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Two days to go and it looks like Supervillain is going to clock in at almost exactly half the required word count for NaNoWriMo. On the other hand, I think I can safely say it will have a beginning, a middle and an end (a three-act structure with an epilogue actually), so even if I can't subsequently expand on it it'll be a decent novella, which is better than I've ever managed to do before...
Here's another chapter or so to be going on with:
"Oh god. It was her. I can't prove it yet, but it was her." Amanda looked at him. "I don't know how much you remember from last night-- just before I grabbed Kestrel and Assassin Bug hit you, she was saying "so you're that new player in town.' Not 'the new player', not 'a new player'.."
"Implying she'd heard me mentioned before."
"Right; and the only person I'd mentioned you to..."
"..was Dr. Vermin, who was killed a few hours later; so she must have gone to see him, and you think she killed him? But why, exactly? I mean, he was stalking her, but she's a superhero. She's not supposed to do stuff like that."
"If she also went after Keypad FX, then it's about the fones, and she's not a superhero."
"How can we prove it?"
"I'm a supervillain, I don't have to prove anything. Law and order are not my problem."
"Don't you want to prove it to yourself before you take any action. She might be innocent - she might have gone to question him."
"About what? We only found out by accident that there was something up with the fone film. I'm telling you, she's up to her pinfeathers in something and she's taking out anyone who could shed light on the matter."
"But on the other hand, she could have gone to confront Vermin about the robot attack on the restaurant, and somebody else could have killed him after she left. We have no way of knowing what her motions were."
"Why do you have to give everybody the benefit of the doubt?!" Victor demanded, and then remembered: that's why she's dating me. Amanda looked at the floor; she had gone pale, but her mouth was a thin line.
"You're right," she muttered, "I don't belong in this game. I should go."
"I didn't mean that."
"But it's what you tried to tell me when we first started going together, isn't it? You don't follow the same rules as me - I mean, I have no complaints at all about us - you've been better to me than anyone I've ever met. You even tried to warn me that you don't play fair with the rest of the world - and I guess that's where we don't see eye to eye."
"I-" Victor stopped himself from pleading. Supers of either affiliation didn't grovel, and anyway Amanda was right; he'd been naïve to think anything between the two of them could work for long. He was the one who'd introduced her to this life, but she really belonged with the other team.
"Amanda," he began again, "you don't have to stay with me, but at least stay in the safe house for the next day until this matter gets settled. I just don't want you to get hurt, and Kestrel will be on the hunt for you now. I'll leave right now if you like. Call your office tomorrow and tell them you've got the 'flu. The fridge is stocked and there are books and dvds. Just give me a day to stop her, and you'll never have to see me again."
"I've not as naïve as you think -I do understand this isn't a game. Look, I'll go with you - you're right, this isn't a courtroom and we're all outside the law - but confront her first. Just find out what's really going on before you go after a possibly innocent person. In any case you must want to know if it's all of them or just her. I know the Five are the opposition - believe me, I've got the bruises to remind me of that, and someday I'd like to pay back what's-his-name, Assassin Beetle; but this is different: someone killed Vermin, and I can see in your eyes that you mean to kill the person who did it. All I'm saying is be sure you've got the right person before you attack."
She stood up, hesitated, then kissed him on the brow. "Anyway, goodnight," she said, and walked away down the hall. Victor was not sure if she expected or wanted him to follow. He waited a few minutes until he heard her turn the tap off, and the bathroom door open and shut as she left and went into the bedroom. He got up and went to brush his teeth. By the time he had done she had already turned off the light and gone to bed, and he stood a moment outside her door, trying to read her mood by the sound of her breath, but she was too quiet for him. At last he returned to the living room, unfolded the blankets he had taken from the linen cupboard the night before, and went to sleep on the couch, alternately cursing himself for doing nothing, and for caring.
The next morning he woke early, happy to be in familiar surroundings until he remembered their conversation. He sat on the couch looking at weather reports, wondering what to do. Had things really been that awkward? Had he disappointed Amanda, one way or the other? Should he slip away now and begin his vendetta before she could put herself in harm's way? The last line of thought seemed the most productive, and he tiptoed to the kitchen to make himself some toast and coffee before slipping downstairs to his hidden stash of equipment.
