A/N: Thanks to leathman and sgsupersoda for reviewing. By the way, in case it isn't clear, Ayla was not hit by the lightning beasts, so she doesn't have lightning powers.
As promised, a plot-heavy chapter for today.
Chapter VII: The Codex
28 October 2998
The Botanic Gardens had been closed for the day after the events of the morning, so Rokk, Garth, and Imra had to sneak in via a small side gate after the last Science Police had vacated the area. A tiny voltage of electricity from Garth's finger overrode the security lock, and Rokk magnetically manipulated the gate open so they wouldn't leave fingerprints (not that it was likely the Sci-Pol would have any reason to check this gate, but there was no sense in taking such a risk when it was so easily avoided). The trio cautiously made their way to the site of the Magnoball game.
The signs of the earlier turmoil were abundant, with broken twigs, trampled flowers, and disturbed earth everywhere. Here and there, scorch marks from the lasers seared the grass, charred the barks of trees, and marred the paved pathways. Nevertheless, anything dropped by the people who had been here – earrings, blood, scraps of clothing, and the like – had already been removed, and the Magnoball pitch had been packed up and taken away, leaving the field bare and empty once more.
"I'm going to see if I can pick up any lingering psychic trace," said Imra. "You two look around, see if you can find anything." She strolled towards the grass field and positioned herself at the approximate center of where the Magnoball pitch had been. Rolling her shoulders and taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and placed both hands to her head in concentration.
"What are we supposed to find?" Rokk wondered while Imra began searching telepathically. "The Science Police cleared out everything."
Garth rolled his eyes. "Come on, you pessimist. Let's check out where that laser machine was."
"But it's not there anymore," Rokk protested as Garth pulled him along.
"Grife, you are dense, aren't you? If the guy who shot at you really did tamper with the machine, he may have left something there."
"Or she," Rokk added.
"Whatever. Come on."
The two boys tramped across the path to reach the nearby clump of bushes. It was obvious where the laser machine had stood, as it had flattened the grass beneath it.
"You search the bushes, I'll search the grass," Garth offered.
Rokk nodded, and the two of them set to work. Garth got down on his hands and knees and combed through the grass, searching for anything the shooter might have dropped; Rokk moved systematically along the row of bushes, rustling through the leaves, applying a light magnetic field to pick up any potential metal bits. After about ten minutes of searching, Imra came up to them, her eyes still glowing pink.
"Any luck?" Garth asked her, watching curiously as she moved her head slightly to track psychic trails he couldn't feel. After a moment she sighed and let her hands drop, and the glow in her eyes faded.
"I can recognize the shooter's mental signature, so I'd know him if I met him, but I can't track where he went." She sounded disappointed.
"Hold on, I've found something!" Rokk called. He had moved farther away and was bending over a large rose bush about six meters away from where Garth and Imra were. They hurried over to see what he was plucking from one of the leaves.
It was a small, ragged fragment of paper – actual, proper, made-from-tree-bark paper, the kind that hadn't been in common use since the rise of e-paper and datapads in the late 22nd century. Paper had been revived as the primary medium for transcribing information when the Great Crisis of the 23rd century set technological progress back by centuries, but by the 25th century its electronic counterparts had truly and completely taken over again. Traditional paper was still made by a select few companies, but it was now a highly exclusive niche market consisting mainly of historians, archaeologists, and fervent book collectors (though ironically, it was still cheaper than e-paper). The paper in Rokk's hand was dirty and discolored, with a small hole near the middle from where it had stuck on a thorn. It looked like a corner from a larger page, as the cramped, untidy writing scrawled all over it was broken at the ragged edge.
"Here's something you don't see every day," Rokk remarked as Imra squinted to make out the writing. "Who the heck uses paper anymore?"
"I do," said Garth pointedly. Rokk looked amazed.
"Seriously?"
"There's a lot more trees on Winath than ionic plastic," Garth said defensively. "We still use paper more than e-paper."
"Winath sounds really…" Rokk searched for a word that didn't sound insulting. "Rural."
Garth crossed his arms. "Life is simple there. Got a problem with it?"
"None at all," Rokk assured him. "It's just really different from what I'm used to."
Garth snorted. "So what's it say?" he asked Imra.
"I can't decipher the writing," she admitted. "It's too messy. Stylus writing is never this illegible." While writing with a stylus on e-paper was very similar to traditional pen on paper, there was a limit to how untidily one could write without actual ink.
"Here, farm boy, see if you can read it." Rokk thrust the paper at Garth, who scoffed.
"'Course I can read it," he said confidently. "I write like this on a daily basis. Let's see…" He smoothed out as much of the fragment as he could, then focused on reading the scribbled Interlac. "Here's a number 7, then the letters R-O-K…actually, that looks like Rokk's name, right there – 'course, it's broken halfway. Then there's today's date, and a couple of other numbers…and below that is the number 8, followed by the letters C-H-R…actually, I'll just type it out for you." He fished around in his pocket for a datapad, then set to work copying the handwriting into neater digital type. When he was finished, Rokk and Imra crowded around him to read:
7. Rokk Kr-
28.10.2998; 01/011
8. Chr-
30.10.29-
9. L-
1.1.-
"What do you think it means?" asked Garth.
