“You little turd!” Her metal walker shakes, then starts to crumple in her wrinkled fists. “Fine. Where’s Thorpe holed up? We’ll go beat his ass until he confesses to the psychic twerp’s murder or whatever.” You were actually thinking you’d visit the crime scene and look for clues or something along those lines, but her plan is good, too.

  ▶ If you decide to play to Magnifica’s strengths and go with immediate violence, click here for page 50.

  ▶ If you insist on digging up some more information first, click here for page 164.

  259

  Considering how your first attempt to battle the Ox turned out, backup does hold a certain appeal. The helicopter touches down on a giant elevator platform tucked away in a secluded mountain range, which descends to reveal an immense subterranean complex. It’s everything you’ve ever imagined a top-secret government installation to be. Moretti hops out as soon as the platform stops moving.

  “Guardian, meet Migraine, one of our most trusted agents.” The man in front of you is either well into his sixties or has lived a very hard life, and is wearing a uniform that looks more like something you’d see on a COBRA operative than a federal employee. It only serves to emphasize his spindly legs, bulging waistline, and crooked posture.

  “Another space freak?” he says, looking at your outstretched hand like it’s been soaking in smallpox. Nice manners on this guy. “Well, whatever. Just do like I tell you, and we should both get out of this mission alive.”

  Moretti waves him off. “Actually, I’m putting Guardian in charge.”

  “You’re what?” That was Migraine talking, but he echoes your thoughts precisely.

  Moretti gives you a reassuring look. “If you think you’re up to it, that is.” Meanwhile, your new partner looks like he’s trying to shoot tiny knives at you from his eyes.

  ▶ Screw that guy! If you accept command of the mission, click here for page 78.

  ▶ If you defer to your partner’s greater experience (considering your own resumé spans less than an hour and includes considerable time spent passed out and covered in dirt clods), click here for page 186.

  260

  “Actually, a supervillain meeting sounds super fun,” you say.

  “Then you’ve never been to one.”

  “No, seriously! It would be a really good opportunity for me to network. We can do the meeting, grab some beers, and then plan our attack. What do you say?”

  He shrugs, opening the sliding door on the side of the van. “Hop in,” he says. The meeting is in New York, still several hours away, so you spend the time getting to know your new partner in crime. Despite yourself, you actually kind of like him.

  “You know, if you’re going to be a bad guy, Cosmic Guardian won’t cut it,” he says. “You need something scarier. Like, how about Cosmic Tornado?’ Ooh, or Galactivator. Plus, you gotta do something about that armor, like put some spikes on it or something.”

  At the Ox’s urging, you experiment with your battlesuit. It’s shown the ability to shift and reconfigure on its own, and you discover that with focus you can will the exoskeleton into any number of different shapes like a Transformer. It’s actually pretty fun.

  The meeting is being held in the basement of a community center. You’re not sure what you were expecting — a lair? — but it’s fairly underwhelming. As you shuffle in, villains seem to be taking turns complaining about their particular nemeses. You wonder when the actual meeting will start, but after about 20 minutes it dawns on you that this is the meeting.

  Then all hell breaks loose.

  Agent Moretti bursts in the door, followed by at least a dozen armored figures. With a shock, you realize that they’re all in battlesuits similar to yours, but in various shapes and sizes (one even looks like a giant slug). Is this the Cosmic Guard? Nothing Moretti told you led you to believe that there were other Guardians currently on Earth.

  Something inside your head is telling you to run, and you realize that it’s the Guardian armor. Maybe all the time spent bonding over armor spikes is making a difference, but instead of the badly translated audio messages you heard earlier today, it’s as if the suit is trying to communicate via emotion. And with every fiber of its soul, it’s screaming at you to get the hell out of there.

  Moretti spots you. “There you are!” he says. “Quick, help us take these targets down!” You’re getting conflicting orders. So who do you trust? Your government employer, or your apparently self-aware alien battlesuit?

