Thrusts of Justice (Chooseomatic Books), page 20
Magnifica stands in front of you, arms crossed. “Those people aren’t heroes. I swear to you, they’re as bad as the villains these days.”
“But Maggie,” Octavia says. “Magnifico and the rest of the Squadron…”
“That little pissant is not affiliated with me. I’m telling you, you can’t trust any of them.”
“We can’t do this alone.”
“We’re not alone,” she says, pulling something from a chain around her neck. You look closely and see that it’s her old Liberty Patrol communicator ring. “We’re getting the team back together.”
Magnifica might be on top of her game, but you don’t imagine Octavia would be much use in a non-psychic fight. Then you glance at Mr. Patel, still waiting patiently for a diagnosis. What are the chances that the rest of Maggie’s contemporaries will be in any shape to stop an alien invasion? The fate of the planet is literally at stake, and there’s no time to let hard feelings get in the way.
Then again, the Nightwatchman’s notes said Magnifica was the only person in the world you could trust. Should you trust her judgment now?
▶ If you send out a distress call to every superhero on the planet about the alien invasion, click here for page 113.
▶ If you decide to rely on the former members of the Liberty Patrol alone, click here for page 193.
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Lightning Queen is notoriously unstable and needs to be returned to the slammer pronto, or innocent people are going to get hurt. With your enhanced strength and agility — and the fact that you can make any part of your body as adhesive as you want it to be — scurrying up three stories to the rooftop is a snap. You start forming a ball of goo in your left hand, ready to hurl it at Lightning Queen—
And immediately get tackled by one of the Cosmic Guardians.
“Wait! I’m on your side!” You realize this can’t be the same Guardian that you witnessed in Cleveland this morning (for starters, it has twelve arms). Despite your continued protests, it pins you down with two of its massive limbs and starts pummeling you with the other ten. Your coating absorbs most of the force from the blows, but soon a blast of energy hits you from behind. The other Guardian is firing on you!
“Dude, I’m trying to friggin’ help you guys!” Purely as a defense mechanism, you start pumping slime onto your attacker, and apparently the goo functions as an extension of your senses, because you can feel it seeping into the cracks in the Guardian’s armor. Something flashes, and suddenly you see yourself through your attacker’s eyes. Whoa. Are you psychic now, too? That’s kind of awesome.
You’re shocked, though, by the state of the Guardian’s mind. It’s a terrifying glimpse into what seems like two distinct entities: a malevolent, calculating intellect barely in control of a separate psyche, utterly consumed with madness and rage. You’re certain that they both intend to kill you. And afterwards, possibly tear the limbs off of your dead corpse and suck the marrow out of your bones.
Before they get the chance, a white-hot bolt of lightning comes out of nowhere, breaking your psionic connection and blasting you halfway across the rooftop. That’s one more item to add to your list of supergoo properties: it’s an excellent electrical insulator, which is the only reason you’re alive right now. You see Lightning Queen standing over the hollowed-out, smoking remains of the twelve-armed Guardian’s armor. Its partner takes one look at the carcass and flees, quickly disappearing into the night sky.
“Thanks for distracting them,” Lightning Queen says. “Jesus, what are you supposed to be? The Purple People Eater?”
“No, I, uh…” Should you even be talking to this woman? The truth is, after the beating you’ve taken, you’re in no condition to fight. And she may be crazy, but there’s no way she could be half as insane as that thing that just tried to kill you. Still, Lightning Queen is famous for her volatile temper and sudden violent outbursts, so you’d better play this carefully. “I don’t really have a name yet,” you say. “I’m new.”
“Are you, now?” She takes a few steps toward you, one eye twitching just a little. “Tell me everything you know about our attackers. Do they have anything to do with that stupid space dog?”
Space dog? That’s new. “There’s a space dog?”
