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Chapter 248: Big P Energy
🕑 Added 2024-02-05 19:11:34 +0000 UTC“Okay, that didn’t go quite as planned.” Tom admitted.
“You THINK!?” Felix demanded as they ran down the venue’s built-in secret tunnel, aiming to get as far away from…whatever the hell that was, as they could.
“But the P-energy…”
“Apparently that’s not all there is to it,” Felix said, grunting as he crouched down to exit the tiny one-man tunnel that exited out into Chicago proper. “Who knew?”
They’d gotten a lot of info about Paradox over the years by scrapping anything he left on the battlefield, and that mummy had been the feather in their cap that had given them the information – and confidence – they’d needed to try and pull off the biggest heist ever: Holding the wedding cake hostage in exchange for Phat Loot.
Holding the cake hostage had been carefully selected to give them the best chance at pulling off the heist without bringing the wrath of the assembled supers down on them but still having a shot at that sweet, sweet ransom money.
The perfect plan really. They had all the counters for Paradox’s security system lifted off that mummy, allowing them to make tech and bio-parts that confused it enough for them to slip in through the building’s secret tunnel.
“You know, after Avery and Maria, I’m kind of wondering if maybe our plans…aren’t that good?” Tom posited.
“What’s the problem, man? We realized we were being unethical, apologized for bringing them into existence, and gave them a golden parachute.” Felix said, stepping out into the street and taking a grateful breath of fresh air as pedestrians cruised by at high speeds on the Tinkered sidewalks.
“Yeah, but it was still a bad plan.” Tom said. “Aren’t we getting…too old for this? We’re twenty four.”
“Well…maybe. But are you still having fun?”
“…Yeah.” Tom admitted, catching his breath against the wall.
“There ya go. I’ll stop running around in power armor when it stops being fun.”
“Hey, there’s Easy Access.” Tom said, waving at the super parked across the street.
“God, I wish we didn’t have to work with him.” Felix muttered.
Easy Access was a Wildcard type super who could reveal secret passages into buildings that had ‘always been there’, retroactively creating them. He charged obscene amounts of money for each job, and mainly specialized in heists…but that wasn’t what bothered Felix.
It was the name, and the suit with the cartoonish tunnel entrance with a big question mark over his crotch.
It had hinges and everything.
Felix shuddered.
Suddenly, Easy Access stopped waving back, and paled for an instant before their getaway car sped away, flickering through disguises as the super fumbled the knob.
“Huh. Wonder what spooked him.” Felix asked.
“I think I might have an idea,” Tom said.
Felix glanced over and spotted a black suit of armor standing between the two of them, arms over their shoulders.
“Ack!” Felix lashed out with a reflexive punch and landed it…on Tom’s blue painted helmet.
Tom lashed out at the armor between them with a jet-assisted kick, and his toe caught Felix in the kidney, the dead-gel inside barely absorbing the shockwave before it reached Felix’s organs.
An instant later, the suit of armor grabbed their heads and spun them around. Felix could hear the crick crack of stressed ceramics inches away from his squishy human skull as his whole body began to spin at outlandish speeds, turning the scenery of Chicago into a hellish tilt-a-whirl.
Felix broke away and staggered to a halt long enough to shoot a micromissile at the black armor, which flickered out of the way, revealing his brother.
“Oh-“
Tom got hit with the micromissile, which sent him tumbling backwards into the nearby Chicago wall.
That’s less than ideal.
“We give up!” Felix said, raising his hands.
“You sure?” Paradox asked from behind him. “Cuz I could keep this up for a while.”
“Pretty sure, yeah,” Felix said, hands still raised.
“Did we surrender?” Tom’s voice came out of the hole in the wall.
“Yep.”
“Cool.”
“I saw Easy Access speeding away from here, so that explains how you got in, what I’d like to know now is how you got the security system to ignore you.”
“Welll…” Felix didn’t want to give away their work of the last several years.
“Or you will officially become my nemeses, and I’ll try to kill you every so often, just like you wanted. Although I think it’ll only happen once. Believe me, you don’t want me to remember who you two are.”
“I knew it was nemeses!” Tom’s voice came from the hole.
“When you put it like that…” Felix said.
***Paradox***
“This is ridiculous,” Perry said, staring at the blown up picture of himself with devil horns and a goatee, along with the dart board with another picture of his armor taped to the front, several darts nestled in uncomfortable places.
“Actuallyridiculous.”
“Well, you know, we haven’t had a nemesis at our lair before...” Tom said with a nervous shrug. The two of them had filled out since the last time Perry had seen them on the beach…roughly five years ago.
They were threatening to go to fat, but not quite there yet. They were at that finite moment where a youthful body could still counteract a poor lifestyle.
“This looks more like a college dorm than a lair.”
“You’re one to talk, you put a foosball table and a pool in yours.” Felix said.
“In the entertainment area!” Perry said, plucking a banana peel off a laser cutter’s power supply. “And I kept it clean!”
“It would be clean if we had a maid.” Tom said, glancing at Felix.
