In My Daydreams

Around four on Sunday afternoon, Lt. Van Kley showed Travis, Haley, Daniel, and I the dead bodies. There were three of them — two men and a woman, each of them horribly burned.

The house looked as bad inside as it had outside. Outside, it stood as an excellent example of urban decay in Grand Lake. Built in the 1920’s, the house had cracked, beige paint over wooden siding with spots of greenish moss. It sat in the middle of a neighborhood of houses almost exactly like it.
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Pieces of metal dropped out of the air. An engine block landed twenty feet away from me and bounced, smacking into the scrap pile, then bouncing off it and rolling to a stop.

Insulting a guy with magnetic powers in middle of a metal scrap yard might not have been a good idea.
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Daniel drove us to HQ and we suited up.

I got into the full Rocket suit because Sean apparently hadn’t realized that the stealth suit was also a Rocket suit at Meijers. I’d told him, but better to make things completely unambiguous if we were going to hunt him down and pretend to be voices of authority.
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Haley and I listened until they finished the meeting, but they didn’t have any more bombshells. Not that anything could trump the bit where Russell Hardwick had scanned the relevant bits of Red Lightning’s version of the working Impregnator plans and was handing them out to his people.

Probably at that point, people more competent than we were would have tracked down the engineers Hardwick had assigned the job, deleted their files, recovered the original journal, and scared them away from even trying to reconstruct them.
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Haley turned around and started walking back toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“They can’t do that. They don’t have any right to tell us what to do.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “She’ll probably make you turn around again. Or something worse.”
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On Saturday morning around 6 a.m., I drove the Ball over to Man-machine’s lair. It was far too early to get up for a Saturday, but it was the best time to go.

Taking the Ball apart turned out to be a bit of a pain. Chris and I kept on discovering new wires and cables to detach from the back of the dashboard, but then we discovered an access panel for the weaponry on the outside of the Ball.

Granted when you’re making weaponry for supervillains, making access panels clear and obvious probably isn’t the highest priority, but I still wished it had been a little higher up on the designer’s list.
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As we sat down at the table, Travis said, “Handle them? We don’t see them as a big threat yet. We don’t want them to know who we are obviously, but they’re not targeting us. The Executioner and that gang? Those guys have to be handled.”

Agent Torres smiled back. “Then I should ask what operations you’re running right now.”
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On Friday afternoon, as planned, the Heroes League landed on Central High’s lawn.

The Rocket looked exactly right. The Feds had the original design for the World War 2 era Rocket, so it probably hadn’t been hard to come up with something similar looking to the current version.
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In my mind, I tried to get Daniel’s attention, and succeeded.

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Me: Don’t tell him about the Impregnator. Pass it on.
Daniel: Got it.
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He did, and everyone looked at me.
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Marcus started to show Cassie the clips, but once he started Jaclyn showed up, and then as he backed up to find the start for her, Daniel stepped out of the elevator.

We decided at that point that we were better off waiting for everybody.
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