Disclaimer: "Megamind" is owned by Dreamworks. I am not profiting from this fanfiction.

Syphon

Part IV

It took almost half a day for Megamind to shake of Syphon's effects. Whatever her touch had done had worn off quickly, but the damage done by her voice had been far more disastrous. Tests via electronics he'd constructed checked him again and again, finding no permanent damage. She'd practically paralyzed him, and yet he was recovering without trouble.

. . .Physically.

During the four months he'd been the city's hero, no supervillains had shown up. One or two had threatened the city, but those were empty threats, until Syphon had appeared. And when word spread of what she'd been able to do to him, there would be no stopping the attacks on the city.

Which is why he set to work on defenses so quickly. Within a day he had new plans sketched out for a workable force field generator, designed to make a dome around the city once about three hundred had been set up. It would prevent entrance or exits - which means that if he saw a supervillain threat from outside and activated it, none would be able to get inside to do harm.

That would give him at least enough time to work out how to deal with the aforementioned supervillain.

On the flip side, it would also contain any threat already in the city. It wouldn't be as easy to put together a plan on that kind of timetable, but it would keep the devastation from spreading.

Once she'd warned-slash-asked for help from Music Man, Roxanne had returned to the lair and thus far only left to give the latest report. Her report included a warning to immediately use ear plugs should Syphon be spotted.

Minion, who'd also been affected by her voice, was working up sketches for a sound dampener, something to battle her voice. Battling her touch was easier; just be shielded. But one thing at a time, he told himself. Syphon had promised to return, but who knew when that would be?

For now, both he and Minion had a job to do, and Roxanne - while restless - was keeping calm and helping in whatever way she could. Which, mainly, was brainstorming. She had a very quick mind, which he admittedly admired. She put it to work trying to figure out Syphon, and given everything Megamind had told her (which was every detail, every word; his faultless memory provided all), she'd come to a conclusion.

"It's more than just wanting to be a supervillain pal," Roxanne had explained. "She must have been obsessed with you."

"Obsessed?" he'd echoed, shocked. No one had ever shown him real positive feedback before, besides the criminals who'd raised him, and Roxanne - and recently, the public.

"Enamored, even. It sounds like she thought she was in love with you," Roxanne clarified.

That one left him stunned, and even Minion gasped in shock. For a moment, all he could remember was his conclusion that she'd tried to seduce him on that tower. A part of him (against his will) began wondering what life would've been like, had he met her before Metro Man's faked death. If he'd accepted her bid to be a partner.

Then Roxanne's pinched expression hit home, and he started to laugh.

"What?" she'd demanded, angry. "What's so funny?"

"You're jee-lus," he'd snickered, pointing at her. He couldn't help it; she was being possessive of him. Which, he admitted, felt damn nice.

She'd frowned, then all but tackled him, she threw herself at him so hard. "That girl may have thought she loved you, but I know what it really feels like," she'd bit out, refusing to look in his eyes but also refusing to let go. "Besides, of course I'd be jealous. You're one of a kind, and you're mine."

That last part was murmured, but her years of practice behind a camera made her words come out crystal clear despite it. With a warming bloom going through him, he'd hugged her close, holding tight. It felt good to be wanted, to be accepted, appreciated. . .and especially loved.

Which was precisely why the next project awaiting his attention was another dehydration gun, one smaller and easier for Roxanne to handle, but hopefully just as powerful. Then maybe a few more trinkets. . .a portable deflector shield of some sort. . .yes, that sounded good. . .

The following morning, as they were all busy working, Roxanne's cell beeped as a text arrived. She put aside the white pen and ruler she'd been using (Megamind discovered she was very handy with blueprints and had put her to work reconciling measurements) and flipped open her phone.

He only spared her a glance before getting back to work.

Until he heard her sharp inhalation.

"What is it?" he demanded at once, watching her as she hurriedly texted back.

"Music Man. Said Syphon paid him a visit," she ground out.

Jealousy seared him then - against his will, always against his will - at the thought that his Roxanne was texting his once-rival. They were never a couple, he reminded himself as he bit his lip on a retort. He's not her type, she's with you.

"Did she do any damage?" he asked now.

She shook her head. "I don't know. I just asked." She glanced up, meeting his gaze with concern.

In a fraction of a second, Megamind relaxed. His mind had already deduced the chances of Music Man falling prey to Syphon, and determined that nothing had happened - or nothing severe, at least. If she'd tried to sap his powers, she'd have a hard time of it; Music Man had super speed and could fly. Syphon had no such capabilities. If she had sapped his powers, she wouldn't have let go as quickly as she'd released Megamind, which would inevitably result in Music Man being too weak to even text.

Logic achieved.

"He's fine," Megamind said, going back to work.

