Paradox’s entire world narrowed down to Karnos, his vision tunneling as if he’d turtled into his own skin and was watching everything through a narrow periscope.

His heart slammed in his ears.

He knew Karnos was bluffing.

Karnos know Paradox was bluffing.

The game they were playing now was chicken. Seeing which one of them would swerve before it came to a full-on brawl that could get one or both of them killed.

Because if Paradox rolled over to a threat, Karnos would do it again. And again. That was just the way self-serving animals without a shred of empathy operated. Like serial killers, career criminals, corporate CEO’s, and housecats.

The moment hung in the air, each heartbeat seeming to last an eternity as Paradox made plan A through Z.

Plan A was to run away by drilling a hole through the wall or ceiling with Floating Armaments.

Plan Z was inflicting as much damage as possible with them the instant before he died. Everything in between was a variation on those two outcomes.

The storage unit wasn’t very sturdy, and Paradox was fairly sure he could do it. The trick was holding Karnos away from him with his floating armaments while he made his escape.

Once Karnos got into melee range the fight was essentially over. He could shapeshift, dive into Perry’s sinuses and explode his head from the inside.

Ooh! I wonder if I could make my next suit airtight. That seems like it would become necessity sooner rather than later. Like in the next four seconds.

FOCUS!

Paradox’s eyes narrowed.

I bet I could make a Floating Armament suit of armor. I wouldn’t even need to design power armor then. I’d just have to branch out into micro-cutters and lasers for higher precision at nanoscale. Could be highly useful as backup armor.

I wonder if I could modify the properties of floating armaments by introducing impurities? If properties could be modified, could I make a summonable microchip, and if so, could the summoned armor therefore have HUD and electrical components?

Summonable computer. Weird.

FOCUS!!!

Perry’s brain seemed to be oddly numb to the danger in front of him and had begun wandering despite his heart screaming the seriousness of the situation directly into his ears.

Karnos opened his mouth and limbered up his gun, breaking the oppressive stillness.

This is it. It’s on, Perry thought, his skin prickling as he tensed, ready to trigger the belt around his waist, summon some floating armaments and get the party started.

RIIIIING!

Perry’s cell phone on the desk began ringing, cutting off whatever the supervillain in front of him had been about to say.

Paradox and Karnos glanced at each other. The older supervillain shrugged wordlessly.

RIIIIIING!

“One sec.” Perry said, grabbing his phone and immediately recognizing Titan’s work number.

Perry held the phone to his ear and spoke without taking his eye off the supervillain in the corner of the room.

“Paradox speaking. I’m a little busy right now, so-“

“Locust is planning a coup. She’s gonna take down Nexus during High Tide.”

Perry blinked, and glanced over at Mr. Skinner, covering the mic.

“Can you excuse me? I need to take this.”

***Later***

“What’s the deal?” Perry asked, arriving at the meeting point in his Mk. II.

“You got here fast,” Titan said approvingly.

“Yeah I was just in my lair in a mexican standoff with Karnos when you guys called. It’s no problem,” Perry said with a shrug. “He’s probably still there, trying to break all my stuff as we speak.”

“And you’re…okay with that?” Warcry asked, her brows furrowed.

“It was cheap,” Perry said with a shrug. “Plus he literally didn’t bring enough firepower to break anything I’ve made.”

The only caviat to that was the spell discs, which he’d loaded and brought with him, and the spell materials, which were hidden.

Perry had over fifty thousand dollars in parts for sale in the Marketplace, dribbling money into his bank account over time.

If somehow Karnos managed to break his lair, he’d get a new one. Underground. And actually secret this time. The primary purpose of a lair was to ensure privacy, so his current one was less than ideal, anyway.

He was madder at the lair than he was at Karnos.

The Spendthrift perk was very conducive to an easy-come-easy-go mindset.

“Anyway, enough about that mess. What’s this about a coup?” Perry asked, glancing around at the assembled capes.

There were a lot more than he was used to. Titan must’ve called all his contacts for this, implying this was something big.

“They’ve been creating anti-super weapons and testing them on prawns.”

Prawns being excellent benchmarks, with how durable and common they were. You could catch thousands of them for cheap if you had the infrastructure to survive said endeavor.

“How do you know?” Perry asked.

“Heather gave us one of her father’s contacts and we managed to track him down. He pointed us to a R&D facility where we hit the mother load.” Titan said, opening up a roll of papers as the nearby supers crowded around.

Perry glanced at Heather. “You told them about your dad?”

She shrugged. “Seemed like the kind of thing that could come back to bite me later and make drama.”

“Good call,” Perry said. “God knows there’s plenty of that already with all the spandex-wearing idiots running around the city.”

Warcry punched his shoulder, being one of those spandex-wearing idiots. Perry didn’t feel it, being a metal-wearing idiot.

“The reason we think Locust is planning a coup is because we also found these.” Titan said, cutting through their banter.

Perry only took a second to understand what he was looking at. It was a comprehensive list of supers and their abilities, along with how much damage they could take, where they would be during High tide, and most damningly, what their weaknesses were. Each hero got a handy little metric in terms of the number of prawn it would take to kill them, and by extension, how strong the weapon to eliminate them would have to be.

