“All will fear the name of Mechalon Prime!”

  Greg Haden muttered to himself, still trying out names for when he finally revealed his presence. He wasn’t ready quite yet, but he was confident he would be soon. After all, not even Mechaniacal himself had managed to take out Glorybeam.

  Sovereigns were generally unassailable — except by other sovereign-class powers, of course. Which he obviously was, now that he’d demonstrated that exact capability. Watching Glorybeam hit the stage had been extraordinarily satisfying, though somewhat marred by having his drones destroyed soon afterward. Still, it had been worth it.

  By habit, Greg checked over his defenses yet again. Not only was the lab dug deep under the middle of the zone that had been destroyed all those years ago – safely below even the shelters – but he’d also weaponized some of the technology to shield himself still further. The depowerment – no longer a mere suppressor – served as an aegis to protect him from any would-be attacker, interlocked with his own self and his other security so he could walk in and out, but nobody else could.

  More ordinary weapons served as extra deterrent — though there was nothing ordinary about anything built of his tinker talent. The original drones and defenses had all kinds of odd tricks – discombobulator rays, holographic duplicators, gravity inverters, relativity projectors, and even photonic reversers – but most of them were nonlethal. He’d put all that stuff in storage and replaced them with the more effective energy blasters and a few of the molecular disruptors between. Enough to easily eradicate any depowered so-called hero.

  Assured the perimeter was secure, he returned to piloting one of his drone formations through the sky above Star City since the chaos had also given him the chance to settle old scores. The kids that had bullied him when he was still in foster care; the gas station owner that had chased him out when he’d accidentally dropped a case of soda and spilled it all over the floor. The people who had humiliated or ignored him over the years — those that he could find at least.

  He'd been restraining himself from going after them before. So long as Star Central so foolishly believed the drones were a lesser threat than other concerns – biotitan attacks, crystalline entities, uncontrolled awakenings, and Blacktime himself – then he was able to operate with almost complete freedom, even taking the stealth systems into account. Now he no longer had to worry about operating covertly, and had no compunctions about sending some of his drones to eliminate the people he so hated.

  Some of the people on his list just weren’t available. Cayleb Ruston, for example, was somewhere deep in the bowels of Star Central itself, the coward that had so often stolen the attention that was rightfully Greg’s hunkered down beyond his reach. He outright couldn’t find Mark Melton or Annie Caspar, his former roommate and the annoying girl across the hall having vanished somewhere into the general morass of people in the Five City Alliance.

  That was something he could pursue once he was in charge. With Glorybeam out of the picture, the Five City Alliance could only borrow the services of other sovereign supers. Considering that everyone else’s supers were usually fairly busy, that wasn’t a situation that could be borne for too long. Someone would have to fill the role, and he was exactly the sort of brilliant sovereign who was born to do it.

  He'd always thought that the city – really the world, but first things first – was far too messy. A sloppiness that allowed people like Glorybeam and Blacktime to run rampant, to destroy entire generations with impunity. Careless and foolish individuals kept people like him back, ignoring or treading on those with true vision, drive, and understanding while exalting the foolish, the weak-willed, the pathetic followers blindly carrying out the machinations of a barely functional system.

  It would be far better if things worked like clockwork, where people were formed and fitted like gears to a machine, so that everything worked smoothly. As it stood, so many were useless or worse, turning what should be an orderly advance into a useless procession of vagaries. The world needed to operate according to a proper design, orderly and organized, crafted by the hand of a grand visionary.

  Easily done. All he had to do was sweep away the worst of the detritus first, and give himself a clean workspace. Arrange Star City as he wished, then the rest of the Five City Alliance would be easy, and after that — well. The project would be half-finished. All he’d need to do was to follow through.

  Greg glanced away from the projection that his drones gave him to look over his list, ordered by personal importance, difficulty, and logistical requirements. A complex matrix that he could read at a glance but would of course be utterly impenetrable to anyone else. There were still far too many things on that list, but his eyes found their way unerringly to the next potential target and he smiled.

