Realign 14.o
Monday, August 1
"Sun's getting real low, boss," Ryan Hunter said, watching the sun set behind the outline of Philadelphia. "We doing this or what?"
The helmet of Tanya Abigail, the leader of this ragtag crew of theirs, turned towards him, and he had hold back a grin when she realized he could not see the glare she was sending him because it was hidden behind her visor. "We wait until nightfall," she bit out.
He rolled his eyes at her attempt at a rebuke. He had never worked with her in the field before, but he knew she had a reputation for being a bit of a hard-ass. She would have to lighten up if this thing was going to work out. A stick in the mud like her and someone like him with a dozen notes in his file mentioning his issues with authority? Either they'd get into a fistfight at some point or she would lose her mind.
Just to tweak her nose, he sent a grin to the beagle-boy standing at her side. The apparent twelve-year-old smiled back, his thin tail whipping back and forth.
«
She's going to hit you one of these days.You know that, right?» He turned slightly to the side to glance at the husky lying on the ground at his feet. The dog turned pale blue eyes up to look at him. «
Don't say I didn't warn you.»
«
It'll be fine,» he told Jeremy. «
Won't be the first time my CO's hated me.» "I'm just saying, if we're going to be standing around waiting, we could do that inside just fine."
Greg Weis, the designated second in command, cleared his throat and pointed at Abigail's boy and the leggy woman lounging next to their resident sniper. Ryan would find her rather sexy, actually, if she were not a dog. "I think the extra ears on some of us might raise questions."
"Thank you, Weis. We need to wait until night so we are all but invisible in the sky." She crossed her arms, her gaze firmly on him. "We need to be cautious and subtle, Hunter."
Subtle? He sighed and shook his head. "Boss –
Lieutenant Abigail – think about what we're doing tonight. We're about to get in a firefight with
magic. I don't think we're going to pull off this whole subtle thing, and I say that as the guy who turns into the Invisible Man."
Abigail stared at him for a long moment before her helmet dissolved in a wave of blue pixels. The reason why became clear when she ran her hand through her cropped blonde hair. "God, I hate it when you're right," she muttered just loudly enough that he could hear her. "Anyone have a problem with setting out now?"
"I don't know about anybody else," Loomis said, rolling the arming sword the doggo Tinkers had built for him around in his hands, "but I'm game for getting started."
"Alright, Hunter. You get your wish. Let's roll out, people."
Finally! His own helmet formed over his head, and Jeremy stretched into human form beside him, the Guardian Beast dressed in standard PRT armor with 'Mask' stenciled over his chest instead of his name. Then again, Ryan's own ballistic vest read 'Charlie', so he did not have much room to criticize.
He was looking forward to the unclear time in the future when their team would go public and they could personalize their Barrier Jackets, but until then they needed to look like every other PRT trooper to maintain the pretense that they were not something new and special.
Abigail – sorry,
Alpha now that they were actually entering the field – raised her grey and navy blue staff, and the team took to the sky and shot into the air. «
You two know where we're heading,» she said in his head on their telepathic 'team channel'. «
Lead on and fill us in on any details.»
'Fill them in'. He rolled his eyes as they flew through the sky. In reality, that meant 'review all the stuff we already know about this guy'. «
Villain's name is Vulture. At least, his alias is because we aren't supposed to know their real names or faces even though we're arresting them—»
«
You know why that is, Charlie,» Bravo cut in before Alpha could do the same. «
And you know none of us like it, either, but there's nothing we can do about it right now. Let's focus on what we can do.»
Blowing out a frustrated breath, he eventually nodded. He knew he was not the only one who chafed under the dumbass restrictions they had to work under, but Bob Samuels, the head of field operations and their direct superior now that they were a special operations team, had laid out the logic in a way that was hard to argue against.
"This is something ingrained in cape culture," Samuels had said when Morgan suggested tracking them down and just plugging them in the back to haul in for booking.
"When the masks come off, they aren't villains anymore. They're regular people just like everyone else. It's dumb, it's backwards, but it's also a testament to the fact that the bad guys outnumber the good guys by three or four to one on average. They have what's called the 'monopoly of force', basically a different take on the golden rule. Whoever has the gold, or in this case the raw power, makes the rules.
"This program is the first step to changing that, along with arming even the regular grunts with magic Tinkertech weapons, but we still can't hold out if every villain in the city and the vigilantes who see their 'Unwritten Rules' as more important than law and order decided to join forces and attack us all at once. That's why we can't break their rules of engagement, even if we are going to bend them.
"As we arm ourselves and this program expands to the other PRT branches, we will eventually outnumber and outgun the capes, and then we can start doing things based on common sense. But not yet, not while Operation Pentagram can still be strangled in the crib."
