IV
The Eco-Activist strode the floor of the bank, weaving around the people—employee and patron alike—ensnared by his vines. Dr. Robotico would probably be upset that he'd acted on his own without his approval. Or that he'd found the technological defilement on his person that Robotico used to track him, and had removed it.
Well, screw the Doc, the Eco-Activist thought. Robotico wasn't his boss, and the Eco-Activist certainly didn't owe him any allegiance. If there was anyone who deserved any kind of appreciation, it was Lord Recluse for busting him out of the Zig in the first place. He didn't know why he'd allied himself with Robotico except for the promise of fighting one of Corporate America's biggest companies.
Robotico, despite the hard armor he wore, was too soft. No one affiliated in any way to Corporate America deserved mercy.
"You are all guilty," the Eco-Activist lectured to his hostages. "Guilty of crimes against the Earth. The money handled by this bank is used by corporations to fund the ruination of the planet's natural order. All of you in here—each and every one of you—uses the money you store here to purchase merchandise manufactured by those same corporations. You are all guilty of crimes against the Earth."
"You hypocrite," an older man snapped. "That spandex outfit you're wearing is probably made of artificial fibers. Polymers. Plastics, which are an oil-based product."
The Eco-Activist leveled his hard gaze on the speaker. "My clothes are formed of natural, living plant matter. We have a symbiotic relationship." He held up a fist, and a large spike of plant matter extended from his glove. "Would you like to test the symbiosis?"
The man shook his head.
The Eco-Activist retracted his spike. "Fine. Then keep quiet."
He strolled among the people, and he stopped before an attractive woman wearing a tank top whose arms were pinned at her side. He pulled at the neckline of her top for a quick peak down, then continued his stroll. He walked around the lobby, maintaining his air of menacing authority.
"All right, can someone tell me where the vault is?" he asked.
No one spoke. He extended the spike from his glove and placed the point at the throat of a woman standing next to her young son.
"Anyone?" he demanded.
A middle-aged man jerked his head toward the opening of a hallway that led toward the back of the bank. "Down that way."
The Eco-Activist retracted his spike. "Thank you."
He headed down the hallway and found the vault. He examined the vault door for a moment, then extended spikes from both gloves. He coalesced the cellular structure of the spikes to diamond hardness and set to work on pounding the door.
---
When the call had come over the police scanner that a super-powered criminal with the ability to control plants had taken hostages in a bank in Atlas Park, Dave knew exactly where the Eco-Activist had disappeared to after removing the tracking beacon. He hadn't been surprised by the green villain's actions. In fact, he had fully expected the Eco-Activist to eventually act on his own. The plant master had his own agenda, as did Dave.
The Eco-Activist was predictable, however. Like any hippy, as much as he preached against the trappings of capitalist society, he still needed money. And a bank not only held lots of cash, but it was—in the Activist's mind—a symbol of Corporate America's greed. So Dave waited for the Eco-Activist to do exactly what was expected.
Dave also knew that Ben and his Liberty Brigade would be drawn to the Eco-Activist's activities due to the fact that Dave and the Activist were accomplices in the destruction of the Crey mutagens in that armored truck.
Ben had succeeded in creating a firewall to block Dave's hacking of the Brigade headquarters mainframe and, by extension, his tapping into their comms network. It wouldn't take long for Dave to breach that firewall, but in the meantime he used police scanners to learn the information he needed. And when the on-scene commander at the robbery reported the arrival of the American Crusader and Miss Michigan, Dave knew that the Liberty Brigade's attention was on the Eco-Activist.
Dave stood on a rooftop in the Galaxy City district overlooking the nondescript building below the Chris Jenkins, Attorney at Law billboard. Unbeknownst to most citizens of Paragon City, Crey Biotech operated a lab there. The lab where Dave's project team worked. Where Dave had maintained the high-speed AI computer necessary for the work conducted therein.
It was here where Dave's life changed forever.
He set his robots to work. Encapsulated in Sonny's force field bubbles, Hal and Joshua opened fire on the building's main doors. Breaching the security doors, which were disguised as typical shopfront doors, the drones entered.
Dave leaped into the air and descended to the sidewalk before the facade. He strolled through the breach and encountered a pair of Crey's costumed super-powered clones, the Paragon Protectors, lying slumped to the floor at the drones' feet.
He could almost laugh at the name. Protectors? Ha! They were Crey's private army of super thugs. Perversions of life.
He ordered his battle drones to take the lead, and they headed down the hallway toward Dave's old lab. He unlimbered his rifle and ensured it was set to stun.
A woman in a lab coat rounded a corner, and she shrieked in surprise when she saw the intruder in the red and blue armor. Dave fired a stun pulse into her, and she slumped to the floor.
He found his old lab and entered his pass code into the keypad beside the security door. Access was denied, indicating the project head had indeed changed the code. It was worth a try.