  The damned foster care home, the one that suppressed and humiliated him throughout his entire childhood. Something entirely unfit for purpose, and at the top of the list for poorly-shaped cogs in his city. Definitely something he was looking forward to clearing away.

  ***

  Isaac stared at the drones in the sky, watching them for a moment and hoping they were headed somewhere else. He had no such luck, as the formation of three small spheres swept down toward the foster home. For a moment he just stood there, too shocked to respond, then he shook himself and went through the short checklist that Justice for Hire used when getting ready for a fight. Civilians, weapons, armor, targets.

  “Get back inside, David,” Isaac said, giving his voice a snap that Lou didn’t generally exhibit. Thankfully, David didn’t argue with him, scurrying back through the door as Isaac grabbed the mop. While he would definitely have preferred to have Ravdia’s armor and weapons, he shoved inertia into the mop and Lou’s overalls anyway, eyeing the incoming drones. His first thought was that whoever was behind them had seen through the Lou persona and was there for him, but the drones completely ignored him as they swept down toward the office window.

  “Take cover, Dolores!” Isaac shouted, charging forward and swinging the mop around as energy blasts shattered the window and put holes in the brickwork. Whoever was controlling the devices seemed to have marked him as irrelevant, since he was just a janitor, but he still almost missed the first drone as it automatically dodged the overhead blow from the mop. It was the cloth strands that hit it, swinging out to smack the melon-sized drone — and drive it into the sidewalk with set of jagged rents in its shell.

  A frantic clicking came from within the drone’s shell, but it merely rolled around rather than lifting again. That didn’t mean it was safe, but safe enough that he could focus on the other two. They dodged his followup swipes, swiveling in midair and gaining some distance. Isaac backpedaled, dashing over to the janitor’s cart and pushing inertia into it as he took cover.

  The sound of the energy bolts splattering against the cart was accompanied by the cart itself shaking. There was a sharp whining noise, and the bit of mop protruding over the lip of the cart groaned before the wood seemed to slump like rubber in Isaac’s grasp. He dropped it with a bitten-off curse, reaching up to fumble for something from the janitor’s cart.

  His fingers found the spray bottles for cleaning products, and after a blink he took them, pulling out two, one for each hand. Each bottle and contents got as much inertia shoved into them as he could manage, the mechanically-pumped squeeze sprayer being something that might actually benefit from his power. He began to work the triggers as the two blaster drones cleared the minimal cover the cart gave him, the spray anemic at first but after a few pumps fluid began to flow.

  The spray droplets shot into the air, not turning into mist like usual, but rather a cone of fluid moving fast, hammering into the drone hulls and visibly denting them. Not enough to destroy them, but it was far more effective than he’d thought. Isaac dashed to the side, dodging the red and blue energy bolts, and focused on pushing inertia specifically into the area below where his thumbs were, pressed against the spray chamber of the bottle. Just giving it an extra kick if he could, over and above what he’d already put into his impromptu weapons.

  He skidded to a halt, gouging tracks in the concrete, and then launched himself at the weapon drones, giving them each a good spray with his bottles. It was a damned good thing they were area effect, because his aim wasn’t great, but the extra inertia did the trick. The cleaning fluid punched through into the interior, doing enough damage to drop them both from the air. A faint noise came from behind him before he could think of how to follow up, and Isaac whirled to see a larger drone slide into existence, the telltale distortion of the depowerment ray starting to build around the drone.

  “Heck.”

  Isaac had about half a second to brace himself. Instead of trying to do anything physical, he pushed his power in the sort-of-sideways manner, buoying himself as much as he could. He flung out his hands to try and intercept the beam, half by purpose and half by instinct trying to pull the inertia out of the depowerment ray — he had to hope that since it made a change, that change could be resisted.

  The beam fired, and Isaac could feel the tug of war. That wasn’t the right metaphor, but he could still put a metaphorical finger on the metaphysical realm where the suppressor beam was trying to change his power, and where he was struggling against it with his own abilities. Sapping the force from the beam, reinforcing his own resistance to the changes it was trying to make. It only lasted a second or so, but it felt like a long, frantic struggle.

