Johnny woke up around noon and started his day quietly. Decades of coming to hungover only to immediately down a warm glass of alcohol and do a line of coke seemed like distant memories. Now he was quiet as the grave as he got dressed after a shower.
The bar was noticeably quiet, midday being particularly unlikely a time for people to come by, but he let it stay open even as the employees mostly just cleaned. Being one of the only places in town considered a nightclub, and being a little looser about the public sex laws, it was important to have a more serious cleaning routine. Not to mention he was one of only two bars open Downtown, which was prime real estate for businesses.
There was, however, one person nursing a glass at the counter. A rather beautiful woman with a well cared for fedora on her head. Johnny walked up to the bar next to her and reached over the counter for a bottle and a glass.
"I'd guess you were Silverhand then?" the woman asked, pointedly glancing at the chrome hand that made the name particularly obvious as to the source.
"The one and only. You are?" Johnny asked.
"Fortuna. Been looking for you."
"Oh?" Johnny asked, feeling a strange tone in the air.
"Got a job for you. Heard the Silverhand was pretty good in a scrap."
Johnny's face closed off. "Are you messing with me?" he asked.
Fortuna turned her head to the side like a confused dog, and then continued. "I'm just here about a job. Don't read into things."
Johnny stood up and shoved her off the stool. "Where the fuck have you heard that before? You looking to die? Who the fuck are you?"
"My name is Fortuna. I also go by Contessa. I was hoping you could go on a walk with me."
"Like hell. If I go anywhere with you, it'll be to bury you when I'm done." Johnny snarled.
"That's fine. But we need your help, Johnny. We got a job. The last job you'll ever have to do. It'll fix everything, but only if we pull it off."
Johnny snarled again, all the muscles in his body were tensing and relaxing intermittently while he tried to resist the urge to punch the woman in the mouth.
"What are you doing? How do you know those goddamn words." he growled.
"I could explain, but you'd need to come with me." she replied confidently. "Wake the fuck up, Samurai. We've got a city to burn."
It was indisputable. There's no way she should know that phrase, or how it applies to him. It was impossible. It was aggravating, it was daunting, it made him pissed.
But it also made him curious.
Grabbing the whole bottle he'd retrieved, he took a deep swig and followed her out the door without a word.
The bartender and other employees watched him go for a second before brushing it off. If he didn't come back, their deposits were automatic.
Johnny felt, as Fortuna or Contessa or whatever her name was walked through a glowing gateway that appeared in front of her at the end of an alley, that he should have brought a second bottle. This was clearly 'cape' bullshit. Probably explained the two names.
"Is this the guy you were talking about?" another woman asked. She was middle aged and dark skinned. French accent.
"It is. This is Silverhand."
The dark skinned woman glanced down at his hands. "That seems to be the case, yes."
"So says the woman who wears a doctor's uniform and calls herself Doctor Mother." Fortuna supplied.
The so-called Doctor Mother didn't react to the words at all, not seeming to feel anything from the remark.
Johnny realized it then. That was an introduction hidden as comraderie. The other woman either realized it immediately or planned for it to begin with.
"Let's go over the situation." Doctor Mother continued professionally. "The opponent is an Entity known as Scion. He is the source of parahuman powers, and we have between 6 and 30 years before he decides to kill everyone on the planet and then destroy the world, including every parallel dimension of Earth."
Johnny sipped from his bottle.
"Yes, many people would turn to drink if the world were going to end, but we believe that you-"
Johnny sat in one of the chairs at the table, a large circular ordeal made for easy conversation, and kicked his feet up on it.
This time, Doctor Mother showed some irritation. "I'm trying to explain that-"
"I don't need to hear it. Let's try some quick questions here. If it was easy to kill the guy, you would have done it before you built up some big secret base and secured all this funding. Genuine old growth wood right here under my feet. That's the sort of thing people get when they're vain or have a lot of resources. Resources that they would feel were a waste if you got something cheaper. So why can't you kill this guy?"
Doctor Mother shuffled through some papers. "Every precog we've pointed at Scion fails unless they're really vague, but those ones all suggest that his threat level is beyond planetary, and would be nearly impossible to defeat. One of our theories is that he may be as tough as the Siberian, who can freely ignore damage as far as we can ascertain."
Johnny sipped from his bottle. "How was your diplomatic approach?" he asked.
Doctor Mother looked at him with distant confusion. "Diplomatic approach?" she asked.
"Well, you basically just admitted you have no idea how to kill the guy, and you believe that he's invulnerable and genocidal. Okay, sure. But he hasn't killed, as far as I know, anybody since he got here. That means it's for a reason that he'll do it. That means talking to him could work. Not like you've mentioned a better plan."
Fortuna casually put her hand on his leg. "We've been harvesting powers from another dead entity in the hopes that they will dispatch an Agent, the cause of powers, that was created for the purposes of fighting other Entities. We know that they have conflict between one another because that's how the other entity died."
"You guys are the ones who make those monster capes, aren't you?" Johnny realized.
"Yes. We are. We hoped that we could mass produce parahumans and eventually one would be able to beat Scion, but the formulas are erratic. The monster capes are mostly volunteers and assets that had a bad reaction, so we wipe their memories and let them go."
"Why are you telling me all this?" Johnny asked.
"We're trying everything we can to win, sometimes terrible things. But when we checked our precognitives to accomplish our goal, any route we take where you made the decision was safer, faster, and more morally justified than we were going to do, and any route we take that leads to you finding out by yourself about us leads to our loss and lowers our chances against the Entity by 40% or more."
"Well damn." Johnny said, drinking the last mouthful from his bottle.
Doctor Mother wasn't sure if it was from the information or from the emptiness of his alcohol.
