Isaac felt totally out of his depth as he watched at least a score of supers in action.

  Lines of blue flame marked where the battle had trailed across the floor of the convention center, clinging to bare tile or catching on abandoned booths and props. It was only by the efforts of two metas – one with ice powers, the other with water control – that the fire was being kept at bay. Virtually all the windows had been blown out by shockwaves or direct impact — and there were a few people-shaped holes in the wall, too.

  The rattle of gunfire and the hum of more esoteric weaponry echoed upward from somewhere on the first floor, punctuating the impacts of super-powered bodies and energy flying across the open areas of the convention space. In one corner, a high-speed boxing match was underway between one of the mooks and one of the mercenaries; a masked martial artist that went by Victor Hardbody. Above, a flying super dressed like the entirely fictional SkyGal smashed one of the drones against another, sending spurts of fire in all directions.

  Reaching down to grip one of Ravdia’s flails, cradling his other arm against his chest, he skated out of the corridor looking for Lunar Bolt. Even as he moved, he kept pushing as much inertia as he could into the armor. It was pointless after a certain amount, just straining the muscles of his power against the ceiling of his ability, but it was reflex. He couldn’t help it; the place was like an active war zone, and just making it to the exit was like running through a battlefield, forcing him to push as hard as possible.

  The instigator of the whole thing, Plasmaster, was going toe to toe with a pair of Star Central’s supers — Aegis and Jacques the Whipper. The former was a squat man with a larger, shimmering blue outline that seemed to be doing the actual fighting, and the latter a willowy flyer wielding a long metal cable pulsing in various colors. Each clash sent shards of energy whipping through the convention center with enough force to punch holes in walls and doors, starting new fires where they landed.

  The growl of an electric guitar cut through the normal sounds of battle as Moon Prism shot past Isaac in full regalia. Three of them had their instruments; guitar, bass, and keytar, each of them broadcasting visible waves through the air as the magical girl group positioned themselves above the battle. A moment later, with a blast of sound, a colored wave blossomed forth from the group.

  Magical powers, especially magical girl powers, weren’t like meta abilities. They might do anything, and unlike the concentration of force meta abilities showed, they were often wide-scale and subtle. The red put strength into his muscles, the blue pulled out the fear from the sheer impact of the powers being flung about. The green visibly healed up wounds all over the convention center – even making his wrist feel better, even if it still ached – and the other colors had effects he didn’t notice but surely did something.

  The impact of their magic set him into motion once again, and he skated forward at speed to try and find Lunar Bolt. He hadn’t been gone that long, but he couldn’t catch sight of the light blue costume anywhere. A sudden whir presaged one of the flame-drones smashing into him from the side, barely rocking him thanks to his powers but, at the same time, the device’s ceramic armor wasn’t cracked either. It took something stronger than that to damage the machines.

  The drone swiveled the barrel of its flamethrower in his direction, and by reflex he smashed at it with Ravdia’s flail. Enough to send it spinning away, but that was it. A moment later Galvanitor’s lightning smote it in a sharp flash, sending it smoking to the ground, and the would-be villain saluted Ravdia before zipping off elsewhere.

  Isaac gave up on trying to find Lunar Bolt with a muttered curse. She could be anywhere, and the fight was far too chaotic for Isaac. He turned to zip toward the exit, hopping over craters in the floor and strewn debris, only to practically run into one of the fights. One of the ceramic-clad mooks, a super with a clear strength power, grappled with some guy in a tank top with bulging muscles.

  The pair smashed into him and bounced off, and the muscle man widened his eyes at Ravdia, silently asking for help. Isaac simply bopped the armor-clad villain on the head with the flail, and the man’s feet broke through the floor with a grinding crack, burying him to his knees. The muscle man used the leverage to put the mook in a chokehold, and Isaac hopped over a potted plant to continue to the door.

  “Join us, sister!”

  Isaac glanced up to see Orange of Moon Prism waving, and grimaced behind the veil. A victim of his own disguise, he was definitely not able to keep up with real magical girls. Even trying to talk like one was liable to make the real deal suspicious.

  “This fight is too great for Ravdia!” Isaac managed to get out, and Orange pursed her lips in disappointment. But she was professional enough to give Ravdia a nod and fly back to the rest of her group. Most supers understood that just because someone had powers, or an artifact, or whatever, didn’t mean they were cut out for combat. Let alone something where so many different energies and attacks might strike someone where they were weak.

