groan from Lisa, and a grin from me. Nicky, being able to fly already, did not need the module, and Akane, having an armored flight suit already, did not need the module either, and thus Lisa and I were the only ones who did. Which was just as well, because the trick for making identical duplicates of your gadgets that shared headspace was one Akane only barely knew, and she could only support two of them."
Lisa shuddered, and I grinned.
"It wasn't that bad," Nicky said, grinning as well.
"Foxes weren't meant to fly, dammit," Lisa said, pouting.
"Oh, for sure, the arboreal cat-like predators known for pouncing have absolutely zero conceivable use for enhanced vertical movement," I said, nodding. "You're definitely not salty about Nicky teaching you how to fly, just like she was definitely not still sore about getting her shit rocked in sparring with you. Right, well, provided nobody has to pee?" There were no objections. "Alright, let's get going."
----------------------------------------
I'd known where Skinner's lab was after two days of tracking. A mixture of Google Earth and also some surveillance drones of my own told me precisely what it looked like.
It was a compound out in the Hill Country, Southwest of Austin, with a lot of empty space all around it. It looked kind of like a warehouse, complete with a dock for trucks to load and unload stuff. It'd been one of the destinations in Gideon's own instructions, but considering it showed up only once, transporting stuff that didn't appear very often in the rest of his instructions, we had the feeling he wasn't exactly a highly-trusted operative. Considering that, apparently, jailbreaking the villains and coming at me with his two loaned-out vampire minions which he promptly lost was his own stupid idea to get on Skinner's good side, it wasn't hard to see why.
The warehouse up top was full of miscellaneous crap, very inconspicuous save for the fact it was shielded from scanning by mad science, but my surveillance told me that, beneath the facade of a warehouse in the middle of nowhere, there was a freight elevator going down to somewhere. An underground complex, most likely, with stronger anti-scanning shields than I could penetrate with anything I had... until now, anyway.
Skinner was inside that complex. We were going loud, now, with our own anti-scanning- and anti-teleportation- field projector in the back of a big ol' van, along with a big, beefy active scanner in a second van to punch straight through Skinner's shielding. The other heroes- some of them on loan from San Antonio, Houston, and one guy from Dallas- were maintaining a perimeter to make sure nobody could get in or out. We were, at the moment, mapping out the escape routes from the complex, to make sure those were covered too, and once that was ready...
...We went in.
Down the freight elevator we went, all armed and dangerous. Akane had her petrification gun, which had been tuned and refined for enhanced reliability. I had a VM module that'd coat my tentacles with a psychic paralytic that could ignore most armor. Lisa had improved electrostun gauntlets augmenting her claws, plus some druidic spirit magic I had no idea about. Nicky had her strong arms and an electric warhammer.
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The elevator landed in a waiting room with a TV, where Doctor Skinner's face was on-screen, as well as Doctor Skinner- or, as I could now tell, the android facsimile I'd been following this whole time- sitting perfectly still in a chair.
"You've gotta be fucking shitting me," I said.
"Yes, I certainly have been yanking your chain, haven't I?" Doctor Beatrice Faith Skinner said, grinning smugly at me from the TV screen. "Unfortunately, Doctor Updyke, this is the end of the line for us. You've been excellent inspiration for me to learn and grow, filling the role of the rival so admirably, but we've entered the endgame, and I no longer need you."
"...Whatever helps you sleep at night," I shrugged, before pulling out my revolver and shooting the TV in the control board, fizzling out the entire display. She pathologically needed to be in control, and so had convinced herself that me turning on her and stopping her, and breaking her leg, and trashing her stuff, and dismantling her cult- that was her plan, to make me a tool to help her grow through adversity.
She didn't want to confront the fact that she really had tried to control me just like everyone else and simply failed.
I shot the automaton in the head as it jerked to life- probably Skinner piloting it remotely to continue monologuing at me. I wouldn't give her the pleasure.
