Across the street from one of the most exclusive residential buildings in the Gold Stage, three suspicious characters, one older man and two young girls wearing mirrored sunglasses late at night, stood with the sort of feigned casualness that only came from being up to no good.
"Do you know what floor he lives on?" the older girl asked.
"No," the younger one replied.
"Are you serious?"
"I don't remember the floor or room," the younger girl added apologetically.
The older girl whipped her glasses off to better berate her comrades. "We don't even know what floor he's on? We don't even have that to go from?"
"Blue Rose, put your glasses back on!" the younger girl insisted.
"What for?" she asked, folding the glasses' arms. "Why would Bellisair be up here?"
"It's for safety! We couldn't handle it if he gave you an Objective, too! Maybe it'd be something worse than Tiger's!"
"What's worse than murder?"
"More murder," the man rumbled. "What if Tiger's Objective was 'kill the heroes' instead of just 'kill Barnaby?'"
The older girl froze, then slowly unfolded her glasses and, without another word, slid them back onto her face.
"So what's our plan?" Pao Lin turned her head towards her teammates.
"Can we ask the security guards to page him? We have these glasses for our identities, so we could even tell them we're heroes," Karina suggested.
"They don't have a reason to believe us. And we'd have to ask for Barnaby, who isn't there. Tiger wouldn't answer to that. We need to make him come out," Antonio re-folded his arms.
"Pull the fire alarm," Pao Lin said. "That'll make everyone evacuate."
"I like that idea," Karina said. "Then we can look for him at the emergency exits. But can we get to the fire alarm?"
"I'll check," Antonio said, leaving his teammates and crossing the street to Barnaby's building.
Suddenly aware that they were alone, together, the two girls started to fidget. Karina leaned against a wall and examined her nails. Pao Lin scuffed her shoes along the sidewalk.
"Um… Blue Rose?" Pao Lin broke the silence after a few minutes.
"Hm?"
"Your glasses look nice."
"Come on, Dragon Kid, don't tease me," Karina adjusted her mirrored sunglasses. "These frames don't fit my face at all."
"No, I think they look good!"
"I would have found better ones if we had more time. These will just have to do." Karina turned to Pao Lin and smiled a bit. "If anyone lucked out, you did. Those frames help age your face."
"Huh?" Pao Lin grabbed at the sunglasses, though she didn't remove them. "They make me look old?"
"Not old, more mature. Like a grown-up. Now if you just grow a few inches, you'll be a real beauty!"
"Y-You think so?"
Karina laughed. "Definitely! I'll have to watch out for you. You'll steal my arrests and my fans!"
"I don't want your fans! They're creepy!"
The laughter ended when Antonio returned. Even without seeing his eyes, the deep frown predicted bad news.
"The lobby fire alarm is behind the security desk," Antonio said. "I looked the rest of it over, it's all to code. Any fire in the lobby would be visible from the desk. I think they built it that way to keep people like us from causing a scene."
"I see," Karina said. "So we can't make the building evacuate?"
"No… It just means we can't pull the fire alarm."
The other two looked to Pao Lin. "What are you talking about?"
"The fire alarm has to be on an electrical system somewhere. If we can get into a utilities closet, I could try to fry it and make the alarm go off."
"Good idea, Kid," Antonio said. "We'll go around the back, find the service entrance, get Tiger out of there."
The girls nodded in affirmative, and the three suspicious characters crossed the street and took a back alley to the side of Barnaby's apartment.
They found a single door, a steel, unlabeled, handle-less door that Karina found absolutely suspect in every way. The three of them agreed it was their best bet, but to get in, Antonio would have to break it down. They debated the pros and cons of leaving no trace, until Pao Lin announced the door was locked magnetically.
"Magnetically? What does that have to do with anything?" Karina asked.
A blue aura ignited around the young Kung fu master, and sparks crackled from her fingertips. "It means electricity."
Pao Lin placed her hands on one side of the doorframe, gently easing more and less current through her fingertips. Karina watched in awe as, suddenly, the door popped open, repelled by the electric charge in its own lock.
"Nice one, Dragon Kid," Antonio ruffled her hair, leaving it standing on end like a porcupine. Karina giggled a little, but Pao Lin just combed her fingers through her hair, pulling out the static electricity and then zapping the door with it for good measure.
The three slipped inside the apartment building, and Antonio activated his own power—a self-contained ability that had no chance of accidentally shocking or freezing anyone—providing an eerie glow to illuminate the space. From a tiny landing, a stairwell dipped down, just a few steps, until they found themselves in a low-ceilinged basement filled with large steel boilers and pipelines studded with solid-looking valves and wheels.