His drones opened fire on the metal door, blasting it open.
Three technicians in lab coats coughed as smoke filled the room, and before they could recover Dave stunned them with pulses from his rifle.
Crey was so adamant about maintaining the compartmentalization of the overall project that this lab's mainframe would be isolated from the other parts of the project. It was also isolated from Crey's central mainframe. There would be no sharing of data until all parts of the project had completed their portions.
Dave unspooled a connector cable from the forearm of his armor and connected it to the lab's main terminal. He flipped open the protective cover of his keypad and initiated his hacking program. Once connected to the lab's memory core, he downloaded a virus that would wipe all stored data in the mainframe.
He disconnected and left the chamber. He encountered a pair of Paragon protectors. Resetting his rifle to kill, he fired a pulse that transfixed the clone on the right, piercing its heart.
The other clone discharged an electrical blast from its fists, and Dave's drones interposed themselves to take the arcs with their shielded bodies.
Dave fired, and his pulse went clear through the clone's head. It dropped to the floor beside its slain partner.
Perversions, Dave thought as he stepped over the fallen clones. He arrived at the data backup storage room, and without even attempting to enter his pass code into the keypad he ordered Hal and Joshua to blow the door down. He stepped past the wreckage and stopped just inside the room.
He and his drones opened fire, peppering the racks of backup copies with energy bursts.
Even if Crey had backups of this lab's work stored in another location, it would take some time to properly and stealthily set up another lab. Crey's project to create an all-powerful super being, incorporating all the known "archetypes" into one, had been disrupted for the time being.
He had one thing to do to ensure the complete destruction of this lab. He and his drones swept the lab complex, stunning the human occupants and destroying the Paragon Protector clones. They removed the unconscious humans from the building, and Dave set explosives around the load-bearing beams.
With a tap of a key on his forearm keypad, he detonated the explosives. The building collapsed in upon itself, throwing up clouds of dust and debris. He'd expertly set the demolitions, however, and none of the surrounding structures were harmed. Even the Chris Jenkins billboard remained intact.
---
Meanwhile, in Atlas Park, Ben and Kari touched down on the sidewalk near the perimeter set up outside the bank by the Paragon City Police Department. The heroes found the on-scene commander hunkered by a patrol car.
"Finally, some masks show up," the commander said. "We have a super-powered perp inside with several hostages."
"The Eco-Activist," Ben remarked.
"You know who he is?"
"Only that he has dominion over plants, and he was broken out of the Zig not too long ago." Ben looked into the dark eyes behind Kari's blue mask. "I'm going to do a little recon. Stay here with the police."
"Be careful," she said, carefully maintaining a professional air to her voice.
Ben leaped into the air and moved to hover above the bank. Linking with the Liberty Brigade's mainframe, he accessed the city zoning records and found the floor plans to the bank, displaying them on the miniature computer monitor attached to the forearm of his armor. Memorizing the bank's key locations, he flipped down the mini-computer's protective cover. He set his helmet's goggles to infrared and scanned inside. Most of the heat signatures inside were in the lobby. A single individual was at the vault door.
That had to be the Eco-Activist. Ben activated his communicator.
"I found the target," he said. "He's at the vault. The hostages are unattended in the main lobby."
"I'll take care of them," Kari's voice responded over the comms.
Ben somersaulted backward into a dive, and he flipped over to touch the ground feet first at one of the emergency fire exits. Like most fire exit doors, this one didn't have an exterior handle. He manipulated the electrical field of his armor to create electromagnets on the palms of his gauntlets, and he latched them onto the surface of the door to pull it open.
Once inside, he quietly moved toward the bank's main electrical distribution panel. With a sweep of his gauntleted palm, he tripped all the lighting breakers, bathing the interior of the bank in darkness.
He set his helmet goggles to night vision and headed for the vault.
He found the Eco-Activist at the vault, a spike extending from each hand, gazing upward as if he was trying to understand why the lights had gone out.
Ben opened fire with his emitters, disgorging a torrent of energy that sent the Eco-Activist flying backward. The villain slammed hard into the opposite wall.
"Well, well, well," the villain said, chuckling. "If it isn't the American Crusader, the epitome of America's rejection of the natural order, encased in that technological monstrosity bearing the colors of that despicable flag."
The Eco-Activist scrambled to his feet, but another burst from Ben's energy emitters put him back down. The green-clad villain hurled a fan of thorny missiles in Ben's direction. Ben twisted his body to evade, but diamond hard thorns still peppered him. Some deflected off his armor, but two or three pierced the hard metal and embedded themselves in Ben's flesh.
Vines punched through the cement floor and snaked up around Ben's arms and legs.
The Eco-Activist extended spikes from his gloves and punched a hole through the bank's masonry walls. Ben pulled himself free of the ensnaring vines and moved to follow, but just as he arrived at the hole created by the villain a network of vines wove themselves into a barrier to plug the opening. Ben fired his energy pulses at the vines, cutting them away, but by the time he emerged outside into the sunlight he saw no sign of the Eco-Activist.
