Joshua Cochran was on edge as he steered the cruiser down the streets, shining the police car’s lamp down alley after alley, thankfully finding nothing but garbage and the evidence of crimes long past. Broken needles, soot-covered spoons laying discarded beneath dumpsters.

All stuff that he didn’t actually have to do anything about.

“Why are you so nervous?” His partner asked, glancing at him askance. Kyle was stuffing his face with a donut, a trail of powder dusting the front of his gradually expanding belly.

“I don’t consider myself a superstitious man,” Josh said, peering down another alley as they slowly drove forward. “But my wife is pregnant with our first baby, Captain just informed me I’m getting a desk job with a fat pay raise in a couple weeks, and my wife’s grandmother just died, leaving us her house and a little extra.”

“None of that sounds bad.” Kyle said, scarfing down another pastry.

“No, it’s fantastic, and that’s the problem: It sounds like the setup for the punchline of a bad joke, or an obituary.” Josh said as they drove. “He had so much to live for.”

“You think because everything is going right for you, you’re screwed?” Kyle asked.

“What goes around comes around,” Josh said, shining the spotlight down the alley.

“Oh Shi-“

A sparking hulk of something came barreling out of the alleyway and crushed the front of their cruiser, collapsing Kyle’s side of the car, crushing his partner instantly.

Adrenaline flooding his body, Joshua jerked open the door and rolled out onto the damp Chicago street.

Josh fumbled the flashlight out of his belt with trembling hands, pointing it and his service pistol into the dark alley.

Dozens of massive shapes cloaked in darkness seemed to shy away from the light, jumping up an unbelievable thirty feet to the nearby roofs, disappearing over them before he could so much as make out what they were.

He shined the light on his car. The front right half was crushed with Kyle inside, but whatever had done it was long gone.

“What the hell, what the hell?” Josh turned his light back on the alleyway and spotted no less than seven people, dressed like it was Halloween in crazy-town. One of the girls was wearing a bikini, for gods-sake! Another was wearing some kind of skin-tight suit that looked painted on, and the men weren’t much better, with outlandishly bulging muscles on full display underneath brightly colored spandex.

Two of them were wearing some kind of outlandish armor suits.

The freak shows were showing signs of physical exhaustion, leaning on each other, and watching him cautiously.

“G-get your hands up!” He said, brandishing his revolver. There were more people than there were in his six shooter, and Josh prayed to God they didn’t realize that.

“What’s up with the cop?” one of the armored ones asked pointing at him. “All the Replicators left as soon as he showed up.”

“Shut up!” Joshua shouted, backing towards the open door of his cruiser. There was no way he could arrest any of these people with his car totaled, but maybe he could call in backup.

Oh shit, he though, ice flowing through his veins as he glanced down at the crushed radio through the door.

New plan: Leave these assholes to their own devices and make my way to a payphone. This isn’t gonna work out in my favor.

“I’m gonna…check the perimeter,” Joshua lied, “None of you people move.”

He didn’t care if they moved or not, he just wanted to sound like he wasn’t running away. If they thought he was running away, they might chase him.

“Hold up,” a voice said from behind him, causing Josh to wildly swing his gun around, already squeezing the trigger.

A massive steel beam with…fingers…came down from above him and poked a single steel digit behind the hammer of his gun. Josh gaped, looking up at what looked like some abominable cross between a giant van and a spider. The monster tugged the gun out of his hand and tossed it aside.

“Sorry, about that,” a voice spoke, prompting him to look down. A tiny woman wearing a faceless black helmet was standing in front of him. He knew it was a woman because…well, it was pretty obvious under the body paint. “We’re gonna need to keep you around for a moment.”

***Paradox***

“Please, just let me go,” The cop groveled on the wet concrete, his eyes and nose watering as his face crumpled. “My wife is pregnant, I’m gonna be a daddy. Pleeeeeaaaase.”

“How does that work?” Plagius asked.

“Well, young man, when a mommy robot and a daddy robot love each other very much…” Sin-Eater said.

“You know what I meant!” Plagius asked.

“His wife can’t be permapregnant…right?” Hardcase asked.

“W-what?” The officer stammered.

“Maybe if their cognition is selectively impaired?” George asked.

“Ugh, imagine being pregnant for fifty years,” Wraith groaned.

“Are we still operating on the robot hypothesis?” Hardcase clarified.

“One way to find out,” Perry said, tearing the cruiser door off it’s hinges and inspecting the corpse within.

“Yep, it’s an android.” Perry said, peeling the bloody fractured skull back to reveal the bruised Comp-gel brain. Comp-gel was that top-shelf stuff that Perry would have to buy on the Marketplace if he ever wanted to make a learning computer. “A really good one. Maybe good enough to make babies, actually.”

