Inflammation 3.3
As soon as Alex's surprisingly plucky little sidekick had gone her separate way, he reflected on how his plans had changed.
Taylor had responded much better to Alex's tutelage than he'd expected. She didn't whine or ask him stupid questions like a bratty kid, and she wasn't afraid to go on the attack or get dirty like a spoiled girl.
The thing that surprised Alex the most, though, was Taylor's rate of improvement. Not just in the use of her power, but also in her combat tactics. Even as Alex further refined his hearing, olfaction, and electroreception to find her, Taylor kept getting better at escaping and coming up with new tricks to stymie him. Swarm camouflage, noise distractions, silk tripwires, even nose-blinding with stink bugs. Her advancement was drastic enough to make Alex think that he'd initially underestimated her power's untapped potential, or that he was simply a naturally talented instructor. Possibly both. Either way, he was more than satisfied with the progress they had made.
With sufficient preparation and advantageous conditions, together they were ready to engage Oni Lee and Bakuda. There was no one alive with more experience to judge that than Alex himself, given his exhaustive study of Lung's memories of Oni Lee and Bakuda, so he was highly confident. Now the problem was just finding them.
Playing hide-and-seek alongside Taylor was all well and good, but the duration was limited by Taylor's schedule, and Alex didn't like being in her presence when he was hungry. Even putting aside that he needed to be on his best mental footing and not betray any tells in order to keep his secrets, it still felt wrong to have his appetite whetted by a kid. Sure, she claimed to be seventeen, but Alex didn't believe that for a hot second, no matter how precocious she was. If Taylor was actually seventeen years old, then Alex was Mary, Queen of Scots.
It was one thing for Alex to feel insatiable hunger for human flesh. That was normal, at least for him, and he was more-or-less used to it by now. The fact that Taylor was a kid, though, just made it weird.
Of course, Alex's hunger wasn't even remotely as intense or painful as it had been before, especially after eating all that metal had done wonders for his persistent aches, but it was still bothersome. He had managed to compensate decently enough by deliberately staying upwind of Taylor while they were out searching, but he couldn't avoid her like that all the time. It just wasn't practical.
The obvious solution was to make sure he was always comfortably full while in his public-facing persona. He could hunt at night and gorge himself until he was fit to burst, then go on a long fast during the daytime and tool around town to lower any suspicions directed at him. If hundreds of millions of people could make daytime fasting work during Ramadan, it should be no problem for him.
Thus, Alex decided to kill two birds with one stone. He could scope out the city, getting a head start on tonight's hunt, while also looking for any evidence of Bakuda and Oni Lee.
The thing was, Alex was sick of simply wandering around, passively looking for opportunities. He was feeling too impatient for that.
Usually that feeling was the prelude to him making a catastrophic mistake, but the fact remained that unless he got extraordinarily lucky, he wouldn't be able to find Bakuda just by looking around at the street level. It wasn't like the mad Tinker would be advertising her activities outside.
Alex needed a way to draw out her goons from hiding, and he was tempted to go into costume as Revenant and charge around at high speed, using himself as bait, but there was no outrunning Oni Lee's teleportation, unless you were someone like Alexandria or Legend.
Without Taylor around to search the interiors of buildings, Alex really had no choice but to shake things up, and think outside the box.
Changing course to head due south, Alex went towards the ABB's border with the Empire's downtown holdings. In just a few blocks, the place grew more and more like an active war zone. It wasn't Stalingrad levels of bad, or even Fallujah levels of bad, but it was still pretty fucking bad for anything seen in the mainland United States.
The infrastructure wasn't all that different from the other poor areas of Brockton Bay—that is to say, it was appalling—but what truly made the difference were the people. Whereas in the poorest parts of the Bay you couldn't look anywhere without seeing people making some attempt at industry, even if it was just sifting through trash or selling various vices, here there was none of that. Wary eyes watched Alex from behind windows and dark corners. Few pedestrians were scurrying along, their backs hunched and looking down, giving a wide berth to everyone and everything. Others were standing in loose groups around entryways and stoops, their intention to guard unmistakable.
It was, in short, a powder keg waiting to go off.
There had to be some way to leverage this tension to bait out a useful target. Surely, if Alex wore a civilian disguise, he could escape in the general confusion without Oni Lee hunting him down if he showed up. Lee was a consummate assassin and sadistic torturer, he attacked specific targets, and didn't generally go for crowds or fleeing civilians. That kind of thing would have gotten a kill order rather than the automatic Birdcage sentence he already had, and though that might have seemed like a distinction without a difference to Alex, Lung's memories contextualized that the actual enforcement measures were of a completely different magnitude. Even so, Alex wasn't too confident he'd get away without a fight if Oni Lee actually showed up.
