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100YoP Chapter Twenty-Eight "I turned up the music and looked away."
🕑 Added 2024-01-31 22:21:15 +0000 UTC“AAAAAAALL BYYYYY MYYYY-SEEEEEELF!” I sang, as loudly and as off-tune as possible, along with the radio which I’d just turned to max volume.
Farah, who’d been sleeping on the seat next to me, startled awake with a snort. She looked around, spotted the empty food wrapper on her lap, then saw me singing my heart out like I was trying to win a contest.
She glared at me for a while as I crooned, then she suddenly reached over and made for the handbrake. Only my Spidey Sense let me catch her wrist before she could crash the car into the one behind us just out of morning crankiness.
“None of that,” I said.
“I hate you forever,” she replied.
“The cup of coffee on the cupholder is for you.”
“I love you forever.”
I snorted and turned a corner, looking around as if I didn’t know that we were two blocks from STAR Labs.
I had a balaclava on my lap, since I wouldn’t be doing this as Spider. Once the car was parked in front of the labs, I left it idling and put the mask on, feeling my hot coffee-smelling breath hit the back of it and leave it slightly moist.
I turned to Farah, who chugged her lukewarm latte and put her own balaclava on.
“Ready,” she said before I could ask.
I got out and didn’t lock the car behind me, as every second mattered.
When performing a heist, it’s important to factor in as many details as possible. I’m not talking about obvious stuff like guard shift scheduling, police response times, or other amateur details like that. I mean stuff like how the sun hits at every hour of the day, what businesses are nearby and what type of clientele they attract, the personalities of those working at the target.
It’s similarly important to obscure identifying details in yourself. I was wearing gloves to hide my knuckle tattoos, and both Farah and I had turtlenecks and long jeans that hid every inch of skin.
People’s minds held on to details in the oddest circumstances, so it was important to obscure those. Having a fairly normal eye color, I could get away with leaving that exposed, and I couldn’t do anything about my height, but it still wouldn’t be enough for some overworked schmuck detective to track me down.
Especially not since I knew that in Central City there was a redball case going on right now.
Someone that mattered had been killed recently; a taxpaying, church-going mother of three and the sister of a local pastor got gunned down by someone, and the media bit down on the death like a dog on a bone.
It was an election year for CC, after all.
Every moron with a microphone and dreams of occupying the mayor’s office had an opinion on the case, then an opinion on the opinions of the other morons, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum.
The detective on the case was working extra hours with the entire chain of command spiting down at him, tossing opinions and demanding answers. Why didn’t you pressure that suspect more? Why didn’t you pursue this lead? Why this? Why that? Do this. Do that.
This spread to the rest of the cops, who were starting to feel pressure to make the candidates and the current mayor look better by solving this or that, or make the other guy look bad by exposing something or another, which altogether made response times in certain areas drop to outright hoursas the right and left hands started trying to sabotage each other.
Obviously, low income neighborhoods felt it the most, but as it happened, no one really had time for a bunch of egg-heads that were seen as a Mad Scientist factory by the public at large.
If Farah and I’s math held up, it should be anywhere from thirty to forty minutes for the cops to get here.
But, just to cover my bases, I called in a bomb threat on the other side of the city.
And I had a bomb planted by the Flash museum, just to increase tension. Nowhere near the people, in the sewers, but a few people should be without water or sewage for a while. Or, way too much water and sewage, for the people with flooded apartments.
As we got out of the car, which was running and had the radio on, Farah and I took out our respective pistols and marched right in, opening fire on the two rent-a-cops standing on each side of the entrance.
Nothing lethal, but they did get a bullet to the gut and the leg each.
The doors automatically locked, but they weren’t made to account for someone with the proportional strength of a spider. A single kick right to where the lock met the wall tore it straight through the concrete and smashed it open, shaking the hinges and several screws loose.
I gestured for Farah to pass first with a chivalrous bow, and she mimed picking up her skirts in a curtsy as she passed.
The fact is, STAR Labs doesn’t have great security, that’s why they’re constantly getting robbed by dumbass thug villains that want to get their hands on a super weapon to build a gimmick around. Weather Wizard, Mr. Freeze, those types of guys.