“What is wrong with you people?” The remaining android asked, his expression aghast at Perry’s antics.

“They haven’t attacked again,” Chemestro stated the obvious, peering at the rooftops, which were presumably swarming with Replicators with superpowers. The remaining two slicey-boys had played defensively and bogged them down until some of their buddies arrived to even the odds.

“There’s only one variable that’s different,” Hardcase said, glancing down at the grovelling police officer.

“Non-interference rules?” Perry supposed with a shrug.

“Mmmaybe.” Mass driver rubbed the stubble forming on his chin. “Makes about as much sense as the rest of this does. If this bozo here was the end goal of Professor Replica’s schemes, then it’s possible his minions are embedded with rules to not ‘upset the applecart’.”

“Bozo? Were you born in the twenties?” Perry asked, his grin hidden by his helmet.

“You know goddamn well I was!” Mass Driver said, glowering.

“What are you people talking about!?” The android asked, his voice trembling.

“Nothing you need to worry about, sparky.” Mass Driver said.

Perry glanced down at the officer’s badge, which read ‘J. Cochran’.

“Can I call you J.C.?” Perry asked.

“Uhhh.”

“Anyway, J.C. You didn’t do anything wrong, and we’re not really planning on doing anything bad to you it’s just that your presence seems to be an effective deterrent against the things that go bump in the night, if you catch my drift.”

“I-I don’t, I just wanna go home,” J.C. said,

ZZZZ!

A beam of blinding light descended from up high and traced across Perry’s face, carving partially through his helmet.

HP: 9

“Crap, they found something that works,” Perry muttered, glancing up at the tiny hole in the clouds that silently closed up as his armor visibly grew back together.

It was only 176.5 times stronger than a normal carbon composite, meaning a strong enough laser could still punch through it. A strong enough laser could punch through just about anything, Solaris being a case in point.

“Umm…what was that?” J.C. asked, his voice trembling.

“Satellite fire, get under cover.” Perry said,

“I thought you said they wouldn’t reveal themselves in front of the cop!?” Plagius said accusingly as the nine of them ducked under eaves.

“Do you SEE any replicators?” Wraith demanded.

“They have satellites!?” Hardcase cried. “They’re not supposed to have satellites!”

“What’s wrong with them having satellites?” Moonlight Flash asked on behalf of her and her brother. The two mages looked confused.

“Because we thought we had space superiority, and not having it is a serious problem,” Perry said, checking his phone. Predictably, there was no signal.

“Worse, they decided to reveal it,” Chemestro muttered.

That was indeed a problem. If the satellites were a secret, and they decided to reveal it to a rag-tag group of supers in way over their head, that meant they had every intention of killing all of them to keep it a secret. They were no longer targets of opportunity, and had become priority #1.

“This has been a fun little trip. I’m having fun. Who else is having fun?” Perry asked.

Heather and Mass-Driver raised their hands. Everyone else gave him the stink-eye.

“Mass-Driver, do you think you can take out that satellite?”

“Nah, I’ve tried to take out a satellite before. It’s a needle in a haystack. You wouldn’t think it, but space is BIG.” Mass Driver said.

“If we were going fast enough it would have a hard time hitting us.” Natalie said. “Tracking is complicated.”

“Hold on, I have an idea,” Perry said, setting Gor’s Disintegration to the ‘shotgun’ setting, and dialing the spread down to thousandths of a degree.

You wanna play with light? Let’s play with light.

Sliding stats

Nerve 14 -> 18

Perry boosted his aim and reflexes, took a deep breath, stepped out of cover and looked straight up, raising his left hand to give the satellite the finger.

ZZZZZ

HP:8

Most of Perry’s faceplate was burned away in a fraction of a second.

Perry oriented Gor’s Disintegration into the same path the light had travelled and fired a shot, expending a quarter of the crystal on two dozen tightly clustered rounds.

By the time they got to space they should’ve separated into a scattershot a dozen feet across, enough to land a couple hits and disable the satellite even if he wasn’t perfectly accurate.

Aaand…no follow up laser. Somewhere off the coast of America, a swiss-cheesed Replicator satellite would crash into the ocean.

“Tah daa,” Perry gave them Jazz Hands.

“Your eyebrows got burned off,” Wraith chortled.

“Come on, I just took out a satellite with a spell! In SPACE. Nobody’s impressed?” Perry asked.

“I’m sure it’s very impressive, Paradox,” his cousin said, patronizingly.

“Fine, let’s get to the museum and get what we came for before any more satellites get into position,” Perry muttered, picking up their good-luck charm and throwing him in Boomer’s cockpit. “I can’t do that forever.”

“You good?” Perry asked Hardcase, his gaze lingering on the large bloodstain on her upper arm.

“I’m good,” Hardcase said, picking up the expended Astra’s Mending cannister and showing it to him.

