Chapter 21

It all comes to a head.

“Ranvier!” I said. “I, uh...I knew I would find you here!” My heart was beating like a drum, but there were rules you had to observe before you started a superfight. Banter was very encouraged, if not entirely mandatory.

“You did?” he asked. “How?”

“I…” I started. “Well, I didn’t actually know. But I had a pretty good hunch. I was just trying to do the banter thing.”

Ranvier shook his head and sighed. “Kid, you’re better than that. You’ve been hanging out with too much that idiot.”

“Meteor isn’t an idiot,” I said. “He’s...well I guess he’s not the smartest guy, but he’s far from stupid.”

“Oh yeah?” Ranvier replied. “I could tell you some stories, kiddo.”

“The point is, I’m here to stop you,” I said. “So give up.”

“You’re going to stop me,” said Ranvier.

“...Yeah,” I said.

“You’re going to stop me,” he said again, with emphasis.

“That’s why I’m here.”

Ranvier walked close to me. I braced myself in case he tried anything. I could move faster than he could fire that rifle, so that wasn’t much danger, he might still have some tricks up his sleeve.

“Kid, you know who I am, right?” he said.

“I’ve read a few articles on you,” I replied.

“A few articles?” he said. “I’ve been kicking a*s from here to china for the better part of twenty years. When I was in middle school, my science fair project was a fully functional miniature nuclear reactor. In college I was teaching advanced quantum physics by the second month of freshman year. It would take more than a few news pieces on me to know who I really am.”

“Someone with a very high opinion of himself, I guess,” I said.

He looked mildly stunned for a second, then his face broke into a grin. “I really do like you, kid. How about joining up with me? We could be a real force to be reckoned with.”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

He shrugged. “I didn’t think so, but I thought I’d ask anyway.” He twisted his head to one side, accompanied by a series of pops. He did the same to the other side, loosened his tie, and started rolling up his sleeves.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” he said. “It’s been a while since I’ve had a really good scrap.”

I was perplexed. “You’re going to try and fight me? Like, physically? You know I have super speed, right?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Don’t worry about me, kiddo. It’s yourself that you should be worried about.” Finished, he looked my straight in the eyes; his face twisted into a creepy smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Here’s how this is going to go down,” he said. “I’m going to punch you. A lot. Then you’re going to fall over, and I’m going to kick you. After that, we’re going to find Meteor, and you’re going to beat the living s**t out of him. Got that?” His eyes were wide, and a shade of blue that I had never seen before on a human being. He slung the rifle over his back, put up his fists like a boxer, and threw a punch.

As easily as breathing, I dodged it and slammed my fist into his jaw. He pitched backwards and hit the concrete floor with a crack, landing on top of the plasma rifle. It fired a blue bolt that screamed through the air, striking the far away ceiling with a small explosion and a noise like loud television static.

“Ah,” Ranvier groaned. “Oh, s**t.”

“Super speed,” I said.

Ranvier got unsteadily to his feet as I stood with my arms crossed threateningly.

“Oh, man.” He rubbed his jaw. “That was a really good punch.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Now put that rifle on the floor. You’re coming with me.”

“Hang on, now,” he said. “Don’t you want to know what’s in the crate? Aren’t you curious about the nefarious plot of a true criminal genius?”

“A little bit,” I admitted. “But-”

“Great!” Ranvier said. “So get this: for the past eight years, I’ve been absolutely racking my brain for a scheme that is not only worthy of my considerable intellect but would finish Meteor once and for all. I needed something that was a real humdinger, something that was better than anything else I had ever attempted. Now, being in prison was a tremendous kick in the balls, but I survived just fine because despite what you’ve just seen, I’m a black belt in several different forms of martial arts. Of course they slapped a power inhibitor on me so I no longer had access to my psychic lockpick set, but I was far from powerless and I still had my brain. Now, there’s this other guy who was the head of this giant drug racket in Nova. Real respected guy, still running his operation from in prison, always had a few human gorillas to act as bodyguards. Well, I think to myself, that’s a useful guy to know. So I strike up a conversation with him at lunch. Try to make friends. He doesn’t give a s**t. I tell him who I was on the outside. He’s never heard of me. He doesn’t care. So I have to resort to a little persuasion. I kill his bodyguards with a plastic fork, and then I get him down on the ground. I break a few of his fingers, slice him up a little...you know. Business. As I’m about to pry his eyes out, he gives in. Now he works for me. So I‘ve already got this plan forming in my head that was inspired by this purveyor of mind altering substances. If you can take a drug that will eventually drain your body dry until you look like something from a vampire movie, why can’t you do the opposite? Why can’t you take something that will make you stronger?”

