Then I realized why I could see inside the van—the back door was open. All the doors were open. They’d been wrenched open by someone strong enough that reinforced metal, and whatever metahuman precautions the van’s designers had included, were useless.
That level of strength, coupled with my guess that a speedster had been involved, gave me a very uneasy feeling. If we were dealing with someone at Jaclyn’s level of speed and strength, we were going to have to be very careful. Actually, we were going to have to do more than that. We were going to have to have Jaclyn or Izzy along almost any time we went into action.
Most of us couldn’t survive even one punch from Jaclyn when she wasn’t holding back. Fortunately Marcus and I were the exception to that.
“Right,” I said. “Not getting your name right isn’t a good sign. I mean, to be fair, when you’re talking in front of a bunch of people, it’d be easy to get something wrong.”
Haley made a tsking noise. “You’d have to be extremely distracted to get our names wrong. When we’re in costume, it seems like we can’t even breathe without it being covered by the press.”
Marcus looked up at me from the computer screen. “If you’re going to talk about Biohack instead of boyfriend/girlfriend stuff, would you mind bringing me in?” Continue reading Super Social: Part 4→
“Metahumans,” I said, “but not metahumans that you’ve seen yet.”
“Or that anybody has,” Marcus said. “Whether they’re metahuman or plain, vanilla human, human, they’re good. I’m thinking that they’ve got to be training all the time. Well, I’m mostly thinking that because Gerald Cannon—Man-machine himself—said they had to be.”
I nodded. “Cannon ought to know. I’m sure he ran a few heists. I got the impression though that he was more about showing my grandfather up than actually stealing things.” Continue reading Super Social: Part 3→
The video went straight up to the part where Amy and then Lee appeared (as Gunther, the form he’d used in World War 2), the dragon Artaxus ran away, obviously terrified, and all the attacking forces followed him through a gate and out of our world.
I couldn’t help but notice that the video had been drawn from different cameras and different angles. It made me wonder if it had been taken from security cameras (or maybe drones) at the compound where we’d stayed last summer.
That brought me back to wondering who had released it. It made our team look good, while the Stapledon program, the teachers, the Feds, and the Castle Rock compound where we all stayed look bad. At the least, it didn’t make them look competent at security.
The Stapledon program ended in the third week of August. My first classes started in the second week of September, so I had two weeks to relax—really more like a week and a half. I spent most of it sleeping.
Okay, that wasn’t true. It felt like I slept a lot, but that’s mostly because I wasn’t having to get up at six or seven in the morning to be out on the field running or fighting. So anyway, it was a wonderful week and a half. I spent it hanging around with Daniel, Haley, Vaughn, and Jaclyn. Cassie even managed to sneak up from D.C. for a few days.
She felt whole for the first time in hours, and tired enough that she could sleep—not that she really could. Even if she hadn’t been fighting aliens for the last three hours, leaving her dead tired, but at the same time too full of energy to sit, she was in an airplane hangar. There wasn’t any place to sit down but the concrete floor. Even if she’d wanted to try napping, she was sharing the hangar with nearly one hundred people, all of them veterans of the same fight.
She looked better than most, if only because her body physically changed, and instead of being in her armor, she was now in her clothes, the jeans and white, wool sweater she’d been wearing back when they all thought they were about to go home. Continue reading Bloodmaiden: Part 21→
All it said was “You know what to do,” and underneath that sentence there was a link to a Dropbox folder. I hesitated for a moment and then clicked on it. It opened to a web page that listed only one file in folder. It was called “Exposure.mpv.”
I’d heard of the video format. It only ran on the associated player and only worked once. No one knew who had designed it. The Double V forums were certain it was a known tech genius, but couldn’t agree on who.
Daniel’s bed creaked, and I heard him walk up behind me as I sat at the desk. “Maybe we should get Izzy. It’s only going to play once, and she’s got a great memory for sounds.” Continue reading Faerieland: Part 48→
A second look gave me a few clues I’d missed when I’d first seen what I’d thought was Adam. “Adam” had the same thin build and overall look, but he seemed taller than normal. It wasn’t by much.
Haley bent down, obviously getting a closer look. “Is she okay?”
Daniel stared at “Adam’s” face briefly. “I think so. There’s no way of knowing how she’ll take this later, but she didn’t kill anybody, or even hurt anyone. She relayed Artaxus’ orders to Hunter and the fae. That’s all. It’s not out of the question that being mind controlled might still traumatize her, but she didn’t do anything particularly terrible under his influence. She was more of a glorified gofer.” Continue reading Faerieland: Part 47→
“If you think you can do it, I’m all for it,” I said.
Alex grinned. “Trust me. I’ve seen worse, and it worked out. Now, can you take off your glove?”
I thought about it, checking my HUD for alerts. There weren’t any left. “Assuming the repair systems worked, yes.”
I used my right glove to set the left gauntlet to split and be absorbed into the left forearm. It worked. That didn’t surprise me and it shouldn’t have. It wasn’t the first time I’d tried it after all, but it was the first time I’d tried it after the suit took massive damage.
Taking a risk, but not much of one, I switched the view from sonar to computer enhanced night vision. That gave Haley and me an excellent view of the dragon running down a street in between big suburban houses, unknowingly tearing up flowerbeds, and smashing a Volkswagen Beetle.
As Artaxus smashed a silvery, reflecting ball on a pillar, the air in front of him began to shimmer.
In the next moment, the shimmering had spread across the road, and solidified into a half circle. The dragon blocked much of the view, but I could see a grassy field and a castle wall towering over it. Continue reading Faerieland: Part 45→
The Legion of Nothing: A Series of Online Superhero Novels (Updates Monday and Thursday)