In addition were blueprints of the wall and the Nexus along with several other important parts of the city, the power plant, water plant, etc.

That looks bad, Perry thought. None of the information by itself was alarming. People looked up heroes on the Capes Wiki all the time. Most of it was readily available. Any super that had been in the business long enough had their powers narrowed down by the fandom pretty accurately.

It was when combined with plans for high-power weapons, blueprints of the wall with annotated weak-points, and high-value targets that could cripple Franklin city, that it started to get worrisome.

“So what’s the plan?” A yellow-wearing cape asked, the man had a helmet that was longer in the back then it should be and a black bolt of stylized lightning down the center of his suit. “You wouldn’t call us all in if you didn’t have one.”

He motioned to the dozens of semi-pro capes standing in a loose circle around the damning evidence.

“Plan’s simple. We’re going to throw such a big wrench in Locust’s plan that she’ll have no choice but to abort it. We’re going to arrest Locust, smash the places she’s storing the weapons, and expose her plans to Nexus before they can get off the ground.

“In order to make all those things happen at the same time, we need all of you. There’s at least five places where she’s keeping the guns. We expect each place to be guarded by at least one of Locust’s cowls and probably some normies with the new weapons.”

“Normally a usual team of four or five would be plenty for a gang-raid, but we’re doubling up, because any one of these places could be crawling with minions armed to the teeth. If your group finds a place that’s too hard just retreat and call it in. This is serious business, but it’s not worth losing your life over. Not while the coup is still just a plan, anyway.”

“And of course there’s Locust herself,” Titan said. “My team is going to try and pin down the one in charge. I expect there’ll be some pretty stiff resistance.”

“Oh sure, take the job that puts you in the spotlight.” One of the surrounding heroes in neon blue spandex said, crossing his arms.

I mean, it’s Titan’s plan…it’s HIS plan. The rest of you were gonna sit around and watch for purse snatchers all nigh- whatever.

Perry diverted his attention away from Titan straightening out the kid and decided to do some recon on Locust on his phone.

Locust was a duplicator with green-tinted skin with what appeared to be modestly armored scales that substituted for skin. Her strength, durability and especially her jumping ability were all superhuman.

The thing that earned her nickname was her abilities as an extremely powerful Duplicator.

As in, she could create swarms of herself, each of them superhumanly strong and tough, green colored and bounced around like grasshoppers.

Hence, Locust.

The current count during the Mayday riots was eighty-three, but it was unknown if that was her limit or not. The strong point of her power was that anything she wore or held while she split was also duplicated, until she un-split.

Which included Tinker-tech weapons.

Talk about a force-multiplier.

The cowl’s history was actually grounded in minioning. The woman had done a long stint as the only employee of her own business renting out her clones as muscle, gradually accruing wealth and experience in the biz until she eventually became the de-facto expert on minioning as a profitable enterprise, expanding her business and branching into the many wonderful aspects of organized villainy.

“What are the odds we’ll find locust at all six of these locations?” Perry asked, glancing up at Titan.

“If it’s as important as we think, the chances are pretty good,” Titan said. “Locust is probably going to be more spread out tonight than she usually is, which is going to be a key factor in whether or not we can actually catch her. Each duplicate divides the max limit among themselves, so if she’s split up in all six places, her original should only be able to make fourteen copies, give or take.”

“The original, wherever she is, does not have psychic communication with her duplicates….as far as we know, and the more of her copies that your teams can subdue, the easier the fight will be for everyone else. But keep in mind, she’s not the only super there. Keep your eyes open for surprises.”

They nodded as Titan laid out the specifics of his plan, even the heckler seemed satisfied with his piece of the pie once titan pointed out there was a good chance everyone’d be fighting Locust anyway, and a large weapons grab to deliver to Nexus, which was money icing on the prestige cake.

The giant had a way of appealing to people’s hearts and wallets.

******

“This place seems…friendly,” Perry said, scanning the surrounding streets and buildings. Blind were drawn, and Perry could barely make out the occasional peeker.

The people on the street openly scowled at them and moved indoors, spitting on the ground before hustling away.

“It’s a rough neighborhood,” Titan agreed as they sauntered towards Locust’s base, a gleaming skyscraper in the center of a landscape of two-story flophouses. “But that’s not why they don’t want us here.”

“Why’s that, then?” Perry asked as Hardcase’s mech walked alongside him and Heather flew up in the air with Jetset. Heather liked flying a lot more than he did, although Perry was better at it due to his Nerve stat.

“Locust represents stability and law in this part of the city,” Titan explained. “We represent the potential for that stability to turn on a dime. If we remove Locust, create a power vacuum and then leave, the resulting implosion will cause casualties.”

Titan glanced around at the buildings.

“Not to mention there’s a good chance we’ll break some of their homes and businesses in the scuffle.”

“Kinda sounds like we’re the bad guys in this situation.” Perry said.

“Oh, we’re definitely the good guys,” Titan chuckled. “And if you wanna keep it that way, you’ll spend the rest of High Tide in the southeast Block doing damage control with us.”