To be fair, El Hazard actually had been pimply when he'd begun his career of super-villainy as a young man. Now he was pock-marked; but when Victor contemplated him, he thought only of his destruction of the Neon Gate Bridge, or of the incredible daylight airlift robbery of the Corporatron bank, when the SWAT team had been called in, only to be too astonished at what they were seeing to fire a single shot. Another advantage of supervillainy over superheroism - the latter, in Gradient City at least, was usually a young man's game, and a burly young man at that. Villainy was more a matter of plotting and invention - if you didn't get zapped, you could do it till you went gaga (and occasionally longer - some of the mad scientists' cadre took the title a bit literally). El Hazard had been shocking capes, uniforms and civilians for over thirty-five years, and showed no sign of letting up.
Amanda was sitting at the kitchen table, chin propped on one hand, a mug of coffee in the other.
"I couldn't sleep," she said. Ashamed, relieved, Victor poured himself a cup, put the milk (noting that it was getting low) back in the fridge, and sat down across from her, not looking in her face. She reached over the table and linked little-fingers with him. Victor was not sure why he felt like he was going to cry.
Roadie was, at that particular moment, a deeply puzzled man. There were situations in which he was used to feeling thus, but fighting crime was not one of them. He was good at putting pieces together (both literally and metaphorically) and his current state of bewilderment was traceable, he at last realized, to a suspicion that he did not have all the pieces in this case. Knowing this he felt better; he had an approach to try against the problem. He stood up, groaning a little as his knees cracked; stretched, dug through his pockets for a fresh piece of horrendously over-caffeinated chewing gum (which he bought by the flat from the Japanese grocery on the other side of town), and settled back don to go over his notes again. This time he would look for the outline of what was missing.
Posterchild had a room at F5HQ whose walls and doors were of a psycho-dampening alloy to keep his dreams from blasting into his teammates' heads whenever he slept. He'd covered them with posters to relieve the starkness of the silvery cubicle; paper landscapes, cars and figures covered the walls and the ceiling. All were distance shots - he felt uncomfortable looking at cropped photos that only showed part of a person or thing. They were arranged so that each picture was adjacent to those closest in scale, and the scenes graded subtly one to another. Stephen was jolted awake by nightmare images of Vermin's dead eye framed on the computer screen. He clapped the lights on and pulled the blankets tight around himself for a while as he sat up in his bed. When he felt a little calmer he got up and put in his favourite dvd, and watched the house front fall perfectly around Buster Keaton. He ran it back and watched it over and over again. Roadie knocked at his door.
"Yeah," mumbled Stephen, annoyed at having to speak. The big man opened the door carefully and leaned in.
"Can I run something by you?" he asked. Stephen nodded, put on his favourite blue sweater, and went out to the main room where Roadie swung out an extra surface from his computer desk.
"These are the attacks made by the Obscurant: the Flexikeratin warehouse, Club Molybdenum, Vermin's HQ and the Keypad FX studio. What's the same and what's different?" Stephen simply looked up at Roadie, knowing he couldn't wait to tell him. After a pause of appropriate length, Roadie went on:
"The Obscurant has taken credit for Flexikeratin and Molybdenum. I've looked over the names of employees and investors past and present, anything I could think of to connect them and I can't find it. The other two attacks on the other hand, do have a link - Keypad FX worked on a little scare-tactic doc for the school board about a device made by the late doctor that had been picked up by kids as a recreational drug." He frowned thoughtfully. "You were too young for that but you remember it, right? Anyway, with two credited Obscurant attacks having no apparent connection, and two unconfirmed attacks that do have a connection? Maybe the second two really are a separate case." Stephen raised an eyebrow at him. Roadie nodded, "Yeah, I know A.B. and Kestrel chased and fought a couple of suspects fleeing the scene of the crime, and Kestrel says the guy claimed to be the Obscurant. But look at it - the Obscurant's trademarked crimes were completely and probably deliberately random, and his focus was on confusion, property damage and bizarre gimmicks - no major injuries, not even anything taken. I don't know what the motive is, maybe he's one of those performance art criminals. Vermin and the Keypad FX guys were deliberately and lethally targeted. It's all at the other end of the scale. And we've got a motive. So what made the Obscurant break pattern so thoroughly?" Stephen put an image, a familiar metaphor, in Roadie's mind, but Roadie shook his head:
"If he's using the random crimes to cloak the motive of the lethal ones, why only take credit for the pranks? I know, he's involved in this somehow, but I still think he's a sideline player."
