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I don't know if anyone's actually reading this, but here's Act II of Supervillain:
The alarm broke in on them in the dark, and they struggled to get up when they had been so warm in bed, but Victor was used to odd hours.
"Mesmer raspberry teacup?" murmured Amanda, but she got up too, and put on her new utility belt. Victor returned form the bathroom and she went in to brush her teeth and wash up before putting on her gloves and her improvised cowl.
He climbed cautiously out her window, feeling around for the invisible fire escape, then tapping it gently until it reappeared. She squeezed out after and followed him down to the parking lot below. The last couple of metres were a jump; Amanda went first, then Victor, after he had made the ladder invisible again and affixed a piece of glow tape to the wall to mark where it was.
"You'll have to lift me up to reach it when we get back," he observed. "I'm a little bigger than your aunt, but I know you can do it." They took each others' hand and set off.
"Warm enough?"
"I'm ok. Thermal undies, remember? You say you've got transportation?"
"Not five blocks from here." They walked casually, studiously not avoiding streetlights or the windows of all-night donut shops. Amanda had taken her cowl off so that anyone seeing them would think, if anything, that they coming back from a late date and that she had interesting taste in clubwear. "Though to make that work you should probably have a costume too," she added.
"Nah, I can be your geeky boyfriend."
"I don't know, I think you'd look good in black." By now they had reached Victor's ride.
"Wow - it looks like a completely normal car."
"I like to keep things simple. I have two or three around the city - I...took care of some trouble... for the parking lot guys, a few months back, and thye let me have a corner here and a corner there."
Keypad Factory FX Industries were on a block of warehouses that had been reclaimed as galleries and studios by the not-yet-a-famous-artist community. They parked one street over and crept back to check the place. Evidently Victor had been right, and the FX artists had indeed been working late, for metal was blaring from speakers attached to a laptop, and the lights and the coffee machine were on. The coffee smelled evilly strong, with an off, chemical taint to it; Victor wondered what other rackets the "FX" company might be up to.
"Watch yourself, love, this place is quite the funhouse. I'm amazed I've never been here before, actually."
"I don't know whether to be scared of the owners or scared for them." Amanda had the initial impression that the place was quite crowded, but all the silhouettes turned out to belong to maquettes of the work the place had done. No humans, on close inspection, were to be seen, but there was an unsteady quality to the air that made the mannequins almost seem to move in a disturbingly shimmery fashion. She started to feel shaky and realized she was sweating. The warehouse seemed much bigger than it had from the outside, or even since they had entered it. The shelf next to her looked suddenly as though it were ten metres away. Some instinct began urging her to run back the way she had come, but turning made her dizzy. The music was slowing down, developing a creepy echo. Any moment, now, she knew, the dummies were going to break their pretense of stillness and started coming towards her. It wasn't their attack she feared, it was the thought of seeing their strange shuffling movements that paralysed her with terror. She almost fainted when someone grapped her arm, but it was Victor, and his hand was warm.
"Poison fumes - look." A pair of unconscious and possibly dead men, clearly the FX guys (beards and tool belts) were slumped on the floor at the back of the room near a disconnected pipe on one of their machines. Their hands were tied with rubber hose. The air around the set-up seared and rattled the throat.
"Amanda, cover your face and get out!"
"You take the smaller one," she said, pulling her cowl over her mouth. There was no decision for her, he realized. With no breath to waste on protestations that she save herself (there's no time, they may already be dead, this stuff is likely flammable as well as toxic and the wiring in this firetrap is probably loose), Victor pulled a switch near the hose, hoping it shut down the system, and seized the skinnier man and dragged him towards the still-open door they had come in by, trying to balance his haste to escape with the need to not exert himself so much that his breathing would speed up and draw in more of the noxious fumes. Amanda, without visible qualm, picked up the bigger man as though he were a sleepy toddler and strode towards the fresh air. Like Victor, though, she coughed and gasped when they had reached the relative safety of the outside. She was human, after all.
"We'd better not stop here, we can't be sure that the place won't explode."
"What if we open all the doors and windows so the fumes disperse?"
"Too much risk - the hinges and metal parts might spark and set it off. Let's get clear with these guys and find out if they're breathing. If they're not, then we can worry about going back inside." He thought of telling her what a dumb but brave thing she'd made them do, but then realized there was no doubt in her mind he'd have rescued the guys even if he'd been on his own; perhaps he would have tried - they needed them for information, after all.
Amanda had taken some first aid courses, and Victor, though not dedicated to saving people, had always assumed he would someday need to rescue a partner in crime and had studied mouth-to-mouth along with other less recommended skills like home bullet-removal surgery. Most importantly, they had come by not long after the victims had been tied up, and while there was yet a good chance of reviving them. The men retched. Their eyes were unfocused and their beards were flecked with vomit, but they would be all right in a day or two.
