Chapter 20

The team has a visit from the luck dragon.

Eagle Scientific headquarters was a truly impressive building. Housed in a skyscraper that seemed to stretch on into the stratosphere, it was encased in a brick and marble exterior with gargoyles every few stories. The door was a large affair made of sliding glass so you could see into the lobby. The raised emblem of a robotic eagle was sculpted into the stone above the front door.

“Well, that’s a relief,” I said, pointing at it.

“What is?” Teravolt asked me. She seemed winded from our power walk from the bus stop.

“The eagle,” I replied.

Teravolt breathed heavily and wiped a drop of sweat from her nose. “Why is it a relief?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it’s just carved that way.”

Teravolt said nothing, but she slapped my arm.

“Ow,” I said, rubbing it.

Meteor came up a minute later, huffing like a coal train.

“My apologies, team,” he said. “It seems I’ve been neglecting my cardio lately!” He looked at the building, a stone and ivory monument to unnatural science and twisted mechanics. “Well, that’s a relief.”

He missed the glare that Teravolt gave him.

“Do we have a plan?” I asked. “Or is the plan ‘stop Ranvier at all costs’?”

“He could be doing any amount of crooked misdeeds in there, and we have no way of knowing!” Meteor said. “We’re going to have to leap before we look!”

And, true to form, he swept off into the lobby.

Teravolt and I exchanged a tired look.

“He’s always like this, isn’t he?” she asked.

“He wouldn’t be Meteor if he wasn’t,” I said.

We followed Meteor into the building. The lobby was brightly lit and very serious looking, with lots of white marble, potted plants, and statuettes. It was very reminiscent of a museum. Sitting behind the big receptionist’s desk was a very large, very unfriendly looking man in a security guard’s uniform. He had a week’s worth of stubble, an eyepatch, and a tattoo that actually said ‘MOM’ with a heart around it. I guess you have to really keep up appearances when you cater to a supervillain clientele.

“I told you, we’re closed,” he was saying to Meteor. “Nobody goes in without an appointment.”

“I have an appointment with destiny!” Meteor exclaimed. I mentally face palmed.

The guard squinted suspiciously. “Dr. Jennifer Destiny, in the genetics department?” he asked.

“...Yes!” said Meteor.

The guard sighed and picked up his desktop phone. “I’ll see if she’s in, but I’m pretty sure she left for the day.” He began to dial a number.

“Is this actually working?” Teravolt whispered.

I was just as amazed as she was. It remained to be seen if our luck would hold out, however. What would we do if Jennifer Destiny picked up and said that we absolutely did not have an appointment?

“I’m pretty sure this is going to go south soon,” I whispered to Teravolt. “We need a plan B.”

“I’m gonna zap him, and then we’ll all run inside,” she replied.

“We can’t do that, we’re the good guys!” I whispered. “Besides, I bet there are security cameras all over this place!”

“Oh, uh, hi, Dr. Destiny,” the guard said into the phone, looking surprised. “I thought you might have left by now. What’s that? Surprise party for Dr. Pullman becoming a father? Aw, I wish I could be there. No, no, I couldn’t; I’m the first line of defence. Anyway, I’ve got three people here wearing crazy costumes who say that they have an appointment with you. Yeah.”

The uncovering of our lie was imminent. Hopefully he wouldn’t call the police; Ranvier would definitely escape if we were tangled up with answering a bunch of police questions.

“Yeah,” the guard continued. “One is dressed like a luchador and I think the other two are acrobats. They’re what? Oh, you did? Well alright then, I’ll send them up.” He hung up the phone and looked at us. “My mistake, guys, I had no idea you were party entertainers. Honestly, for a second there, I thought you might have been superheroes.”

We chuckled nervously, and I made a mental note to buy a lottery ticket if I made it out of this alive. The chances I would ever be this lucky again were probably extremely small.

A buzzer sounded as the guard pressed a button at his desk, and a nearby door swung open.

“Okay, so what you’re gonna do is take the elevator to the twenty second floor,” he said. “The room you’re looking for is the jungle conference room; it’s room two two three seven b. It’s right across from the basketball court. And tell Dr. Pullman I said congratulations.”

We thanked him and piled into the elevator just beyond the entry door. The interior was very tastefully done in wood paneling and soft lights.

“I can’t believe that worked,” said Teravolt.

“I can’t believe we didn’t get kicked out immediately,” I said.

“I can’t believe Dr. Pullman is going to be a father!” said Meteor. “And so young, too!”

Teravolt and I looked at him.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Just getting into character!” Meteor replied.

“We aren’t actually here for the party; we have to find Ranvier,” I said.

Meteor frowned. “Oh, right.”

I examined the directory above the button panel. Everything from the ground floor up was administrative, and all the basement levels were labs and manufacturing floors.

“He’s probably going to be in one of the sublevels,” I said. “But which one? Judging from the directory, this place is huge.”

“In the underground hideout, when I was caught like a fly in a spider’s web,” Meteor said. “Unable to move or do anything without permission from that mental menace, I heard him say something about pills! We should start looking in places where there would be machinery for manufacturing medicinal capsules!”

“Well, I guess that does narrow it down,” I said, looking at the directory again. Sublevels one through seven were research. Sublevels eight through ten were animal husbandry. Sublevels eleven through thirteen were ballistics, explosives, and quarantine, respectively. It seemed like a bad idea to put quarantine right next to explosives, but that wasn’t my problem. “Here it is: sublevel fourteen, manufacturing. It doesn’t say what kind, but we’re racing against the clock here.”