So, the question became, how to draw enough attention to lure out the ABB, without drawing too much attention and baiting out Oni Lee? After training with Taylor, there was one thing that came to mind.
Alex made his way up to an apartment building's roof under his bland civilian guise. He stood in the middle, took out Spencer's revolver, and fired the .357 magnum into the air.
Pain like a railroad spike shooting through one ear and out the other made Alex immediately double over, clutching his head. He swore sulfurously, unable to hear himself, but the damage was easy to fix. More importantly, how could he forget that he'd enhanced his hearing? Fucking hell. And this was afterhe'd just spent the better part of a morning teaching Taylor the ins and outs of firearms handling.
This was definitely going into the ever-growing wastebin of anecdotes Alex would never, ever tell anyone else.
Alex returned his hearing to the human norm and fired five more times, emptying the gun. It was still horrendously loud, but no longer debilitating. For good measure, he pulled out one of the fragmentation grenades he stole from the Empire safehouse, pulled the pin, and tossed it to the corner of the roof, taking shelter behind an air conditioning unit and covering his ears.
When Alex turned his hearing back up to its enhanced levels, the shouts and chaos he could hear from down below were gratifying as hell, and he made a quick exit to the neighboring roof and used it to survey the street level unnoticed. From a crouched position, he was shielded from view by the brick fascia of the building. He peeked out over the edge.
The reaction below was everything he could have hoped for.
While most of the surrounding people took cover or fled the area, three Empire-looking thugs hanging out in a stoop further down the street took out pistols. It was only a matter of less than a minute before there was the sound of a roaring engine off in the distance that heralded the arrival of a gigantic, bright red 1980s Cadillac land-yacht that Alex instantly recognized as Über and Leet's tinkertech 'pimpmobile' that they'd used in their Grand Theft Auto-themed episode. Marcus had been an avid viewer of the video game-themed villainous vloggers, and a gamer himself, so Alex quickly reviewed his memories to get a good idea of what to expect.
Leet was a highly unusual Tinker. He had no set specialty, and could build almost anything, but only once. The closer something he created got to something he already built, the higher chance it would fail, often spectacularly. He'd started out strong, using biotinkering and robotics to create video game minions, but then things started going catastrophically wrong. By the time he and the rest of the Internet had figured out the pattern, he'd already burned out his ability to do anything really useful. Now he was little more than a joke, often overshadowed by his partner, Über, who only had a weak Thinker power that let him pick up on expert techniques if he concentrated on them.
The ostentatious car seemed to defy physics as it turned on a dime to avoid other cars and obstacles, before slamming to a stop about twenty yards away from the Empire goons.
Before the Caddy had even come to a complete stop, the front doors swung open, revealing a duo dressed in badly mismatched and patchwork costumes. They immediately took cover behind the doors as the Empire thugs opened fire, which didn't seem to be affecting the car whatsoever. Even if their car and their disparate relative sizes wasn't indication enough that this was Über and Leet, the pair were decked out in gear they had used in previous jobs. Alex was both behind and above them, so he had a great vantage point to observe the fight.
Über and Leet were both outfitted with a hodgepodge of Tinkertech, with no dominant theme aside from sheer utility. It was all the best, most potent Tinkertech Leet had cooked up for all their heists, which apparently they'd been hoarding just in case the shit hit the fan. Über was wearing black-and-red sci-fi armor from Mass Effect, and his visible weaponry consisted of a new assault rifle that was modified with hasty Tinkertech additions, plus a katana sheathed at his hip. Leet was wearing an electric blue Fallout vault suit with a bandolier covered in pouches, a black hard-light projector backpack that had proven versatile enough to be used in several previous jobs, and Captain Falcon's garish red helmet. He was also carrying some kind of short, boxy weapon that looked like someone took apart an old radio and grafted it to the insides of kitchen appliances. Despite its dubious construction, the way he held it and the improvised trigger left little doubt it was some sort of gun.
"Jackpot," Alex muttered to himself, grinning slightly. Judging by their lack of matching themed costumes, Alex bet dollars to donuts that these two chucklefucks weren't here fighting Nazis of their own free will. Leet was no Squealer or Trainwreck, a Tinker that could only kludge machines together that somehow worked despite all logic. Leet manufactured his own stuff from scratch, and at least made sure his creations fit an aesthetic, so if he was forced to dig up his stash of surviving gear and improvise these two new guns to go out and fight Nazis, that meant he was under a ton of pressure.