“Let’s go!” Plagius hollered, climbing on top of Boomer’s cockpit as the rest of them piled in.

A moment later, all of them blasted off at full speed down the night-time streets, Plagius pointing out their route.

Perry half-expected the teen to lead them the wrong way, but only a few minutes later, they arrived at the Field Museum without a single wrong turn.

Getting in wasn’t particularly challenging. A locked glass door was about as much impediment as a wall of toilet paper.

Chemestro disintegrated the door and the nine of them flooded into the massive building.

The night guards weren’t much different. A couple bullets pancaked off of Mass Driver’s chest, causing the super to roll his eyes and toss them out on the front doorstep like misbehaving animals.

Hauling J.C. behind them, they made it to the wing where Mom and her former team took the photo op, and immediately ran into a problem.

“The exhibit isn’t here,” Perry muttered, glancing around the displays showing the bones of ancient animals whose names he couldn’t pronounce.

“It should be right there,” Perry said, pointing at a giant fish skeleton preserved in ruddy rock.

“There’s no mention of Manita anywhere. Perhaps the Replicators are trying to preserve the pre-Tide timeline?” Moonlight Flash asked.

“Aw, struck out, huh?” Mass Driver said in faux-sympathy, bearing an ancient leather bag filled to the brim with sports memorabilia from the forties.

“Let’s check storage,” Hardcase suggested. “Museums have a hundred times more stuff in storage than they have on display.”

They found an employee-only door, and busted through it with a solid kick from Perry’s armor. After descending four flights, they found themselves facing a huge vault door, which was summarily disintegrated. Behind it was a massive storage room that dwarfed the display section of the museum. Industrial steel shelving dominated the space, filled with unending rows of tightly-packed boxes, marked with hastily scrawled alphanumerical codes.

“Let me,” Moonlight Flash said, holding her hands close together.

In between her palms, a pale orb of light appeared, shimmering in place momentarily before it zipped away to the left, landing on a plain tome tucked away into an inconspicuous corner of the room.

The book flipped open, revealing a dense list of alphanumerical codes along with brief description of their contents.

“I’ve got a Moon-Sage symbiotic spirit,” Moonlight Flash said as Perry glanced at her. “It’s good for information and seering.”

“Like the invisibility purge?” Perry asked.

“Exactly. It pairs well with my Lunar Serpent, and it gives me a theme.”

Oddly enough, Chemestro seemed to perk up at the mention of a ‘Lunar Serpent’. It was subtle, but it was there.

Every once in a while a passage was highlighted in glowing blue light, but never long enough to read it, as the book fluttered through its pages hundreds of times per second. A moment later, the book slammed shut, and the glowing sphere began to tremble in place.

With a soft pop, the pale blue orb split into hundreds of tiny motes of light, zipping through the massive storage facility and landing on hundreds of boxes.

“Everything in those boxes is something we’ll want,” Moonlight Flash said with a nod.

“Hoollly shit,” Plagius said as he pulled one of the boxes off the shelf and opened it. He pulled out a funerary mask made of pure gold and held it up for the rest of them to see. “Can I keep it?”

“Everybody gets two cubic feet of space in Boomer’s storage,” Perry said.

That was the starting gun that kicked off the race to loot the place, causing everyone to rush forward to pull all the glowing boxes off the shelves and pour through them. Gold, gems, Essence-filled materials and Manitian artifacts flew off the shelves.

“Fertility ring!” Moonlight Flash said, tossing the gold ring into her pile forming in the middle of the room.

“Planar compass!” George shouted, adding it to his pile.

“Really? After all that, you’re just…thieves?” The hapless android cop asked.

“More like scavengers,” Perry corrected him as he pulled down one of the bigger glowing boxes. The armor would have to be in one of the bigger boxes. “Although that’s kind of a moot point to you.”

Feeling that it had sufficient heft, Perry pried the box open. He wasn’t expecting to get it on the first try, but was pleasantly surprised when he saw the glittering areonite plate armor shining back at him, covered in death-crystal and dark Nocul runes, giving it the ability to absorb death to empower the wearer.

“Jackpot!” Perry crowed, carrying the box back to Boomer, using up his two cubic feet of storage on the armor.

“Hey, Paradox!?” Wraith called from a few aisles over.

“What’s up?” Paradox asked.

“You’re gonna wanna see this!”

Frowning, Perry jogged over three aisles until he made out Wraith, taking a sharp turn to meet up with her.

“Whats…huh.” Perry came to a halt along with the rest of the team, staring up at the massive steel door dominating the back of the museum’s storage.

It was at least ten feet tall, made from perfectly smooth steel, with pneumatic pistons keeping the door closed, along with a large camera on the front of the door, and a high-tech command console beside it.

“This…is not from the sixties,” Perry murmured.