He returned into the bank and strode to the lobby, where Kari was releasing the last of the hostages.
"He got away," Ben said simply.
Her task done, Kari moved to stand before her husband. She gasped when she saw the thorns jutting from where they'd pierced his armor. She pulled the thorns free and poured her healing power into him.
"At least the hostages are safe," he said. He activated his communicator, relaying it through the Brigade HQ's main uplink. "American Crusader to Shadow Vision."
"Vision here," Derek said a moment later.
"Are you still in DC?"
"I am, but I'll be returning to Paragon shortly."
"When you get back, could you research what is known about one Woody Lawless, a.k.a. the Eco-Activist?"
"Sure thing."
Ben deactivated his communicator. "In the meantime, I'm going to sweep the area from the air, see if I can discern where the Activist went off to."
"Not without me," Kari said.
---
The Eco-Activist arced high into the air, somersaulted at his apex, and on his descent he extended an arm. A vine shot out of his glove and latched onto the overhanging parapet of a building across the street. On the upward leg of his swing, he retracted the vine and extended his other arm. He loosed another vine, latching it onto yet another building.
He swung like this, enjoying the breeze against his face, until he was carried over the wall surrounding the perimeter of Perez Park. Arcing over the stone wall, the expanse of the park spread before him. He fired a vine at the green canopy of the thick forest.
He finally settled onto the thick bough of a massive tree, and he hunkered down to place his palms lovingly against the bark. Ever since his incarceration, even through his alliance with Dr. Robotico, he had been surrounded by steel and concrete. Finally he felt the comfort of vegetation around him. He sat at the base of the bough and leaned back against the trunk. At his command, several branches wrapped him in their embrace to keep him anchored.
He leaned his head back and slept soundly.
---
The members of the Liberty Brigade sat around the table in the conference room, all relaxing in their street clothes. Derek stood at the rostrum at the head of the room, in front of the flat screen that took up one wall. A photo of the Eco-Activist from the files of the Zig was shown on the screen.
"The Eco-Activist," Derek explained. "Born Woodrow Kismet Lawless in a commune to a pair of 1960s-era flower children. His parents have lengthy police records for numerous acts of vandalism, from trashing draft board centers to spiking the tires of logging trucks."
"What role models," Ben remarked.
"Is not dissension a right in this country?" Lyta asked. "I have taken the citizenship exam, and I remember the First Amendment's guarantee to seek redress."
"As long as it doesn't result in damage to private or public property. Some of the more radical elements of our society tend to forget that."
"So he was born to a couple of hippies," Richard said. "How did this twerp get his powers?"
"Back in 1995 he decided to hamper logging operations in the Northwest by residing in the branches of an old-growth tree," Derek explained. "He bought into the propaganda that all logging companies indiscriminately cut down old-growth trees. What he didn't realize was that the camp he targeted for disruption was run by a logging company that was actually conscientious about not cutting down old growth trees, so they harvested in another direction than where Woody Lawless had taken residence. He stayed up there for weeks without seeing one lumberjack."
"Poor guy," Richard said unsympathetically.
"He gained his powers by exposure to a magic ritual while up in that tree," Derek continued. "Apparently, another radical environmentalist group with self-described ties to the Circle of Thorns, but we can't verify the veracity of that, decided to disrupt the logging operations in their own way. By animating the trees near the logging camp."
"They went for the irony angle," Ben said. "Trees attacking the lumberjacks."
"Precisely. As Lawless lay sleeping up in his tree, the newcomers performed their ritual below him. Either they performed the wrong ritual, or they botched it, because instead of animating the trees they infused Lawless with the spirit of the plant kingdom, thus enabling him to animate plants at will."
"I know all too well the repercussions of botched magic rituals," Frost Axe said. "Magic is not something to be practiced by those who know little about it."
"It appears that Dave and the Eco-Activist have parted ways," Derek said. "While the Activist was robbing that bank, a building in the Galaxy City sector was imploded by a demolitions expert. It housed the lab where Dave used to work."
Ben jerked in his chair, and Kari laid a palm on his hand.
"When Paragon City first responders arrived on the scene," the warshade said, "there were already a team of Paragon Protectors present, ostensibly responding to the emergency. None of the lab workers were harmed, and the Paragon Protectors took them to private medical facilities for observation. City investigators found little of interest in the rubble."
"Probably because the Protectors already took everything Crey wanted them to take, including the witnesses," Ben said.
"That probably won't be the last Crey facility Dave goes after," Richard said.
"I hate to say it, but our first priority is the Eco-Activist. According to the witnesses in the bank, he threatened a couple of hostages with lethal harm. He's a threat to human life, and that takes precedence over property damage."