Every light in the room save for the dim glow of the Praxian artifact flickered out at the same time. The spotlights, the red exit signs, every piece of electronics (and, mercifully, every camera and cellphone) turned its self off at the vampire's command.
When one spotlight turned back on, he'd already planted himself front and centre stage. "I am the immortal vampire Nikola Tesla" he said, and apparently he'd left the sound systems intact because his voice boomed through all the speakers, "master of science and electricity."
The crowd went absolutely wild. "Oh dear God" Magnus muttered, but the headset microphones were better quality than she'd imagined because that too was caught and broadcast over the speakers.
"You, ladies and gentlemen, are lucky" Tesla continued, slipping out of his vampire guise and turning the rest of the stage lights back on. "Because today, my lovely assistant and I-"
"Assistant?"
"-My lovely partner and I are going to save all your worthless, short little lives. You see someone, someone thought it was a terribly bright idea to put an ancient, fully active bomb in the middle of a city and see if anyone would notice, and since none of you have caught onto the fact that this hunk of metal is counting down til doomsday it falls to me to-"
"They don't need the full backstory, Nikola, can we get on with it?" He'd gone from reluctant to revelling in record time, and the only thing Tesla liked half as much as science was an appreciative audience. Would she actually have to drag him over to help her with the damned artifact? He shrugged at the crowd, causing them to laugh, and she went ahead and pried the back off the bomb to get a look at the insides.
"All in good time, my dear" he said, sauntering over to the artifact like he owned the place. "It's an ancient time bomb build by an incredibly advanced civilization, shouldn't take me more than a minute to- hmm."
"'Hmm?'" Magnus did not like the sound of hmm.
"Well, it's just this wire here seems to be completely bypassing the usual safety features. I mean, these things usually come with an off switch but-"
"-This one doesn't." Magnus finished for him. "Nikola..."
"Not a problem!" He said, though she could tell he was more worried than he was letting on. "We can bypass the whole system if we just pull out the main energy core."
"Won't that set the thing off?"
"Only if any of the internal sensors are working. I should be able to keep them off with a focused magnetic field, I'll just need to concentrate. And all you need to do is pull that little glowing blue thing," he pointed at a bright azure crystal about a foot inside the device, buried amidst the strange glass-like Praxian wires, "without letting it touch anything on the way out."
Right. That was all. Just like performing surgery, except in front of a live audience with absolutely no room for error.
Tesla stood back up to his full height, and you could feel it in the air when he started the field. His hands crackled with blue lightning, his eyes had shifted back to jet black as he fought to keep the field perfectly level.
The audience's clapping was distracting, and it only got louder as she stuck her hand in the artifact. They were - good lord - actually chanting Tesla's name. How would his ego survive, stuck focusing on the task at hand instead of running to revel in the praise of his adoring public?
But she couldn't afford to rush this, not even for him. Slowly she reached her steady hands into the belly of the bomb, imagining it was something ordinary like a Pteradon's third heart. The power source came out with a little snap, but it would leech out enough residual energy to fuel the device until it was completely free.
She glanced up for half a second, big mistake. The stagehand in the left wing was pointing at his wrist, the universal signal to keep an eye on the time. More pressure, great.
"Helen..." growled Tesla through gritted vampire teeth.
"I'm working on it!" Every wire felt like it was a hair's breath away, Magnus held her breath for fear that even the slightest twitch might end it all. Two more inches, then one, the Praxian device was beeping like mad in protest of her actions but she was almost...
There!
She held the little vial up triumphantly, and was greeted with a hearty round of applause. Tesla looked like he wanted to collapse, but he could run on adrenalines and praise for long enough to get off the stage.
"Still in a hurry to get out of those clothes?" He still had the energy to flirt, and the decency to take off his headset first. The bomb was harmless now, and Nikola was going to be just fine.