  Then the beam finished, and Isaac still had his powers. He felt a little off-kilter, the equivalent of having a kink in his back, but it didn’t feel like anything that couldn’t be addressed by some exercise. That was just a flash of intuition, probably wrong since he was trying to move away from exercise metaphors, but still stored in the back of his head as he scrambled back behind the drooping janitor’s cart. He fumbled for something with a bit of a longer range than spray bottles, but there was no need. The drone shimmered, became transparent, and was gone.

  Isaac stood up cautiously, looking around to appraise the damage. Smoking craters pitted the cement and asphalt where blaster bolts had missed him, and practically the entire office wall was rubble. The damage was more severe than he’d originally thought, or maybe the blaster bolts had some ongoing destructive effect where they hit, but either way it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The janitor cart and most of its contents were a complete write-off, of course, the wood having been rendered half-melted by some aspect of the tinker weapon and the rest just shattered by energy blasts.

  Keeping the training from Justice for Hire in mind, he went around with his spray bottles of doom and made sure the three weapon drones were inactive. A spritz at point-blank range junked the internals, stopping the whirring and clicking before he pulled back the inertia. Not that he could get everything he’d invested, with the liquid running as it did. He’d have to see what he could do about that later, but it fell further down on the priority list. Only once he was sure there were no other threats did he allow himself to check on the foster home.

  “Dolores!” He called, peering through the wreckage of the office wall. For some reason he wasn’t surprised to spot the women crouched in the corner, clutching some ancient tinker-pistol half the size of her head. She could barely aim the thing, but fortunately when she saw it was him she didn’t even try.

  “Oh, thank goodness! Is everything okay out there, Lou?”

  “Yeah, it’s all taken care of.” He didn’t offer any explanation of how – or if – he’d fended off the attack, and Dolores didn’t ask. “Just some cleaning up to do.”

  “I’ll say,” Dolores replied, looking at the ruined brickwork. Isaac didn’t know how structurally important the office wall was, but given the generally brutalist blockiness of the building, the roof probably wasn’t in danger of immediate collapse.

  “Did you call Star Central yet?” Isaac asked. He wasn’t going to stick around for official interest.

  “Not yet,” Dolores said, scrambling for the phone.

  “I’d appreciate if you don’t mention I was involved,” Isaac said, glancing back at the melted janitor cart. “And I’ll see about getting that replaced.” It wasn’t like the carts were that expensive, but the foster home wasn’t exactly overflowing with money either. A construction meta could fix up the outer damage in a matter of moments, but replacing manufactured goods was another matter entirely.

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  Dolores squinted at him with, perhaps, a little bit of suspicion. He’d never needed to fake too much backstory for Lou, and in fact just someone who wanted to help and was decent at cleaning was all he’d ever needed to be. When chatting with Dolores he could talk about things like superhero conventions and cars because they were perfectly normal things for a normal guy to be interested in. Now it was painfully obvious that he was a meta.

  “I don’t blame you,” she said after a moment. “Go ahead and skedaddle, you just make sure that you bring some more cleaning stuff next time, you hear?”

  “Sure will, Dolores,” he said, though it wasn’t that simple. He had to shove the half-destroyed cart and floppy mop back inside, making sure there was no trace of his power on any of it, and then he did a quick survey outside to see if he could find any spatters or puddles and divest them of any excess inertia. He was able to fix some of it, but there was going to be more that slipped off somewhere, a few bits of high-inertia mostly-water somewhere in the cycle, but he couldn’t do anything about that. Only once he was satisfied he had done his best did he get on his miricycle and head off, still feeling a bit out of joint.

  It wasn’t just his power, though as he cycled along he pushed and pulled it through himself, feeling the kink that was put into his ability start to work itself out. It was the big question of why. Who would want to attack the foster home? He knew for a fact there wasn’t any Mechaniacal technology there, since it and everything in it was fairly new and lowest-bidder stuff, mass produced to keep up with demand.

