"Sir I don't mean to alarm you, but you have approximately forty-five seconds until you become a black child in the capture of a number of superhuman klansmen."
The words - from Merlin of course - came to me with a shocking sensation of coldness, as though someone had just dumped ice water down my spine. It was jarring and I would have rocketed upright to try and stave it off but I found myself incapable of moving.
Which… is something I should really be panicking more about. Hm. I could perfectly remember being captured so it didn't feel like I was suffering from memory issues or a concussion so why-
"I have temporarily blocked your motor control and panic responses - so that you do not alert your captors to your consciousness. Thirty-two seconds remain." Merlin explained diligently before appending the count down to my doom to his statement.
Well. The fact that he could even do that with my emotions was kind of disturbing, but it was hard to argue the point at present so I'd let it go I guess. Taking stock of where I was, I realized that I was in the back of a panel van, not wearing my armour. Instead, I was laying with my back pressed against the cold metal floor of the van with nothing but my boxers to provide me coverage. I was also chained to the ground I was laying on by several large bundles of iron chain - which I found mildly distressing on several levels.
Belatedly, I also realized that my left hand didn't have my Spell Core on it either, which confused the shit out of me until I remembered that Polymorph absorbed small trinkets into you until the shapeshift ended - to make sure you didn't choke to death on a suddenly too small necklace or something.
Which was weird, because you still got the benefits of all those trinkets - as evidenced by Merlin still talking to me - and because the spell itself was perfectly capable of resizing armour to fit your new shape.
I was forced to set aside my eerily calm ponderings on the nature of the Polymorph spell, however, when a voice rang out above me, though I couldn't see who was speaking because my eyes were locked shut.
"Did it just move?" A gruff voice asked in a clearly annoyed tone.
"Don't call him an it! Jesus Christ Hookwolf, that's super offensive." Another male voice returned from my opposite side.
"Off- It's a fucking Polar Bear! Who's going to get offended, fucking Polar Bears?!" Hookwolf spat out.
"Case 53's man. Some of those guys are gnarly as hell, but I bet a lot of them were white before they got their powers. You're gonna scare them off of joining if you talk about them like that." The second voice returned equally.
"Shut the fuck up you idiot. That fucking bitch hurt me! The only reason I haven't gutted this motherfucker for revenge is Kaiser wanting him to make a bunch of guns for the boys." Hookwolf returned to my unnamed verbal defender.
Somehow, I thought the entire conversation was hilarious. I mean the sheer irony of hearing one Nazi talk about inclusivity to another Nazi just boggled my mind.
Wait, was I still delirious?
'Merlin, am I still-' I tried to ask only to be cut off.
"You are functioning at normal capacity. I have simply regulated your brain chemistry to prevent you from panicking given your current situation. I used a Psychokinetic Hand spell to inject the remaining healing spells into you before they could be taken from your armour - I believe your captors simply assume you have a healing factor. Fifteen seconds." Merlin answered me, urgency filling his voice.
Well I didn't see what he wanted me to do about it. I had basically just bought myself a couple of extra minutes by using my Polymorph vial - I was under no illusion as to my ability to actually win in this scenario.
But I suppose I could give escape a fair shake. I doubt anything they could do to me would be worse than what would happen if I returned to being a normal black man in the middle of a Nazi kidnapping van.
So, the first order of business was probably armouring up. I had no idea where my suit was, but unless the Empire was literally to stupid to live, they wouldn't have kept it anywhere near me. I wouldn't be overly surprised if one of them trying the thing on back at the stash house even as I thought about it.
Which left me with, perhaps, my least favourite spell in existence.
I spooled up Junk Armor and did my best to rapid fire punch in the chains tying me down as the material component of the spell.
Junk Armor only took junk or scrap material to form itself, but I reasoned that the chains holding me down were probably rusty pieces of shit anyway, and barring that, was kind of hoping the spell didn't actually care all that much.
My attempt was thus rewarded, when Hookwolf paused mid sentence in his rant about Shadow Stalker to ask a question.
"Is he fucking glowing?"