“Fourteen it is!” Meteor mashed the button.

I suddenly felt very tired. From the moment I had woken up to just now, every single minute of today had been an ordeal. I had lost Meteor, gained Teravolt, gotten my a*s kicked, fought Meteor, kicked a*s, established dominance as the best freaking speedy in the city, and chased after an honest to god supervillain...I was exhausted. What the three of us were walking into here, I had no way of knowing. I got the feeling that there was a very good chance we wouldn’t walk away from this.

“Hey guys,” I said, leaning against the elevator wall for support. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m really glad we had a chance to be a team. You know, in case we die here. And I won’t lie, I think we might die here.”

“We’re gonna make it, Jake,” said Teravolt. “I know it.”

“Really?”

“No,” she said, not meeting my eyes.

“How about it, Meteor, what are our odds?”

Meteor gave me a mysterious smile. “Nobody lives forever, champ.”

The elevator dinged and the doors slid open. The room beyond was cavernous, big enough to fit multiple airplane hangars and a cathedral or two. The opposite wall  and the wall to the left were so far away that I couldn’t even see them. The whole place was an crowded maze of laboratory benchtops, expensive looking machinery, and enormous steel vats stretching from the floor to the ceiling. Multichambered centrifuges as tall as a man stood at even intervals between every desk. There were osmometers, pH meters, refractometers, thousands of pipettes, and millions of conical tubes, flasks, and beakers, all filled with multicolored liquid. The equipment reminded me of college. The setup reminded me of a sweatshop.

“Look at this place,” Teravolt breathed, and I was no less in awe.

“It’s like one big monument to evil science!” Meteor said.

“Science is neither good nor evil,” I said. “It only depends on how you use it.”

“There’s a cabinet over there labelled ‘flamethrowers for use in case of horrible monster escape’.” Teravolt pointed out.

“Okay, this might be evil science,” I conceded. “Anyway, I suggest we split up. That’s the only way we can cover this whole room.”

“Isn’t splitting up how people in horror movies usually die?” Teravolt said.

“Yes, but this isn’t a horror movie,” I said, decidedly not thinking about the flamethrower cabinet. “If anything, this would be like a...buddy cop, um, action...comedy.”

“A buddy cop action comedy,” Teravolt repeated.

“Yeah,” I said. “You know, the ones where the good guys always win and absolutely nothing bad happens.”

“You sound a little like you’re trying to convince yourself,” she said.

“Nope!” I said. “No convincing necessary. Meteor is the older experienced one, and I’ll be the young upstart who doesn’t play by the rules.”

Teravolt’s brow furrowed. “I’m afraid to ask who I would be.”

“You’re...the hot blonde one.”

“The hot blonde one.”

“Yeah.”

“The one whose only job is to be hot and blonde.”

“Someone has to be.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “I’m having a hard time telling whether you’re joking or not.”

“Joking aside, we’re getting sidetracked,” I said. “Let’s split up and we’ll meet at the back of the room.” I looked off into the gloomy distance. “Wherever that is. I know it’s not a great plan, but it’s the only one I can think of.”

I looked at the other two, and it was clear that they didn’t have a better idea. I took the righthand side, Teravolt took the left, and Meteor took the middle. None of us were particularly happy with the idea of separating, myself included, but it was probably the best way of going at a room this size. I sped through my side as quickly as I dared, not wanting to get too far ahead in case I actually did find Ranvier. Trying to take him on without backup was probably a worse idea than splitting up in the first place.

All around me were empty lab benches and sterile looking white equipment. It was incredibly spooky, especially in the gloomy half lighting. The few overhead lights that were on cast sinister shadows, and my imagination populated the empty space with grabbing claws and writhing tentacles. Five minutes went by, and there was still no sign of life or even of the room’s end. How big was this damn thing, anyway?

Just as I was thinking I should turn back and find the others, I came to a door marked ‘heavy machinery’. It had a cubby next to it filled with hard hats, thick gloves, and safety goggles. ‘Do not enter without proper protective equipment’, a sign over the doorway said, and the door itself was covered in illustrations of stickmen getting injured in a variety of interesting ways.

Two roads diverged in a lab, and I, I thought,  I took the one that was much less safe looking. I had no manufacturing experience, but you made capsules with heavy machinery, right? Right? So that was probably where Ranvier was.

I opened the door, eschewing the safety clothing.

The room didn’t seem as big as the main one, but maybe that’s just because it was packed to the rafters with gargantuan mechanical monstrosities. Giant robots abounded, surrounded with smaller robots and even some tiny ones. Almost every single one of them had at least one gun, and some of them only had guns. There were conveyor belts of every width and length, from ones that could fit a car to others so thin that a penny wouldn’t fit on them. There were tool boxes scattered around makeshift work stations and bins filled with wires and tubes of every material you could make a tube out of. Despite all of this, it was actually all very neatly organized. It was a lot like the office in Ranvier’s hideout, if Ranvier was obsessively neat.

There came a sound to my right, and a forklift appeared around a conveyor apparatus. It had a large crate that it was carrying. It came close enough for the driver to see me, and then stopped with a screech of tires on concrete. A leg was swung out of the cabin, then another one, and Ranvier hopped out of it, a plasma rifle held in his hands.

“Hey,” he said. “You aren’t supposed to be in here without a hard hat.”

Author's Note

I didn't mean a literal dragon of luck.