He paused again and Stephen shuddered with the memory of Vermin's death scene. Roadie knitted his brow sympathetically at the images in the teenager's mind. "I know it's not a pretty sight, but I need your help with this - Wendy wasn't on site, so we have to work from the photos, and no one sees things like you do. Wait a bit," he took out his phone and speed-dialed Gradient's main hospital, "there's something I'd better take care of first. Extension three eight nine zero, please." He waited some thirty seconds. "Yo, Helen? Yeah, it's me. Those guys from the FX studio still there? How are they? Mm. Can you hold them anyway? Find some excuse to keep them under observation or something? See, the thing is, I think they may have wound up in your care because someone was trying to shut them up, and I'd like them to be safe until one of us can talk to them to find out why. "He listened for another minute. "Thanks Helen, one of us'll be over this afternoon to see them. Wait, scratch that - I'll be over. Don't let anyone else in till then. Yeah, I'll take responsibility if the police ask. Oh, and if anyone other than myself or the police ask to see them, make them wait and give me a call right away. Yeah, even if it's the relatives. Thanks. You're a life-saver. Yes, I know. G'bye."
Dr. Oh hit the button to end her cel phone call and wondered, not for the first or even the second time, why she let Sam unload this sort of thing on her. He had no idea, absolutely no idea, how difficult it could be to hold a patient who didn't want to stick around in a room with pastel-coloured walls and a strict no-smoking policy. She braced herself as she pushed the elevator buttons for the recovery floor and resolved that this time she'd try emphasizing the "your-life-could-be-in-danger-if-you-leave" side of things and downplaying the "semi-official-authorities-want-to-question-you" part of the argument. As one of the higher-up cogs in the hierarchy of the hospital, she paid no notice to the orderly with pale lavender scrubs and a squeeze mop, apparently hard at work a few yards from the floor's main desk.
Here's another chapter or so to be going on with:
"Oh god. It was her. I can't prove it yet, but it was her." Amanda looked at him. "I don't know how much you remember from last night-- just before I grabbed Kestrel and Assassin Bug hit you, she was saying "so you're that new player in town.' Not 'the new player', not 'a new player'.."
"Implying she'd heard me mentioned before."
"Right; and the only person I'd mentioned you to..."
"..was Dr. Vermin, who was killed a few hours later; so she must have gone to see him, and you think she killed him? But why, exactly? I mean, he was stalking her, but she's a superhero. She's not supposed to do stuff like that."
"If she also went after Keypad FX, then it's about the fones, and she's not a superhero."
"How can we prove it?"
"I'm a supervillain, I don't have to prove anything. Law and order are not my problem."
"Don't you want to prove it to yourself before you take any action. She might be innocent - she might have gone to question him."
"About what? We only found out by accident that there was something up with the fone film. I'm telling you, she's up to her pinfeathers in something and she's taking out anyone who could shed light on the matter."
"But on the other hand, she could have gone to confront Vermin about the robot attack on the restaurant, and somebody else could have killed him after she left. We have no way of knowing what her motions were."
"Why do you have to give everybody the benefit of the doubt?!" Victor demanded, and then remembered: that's why she's dating me. Amanda looked at the floor; she had gone pale, but her mouth was a thin line.
"You're right," she muttered, "I don't belong in this game. I should go."
"I didn't mean that."
"But it's what you tried to tell me when we first started going together, isn't it? You don't follow the same rules as me - I mean, I have no complaints at all about us - you've been better to me than anyone I've ever met. You even tried to warn me that you don't play fair with the rest of the world - and I guess that's where we don't see eye to eye."
"I-" Victor stopped himself from pleading. Supers of either affiliation didn't grovel, and anyway Amanda was right; he'd been naïve to think anything between the two of them could work for long. He was the one who'd introduced her to this life, but she really belonged with the other team.