“Hey, you felt it the same as me, it was just as bad-“
“Shhhhhhh…ut up,” Perry said, hushing the two of them before they began bickering again. “I don’t have time for whatever bullshit backstory you guys have going on. Show me what you used to get through security.”
“Um, okay,” Tom said, hobbling over to the side of the lab, his manacles keeping his arms together and steps short. He motioned to a little black box on the counter. “So this box here produces P-energy to-“
“The hell is P-Energy?” Perry asked, already 99% of the way there. He hoped he was wrong.
“Well, it’s the signature that your superpower gives off.” Felix said. “Everything you make has it.”
Perry nodded, already putting together how they pulled it off. They’d momentarily convinced his Lair Control Center that they were him. By scraping together thousands of tiny examples of his work, they were able to spoof it well enough that a dumb machine couldn’t tell the difference.
Definitely getting the AI Tinker perks at level 20…Assuming reality survives level 20.
“By scraping together thousands of samples, we were able to spoof the-“
“Yeah, I got it,” Perry said, waving them off. “From what I see here, you could’ve made the spoof years ago. Why now?”
“Years ago? But-“ Tom elbowed Felix
Perry raised a brow. “You couldn’t have done it years ago? What changed between now and then?”
Tom and Felix avoided eye contact.
Perry rolled his eyes and scanned the room, spotting a secret door invisible to human eyes. In fact, Perry couldn’t see the door so much as he could see the difference in dimensional wavelengths around the wall, forming a door-shape.
He cleverly bypassed the security system by ripping it out of the wall.
It might be a shitty lab, but it was still a lab, and the three of them had an armistice, so Perry set the door down gently where it wouldn’t do any unnecessary damage.
When Perry glanced past the ruined wall, he spotted a table with a partially dissected mummy on it. It was clear that the outside rooms covered in Cup Noodles and various discarded trash were decoy labs, and this was where the braindead duo did their serious work.
“What is that?” Perry demanded, pointing at the pale emaciated figure under a glass box, seemingly preserved for further study.
“Not…entirely sure, to be honest,” Felix said, scratching his head.
“Lots of P-energy though.” Tom said.
“And it’s organs match yours” Felix added.
“Lots of parts do, actually.” Tom nodded. “No lungs though.”
“I wonder why it didn’t have any lungs?” Felix asked.
“Error in the code?” Tom posited.
“Insufficient data?” Felix countered.
“Replica’s machines wanted it to die,” Perry said, stepping closer and peering at the hauntingly familiar corpse. Nothing Replica had ever made was stupid enough to make mistakes that simple. “Raise the glass.”
Tom nodded and flipped a switch to pump the preserving gas out of the tank before raising the glass.
Perry walked around his doppleganger and peered at the Comp-gel brain. Definitely one of Replica’s androids. And the age of the corpse matched that of a mummy drying out in a completely dry, germ-free environment for a good five years.
The people grinder five years ago. When he’d first visited Chicago.
Perry lifted the corpse, flipping it over to reveal the gaping hole in its chest cavity.
“You didn’t do this?” Perry asked, glancing over the organs. The lungs were indeed missing. They hadn’t been ripped or cut, simply not existing in the first place.
“No, that main hole was there when we found it.” Tom said.
There were other surgical cuts made, obviously to take samples and use them to design things that could fool Perry’s security system, both the bio-print and his dimensional signature.
Perry returned to the comp-gel brain.
It was in fairly good condition. He could probably fix it up and get it working again, get that smart AI assistant that totally got him that he’d always wanted.
Sliding Stats
Body 135 -> 120
Attunement 135 -> 150
For a brief moment, Perry’s Attunement became one thousand, five hundred and eight times stronger than his starting amount.
He tapped a finger to the brain and modified its chemical properties with his Spendthrift perk. The brain interacted with the oxygen and ambient temperature, and self-ignited, turning into a puddle of white-hot slag that melted through the table, scorching the floor.
“WHAT WAS THAT FOR?” Felix demanded, taking a step back from the heat.
“The last thing I wanna do is wake up as a digital slave of myself.” Perry murmured, watching the fire spread through the entire corpse, rendering it to primarily carbon and a bit of rare metals.
“Forget what that was for, how the heck did you do it!?” Tom asked, peering down at the ruined table, still bubbling as gas escaped the slurry of molten metals.
Perry reeled his Attunement back in and looked up at the two.
“I’ve got a pretty good idea what you two found, and I don’t like it. Tell me everything you saw at the site. Everything you know about it.”
Perry started rummaging around the lab, making himself at home.
Multi-Tool
A sampler drill appeared in Perry’s hand as he grabbed alcohol and cotton swabs and a nearby gurney, switching on the vent to make sure the gasses from the bubbling hole in the middle of the floor didn’t hurt his test subjects.
“…What are you doing?” Felix asked.
“Less asky, more talky,” Perry said, humming to himself as he grabbed one of their computers and hacked into it in seconds, hauling it across the room to sit next to the table.
Next he went and grabbed a bunch of the testing hardware the brothers had used to study his android’s flesh.