He felt Roxanne staring at him in disbelief before she replied, "How can you say that?"

Oh, right. She was very smart, and quick and sharp and a genius in her own right, but her mind still didn't move as quick as his did.

He answered, "If Syphon got a hold of him, he wouldn't be able to text."

After a moment, he heard her murmur something to herself. Then her phone beeped again and she flipped it open. "You're right," she informed him (and he smirked). "He says she spoke to him, said she'd be back in a few days, and left."

He didn't like that last part.

"So who do you suppose is going to be visited by her first?" Minion wondered aloud, knowing where his thoughts would lead. "You, or him?"

Within a split second, he had his answer. "Him. Before she comes after me, she's going to want his powers."

That was when he heard Roxanne begin texting again, likely to warn Music Man of just that. He told himself he wasn't jealous. Not the least bit. Why would he be, when all she was doing was warning his ex-rival of impending doom? Ha-ha. Texting was impersonal anyway.

And best of all, she was in his lair, not Music Man's. More than anything else, that thought calmed him down.

Minion went to walk by with an armful of rolled-up discarded blueprints, but paused to check Megamind's progress. He said, "Uh, sir?"

"Hmm?" was Megamind's noncommittal response.

". . .Why are you sketching little hearts?"

His blood seemed to freeze. He leaned back to view the blue paper from a distance, shocked. Then he scowled. The paper wasn't at all a sketch of anything mechanical or remotely scientific. Oh, a few lines were measured out with arrows and numbers declaring how long they were and at what angles.

But the rest of the paper was a mess of squiggly lines, most of them mimicking the steps of turning Syphon into a cube, zapping Metro Man/Music Man (he was shown in both outfits) with various rays, and tiny doodled hearts that danced around Roxanne's smiling face.

With a heavy sigh at a wasted sheet of paper, he rolled it up and handed it back to Minion to throw out with the others.

Getting back to work (and focusing harder than before), he missed when Roxanne stopped Minion to look at the discarded blueprint.

They continued working for several more hours, a routine made up between the three of them and the brain bots. Megamind sketched out force field generators, Minion sketched out sound dampeners, Roxanne checked over both sets of blueprints as she received them for errors, and the brain bots scouted out to retrieve and organize the necessary items to build them. It was a comfortable silence, if an uncomfortable timetable to be working under.

And then Roxanne broke the silence.

"How are you planning on fighting her?"

Asking the very same question that'd been plaguing him. That was his Roxanne.

". . .I don't know," he admitted. Dealing with her wasn't going to be easy. He couldn't fool her into leaving the way he'd done to Tighten. He couldn't dehydrate her because, like had happened before, one of her thralls would just rehydrate her. It would only make her angry.

He would have to find a way to keep her at a distance, as well as a way to block out her voice - both the charming side and the glass-shattering side. That wouldn't be easy, either. In fact, that seemed to be the main problem. One scream from her had shaken loose some of the wiring in his rocketbike, even put cracks in the metal.

In short, her voice was a lot more powerful than he'd assumed. Worse yet, he knew she hadn't unleashed a very intense scream, either. The full effect of her strongest scream might just shatter metal, too. Which meant not even his most advanced robot would be able to withstand it.

He was beginning to compare her voice to a punch from Metro Man.

And her touch was just as debilitating as her voice, only it worked quicker and had harsher effects on whoever she was touching. That pain he'd felt was something he wished he'd never have to experience again. And then to hear how she'd taken some of his memories - but which ones? The earliest, going back? Was it random? Did she only pick up on the things he was thinking about?

He remembered, just for a moment after she'd let go, that he'd been uncomprehending of what Roxanne had yelled at the woman. In hindsight, the words were, "Let him go, you harpy! I swear I'll feed you to-" That was when she'd screamed.

But at the time, the words had escaped him. He realized now that she'd managed to sap even his understanding of the English language, though that had come flooding back almost immediately once she'd released him.

"It won't be easy," he said now. "If she gets Music Man's powers. . ."

". . .You won't be able to take them back like you did to Hal," Roxanne finished.

"Look, let's not worry about this now," Minion added helpfully. "We all have work to do. . ."

"And at least a few days before we have to start worrying?" Roxanne quipped. "I think worrying is exactly what we have to be doing. Look, I'll text Music Man again, tell him to go into hiding. . ." She pulled out her cell phone and flipped it open as she spoke.

"Don't bother," Megamind told her. "She'd only find him again."

She growled. "How would she do that? How did she even find him the first time? She's never even been in the city before!"

"She must have gotten his location from my memories," he answered. He put his pen down to face her. "Remember how she mentioned that? Taking my memories?"

"She took one of you and Music Man?"