“Those already exist,” I cut in. “They’re called steroids. They also make you look like something out of a vampire movie.”

“That’s my point, Junior,” Ranvier said, crossing over to the forklift. “I’m talking no sores on your face, no muscular atrophy, no dick shrinkage. No downside at all; just pure power. So Mr. Drug Lord starts supplying me with reagents. His people really can get anything at all into that prison. I spend almost a decade perfecting this thing.” He patted the crate. “I was gonna put them on the market as ‘Alkeuronex’, a panacea in pill form! I was going to make a commercial for it and everything, complete with that part where happy music plays over a soothing voice talking about how side effects may include headache, indigestion, and your guts falling out of your a*s. That’s always my favorite part; how gullible is the average person, right? So anyway, obviously I could have just mixed it into the solutions of a bunch of other drugs or dropped them into the water supply, but then the dosage wouldn’t have been right and almost everybody would have died. And while I’m not against a little wholesale slaughter now and then, it’s so much better when there’s a purpose, don’t you agree?”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “I thought you said you weren’t going to give your plan away.”

“Yeah, and that was true,” Ranvier said. “But then I remembered it’s nice to have somebody to discuss it with who doesn’t have the I.Q. of a rutabaga. I mean, Streak prefers to talk with her fists, Knuckle is a five year old in the body of a mountain troll, and Faultline may or may not be mute. So who’s left? And don’t say phone sex hotlines, because I already tried that. I’m pretty sure the girl on the other end thought I was calling from an insane asylum.” He clapped his hands together and laughed. “Anyway, let me tell you about this little gene that I discovered. I named it MUT1, and by the way that is the official name, thank you very much. I discovered it so I get to name it, and those sticks in the mud over at the nomenclature committee can shove it up their asses. This gene, MUT1, seems to do absolutely nothing. It doesn’t make proteins, it doesn’t dictate melanin type...it doesn’t even give you a predisposition for cancer, like certain other naughty genes I could name. For all intents and purposes, it’s a trash sequence that makes absolutely no difference to phenotype...except for one not so insignificant effect. You see, the presence of MUT1 is pivotal for a certain fun phenotypic expression.” He paused, a grin on his face like he was expecting me to say something.

“Come on, you’re smart enough to know what I’m talking about,” he said finally, sounding a little put out.

I rolled my eyes. “I’m going to guess it’s the gene for superpowers.”

“It’s the gene for superpowers!” Ranvier said excitedly. “But you’ve gotta have two copies. Having only one means that you’re just a boring ape like every other normal dumbass. But if you win the genetic lottery and you get two, boom! You can throw tornadoes, or turn invisible, or...I don’t know, crap diamonds or something. It’s like a built in jackpot on the great wheel of evolution. Congratulations, you get the grand prize!”

He rubbed his hands together while he spoke. “But like I said, if you only get one, then you’re s**t out of luck. So that’s where I come in. I made these formulas. I’d love to tell you how long it took me to develop them to the point where they actually worked, but honestly I was in prison for the majority of it and out of my mind on hallucinogenic substances. Apparently they were a real headscratcher for the so-called scientists that I hired to manufacture them. PhD, more like PhDumb. So imagine this: You have dementia, or Crohn’s, or Gehrig’s disease, also known by its more fun name of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or hell, maybe there’s nothing wrong with you and you’re just an overactive worrier. Well, you’re watching tv one day and you see my smiling face talking about this new drug, this fantastic Alkeuronex. ‘It can cure anything!’ I say, holding the bottle aloft. ‘Just ask little Teddy, who a few hours ago couldn’t even walk!’ The screen will cut to little Teddy, and the adorable little waif is doing...cartwheels or something. It doesn’t really matter, everyone knows that pharmaceutical marketing is all bullshit anyway. So you rush out to buy these pills, which are dirt cheap, and they give you just one, because ‘you only need one!’. You pop it on the spot, and hey presto; you don’t feel any different. A little disappointed, you go home. When you get there, ha…one of two things happens. If you’re lucky and you’ve got a copy of MUT1, you get a shiny new superpower. Flight, or pyromancy, or telekinesis, or even super speed.”