Were the last things either of them managed to say before the majority of the chains holding me down vanished, rapidly reforming into a suit of crappy light armor that cascaded up my form. Perhaps blessedly, Merlin had been working on the efficiency of the spell in his free time - so unlike the pinched helmetless version I was accustomed to, this suit also covered my head in rusty metal, masking my face.
And it didn't pinch every time I moved, which was honestly much more important to me.
I didn't really have time to wait after that, so while the two guys in the back of the van with me were hurriedly trying to shift away from me, and in Hookwolfs case, probably activate his power or however much of it he could safely use inside a moving vehicle, I spooled up another spell.
Ironically, I had chosen this spell and spent significantly more time figuring its code out specifically to be able to cast it on Hookwolf.
Baleful Polymorph worked very similarly to a normal Polymorph spell. The core of it, was that you targeted someone, and then shapeshifted them slightly. Only whoever had first conceived of Baleful Polymorph had taken the core idea behind the original spell and asked themselves 'what if I fuck this up on purpose?'.
The result was a spell whose sole purpose was to physically deform a target in unpleasant and detrimental ways. More to the point, there was some extra space in the code for the spell that let me add a few of my own additions. Space I had happily used to steal a piece of the Technomancers toolkit by adding an addendum to the spell that barred the target from any other form of shifting for its duration.
Basically, for the next three minutes, Hookwolf wouldn't even have a power, as his body failed to shapeshifted in any meaningful way.
Well, besides what I was about to do to him.
With a flash of blue light, the spell went off, matching my rapid rise from the floor of the van. In the blink of an eye, Hookwolf went from being an intimidatingly muscular man, to someone who looked like they had full body cancer. The man shrunk slightly, and his skin took on a texture not dissimilar to a burnt chicken nugget. It must have been painful too, because he immediately started making whining noises and spasming as I leapt forward to punch him clean across the face with all the strength I could muster - which because of all the training I had been doing, combined with the weight of my armor, was a considerable amount.
I was just rearing back to trying to repeat the gesture when a powerful blast of air slammed into me from the side, slamming me into the locked rear door of the van, which visibly deformed the door and made my shoulder make a crunching sound I found extremely disconcerting.
But it didn't hurt.
"I have also temporarily removed your ability to feel pain." Merlin added nonchalantly in response to my obvious confusion on the topic.
"Merlin buddy, we gotta have a talk about all this body modification shit when were done here." I shot to him, taking a second to glance up at my second attacker - something I probably should have done before ignoring him.
"What the fuck did you do to him?!" Stormtiger screamed at me, one hand held towards me in a warding gesture that - because the man was capable of lobbing oxygen grenades that tore normal men apart - was a lot more threatening than it should have been.
"Hey, you're the Master race, you tell me!" I fired back at him rudely, using my good hand to quickly fumble the door I was leaning against open and leaping backwards out of the moving vehicle just in time to avoid a burst of razor wind that - instead of decapitating me - merely left a sizeable gash across my chest.
"This is going to hurt like a bitch when you turn the pain back on isn't it?" I asked Merlin rhetorically as my back slammed into the hood of the car that had been behind the van in traffic, leaving the suburban couple inside of it screaming in panic.
"But you will be alive." Merlin returned easily.
"Not sure I'll appreciate that much at the time." I quipped, grunting as I rolled away from where I had landed just in time to avoid another blast of of air that detonated the glass in the car and mangled the people inside.
"Fuck!" I cursed, quickly searching for somewhere to hide that wouldn't result in me using civilians as cover.
My options were pretty limited. I was all out of first level spells for the day, only having three of them available to me before my Spell Core would start to fizzle them, and the night time traffic was disturbingly active for what had to be two in the morning.
As if to answer my questions on the topic, several of the vehicle driving near us promptly stopped to disgorge a number of men holding guns.
Because sure, fuck it, why not.
"FUCK!" I screeched, turning and sprinting for the nearest alleyway. Without the mobility of my jump jets available to me, I was barely better than a slightly above average normal guy - escaping was going to be a serious pain in the ass, assuming it was even possible with the odds so stacked against me.