Alex suspected it was the kind of pressure that came from having a bomb surgically implanted in one's head.
Of course, that pressure also meant Leet's new weapons were probably made for lethality rather than showiness. The bombs that were probably in their heads couldn't be discounted as a threat, either.
Alex watched as Über rushed out of cover, apparently as a distraction. The Empire thugs opened fire, and where two of their shots should have hit Über, there was a weird optical distortion that appeared around him.
"Son of a bitch," Alex swore. He had forgotten that the black armor Über was wearing had a forcefield generator built into it. It could stop small, fast-moving objects like bullets, but not slow ones, allowing him to move around and fight with it active. So much for Alex's plan to scare them back to their hidey-hole with gunfire.
As Über soaked up bullets, Leet popped up from behind the car door and fired his boxy weapon at the thugs. It flung a weird distortion in the air, too fast to track, and when it hit the side of the stoop next to the thugs, a gray-green pulse splashed out and formed an irregular, faintly glowing bubble around the thugs, about twenty feet in diameter. At first it seemed like the field didn't affect the thugs whatsoever, but it quickly became clear that they weren't moving at all, and had been stuck in place somehow. Über took aim with his modified assault rifle and fired on them. There was no visible beam or projectile whatsoever, just a sizzling noise followed by the crack of one of the thugs' guns shattering to pieces in his frozen hands, and the ripping sound of most of his shirt and jacket being shredded from his completely immobile body, blasted away as though by an enormously powerful wind.
Über repeated the trick on the other thugs, destroying their guns and taking large pits out of the brick behind them. That was a nasty weapon, and Alex highly doubted the thugs would be alive if they hadn't been frozen. It seemed like the temporal stasis field was only affecting living matter—and even the thugs' hair was evidently organic enough to qualify, though none of their clothing did.
Leet either deactivated the time-freeze gun or it ran out of juice, because in an instant the gray-green field disappeared and the thugs were suddenly moving again, considerably disoriented by their suddenly-destroyed weapons and clothes. As Über drew his katana and Leet started chucking pixelated hard-light fireball holograms to mop up the remainder of the thugs' resistance, Alex ducked back behind cover and pulled out his burner phone to give Taylor a call. She picked up in two rings.
"Hello?" she said, sounding worried. "Alex, are you—"
"No names," Alex hissed. "Change of plans. I'm on Lincoln and 6th. Found those two video game freaks. I think they're hostages too. I'll try to distract them, come quick and lie low when you get here. I want you to follow them back to their nest."
"I'm on the bus, we just passed Prescott Park. If I get off now, you're fifteen or twenty minutes away even if I run!" Taylor said urgently.
Alex swore under his breath. "Fuck it. Get here as fast as you can, but in the meantime I'll just beat the location out of them."
Before Taylor could respond, Alex hung up and looked out to see what was happening. The thugs had been defeated in record time, and were all expertly hog-tied. It was actually kind of hilarious watching them ineffectually wriggle around half-naked. He watched as Leet popped the trunk of the car and Über started dragging one of the thugs along, probably intending to kidnap them, if Lucky's description of Bakuda's methods was anything to go by.
Alex wondered if Bakuda was surveilling these two goons somehow. Sending out valuable, volatile parahumans would carry more risk, and joke or not, Über and Leet were the very definition of unpredictable hostages. Knowing the depths of Bakuda's paranoia, Leet was probably rigged to explode in at least six different ways if he so much as looked at her funny.
Ducking out of sight from the street, Alex assumed his Revenant disguise. As he fully stood from the roof, unfortunately his movement seemed to be caught by Über's peripheral vision, or perhaps something built into the tinkertech helmet visor.
Über immediately dropped the thug he was dragging, whipped around, and opened fire. Alex quickly ducked back onto the roof, putting his back to the low brick fascia.
A flash of pain across Alex's back interrupted his calculation of attack vectors. He stumbled forwards away from the low wall lining the roof, then turned to see that the brick he was taking cover behind was silently being pitted and blasted apart like it was mere styrofoam by the scattershot invisible force being thrown out by Über's gun.