"Amanda," he began again, "you don't have to stay with me, but at least stay in the safe house for the next day until this matter gets settled. I just don't want you to get hurt, and Kestrel will be on the hunt for you now. I'll leave right now if you like. Call your office tomorrow and tell them you've got the 'flu. The fridge is stocked and there are books and dvds. Just give me a day to stop her, and you'll never have to see me again."
"I've not as naïve as you think -I do understand this isn't a game. Look, I'll go with you - you're right, this isn't a courtroom and we're all outside the law - but confront her first. Just find out what's really going on before you go after a possibly innocent person. In any case you must want to know if it's all of them or just her. I know the Five are the opposition - believe me, I've got the bruises to remind me of that, and someday I'd like to pay back what's-his-name, Assassin Beetle; but this is different: someone killed Vermin, and I can see in your eyes that you mean to kill the person who did it. All I'm saying is be sure you've got the right person before you attack."
She stood up, hesitated, then kissed him on the brow. "Anyway, goodnight," she said, and walked away down the hall. Victor was not sure if she expected or wanted him to follow. He waited a few minutes until he heard her turn the tap off, and the bathroom door open and shut as she left and went into the bedroom. He got up and went to brush his teeth. By the time he had done she had already turned off the light and gone to bed, and he stood a moment outside her door, trying to read her mood by the sound of her breath, but she was too quiet for him. At last he returned to the living room, unfolded the blankets he had taken from the linen cupboard the night before, and went to sleep on the couch, alternately cursing himself for doing nothing, and for caring.
The next morning he woke early, happy to be in familiar surroundings until he remembered their conversation. He sat on the couch looking at weather reports, wondering what to do. Had things really been that awkward? Had he disappointed Amanda, one way or the other? Should he slip away now and begin his vendetta before she could put herself in harm's way? The last line of thought seemed the most productive, and he tiptoed to the kitchen to make himself some toast and coffee before slipping downstairs to his hidden stash of equipment.
To be fair, El Hazard actually had been pimply when he'd begun his career of super-villainy as a young man. Now he was pock-marked; but when Victor contemplated him, he thought only of his destruction of the Neon Gate Bridge, or of the incredible daylight airlift robbery of the Corporatron bank, when the SWAT team had been called in, only to be too astonished at what they were seeing to fire a single shot. Another advantage of supervillainy over superheroism - the latter, in Gradient City at least, was usually a young man's game, and a burly young man at that. Villainy was more a matter of plotting and invention - if you didn't get zapped, you could do it till you went gaga (and occasionally longer - some of the mad scientists' cadre took the title a bit literally). El Hazard had been shocking capes, uniforms and civilians for over thirty-five years, and showed no sign of letting up.
Amanda was sitting at the kitchen table, chin propped on one hand, a mug of coffee in the other.
"I couldn't sleep," she said. Ashamed, relieved, Victor poured himself a cup, put the milk (noting that it was getting low) back in the fridge, and sat down across from her, not looking in her face. She reached over the table and linked little-fingers with him. Victor was not sure why he felt like he was going to cry.
Roadie was, at that particular moment, a deeply puzzled man. There were situations in which he was used to feeling thus, but fighting crime was not one of them. He was good at putting pieces together (both literally and metaphorically) and his current state of bewilderment was traceable, he at last realized, to a suspicion that he did not have all the pieces in this case. Knowing this he felt better; he had an approach to try against the problem. He stood up, groaning a little as his knees cracked; stretched, dug through his pockets for a fresh piece of horrendously over-caffeinated chewing gum (which he bought by the flat from the Japanese grocery on the other side of town), and settled back don to go over his notes again. This time he would look for the outline of what was missing.
Posterchild had a room at F5HQ whose walls and doors were of a psycho-dampening alloy to keep his dreams from blasting into his teammates' heads whenever he slept. He'd covered them with posters to relieve the starkness of the silvery cubicle; paper landscapes, cars and figures covered the walls and the ceiling. All were distance shots - he felt uncomfortable looking at cropped photos that only showed part of a person or thing. They were arranged so that each picture was adjacent to those closest in scale, and the scenes graded subtly one to another. Stephen was jolted awake by nightmare images of Vermin's dead eye framed on the computer screen. He clapped the lights on and pulled the blankets tight around himself for a while as he sat up in his bed. When he felt a little calmer he got up and put in his favourite dvd, and watched the house front fall perfectly around Buster Keaton. He ran it back and watched it over and over again. Roadie knocked at his door.