“And if you don’t have the gene?” I asked.

“Well, there’s the rub,” Ranvier said. “If you don’t have a copy of the gene, you die in a spectacular fashion, and I do mean spectacular. You should have seen the human trials. I saw one guy get eaten by friggin’ figments of his own imagination. His imagination, can you dig that? One minute it was calm and quiet, and the next he was screaming ‘oh god, they’re eating my eyes! Aaahh, my eyes!’.” He laughed. “It was hilarious.”

“And how do you expect to get your drug out there to everyone on the planet?” I asked. “People are smarter than you give them credit for; they aren’t going to flock to the local drugstore just because some snake oil salesman smiles at them.”

“Well, there’s the beauty of the plan,” Ranvier said, unfazed by my insinuation that he was a seller of snake oil.  “I’m going to slip them into every outgoing batch of every single drug being produced in the entire world. They’re going to hand this s**t out with even the most basic painkiller. And can you imagine the destruction when every person left alive has superpowers? Sure, we’ll have a big influx of superheroes, but they’ll be no match for the overwhelming tide of selfishness and anger and plain old debauchery. Your granny won’t be any trouble, but what about your neighbor? And the skinhead down the road? And the politician who wants to do something about all those nasty immigrants? What about the convict in cell fourteen-B who goes to bed with a migraine and wakes up as a walking inferno? All the costumed do-gooders in the world won’t be enough to stem that tide.

“Why?” I said. “I mean, I am really, truly sorry to hear that your girlfriend died, but you can’t seriously be doing all of this just because of that.”

“Don’t tell me what I’m about, son,” Ranvier said. “Over the years, Meteor has systematically destroyed everything that I’ve ever worked for. No one has ever kicked my a*s like he has. He’s ruined my plans, broken my inventions, and stomped on my spirit. Everything I said about sixty four was true. I really did want to give up the game. I wanted to get away from it all; hang up my hat someplace where nobody even knew my name and live out my life with the woman of my dreams. Then came Meteor, smashing into my hideout like he always did. And did the big red meathead listen when I tried to tell him what was going on? That I was giving it up, that I would never trouble anyone again if he could just find it in his heart to let me go? Of course not. He starts throwing punches left and right, and he happens to hit one of the boxes full of plastic explosives. So he grabs hold of me, with that protective shield bullshit that he can do, and the blast rips through the entire place and throws us both clear of the site. And what do you think happened to poor Luciana, who was standing away from us? Did he grab her? Did he make sure that she was safe? ...Of course not. What’s the life of a lesser being to Meteor, the spotlight’s favorite hero? I want him to feel hopelessness like I felt. I want him to experience the pain that I see everytime I look in the mirror and think about what could have been. I want him to know unequivocally that the planet is doomed and there’s nothing, nothing, that he can do to save it. Then, I’ll have finally taken away Meteor’s world just like he took away mine.”

“Holy s**t,” I said.

“I know, right?” Ranvier said. “It’s pretty brilliant, even for me.”

“Have you considered therapy?” I asked. “It’s probably really unhealthy to carry all that anger around for so long.”

“Yes, I tried therapy!” Ranvier snapped. “It actually helped a lot, all things considered.”

I decided to try one last approach. It hardly ever works, and anyone who tries it usually gets made fun of mercilessly, but it had to be done.

I was going to appeal to his better judgement.

“Listen,” I said. “You know that you’re a supergenius. Just take a second and think about what you’ve really done here. You made a medicine that gives people freaking superpowers. That’s mind blowing! Think about what good you could do for humanity! You could refine cybernetics for amputees, you could cure cancer! You could win the Nobel prize on a weekly basis!”