"Is this the utilities room?" Pao Lin looked around.
"I think it's just the water," Antonio said.
"Oh," Pao Lin said, a little disappointed. "But where's the electricity? I didn't see any other doors."
"I think we can make this work," Karina said, taking a few steps closer to the pipes. She felt the water running inside of them, a little tickle just beyond her reach, like the sensation of being watched.
"Huh?"
"You got an idea, Blue Rose?" Antonio asked.
"I think so," Karina said. "I need you and Dragon Kid to be absolutely silent."
"Okay," Pao Lin agreed tentatively. Karina flashed her an appreciative smile before sitting down at the base of one likely pipe, closing her eyes, and focusing on the tickle just beneath the metal.
When Karina was a little girl and a new ice NEXT, she sometimes had accidents exploding the plumbing in her house. Her powers would activate, and the nearest water would instantly freeze: sometimes harmlessly, like a glass of water on the table, but other times, Karina froze the kitchen faucet, or the shower head, and twice, the 600-gallon water heater buried in the yard. Better than any chemistry lesson, Karina learned very quickly that water expanded when it froze, and if it froze fast enough, it had the power to burst through just about anything. She quickly learned how to control the ability, if not for the sake of her parents' repair bill blues, then for he sake of her water-damaged belongings. But to this day, she still liked to meditate through the pipes, sensing the water behind the walls and under the floorboards and letting it carry away her stress.
Now, Karina had her fingers against the building's pulse, following the water through its veins, exploring the twists and turns of the piping system and building a mental map of where it flowed. From the bottom of the building up, this pipe followed a very regular pattern, spreading out identically among the units with thin, strong pipes. It didn't feel like ordinary plumbing—the ends of the pipes had high-pressure blocks, seals prepared to burst off at any moment, not like the ends of bath or kitchen plumbing, or a sewage system.
The sprinklers. Karina realized. This will be just as good as pulling the fire alarm.
Karina quickly identified each individual sprinkler head, easily hundreds throughout the entire building, and with a pulse of power, froze.
"Gaaaaagh!" Kotetsu tumbled around the giant, empty expanse of Barnaby's apartment floor, still clutching his chosen knife. "Dammit, Bunny, hurry up and get home!"
He was so freaking bored! He wanted to run and jump and scream and punch something and pull his hair out and run through a wall and cry and do a hundred cartwheels and climb a building and cut up more stuff and lift a train over his head and throw this chair out that window and tear the whole building apart and kill Bunny! He had been sitting here—and lying here, and squirming here, and rolling here—for hours and Barnaby still hadn't shown up! He got so bored he even ate all the half-mashed slices of oatmeal cream cookie sandwich, the entire box, and the sugar rush pulsed through his body like liquid cactus needles on fire.
"SOMETHING HAPPEN ALREADY!" he screamed.
And something did—freezing cold water burst from the ceiling, torrential rain drenching everything in sight. Kotetsu shouted in surprised and threw his hands over his head, but the water soaked him to the bone in seconds. He squinted through the water at the source—the sprinkler system. Did that mean the building was on fire? Shouldn't the fire alarm have gone off first?
Then Kotetsu heard people from the units above and below him scream, and decided that fire or no fire, everyone needed to evacuate. But as he stood in the doorway, he looked back at Barnaby's apartment one last time. His partner had so few possessions. Kotetsu knew he only kept the things that were truly precious to him, things that would crush him if they were lost.
Just a second kill Bunny... He stepped back inside.
The three heroes outside watched the stream of soaked residents as they evacuated the building, lots of people ready for bed, a few people still in their day clothes, and one poor couple dressed only in soaked, hastily-grabbed bath towels. Karina tried her best not to look in their direction. How was she supposed to know what she might have been interrupting? She could only see the water in the pipes, not the people in the rooms.
"Do you guys see Tiger?" Pao Lin jumped, trying to see over the heads of the people in the crowd.
"Not yet," Antonio reported. The sunglasses really impaired his vision, but he couldn't remove them.
The throngs grew larger, and the heroes shoved their way closer to the exit, searching for the man with the cat-shaped beard.
"I see him!" Antonio reported. "He's limping!"
Karina's heart stopped. Had she injured Kotetsu when she broke the pipes? Was it her fault that he was in pain? Oh, Tiger, I never meant to hurt you!
