The tendrils died at an alarming rate. Even though Hal downplayed the effectiveness of the anti-personnel lasers, he could fire off multiple beams at multiple targets. They wouldn’t have been effective against the mushroom central brain he’d destroyed, but against these tendrils it was good enough.
The tendrils sizzled and stopped moving. Somewhere in the back of my brain, the part that distantly remembered breakfast, I wondered if these were edible mushrooms and hoped they weren’t psychedelic.
By the time I did notice that Gifford, Hunter, and other members of Major Justice’s team as well as Shifter were sinking toward the ground, they were shouting at Gifford who was staring off into space.
Was he too tired or had one of the mushroom tendrils gotten lucky and hit him? Either way they were dropping into range of not only the tendrils’ shots (which might not get through the wind), but also the clouds of spores that puffed outward whenever the shots hit something. Continue reading Courtesy: Part 6→
I resisted an urge to shake my head. He couldn’t know. It’s not as if we’d added him to the League’s comm channel. Not looking over at Hunter, I said, “Menagerie added some new features to his… fungus things and they got out of control.”
Even though I wasn’t looking directly at him, I could still see Hunter standing with the rest of the Coffeeshop Illuminati. He didn’t scream it out, but I still heard him say, “Shroomoids. I call them shroomoids.”
Despite being on “the other side,” Hunter took my call. His shouted, “What do you want,” made me wonder if he was paying attention when he took the call.
“This is the Rocket,” something he should already know, but if he didn’t…
“Self-replicating?” I stared at the cloud of spores obscuring the baseball diamond.
Supers emerged from it, most of them covered with a light dusting of spores. By most, I meant almost everybody but Jaclyn. Jaclyn wasn’t covered because I’d designed her suit to be as close to frictionless as I could.
The other two exceptions were Bullet and Theo. Bullet flew out. He wasn’t covered with spores because he floated upward in a bullet-shaped force field. Theo was spore-free for a more obvious reason—almost anything that touches superheated plasma burns. Continue reading Roll The Dice: Part 9→
Still hovering, Gordon stared at Vaughn, breathing without saying anything as if he were having trouble composing himself—or maybe he didn’t know what to say.
When he did talk, he barked out, “Don’t move,” as if we hadn’t gotten that message the first time.
Then he added, “I’ve called in my team,” which was interesting because I hadn’t seen him talking into a mic or typing anything. Continue reading Roll the Dice: Part 4→
It might not be fair to either Gifford or Hunter, but I’d never particularly liked either of them. Gifford and Gordon came from a legacy hero family, the kind that lived in private compounds and didn’t interact much with normal people. Hunter’s mother was a legacy superhero,celebrity, and superhero stage mom (from what I’d seen).
She had a reality TV show about her life in Hollywood called, “Diva!” To judge from the online commercials, Hunter and Gifford appeared sometimes.
Also, and here’s where the unfairness came in, Gifford was interested in Haley. It hadn’t caused problems because she wasn’t interested in him, but it didn’t make me like him more. Continue reading Old Friends & Enemies: Part 4→
Bullet stopped wiping his face, “Who was she really? Do you know?”
“No,” Daniel continued to watch him, “we were hoping you might know. We’re guessing she’s one of the Dominators.”
Looking over at Daniel, Bullet stuffed his handkerchief back in his pants pocket, “I’m going to kill her.”
“You don’t know where she is,” Tara said, her voice level and controlled. “You haven’t seen her since and you haven’t been looking because she controlled you so completely that you never tried. What makes you think that you could?” Continue reading Old Friends & Enemies: Part 3→
The Legion of Nothing: A Series of Online Superhero Novels (Updates Monday and Thursday)
