Thrusts of Justice (Chooseomatic Books), page 12
In your excitement, you spill the beans about the Cosmic Guardian armor as well. “You know what we have to do now, don’t you?” Dale asks through an ear-to-ear grin.
“Heck yeah, I do.”
“CELEBRATE!” he howls. “Bartender! Two bourbons, two scotches, and four beers!”
Actually, you were thinking of something more along the lines of teaming up to fight injustice. But you have to admit that Dale’s idea holds a certain appeal as well.
▶ If you double Dale’s order and get this party started, click here for page 106.
▶ If you’d rather find some crime to fight and save the binge drinking for later, click here for page 179.
136
You start by digging around in the dead man’s tablet. His files are password-protected, but you flip the thing over and discover the words “If found, return to Crexidyne Megacorp” stamped on the back with an address. It’s in Manhattan — looks like you have a destination.
The Ox calms down slightly as you make the trip, and you spend some time experimenting with your supersludge, willing the sticky coating into a hard shell (which should provide better protection and has the added benefit of not ruining the van’s upholstery). This whole purple goo situation is actually becoming sort of cool. Ox is busy coming up with new potential code names for you, the worst of which include Commander Goo and his personal favorite, Globulon. Hmm. Less cool.
Crexidyne is housed in a Manhattan skyscraper, and although it’s well after midnight when you finally arrive, the front entrance opens with a beep from the tablet. If the guy manning the security desk is surprised to see a walking tank and his lumpy, purple-shelled companion stroll by, he shows no sign of it. Not knowing what else to do, you head for the elevator. A button labeled “restricted access” gives you a pretty good clue here, and once again it accepts the tablet as I.D. Ox starts psyching himself up as the elevator zooms upward. “You ready for vengeance?” he asks. “Whatever we find up there, I’m gonna punch it.” The elevator slows, and the door opens with a ding.
What you find is the building’s roof, with several hundred battlesuited Guardians of all different descriptions and a handful of human beings barking orders at them. The elevator closes behind you. Then, as one, every armored alien on the rooftop stops what it’s doing and looks your way. Ox makes a little noise with his throat. “I don’t think we can take ’em,” he whispers.
Grasping at straws, you spot a group of big, silver pods on what looks like a landing pad. Are those what you think they are? “This way!” you yell, breaking into a run.
You throw yourself into the open hatch in one of the pods and find yourself in a strange chamber that might well be an alien cockpit. A Crexidyne memo has been scotch-taped to he control panel — it seems to outline launch procedures. “They’re right behind us!” Ox howls as he lumbers in behind you. He shows very little interest in the memo, instead jamming his thumb into a big red button on the console.
You’re swept off your feet as the hatch slams shut and the pod launches into the sky. Acceleration pushes you against the rear wall, and paper tears in your hands as you scan the memo, trying to figure out a way to steer this thing. “It’s a shuttle!” you yell through clenched teeth, your cheeks all wobbly from the G forces. “We’re on an automatic course for the mothership!”
“Good,” Ox replies. He’s pressed against the wall too, but you can tell that he’s already starting to psych himself up. “Whatever we find up there, I’m gonna punch it.”
▶ Maybe Ox is right. If there are answers to be found, surely they’re aboard that ship. If you leave the shuttle on its set course, click here for page 267.
▶ The memo does include a procedure for manual override, though. If you attempt to turn the thing around, click here for page 94.
138
You make a flying leap for Gravity Bomb since you’ve pegged her as the biggest threat (although, honestly, how she can do anything in an outfit that skimpy is a wonder — gravity manipulation must play a significant role in just keeping the thing on). She’s ready for you, though, and with a flick of a wrist slams you back into the pavement the instant your feet leave the ground.
The Ox just shakes his head and sighs as the force of gravity squishes you into goo and spreads you all over the intersection. That alone might not be particularly fatal with your newfound superpowers, but Coldfront whips up a sub-zero arctic blast that freezes you on the spot. And the freaky alien Cosmic Guardian thing rains down bolts of blue energy that shatter your frozen, flattened body into hundreds of shards. Skyhawk then hits some of those shards with a mace. While the Squadron casually takes the Ox into custody, volunteers from the local P.D. gather fragments of you into individual containers for later incineration.
When a seasoned supervillain immediately throws in the towel, next time go ahead and take the hint.
THE END
139
You find the building in question and use your energy beams to carve a little peephole in the back wall. Sure enough, it’s chock-full of evil. You recognize four of the five costumed criminals huddled around a dimly lit table inside.
Jekyll and Hyde are twins who try to pull off a mad scientist/monster theme, but actually don’t amount to much more than thugs with badger claws and delusions of grandeur. Supercomputer is capable of calculating variables and probabilities with phenomenal speed, but that won’t help her much while you’re punching her in the face. Lightning Queen is the heavy hitter — she’s a raving lunatic with electrical powers and she’s gone toe-to-toe with the best. And then the fifth is some big guy decked out all in black, looking every bit the burglar on a cereal box and trying way too hard to appear incognito.
