June 15th 2013, 7:49 AM
Luminosa had studied superheroics before setting out to be Luminosa, Maiden of Light. It was a significant career change from what she’d been up to before, actively fighting herself instead of operating from the background while the people with combat superpowers did things, and she wanted to do a good job at it. This had given her a good understanding for how it was supposed to work. The bad guys were always supposed to meet in abandoned warehouses, and the good guys were supposed to show up to stop them, and that was the way it was supposed to be. For superheroes to have to was just unnatural, and for American superheroes was even more absurd. American superheroes were supposed to be more superheroic than everyone else, not less.
From the conversation the American superheroes were having, they were inclined to agree with her.
“This place is creepy,” Sunburst said.
“It’s like we went to Russia or something, but everyone speaks English.”
“No, in Russia they’d probably laugh at you. Here -”
“Here’s the world the Tyrant made,” Luminosa agreed. She heard footsteps. Time for her to depart. “Last member is coming. Remember, he’s our ally, not our friend, and he does not like me.” Then she vanished. An instant later the door slammed open, whipped back against the wall. Sunburst leaped to his feet, Warpdrive grabbed a gadget off her belt, and Jacobin flew inside.
His costume was scorched and scarred black and the camouflage was fritzing, the colors constantly shifting, mostly just to static. His face was lean and hungry, his hair uncombed and unwashed and sticky with sweat. His arms were loosely folded, and his legs drifted limply.
The cell phone hovered in midair until he tossed it onto a tiny folding table that stood between them.
“Holy shit!” said Sunburst.
“You?” He looked at the heroes. “You’re the help?”
“We’re the American superheroes. Sunburst,” he offered.
“Warpdrive,” she said. “You’re Jacobin?”
“Yes,” said the phone, which was on speaker. “Jacobin, the International Association of Superheroes has agreed to lend us some help in our conflict with the Titanium Tyrant.”
“We’re here to destroy the shield generator,” Sunburst said.
“Of course,” said the voice from the phone.
“Shield?” Jacobin asked.
“The shield?” Sunburst said, then corrected himself. “The Novapest Shield.”
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Jacobin raised his corpse-like head and met Sunburst’s eyes, and Sunburst flinched. “Assume I’ve been too busy to follow the news.”
“You’re -” Warpdrive said, and then swallowed the rest of it.
“There’s an unbreakable shield,” Sunburst said. “It stops anyone from outside from coming in. There’s a lot more white hats than black.”
Jacobin spat red on the floor. “You lost last time.”
“The Tyrant’s dead!” said Warpdrive. “And we’ve had twenty years to get ready.”
“Tyrant’s had twenty years to train more knights,” said Jacobin. “Eighty-eight…” He paused for a moment to count. “Eighty-two… to four.”
“Ah… He won because he had brains, not because he had a lot of third-raters,” said Sunburst. “His plan was brilliant.” He looked around, seeming excited for the first time. “The AAS leadership figured he’d just have the old Royal Court, but he had basically every archvillain in the country, and half a dozen A-rankers, all trained to fight each others’ nemeses, and they thought the Queen was in jail, and they’d never even heard of Solaris-”
“You know why you lost. Good for you.” Jacobin shook his head. “That doesn’t mean anything if you can’t win.”
“We can win,” said the cell phone. “The odds are much less against us than they were earlier.”
“Oh?” He glanced at it dismissively.
“Your numbers are old. Steelmind took out Lizzy,” it said smoothly. “The only A-ranked supervillain in the city is Sedaris Solaris. By my calculations there are now only sixty-two supervillains in fighting condition in Novapest.”
Jacobin managed a grim smile. (There were very few people who would not shudder at that, in Novapest.)
“So, Sunburst,” the phone continued. “How do we disable the shield?”
“With difficulty,” Sunburst said. “This is a complicated piece of engineering. L - our friends sent me the schematics.” He grinned slightly nervously. “They’re on my laptop. They’re crazy prepared. I guess the Tyrant thought the odds were about the same as I did. Not only is it triply invincible, with layered force fields, zero-momentum kinetic deflection fields, and disintegration fields, but there’s thirty-two stations on the fringes of the city, and any four of them - at opposite corners, of course - could keep it up. Even if we took them out, though…” He shrugged. “There’s a whole ‘nother redundant, super-strong, super-inefficient system in the palace, with the main power plant and the software that controls everything, plus it has its own palace shield so if worst comes to worst, the Tyrant can hide out in his palace impervious to everything.”
Jacobin looked bored.
“That’s the weak point,” said Sunburst. “You see? If the central system with the power plants and everything breaks or is cut off, the fringe shield generators revert to backup power. They can last twenty-four hours on it, but no more. If we cut them off by taking the palace -”
He rubbed the back of his neck.
“Though, uh, they would last twenty-four hours. And they’d be pissed.”
“Can you contribute.”
“She teleports me, I zap things.”
Jacobin gave them a disdainful look. “Really? That’s all?”
“Like to see you teleport!” Warpdrive glared.
“Every knight in Novapest has a laser weapon if he wants one,” said Jacobin.
“Steelstorm Industries makes stuff to not need maintenance,” Sunburst said, visibly trying to keep his cool. “I make stuff to be good.”
Jacobin said nothing, but his facial expression was eloquent.
“Dude, what the hell -” said Warpdrive, pushing forwards -
The doors ripped and bent under Jacobin’s power, warping and shifting as he brought them forwards until a fence of spears was between him and Warpdrive, hovering in midair.
“Jacobin!” said the phone. “These are our allies. And they know the true weakness of the Tyrant’s defenses.”
The voice turned gloating. “As he said, the palace complex has its own force field. If all the rest of Novapest was in the hands of the Tyrant’s enemies and he held only the palace, he could hold it forever.”
The chuckle had a sharp edge.
“Do you see?”
- - -
It was only after that conversation that Luminosa considered checking to see if anyone had sent her any important messages, at which point she stared at the screen for quite some time.