So, how come all this crazy tech was left unsecured?
Because STAR was staffed exclusively by mad scientists.
You think I’m joking? Exaggerating?
As soon as we were through the doors, there was a dude holding an ion cannon that was already warmed up, aimed straight at us in the hands of a balding, pudgy scientist that looked like someone’s favorite math teacher. He was laughing madly.
Farah threw herself to the floor. I rushed forward.
A small step to the side at the last second took me out of the way of the shot, but I still felt the heat of the blast. Pressurized hyper-hot plasma flew through the air by me, consuming everything in its path, even the air.
The small vacuum trail by me popped as it filled out, probably reducing the total amount of oxygen on the planet, and the ion cannon started warming up for the next shot.
The mad scientist didn’t get to pull the trigger again before I pistol-whipped him across the face, knocking him out and cracking his jaw instantly.
I sighed, and looked over to find Farah standing up.
I tilted my head. She gave a thumbs-up back, then blinked and pointed behind me.
Turning around, I found a dozen robotic monkeys crawling on the walls, headed towards me.
“Tsk.”
This was going to be a long job.
{[X]}
Billy took a drag of his cigarette, then let out the smoke through his nose.
He was laying on his stomach, spread out on a rooftop with Yua laid out next to him. He handed her the cigarette and she took her own puff. Neither were in their work uniforms, as they were officiallyjust backup for the morons down below them.
Said morons, a crew of Sionis’ men, were firing automatic rifles into the mold-eaten walls and boarded-up windows of a vacant building scheduled for demolition.
The wooden fence erected around the building got torn up early on in the conflict, though it was kind of funny to call it a “conflict” when it was mostly Black Mask’s men getting their shit kicked in by someone that never left the building. Every so often, someone would get shot from a window. The attacker was constantly unseen, but people were dropping dead left and right.
Some had run away, only to be shot in the back by their own side. It was kind of hilarious, really.
“You think he spotted us?” Yua asked, handing back the cigarette.
“Probably,” Billy muttered, letting the cig hang from his lips as he focused. “Former bat brat, so should have the whole area littered with cameras. Let’s just hope Spider’s intel is good.”
Yua hummed, not contradicting the cover in case of hidden microphones, then clicked her tongue and tilted her chin up slightly. A bullet flew out of the window she indicated a second later, hitting a mook in the head.
“Damn,” said Billy. “That guy owed me a tenner.”
“My condolences,” said Yua, who was well aware that he was paid in hundreds of thousands every month. “Will you be needing a place to stay after your landlord kicks you out?”
That was one of the things Billy had come to like about her. Yua didn’t start jokes, but she’d gotten pretty good at ‘yes, and’-ing when someone else did.
“Are you offering?”
“I could give the warm shelter of my arms,” Yua deadpanned. “I’ll cuddle you good, baby. One window to the left in three seconds.”
Hearing her, Billy put up the cover on his rifle’s scope and aimed as fast as possible, taking a shot.
“Miss,” Yua reported. “But it almost marked his leg.”
“Almost hitting is the same as not hitting at all,” Billy grumbled, covering the scope again and pulling back the slide. “He definitely knows we’re here now.”
The same couldn’t be said for Sionis’ men, who probably all had tinnitus from firing guns in a group.
They hadn’t even noticed the shot or that it’d gotten near Hood. But then again, Billy had been spending all his free time hanging out with the Bat-family and the Stringers. Sam had the theory that spending time around metahumans, aliens and wizards made even regular humans more extraordinary somehow.
He figured it was probably because there was some kind of garbage in Gotham’s water, which was pretty reasonable. With all the terrorist attacks on water plants and reservoirs, it would we weirder for the water to not be contaminated.
… wait. Speaking of contamination.
“Do you smell that?”
“If this is a prelude to you farting again—”
“No, shut up,” Billy looked up, then hissed a curse. “Sleep gas!”
He jumped to his feet, rifle in hand. His body was already slower, sensations dulled, and he turned around just in time to get kicked in the face.
His last thought before he fell over the edge of the roof was that it was a surprisingly small foot that kicked him.