Alex juked to the right and drew closer to the edge of the roof, picking up an irregular chunk of debris roughly the size of a bowling ball and digging his fingers into the brick and masonry to get a firm grip. He popped back up to lob the chunk at Über like a fastball, and was almost instantly rewarded with a searing pain along his ribs and sternum. Über's reaction time was quick.
Dropping back down the moment he hurled the piece of debris, Alex closed his wounds with a flurry of biomass, though at a noticeable loss. He shuffled further along the edge and risked peeking out from another spot on the roof, and saw that his aim had been true. Despite his force-shield, Über had been knocked clean off his feet. Red-and-gray dust from pulverized brick and mortar decorated his dented chestplate and upper arms in a starburst pattern, and the only evidence of the chunk were a few bricks strewn about like shrapnel. Alex felt a thrill of satisfaction that Über's gun was lying on the ground, the fragile added construction clearly busted by the impact. Even as Alex watched, though, Über was gingerly getting to his feet. Apparently, the armor wasn't just useless aesthetics for the forcefield generator.
Growling with frustration, Alex jumped off the roof, landing not ten feet from Über and cracking the pavement on impact.
"You're no match for us," Über proclaimed, drawing his katana with one smooth motion.
"Is that cliché supposed to be intimidating?" Alex said with a scornful laugh. "Run back to your—"
Cutting himself off when he noticed an object flying towards him from the corner of his eye, Alex instinctively jumped back, an inelegant movement that nonetheless easily covered thirty feet. The red-and-white object fell to the ground, but it was soon joined by several others, being thrown underhand by Leet from behind the car.
Glancing back to the first shape on the ground, Alex felt nonplussed when he saw that what he'd thought were grenades were actually pokéballs.
The scattered balls sequentially activated in the space of about a second, in a disorienting array of different effects. Some disgorged chimeric knockoff Pokémon with bright flashes of light, others vanished and were replaced by a monster with a loud bang of displaced air, and one seemed to dizzily unfold a monster from a shrunken-down state.
The first to emerge was a hulking bipedal alligator-man which looked like a Godzilla rip-off that had been spray-painted blue and red. The second was a child-sized goblin thing with long claws that looked like an anthropomorphic Siamese cat. The third was a three-foot-long dull yellow creature that looked like a cross between a squat, legless lizard and a wasp, with two proportionally small insect-like wings and a short, cone-shaped tail tipped with a stinger. Then, a three-headed wingless bird that looked like a cormorant crossed with an emu emerged at the same time as a bear-sized green toad with tentacles, fronds, and a massive, fleshy red flower sprouting from its back. Lastly, there came a two-foot-tall bipedal rodent that was obviously supposed to be a Pikachu, and was easily the most accurate of the bunch except for its clearly dyed hair and weirdly moist, lobed, naked tail.
Either Leet's various attempts at biotinkering hadn't taken well to however long they'd been confined, or his power's drawback had applied to the pokéballs, because the goblin-like cat-thing and the giant toad immediately keeled over, apparently dead, and the others were disoriented.
Alex recovered from his shock at the monsters' sudden appearance before any of them did, and charged forward to attack.
The musclebound blue freak met Alex's charge, swiping its claws at him with surprising speed. He took the blow and was nearly staggered off his feet, but he regained his footing and punched the thing in its mismatched jaws with a satisfying crunch. The thing's head rocked back and it gave a gurgling roar of pain, but it quickly recovered and surged forward, attempting to bear Alex to the ground. He managed to get his arms around its thick neck instead, and with a quick, violent jerk, the thing collapsed with a broken spine.
"Über, now!" Leet shouted, and before Alex could figure out what Über was supposed to be doing, Leet appeared over the long hood of the car, took aim, and fired his boxy device. Alex felt a sudden flash of disorientation as all the monsters around him suddenly shifted positions, swarming in close all around him, while Über and Leet had also shifted somewhat.
After a moment, Alex realized he'd been briefly stopped in time, but he had more immediate concerns. The three-headed bird was mostly blocking his field of view, and the fact that its long, incredibly sharp beaks were pecking at the eye-holes in his mask prevented him from noticing anything else.
Unfortunately for the monsters, Alex had just spent half the day practicing how to move and fight even while essentially blindfolded, and these monsters weren't nearly so coordinated as Taylor's bugs. Alex shielded his eyes with one arm and struck out blindly with the other, managing to catch the three-headed bird backhanded, batting it aside like a toy and sending it tumbling in a small explosion of downy brown feathers.
