Category Archives: Arc 1.4: In the Public Eye

In the Public Eye: Part 40

Wind blew out of the tunnel, rattling parts in their boxes and tools hanging the walls. In the middle of it, I could see the hazy shape of the girl. I wondered what effect the sonics would have on her. Would sound do nothing or would it disrupt whatever connected her to herself in that form?

I didn’t want to kill her, so I decided not to think about it. She was Daniel’s problem.

“She’s kind of… dispersed mentally,” he said, “but I can do this –“

The hazy form flattened as it hit an invisible wall, face, glasses and the back of her skull interpenetrating each other. She dissolved into a colored gas, reforming a few feet away as cloudy version of herself.
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In the Public Eye: Part 39

I punched the distress call.

Above us, scattered lights began to blink slowly red.

I looked up. “I didn’t know that happened.”

“Me neither,” Daniel said. “It looks like we’ve got a lot of dead bulbs.”

With that we got another round of phone calls — except we got one less. In addition to Vaughn, Jaclyn didn’t call back.
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In the Public Eye: Part 38

Having watched the recording, I understood why the mayor had slipped under everybody’s radar for so long. We had video right here of him planting commands into the brains of an entire team of heroes while simultaneously having almost no evidence of it.

The fact that everybody had stopped and started talking on his cue pointed in that direction, but not inarguably. It was purely circumstantial evidence.
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In the Public Eye: Part 37

Sitting on my bed later, I tried to think through my next move.

I didn’t for a minute intend to seriously consider anything Magnus thought he had to offer. It sounded like he wasn’t going to be any help in a fight and I couldn’t see how cutting off access to the mayor’s money would do any good. I would have blown him off immediately except that I had been freaked out by the fact that he’d called me on my cell phone.

Not that I still wasn’t a little freaked out by that.
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In the Public Eye: Part 36

“Uh, hi?”

I stood on a corner a couple blocks from my house. The street was dark and music came from the house behind me. With all the windows shut, I couldn’t tell what kind except that it definitely included a bass drum. Cars lined the street in front of it. A man in a devil costume walked up to the front door and stepped inside.

I felt naked. My armor sat back in HQ and I wasn’t wearing the full stealth suit — just the part that could fit under clothes.
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In the Public Eye: Part 35

“OK,” I said, “I’ll take a look at the recording tonight and put something together for the local news.”

“Thanks, Nick,” Travis said, “Once we get this asshole off our backs, we can get back to fighting crime instead of other heroes. Which reminds me, how did you end up fighting Tomahawk anyway?”

I told him.

“Red Lightning’s lair? That’s unbelievable. You’ve got to take me down there.” Travis put down the Denali book and not, I noticed, on the pile. It was placed diagonally next to the pile.

Fighting an urge to pick it up and put it back, I said, “No reason you can’t go. Just talk to Vaughn. He let me and Haley in.”
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In the Public Eye: Part 34

I decided to take the day off from costumes, but the day didn’t cooperate with me.

School went okay that way. I saw Vaughn and Cassie in the halls and said, “hi,” but that was about it. The day didn’t fall apart till I got home. I arrived before my parents, pulling the mail out of the mail box and grabbing the paper off the front porch. I unrolled it to find myself on the front page under the headline, “ROCKET AND TOMAHAWK BRAWL DOWNTOWN.” A smaller headline below it said, “Mayor Calls for More Assistance.”
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In the Public Eye: Part 33

“Looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?” Vaughn said. “You’d never believe it, but my grandfather’s personal stuff never burned.”

“It must be the only thing that didn’t,” I said.

A layer of dark soot seemed to be everywhere, mixed with bits that crunched when I stepped on them.

“Nah,” Vaughn said, “The side tunnels didn’t burn. That’s where I found the stuff that I handed over. Let’s go.”

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In the Public Eye: Part 32

“Why are we going this way then?”

“The tunnel I used to go through collapsed during the rainstorms we got near the end of August. This is the only other one I know about,” Vaughn said.

I couldn’t see anything. Was I supposed to go down there and locate the gun by the flash from its muzzle? If I was lucky, the gun was fixed and capable of firing in only one direction. If I was unlucky, it had the ability to track targets. My armor did well against bullets, but I didn’t feel much of an urge to test its limits.
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In the Public Eye: Part 31

Hardwick House sat on a hill near the middle of downtown. It began, not especially humbly, as an enormous mansion back when Percival Hardwick made his fortune as a lumber baron. His heirs added on to it in a peculiar mixture of styles. The first section used the thin spires and intricate woodwork of the Gothic style. A later addition to the house had added an eight story tower and the extensive stonework of the Medieval Revival style. The final section of the house had been added in the late 1920’s — six, flat roofed stories, each story less wide than the story below. The final story ended in the shape of an Egyptian pyramid.

Impressively hideous, it absorbed almost half a city block when you included the grounds.
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