  He just knew that Star Central would be calling in someone tactical-class or better, given how out of hand the melee had become. Unfortunately, getting swept up as a matter of course when the heavy hitters came in would be as bad as being taken in by Lunar Bolt. And he was certain they would be coming, and fast, because nobody wanted the convention center totally leveled. Especially considering that, thanks to him, the press was already pretty bad.

  Finally, Isaac reached the second-floor emergency exit and bulled through, the throbbing in his wrist making him forget how much he’d invested in himself — and accidentally making him pop the entire door off its hinges. He winced, both at the inadvertent demolition and the spike of pain that shot through his arm, but considering the rest of the destruction, it was nothing. The door was in the rear of the convention center, but he could hear people shouting and horns honking as people tried to escape. Divesting himself of his inertia, he jumped off the fire escape and landed in the walkway.

  There were, of course, some people who had stuck around to watch rather than getting further away from the blast zone, snapping pictures and writing notes. The hardcore fans, who rarely got to see a fight of such magnitude and couldn’t help gawking. A few started his way, but the skates gave him a speed advantage on the concrete and he zipped away without comment.

  To solve the problem of what to do with Ravdia’s costume, he skated into a small convenience store across from the convention center and purchased some sandals, a pack of trash bags, and a tote, then borrowed the bathroom in the back to change. It wasn’t anything the store hadn’t seen before; between cosplayers and actual superheroes with a proper civilian identity, people turned a deliberately blind eye to that kind of behavior. He cursed to himself as he took off the armor, his wrist aching with every movement, though it was better than before.

  A peek out front showed that with the impressive traffic jam, Smokeshow wouldn’t be going anywhere with the car anytime soon, so he hurried along to the nearest post office. He was waiting in a two-person line when a brilliant light washed through the building, and Isaac turned around to see the golden suffusion of Glorybeam’s power descending on the convention center.

  Isaac had never actually seen it in person. There were some grainy bits of footage from the few instances where the sovereign-class power had engaged a nearby threat, but most of the time she dealt with such things away from the city. Nobody wanted anything seriously dangerous to actually get to a population center, and if Glorybeam was on the edge of the atmosphere, or over open ocean, she could unleash her full power without worry.

  The precise nature of her power was purposely kept unclear, but everyone had seen the areas of glowing gold and the beams of intense light that had provided the name. For all the spectacle, that impression of raw power made him shudder, and he was definitely glad that he’d managed to get out in time. A small and cynical part of him pointed out that Star Central was going to use this to offset any of the bad press Glorybeam was getting thanks to Greg’s efforts, but it didn’t bother him too much.

  He nudged the person in front of him, who stepped aside, still staring at the convention center, and put his parcel down on the desk. Ravdia’s costume, addressed to Harkeem care of the self-storage. It was the only way he could think of to actually hang onto it, at least without creating all kinds of questions. Paying with a couple of cred tabs, he slipped back out and circled the block, heading for the parking lot.

  Horns honked, engines revved, chimed, roared, and grumbled as he worked his way through the lot, just outside the field that Glorybeam projected. He’d been half-expecting to find the car gone, but Smokeshow was still there with the windows rolled down, staring at the convention center with her lower lip between her teeth. She jumped as he rapped on the roof of the car, face sagging in relief.

  “Chains!” Her normal mask slipped, and for a moment she looked just like any other twenty-something. He had to wonder how much of the tough boss-bitch attitude was a persona just like any of his characters. “Sorry about…” She paused for a moment and Isaac waved it away.

  “Thanks for waiting,” he said instead, and tugged on the door handle with his uninjured hand, finding it locked. Smokeshow slapped the switch, the latch clicked, and Isaac slid inside. She didn’t comment on the lack of chains or the change in footwear, and neither did he. What he did do was pop open the glovebox for the QwikMed, applying the patch to his wrist and letting out a sigh as the throbbing ache eased.

  “Sorry the convention wasn’t so great this year,” he said. It was technically supposed to be a three-day thing, and he was sure the people who ran it would do something to make up for the lost time, but it wouldn’t be soon.

  “Hah!” Smokeshow slapped the steering wheel and started the car. “Wasn’t too bad for me. Least I didn’t get hurt.”

  “It’s fine,” Isaac demurred, but the injury wasn’t what really worried him. Nor were the fights, the interruptions, or having to leave his bag to hopefully be reclaimed in a few days’ time. What worried him was that he’d left behind altered material, not some minor scrap or fragment to be lost in the world, but something that a super knew he had done. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he had made a terrible mistake.