"You piece of shit!" Stormtiger screamed at me from above as I sprinted, even as bullets began to slam into my back with bone crunching force that I only survived because of whatever magical bullshittery made Starfinder armor of any kind bullet resistant.
"Oh fuck off!" I growled back at him, throwing a ray of electricity searing up into the sky at him that - despite theoretically only doing a very small amount of damage - caused the man to freeze up for a moment while the charge ran through his body.
When I made it to the end of the alleyway, I leapt up onto the dumpster at its rear, then over it into the alley on the opposite side of the chain link fence behind it, hurling a burning ray at the dumpster as I past it just to deter any of the normal thugs from following.
At this point, despite not being theoretically able to panic, I was definitely beginning how perfectly fucked I was. My only real chance was to hide out and avoid detection for as long as possible in the hopes that help would come. The problem was, a guy in power armor roaming the streets would be pretty obvious, and my naked form beneath wouldn't be much better.
And that was assuming I could break away from Stormtiger, who was proving annoyingly relentless in his pursuit.
As evidenced by the detonation of air right behind me that sent me sprawling across the ground and into the road on the opposite end of the alleyway from where I had started.
Even though I couldn't feel pain, I was definitely starting to notice a marked decrease in my ability to well… move, as all the injuries I had picked up in this very short period of time started to catch up with me, which was why all I could do when Stormtiger came to a hover over me was roll over onto my back while praying a car didn't run me over or something.
"You know, I don't think it's worth keeping you around. What you did to Hookwolf, that isn't right. I shouldn't have defended you to him - you are a monster." The tiger masked man declared angrily as he loomed over me.
Oh come the fuck on, why does everyone think everything I do is some kind of sick torture shit? The spell was only going to last three fucking minutes! What's a little temporarily induced genetic damage between enemies!
I wish I could say that I stared defiantly up at Stormtiger until the end, or that I pulled a clever trick out of my ass to make the situation survivable at the last possible moment.
Instead, none of that happened.
Because a white blur slammed into Stormtiger from the side, dragging him out of my field of view.
"Fuck is going on now?" I complained.
"Language!" Vista complained right back as she and Clockblocker appeared from literally nowhere to stand over me.
"Vicky texted us as soon as she was clear with Shadow Stalker, then all our cellphones started showing your location at once. Piggot is pissed." Clockblocker said in a tone that told me how little he cared about that fact as he leaned over to pull me to my feet - a posture I couldn't actually hold without effectively stumbling over and resting my body weight atop Vista's head.
"Hey!" She complained, pushing me away for Clockblocker to catch and hold up.
"Sorry. I'm pretty fucked up." I told her honestly, glancing around for whatever had batted Stormtiger away from me. I had a pretty good guess however, and was proven right when Vicky zipped into view waving hurriedly at us.
"Let's go, let's go, let's go!" She was yelling as she approached with Stormtiger hot on her heels, lobbing explosive blast after her that tore up the road and damaged nearby buildings in her wake.
Hell, I had survived one of those things? I take back every complaint I ever had about Junk Armor or Victoria Dallon. I'd spend the rest of my life as her stupid marriage counselor.
Oblivious to my inner monologue - which was feeling incredibly disjointed and loopy - Vista quickly took on a look of concentration, and then suddenly all four of us were somewhere completely different.
Everyone seemed to relax slightly once we were out of immediate danger, but Vicky took to hovering around me like a worried mother once she got a good look at me.
"Christ are you okay? Do you have any more uh-" She glanced at Vista and Clockblocker who threw curious glances at her, even as Vista continued to move us further away and Clockblocker sent out a text message, probably to the effect of 'we found him'.
"Can you do the thing?" She finally tried, hesitantly trying to use her cape to staunch the bleeding on the gash in my chest, which was visible through the armor because of the hole in it the attack had made.
"I have some backup crap in my lab. Just-" I had to stop to cough, and felt the sensation of my ribs touching something they probably shouldn't inside my chest. "-just bring me to Shadow Stalker. She knows what to do." I managed to get out before devolving into another coughing fit.