“Yeah, I paid a visit to Übermind a while back, in some horrid little apartment in Queens. You know Übermind, right? Little guy, super egomaniacal? Anyway, he’s retired now, and completely obsessed with caring for some vile animal.” She kicks the dead Guardian’s helmet, and you see that it still contains a chunk of charred meat. “The pooch was covered in alien circuitry that looked just like this junk.”
The Cosmic Guardian did have a canine sidekick back in the ’90s, but you’re not sure what the dog could possibly have to do with this. He was also rumored to be a member of a larger interstellar police force. “I think this was the Cosmic Guard,” you say. “I saw one of them stop a meteorite in Cleveland this morning.”
The same meteor, in fact, that gave you your superpowers. Now you’re intrigued. What was it the Ox had said about meteors and superpowers? “Hey, do you know a villain who calls himself Verminator?”
“Sure, he’s been rotting in a Mexican jail for years. Why? You think he has something to do with this?” Lightning Queen grits her teeth. “Well, perhaps it’s time to check in on our incarcerated friend.” She lifts one arm above her head, and her entire body crackles with electricity. “Feel free to join me if you’d like.”
Hmm. If Verminator received his powers the same way you did, he might be able to shed some light on whatever’s going on. You’re not sure traveling with Lightning Queen is a good idea, but — other than the dog thing, anyway — this is really your only lead.
▶ If you travel to Mexico with the notorious, clearly bloodthirsty supervillain, click here for page 222. What could go wrong?
▶ If trying to track down Cosmo the Space Dog sounds like a better plan, click here for page 116.
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You’ll never make much of a supervillain if you run at the first sign of trouble. Besides, from what you’ve heard, the Ox breaks out of jail all the time. It’s something you can do together. A villain bonding experience.
Magnifico charges the Ox, and you leap onto the hero’s back like a crazed lemur. “Seriously?” he says with a note of surprise in his voice. “You guys have sidekicks now?”
He throws you across the room and you hit the far wall hard. In fact, the impact is enough to completely shatter your right arm — much to your surprise, it explodes with pain and then dissolves into purple goop. Something’s definitely wrong here, and not just with your biology. Magnifico is supposed to be one of the good guys, but he just tossed you aside with enough force to kill a normal human being.
As the glop spreads across your body, though, forming a protective coating and quickly reconstituting your damaged arm, you realize that you’re not a normal human being. You clearly have some kind of disgusting gunk powers.
And now you’re pissed. You leap back into battle, but this time when your opponent punches you, his fist smacks against the gelatinous coating on your chest and sticks like glue. Trapped, he delivers a blow with his other hand to your face, hard enough to cleave your skull in two. Your head, though, just melts into purple goo and reforms on the spot. Magnifico’s eyes widen. “What are you?” he says.
“I’m your doom.” You shove one hand into his face and force a river of goo out of the pores of your palm, directly into his mouth and nostrils. You can feel it filling up his respiratory system, and instinctively know that you have complete control over this substance — you can make it flow into every crevice of his body and harden into steel with a mere thought. Your opponent collapses to the floor, choking.
“Jesus,” the Ox says from somewhere behind you. “You’re gonna kill him.”
And why not? He definitely tried to kill you, and probably will again if you let him walk away. Besides, this is what being a villain is truly about, isn’t it? Or is it going too far? You’ve committed to the life of a miscreant. This is your chance to kick that up a few notches, all the way to STONE COLD KILLER.
▶ If you straight-up murder the world’s mightiest hero, click here for page 291.
▶ If you back off and let him live, click here for page 54.
238
Dale’s plan actually works shockingly well. You fire energy bolts from your gauntlets to keep the Cockroaches away, and soon there are stretchy, purple tentacles shooting out from your back, smacking individual clones upside the head to knock them unconscious. More importantly, Dale is able to interpret instructions from your battlesuit and shout them back to you. Fighting the Cockroach is a matter of knocking out (or just plain squishing — you remind yourself that only one of the copies actually needs to survive) each unit before it has a chance to replicate into more. At first it seems like an impossible task, but you and Dale work as a single, well-lubricated machine, and before long your foes are utterly vanquished. It looks as though several of them were trying to haul a confusing-looking super weapon from the ship’s cabin, but you take them out long before they can activate it.
