This chapter beta'd by Undead Robot and Abhorsen.
Today's music is The Final Countdown by Europe. I highly recommend looking it up on your favorite platform to listen to as you read.
Tango 2.6
I decided to play the song on my hip speaker for a few reasons; it would announce our presence, letting them think that we were still unaware, and it would make it more likely that people would think they needed to hear the music to get controlled.
"Let's walk," I told the team as the opening bars played.
I wasn't really worried about who was and wasn't a squatter in this facility at this point. Everyone who entered my range was getting the same treatment. I gave a running count of the forces as they came into range.
"17, 20, 22, geez, where did they get all of these guys? Thirty, maybe forty if they keep to the trend to the end of the row."
Tattletale frowned. "Even with squatters, that's a lot, yeah. Describe their costumes to me?"
I had one of the owls perch across from them, idly tapping out with one talon as it looked. "I can't be 100% sure because this owl can see UV, but they look like blue bodysuits, skintight white hoods, and a weird antenna with a ball on top. Boots, gloves, and the ball are bright pink, or maybe purple. One of them has a backpack."
She didn't seem to recognize it from the description. We walked up to the locker where they were laying in wait.
"Sixteen-oh-three," Grue said with a forced casual tone, thankfully dulled by the darkness.
"I found Bitch," I whispered as he pulled up the door. "Not under guard, but unconscious. Dogs are in the containers across from her."
Grue peeked inside, then gestured to me. "Time to drop the act," he said, standing up and backing off. "Aright, you fucking idiots, we know you're up there," he called out.
We're leaving together…
About a minute and a half had passed since I'd started the song, which meant the lyrics had finally started(The Final Countdown had a very long intro.) I wasn't ready to assume control of everyone for a while yet- it seemed to take three to five minutes for most people- but I was far enough along that, with a thought, the men and women lined up in storage lockers began to get a very bad case of restless leg syndrome. For their part, Uber and Leet clambered over the roof, clumsy but not twitchy; I was saving them for last.
Will things never be the same again? It's the final countdown!
"Ah, the Undersiders!" Uber declared. "So glad you could join us! He was putting on a voice that reminded me of a sports announcer, or that movie trailer guy who'd passed away a few years ago; deep, booming, with rich tone and expressiveness that just makes you get excited. Except he was wearing such a ridiculous costume, and he hadn't seemed to notice that his small adjustments in posture were timed to the music, so he ended up looking too stupid to care about, even before the fact that I was inclined to punch him in the throat right now. He continued. "I see your new member is with you. Earworm, is it? Catchy."
The final countdown...
"Uber and Leet," Tattletale said smugly. "You know, we were worried on our way here, with a teammate going missing and all. I don't know about the rest of them, but I for one am relieved to see that I was worried for nothing."
We're headed for Venus..
"Oh, you have something to worry about all right!" Leet's voice was in the higher range for a guy, which made his confident tone sound more like a whine.
"Hey Tattletale," I commented idly, making every minion in the block drop whatever they were holding at the time, "How many hits do you think we're gonna get on YouTube after this?"
'Cause maybe they've seen us, and welcomed us all...
She smirked.
"We'll just edit-whoa!" Leet was cut off mid-sentence as Regent lazily waved a hand, knocking him off-balance and sending him careening to the asphalt in front of us with a satisfying smack.
"Whoops," he said with a bored tone. We backed off a bit as Uber hopped down.
I continued. "I could grab the snitch when we're through here. I bet they've got internal storage in case the stream goes down." It'd be tricky to grab with an owl, but if I could get it knocked down to the ground I had a small family of raccoons that would be dexterous enough to hold it for a bit.
It's the final countdown!
"You bitch!" Leet said, wiping his nose of blood as he got to his feet. He put his behind his back, cupped, and when it came back out, it appeared to be holding an old-fashioned cannonball-style bomb. I say appeared, because it looked off, like a picture of a cartoon bomb that seemed to rotate to always face the viewer. I could vaguely feel Leet's senses too, and they were telling me that he was holding a weightless, smooth object. The bomb was fake.
Of course, a gesture from Regent and a twitch from my power, and the 'bomb' was flung backward into the empty storage unit where our money should have been. Our group scattered, while Uber and Leet were caught off guard for a comical moment, their faces sharing a brief look of horror. The 'blast' came a moment later, sending the two staggering forward from concussive force, but thankfully lacking heat or shrapnel that might have proven lethal. We turned back to face the duo.
"You know, you definitely picked the wrong game," Regent commented. I thought I saw where he was going with the statement, and crossed my arms as he continued. "Any idiot should know after what we did yesterday- the only choice was Dance Dance Revolution."
The final countdown!
I let the restraints I was putting on my control go, and did an over-the-top point like I was challenging them to a dance-off. The two villains began badly boogieing against their will, and I had the minions begin to sashay their way towards the doors. I was just starting to be totally aware of their senses, and used them to throw open doors across the facility so that a crowd of minions could embarrass themselves while we beat the duo senseless.
Unfortunately, as the song went into a guitar solo and the doors started to open, we realized something was very wrong. The minions were all of Asian descent, some wearing red and green, others in civilian clothing like uniforms, blouses, slacks. Some faces were streaked with tears, others were furious.