  ***

  “Fuckin’ — amateur hour nonsense,” Lunar Bolt muttered, pacing around in her civilian clothes in the viewing area for the lab. Out of costume, she was a short blonde with the only tell of her power being luminous blue eyes. “Can’t believe I lost him.”

  “You won’t face any censure,” Administrator Ike replied, watching Handy Hands through the reinforced glass as Star Central’s top tinker analyzed Lunar Bolt’s costume. A tremendous, room-sized machine hummed and whirred and crackled, lightning zipping through clear tubes and powering intricate glass globes positioned around the sample case. “That particular super was not very high on the priority list.”

  In fact, she probably shouldn’t have tried accosting him at all, given the situation, but he wasn’t going to second-guess people in the field unless he needed to. The convention brawl had been unexpected, but a welcome excuse to push back against the sudden influx of stories on Glorybeam’s relationship. Something that had never been entirely secret, but also never before substantiated.

  The life support chair beeped softly, and he glanced at the readout to see that it had supplied more medication to reduce stress-induced problems. Ike didn’t really get headaches anymore, but the chair’s warnings served essentially the same purpose. Telling him he was working too hard; not that he had a choice.

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  If anything he was lucky that Glorybeam had gotten back in time. She had been off on the Isle of Leaves, helping out with a biotitan uprising, and that was the kind of thing she couldn’t just drop in order to take care of things at home. The most appropriate strategic and tactical-class team had been down underneath the city suppressing a Crystalline Entity rising from the Deep Kingdoms, and the people he had on hand would have likely caused more collateral damage.

  It was harder for people to appreciate battles that went on out of sight, but that was actually one reason he had such high hopes for Machine Head. Being able to get some photos of various supers in action in obscure and far distant places would do wonders to offset the inevitable disgruntlement from the public. The release of the Glorybeam files were unfortunate, especially given her past, but Star City couldn’t operate without a sovereign-class hero.

  “Well, it’s interesting.” Handy’s voice came over the intercom as he stepped away from the analysis machine, stripping the gloves off his natural hands. The other dozen or so mechanical hands scuttling around the lab shut down the massive device, needing to work together to secure Lunar Bolt’s costume. “No residual energy, no stray emissions, but at the same time it just registers as normal mega-mer fabric.”

  “But it’s still weighty. Or…” Ike paused, as it clearly didn’t weigh more, but what Lunar Bolt had described was something very similar.

  “Massy, except not,” Handy agreed. “I’ll want to keep a sample to see if the effect decays. The only thing I can’t test for is magic, and this doesn’t feel like it but you never know.”

  “I’ll get Mocker on it,” Ike said, although the man had already been tasked with finding Dimetria — an effort that had been stymied by Ike also needing his services to make up for the supers that had already quit in the wake of recent news articles. His gut said that Dimetria and this new super were related, though, so hopefully it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition. He made a note, escalating the villain responsible for the strange costume alteration from a level three concern – important – to a level two concern – very important.

  “Administrator?” The voice that came through the chair’s speakers was Thoughtstealer’s, and if there was one person in all of Star Central that took precedence, it was her. Ike tapped the privacy button, baffling the audio for a moment.

  “Proceed.”

  “Finished the pass on those reporters. The two who were asking about Machine Head were nudged. Exactly the same influence, very subtle,” Thoughtstealer reported, sounding almost impressed. “I would barely call it mind control. All it does is make it just a little easier to decide on a path and carry it though.”

  “Which is the foundation for all behavior,” Ike sighed. “Do we know who it was?”

  “I think so,” Thoughtstealer said, and Ike’s chair beeped a warning as it dampened a flood of excitement. “No name, but I do have a face.”

  “Get with Palette and put out a bulletin,” Ike said. The clairvoyant issue was critical, only superseded by immediate crises. Of which there were plenty, but someone running around manipulating reporters and supers was one of those utterly insidious threats that could snowball very quickly. “We’ll make it a manhunt.”

  Even if the clairvoyant wasn’t in Star City, even nations outside of the Five City Alliance would certainly be willing to screen people to ensure that kind of influence wasn’t happening in their cities, either. If he could get that done, that’d clear out a lot of underbrush for dealing with the issue that was slowly escalating to the same level of impossible crisis. The Mechaniacal situation.

  While most eyes had been on the convention center, the drones had tested Star Central’s own defenses. They’d been rebuffed, of course – Star Central was quite well defended – but the fact that someone was willing to even try showed that they were far too comfortable in their anonymity. Whoever was behind it had six fewer drones, and Handy had a lot more spare parts, so it was probably a severe mistake.