Alex's victory was short-lived, though, as the fake Pikachu slapped its wet, slimy tail against his leg and sent a jolt of electricity surging through his body. It burned like fire as it conducted through him, and he would have screamed, but he was rendered completely rigid by the current.
The attack lasted less than a second before the disgusting overgrown rat was spent, and finding he could move again, Alex uprooted his right foot and gave the mutant mascot a vicious kick that sent its broken body crashing into a boarded-up storefront window.
That same moment, there was a buzzing sound, and something bit down on Alex's shoulder, then repeatedly punched into his leather-clad torso with something sharp, as if it were trying to shank him in the kidneys. The sharp point didn't penetrate deep, but almost immediately, Alex started to feel the biomass making up his torso prickle and seize up where he'd been stabbed. He twisted and tried to rip the thing off of him, but it was unnaturally graceful and kept evading his hands, only to latch onto his back yet again and renew its attack. Finally, he twisted around violently enough to cause it to lose its grip, and he managed to smack it away just as it was coming back to bite again.
As his hit sent the thing tumbling away across the asphalt, Alex saw that his attacker had been the bug-snake thing. Disappointingly, the blow hadn't splattered the thing into paste—in fact, hitting it had felt like swatting aside a balloon. The creature was simply too lightweight and rubbery to get thrown with any damaging inertia. Just from the look of it, Alex surmised that his numbness was probably from some kind of venom. He stomped towards the bizarre creature, fighting through the paralysis and intensifying, prickling pain that was spreading through his biomass.
The creature was frightened by Alex's approach, its horizontally-slit pupils dilating in alarm. It scrunched up its body and leaped, its undersized wings beating frantically like a startled chicken. It quickly ran out of altitude and landed on a patch of weeds and dead hedges that used to be a small landscaped area in front of a store. Wriggling rapidly, it used its blunt snout to dig into the loose dirt and used its tail to fling the excess soil away. Within seconds, it had burrowed down out of sight.
Nonplussed, Alex looked over to the three-headed demon-emu, but it, too, had given up on fighting. It hopped to its feet like an acrobat and ran away, two of its three heads hanging limp and bleeding. Alex could barely move anymore at that point, though, so pursuit was out of the question. Thinking frantically, he recalled that swallowing snake venom wasn't dangerous, only blood contact, so he tried consuming and reforming the parts of his body that were going numb. The paralysis vanished almost instantly, and surprisingly Alex had gained a new template as well, which he filed away in his mind for later examination.
Turning his attention back to Über and Leet, who hadn't moved from before, Alex paused in confusion at what he saw.
Über and Leet had both removed their helmets, revealing their true faces to the world. Über had squarish features and short, straight brown hair, while Leet was rat-faced with a weak chin and curly black hair, and both of their expressions were twisted up in agony. Alex noticed something was odd about the way they were standing—they were holding their heads stock-still as if an invisible vice was clamped down on them. Über had taken his katana and was holding it by the blade behind his neck, the tip of the sword pointed towards him like he was about to plunge it into his own skull.
"Hurry!" Leet said, the words escaping him like a last gasp.
With a muffled cry of pain, Über brought the blade down on his own neck and wrenched his head forward, leaving a bloody thing roughly the size and shape of a battery suspended in a tiny yellowish-gray time-stop bubble in the air behind him.
Alex was too surprised to take advantage of the opening. With a start, he realized what they were doing—Leet had somehow reversed the Manton Effect limitation on his pistol-thing and frozen the bombs in their heads just like Clockblocker could freeze objects with a touch, and he was having Über cut them free.
Knowing Leet's unreliable technology and Clockblocker's unpredictable freezing duration, though, Alex decided to back up while the two geeks extricated themselves.
Über ran behind Leet, who was still holding his weird gun, which was starting to emit white smoke. Without so much as wiping off the blood from the katana blade, Über used it to cut into Leet's neck like a scalpel.
Leet screamed, and fell free of the bomb a moment later. Über dropped the katana and grabbed his scrawny friend's arm in one hand and scooped his helmet off the ground with the other, then he practically hauled Leet away, both of them breaking into a sprint to escape the bombs.
"Stop right there," Alex spat, running to intercept them. He got ahead of them easily, and turned to face them as they stopped running from the bombs.
"You're done. Surrender before I start removing body parts," Alex said, readying himself to pounce on them if they made a move.
"Dude, what the fuck!? We never wanted to fight, we had bombs stuck in our heads, do you not see them!?" Leet shouted, gesturing back down the street before gingerly putting his red-and-gold helmet back on.