"The last time I was there was with you," Megamind reminded her. "The day we learned he was still alive. I haven't been back since. So she took the only memory I have of his lair."

"Which means she either can't control what she learns," Roxanne put together, "or she took four months' worth of your memories."

He gave a nod. "If you tell Music Man to leave, and she discovers him missing, she'll just come find us. And when she does, if we're unprepared. . . She could just go through our memories until she finds him again -"

"Providing he tells us where he's going," she interrupted.

He wished it were so simple. "Do you think she'd really believe we didn't know? You don't know what her touch felt like. How much. . .pain there was." He voice grew softer. "I don't want you to ever feel that."

Minion murmured, "Sir. . ."

Roxanne's gaze fell. But then her face hardened and she looked up. "You're not sending me away," she told him.

Caught before he could even finish the plan. He couldn't help but smile. She knew the way he thought, all right. Getting back on track, he continued, "Worse comes to worst, she'll leave you and I in too much pain to move, and would probably leave Minion as her thrall." As he spoke, a plan began forming in his mind. "She would use whatever she could to wreak havoc on the city, demanding Music Man to return."

"And, eventually, he would," she finished. "With you and I as bait, with the city under her thumb. . ."

"She's more dangerous than Hal was," he added. "Or at least, her potential for destruction is higher. And while Hal was scorned by you, she was scorned by me," he said, remembering the old phrase about women scorned.

Roxanne seemed to remember too, glaring at the table before her. "You're basically telling me that we'd be used as bait to lure Music Man back. . .so it's better to let him be the bait."

The lesser of two evils. . .

"That's what I was thinking, yes," he agreed with difficulty. "My hypothesis is that she doesn't want Music Man dead - she'd rather have him as a live battery. The worst she could do is drain him and then use his powers against us. But with luck, it'd take her a while to get used to them. Time we could spend learning to counter her powers."

"Sir," Minion began.

Roxanne cut him off. "You're going to let him be bait to save our skins?" She was getting angry.

Megamind snapped back, "I was going to send you away, somewhere safe, so I could deal with this. You demanded to stay."

"Would that have changed your plan?" she shot back.

"Sir?" Minion tried to cut in again.

"Yes, it would've!" Megamind plowed over him.

"And what would your next brilliant plan entail?" she mocked.

Ouch. "Getting Music Man a hologram watch of his own to impersonate Hal - or someone else - then teaming up to fight off Syphon!"

"Sir!" Minion snapped.

"What?" both he and Roxanne cried in unison.

Minion swam low in his bowl in a flinch, then pointed. "I think we have a problem."

Megamind followed the point to a monitor. His eyes widened when he saw what was displayed. He'd tapped into the city's security cameras - almost every last one of them - and programmed in a search for Syphon. Now that she'd been spotted, the cameras followed her.

She was strolling down the street, not a care in the world, wearing a heavy trench coat with the collar up. Her pink hair was displayed, her metal claws poking out from under the sleeves.

And she was flanked by a dozen glass-eyed humans, all watching her closely as they ambled along. One among them was dressed. . .differently.

His hair was red and short, spiked straight up and back. His clothes amounted to a t-shirt and jeans, both red and splashed with yellow flames. As he followed her, fire kept dusting off his fingers; the quicker he moved, the stronger the flames appeared.

He was a super. And he was under her power, as love-stricken as the rest surrounding her.

"Oh, no," Roxanne murmured.

Her voice snapped Megamind back to the present. He swung a sharp look on Minion, rising. "Who is that with her?" he asked, heading for the console.

"Um. . .I don't know," Minion answered, scratching his bowl. "No one I've seen before. Someone new?"

"What do you mean, someone new?" Roxanne demanded, coming to stand with Minion - she knew better than to get in Megamind's way when he started with the buttons and switches.

He half-listened as they continued talking, granting them just enough focus that he'd be able to recall everything they said later. The rest of his focus was on Syphon and her thralls.

The cameras panned back, following specifically the duo, recording them. It began taking snaps of the rest of Syphon's thrall's faces, lining them up on one monitor. The computer's drives whirred as it sifted through information, finally coming up with - and displaying - the names of the citizens with her. Then their addresses, dates of birth, occupations, and criminal history, if any.

What he saw made him catch a breath. Syphon was being methodical. Two of the men Megamind recognized from his time in the asylum for the criminally gifted, and the rest had a history there. The fiery guy with her, however, had no known record. His computer couldn't match his face.

And worse, four of the men still wore a very familiar orange jumpsuit with numbers printed on the chest. She and the new guy had sprung them from prison.

Megamind hadn't realized he hadn't included the prison's cameras in the list of ones he'd hijacked until now. And he officially felt stupid. Of course Syphon would go for inmates.