But worst of all, limping out of the storage locker across from ours, dressed in a similar costume to Uber and Leet, was a woman wearing a gas mask and bandolier, with a revolver-style grenade launcher hanging from a belt by her hip. She was laughing, the sound twisted by her mask into a huffing, wheezing hiss.
"Ru-!" Tattletale yelled as the minion closest to me exploded and the world stopped existing for a moment.
The world came crashing back into existence with a wave of pain and noise and the smell of cooked pork.
"-" someone said, shaking me. I could thankfully make out the sounds, but my brain wasn't putting things together just yet. My mask's lenses were partially melted, making it hard to see, and it was far darker than it had any right to be anyway. My speaker had stopped playing; I needed music.
"- up! She's back, grab her and run!"
I realized the voice was Tattletale. My body wasn't responding right, and everything hurt. Grue threw me roughly over his shoulder. Most importantly though, I realized I still had my headphones on; they'd slipped down to my neck. I coughed, trying to speak.
"Right, music. Here," Tattletale said, clumsily adjusting the headphones onto my ears as we jogged down the tunnel of darkness, Regent limping behind us and making anyone who stumbled in stumble right back out. A button was pressed, and the sweet, beautiful sound of the classic synth-brass from The Final Countdown flooded back into my ears.
Awareness of everything around came back to me after a few bars. I didn't have anything under my control, and immediately got to work on fixing that; in a few moments, I had twenty rats, ten bats, the family of raccoons, and a small nest of wasps; the owls must have spooked. I sent the bats out for aerial reconnaissance.
Grue had flooded the row with as much darkness as possible, a low shifting fog that came to the tops of the locker doors and flowed like condensation along the ground. Near where we'd been standing, a spire of jagged, knife-like stones coated on one side with delicate ice crystals rose out of the darkness like an island in the sea. What the hell had happened?
The final countdown...
Tattletale ducked into my vision again, waving her hand to grab my attention. "Earworm, honey, we need to find Bitch. Little help?"
I didn't have the energy to speak or move with the constant jostling, but I had a few bats swoop down to lead the way.
"Right, follow the bats Grue!"
Regent waved a hand again to clear or way, and cried out in pain, clutching the hand to his chest. For a moment I worried that he'd been shot, but Tattletale dropped back and started helping him keep up, talking about a 'backfire', so I let it go. My own body was in enough pain that I was surprised I wasn't still out of it, every nerve vividly giving my brain its best impression of being dunked in acid and electrocuted at the same time. My hair was burned, my costume smelled like burnt plastic, and while I could in theory tell my body to move, the mere action of twitching a finger under my own power sent my arm spiraling into fresh new depths of pain.
...the final countdown...
We reached the lockers where Bitch and her dogs were being kept. Grue set me down, and being the only physically whole member of the group at this point, got to work using my baton as a crowbar to smash off the locks.
I'd started retaking people the moment I had music again, so I was the first to sense the moment Bakuda (because it had to be Bakuda, and what was our luck that a crazy bomber like that had taken an interest in us?) managed to figure out a way around Grue's darkness. Two of my bats were rendered blind as the entire alleyway was flooded with pure light, a camera-flash as bright as a nuclear explosion, completely soundless and gone as soon as it came. By the time I had fresh eyes on things, a sixty-foot clearing had appeared in the alleyway, and the temporarily-blinded ABB began to slowly regroup.
It's the final countdooown, we're leaving togethe-e-er!
Grue broke the lock, and ran to get started on the dogs' locker without a word. Tattletale went inside and roused Bitch, while Regent and I nursed our injuries. I managed, with extreme effort, to get into a sitting position against the wall, and forced my throat to make words with as little jaw movement as possible. "What do we do now?"
Regent worked his left hand, massaging the cramp as much as he could. He looked to be suffering a lesser version of my own injuries, his muscles stiff and twitching in repressed agony. "No fucking idea," he responded, sounding bored.
I would have laughed if it didn't require constant effort and extreme pain to do. Regent, bored? News of the day. I could appreciate the mindset; cut away all the worthless fear and the drive to hurt the bastards who'd hurt me and my team, and all that was left was a situation that wasn't exciting, wasn't fun, just a struggle for our lives where the dice would land where they fell.
Bitch woke up, shot to her feet, and began pumping power into her dogs the moment she knew their location. By the time Grue got the lock off, Brutus, Judas and Angelica were the size of ponies. For her part, Bitch looked like someone had put her through fifteen rounds with Tyson minus the gloves, her body bruised and her face swollen, her nose even more crooked than usual. She scratched the dogs roughly as they bounded out of the unit, giving them a moment of joy at seeing their master before whistling them back to heel.
I struggled to my feet, hoping I could walk, offloading as much of my emotional protests as I could into the half-formed connections with the ABB. I had to get functional fast, or we weren't going to make it out of the Trainyards. With a single triumphant step, I broke from the wall.
My vocal chords, still on fire, croaked out, "We've got incoming."
There was no way we could run in our condition. We all got ready for a fight.