"I also do not need the continuous drain on my resources," Skinner announced over the intercom as her automaton body double fell over, spilling gears and oil all over the floor. "You're a very expensive rival to have, Doctor. Thankfully, everything in here is written off as experimental."
"Oh, good," Akane said. "So this place isn't a decoy."
"Indeed, student of my student. This place is, while not vital to my plans, still quite nice to have. My central plan was to enslave this world, and build an army of its strongest fighters to conquer and enslave my own world as well. And this place is where I house an experiment to create an army of its strongest fighters, so that I don't have to worry about running out. So no, little Demiurge! This is not in fact a decoy! This is a trap!"
The rear wall of the waiting room collapsed backwards, nothing more than a propped-up facade, and opening the waiting room up into a much larger central chamber, currently unlit.
"This experiment was an important one. One enslaved world would certainly be nice to have, but I want to enslave the world that matters, and for that, I'd need an army capable of bringing that world to its knees. The local superheroes certainly had their standouts with appreciable oomph, but it was only the standouts. You've noticed the same thing, I'm sure, where a middling demiurge and druid could curbstomp entire teams of supervillains. What is the legally-neutral term for people with superpowers, anyhow? Oh well. I don't care that much, and neither will anybody else, once I'm done.
"What I do care about is cloning powerful superheroes. Unfortunately, while I could obtain genetic information fairly trivially, my cloning process wasn't able to replicate the powers of the superheroes I cloned. They weren't metaphysically the same person as the hero. They were metaphysically children of the hero. And hereditary superpowers simply don't exist!"
"Ah, shit," Red Fox whispered.
"Unless... perhaps they do?"
The lights raised, revealing an army of about eighty identical clones. Odd; I'd been expecting a hundred and sixty, but then, I suppose this place wasn't ready for prime-time.
"After all, Princess Vega seems to be quite capable of passing her powers on to her children. Apply the right mental pressures, and the spirit half forms perfectly, and I get my army of cloned supersoldiers! But, of course, as a woman of science, I can't simply assume they'll work. I need to test them first. See how they perform in a live-fire environment, against actual opponents trying their best to kill them. Good luck, Doctor!"
There was something of a resemblance to Princess Vega in there, with the clones. The facial resemblance was uncanny. But a lot of the other details were wrong; they were a bit shorter, they had black hair and brown eyes, their skin wasn't as pale, and they were nowhere near as curvy.
(Doctor Skinner had been of the opinion that being horny was unbecoming of a proper scholar, demiurgic or otherwise, and therefore probably intentionally made her army of vat-grown, hyper-loyal Power Girl clones look like... well, not super-fetishistic 3D porn models brought to life. And frankly, that was an act of cowardice. If you're going to enslave the world, you may as well do it in a way that gives people some eye candy to enjoy.)
(Also, this was probably adding insult to injury to House Vega. Princess Vega had all kinds of alien bullshit supertech, and Nicky was pretty sure she wouldn't look like that if she didn't want to, which she did, because of the culture she'd grown up with in Vega. Tits the size of your head was how Vegans signaled royalty, or maybe authority with a halo-effect moral component, possibly from the same root as the term 'mommy milkers'- Nicky didn't super understand Vegan culture herself, and was mostly guessing.)
The clones were all in uniform: black jumpsuits that were just matte enough under the lights to probably not be latex, and instead probably neoprene rubber. The boots were dark blue, and made of the same material. The sleeves ended above the wrists, on dark blue cuffs.
In their hands were sabers of very obvious demiurgic make, glistening with something that was probably unpleasant.
"You're going to need it!"
"There's one little thing you've forgotten," Lady Venus said, stepping forward into the chamber as all the clones got into formation for battle. "Our power isn't gravity. It's gravitas. It's respect. It is the weight of our reputation, our actions, our legend upon the very fabric of reality."
Lady Venus turned her hammer in her hand, putting the spike forward, intending to kill with this hammer, and just stood there, waiting, as the clones began to charge her in unison.
"And these clones don't look like they get out much."