"Shit is starting to hurt buddy." I complained to me AI.
"I thought it better to slowly begin easing you into it, rather than to open the floodgates all at once. The chance of you going into shock in such a scenario is not insignificant." Merlin responded dutifully.
"That why I'm starting to feel punch drunk again?" I asked, blinking furiously to clear my head.
"No. I only have so much micro scale control over your brain chemistry - I could only ever affect you in that way very briefly." Was the AI's ashamed response.
I had no idea why he was ashamed about it. I found it kind of relieving that he couldn't just permanently turn me into an unfeeling machine.
Even if I would drastically prefer it right now.
"Dude, I dunno how to tell you this, but you need a hospital." Clockblocker chimed in countermanding my request.
"What so that the PRT and every villain who can tap into its systems can figure out my identity?" I snapped at him, immediately regretting it when he jerked slightly away from me at the tone of my voice.
I didn't interact much with Clockblocker. Despite my lackadaisical opinion on insulting my enemies during combat, we didn't actually get along all that well. I got the impression he didn't know what to make of me, and was staying at arms length for the time being. I guess it was true that he was smarter than he let on.
"Star quit being a dick. Clock, give him to me." Vicky stated resolutely.
"Why?" He asked suspiciously.
"Cus I have Stalkers cellphone number and you don't?" She shot back at him, still hovering along next to me to press her - now red - cape against my chest. I dunno why she bothered, I doubt it was helping all that much.
"Miss Piggot sent orders to have him brought to headquarters." Vista chimed in acerbically - I guess because her nascent dislike of Victoria had already started to kick in. Clockblocker gestured at her as though to say 'yeah that', but didn't otherwise comment.
"So? She's not my boss." Vicky maintained, shooting me a worried look. They bickered for a bit while I silently watched on, too tired to add much, until finally the Wards gave up.
"Fine. Piggots gonna be pissed though." Clockblocker eventually acquiesced.
"Thanks, I'll make it up to you." Vicky assured him with a cheeky wink and a weak smile.
It occurred to me that throughout much of the conversation she had actually managed to restrain her aura - which was weird because it would have made things a lot easier for her. I decided to file that away under 'things to wonder about later' as the flying teen scoop me into her arms like I was a princess - and rocketed away.
"You stupid fucking asshole! What the fuck 'run away' like I'm some useless weakling! How the fuck do you think I was going to explain that to Mom huh? Did you think of that?!" Sophia growled at me angrily, continuing a rant she had been on from the moment we had reconnected with each other.
I just let her get it out of her system, knowing that for all she was sounding extremely abusive, she was also pausing every couple of minutes to grab me a new Healing Ampoules from the stash in our hideout I'd built up.
You can never have too many healing potions after all.
"Sorry." I muttered to her while I patiently waited for the frankly disgusting amount of healing medicine I was injecting into myself to finish straightening out all the parts of me that were torn up or broken. I was honestly just lucky I hadn't actually lost either of my legs to Kaiser - I might have leveled up to four as a result of that little altercation, but I definitely didn't have the ability to regrow a new leg yet.
"Don't fucking- fuck you John! Do you even- fuck!" Sophia screamed, completely ignoring her own 'don't draw attention to the hideout with loud noises' rule.
Victoria - who had needed to be shown our hideout because Sophia couldn't carry me there fast enough under her own power - stood off to one side, examining the place and doing her best not to enrage Sophia even further.
"Sorry." I repeated quietly.
I had, for lack of a better word, broken down shortly after getting to relative safety. Once I had enough healing in me to be able to stand I had stumbled off to an empty room, vomited, and had myself a good cry over how close I had come to being either a slave or a corpse.
Now I was leaning back in my chair, completely sans costume, wearing my jeans and a t-shirt.
I felt… stupid. I had been so sure of myself once I had gotten Merlin online that I had started to consider the Empire a trivial threat. Something that was only around still because of the stupid rules of the setting I was in. A group that only maintained its presence because no one was actually trying to get rid of them.