  “Someone have a grudge?” He wondered aloud, words snatched by the air as he guided the miricycle along the sidewalk. It was almost a joke, if one only to himself, but the more he thought about it the more seriously he took it. There was nothing tactical or strategic about assaulting the foster home, and from the look of things, without a meta those drones could have disassembled the place fairly easily — and whether that included the kids inside didn’t bear thinking about. Given everything else going on, it wasn’t likely that Star Central would have been able to get there in time to matter.

  So someone really hated the foster center, and it didn’t take much imagination to figure out who. He’d borne a grudge himself, until adulthood and time to reflect had helped him let it go. Any number of kids who had gone through the system, and rightfully hated it, might well try and take it out on Dolores and the building. Except, it wasn’t any number of kids that had access to Mechaniacal’s technology.

  It was someone who was a tinker, or knew a tinker, since he didn’t think any other talent would be able to get the insanely complex machinery going. Not only that, given that the drones had taken out Glorybeam, his gut said it was someone with a serious grudge against the hero — which all the Lost Generation had reason to have, but it wasn’t actually something real and immediate for everyone. Maybe hardly anyone.

  Except he did know a tinker with a serious hate for Glorybeam. A tinker whose specialty was, very specifically, mechanical devices and not anything to do with electricity or softchips. A tinker who had recently come by a cache of material that had ultimately forced Glorybeam to appear in a public, predictable place where she could be targeted by mechanical drones.

  It was all circumstantial, but Isaac had a gut feeling. One that made him steer his bike to the nearest gas station, where he bought a soda and a bag of chips and changed out of Lou’s getup in the bathroom. He wasn’t dumb enough to go try to do anything about his suspicions, but he could at least take a look in passing.

  Back on the miricycle, he steered his way through the neighborhood to where Greg’s apartment was, way over at the other end of the rebuilt area. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but there was nothing particularly unusual there, just the usual parade of old cars and brick walls that were a few years past normal maintenance. Even Greg’s actual home – which he rode past without slowing down or glancing sideways – didn’t betray anything unusual, though Isaac had a deep sense of foreboding that was probably just all in his head. For all that his powers stretched beyond the physical, he wasn’t a clairvoyant.

  With his curiosity unsatisfied, he steered back toward uptown, aiming to return to the merc house, but he slowed down and then eventually stopped. This wasn’t just something he could sit on and ignore, leaving it to Star Central. As much as he didn’t want to, he had a responsibility to do something about it. Even now it gnawed at him, demanding he stop and take action.

  To clear his head, he stopped off at a comic shop. Flipping through the offerings there had always helped him before, though usually his concerns had more to do with inspiration for costuming than the almost existential issues of personal responsibility and confronting supervillains. Still, the familiar activity helped settle him a bit, and hide the contortions his face was certainly going through as he tried to decide what to do.

  The easiest path forward would be to simply call Star Central. Except, he doubted they were likely to believe him, and even if they did, they’d bring him in long before they did anything else. They definitely didn’t have time to follow up anonymous tips at the moment, and he was sure there were dozens of people claiming – innocently or malevolently – to know something about the person behind the drones.

  He did have another option. One that he didn’t like, that was almost certainly a bad idea, but it was an idea that wouldn’t put him on Star Central’s radar once again. Isaac knew someone who could get in touch with Blacktime — a man who certainly would be interested in whoever attacked Glorybeam. The radio and papers hadn’t told him anything about what was going on with the former sovereign, but he had to assume that Blacktime had not been happy about the attack. The files he’d recovered from Crash made the relationship there unequivocal.

  Isaac chewed over the idea as he flipped through comic pages, and despite his misgivings, the more he thought about it the more he liked it. There was a risk, and if his hunch was wrong there would no doubt be consequences, but he could simply be honest about his lack of certainty. Even if he wasn’t certain, he figured Blacktime would be more likely to move. After all, the villain didn’t need to answer to anyone but himself.

  Not only did it seem likely Blacktime would act faster, but the plan would give him a reason to get back in touch with Smokeshow and see if he could maybe even undo what had happened to her. It was his fault that she had gotten depowered, but now that he’d encountered the effect himself, he had an inkling he could fix it. Maybe.