But he was still more concerned about who the red-headed flame boy was. Hastily typing, he ordered the computer to freeze-frame the boy's face, then hacked into all the major computer systems the world over, searching for a match. With his high-tech computer, it could take a few days to go through all the files available - still several times faster than any other computer.

Leaving the computer to its task, he made a quick decision to go out and confront her. He knew she wouldn't attack - she was amassing a following, while learning the streets.

Minion and Roxanne had been talking the entire time he'd been working.

"Someone. . .new," Minion explained. "Look, we could get. . .targeted if this leaks out, but. . . There was a convention. Of. . .supervillains."

". . .Convention," Roxanne echoed.

"Right. They got together twice a year, chatted, some made alliances, others. . .punished failures, that kind of thing. The only thing we ever went for was to keep Metro city as our domain - and Metro Man our target."

She sucked in a breath. "Imagine the press if I'd gotten my hands on that story. . ."

"No!" Megamind snapped without thinking. "Look, I may have always been a kind of. . .nice guy when it came to my evildoings, but a lot of the others. . .weren't. Several of them had killed eavesdroppers, people who got too close or leaked its existence. I'm sure they've heard about my switch from villain to hero by now," he added, something he'd thought about before in length, "and the only reason they haven't attacked on mess -"

"En masse," Minion corrected.

"- was because we haven't breathed a word of it. I consider the lair perfectly secure," he said, catching Roxanne's eye, "but you can't ever breathe a word of it. If they all came here to get you. . ." He couldn't even fathom the devastation that would bring, both to her and to himself. He felt he would die if she did, and without a doubt, the other villains would kill her if they heard she knew about them.

Absolute Secrecy. That was their motto. So far none of them wanted to tangle with Megamind, who'd (according to all reports) taken out Metro Man and then Tighten, a super he himself had created, by sucking his super powers right out of him.

But that wouldn't last. Eventually he'd have to start hunting, taking out each of the villains one at a time. Lucky for him, his perfect memory recorded a great deal of information on each villain, including powers, weaknesses and habits. He could bait a trap within a trap for every last one of them, render them powerless, and send them to prison for eighty-seven life sentences.

Irony felt good sometimes.

Roxanne was silent, he noticed now. She seemed to have understood his unspoken words, maybe seen the trepidation in his face. She said now, ". . .In which case, I won't be doing any breathing about them." She cocked her head and added, "Just like how I never say anything about anything that goes on in here."

Megamind exhaled a sharp breath, relief suffusing him. "Okay. Stay here," he told them both, heading off.

"You're going to confront her, aren't you?" Roxanne demanded, stepping in his path. "Did you forget what she did to you last time?"

"I never forget anything," he shot back, offended. "And she won't attack me." He went to walk around her.

She moved with him, again blocking him. "So now you're also psychic, is that it?"

He might as well have been. With his gift for reading motives and constructing plans in mere seconds, it was as good as seeing the future. "No," he answered. "But I know bad. She won't attack, because that's not why she's out. Unless I provoke her - which I won't," he added in a rush when Roxanne opened her mouth, "the most we'll do is talk."

"Talk," she repeated, arching a brow.

"Yes, talk," he agreed, moving around her at last. She let him - which disappointed him a bit, but he pushed it aside.

He admitted to himself that he wasn't immune to Syphon's voice, but somehow, he couldn't be fully swayed the way everyone else seemed to be. He and Roxanne both, he corrected himself. But how could Roxanne remain immune if Syphon was gathering humans left and right, even managing to enslave a super?

He'd originally thought he hadn't been enthralled because of his superior brain. And it may still factor in. Yet now he began viewing things differently. Even Minion had been swayed by her voice. So what did he and Roxanne have that the rest of the city didn't?

Love?

A part of him wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the idea. Not that he doubted he and Roxanne loved each other; there was no doubt of that. But how could a feeling - albeit one he believed was stronger than any other he'd ever felt - possibly have fought off her mystical voice? The only answer he could come up with was that it wasn't love at all; it was his reactions to it.

Having Roxanne around kept him focused on her. . .most of the time. So maybe it was the focus that battled Syphon's power. Maybe it was focus her voice relied on. Complete focus of the victim on her voice. If that were so, then would distracting her thralls free them?

It was worth a shot, he supposed.

No getting too close to her this time. He began a list of her abilities, what she could and couldn't do. She could yell and sing and take a seventy-story fall - with a passenger - but she couldn't fly.

. . .And she couldn't see through illusions either.

He called a dozen brain bots to him as he went for his recently-repaired rocketbike, giving orders. A part of him was beginning to view this confrontation as fun. Which, he supposed, could go either good or bad in the end.

No matter what, though, he promised himself he was going to ferret out answers from her.