Ranvier leaned against the crate, his arms folded. “You think I’ve never thought about that? I’m a violent sociopath, not a moron. Sure, I could have become the world’s best doctor, or top scientist, or leading engineer. I could have collected PhD’s and prizes and awards like they were postage stamps, but for what? It wouldn’t have made me truly happy. And as for doing good for humanity...I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Jake, but you and I? We’re not humans. Not really.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Use your brain, kid!” Ranvier said. “You can move faster than someone can blink, and you just saw me control your friend like a damn R.C. car! Does that sound human to you?”

“Of course we’re humans,” I said. “We just have an anomalous gene. You said so yourself.”

“Oh come on,” Ranvier replied. “Mutation is the fundamental basis of evolution! It’s what separates us the rest of the apes! And statistically speaking, ten percent of the population is metahuman, and that ten percent is just the ones who are willing to admit it. That’s not anomalous, that’s evolution.”

I furrowed my brow. “There have always been metahumans. There are reports of us all the way back to when writing was invented. Cave paintings of homo erectus lifting boulders and singlehandedly chasing down mammoths.”

“We’re the branching pathway, kid.” Ranvier put his hands in his pockets. “Like it or not, what I’m doing here would have happened anyway. I’m just speeding it up. We’re something better than human, Jake. Call us homo deus, if you like.”

“That sounds like a gay classical composer,” I said.

Ranvier pounded the crate with his fist. “It’s just an example! Besides, what have humans ever done for us, huh? Treat us like freaks? Outcasts? You ever been out some place with your costume on and see a mother pull her child away, or a man avert his eyes? How about the anti meta marches that they stage on the streets? ‘Heroes, go home’? You think they’d tolerate your presence if you didn’t walk around behind them, wiping their asses and kissing their boo boos? They don’t even have the balls to use us as soldiers; not in any kind of official capacity. If you ask me, the Amaranthine was just trying to institute the natural order. So I’m going to finish the job.”

“People have always been at odds with each other,” I said. “It happened in the nineteen hundreds, it happened in the early two thousands, it’ll happen long after you and I are dead. It’s just in our nature. But the good outweighs the bad. And I’m going to stop you.”

Ranvier stood up straight and bounced on the balls of his feet. “No you aren’t.”

“Yes, I am,” I retorted. “You can’t beat me in a fight, and your powers don’t work on me. It’s checkmate.”

“No,” said Ranvier. “All I had to do was stall you for long enough.”

Uh oh.

“Long enough for what?”

Ranvier twisted his back, making his spine pop, then he began to pace. “Long enough for the pill I took to take effect.”

As he spoke, the outline of his body began to get fuzzy. He looked in my direction, and I saw that his eyes were solid blue.

“I already have powers, clearly,” he said. “But I thought to myself, what if I took the psychic pill? Would it affect me at all? Or would I get stronger?” He smiled. His teeth were blindingly white, and the backdrop of his mouth was solid black. “I guess we’ll find out, huh?”

Behind me, the door burst open and Meteor and Teravolt rushed into the room.

“Jake, we heard the gunshot!” Teravolt said. “We came to see if...whoa…”

Ranvier’s outline continued to blur. There was now a faint black nimbus around his body.

“You know,” he said, and his voice sounded like a badly decompressed audio file. “I considered taking a whole bunch of these pills and giving myself every superpower that I manufactured. But I haven’t done any tests on what happens if you take multiple pills, and I value my own life way too much to try anything like that on myself. And what if I became some kind of twisted abomination and it ended up killing me? So that was a no go. But what I am going to do is give you one last shot at joining me, Jake.” He paused, possibly for dramatic effect, and looked deep into my eyes. “Kill your friends.”

He must be using his telepathic powers on me, I realized. I braced myself to try and resist, to do everything in my power to keep him from controlling me, even if it meant destroying my own mind in the process…

But instead, absolutely nothing happened.

“I said,” Ranvier repeated. “Kill Meteor and Teravolt.”

“I heard you,” I said. “But I’m not going to do it.”