The commotion has attracted attention from local law enforcement, so you figure they can call in their supervillain clean-up crew and perform the (potentially actually legal) search for any contraband that might be stowed away. Besides, you’d still like to keep as far under the radar as possible, so you take to the sky as the sirens approach.
“That was friggin’ AWESOME,” Dale says. And it honestly was. “Time for drinks, now?”
“Time for drinks,” you agree. You head back to Cleveland, and the next several hours are an increasingly blurry vortex of celebration and alcoholism. You can’t remember how you got there, but sometime late the next morning you wake up face-down on Dale’s couch with one arm wrapped around an insanely heavy blue suitcase that you slowly recall is a camouflaged alien battlesuit. Dale is sprawled out on the floor across the room, covered in purple gunk.
As you roll over, for the second time in 24 hours, you see the glowing yellow eyes and unmistakable black cowl of the Nightwatchman.
This time he’s just a few feet away, and creeping you the hell out with his stare. After you recover from the initial shock, you realize that up close he looks considerably smaller than you expected. Also, he kind of has an amazing rack. He removes his mask, revealing a face that’s surprisingly feminine and extremely familiar.
“Melah? What the… what?”
“I followed him yesterday after the bank robbery, and found his secret equipment stash,” she says. “After that, we sort of teamed up.”
“That’s amazing!” you say. “I ran into—”
She cuts you off. “I know. We’ve been monitoring both of you. You’re the new Cosmic Guardian and Dale’s… whatever he is. There’s no time to go over it all now,” she says. “The world’s about to end, and I need you to help us save it.” She explains that she and the original Nightwatchman have unearthed a vast conspiracy involving most of the Earth’s superhumans — villains and heroes both — as well as an entire army of Cosmic Guardians. The Guardians, though, aren’t the galactic peacekeeping force you’ve always thought they were. They’re the frontline of an alien invasion.
“They’ve set up some kind of giant atmospheric conversion tower at the South Pole,” Melah says. “Nightwatchman and Magnifica have gone to take it down. The thing is, they may already be too late. You’ve got one of their battlesuits, though. They’re getting ready to deploy a second tower, and we need to you to get to the mothership and find a way to destroy it before that happens.”
“I’ll go with you,” Dale says. He looks like hell, but has a determined look in his eyes.
“Can you breathe in outer space?” Melah asks.
“I could get a NASA space suit, and…”
“There’s no time. It’s all happening right now.” She puts a hand on your shoulder. “Go,” she says. “You might be humanity’s only hope.”
Dale sighs. “If our fate rests on your shoulders, then I can’t think of a better pair.”
The thing is, you can. You feel as if your entire life has been leading up to this moment, and can’t believe you’re even considering the idea. But the truth is that you can barely understand what your space armor is even saying to you, while it seems to somehow share a special telepathic bond with Dale. If you’ve got only one chance, wouldn’t it make more sense to give the suit to your friend?
Then again, it’s Dale. His heart is definitely in the right place, but his judgment can be a little suspect. Regardless of how well he understands the suit, can you trust him not to screw up saving the world?
▶ If you take on the alien invasion yourself, click here for page 249.
▶ If you lend the suit to Dale and send him on his way, click here for page 196.
241
You decide to file away the blowing-yourself-up idea as a potential plan B. Fortunately, you’re already on course for the hangar, and in moments you’re nearly there. The terraforming structures appear truly massive up close, but what startles you more is that hundreds of Guardians witness your approach and immediately stop what they’re doing.
