The city's superheroes have done a ridiculous job in teaming up behind some newbie called 'Strawberry Boy' - even some of the long established heroes like White Rabbit. Tesla thinks Strawberry Boy sounds like a figurine you'd stick on top of a pornographic wedding cake, but he's never really figured out how superheroes get their names.
Villains get named by the papers. Or their victims, perhaps, if those can still speak.
Regardless of whether or not he sounds like an unpopular cam boy, Strawberry Boy is evidently a monster in a fight, and the city's supervillains have responded with a team up in kind.
"This is fine," mutters Tesla, locking his door behind him. He heaves himself unsteadily away from the threshold and slumps into his seat. It's not a wildly expensive, plush seat - Tesla's crimes are not financially rewarding for the most part. He has, technically, got a day job. Some supervillain.
He rips his mask off and rests his head on the table in front of him. The apartment is cool and dark and quiet around him. His breathing is suddenly very loud.
This is fine. It's going to be fine. It's-
It would have been fine. It... Tesla, for a supervillain, is actually well regarded among his colleagues. He should be having a much easier time with the team up than pretty much anyone.
And it would look absurd to back out of this team up for exactly that reason.
Tesla had responded to Aizen's call. It never pays to resist him too much - he's too influential, and when he has an odd job here or there, every supervillain knows better than to say 'no' too many times - and Tesla had not felt he'd had a good enough reason to rock the boat.
(Aizen's supervillain name is "God". Nobody uses it except to his face. There's pretentious names, and then there's... that.)
It turns out that Tesla does have a good reason, and now he has to decide whether it's good enough to renege on his support for Aizen's plan.
It ... would not look good.
He really had not expected that Aizen would bring Mantis in. He's never really sure if Aizen should be able to bring Mantis in. It's harder to say what motivates Mantis than what motivates Aizen sometimes.
Mantis is supposed to be across the other side of the planet.
Tesla exhales noisily.
Aizen calls the meeting in a room with no windows, well underground. It may once have been a parking garage, but it's too dark to tell. The walls are covered in, or perhaps even comprised of, draped fabrics, all black and slick and shiny. The floors are concrete. The only light comes from a series of tiny lamps that burn much too pale, and people's phones. Both stream ghastly silhouettes across the shifting fabric walls.
The group is pretty ghastly even without Aizen's melodramatic hospitality. Supervillains come in all shapes and sizes - this is one of their strengths, really. Heroes are beautiful and virtuous. Villainy does not discriminate.
Aizen is late - or, rather, Tesla supposes that he isn't late, because he'll arrive exactly when he plans to. But his arrival does not match the time set for the meeting.
It wouldn't, Tesla thinks cynically. He takes a seat at the table - bold move, probably, but unlike the rest of the villains here he doesn't actually have that many enemies in attendance. And then he too pulls out his phone. He found a good tetris app last month and he's been dreaming of straight line blocks ever since.
Mantis shows up to their meeting like he's been invited. For all Tesla knows, he has been.
Tesla doesn't actually notice him at first because he's trying to find a place to slot in an L-block. But then the doors slam and Tesla hears his boots go click-snap, click-snap, click-snap on the cement floors, and even without seeing them Tesla can - he can hear the heels.
He stops, looking sightlessly at the screen in his hand, and for a second he doesn't understand why his whole body feels twisted with sudden tension at the sound.
He looks up just as a square block reaches the top of his screen and gives him a game over.
Tesla understands then. His instincts are better than his conscious attention. He is right to feel that mounting anxiety.
The face is covered - a black cloth across the mouth, dark sunglasses over the eyes. But Tesla would recognise that figure anywhere.
People get out of Mantis's way when he walks in.
"Wait," Tesla hears someone say, "why? That guy's a twig, I could snap him in half-"
"Oh my god, Burner. Shut up," hisses someone else, even as a broad circle of personal space appears around 'Burner'.
Red coat, red half mask, blond hair. Burner. It doesn't ring a bell. Tesla doesn't know him.
Mantis does turn toward the commentary. He's not imposing like some of these others: just a tall, extremely skinny figure dressed all in black, further elongated by his sharp-heeled boots, glittering with an excess of silvery bangles. He looks more like an alternative fashion plate than a supervillain.
He looks ...good.
He pulls his heavily tinted sunglasses off, exposing the gaping wound in his head and its sharp teeth. They gnash and strain, distorting his face while he looks among the crowd of supervillains for whoever suggested he might be snappable.
"Is that meant to, what, scare us? I don't even know your name."
"You're new here, huh," Mantis says. Tesla can hear him smiling.