"Yeah," mumbled Stephen, annoyed at having to speak. The big man opened the door carefully and leaned in.
"Can I run something by you?" he asked. Stephen nodded, put on his favourite blue sweater, and went out to the main room where Roadie swung out an extra surface from his computer desk.
"These are the attacks made by the Obscurant: the Flexikeratin warehouse, Club Molybdenum, Vermin's HQ and the Keypad FX studio. What's the same and what's different?" Stephen simply looked up at Roadie, knowing he couldn't wait to tell him. After a pause of appropriate length, Roadie went on:
"The Obscurant has taken credit for Flexikeratin and Molybdenum. I've looked over the names of employees and investors past and present, anything I could think of to connect them and I can't find it. The other two attacks on the other hand, do have a link - Keypad FX worked on a little scare-tactic doc for the school board about a device made by the late doctor that had been picked up by kids as a recreational drug." He frowned thoughtfully. "You were too young for that but you remember it, right? Anyway, with two credited Obscurant attacks having no apparent connection, and two unconfirmed attacks that do have a connection? Maybe the second two really are a separate case." Stephen raised an eyebrow at him. Roadie nodded, "Yeah, I know A.B. and Kestrel chased and fought a couple of suspects fleeing the scene of the crime, and Kestrel says the guy claimed to be the Obscurant. But look at it - the Obscurant's trademarked crimes were completely and probably deliberately random, and his focus was on confusion, property damage and bizarre gimmicks - no major injuries, not even anything taken. I don't know what the motive is, maybe he's one of those performance art criminals. Vermin and the Keypad FX guys were deliberately and lethally targeted. It's all at the other end of the scale. And we've got a motive. So what made the Obscurant break pattern so thoroughly?" Stephen put an image, a familiar metaphor, in Roadie's mind, but Roadie shook his head:
"If he's using the random crimes to cloak the motive of the lethal ones, why only take credit for the pranks? I know, he's involved in this somehow, but I still think he's a sideline player."
He paused again and Stephen shuddered with the memory of Vermin's death scene. Roadie knitted his brow sympathetically at the images in the teenager's mind. "I know it's not a pretty sight, but I need your help with this - Wendy wasn't on site, so we have to work from the photos, and no one sees things like you do. Wait a bit," he took out his phone and speed-dialed Gradient's main hospital, "there's something I'd better take care of first. Extension three eight nine zero, please." He waited some thirty seconds. "Yo, Helen? Yeah, it's me. Those guys from the FX studio still there? How are they? Mm. Can you hold them anyway? Find some excuse to keep them under observation or something? See, the thing is, I think they may have wound up in your care because someone was trying to shut them up, and I'd like them to be safe until one of us can talk to them to find out why. "He listened for another minute. "Thanks Helen, one of us'll be over this afternoon to see them. Wait, scratch that - I'll be over. Don't let anyone else in till then. Yeah, I'll take responsibility if the police ask. Oh, and if anyone other than myself or the police ask to see them, make them wait and give me a call right away. Yeah, even if it's the relatives. Thanks. You're a life-saver. Yes, I know. G'bye."
Dr. Oh hit the button to end her cel phone call and wondered, not for the first or even the second time, why she let Sam unload this sort of thing on her. He had no idea, absolutely no idea, how difficult it could be to hold a patient who didn't want to stick around in a room with pastel-coloured walls and a strict no-smoking policy. She braced herself as she pushed the elevator buttons for the recovery floor and resolved that this time she'd try emphasizing the "your-life-could-be-in-danger-if-you-leave" side of things and downplaying the "semi-official-authorities-want-to-question-you" part of the argument. As one of the higher-up cogs in the hierarchy of the hospital, she paid no notice to the orderly with pale lavender scrubs and a squeeze mop, apparently hard at work a few yards from the floor's main desk.