"I know what Bakuda did. As hilarious as it is that you actually managed to out-Tinker that arrogant cunt right under her nose, I'm not going to let you get away. Where is she?" Alex demanded.
"Wait, whose side are you on?" Über asked, stepping in front of Leet protectively, putting on his own helmet and re-sealing it with a click and a hiss of air.
"I'm Revenant, a rogue, and I won't hesitate to—" Alex began, but was cut off by a fizzling spark of the smoking gun in Leet's hand, followed by the disappearance of the yellowish bubble and immediate detonation of both bombs.
They were all standing well outside of the blast radius, but one of the bombs had sent out an icy chill that affected the width of the entire street. Near the epicenter, frozen water vapor in the air sparkled as it drifted down and melted into a haze of fog, the four corpses of Leet's biotinkered monsters were half-frozen, and the Cadillac was covered in frost. The Empire thug Über had been dragging towards the car had one side covered in delicate hoarfrost, and was making a pained, keening sound like a teakettle.
Whatever the other bomb had done, it was only marginally less spectacular than the ice bomb. A circle of asphalt where Über had been standing that had turned a sickly off-white color, seemingly unaffected by the ice, and where the circle intersected a light pole and the front third of their Cadillac, they had changed color to darker hues and slumped into a half-melted taffy-textured mass like something out of a Salvador Dali painting.
"Bakuda knows we slipped the leash," Über said quickly. "She'll have sent Oni Lee after us when the bombs went off."
"Shit. All right, truce for now, get moving!" Alex said, stepping aside.
Leet dropped the gun and they all started running again.
"We'll take a car!" Über said, diverting to the nearest car parked down the street, an old green Nissan sedan.
"I can—" Leet started, but Über interrupted him by raising his armored fist and punching out the driver's side window, then popping the door lock from inside. The alarm went off, but the door opened.
"That works too," Leet muttered.
Über leaned inside and wrenched out the wiring harness beneath the steering wheel. A few seconds of fiddling later, the alarm cut out, and few seconds after that, the engine started up.
As Über was starting the car, Leet ran around to take the passenger seat, while Alex got into the backseat. The car listed far to the side as he stepped in, its suspension squeaking in protest. He settled into the middle seat, trying to distribute the weight more evenly, inwardly cursing himself for forgetting to hide his unusual mass better. Too late now.
The front tires chirped as the car slowly lurched forwards. Über expertly rowed through the gears of the manual transmission to get them out of there as fast as possible, but the small engine was straining to compensate for the vehicle's load.
"What the hell? Can't you focus on driving this car any faster!?" Leet said to Über.
"I'm trying! There must be something heavy in the trunk. Any sign of Oni Lee?" Über asked, sounding uncharacteristically terrified even as he managed the car's wallowing understeer during a high-speed turn onto a side street.
Leet lowered his window and stuck his head out, turning it gingerly while his hand cupped his bleeding neck.
"No, I think we got away clean," Leet said, pulling his head back into the car. He looked back at Alex and added, "Mostly clean. What the hell is wrong with you, Revenant? Why did you attack us if you already knew we were fighting because Bakuda made us do it?"
"Nobody made you shoot me on sight," snarled Alex.
"Oh, well, excuse me for thinking a guy dressed like that, who was hanging around the armed Nazis, was an Empire Eighty-Eight cape!" Über said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "What do you want from us, anyway?"
"I was trying to get you two to run away so I could track you back to Bakuda," Alex said.
"Well, sucks to be you, because she didn't keep us at her hideout," Leet said sourly. "She got one of our henchmen to turn on us, attacked us at our hideout, destroyed my last robots, stole the rest of my tools, and rigged us to blow right then and there! Then she parked us in front of a webcam and used the computer to give us our marching orders."
"So you don't even know where she is?" Alex said, feeling his anger spike. He'd been hoping parahumans warranted a closer eye than low-level goons like Lucky, but apparently Bakuda had a solution for that, too.
"Yeah, so your dumb plan wouldn't have worked," Leet sneered.
Alex ignored the insult and got out his cell phone, opening his text messages and sending a new one to Taylor.
I have them both in hand, we're in a green sedan. Where are you?
Not long after, she sent a reply.
Just past the north gate of Prescott Park
Alex typed out a quick response.
change of plans. Stay there. I'm coming to you. Dress appropriately and call it in.
"Über, drive us to the north gate of Prescott Park." Alex demanded.