I was wrong, and I had nearly died because of it. It was a strange feeling, thinking about it. Like I had fucked up colossally but couldn't really do anything about it anymore. Ultimately, I hadn't really lost much in the long term, and I had even managed to hide my identity from the Nazis - but it didn't feel like I had eked out a win. It felt like I had gotten lucky.
And it felt bad.
I might be using Starfinder based superpowers, but that didn't mean I wanted my life to rely on a roll of the dice.
The worst part was, everything I did, all my scrambling to exercise and build things, that was supposed to be me, being better. It was the physical representation of my struggle to improve and solve the problems around me. And ultimately, none of it had actually helped me when I had decided to start treating real life like a game I had to grind out levels in.
So I really didn't know what else to say to Sophia except sorry.
"Stop fucking apologizing!" Sophia barked at me, moving forward as though to strike me and stopping when Victoria went from wandering aimless about the fish packaging plant to paying very close attention to us.
"Right. I'll stop. S- Yeah. My bad. I'll do better next time." I… pseudo apologized.
Sophia made a growling noise and leaned away from me, snatching another Healing Ampoules and dropping it in my lap.
"Fine. Whatever. What the fuck are you still doing here anyway?" She snapped, finally acknowledging the Victoria was even in the room with us.
"Uh, mostly avoiding my Mom. I kind of called a huge emergency only for your phone program thing to just… tell us where you were. She's a little pissed that I got the whole family up and in costume for nothing." Vicky offered sheepishly.
I blinked at her, slightly touched that she had even bothered. I was kind of expecting New Wave to do what it always did - which was nothing - while the Protectorate scrambled to decide if it even cared enough to help. My hopes of someone actually helping me were pretty low, if I was being honest.
"You're okay Vicky. Feel free to hang out here whenever. Just don't get caught coming in - secret base and all." I offered with a slight smile that she returned.
"I prefer 'amazing' but I guess I'll take 'okay' in light of the days events. Are you guys gonna be okay? Do your parents have know you do… this?" She asked curiously.
Me and Soph looked at each other, then back to Victoria. For obvious reasons, we had generally avoided talking about our home lives around the white clad cape, but since I was literally unmasked and sitting in front of her at the moment it felt like a lost cause to continue on that route.
Plus, she saved my life. That's worth some trust.
"My Mom barely notices when we're around or not. We're good." Sophia answered her eventually, if not necessarily happily.
Sophia, not being a girly girl or enjoying 'girl talk' of any kind, didn't really get along with Vicky as well as I did. They shared the same opinion on Nazis and could work together if need be, but that was about it.
"So you do live together!" Vicky exclaimed triumphantly.
"Yeah, we're cousins. What of it?" I asked.
"Oh, just speculation. You guys don't talk to many people in costume so you aren't very well known, but PHO guessed that you were related somehow." She explained, waving her hand through the air dismissively.
"Is it that obvious? I mean we could just be two capes who met and teamed up afterward." I asked incredulously.
"At least most people agree that you aren't dating." Vicky answered with a shrug, even as Sophia and I immediately started gagging in revulsion.
"Anyway! Since we're all friends now and such-" the blond offered with a glance at Sophia who still hadn't taken off her mask and didn't seem especially likely to do so. "- do you guys wanna come hang out at the mall with me and Ames tomorrow? You're okay if she knows who you are right? Your Thinker thingy brought her up once."
"Pass. We don't have time for that shit. Gotta hit Kaiser where it hurts for this." Sophia immediately refused, growing dour as she spoke.
"Yeah but you need to take time to relax too. It's called Work Life Balance. Ever heard of it?" Vicky countered immediately.
"Punching Nazis is how she relaxes."
"Punching Nazis is how I relax."
Me and Sophia spoke at the same time, earning a withering look from Victoria for each of us.
"Come on, pleaaaase? Look at Star, he's got crows feet! When's the last time you took time off?" She pleaded, suddenly sounding oddly demanding of the point.
And I found it suspicious. Especially because she was clearly working really hard at not blasting us with her aura, something I warned her about constantly since meeting her for the first time, but that she rarely did - even when I politely warned about the long term effects it could have.