  ▶ If you trust Moretti and help round up the villains, click here for page 247.

  ▶ If you trust the suit and hightail it, click here for page 90.

  262

  Something tells you that the Ox is the key to whatever is going on here. Octavia says she once had a therapy session with him and thinks she can track his psychic signature by returning to the scene of yesterday’s bank robbery.

  “Jesus,” Magnifica says. “You’re taking villains for patients now, too?”

  “He was a mixed-up kid, Maggie. If they’d ever been treated with compassion, they might not have become villains.”

  “Oh yeah, and good job with all that. Pillar of the goddamn community that one turned out to be.”

  Magnifica grabs both of you for a gut-wrenching trip to Cleveland, where the Ox’s psychic scent leads you to a cheap motel and then into Pennsylvania down a stretch of I-80, where you find an empty, overturned van on the side of the highway. From here, the trail leads northeast toward the Catskills. “Wait,” Octavia says, her hands on her temples. “I think I’ve got him. So much anger and rage! Something else is controlling his mind, you guys. Something… cold.”

  She gasps. “Brace yourselves! He’s coming!”

  You dive out of the way just in time to avoid a dark shape that rockets to the ground, impacting with a boom and making a crater much like the one you witnessed yesterday, only smaller. As you stumble to your feet and dust yourself off, you’re treated to another familiar sight: something crawls out of the hole that looks like the Cosmic Guardian.

  Only bigger.

  You realize that this hulking, armored figure is the Ox. Has he somehow become Earth’s new Guardian? If so, the Earth is in trouble. Magnifica clenches her fists and takes a step toward him as he throws back his head in a furious wail. “Wait!” Octavia says. “His mind is a mess — he’s not himself. I think the battlesuit is controlling him. Don’t fight! We need to calm him down so I can get a better look inside there.”

  Magnifica scoffs. “Tell me you’re joking. Are you suggesting we hug this out?”

  ▶ If you follow Octavia’s path of nonviolence and try to subdue the Ox, click here for page 39.

  ▶ If you agree with Magnifica that violence is clearly the solution, click here for page 182.

  264

  You send one of your new lackeys (who has pterodactyl wings and apparently x-ray vision?) on a scouting mission to Crexidyne’s headquarters in Manhattan, and she quickly returns with a report: the action is on the skyscraper’s roof, where hundreds of Guardians are busy with some sort of massive construction project.

  Guardians? You know how to deal with those. Suong opens a portal to the rooftop and you send the Ox through it with the armor-busting box. The rest of your horde charges in behind him, and soon you’re witnessing a replay of the earlier altercation on a much larger scale: rampaging supervillains and helpless aliens of considerable variety being systematically eviscerated. It’s a good thing you’re a hardcore, badass criminal overlord now, because the level of blood and gore involved is straight-up nuts. What the aliens are building turns out to be a launch pad for big, silver capsules that look like spacecraft. Tinker inspects one, and reports that they have detailed memos taped to their consoles with piloting instructions.

  “Hey, boss!” Verminator yells from across the roof. It’s nice that they’re calling you boss already. “I think I can communicate with this one.”

  He’s found a Guardian shaped like a giant praying mantis, helpless and twitching but still in one piece. “I don’t know if it’s because it isn’t proper vermin and I’ve got a bad connection or what, but its brain is a big, crazy mess.” He pauses, squinting. “There’s something else there, too. Something mechanical. A separate intellect for the battlesuit, maybe?”

  His eyes widen. “I don’t think these guys are taking orders from Crexidyne, boss — the invasion plan is coming from the Cosmic Guard. And unless there’s some kind of quaint alien mistranslation for ‘Kill all humans,’ it’s already started.”

  The night sky is illuminated by a sudden flash of light, and you look up to see a stray Guardian hurtling from the clouds on a collision course with Tinker’s weapon. It crashes into the big metal box and explodes, sending fragments scattering in every direction. Tinker is mortified, and says it’ll take two days, at a bare minimum, to construct a replacement from scratch.