"Who did this?"
"Don't know. I didn't see."
"Me neither."
"There are two of you. How could neither of you have seen who knocked you out?"
"I saw something hit Doug, but I didn't see who threw it. Then something hit me."
"What kind of something?"
"I don't know, it was kind of a blur."
"We know it must all be a bit fuzzy for you to remember --"
"No, it was a blurry thing that hit him."
"Could have been a gas bomb of some sort, I suppose."
"What did - why would someone attack you guys?"
"I don't know - I mean, that Obscurant guy's been doing some crazy stuff lately..."
"It was the dvds, Andre. I told you they would bite us in the ass someday." Amanda and Victor looked at each other.
"Dvds?"
"This ass-clown was trying to pirate dvds on the side." Amanda looked disappointed.
"Hey," said Andre defensively, "those were rarities. No had them out commercially. Anyway, whoever heard of copyright investigators tying people up and trying to kill them."
"Well, maybe it was rival bootleggers."
"For cutting into their lucrative sales of Explodeo Drive, or maybe Night of the Garter-Snake?" Victor looked hopeful.
"What about Fone Fakers?" Doug and Andre both looked puzzled:
"Not much demand for that one," said Doug, "and that's coming from a guy who worked on it."
"Listen," said Victor - Keypad Factory FX Industries had no reason to suspect who he was and since he had, under Amanda's influence, just helped save their lives, he figured he'd play the role of crime fighter for the time being - "We've recently reopened the case of Vermin's Fones, and we've been noticing that every opy of the documentary made on the subject has vanished. Do either of you have any idea why?"
"We just did the fone effects?"
"How did you do them? Did you have an actual fone?"
"No, even by then the things were starting to die off. We had to finish the film as fast as we could before they scrapped the project and stopped our pay, so we just bought some rave footage off a couple of former kamerakidz and ran it through a few filters." Doug and Andres' rescuers exchanged glances.
"Was there anything odd about the original footage?" Victor asked, "anybody recognizable in it?"
"Don't know. It was hard to look at directly without getting blitzed, and that fone stuff never did it for me - just gave me migraines."
"What about you, Doug?" Doug pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, trying to remember.
The alarm broke in on them in the dark, and they struggled to get up when they had been so warm in bed, but Victor was used to odd hours.
"Mesmer raspberry teacup?" murmured Amanda, but she got up too, and put on her new utility belt. Victor returned form the bathroom and she went in to brush her teeth and wash up before putting on her gloves and her improvised cowl.
He climbed cautiously out her window, feeling around for the invisible fire escape, then tapping it gently until it reappeared. She squeezed out after and followed him down to the parking lot below. The last couple of metres were a jump; Amanda went first, then Victor, after he had made the ladder invisible again and affixed a piece of glow tape to the wall to mark where it was.
"You'll have to lift me up to reach it when we get back," he observed. "I'm a little bigger than your aunt, but I know you can do it." They took each others' hand and set off.
"Warm enough?"
"I'm ok. Thermal undies, remember? You say you've got transportation?"
"Not five blocks from here." They walked casually, studiously not avoiding streetlights or the windows of all-night donut shops. Amanda had taken her cowl off so that anyone seeing them would think, if anything, that they coming back from a late date and that she had interesting taste in clubwear. "Though to make that work you should probably have a costume too," she added.
"Nah, I can be your geeky boyfriend."
"I don't know, I think you'd look good in black." By now they had reached Victor's ride.
"Wow - it looks like a completely normal car."
"I like to keep things simple. I have two or three around the city - I...took care of some trouble... for the parking lot guys, a few months back, and thye let me have a corner here and a corner there."
Keypad Factory FX Industries were on a block of warehouses that had been reclaimed as galleries and studios by the not-yet-a-famous-artist community. They parked one street over and crept back to check the place. Evidently Victor had been right, and the FX artists had indeed been working late, for metal was blaring from speakers attached to a laptop, and the lights and the coffee machine were on. The coffee smelled evilly strong, with an off, chemical taint to it; Victor wondered what other rackets the "FX" company might be up to.
"Watch yourself, love, this place is quite the funhouse. I'm amazed I've never been here before, actually."