  Obviously he’d never tried to alter someone else on purpose. He didn’t even know if he could; after the early scares with his power he’d never even considered trying. But now that he knew that he could affect people and the ontological inertia of the depowerment beam, it seemed like it might be possible. Smokeshow would have to do exercises and start moving on getting her power back from how it had been shifted, and he didn’t know if the depowerment effect worked the same between his talent and hers. But it was better than nothing.

  With that decided, he picked up an issue of a new serial that caught his eye and paid, just so he wouldn’t be seen as a moocher, and headed back to the merc house with more assurance. Changing to Ravdia was a matter of course, but at the same time, it felt odd.

  Shifting was harder than usual, possibly due to the kink in his power that he hadn’t quite worked out, or possibly because of how much extra oomph he’d put into Lou. Readjusting into Ravdia, he put away everything in his costume bag, catching sight of the comic he’d bought and finding himself a little surprised at how uninterested he was in it. And for that matter, how little sense the stop at the comic shop made, in retrospect.

  He didn’t like that at all, as with that realization came the worry that his persona affected his perspective far more than he realized. That the more inertia he gave them, the harder it might become to switch out, suddenly creating the worry that he’d be stuck playing a character for the rest of his life. But he was committed now, the events were in motion, and he had to keep moving forward.

  Even if it was his day off, Justice For Hire was plenty busy — though that meant, ironically, that the place was entirely empty save for Lia playing dispatcher. Everyone else was out on jobs or enjoying their own time off, giving him cover to grab the clamshell from the hidden hole in the wall. It probably wasn’t strictly necessary to be so careful, but he was very aware of how much incredibly revealing information was on the machine. With the door closed and locked, he pulled up the decrypted data and started hunting.

  It took him longer than he would have liked, since his hazy half-recollection of where he’d seen the address for Smokeshow’s mom was wrong. In fact, it was just a guess that, without powers, she’d wind up at her mom’s place or even that the Sally Miller he’d found in the communications might know where Smokeshow had gone. Given Crash’s warning he wasn’t going to try the slums, especially not with all the chaos going on.

  The Honorable Sally Miller had an address over on Park Avenue East, which was about as fancy as fancy could get. More impressively, it was just a floor, not an apartment or suite. That was serious money, but he probably should have expected it. Crash may have his base in the slums, but he was part of Blacktime’s operation and there was no way that anyone so involved with that type of crime would be poor.

  Chains would surely be out of place, and Lou definitely wouldn’t get any response. David Jeffries might work, but Isaac would have to dress up a notch or two. Thankfully his busy week for the guild had netted him a few extra creds, so he wouldn’t have to dip into his emergency funds. So far he hadn’t done much specific costuming for David, but it seemed now would be the time.

  The current fashion for the spoiled rich was tailored, tinker-cloth outfits, shaped after the various sovereigns’ super costumes without quite crossing the line. Bright colors, compression fabrics to improve body definition and posture, and not incidentally provide a little bit of genuine physical protection. Or even augmentation, depending on how much people were willing to spend.

  Isaac could do the tailoring himself, which would save him quite a bit of money since he could spring for a wannabe brand and make it look like something far better. While Glorybeam’s gold might be more apropos, he decided to use Endymion’s color scheme — though the Isle of Leaves sovereign was generally seen inside his giant mecha rather than wearing his actual super-suit. The basic stuff was still expensive, silk-smooth, brilliant blue with gold piping and green highlights, and he would have felt silly wearing it if it weren’t practically a costume. The final look was halfway between business casual and superhero outfit, and frankly he didn’t think it took the best components of both, but he wasn’t in charge of fashion.

  The final touch was the absurdly overpriced pins that went on the left side of the shirt. He’d only faked them before when it came to costumes, never purchasing them himself because they were so distinct to the upper classes. The small, embossed, logo-bearing decorations were somewhat in the realm of sports teams, proclaiming allegiance to and interest in certain supers – hero or villain – and their teams, but also personal ability. He didn’t know all the nuances of the pin system, but enough to avoid conveying anything stupid. Sticking to rescue metas like The Living Lift was a generally safe, positive message, though he was tempted to get a Blacktime pin solely because of who he was going to be begging a favor from.