  “I think we’ve got bigger problems,” Verminator says, still mind-melding. “The mothership is on its way. Unless my alien bug-translating skills are way off, it’ll be here by morning.”

  “So we stomp ’em before they get here,” the Ox says, gesturing toward a space pod. “Tink says he can fly these things. What are we waitin’ for?”

  You’re supposed to be the villain here — is it really falling to you to save the world from an alien invasion? This sucks. You’re pretty sure you fall under the category of ‘all humans,’ though, and the so-called heroes — Magnifico, at the very least — seem to have sided with the invaders. But should you go charging off into deep space to battle these things on their turf? It might be better to make your stand on-planet, since considerations like oxygen and gravity seem like sound tactical advantages.

  ▶ If you commandeer a space capsule and take the fight to the alien invaders, click here for page 132.

  ▶ If you hold your ground and let them come to you, click here for page 93.

  266

  Reginald Thorpe isn’t even here, and you’re guessing you won’t get anything out of this Moretti guy. You tell Magnifica to back off. She sneers, drops him, and picks you up in his stead, leaping out the window and flying a few blocks down the street, where she deposits you on an empty rooftop.

  “What the hell?” she asks while you catch your breath. “I thought we were gonna go bust heads real quick and be back for bridge.”

  “It looked like a dead end to me,” you say, straightening your cloak. “And I figured there was no reason to fight the Justice Squadron if we didn’t have to.”

  “You don’t understand,” she says. “If he does have those little bastards on a leash, they’re coming for us right now, no matter what we do.”

  You scan the horizon and discover that she’s right: Megawatt, Gravity Bomb, and Skyhawk from the Squadron are flying toward you, fast. And they’re joined by a half-dozen other non-team-affiliated heroes as well. You recognize Luminati, as well as Doppelganger and Salamander (the latter pair quit the Phenomenal Five a few years back, ruining their alliteration).

  “Get the hell out of here,” Magnifica says. “Now.”

  “What? Surely this is a misunderstanding. We can just explain that—”

  “Do your little invisibile thing and run!” she says. “I’ll hold them off!”

  ▶ If you follow Magnifica’s command and split, click here for page 304.

  ▶ If you stay, hoping to defuse the situation or at least help her fight the heroes off, click here for page 190.

  267

  Your ship breaks atmosphere and the pressure eases up. Ox starts pacing back and forth in the cramped cabin. “You and me, dude. Ox and Globulon. Kickin’ ass!” See, that’s just how these things start. You’ve got to nip this in the bud before “Globulon” sticks.

  There’s no way of knowing how fast you’re traveling in the windowless ship. You putter around the craft and find a stash of space suits and what might be a set of weird alien tools. After less than half an hour, a clang of metal on metal rocks the cabin and machinery begins to whir. It sounds like you’ve arrived. The hatch, though, remains shut. You feel a rush of wind, and notice brown gas filtering through vents in the walls.

  They’re pumping the atmosphere out of the ship.

  There’s no time to get into a space suit, so you grab a helmet and oxygen tank and pop them on your head and back, sealing them to your body with supergoo. “I can hold my breath,” Ox insists as you prepare a helmet for him, but you graft it to him, anyway — who knows how long you’ll be up here? Once the chamber has been filled with sickly-looking smoke, the hatch jerks open and you can make out 20 or 30 bloated, splotchy figures in a hangar bay. They’re not in battle suits. Your friend tenses up, ready to charge.

  ▶ They haven’t attacked you yet. If you attempt to communicate with them before resorting to violence, click here for page 173.

  ▶ Um, they just tried to poison you with brown gas. Plus, the fate of the entire planet is probably at stake! If you utilize the element of surprise and strike, click here for page 29.

  268

  Magnifico charges, but Maggie holds up one hand, catching his fist and stopping the enormous man dead in his tracks. Wow. You had no idea she still had it in her. She launches into the air, slamming them both into the office’s vaulted ceiling.