“Look into my eyes!” Ranvier commanded, leaning toward me. “Do you see these baby blues? Can you feel them penetrating your soul, peering into the very essence of your inner being? All your secret thoughts and desires are laid bare before me! You cannot run, you cannot hide! Now tear your friends apart!”

“...No,” I said.

Ranvier shifted his weight back to his heels. “Damn,” he said. “It was worth a shot.”

I shook my head. “You are by far the strangest person I’ve ever met.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Ranvier said. “So I’ll tell you for free you’re really lucky that my powers aren’t working on you for some reason, otherwise you would probably have already torn your friends’ hearts out and eaten them. Super speed is a pretty game-breaking power. But it’s okay, because even though my powers of persuasion don’t work on you...you can be damn sure my telekinesis will.”

He was now devoid of color except for a deep purple underneath his black silhouette. His entire body looked like a living shadow, right down to the outline of his pompadour. The only features he had were his eyes, solid blue like flawless sapphires, and his impossibly white teeth.

He gestured with a hand, and it felt like speeding fists hit me on every square inch of my body. I hit the concrete hard. That was gonna be a hell of a bruise.

“Come play with me,” said Ranvier. “Let’s have some fun.”

Meteor rushed at him, and Ranvier reached out and plucked him off the ground by his neck.

“I’m gonna kill you last, old enemy,” he said. “And I’ll make sure it’s slow.” He threw Meteor into a pile of shipping crates like he weighed nothing. The crates burst open, spilling a rainbow of pills all over the floor.

“Oops! Butterfingers! But that reminds me; what I’m gonna do,” said Ranvier. “Is I’m going to kill all of you, and then I’m going to take Meteor’s blood, extract his DNA, bust it open to get at his metahuman gene, then engineer that into myself so I can have his powers. No offense to you other two, of course, but I already know how to manufacture your traits. And in the new world order, I’ll be the goddamn king.”

Teravolt thrust her hands out and lightning lanced toward Ranvier. He pointed downward and the electric stream bent at a right angle to dissipate into the ground. I leapt at him like an olympic sprinter and ran face first into an invisible barrier.

“How fast can you move, Jake?” Ranvier laughed. “Can you move faster than I can think?”

It was hopeless. He had us right where he wanted us, without even breaking a sweat. He was just toying with us now.

Teravolt shot more lightning at him, and he directed it off into random directions. Meteor had climbed on top of a nearby conveyor machine and jumped at him, both fists poised to strike. Ranvier brushed him aside with a lazy wave and Meteor was left skidding across the ground.

Think, Jake, think. There had to be a way out of this.

“Don’t give up!” Meteor shouted, picking himself up. “He has to have a weakness!”

“No weakness here, Dougie,” Ranvier said. Meteor rose into the air and slammed against the ceiling. “Also, your name has been Doug this whole time? That’s like, the most candy-a*s name since they invented the name Eugene.” Meteor fell and almost hit the ground before he was caught and tossed upward again.

With a cry, Teravolt charged, her body lit up like a christmas tree. As she went in for the hit, Ranvier stamped one foot. A shockwave burst from around his body, visible only in the dust on the factory floor and the swirling motes in the air, and tossed us like ragdolls away from him.

“Naughty,” he said as he continued to throw Meteor up and down.

I lay there, dazed, staring up at the ceiling. I had never gotten my a*s kicked this hard. Not by Streak, not by a mind-controlled Meteor, not by any of the cavalcade of costumed weirdos calling themselves supervillains that I had fought in the past. Ranvier was absolutely destroying us, and without even giving us his full attention. I considered making my way over to the pills and trying to find the one for speed. They were probably color coded for convenience. I might not be fast enough now, but if I could move faster than even a neuron could fire, faster than the electrical impulse could travel down an axon...I dismissed the thought, however. Even if I could locate that one pill among the thousands cascading from the crate, who knows how long it would be before I felt the effects? I would almost certainly be dead before then.

I got up to see Ranvier slam Meteor onto the ground with a solid thump. Meteor picked himself up, and I remember thinking that he must be literally made of steel, when Ranvier punched him once, twice, three time, then blasted him into the far wall.