“There’s no…corpse left…what are you…” Felix paled.
“Why don’t you take a seat while you tell me about when you found the mummy?” Perry asked, patting the gurney.
WHIIIIR.
The bone-marrow sampler in Perry’s hand whirred with what felt like a particularly eager drilling sound.
“Look, I need bone marrow samples from both of you. We can do this the easy way, or I can lock you down again. And let me tell you. It will hurt less if you’re not freaking out.”
“Why do you need bone marrow samples!?” The brothers demanded at the same time.
“To make sure you’re you.” Perry said with a shrug.
“What?”
“Up on the gourney.” Paradox said, pointing with the massive drill. “Hop to it.”
***Two excruciating bone marrow samples later***
“Good news!” Perry said after he’d tested the samples. Both brothers were clutching their left arm. It would probably be bruised for weeks.
“You guys are still human…for better or worse. Now, show me on the map where you found the mummy, and don’t leave each other’s sight for the next…eh…six months should do it.”
“Tell me what’s going on!” Felix demanded
Paradox fixed the two of them with a stare, causing the two recreational supers to lean away from him.
“Why? Do you want to be the ones to deal with the problem?” Perry asked.
“Umm…no?” Tom said.
“Then show me where the replicator hideout where you found the mummy is. Afterwards you can go back to your day job as birthday clowns.”
Comments
Hayden Leech
I was more wondering if the bone marrow sample was an Android test or an Abun’Zaul test. I hope Abun’Zaul can make perfectly believable bone marrow.
closeded
That's what I'm saying though, if it is him, not just a clone, same mind, two brains, a common sci fi trope, then it wouldn't want to murder him, and high stability or not, that seems like a risk high attunement Perry would take.
Josiah Elliott
His stability is high enough to not want to make himself an android slave, and besides he still has the logic to realize that doing so would almost immediately lead to a Perry Android trying to escape/rebel/murder him.
Apotheosis
It'd be funny if all this was red herrings and the thing that actually ends the world is a *different* asteroid and the series just ends like that
Apotheosis
Oh 100% but when there's world ending threats around every corner you've got to prioritize what you can deal with
John Brady Anderson
Yeah, they even were decent enough to not keep cyborg girlfriends as "theirs" and smart enough to target the cake instead of a kid or person or anything like that. Stupid, but smart enough to actually make themselves harmless, rather than needing oversight to make them harmless.
Daemion
Fixing Solaris doesn't seem to be in the cards. The guy is an omega level threat, he can end the entire world if gets going. Killing an enemy is easier than capturing them alive... and against Solaris merely surviving is a real challenge already. Using force is the only option on the table right now because the guy is too paranoid to willingly submit to treatment... if such treatment even existed. There was also always the hint that killing Solaris would give Perry massive XP, something he'll need to level up. After all, solving the Tide is probably the most important thing left to do.
closeded
“The last thing I wanna do is wake up as a digital slave of myself.” Perry murmured, watching the fire spread through the entire corpse, rendering it to primarily carbon and a bit of rare metals With 150 attunement, i don't think he'd care about that, he also wouldn't need to enslave it, he could extend his polyamory to polybodied, and make the android actually him, instead of a slave. Especially since it technically has the same soul.
Apoca
That's true. But it doesn't really matter if an asteroid hits the planet or the sun goes supernova. He cannot afford to focus only on one problem when both are catastrophic
Ryan Naquin
The idiots have all the pieces to the puzzle they just need to put them together to see the picture of a monster that can almost perfectly imitate people. Then again i dont think they are in the habit of critical thinking or problem solving. The cake hiest is probably the only original thought they have had in years.
Nathan Quitugua
Considering this is a legendary mimic that successfully ate an entire civilization and only gets more powerful the more it has time to grow...then yes...he should probably take care of that before doing hardlight brain surgery on Solaris
Nathan Quitugua
as the super birthday clown for thier kids?
Gavriel
Pretty sure Perry will soon be powerful enough to fix Solaris, if he's not already.
Apoca
I feel like Perry got distracted from the Solaris problem.
mhaj58
What’s the point of having superpowers if you don’t have fun with them every now and then. Although I’d never make being a super birthday clown my career. Probably be an independent contractor for Perry, Marigold and Solaris.
Phsteven
And have them panic and spread rumors that will eventually get to a paranoid Solaris? Nah fam miss me with that shit.
Dominic Harney
Interesting fact about bone marrow is that it’s inside the bone so that the least amount of environmental factors, such as radiation can effect it, meaning that with a sample of could tell you how old a person is on a biological level. Less than 20 years old and you have a Beavis and Butt-Head clone.
Apotheosis
As much as I hate to admit it, they've got a point. If I had power armor and resources like theirs I'd totally run around doing stupid shit far past when it was age appropriate
Hayden Leech
Huh. Bone marrow? Is that the test? I kinda thought it would be harder than that.
BlackFire13th
If he wants them to ask less questions and be more cooperative, maybe he ought to give a ten second explanation of what was wrong to the idiots.
Andrew
Thank you!