“Booooring!” Warcry groaned just on the other side of Titan. “Can I pass? My powers suck at rebuilding things.”

“Look, if you wanna graduate from chasing purse-snatchers through the sewers to headlining for Nexus, you’ve gotta look at the whole picture. Do the whole job.”

Titan waggled a giant finger at Warcry. “And it is a job. Make no doubt about it. You don’t get to slack.”

Warcry rolled her eyes.

“Have you tried using your powers to grind up concrete and heat it up hot enough that it can be re-used?” Perry asked, leaning over and catching the energy-user’s gaze. “Or using your power to create forms for construction? Cutting beams? Shaping bricks or clearing rubble so rebuilding can begin faster?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but mind your own business,” Warcry said.

Perry shrugged. Clearly she hadn’t given the problem the thought it deserved. That seemed to be all Perry was able to do recently. It was as if his mind had become so bored with the mundane that he put himself on autopilot and thought about other things.

Even Karnos threatening his life had been a little boring.

I wonder if that’s a result of my heightened Nerve. Or being a tinker. Or something else?

Oh, speaking of heightened Nerve, taking the summoned computer thought experiment to it’s conclusion, wouldn’t that allow me to have a computer magically connected to my mind? I could run CAD completely with my mind, increasing the speed severalfold. Maybe I don’t have to buy a cortex connection device. I could just build a magical one.

That would be pretty crazy. And if I could figure out a way to make a variety of standard connections come off of the computer, like USB male cords, I could plug my mind almost directly into any other computer, using my magical computer as the go-between.

How weird would that be?

I’d have to make an operating system for it, and…do I have enough skin for that? If perry wanted his magical floating computer to be permanent , he’d need a lot of skin. If permanence was even something that was possible. Computers had a lot of parts.

Does the skin have to be attached to my body? Perry assumed it was a central nervous system thing.

What if I grew some of my skin on a petri dish and tried that? perry assumed that wouldn’t work because the skin wasn’t connected to his nervous system.

Wait a minute.

What if he then connected the skin to his nervous system by using a symbol written in mindtaker ichor on the other side.

Would that be possible?

It seemed like it might be a way to condense dozens or even hundreds of large symbols down to one symbol on his own body.

This will require a more advanced chemistry setup, Perry thought. I should look into making some drilling drones so I can get started on that new lair.

Speaking of new lairs, I need to figure out how everyone is surveilling me and put a stop to it. Creating a new lair while I’m on reality T.V. probably won’t do me any favors.

So Perry’s first priority was to figure out how he’d been bugged, disable it, then launch counter-intelligence against his old man.

It was all in good fun.

Then a new lair.

Then the mad science.

Although, I suppose I’ll have to deal with this ambush first.

Three identical women with a greenish hue were standing in the street in front of them, holding oversized blasters of unknown potency.

They were flanked by no less than twenty minions in faceless white masks and black hyperweave (spandex), each carrying some manner of weapon.

“Where do you think y’all are going in my block?” the center Locust asked, hefting her gun menacingly.

Perry glanced up and spotted white masks in the windows on either side of the street, and on the rooftops, flanking them on every side. Those minions were in turn flanked by Heather and Jetset, who seemed to be dismayed at the sheer quantity.

I don’t think I’ll ever get a better shot at this. If a fight breaks out I won’t have their undivided attention.

Taking the initiative, Perry gave the code-phrase he’d taught Titan’s Crew a week ago.

“Oh my god you guys! I think I’m having a baby!” Perry shouted, flailing his arms.

Weallfloatdownhere.EXE

Titan and Warycry clenched their eyes shut and looked away from him as the spell-disc did its work.

A crystal was shattered in the crown of the Mk.II helmet, causing a pulse of blinding light to emanate outwards as Tomward’s Floating Dazzler was cast from his helmet.

“Agh!” Locust snarled, backing away and covering her eyes. “What the Heaaaa!” The supervillain began squawking as her feet divorced themselves from the ground without her permission. And they weren’t getting back together either.

Dang near one hundred percent of the assembled minions and their boss had been caught gawking at the strange display. Nice.

They now weighed as much as the air they breathed, tumbling up into the air with no balance, nor ability to aim their weapons without spinning wildly in midair.

The original trigger phrase was going to be ‘hey, look at me’, but it got shot down because it revealed the intention of the spell to the cunning observer. I think this way is a heck of a lot funnier, and just as effective. I mean, who wouldn’t look at a man in power-armor that claims he’s about to give birth?

“Thirty seconds!” Perry shouted. It was more like thirty-four point five, but who was counting?

“Hardcase, scatter the minions, gently!” Titan shouted “Warcry, corral Locust, disable her guns if you can, and definitely prevent her from-“

BANG!

The three Locusts popped as they shot themselves in the head.

“Doing that.” Titan gave a rare pout then put his game face back on.

“She’s gonna know we’re coming, let’s plow through these guys before she has time to go to ground!” he shouted, leading by example and knocking aside wildly flailing minions like bowling pins.

Behind them, Manic followed along, riding along on his Segway and absolutely destroying a plate of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.