  “Head down to the basement, I’ll make sure they make you a new costume,” Ike told Lunar Bolt, who was still looking through the glass and sulking. “Of course, we won’t count it against you. It’s not every day you run into a super with an unregistered power like that. And you did well against the drones even with it.” Lunar Bolt had bumped into the false Mechaniacal forces just as they’d reached Star Central in one of those bits of serendipity that were inevitable with so many supers moving about.

  “Good enough to get me bumped to tactical-class?” Lunar Bolt challenged, only half joking. The classes were not, after all, just about raw power. Someone like The Living Lift could have remained a nominal-class meta his entire life if he hadn’t actively pursued understanding of the limits of his power and a career that benefitted from it. Being able to lift anything over his head was narrow, but with the right imagination it could be incredibly powerful. Like lifting an entire city above a magma flood.

  Lunar Bolt’s raw power was on the top end of what was generally considered common-class, but with enough presence of mind and inventiveness she might break into tactical-class, and get the accompanying pay bump and merchandizing improvements. The incentives were there because Ike actually wanted more effective supers, which was why people like Lunar Bolt were given tactical and command courses. Unfortunately, not everyone was cut out for it.

  “I’ll expedite your tests,” Ike promised, which was the best he could do. “In the meantime, if you could join Thoughtstealer and Palette to add the chain-user to the high-priority bulletin.”

  “Sure thing,” Lunar Bolt said, most of her sullenness falling away as she saluted and half-ran, half-floated out of the observation room. Ike made certain that Handy didn’t need anything further, then directed his own chair to the elevators. While he could have called Machine Head up to his office, Ike preferred visiting the various people down in the Dungeon — and besides, he preferred moving around to being stuck in one place. Even more than he was, anyway.

  The lab space that young Cayleb had made was far different than someone like Handy. Instead of big mechanical devices, glass tubing, and lightning, his was a nest of wires, fans, magnets, and softchips. Ventilation blew from the ceiling, hard enough that it would have been frigid in the room were it not competing with the waste heat of cathode ray monitors and processing arrays, arranged around the walls.

  “Administrator,” Machine Head said, putting down a can of soda to wave.

  “Machine Head,” Ike returned. “We’ve found more evidence of the telepath, so it’s no longer a one-off phenomenon. Which means I think we need to find your friend Isaac.”

  “He’s missing?” Machine Head asked with some alarm, sitting up straighter in his chair.

  “We should have brought him in once we found out about the influence on your mind, but we didn’t want to alert anyone we’d noticed so we just observed him for a little bit.” Ike sighed. “He hasn’t shown up for work and the apartment was cleaned out. So he wasn’t just snatched off the street; we suspect the telepath is using him as a proxy.” He wasn’t sure why, but considering that Cayleb’s power had been reassessed at a broader level, perhaps Isaac’s would be too.

  “Oh. Damn.” The tinker’s bald head paled and he sank back again. “Is there anything I can do? I mean, I can’t exactly go out…”

  “Your surveillance will probably do more to find him than any amount of legwork,” Ike assured the young super. “But if there are any places where he hangs out, people he might see, or other ways of communicating, I’d like you to submit them to the Greyhound Division.” For all its grandiose name, the tracking arm of Star Central had a total of five supers. There just weren’t all that many people with investigation-focused powers in Star Central’s roster.

  “Yeah, right away!” Machine Head said, swiveling to his computer. “Does this mean quarantine’s down? I can talk to people outside Star Central?”

  “With caveats,” Ike cautioned. “Now that we know that telepath is still active, we will have to vet everyone that comes in contact with you. In fact, we’ll be screening everyone regularly until this is over, though at least the influence is minimal.”

  “Sounds fun,” Machine Head said absently, his mind clearly elsewhere. “I hope Isaac’s okay.”

  “The sooner we find him, the more likely he is to be healthy,” Ike said, not entirely lying. If the telepath had taken the trouble to exfiltrate Isaac Hartson, then there was some kind of investment or emotional attachment. It was quite likely that he wasn’t regarded as a disposable a tool.

  “I have some ideas,” Machine Head promised, and turned to his keyboard.

  ***

  “What are you?” Greg muttered to himself.

  He was, of course, in the depths of his lab, surrounded by the click and whir of meshing gears, the soft pinging of metal as springs unwound, and the hum of esoteric engines pulling energy from the deep places of the universe. His testing of Star Central’s defenses had been interesting, and even if he’d lost a number of drones he was getting closer to being able to reproduce them with his own materials. But the data wasn’t even the real prize.