"I don't know whether to be scared of the owners or scared for them." Amanda had the initial impression that the place was quite crowded, but all the silhouettes turned out to belong to maquettes of the work the place had done. No humans, on close inspection, were to be seen, but there was an unsteady quality to the air that made the mannequins almost seem to move in a disturbingly shimmery fashion. She started to feel shaky and realized she was sweating. The warehouse seemed much bigger than it had from the outside, or even since they had entered it. The shelf next to her looked suddenly as though it were ten metres away. Some instinct began urging her to run back the way she had come, but turning made her dizzy. The music was slowing down, developing a creepy echo. Any moment, now, she knew, the dummies were going to break their pretense of stillness and started coming towards her. It wasn't their attack she feared, it was the thought of seeing their strange shuffling movements that paralysed her with terror. She almost fainted when someone grapped her arm, but it was Victor, and his hand was warm.
"Poison fumes - look." A pair of unconscious and possibly dead men, clearly the FX guys (beards and tool belts) were slumped on the floor at the back of the room near a disconnected pipe on one of their machines. Their hands were tied with rubber hose. The air around the set-up seared and rattled the throat.
"Amanda, cover your face and get out!"
"You take the smaller one," she said, pulling her cowl over her mouth. There was no decision for her, he realized. With no breath to waste on protestations that she save herself (there's no time, they may already be dead, this stuff is likely flammable as well as toxic and the wiring in this firetrap is probably loose), Victor pulled a switch near the hose, hoping it shut down the system, and seized the skinnier man and dragged him towards the still-open door they had come in by, trying to balance his haste to escape with the need to not exert himself so much that his breathing would speed up and draw in more of the noxious fumes. Amanda, without visible qualm, picked up the bigger man as though he were a sleepy toddler and strode towards the fresh air. Like Victor, though, she coughed and gasped when they had reached the relative safety of the outside. She was human, after all.
"We'd better not stop here, we can't be sure that the place won't explode."
"What if we open all the doors and windows so the fumes disperse?"
"Too much risk - the hinges and metal parts might spark and set it off. Let's get clear with these guys and find out if they're breathing. If they're not, then we can worry about going back inside." He thought of telling her what a dumb but brave thing she'd made them do, but then realized there was no doubt in her mind he'd have rescued the guys even if he'd been on his own; perhaps he would have tried - they needed them for information, after all.
Amanda had taken some first aid courses, and Victor, though not dedicated to saving people, had always assumed he would someday need to rescue a partner in crime and had studied mouth-to-mouth along with other less recommended skills like home bullet-removal surgery. Most importantly, they had come by not long after the victims had been tied up, and while there was yet a good chance of reviving them. The men retched. Their eyes were unfocused and their beards were flecked with vomit, but they would be all right in a day or two.
"Who did this?"
"Don't know. I didn't see."
"Me neither."
"There are two of you. How could neither of you have seen who knocked you out?"
"I saw something hit Doug, but I didn't see who threw it. Then something hit me."
"What kind of something?"
"I don't know, it was kind of a blur."
"We know it must all be a bit fuzzy for you to remember --"
"No, it was a blurry thing that hit him."
"Could have been a gas bomb of some sort, I suppose."
"What did - why would someone attack you guys?"
"I don't know - I mean, that Obscurant guy's been doing some crazy stuff lately..."
"It was the dvds, Andre. I told you they would bite us in the ass someday." Amanda and Victor looked at each other.
"Dvds?"
"This ass-clown was trying to pirate dvds on the side." Amanda looked disappointed.
"Hey," said Andre defensively, "those were rarities. No had them out commercially. Anyway, whoever heard of copyright investigators tying people up and trying to kill them."
"Well, maybe it was rival bootleggers."
"For cutting into their lucrative sales of Explodeo Drive, or maybe Night of the Garter-Snake?" Victor looked hopeful.
"What about Fone Fakers?" Doug and Andre both looked puzzled:
"Not much demand for that one," said Doug, "and that's coming from a guy who worked on it."
"Listen," said Victor - Keypad Factory FX Industries had no reason to suspect who he was and since he had, under Amanda's influence, just helped save their lives, he figured he'd play the role of crime fighter for the time being - "We've recently reopened the case of Vermin's Fones, and we've been noticing that every opy of the documentary made on the subject has vanished. Do either of you have any idea why?"
"We just did the fone effects?"
"How did you do them? Did you have an actual fone?"
"No, even by then the things were starting to die off. We had to finish the film as fast as we could before they scrapped the project and stopped our pay, so we just bought some rave footage off a couple of former kamerakidz and ran it through a few filters." Doug and Andres' rescuers exchanged glances.
"Was there anything odd about the original footage?" Victor asked, "anybody recognizable in it?"
"Don't know. It was hard to look at directly without getting blitzed, and that fone stuff never did it for me - just gave me migraines."
"What about you, Doug?" Doug pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, trying to remember.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-22 06:37 pm (UTC)From: (Anonymous)