Uh-oh. Your commandeered suit may have the same basic propulsion system as theirs, but the burned-out, half-dead husk doesn’t offer much in the way of handling. They quickly surround you, and although their blue energy beams don’t damage your new body at all, the force of their blasts does manage to push you off course. That won’t do. You coil yourself up and spring from your busted-up shell toward one of the attacking Guardians, intent on upgrading your ride.
It dodges. These things are fast! Now you’re hurtling alone in the emptiness of space with no means of propulsion whatsoever. Yeah, you didn’t think that through. You try reconfiguring into different forms to slow yourself down, but it’s space. There’s no atmosphere to create drag. Satisfied, the Guardians leave you to your fate and get back to preparing for the invasion of your planet. And although you don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe in this form, you still have consciousness, and after what might be hours or might be days of drifting, you eventually fall asleep.
That’s when your body instinctively reverts to flesh and bone.
THE END
242
“Even if what this guy says is true,” you say, “he’s only telling us because he has something to gain by it. You can stay and listen to his blathering all you like. I want nothing to do with it.”
You leave, and soon Nancy rushes to join you. “You’re right,” she says. “I let my obsession with Crexidyne color my judgment back there, and I just want to say thanks for calling me on it.”
“Uh, sure,” you say. “So what do we do now?”
“I tied him up — we’ll leave him to stew while we verify a few details of his story.” She pulls a cell phone out of her bag. “Meanwhile, I think it’s time for me to call in a favor or two.”
Before she can dial, some kind of gray, misty portal opens up in mid-air behind her and two figures emerge from of it. You immediately recognize them as Jekyll and Hyde, a pair of low-rent supervillain thugs — wild, feral-looking twins with jutting fangs and big, nasty claws. You’re not sure how they settled on Robert Louis Stevenson’s literary classic as a theme, but one of them wears a lab coat, while the other dresses in rags and plays up his animal attributes. They’re both dumb as rocks.
Jekyll grabs Nancy by the throat. You’ve got to save her! But if you turn on your superhero gear, you might draw the attention of the Cosmic Guard. You can’t possibly fight these two with your bare hands, though. Can you?
▶ If you risk switching on your gear to deliver a Nightwatchman-style beating, click here for page 122.
▶ If you try to save Nancy without it, click here for page 200.
243
Your decision might have panned out a little better if the Cosmic Guard had any concept of mercy. Or courts. The truth is, the idea that they’re any kind of galactic police squad at all is based on a lot of vague assumptions made about your predecessor. And if nothing you’ve read so far has led you to assume otherwise, well, sorry. Honestly, this book is kind of a bastard that way.
As the biological creatures inside the suits scream out silently in the throes of madness and agony, the synthetic alien minds that slowly drove them to that state follow their primary orders, which amount to something along the lines of “Kill all humans.”
They start with you.
THE END
244
Fortunately, Tinker has been accumulating secret files throughout his sporadic jobs for Crexidyne, and one of the bits of information he’s obtained is the address of Reginald Thorpe’s personal residence. That, and a little time spent on Google Earth, is all Suong needs to open up a misty portal from Tinker’s workshop right into Thorpe’s living room.
You hop through it and immediately find yourself surrounded by gold-plated security robots. The Ox is carrying Tinker’s anti-Cosmic Guardian weapon over one shoulder and grabs the paddle in his oversized hand. “Okay, let’s see what this baby can do.”
“Wait!” Tinker yells. It’s too late — Ox presses his paddle against one of the approaching droids, but it results in electrical sparks and thick, black smoke coming from the box on his shoulder rather than his intended victim. Tinker is horrified. “It transmits a specific pulse that causes Guardian armor to short-circuit itself. It doesn’t work on any old robot that wanders by!”
“I guess we’re gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way, then,” Ox says, throwing the box hard enough to flatten his attacker against the room’s back wall. Cockroch starts splitting into multiple clones, and between the two of them — and Suong dropping robots into portals that open up to god knows where — the room is soon empty save for your crew and various piles of gold-plated scrap iron.