  It was just a piece of cloth from one of the hero costumes, but a very interesting one. The hero in question had clearly been suffering from some form of attack, movements almost drunken, but it turned out it was the costume that was at issue. A brief fracas with some of his attack drones had ripped the cloth, and free of the costume the hero had been rather more effective.

  Unfortunately his suppression ray failed several checks during spin-up, likely due to Star Central’s defenses. That resulted in the beam flickering out before it was properly formed, so he’d had to pull back some of that particular group, but not without a prize. A scrap of that costume, stuck to one of the pike-arms of his attack drone. Not that he had intended to take it at the time, but once the drones had returned – through the circuitous path and under full stealth, as always – he had noticed its unusual properties.

  Light but massy, a strange sort of combination that was generally only seen in magical or deeply exotic materials. He had to guess it was a result of an attack by an opposing meta, rather than a deliberately engineered result, but the effect was fascinating. Greg could think of all kinds of uses for such a material, if only he had more.

  The analytical engine pinged and hummed away as he watched it work on the cloth, probing it with tools, with light, with sound and all kinds of more obscure energies. Most of it just confirmed what he could test just by picking the scrap up and waving it around; there weren’t lingering energies, magical spells, decaying isotopes, or other evidence of temporary reality distortion. It wasn’t until near the very end that anything came up.

  Greg still didn’t have a full mastery of some of the deeper levels of the artifice, so he wasn’t fully certain of the theoretical underpinnings for the analytical instrument that had come with the lab, but he knew what it meant. The cloth had indeed been power-altered, some peculiar twist that wasn’t some kind of radiation or manifestation. Just looking at the readouts tickled a deep part of his brain, inspiration flowing as he grabbed scrap material and started cutting and welding.

  The suppression ray was good so far as it went, but it wasn’t enough. The original wore off quickly, and almost instantly if the projector was destroyed or the target went out of range. The suppression was a constant effect, held in place by an arcane engine buried in glass and gears. But what if he could use that twist in the cloth, a trick to make something better than just suppression? A true depowerment effect?

  Yet another instance of why Greg was superior to the older Mechaniacal. His alternate-universe self had relegated power suppression to some sort of area denial field, refusing to cross the line into something that would do real damage. Given that the man had professed to want to rule the world or the like, it was a tremendous oversight. Bespoke a certain lack of imagination.

  He had to wonder how the other Mechaniacal had grown up. Whether the Lost Generation had happened there as well, or if Mechaniacal had been able to have a normal childhood. Resources to learn, to build, to create. Oh, Mechaniacal had surely been a terror in the past, the histories were quite clear, but he’d never been fully lethal against the superheroes. A softness that Greg was quite willing to correct.

  The suppressor augment came together slowly. Tiny gears, needing a jeweler’s loupe to see, meshed around a core of glass and crystal, miniscule dischargers crackling like dried leaves. Brass and silver casings, with springs to absorb shock, the entire thing made to slide onto the barrel of his projector. A tiny chamber where he placed a miniscule scrap of the cloth, excised from the larger portion he’d recovered.

  The last part was irksome. He hated having limited supplies, though there wasn’t a choice at the moment, since he had not yet taken control of industries as he knew he eventually would. It wasn’t worth spending money on anything other than marginalia when it came to his creations, either. The drones and remnant technology he could salvage from the stashes Mechaniacal had left all over the Five Cities – and further afield, but he hadn’t gotten there yet – were of far higher quality than anything he could have sourced in any other way.

  Unfortunately, he couldn’t create the effect he wanted whole cloth. Powers were tricky, and even he didn’t quite have the ability to replicate the suppressor effect that the drones used. Greg had allotted himself exactly one of the suppressors to dismantle and reverse-engineer, and it still sat partially disassembled in a place of honor in his laboratory. The innermost workings were delicate, sealed, and too obscure to understand with his current equipment.

  Amplifying an extant example was far easier, and something that Mechaniacal’s devices had already been set up for. Leverage was one of the main design principles that any mechanical tinker knew. Why expend time and energy doing things the hard way when, given a long enough lever, he could move a world?

  He attached the augment to the projector, standing well back as he sent the commands to cycle it, listening to the hum rise and fall before sputtering out. Not quite there yet, but a few more iterations would do it. After all, he was Mechaniacal — in fact, he was better, and he would need a meta name soon enough to show it.

  Even after he’d gotten the depowerment ray working, It still needed testing, and there was only one way to do it.

  Fortunately, he had just the target in mind.

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