"Time off? What is that, can I eat it?" I drawled at her.
"I'm serious! Come on! Why are you even complaining? Who doesn't want to go to the mall with a bunch of cute girls!" Vicky continued to needle me.
"Vicky I don't know if you noticed but I don't even have a costume right now. I kind of have to-"
"I'll help buy you stuff for a new one!" She blurted out.
Okay now I knew something sketchy was going on.
"Alright, what the hell is going on and why is it so important I go to the mall with you?" I finally asked.
"Well you know, everyone in my family has powers but Amy, and when we first met you acted like it made total sense for me to go get her in the middle of the night to handle Nazis. Gallant told me you have like, pattern based Thinker stuff going on, so I thought maybe…" She trailed off.
"You thought maybe I knew if or when your sister would get powers." I answered flatly.
"I mean when you put it like that it makes me sound manipulative." Vicky complained.
"Maybe because you spent five minutes saying anything but what you meant." I responded only mildly annoyed.
I weighed the pros and cons here. On the one hand, I actually didn't know shit about how Amy got her powers. The best I could possibly do would be to tell Vicky what power Amy is eventually going to have, and that was about it. On the other hand, I was being offered a pretty easy way to interact with the girl to see if she was as unstable as I remembered her being. It wasn't like I wanted her to go coocoo for cocoa puffs.
"You realize that even if I knew something I couldn't tell her right? Expecting to trigger makes it harder to trigger." I explained slowly.
"Seriously? Why didn't anyone tell me that growing up? Do you know how stressful it was?!" Vicky shouted in dismay.
"Because they didn't know." I responded bluntly, glancing at Sophia who was tapping her foot impatiently while she waited for the conversation to finish, no doubt off in her own little world imagining all the terrible things she wanted to do to Kaiser.
Then with a sigh, I turned back to Vicky.
"Look, if you'll actually help me get some of the stuff I need, then I'll come with you. I could honestly use a brute to move some heavier stuff anyway. But don't bring the powers thing up around Amy - it won't help." I finally agreed.
Frankly, I kind of did need some time off. I found out a couple days ago that my new bodies birthday had long come and gone while I was distracted by everything else going on in my life. Auntie hadn't been aware of it, and I hadn't realized it until we had gone to sign up for highschool in september and I'd had to put my date of birth down on a form.
I had effectively missed my own birthday, and if the events of the night were anything to go by, I might need to find more time to relax and sleep.
Even if I hated the idea of wasting time like that.
"Yes! You're the best Star! Come on Stalker pleaaaaase?" Vicky cheered, rushing forward to envelop me in a hug that lifted me out of my seat and then dropped me back into it when she hurriedly turned her puppy dog eyes on my cousin.
"...fine." Sophia eventually grit out, turning her head away from the both of us - definitely not to pout, which is something Sophia Hess is too much of a badass to do, no sirree.
"Yes!" Vicky cheered once more, doing a weird shimmying dance in the air.
The entire time I was pondering.
'Amy, Powers, Mall. Amy, Powers, Mall. Why is that twigging warning bells in my head?' I wondered to myself.
Still, no matter how much I thought about it, nothing came to mind - so I ultimately wrote it off in favour of other concerns.
Concerns like the fact that - now that I was level four - I finally had access to power armor. Real, actual power armor! Not just magical heavy armor, Armor that made me stronger. If I was going to have to replace my Mining Jack - may it rest in peace - then I was going to do it with the biggest, meanest piece of tech I could cobble together.
And Victoria would be perfect for helping me move around all the heavy parts and scrap metal I would need.
Besides, what's the worst that could happen?
'No wait, fuck, I take that back!' I thought frantically the minute I had thought the words.
This was Worm for god sake. Of course, something bad had the potential to happen. That didn't mean I had to tempt fate. No, tomorrow was just going to be a nice calm spa day for me. I'd have a burger, buy some stuff at the hardware store, and try to see if Amy was crazy or not, all while having some nice, normal social interaction with someone whose hobbies weren't ambush tactics and target shooting. And that was all that would happen.
I hope.