Just remembering that conversation put a frown on his face, but he forced it away. This was how they would change things. Get the villains out of the sky, and then they could rain down holy hell on their heads. «
Yeah, yeah. I know.
«
Vulture. Tinker, makes wearable gear including winged backpack things that he and his henchmen use to fly around. He's the only flying villain who can give other people the means to get up in our airspace, which is why he's our first target. Has a total of eight henchmen, though only four or five of them are normally in the base at a time. Should be easy enough to deal with.»
«
Anything we need to know about their base?»
He shook his head only to remember that they could not see it. «
Not much. Old photography store. Not a lot of windows, so Foxtrot, you won't have many lines of sight to snipe anybody. Front door is locked and blocked, but they enter through the back door and have an electric garage door setup to block off the hole they use when they fly in and out.»
«
Sounds like it will be easy to limit their chances of escape, then. How much farther?»
Glancing at the marker his gauntlet-computer-thing projected on the inside of his helmet, he turned his head downwards and descended until he landed in an empty parking lot behind a couple of dumpsters. "We're here."
The rest of the team turned to look at the building, and Foxtrot's wolfhound-turned-woman said what Ryan thought the first time he saw it. "They made their base in this dump?"
"That just makes it easier for us to get in," Alpha said after a moment. "Charlie, Mask, get in and make sure the target is actually here and is appropriately dressed."
He rolled his eyes behind his visor and toggled the mental switch that would start up his invisibility spell. 'Appropriately dressed', right; costume and all. It was not as if he did not know what Vulture looked like underneath it. Surveillance and skulking around unseen kind of made that impossible. It certainly made it awkward a few days after that when he ran into Vulture without a mask in the grocery store and had to force himself not to arrest the bastard right there and then.
Mask was right behind him when he ran to the door, both of them hidden under their Cover spells. A quick twist confirmed what he suspected; once or twice the henchmen might have left the door unlocked, but not often. Thankfully, they had another way in.
He held up one hand and focused. He had a very specific image in mind, and dark purple energy flowed out of his hand to solidify into that very shape. It looked almost like a screwdriver, but one with a much wider tip. That tip fit perfectly into the innocent-looking gap under one of the windows, and with slow, careful motions he pried the bottom of the window pane out of the frame. He did not want it breaking and alerting everyone inside that someone was breaking in, after all.
Soon enough, the square of glass was free, leaving a hole into the building. Too high and awkward for a human to climb though, but one of them was not limited to human form like that. Ryan crouched and pressed his hands against the wall. «
Just like last time—»
Something heavy landed on his back and bounced off, and he shot a glare after the husky that had used him as a springboard. «
You need to lose some weight, buddy.»
«
You could have crawled through that hole, you know,» came his Guardian Beast's rejoinder. Something clicked in the back door, and it opened without any obvious source.
He shook his head and stepped through the open door. «
Ready for this, Mad King?» he asked the red gauntlet covering his left arm.
«
Affirmative. Combat ready.»
Awesome. «
Enhance Jeremy's outline so I can see him. Then we get to take this bastard down.»
The pair of invisible agents crept down the hall towards the front door. It was in the opposite direction of the main workspace, but they had found a break room on their previous trip that the henchmen still used. It would suck for the team to jump in only to be surprised by armed guards coming up behind them.
Sure enough, one hench was sipping a cup of coffee in the break room, and as they turned the corner another was visible sorting through some equipment in what Vulture used as his storage room. Jerking his thumb at the coffee-drinker, he left Mask to take care of that while he went after the man in the storage room. More mana flowed into his hand to form a second energy construct, and he jammed the tip of his knife into the back of the man's head.
It was a funky quirk of this spell he had noticed while casually sparring with Loomis and Michael. The spell itself would not kill anyone, which stabbing someone in the kidney or lung or heart would normally do, but it apparently still
felt like there was a piece of steel sitting wherever. The henchman dropped to the ground as surely as if he were dead, but pulling the blade caused him to let out a quiet gasp.
Ryan put his fingers on the man's neck and nodded to himself. Alive, but having his brains scrambled and then magically unscrambled was too much for him to regain consciousness anytime soon. He knew from his and Jeremy's experiments with some rats near their apartment that once he woke up, he would be dizzy for a little while but otherwise fine.
Glancing behind him, he watched the unconscious body of the other man be lowered to the ground by a white outline that shot him a thumbs-up.
That was two down, which meant there should only be two or three more henchmen around. Assuming Vulture was here in the first place, otherwise they would have to wait. «
Gag and tie up both these guys. We don't want anyone stumbling on them,» he told Mask. While the Guardian Beast was doing that, he snuck back the way they came.
