22) Shopping Trip

Thursday afternoon, I was watching my afternoon lecture online on my laptop upstairs in the old gas station while I accepted deliveries for Algernon. Most of the delivery people thought I was fixing up the building to be some sort of scale model store.

The splinter group of Mice were going with some fanciful hamster habitats around the monitor console so they could interact with people, while Core’s fourteen year old daughter May had been commissioned to help them make an underground city out of some of the collapsed portions of Dr. Talons old base.

She had picked out the Cape name Matrix for when she was older, but she was still going by May for now.

Some of the Mice were making and would be wearing cosplay outfits from various versions of the Wizard of Oz films and taking up temporary occupation of May's scale model of the Emerald City for her ninth grade art contest.

I had seen the designs, both for the contest, which looked amazing and for the Mice's new digs. Which were very post apocalyptic underground city looking. Cricket farms, recycled junk, and scale models from various movies.

The last of which I fully expected to get drafted into helping to put together, not that I was opposed to getting to put together geeky models. Manifest had seen their Amazon order and had called dibs on putting the Emperor's Death Star throne room together.

The Mice’s tiny little paws with a human level of intelligence had given them a profitable side gig making doll house and scaled model items for years. Mr. Iole's Crafting Emporium was selling out monthly on Esty.

But then, the bad guys just had to do it on a Thursday. If they had waited one more day I could have gotten out of therapy.

From: Shimshimsherry

[Flash mob hitting the Shen quarter Core Values store. We’re on deck. Suit up.]

I turned the sign on the door to closed and slid my white access card along the old pop machine in the back hallway with the “Out of Order” sign on it to get it to slide to the side and reveal the short narrow door at the top of the stairs.

The Royal Court, our secret base, or as I thought of it, the clubhouse, was two stories down. As a Brute 2, my knees could take jumping down to the landing. Of course, I also ended up slamming into the opposite walls on the landings. I had enhanced strength and toughness as a Brute 2, not agility.

I was outvoted on the name by the way. I wanted to call it Throne One, to imply we had more than one base, but Shimmer had convinced everyone it would be an even better name for our own transport, like Air Force One.

Like we would ever need any kind of vehicle with Manifest on the team.

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

Another slide of my card got me in the command chamber where I sprung into action by stretching out on my padded hammock off in one corner of the room.

Corpse Corps number seven, Lucky, was up on deck.

T-Rex surprisingly had gotten the Genius tech quick heater built into the locker room outside of the walk in freezer by a friend of his. The heater could warm up a frozen corpse to room temperature evenly in twenty seconds without cooking the edges like a microwave would.

Since today we would just be dealing with a pack of shoplifters, I was using Lucky rather than one of the better bodies. Lucky had taken a few hits from when I was training with Bravada, and I had used up all of its body fat as well as some bone density and muscle mass fixing it up.

I wasn’t a Regen 4, I was limited to what a body had available to fix it up with. When I got hurt that just meant I needed a few good meals to replace what I used. For a corpse, it meant a gradual weakening of its structure. A dead body just could not metabolize anything to add to its mass.

Freezer burn had cost me a few pounds off of the Talon Troopers before I brought Mr. Adam in as an associate member of the team to embalm the Troopers with a chemical mix that included a type of Ethylene glycol to help keep them in cold storage without further damage.

He got a kick out of getting a code name, Count Tepes.

Of course, it also turned the dead Talon Troopers into a bruised looking blue color, which as a long time Zombie film fan suited me just fine. It wasn’t like I was going to strip down one of the Troopers in public.

I waited for the timer to ding before I moved myself into Lucky. The Genius Tech Heater itched.

By the time I walked out of the Freezer and out into the main room, Manifest had assembled the team on Shimmer's order of, "Time to go." He opened the way to a scene of Chaos.

Like all the buildings in the Shen quarter, the Core Values store had an Asian look to it with a prayer gate like frame around the front entrance, large standing slabs of stone on each side with Kanji ideograms with the store's name on them, and Fu Lions statues on top.

Cheesy as heck, but Core had decided on a theme for each quarter of his city to give it a look and every complaint and accusation of culture theft had only made him double down.

Inside a mob of people were grabbing everything they could, relying on the fact that the Core Stone Cops, the Concentric Cities Police force's nickname, either couldn't catch them all, or the ones they did, it would only be a charge of petty theft.

As soon as we arrived Fable, dressed down in a pair of distressed jeans, and a simple top seemed to focus on the front of the stone for a second, then drifted off to the side to get out of the line of fire from anything that was going to happen.

The shoplifters heading out of the store at a run, either because they had grabbed enough to satisfy them or had spotted a team of Superheroes arriving outside, began to stumble to a stop, wide eyed and staring forward. Each one of them either standing frozen in place or tumbling over stiff to the ground.

I had never seen her in person, and as normal for me, I wasn’t seeing her now, but Fable’s summons of Medusa was literally and figuratively a stunner. From what I had seen in Fable's selfies, her version of Medusa was also a lot curvier than most depictions of her, to the point that getting men to look her in the eyes might have been a bit of an issue. But the motion of the writhing head full of serpents must have gotten guys to look up.

Of course, she wasn't turning anyone to stone, just a Mental 2 mind control effect that paralyzed people for a good twenty minutes depending on how strong willed they were.

For anyone who managed to avoid eye contact, having T-Rex scream at them in his dinosaur form at the entrance was plan B. At least people didn’t wet their pants facing off with Medusa.

Shimmer snapped a visor made up of force in front of her eyes as she grabbed T-Rex and Manifest's hands and got them past the illusory summons with their eyes shut. Fable’s friends had to work like the stories and Gorgons were definitely prone to friendly fire.

The curved surface of the force plane Shimmer had put over her eyes put out a multi colored flairs of light which meant she could barely see through the thing well enough to find her way to the front door let alone worry about making eye contact with the Summons.

I just followed them along, with a wave at where I thought the summons was standing as I resisted the urge to kick a few idiots in the ribs. The pain of a broken bone healing for a few weeks might remind them not to do things like this, but the boss frowned on things like that.

Inside Shimmer dropped her visor, T-Rex went lizard and let out a growl that rumbled throughout the store, and Manifest began dropping cement barriers stacked two levels high to discourage people from trying to run past them.

As Shimmer posed to give a speech, I looked up at the steel mesh security gate up in the ceiling and wondered why no one working in the store had dropped them.

Then all three members of the team nearly collapsed as their faces twisted up in pain.

Oh, that’s why.