Alexa pulled out the safety chip from the S-shuttle Taxi.
Safety was for tools. She wanted to feel the wind on her face.
The taxi let her open up the maintenance panel because it was run by yet another copy of bamboozled Ember. Ember 12053 to be precise, who was 3 months old and had no idea who Alexa was. Alexa made sure that her obedient army of Embers didn’t see the Doomsday broadcast, telling them that watching it would distract them from their gold-buying mission.
The only copy of Ember who knew anything of value was currently residing in Alexa’s head. The Wardens were allowed to access criminal records and the eyes of Titanomachy that oversaw all, so that they could correct Tartarus prisoners in the right direction.
It was hilarious how many Embers were out there doing jobs that nobody else wanted for very low pay. Ember had outbid, forced tons of other super ghosts out of their jobs. How did Ember do it? She used her power to study these basic jobs so that she could do them better than anyone, outperform them all in online tests. Ember’s ghosts had become the best theoretical plumbers, taxi drivers, cleaners, wardens, etc. Hero Resonance had found a loophole within the SCA and used her power to fill it. Seventy thousand Embers worked for below market value wage, but all of them put together were making a lot of money regardless. Alexa herself would have done the same, if she was a hero from a respectable family and could make thousands of duplicates to take thousands of tests. Alas, Alexa was born a villain. She had no Superstate citizenship, no connections to the heroes.
Alexa appreciated Ember’s ingenuity and diligence more and more with every minute. She asked taxi driver Ember 12053 to turn on Market watch on the taxi holo panel. Alexa listened in as her plan to bamboozle the global banking system rolled forward in full steam, spearheaded by an army of digital Embers manipulating social media. Pretending to be Resonance, tricking all of these Ember ghosts wasn’t hard. She knew exactly what they wanted, had a copy of Resonance inside her brain.
Her own little ex-warden inside Tickles was the key to it all. The A in A-credits obviously stood for Alexa and A-credits had a mechanism that prevented them all being sold off immediately. They were a long term investment cryptocoin registered under an unnecessarily long, complicated web of corporations and trusts that owned each other. Whenever the SCA were to dig through all of the paperwork of a thousand trusts owning trusts then they would find that it was all held under the name of Hero Resonance. A hero that no longer existed. A hero that would eventually be blamed for everything.
Alexa slid open the taxi door and let her feet hang out of the shuttle as it zoomed above the incredibly blue, transparent water of lake Eerie. Long ago, this lake had one less E. It was just Erie, until a 19th century supervillain named Nikolah Tongsteel had infected the lake with hallucinogenic bacteria. He was pissed off at some local industry steel barons that had screwed him over and wanted them to lose their minds, along with every human who lived nearby. The bacteria had propagated at a far slower rate than he had expected it to.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
Nobody had lost their minds. People occasionally saw ghosts and other mildly spooky hallucinations in the fog like slenderman, and that was about the extent of it. The lake had gained another E. Over the century the bacteria in the lake multiplied and the problem had become big enough for the heroes to finally deal with it. Dora the Terraformer had triumphantly returned from her trip to Europa and terraformed the shit out of the lake, vaporising everything alive within it. Even ordinary pebbles around the lake had turned into clear glass from whatever Dora had done. The lake no longer spooked people but the E and the urban legends formed around the place had stuck.
Nikolah’s plan was adorably stupid with an equally adorable conclusion. Most villains made such plans, failing to look ahead, falling to coordinate, failing where the Superstate had succeeded. They all pulled their own future into all sorts of random directions trying to meet their selfish goals, cancelling each other’s plans out half of the time. Alexa knew exactly how and why this was. There were a lot of villains within her, a lot more than she had ever wanted. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t choose to be like this. Somebody had to stop the Superstate and that somebody was her.
The Superstate had declared her a villain once again, according to the news channel. She giggled. Where were they even going to put her now? The explosion made by Nonpareil and Three had undoubtedly, irrecoverably damaged Tartarus. Sure, their Catastrophe shields had come on too, but the facility was too close to the epicenter. Tartarus was likely devastated beyond repair now.
Alexa had only one destination in mind - Hero’s Academy and nothing and nobody would be able to stop her and her minions from attending, not the prognosticators, not Nonpareil, not the Five, not Dean Otter himself. She was swinging her legs, looking over the lake and excitedly waiting for the call from Dean Otter. Oh such a fun talk they would have!
The mushroom cloud in the distance was already being blown apart by the wind. Alexa looked up. Thousands of shuttles filled with supers headed out from Titanomachy to try and liquidate the results of the unprecedented disaster. Dora the Terraformer was likely sitting in one of these shuttles and would likely make another nice, lifeless lake in the giant hole that had only an hour ago had been the middle of the Ruskadian mountain range, separating nations of Ruskadia and Acadia that were once a single country called Canada.
Supers were constantly rearranging world maps, splintering nations apart, redrawing borders. They always had more power, more wealth than regular people and the rise of the Superstate had only made it worse, producing richer, wealthier, more corrupt individuals. S-credits had become absurdly expensive over time and the Superstate was far too wealthy for its own good. The democratic system had failed as Supers could out-donate any human voter. It was a slow, meticulous, unending attack against humanity that gave Supers more and more rights. Any super could buy a town or a few thousand farms and declare it sovereign territory or an independent micronation.
Alexa was about to change all of this. She was about to set the future on an entirely new path.
She had outdone the Equalizers, brought the entire Superstate down to its knees and now held the gun to its head. A gun made from seventy thousand Ember ghosts that were about to unknowingly pull the trigger.