"Okay, but before you do anything rash, I'd like to point out that we want Bakuda dead too," Über said, his voice growing calm and assured. "Leet and I are free now, so there's no reason we shouldn't help each other."
Alex looked up from his phone and frowned behind his mask. Über was driving a lot more conservatively now, which meant he was putting his power's focus elsewhere. "Using your power to try your hand at diplomacy, huh? Don't bother, I know you'll double-cross me at the first opportunity. You two aren't slaves anymore, you should just take that as a win. I really couldn't care less what happens to you, but maybe if you come with me and surrender willingly, they won't count it as strike three and put you in the Birdcage."
"We aren't on our third strike yet," Leet said snidely.
"What, does attempted murder, kidnapping, and grand theft auto not count? The felony, not the game," Alex shot back.
"You stood aside and let us steal this car! That's a crime too! Plus you killed my Pikachu and Über's Feraligatr, that's animal cruelty!" Leet argued.
"And you two get off on beating up prostitutes, so don't act all high and mighty." Alex said with a rude, dismissive wave.
"Just for the record, we were only robbing the ABB, including their hookers, and one of them fought back. We get no end of grief for winning that fight, but losing it would have been even worse for our reputation," Über said resignedly.
"Yeah. No matter what else you do, if you fuck one little goat, then you get labeled a goatfucker for life," grumbled Leet.
"Spare me your excuses. Besides, you were the ones who let those last two chimeras escape out into the wild. If they start breeding, the PRT Director will skin you alive." Alex scoffed.
"Look, asshole, you're not the only one that's watched Jurassic Park. I avoided even the possibility of them changing sex and breeding because I only ever made one of each," Leet countered.
Alex could hardly believe his ears. His mind tried to process the sheer ignorance behind that statement and blew a gasket somewhere along the way. A bitter envy started seething inside of him at the sheer injustice that manipulating genetics came so easily to this entitled, ignorant, pissant little Tinker, despite his mastery being entirely unearned.
Alex worked to unclench his jaw long enough to bite words out. "Did you even realize that at least half of the monsters you made had parts of organisms that can possibly reproduce by themselves?"
"What are you talking about? I didn't use anything weird like that, just whatever samples of normal animals I could find," Leet said defensively.
"It's called parthenogenesis, you fucking moron! There are common kinds of frogs, lizards, snakes, bugs, and even birds that don't need a male in order to breed, to say nothing of that plant-thing self-pollinating and dropping seeds," Alex said, counting off his points on his fingers.
"I never noticed Venusaur dropping any seeds or anything like that," Über said reasonably.
Shaking his head, Alex hid his jealousy beneath a layer of hostile contempt. "Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't. What about that snake-bug-thing that ran away? What the hell was that even made from?"
Leet shifted to the side to glare at Alex without straining his injured neck. "You mean Über's Dunsparce? I made it from a wasp and a garden snake I found in my backyard, plus some pigeon to fill in gaps in the internal anatomy. There were little bits of dog and human DNA in it too, same as all the rest, to make them smarter and want to follow orders. There was nothing that can make any seeds or spores or buds or whatever."
"What kind of garden snake? Do you mean a garter snake?" Alex demanded.
"No, it was one of those tiny little black ones that looks kind of like a worm. What's the big deal?" Leet said, narrowing his eyes in irritation.
"The big deal is that you used a threadsnake, you fucking idiot! They're invasive, they live underground practically everywhere, and the females can reproduce asexually! And do you even know how wasps breed? They paralyze a host, drag it underground, lay eggs in it, and then their larvae eat it alive, saving the vital organs for last!" Alex said, smacking the back of Leet's headrest and making him jump in surprise, then wince in pain as his neck wound was jostled by the sudden movement.
"Hax never did that! He's my pet. He's such a sweet little dude—or she, whatever. Maybe Boss might've hurt someone, but you killed him..." Über trailed off, his voice cracking a little as a hint of his true shellshock and grief got past his power's shallow façade of diplomacy.
"I told you not to get too attached to them," Leet sighed. "Besides, this douchebag doesn't know what he's talking about. He can't know if Hax is male or female."
"It stung me, and only female wasps have stingers," Alex said, clenching his fists to keep his hands from crushing the smug little twit's skull of their own accord. "Tell me, how many chromosomes does it have? Is it haploid, diploid—or, God forbid, triploid?"
Leet's frustration finally boiled over. "Enough! Holy fuck, man, who the hell cares? How do you even know all this shit off the top of your head? Are you a veterinarian or something? Does your TV only get the Animal Planet channel? Why won't you just shut up about the fucking chromosomes!?" he ranted.