You and Dale formulate a complex plan to take them out — it might have worked, too, but you failed to account for Burglar Guy, and that was your rookie mistake. You burst right through the wall with space weapons blazing, but before you get the chance to put your cunning plot into action, the mysterious stranger turns to face you, and you recognize him instantly.
It’s Magnifico, world’s most powerful hero and leader of the Justice Squadron. Your first thought is that he could be on some sort of undercover mission, but it only lasts until his fist smashes through your visor (and, in turn, your face).
If he’s only pretending to be evil, he’s extremely committed to the role.
THE END
140
“Bring ’em on,” Ox says, almost in a whisper. “I can take ’em.” Then he passes out.
With the big guy out of the picture, the Cosmic Guardians pounce. You start to build another goo barrier, but aliens quickly grab hold of your limbs and pull. This can’t be good. You focus on increasing the thickness of your armor, spreading it to cover your head and face as well. You feel stronger, but more unidentified appendages grab you. They’re pulling you apart! More goo! More goo!
You feel something snap. Suddenly, the goo isn’t just coating your body. It’s inside your body. It is your body.
You are the goo.
You dissolve into a puddle, slipping out of the aliens’ miscellaneous grasps, and then quickly form a series of spikes, jutting into your attackers’ soft underbellies right through their body armor. These are the battlesuits Megawatt was so impressed with? You’re ripping through them like soft-shell crabs. You send out tendrils for each of the Guardians hovering throughout the hangar, and it’s as if you’re everywhere at once, hyper-aware, with your brain and senses spread throughout every iota of your new form. You quickly seep though the cracks in their armor and resolidify inside. The aliens drop to the floor.
You’re Globulon, bitches.
You shoot a line into the ship’s console as you scoop Ox up and stuff him into the rocket pod. Is anything else still alive?
NEGATIVE. SKELETON CREW EXTERMINATED. PASSENGERS SAFELY IN HIBERNATION AWAITING TERRAFORMING AT TARGET IN 65,000—
Good enough. Another tendril goes into the pod’s controls and you command it to launch. With a direct link to the escape pod’s flight systems, you have complete control. You don’t even need the Crexidyne memo.
Just moments out of the bay door, the mothership jumps to lightspeed, and the resulting shockwave rocks your tiny craft. As you hit the Earth’s atmosphere, the pod begins to shake furiously. She’s falling apart! You form yourself into a protective shell around Ox as the pod burns completely away, leaving the two of you hurtling toward the Earth like a meteor.
You hit the ground and completely lose structural integrity, splattering into a million tiny droplets scattered across the acre-wide crater created by your impact.
It takes you several hours, but you slowly manage to reassemble, pulling each speck of yourself together into a concentrated mass. You will yourself back into human form, feeling your insides morph back into bones, then organs, muscle, and skin. Finally, your gooey outer coating is sucked back into your pores and you’re none the worse for wear.
Ox is at the center of the crater, curled into a ball. You poke him. He moans. “Whatever just hit me, I’m gonna punch it.”
It turns out that while you were stopping the invasion, all hell has broken loose back home. An international coalition of military forces is waging war on the planet’s superpowered beings, and the bulk of the Cosmic Guard is still on hand, waiting for a colony ship that, thanks to you, will never come. However, the Earth clearly still needs a champion. You and the Ox may have started out as partners in crime, but you’ve already rescued all of humanity once today. And this looks like a job for a superhero.
It’s your call.
THE END
142
You may be new to the hero game, but you know one thing for sure: you didn’t spend your formative years dreaming about avoiding criminals. You switch on your computer’s audio during the trip for some hands-free research, and study up on the Nightwatchman suit’s capabilities while you drive. It has cloaking technology that will render you invisible if you keep to the shadows. Your gloves have a built-in electric shock to augment hand-to-hand combat, and your cloak can double as a glider, just in case you decide to leap from any tall buildings. It’s well after dark by the time you make it to the city, but you’re ready.
And your quarry is on the move.
You track Rockjockey to an industrial neighborhood known as Hunts Point and position yourself in an alleyway near the railroad tracks, directly in his path. You switch on the cloaking device, but as you position yourself next to a dilapidated brick wall, you bump up against a garbage can, loudly toppling it over just as your target rounds the corner in front of you.
“Who’s there?” he says, skidding to a halt. “I’ll kill you all, goddammit!” Suddenly the brickwork behind you shakes violently, and it’s all you can do to leap out of the way as chunks of masonry tear free and hurl themselves at the villain, engulfing him. There must be a human being inside it somewhere, but the ten-foot-tall golem that now stands before you is more crumbled architecture than it is man.
Here goes nothing. You drop the invisibility and flicker into view, a stark shadow against the night sky, the yellow lenses of your goggles glowing fiercely in the darkness. “Rockjockey,” you say with all the steel your voice can muster. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“You!” His shocked expression is exaggerated by the bits of rubble fused to his face. He stumbles backward. “I didn’t do nothin’, I swear!”
You take a single step toward him, and he flinches. “Oh, no? Then who are you running from?”
“It’s that Cosmic Guardian guy from like 15 years ago! He’s back, and him and his buddies are hunting villains — just grabbin’ ’em off the streets!”
“Sounds like they’re performing a public service.”