«
Charlie, Mask, we have movement above the building. Looks like Vulture coming in.»
Perfect timing. He opened the door to the main workshop and froze. It was not two or three henchmen running around inside the room but six. The garage door on the roof noisily slid open, and Vulture dropped into the building. The rocket-powered wings folding up to fit better on his back, the villain stomped around and started barking out orders.
«
He's here, and he's in costume. The entire rest of his crew's running around, too. Your call, boss. We moving in or not?»
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
«
He's here, and he's in costume. The entire rest of his crew's running around, too. Your call, boss. We moving in or not?»
Tanya took a deep breath in and held it. One, two, three. She let it out, imagining that her worry for her team and her knowledge about the risks they were about to face were pouring out of her along with the air. «
Delta, are you, Echo, and Sword in position at the back door?»
«
In position and ready to rock and roll,» the former paper-pusher sent with an audible grin.
She blinked and shook her head. She still had a hard time believing he was former Marines, let alone that he spent nearly a year in the front lines in Vietnam. He was just so jolly and weird!
Maybe it had something to do with when they had done their service. He was a soldier when superheroes were still confined to the old comic books. She had been an eighteen-year-old Army grunt in Bosnia in '93, when capes had sided with their respective ethnic groups and turned what would have been a brutal civil war even without superpowers into an absolute bloodbath. He lost comrades to traps and fellow soldiers; she had watched half her squad be literally torn apart by one man.
A high-pitched whine from a short distance away pulled her thoughts out of that dark spiral, and she shoved the memories of those months deep down where they belonged. They still had a job to do. She looked down at the hole in the garage that was to be her entry point and ignored the little boy her magic had made from a dog. «
We are in position as well. This mission is a go. Proceed on my mark. Three. Two. One.
«
Mark.»
The three men ran into the building, and in just a couple of seconds she heard the odd bangs that were not quite gunshots but still faintly reminiscent of them. They were drawing the attention of Vulture and his men to them, and that would leave the backs of the villain exposed.
She dropped through the hole, coming to a stop a foot off the ground. Vulture had no way to know things were about to go from bad to worse. Leveling her staff at the villain's winged jetpack, she called out, "Force Blast!"
A cone of blue energy flew from her Device like a science fiction shotgun, hitting the jetpack and crumpling it as it threw Vulture forwards. She wished him luck using that thing again now that she had turned into little more than scrap. Reaching out with mental hands, she picked up a number of tools on the ground with magical telekinesis and flung them at a decent speed at a pair of henchmen who were turning around in shock at the voice coming from behind them. A pair of bullets from Delta hit them in the head immediately afterwards.
On their other side, Tanya could see Echo using his sword to knock a woman's gun away and then slicing her across the belly, leaving the blade coated with red. It was a good thing Delta's Guardian Beast could use healing magic, otherwise that could turn out badly.
One of the remaining henchmen finished turning towards her with an assault rifle in his hands, but without warning he dropped the gun and collapsed. A knife formed from purple magic poked out of his back.
"Nice throw," she said as the air wavered and revealed Charlie standing fifteen or twenty feet away.
"Eh," the admittedly irritating field agent said, shrugging one shoulder and looking away from her. She felt a thoughtful frown form on her face at that reaction. Hunter tended to respond to everything she said with some degree of sarcasm and insubordination, but she had never seen him act like this before. Then again, she had never given him a genuine compliment before, either.
She filed that tidbit away to think about later. Anything to make him less of a pain in the ass would be worth its weight in gold.
"Is this everyone?" she asked, looking around at the unconscious bodies on the ground. Everything about this fight felt wrong. She was used to having to find cover and fight for every inch of ground when fighting a villain and his entourage, not dropping in from the sky and casually crushing them.
If this was how cape fights felt on the other side, it was no wonder some of them were so full of themselves.
"Vulture. Three, five, six henchmen, plus the two Mask and I took out," Charlie counted up. "Yeah, this is everybody. His whole damn team."
Vulture groaned, and a moment later a golf ball–sized 'bullet' hit him. She looked back to find her own Guardian Beast standing with one hand outstretched and his tail whipping back and forth at a mile a minute.
"Then it sounds like this mission is done. Get Tome in here to heal that woman, and let's call in a prison transport. I want these people in cells within the hour."
Operation Pentagram's character sheets added.
Yes, this supervillain is heavily influenced by the villain of the same name from Spider-Man. No, I don't particularly care. I needed a throwaway baddie.
The normal Device experience thing is going into effect this arc, by the way. Any non-template mage starts this week with 0 XP in the bank. Writing this chapter reminded me I might want to announce that.