"It looks like a list of some kind," said Rokk. "A list of names and dates."
"Then what's that weird number with the slash?"
"City coordinates," replied Imra. "New Metropolis is divided into 14 boroughs, and each borough is subdivided into zones. The borough we're in, New Troy, is the first borough, and the Botanic Gardens is in zone 11. So the coordinates are 01/011."
"Do the Science Police actually have to memorize all these numbers?" Garth sounded half-horrified, half-incredulous.
"Of course not. It's impossible to memorize thousands of coordinates – all Sci-Pol have a datawatch which automatically tells them which location a set of coordinates refers to."
"Okay, so this is a list of names, dates, and places," Rokk interjected to get them back on track. He caught Garth's eye. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
Garth frowned. "A hit list? Really?"
"It probably is something like that, seeing as the date and location of the Magnoball game is right under Rokk's name," Imra pointed out.
"So whoever this guy is, there's at least nine people he wants to kill?" Garth was puzzled. "What for?"
"More importantly, it looks like he's going to strike again in two days," said Rokk, pointing to the partial date under the number 8 name.
"Yes, but who's his victim?" Imra wondered. "All we have are the letters C-H-R. There could be millions of different people with names beginning with those three letters."
"We should take this to the Science Police," Rokk said seriously. Garth scoffed at the idea, and Imra shook her head.
"They wouldn't believe us," she said. "All we have is this piece of paper and our own suspicions. And even if we could find someone to humor us, NMPD just has too much on their plate right now."
"In other words, we're on our own," Garth supplied.
"So what now?" Rokk questioned. "How are we going to warn this C-H-R person?"
"We can't," Garth said bluntly. "It's impossible for us to try to find this guy – or girl – our best bet is to try to find the shooter."
"Garth's right," Imra agreed. She plucked the scrap of paper from his hand.
"What are you doing?" asked Garth.
"Objects usually retain psychic echoes of the person they belong to. Since this list was obviously important to our shooter, I may be able to trace him."
Rokk looked thoughtful. "Isn't that more like psychometry? I didn't know Titanian telepaths could do that."
"Not many can." Leaving Garth and Rokk to absorb that, Imra closed her fingers around the piece of paper and concentrated.
It was quite some time before Imra came out of her telepathic trance. Rokk waited patiently enough, but Garth started fidgeting before even a minute had passed. He tapped his feet, twiddled his thumbs, and kept turning his head until Rokk, exasperated, pulled him to one side.
"Can't you ever stay still?" he demanded.
"I don't like waiting," Garth said plaintively.
Rokk sighed. "Okay, let's give you something to do, then – let's work on your lightning."
"What, now?"
"We do have the time," Rokk pointed out.
"True," Garth conceded. "All right, so how do you want to go about this?"
Rokk looked thoughtful. "When is your control the weakest?"
"When I get mad or worried."
"What about other times?"
Garth took a moment to think about that. "No, other times I'm pretty much in control."
"Show me."
Garth raised his eyebrow, but Rokk's eyes silently dared him; so Garth simply shrugged and, with an impish grin, shot a volt of electricity at the ground mere inches away from Rokk, who cursed and lunged to the side. He glared at Garth as smoke curled from the burnt grass.
"You asked," Garth said innocently.
"I didn't mean for you to nearly kill me!"
"Hey, what I did to get you out of here this morning was much riskier than that, and you're fine, right?"
"What do you mean?" Rokk demanded. "What did you do?!"
"Are you gonna help me or just yell at me?" Garth inquired. "Because if it's the second one I'll just learn from Imra."
Rokk clamped down his irritation and inhaled deeply. "Fine," he said, a little tartly. In a calmer voice, he continued, "What does it feel like when your control lapses?"
"It tingles," Garth replied. "I mean, it always sort of tingles when I release lightning, but when I'm not in control it tingles more, like a lot of pins and needles in my hands…and the only way to ease the tingling is to let the lightning loose."
"Do you consciously think about the lightning when you use it on purpose?"
"Yeah."
"Do you also think about it when you get angry or scared?"
"Um, no…I'm too busy being angry or scared." Garth's tone made it clear that he thought that should be obvious. Rokk ignored the implied insult to his intelligence.
"So the lightning just sort of comes out when you don't think about it?"
"Yep," Garth confirmed. "Why?"
"Try this." Rokk's hands took on a purple glow as he created a localized magnetic field around them. "Do your fist-crackling thing and see how long you can keep it up."
"How is this supposed to help?" Garth wondered as he obligingly let electricity emanate from his closed hands.
"Practice," answered Rokk. "You said it tingles when you use your lightning, and that you have to think about it to control it properly. My guess is that the longer you make electricity, the more your hands will tingle. If you can keep your focus, you should be able to keep the tingling under control – and from there you should be able to keep the lightning under control."