“It ain’t like that! They busted into a freakin’ AA meeting and hauled off a dozen guys in burlap sacks. This ain’t justice, it’s a witch hunt! Cockroach says they’re working for Crexidyne, but that don’t make sense — I just did a job for them. I’m square with those guys.”
If anything, in the ’90s the Cosmic Guardian was famous for playing by the book, and he certainly wouldn’t be allied with Crexidyne. Still, the look of abject terror on Rockjockey’s face makes you think he’s telling the truth. Or the truth as he understands it, at least. Before you can tighten the screws, however, something flashes across the screen on the back of your gauntlet.
SHUT DOWN YOUR SYSTEMS.
Is somebody texting you? Could the real Nightwatchman have discovered that you swiped his stuff? You’re sort of in the middle of something, but the warning seems fairly ominous. Should you heed it?
▶ If you quickly wrap this up and shut your Nightwatchman gear down, click here for page 226.
▶ Are you kidding? You don’t take orders from random text messages. If you ignore it and continue the interrogation, click here for page 178.
144
You throw yourself at one of your attackers, flinging a wad of goo that completely envelops its head. Or head analog, anyway — many of these things aren’t even vaguely human-shaped. You manage to create a mental link with the creature almost immediately, but melding with its mind is not a pleasant experience. The armor’s intellect is cold and calculating, but the host is barely even self-aware. It’s a mass of chaos and confusion, lashing out in anger and pain.
Wow. That’s not cool. You try to exert a calming influence, but the thing doesn’t even acknowledge your presence. So you focus on the machine mind. Before you get the chance to seek out its innermost hopes and dreams, though, a second Guardian grabs you. You cover its face-thing with goo as well, but now you’re connected to two mechanical intellects, and they gang up on you. This isn’t working out as planned.
While you try to master the finer points of psychic combat, several more Guardians utilize tried and true methods of regular combat to tear your limbs off and pull out your internal organs through the bloody stumps before your distracted subconscious can even defend itself with goo.
THE END
145
With a little coaxing, the Ox agrees to work for Moretti. He climbs into the helicopter and you start to follow, but Moretti stops you. “You’ll receive your orders in the morning,” he says.
Okay. It’s been a pretty full slate already, and you still have a bag full of cash from your bank heist, so you go buy a Playstation 3 and a case of good liquor and call it a day. Sometime around eleven o’clock the next morning, your employers send a 14-year-old Vietnamese girl through a dimensional portal to collect you. So that’s pretty cool. The portal opens up to Washington, D.C., where a bunch of other villains have already begun trashing the place. You’re told to go crazy and cause as much destruction as possible, which is fun at first, but after an hour or two starts to wear thin. You’re thinking about sneaking off to grab some lunch when you see several members of the Justice Squadron approaching. Finally, some real action!
To your surprise, the Squadron just joins you in the effort to reduce the nation’s capital to rubble. Soon the army shows up, but destroying tanks isn’t your idea of a good time — those are regular people in there, with wives and husbands and stuff at home. You’re starting to wonder if taking this gig was the right move after all. Still, lots of people work crappy jobs to collect a paycheck, right?
Then the toxic gas rolls in. Thick, brown smoke fills the air, and the slightest whiff of it makes you gag. You try to escape, but it’s as if the entire city is filling up with the stuff — you breathe it, and it immediately burns through your lungs and starts eating away at your internal organs.
The Crexidyne retirement plan: not what it’s cracked up to be.
THE END
146
The truth is, your molecular structure is still in the process of being transformed by your contact with the alien biochemical agent. But whatever it is you’re turning into, one thing’s for sure: it isn’t any species of bird.
You hit the pavement like a sack of meat, and a portion of your anatomy melts into purple goo, ready to spring back into its natural form none the worse for wear. The bulk of you, though, just gets kind of broken and bloody the way a regular person would after leaping from a five-story building.
The overall effect is extra gross for the guy whose job it is to hose your remains off the sidewalk.
THE END
147
“I’ll take it,” you say. “There’s not much else I can do without my equipment, anyway.” Your hands and feet are already completely numb. You may in fact be freezing to death. None of you are dressed for this weather.
Tina pushes a lever on her upgraded wheelchair and rockets into the air. “Tank hold off bad guys!” she yells from above.
“There,” Octavia says. “Done.” The pulsating alien technology clings to your back, clamping a metallic tendril to the back of your head. The terrifying dog is finally out of the picture, at least — Cosmo’s ancient form turns to dust and blows away the instant Conrad and Octavia remove it from its alien life support.
You can feel the thing resisting the genetic graft with you, attempting to pollute you with its essence instead of the other way around. So you clench your eyes shut and concentrate on being your human-iest. When you reopen them, everything is tinted a dark, murky orange. Gah. That can’t be great.
A figure breaks away from the group dogfighting with Tina and heads your way. It’s in the armor of a Cosmic Guardian, but shaped like a giant eyeball with tentacles. Octavia stands in front of you, hands on her temples. She lets out a grunt, and the alien screeches and falls from the sky. Octavia’s knees buckle. “I don’t know how much more of that I have in me. Let’s get moving!”