Tesla's whole body shudders.
Even Burner's more sensible friend is edging away from now.
Tesla, very deliberately, goes right back to his phone and begins a new game. High score, he tells himself.
There's a wet tearing sound and a splatter of something on the concrete. Nobody yells. Nobody screams. A few people flinch, but this is, after all, a gathering of supervillains.
Tesla doesn't look up.
Not even when the seat across from him scrapes on the concrete, and the shadow of a scythe falls over his hands.
Mantis's arrival is unexpected, and Tesla suddenly has a very bad, very scary suspicion about his own inclusion among the invitees.
Tesla isn't the only one surprised to see him there. He hears, like pretty much everybody else, the massive hulking Hellfist lean down and "whisper" to tiny Chiropteran, "Thought he was meant to be in Austria."
Chiropteran slowly tips his head and turns his automaton stare on Hellfist. His eyes are a bright, poisonous green. In the dark of the room, they seem backlit by some inner glow.
"Australia," he says in his soft, raspy, dead voice. "He was in Australia." He doesn't, Tesla notices, remove Hellfist's giant hand from his own shoulder.
"...'S that different?"
Someone snorts
Chiropteran's head swivels like a weathervane, attention snapping from Hellfist to whoever has had the bad taste to laugh at him. The room goes very still. Tesla can feel it.
"Hey, Pig. Aren't you even going to say hello?" drawls Mantis into the silence of Chiropteran's contempt. "That's not very polite."
"Pig" always seems like an odd name for a supervillain. People giggle about it, sometimes - people not in the know, usually. But nobody in the room laughs.
A lot of them are named after animals. Tesla wears a pig mask. And... Tesla actually likes pigs. He might have preferred something more serious and dangerous sounding and a little less like dinner - "Boar", maybe, which rhymes with "gore", and guess what Tesla's famous for? - but he's not really that upset. Better Pig than Strawberry Boy.
He's not upset by his name, but he the idea that Mantis may yet decide to take offence - that is a concern. Tesla pauses the game, licks his teeth in the split second he uses to brace himself, and looks up.
Mantis's gaping head wound and cloth covered mouth greet him. He's leaning forward over the table. His chin is propped, not on his hand, but on the blond curling hair of Burner's head.
Tesla looks at the head for a second, then meets Mantis's eyes. Eye. He doesn't know, after all, if Mantis can see with it. The teeth are relaxed, no longer straining to chomp down upon something.
Burner's eyes stare at nothing. The red half mask is askew. His mouth is slack. His neck is leaking on the table.
Mantis combs his fingers through Burner's hair. He's gentle now that the man's dead.
Tesla remembers, vividly, what it feels like to have that hand curled into a fist in his own hair. It wasn't gentle then. He never asked for it to be.
He's glad for his mask, now.
"Hello," Tesla parrots obediently. His voice comes out steady even though his insides are trying to become his outsides by way of his throat. "You've been away for a while, Mantis," he says. He knows how to be polite. "Are you glad to be back?"
"We'll have time for civilities later, Pig," says a new voice, and Aizen finally makes himself known. He melts from the shadows, blinding in head to toe white as usual.
Who even knows how long he's been there. Illusions are his stock in trade. He could have been watching for an hour, for all they know.
The meeting, such as it is, gets immediately under way. Maybe there are people here - foolish, conceited people - who don't know about Chiropteran and Hellfist, or who haven't heard of Mantis, but everybody knows who Aizen is.
Aizen is God. And maybe that name is pretentious and maybe he's intolerable in close quarters, but - there's a reason everybody still calls him 'God' in public, to his face.
Tesla wants to go back to his game the second he hears the plan. Team up. Small teams and partnerships. Nobody working alone...
It only confirms what Tesla knew as soon as Mantis walked in this afternoon.
He keeps his spine straight and still when Aizen says: "And of course Pig and Mantis, who've worked so well together in the past -"
Tesla doesn't flinch. He doesn't hunch. He doesn't twitch.
"Yes," he says, as though through a solid glass wall.
Mantis is watching him from across the table. It's hard to say, without hearing him, if he's smiling. His good eye is an unearthly violet, and for all the attention and intensity with which he is watching Tesla, it's hard to say if he's listening - or even hearing - Aizen.
Tesla is the only person here with the dubious honour of surviving a team up with Mantis, and he knows it.
He thinks even Burner is watching him with pity.
Prompt received from tumblr user scribe-writes-stuff. One sitting, zero editing, we die like arrancar.
if you liked something in particular here feel free to let me know; otherwise have a good night.