  Has Magnifico gone mad? Your files include several complicated scenarios for dealing with a Magnifico-related catastrophe (one of which involves luring him to the Arizona-Nevada border so you can use the electricity generated by the Hoover Dam to knock him unconscious), but nothing about what might set him over the edge. He said he was taking orders. From whom?

  You notice Moretti’s tablet computer resting on the desk, lightly sprinkled with its owner’s remains. Magnifico seemed awfully eager to get the Crexidyne executive out of the picture. You pick up the tablet and wirelessly jack into it. Fortunately, your equipment includes some really phenomenal password-breaking software, and the screen crackles to life. Meanwhile, Maggie has her own investigative methods. She now has her much larger rival pinned to the floor and is straddling his chest, literally beating him senseless. Damn, girl.

  “So, you’re a murderer now?” She doesn’t pause to give him a chance to respond. “Who are you working for? Damn it, you wear that uniform, you use your goddamn powers to protect people, do you hear me?”

  She finally lets up, and Magnifico speaks, coughing up a little blood with the effort. “They gave me my powers. They gave all of us our powers, and they can take them away with the flick of a switch.”

  A cursory search through Moretti’s most heavily encrypted files seems to back him up. There are entries tracking literally hundreds of superhumans. Magnifico’s own file has years of what appears to be basic surveillance, followed by something called “full memory reestablishment” just a week ago.

  Before you can learn more, a blast of red heat knocks the tablet out of your hand. “I’d rather die than go back to that life!” Magnifico brings his wrist near his face, and you realize he’s speaking into a Justice Squadron communicator. “Send reinforcements! Dammit, send everyone!”

  Maggie pummels him a bit more until he falls silent. You check on the computer, but find that it’s been melted to slag. There goes your information gold mine. Glancing out the window, you see a swarm of flying figures approaching on the horizon. You’d just as soon be elsewhere when they arrive.

  However, you notice a tablet docking station on Moretti’s desk and realize that the melted files were surely backed up. Your first instinct is to grab the computer and run, but there is no computer. The dock is connected to a port on a desktop monitor, which is connected to some funky looking jacks underneath the desk. This terminal must be attached to the larger Crexidyne network.

  “Let ’em come,” Magnifica says.

  ▶ If you have Magnifica hold off the flying monkeys while you gather more intel, click here for page 65.

  ▶ If you’d rather get out while the getting’s good, click here for page 204.

  270

  You decide to ally yourself with the terrifying space creature. “Nightwatchman! Surrender to the combined might of the Cosmic Guard and…” well, you still have no idea what you’re going to call yourself, so you just sort of trail off. He ignores you and touches a panel on the back of his glove and his entire body flickers and disappears. Whoa — if this guy’s just some cosplayer, he’s put some serious money into his hobby. Nevertheless, it turns out the Cosmic Guardian doesn’t need much help from you to apprehend him. It bathes the alley in a blue light that neutralizes your quarry’s cloaking technology. You see his shimmering form hugging a brick wall across from you, trying to remain as silent as possible.

  Then the Guardian opens fire, incinerating him on the spot.

  Holy crapsicle. Wherever this thing is from, they administer a harsh brand of justice there. It immediately turns its attention to you. Seemingly perturbed that its original target didn’t put up much of a fight, it snatches you off the ground with its jellyfish tentacles and rips you into dozens of pieces, torching each one individually.

  You, my friend, clearly backed the wrong filly in this horse race.

  THE END

  271

  You make the connection. The first thing you sense is that the other Guardians are not like you. They’re cold, mechanical intellects, grafted to kernels of utter, raving madness. And as you start to make sense of the wave of consciousness that washes over you, you quickly learn that the supervillain attacks — and there are more on the way, all over the globe — are a decoy to occupy the Earth’s forces while the aliens put their real plan in motion. In order to inhabit Earth, they need to terraform it, a process that will kill everything currently alive on the planet within days.

 

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