"Huh," said Garth. "Never thought of it that way." His forearms began to shake slightly with the strain of generating a constant surge of electricity. His breathing became more labored. "It sure feels like you're right." The voltage around his hands jumped and increased as his control began to slip. Garth winced as he felt the familiar pins-and-needles in his fingers intensify. "Uh-oh," he commented, just before he lost control and the lightning burst from his hands.
Rokk was quick to cloak himself in a magnetic field to prevent from getting electrocuted, but the bush next to him wasn't so lucky. He sighed as he observed the newly smoldering, crispy brown leaves. Garth looked sheepish.
"Well, practice makes perfect," Rokk allowed. "Though you might want to practice somewhere without flammable materials."
Garth rolled his eyes, but stopped when he noticed Imra coming towards them. "Hey," he greeted. "How'd it go?"
"There still wasn't enough psychic resonance to get a lock on our shooter – but I did manage to get something else." Imra showed them a holographic screen from her datapad; the headline on it was from an edition of the Daily Planets, New Metropolis' leading news company even after the extinction of the newspaper industry and over 1,000 years in business. The Planets' longevity when all its rivals had long since gone out of business was due in part to the legacy of Superman and Lois Lane (Loretta Lane was the company's current star reporter, and it was her byline on this particular article) – but its continued prosperity also owed much to the astute decision to make the expensive, but ultimately profitable, move to e-paper publications before any other newspaper even dared to entertain the idea. The plural S had been added to the company's name after the founding of the United Planets in the twenty-ninth century.
The headline Imra wanted them to see proclaimed the murder of the city's former mayor, Frank Berkowitz, who had been shot dead in western New Troy by an unknown assassin while giving an interview about his successor's current controversial policies.
"What controversial policies?" Garth wanted to know.
Imra explained that for the past month, Mayor Christina Fleming had been pushing to increase taxes in order to fund a new tourism program to boost New Metropolis' flagging economy. The city's finances weren't yet in dire straits, but with the exception of several premier corporations, profits had been declining for the past two years or so. Fleming had jumped at the chance to invite the Magnetic Knights to tour New Metropolis in the hopes of attracting Magnoball fans to the city. Needless to say, there was strong opposition to the mayor's tax proposal, but she also had a fair number of supporters among the wealthier citizens whose businesses would benefit from increased tourism. However, a financial fair play activist group had suggested that perhaps Fleming – who was not a very popular mayor – had more sinister reasons for her proposed tax reform.
"Interesting…" Garth commented.
"Berkowitz was killed three days ago," Imra told the boys. "The case is still ongoing."
"The report says he was the sixth in a series of high-profile murders in the past two weeks," Rokk noted, reading from the screen.
"Yes. The other victims were Anthony Gallo, Alexis Luthor, Jason McKinney, Sebastian Stagg, and Gwendolyn Tracy. None of the murders have been solved."
"Serial killer?" Garth guessed.
"NMPD suspects, but they aren't certain. Loretta Lane, on the other hand," Imra added, "seems to be convinced that it is. She's said as much in most of her articles covering the murders."
"Did the victims have anything in common?" Rokk asked.
"Yes," Imra affirmed. "They were all famous, or rich, or both. Anthony Gallo was the owner of the Utopia Casino, the most famous casino in New Metropolis; Alexis Luthor was the CEO of Lexcorp. Jason McKinney was the star of the Metropolis Meteors Moopsball team, Sebastian Stagg was the last heir of the Stagg family, and Gwen Tracy was one of the leading actresses in New Metropolis."
"What's the connection to today's shooting?"
"My hunch is that there is a serial killer – someone who's targeting the rich and famous – and you were supposed to be the seventh victim," said Imra. "The other six people were probably the names on the list before yours."
"You mentioned that the current mayor wants to raise taxes." The slight crease in Garth's brow indicated that he was thinking hard.
"Yes," Imra concurred. "What about it?"
"Well, I'd bet that an assassin who's going after rich people wouldn't be happy about that idea."
"Probably not," Rokk agreed. "Where are you going with this?"
Garth shook his head at Rokk's obliviousness. "You really need to start paying attention to things," he chided. "The current mayor's name is Christina Fleming, right? Guess what three letters that starts with." He pointed at the transcript of the handwritten list from earlier.
"C-H-R," Imra realized with a gasp as Rokk's eyes widened. "He's going to kill the mayor."
A/A:
1. The Great Crisis is something the animated series of LoSH referred a lot to, even if (to my knowledge) there was nothing to suggest it in the comics.
2. Frank Berkowitz was an actual mayor of Metropolis during Superman's era. There was also another mayor named Fleming, though his/her first name was unknown.
3. Did anyone catch the reference to a certain Marvel character?
4. Who here watches CW's The Flash? The last episode was all kinds of awesome.
5. Just to warn y'all, I may not be able to update for the next few days - but the next chapter should be posted by Saturday at the latest. I think.