“This is too easy!” he shouted. “Let’s introduce some more fun!”

I heard creaks and clicks all around me, and to my horror, all of the robots on the floor began to come to life.

I rushed to Teravolt’s side and helped her up. “We’ve got company,” I said.

The robots started to close in on us, accompanied by the whirring of servos and the clanking of metal feet.

“S**t,” said Teravolt, streaks of lightning already dancing around her irises.

We sprang into action. I picked up an oversized wrench that was lying near me and went to work, in full knowledge that my fists and feet would only break against the robotic metal exteriors. Teravolt unleashed blast after blast of crackling electricity until our hair stood on end and I could taste the static in the air.

The robots kept coming, clambering smoking, broken bodies of their brethren. Teravolt picked up an arm gun that I had smashed off of one and energized it, blowing a series of holes in any robot that came near her. My wrench was looking battered and scratched, but it still had plenty of fight left in it as I caved in the heads of three person sized robots who came my way. I caught a glimpse of Ranvier behind the sea of marching metal. He was busy smacking Meteor around like a cat with a toy.

The robots began to fire off their arm guns, and I used my super speed to direct the fire into each other. Finally, Teravolt and I stood panting and alone in the middle of a ring of smashed and blackened mechanical bodies.

Before I had time to recover, Ranvier was next to me, floating a foot off of the ground with a purple smoke cloud sizzling off of him.

“C’mon, Junior,” he said. “Give me your best shot.”

I thought back to all the training Meteor had given me, all the combos and maneuvers that he said were vital to have in the brawling toolbox. Without a second thought, I ran through each and every single one that I could remember.

Ranvier blocked all of them, using a psychic forcefield when he couldn’t move his arms fast enough.

“Oops, that was close!” he taunted. “Almost got me with that one! Keep going; one of these has got to hit sooner or later!”

I gave in to my rage and frustration and continued my assault. He was playing with me and I knew it, but what else could I do? I couldn’t manipulate energy, didn’t have lightning at my disposal...not that either of those had worked anyway. The only thing I could do was move fast, so that’s what I did. I could only hope that one of my attacks would catch him off guard. Teravolt crouched off to the side, looking for an opening where she could strike.

Over Ranvier’s shoulder, I saw Meteor push himself up.

I punched as fast as I could, even throwing in a few kicks to give my arms a break. I just had to keep Ranvier distracted....

Meteor climbed to a stand, using some machinery to help him to his feet. He looked dazed and punch drunk. I just hoped he could see what I was doing.

Ranvier laughed as I redoubled my efforts. “You’ve got spirit, kid! I’m almost going to miss you after I murder you!” He raised one hand to his opposite ear and backhanded me across the face. The entire world spun and then I was on the ground, Ranvier’s legs filling my vision and my face entirely numb.

Meteor clutched his head, which must have felt like one giant pre-migraine, and then looked up at us. I knew the look on his face.

Quick as a flash, he charged across the room and smashed Ranvier full force in the back of the head.

“Oh ho, that was a good hit!” Ranvier said, turning and rubbing his skull. “It even stung a litt-AAAHH!” His taunt turned into a scream as Teravolt blasted him. From the look of concentration on her face and the clenching of her teeth, I could tell she had thrown everything that she had into it.

“You little b***h,” Ranvier said, whirling around to glare at her. His eyes were cobalt slits in a sea of darkness.

I mustered what little strength I had left and went from lying prone on the ground to making a wild run, my fist poised to hit as hard as I could.

Force equals mass times acceleration. That’s the equation for the energy imparted from an object in motion to another object that it collides with, and is  coincidentally my favorite mathematical expression. Put simply, what it says is that how much hurt you can put on something depends on the size and speed of the thing you hit it with. Now, a regular person can impart a lot of energy with their fist, moving at a speed that your average human can achieve. That can be enough to give a bruise, or break a bone, or in some cases even kill. But change one of the factors, say speed, into a much higher value, say how fast I can move, and that drastically alters the value of the force. Thus, when I found to my great surprise that my fist actually connected with its target, the underside of Ranvier’s chin, I was also fortunate enough to observe the physical situation represented by the exponentiation of the equation. That is to say, I lifted Ranvier out of his fancy shoes and put his his a*s on the concrete, and I got to see it in slow motion, to boot.