  He brought his purchases back to the room, this time taking out the tinkered workbench from behind the wall, and got to work. Tailoring adjustments were easy, relative to constructing an entire costume from scratch, and he made it a habit to know his own measurements. Ones that had changed just a touch after the training and work with Justice for Hire. Barely anything, but enough that previously fitted clothing would sit just slightly wrong. The final touch was styling his hair to be a frosted-tipped, spiked blonde the way that he saw among the young men walking around the more upper-class areas, and then he was ready.

  The care that went into the costume had three good reasons, actually. One was to blend in, two was because David Jeffries was probably going to be his walking-around persona for a long time, and three was because he felt that the more care went into the physical aspect, the easier it’d be to boost a persona with his power. After all, he couldn’t give things motion or momentum, just make it harder or easier to change what was there.

  Instead of a backpack, he used a large gym bag to hold Ravdia’s and Lou’s costumes as he headed to Park Avenue East. The further he got into that area of the city, the more distant the ever-present wail of sirens and sound of superpowers being employed became. By the time he was actually walking by the park, it was almost impossible to tell that there was anything going on — except for the smartly dressed mercenary metas openly patrolling the streets.

  None of them stopped him, courtesy of the new costume, but they were very clearly keeping a sharp eye on the affluent people enjoying the park and strolling the streets. Men and boys in getups similar to his; women in floaty, gravity-defying dresses pushing perambulators; old ladies walking dogs or dog-sized dinosaurs imported from the Deep Kingdoms. Isaac even passed an old man on a bench reading a book who wore a steel band around his head adorned with a glittering blue gem — one of the long-retired Elemental Patrol, aged but still radiating an aura of power.

  Isaac’s jaunt across the park brought him to the Humbert Building, a sleek ten-story confection of swooping steel, glass, and marble surrounded by a fenced-in courtyard. It was, in fact, so upscale that it had its own security, a reinforce guard’s station by the entrance, controlling a powered gate blocking off the courtyard and an underground ramp into the building’s parking garage.

  “Name and business?” The guard asked as Isaac sauntered up to the gate, commendably not sounding bored with his role sitting there at the gate all day. To be fair, he had a small television in his station and in the current circumstances someone would probably be quite unhappy if their guard slacked off.

  “David Jeffries, here to see Sarah Miller. Floor eight. You can tell her I’m the one she met at the convention.” Obviously Smokeshow wouldn’t recognize the name, and he didn’t want to proclaim that he was Chains. Isaac wasn’t sure if Crash actually lived at the Humbert address, but he’d give even odds that Chains was banned from the premises.

  “One moment.” The guard closed the speaker grille and, though the tinted window, Isaac saw him press a few buttons on an intercom and wait. Isaac lounged with the insouciant arrogance of young men everywhere, masking the nervousness that he felt. There were too many things piled on top of each other, too many things he wanted to say.

  “Right, you’re cleared for floor eight,” the guard said. With a buzz and a click the gate slid open wide enough for him to go through, and Isaac waved at the security station as he crossed onto the grounds of the Humbert Building. He followed the signs to the elevator, stepped into a box made of seasoned wood and imported marble, and pushed the button for Floor 8: Miller Residence.

  The elevator brought him up to a vestibule, decorated in bright greens and yellows, with a painting hanging on the wall that was probably worth more than the apartment building he used to live in. The door itself had no handle, but rather a discreet security panel with a few buttons and a speaker grille. He approached it, lifting his hand to press the bright yellow page button, but before his finger touched it the door clicked and slid open.

  The woman that emerged was almost unrecognizable, wearing a skirt and a cool blue shirt, with no black eyeshadow or spiked collars or armbands. It was the first time he’d seen her out of her ganger guise, and it was a relief to see her doing well rather than suffering the way she had been when he’d last seen her. She, apparently, was performing the same sort of assessment as she stared at him, looking him up and down. Between them, she was the one who spoke first.

  “Chains?”

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