"This is the most basic genetics! If you don't even know why that matters, then how the fuck did you think you were qualified to engineer these things in the first place!?" Alex said furiously. Leet had blown a priceless opportunity to create new forms of life on fucking video game monsters. The sheer waste of it all made Alex feel physically ill. Clenching his fists wasn't working anymore, his hands were shaking from sheer outrage.
Leet opened his mouth to argue back, but Über, perhaps sensing Alex's increasingly murderous mood, interrupted him. "Come on, Leet, don't let him get to you. Revenant, this argument is pointless, it's really hit or miss if a Tinker fully understands what it is they're building."
Alex slumped back in his seat. "You know what? Fuck it. Dealing with whatever horrors you two idiots unleash on the world isn't my goddamn problem. I hope you two enjoy being a villain's target practice or prison bitch, because there sure as fuck aren't any video games in the Birdcage."
"Please," Über said, the single word filled with a freight of emotion—it was as if he was badly overacting sadness, honesty, and humility. "If we got sent to the Birdcage, it would be a death sentence. You know that. Sure we fought you by mistake, but we were under duress! Do you honestly believe we deserve to die for that? After everything we've already been through?"
"I told you to knock it off with the sappy bullshit," Alex said. He paused, then leaned closer, smiling with malicious glee behind his mask as he taunted them. "Maybe the whole 'inescapable prison' thing is a lie, you ever think about that? Maybe it's just a fancy Tinkertech execution chamber—it's not like anyone would be able to tell the difference, since there's no communication or parole. The government's done far worse without a second thought. Hell, it's what I would do."
"You're a sadist," Leet said disgustedly. Über made an unsubtle quelling gesture at him.
"Maybe we can work something else out? You're a merc, so you wouldn't mind taking payment in exchange for letting us go, right?" Über said with affected casualness.
"Now that's more like it," Alex said with a humorless laugh. "Christ, took you long enough to figure it out, even after I told you I'm a rogue. If you want to make a deal in exchange for your freedom, then give me your best offer."
"Bakuda stole most of our cash and stuff, but we can still scrape up a few hundred dollars at least," Leet said grudgingly. "Give us a few days and we can get much more. Plus we can offer tech and services."
Alex's interest piqued at that, but he didn't take the bait. "Not good enough. I'm already on the clock working with the heroes anyway. You can't beat their offer, not after counting the intangible benefits bringing you in will provide, such as the cred it will buy me with the heroes, and the sheer joy of watching you two getting hauled off to die in the Birdcage."
"No one in their right mind would actually believe you're one of the good guys just because you turned us in," Über said vehemently, dropping his diplomatic techniques.
Alex laughed mockingly. "Are you joking? Of course they'll think I'm one of the good guys. Nobody thinks it's weird that the 'great hero' Dragon runs that fucking charnel house they call a prison, because it's only the bad guys getting their comeuppance, and the alternative is more villains and monsters running around. I don't have to convince anyone I'm nice and friendly, I just have to convince them I'm on their side."
Leet's lip curled in disdain. "Jesus. If anyone here belongs in the Birdcage, it's you."
Alex rolled his eyes, and in the process caught sight of their destination just down the road. He could even see Bug in costume, waiting by the gate. "Whatever. We're at the park. Pull over right there, Über, and if you try anything with the car I'll snap your collarbones like twigs."
Über didn't reply, but did as he was told, parking across the street from where Bug was standing.
"Get out of the car and we'll go meet my apprentice. Nice and slow." Alex ordered, opening the door on the driver's side and getting out as they did the same.
Leet and Über exchanged a nod across the roof of the car, and then Leet tossed Über a silver cylinder.
"Run!" Über shouted, and with a tinny pre-recorded sound effect, he activated the red lightsaber and slashed out at Alex.
A/N
This was a fun chapter to write. I think I might have gone a bit overboard with the video game-themed Easter eggs, though, and coming from me that's really saying something. Suffice it to say, Leet's biotinkered creations are all made from organisms you can find in a typical New Hampshire city, and although their aesthetics are a bit wonky, their actual abilities are quite apropos to their source material.
In this chapter, we also learn that Alex really hates it when people do genetic engineering better than him without even really trying. Also, he's not entirely accurate with some of the offhand comments about certain animals' biology, but his points remain essentially correct. Give him a break, he's a virologist, not an entomologist or herpetologist.