Ranvier sailed backward through the air, his body arching in the beginnings of a  not-so-graceful backflip until he smacked face first into the floor and lay there, twitching.

“Wait, wait.” Slowly and painfully, he forced himself onto one knee, then stood up. The aura around his body flickered as he struggled to keep his concentration. “That was...a damn good punch, but I think I can-”

Before he finished, I shuffled my feet and unleashed a flurry of punches in a shoeshine combo, a little something that I learned from Meteor. Ten rapid force hits to the face and chest, sacrificing power for speed to confuse the recipient. With my powers, it was devastating.

As Ranvier reeled, concentrating entirely on just staying upright, Meteor stepped up to me and laid a hand on my shoulder.

“May I?” he asked.

“Be my guest,” I said.

Meteor drew back a fist and took a deep breath, straining as he charged up his energy. When it was clear he couldn’t take the strain any longer and his face was as red as the corona around him, he let loose with a blow to Ranvier’s midsection that blasted him across the room. Ranvier smacked into the concrete wall all the way opposite to us and I swear he stuck there like a cartoon character, just for a second, before falling limply to the ground.

I rubbed my aching hands in total disbelief. “I think we got him.”

Meteor nodded. Even two black eyes couldn’t keep the smile off of his face. “I think we did.”

“There’s something I still don’t get,” I said.

“And what’s that, sultan of speed?” Meteor replied.

The three of us sat on the curb outside of Eagle Scientific, blankets wrapped around our shoulders as the police set up a perimeter and bustled around, doing whatever it is that cops do in that situation.

“How did you get superpowers just by touching Powercore?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of that happening before.”

“I was wondering that as well,” said Teravolt. “It’s like you were some kind of sponge for superpowers, and you just schlorped up some of Powercore’s.”

“Darned if I know!” said Meteor. “Maybe I was just a lump of wet clay, waiting for the hands of the right sculptor to give me shape and purpose!”

An officer approached us, tablet computer in hand. Despite the fact that she was wearing aviators, I noticed it was the same woman from the battle with the Society of Impropriety in the movie theater.

“You again,” she said. “You two are beginning to get quite the reputation around here.”

“Just trying to do our civic duty, sergeant!” said Meteor.

“I never said it was a good reputation,” the sergeant replied. “Not if you listen to Torres, anyway. Let’s see your licenses.”

Meteor and I dug out our licenses while Teravolt sat awkwardly, probably feeling like a third wheel. The sergeant took our cards and looked expectantly at Teravolt.

“What about you?” she said.

“She’s, uh…” I started, then faltered as I couldn’t find an excuse for her. Unlicensed vigilantism was a serious offense in Nova.

“She’s a trainee!” Meteor cut in, to my great relief. “Under my tutelage. She only has a bit longer before she’s ready to take the hero test herself!”

“I see,” said the sergeant, and began entering our license numbers into her tablet. “Don’t wait too long. Unregistered heroing carries a fine and jail time.”

Meteor saluted. “Will do, officer!”

“So let me see if I understand this properly,” she said as she finished putting in our numbers. “This guy Ranveer-”

“Ranvier,” I said.

“Ranvier,” the sergeant raised an eyebrow. “Was gonna give everybody in the world superpowers through the use of unsanctioned, non-F.D.A-approved medication?”

“That was only his latest scheme, sergeant!” Meteor said. “He also escaped from a maximum security penitentiary, where he was serving consecutive life sentences for his earlier nefarious debauchery!”

The sergeant scribbled something on her tablet. “Right, so that’s unlicensed distribution of medication, aggravated assault, extremely aggravated assault, breaking and entering, and possession of illegal drugs. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“On the nose, ma’am!” Meteor said.

She wrote down something else, and her tablet dinged. “Alright, so it looks like you’re good to- hang on…”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

She looked down at me over her sunglasses. “Says here your license is expired.”

Author's Note

But wait, there's more!