The crowd shifted, and Karina got a clear view of Kotetsu… carrying a small girl in a nightgown with a slightly bloody skirt. He set her down and patted her head, and an elderly woman next to Kotetsu smiled and shook his hand. Kotetsu tried to wave her attention away, 'It was nothing' on his lips. The little girl took the old woman's hand and left as Kotetsu walked the other direction, absolutely limp-free, though still sopping wet, like everyone else in the crowd.
"Tiger!" Karina called out to him, and he turned to look in her direction.
"Blue Rose?" he frowned. "What are you doing here?"
"That's not important!" Karina grabbed Pao Lin's hand and dragged her toward the bearded hero. Antonio cleared his own path behind them.
"You guys, why are you wearing sunglasses at night?" He pointed to the shades. "I might not always know what's cool, but those look stupid."
"That's not important either!" Karina cried. "Tiger, who was that girl? Why was she bleeding?"
"Oh, they live two floors below Bunny. Mrs. Betty, and her granddaughter Ellen. Ellen tripped and scraped her knee somewhere around floor sixty-two, so I carried her down."
Karina looked after the girl and grandmother. Always the hero, Tiger.
"They're really nice people," Kotetsu continued. "And I even saved this!"
He held up a small toy, a pill-shaped body with stick-like arms and legs and big yellow eyes.
"That's Barnaby's!" Pao Lin recognized the little robot.
"Yeah, I wasn't sure just how waterproof this little guy was," Kotetsu explained, turning it about in his hands. "I know Bunny let Sam play with it when we were babysitting, but the water was really strong. Bunny'd be crushed if it got destroyed."
"That's nice of you," Antonio said, a little sarcastically.
"Isn't it?" Kotetsu failed to pick up on his friend's cynicism. "So I can call Bunny, tell him I've got his toy, and then I can kill him!"
Out of nowhere, Kotetsu produced a long, sharp knife. It flashed in the lowlight, and the heroes jumped back, except for Pao Lin, who jumped forward. She placed both her hands on Kotetsu's chest and shocked him, sparks arcing across his chest. He cried aloud, spasmed with electric charge, and after a second, collapsed, both the knife and toy falling out of his hands, steaming slightly as the water evaporated off of his electrified body.
"Dragon Kid!" Karina exclaimed.
People turned to look, attracted by the flash of lightning, the scream, the mention of a hero's name, or a combination of the three, but Antonio scooped up Kotetsu and threw him over his shoulder for the second time in two nights, calling some excuse about fainting to the crowd. They parted and let him pass, a few people offering to call an ambulance, though Antonio waved them away. Karina gathered up the knife and toy robot and followed him, Pao Lin trailing behind, ashamed and chewing on her thumb.
"Sorry," she squeaked. "I saw the knife, and I got scared! It was a reflex!"
"It's fine," Antonio reassured her. "If the other civilians saw the knife, they'd panic. You stopped this from turning into a riot."
Pao Lin smiled a little, and they navigated their way out of the crowd and to a shadowed awning. Antonio set Kotetsu down and the three heroes breathed a sigh of relief.
"So what are we going to do now?" Karina asked. Antonio gestured for her to give him the knife.
"We've got to get Tiger home," Antonio said, taking the knife and glowing blue, before repeatedly slashing it against his impenetrable skin. Unable to cut him, the blade quickly blunted into a harmless metal stick. "We can't watch him twenty-four seven, and our companies won't understand if we lose any more time. If we tell them the truth, it might get back to Barnaby. We need a place we can keep Tiger that he can't escape."
"Like a prison cell?" Karina asked. "But how do you lock up a guy who can make himself a hundred times stronger and faster and ten billion other things?"
"I thought you'd know. You're a dominatrix."
"I'm not! I only play one for Hero TV!" Karina insisted. "But no matter what we do, he'll just break out!"
"We have to try," Antonio said. "It doesn't have to hold him forever, just keep him from going into work the next day." He turned to Pao Lin. "How long will he be out for?"
"It was only meant to be an hour or two, but I forgot about the water…" Pao Lin admitted. "So probably all night."
Antonio nodded, then picked up Kotetsu again and started walking away. "Come on, Team Two! We've got until dawn to build a Tiger trap."
The two girls trotted after him, Karina carrying the useless knife as Pao Lin examined the toy robot for signs of damage, water or electrical, when it occurred to her.
"Hey, guys, if we weren't heroes, we'd make a pretty awesome gang of thieves," she said, wiggling the robot at her companions, who both rolled their eyes, though she couldn't tell behind the sunglasses.