{[X]}
“Ugh,” I groaned, slamming another robot spider into the wall, shattering it and then tossing the chunks still in my hand at the face of the guy controlling them.
Farah shushed me, but she seemed tired too.
It was a fairly straight shot from the front door to the labs of Mr. and Mrs. Kane. Two hallways and three rooms, not to mention the entrance.
In the entrance, we’d fought the guy with the ion cannon and a bunch of robot monkeys. We moved into a hallway, where flying drones armed with small acid missiles shot at us. Then a break room, where the vending machines pulled out turrets, which connected to the cafeteria where big lizard-like monsters with faces that peeled back to reveal obsidian skulls attacked us, and then one more hallway where gravity was reversed and robot spiders assaulted us. Which doesn’t mention all the stuff Farah disabled before we went in.
Altogether, it took us fifteen minutes to get to the lab. By then I was bruised but not yet bleeding, and very much done with the whole day.
I grumbled and snapped my fingers at Farah, who immediately got to work, plugging a flash drive into the biggest computer in the room and starting to type at the keyboard. While she worked, I stood guard outside the door.
Every so often I had to shoot near but not at the scientists that poked their heads out, eyes glimmering with hope that they’d have a chance to have human trials for all their hilariously unethical inventions.
I saw a guy aim a ray gun labelled as a “cancer-inator” at me before I shot it out of his hand, for Christ’s sake.
Now, you might be wondering how it was possible for two Gotham thugs like Farah and I to pull this off while in Central City, home to the fastest family in this universe.
The answer was simply, it wasn’t just two Gotham thugs. In preparation for this heist, I’d reached through my Goonion contacts (Billy) and got in touch with a few of Flash’s Rogues Gallery. Or, well, actually I got in touch with everyone except Captain Boomerang.
(Last time I was in Central — I was casing the joint for this heist and covering it up with a different job that I took as a solid for Riddler — we met and actually hit it off for a bit. Then, when we had a couple beers at his favorite sports bar while waiting for the job to start, the news showed a clip of the Wayne family at a gala and Boomerang made a comment about Cass being ‘pretty hot for a retard’.
Coincidentally, a remote-controlled explosive found its way to his getaway car and went off just as he was going for it, forcing him to stay back and distract Flash while the rest of us got away.
Whoops.)
I gave the Rogues a simple offer: I needed them, all of them, to make as big of a ruckus as they could on a specific date. In exchange, I would sponsor whatever plan they had so long as it was appropriately distracting.
Since the guys down in Central City are more the “villainy for fun and profit” than the genuine psychopaths and dangerous unhinged lunatics we had in my city, they reacted like a child would upon being told they would get any toy they asked for: with frenzied joy and a desperation to stretch their imagination to its limits.
Now, personally, I had no idea what the Music Meister wanted with three snow leopards, two tigers and one pumpkin. I didn’t exactly get Mirror Master’s plan and how a team of freelance adult male cheerleaders fit into it, and I certainly did not want to know why Reverse Flash wanted five thousand nude photos of every single porn model that vaguely resembled the photo he gave me of a random civilian woman who was murdered years ago.
My only hope was that Captain Cold had really asked for that solid gold flower for his sister, Golden Glider. Otherwise, Cass was definitely going to put me in the doghouse again.
The simultaneous plans were slotted to begin exactly one and a half minutes before we began the heist, and even now I could hear the sounds of fireworks, gunshots, explosions, random African and Eurasian fauna trampling cars, and at least twelve tornados which were somehow playing a rendition of Stand By Your Man by Tammy Wynette.
Looking over the window, I saw a cow be tossed a thousand miles per hours by one of those tornados, only to turn into a talking potted plant on the way to the floor which only had time to scream “OH GOD, NOT AGAIN” before it crashed into the floor.
I quickly resolved to never set foot in Central City again. That place is fucking weird.
Farah snapped her fingers twice. I turned to look at her and saw she was still focused on the computer in front of her, but she was pointing towards a spot on the floor without looking.
As I approached, she tapped a few keys and caused a hidden trap door to suddenly open, its edges disguised as the corners of a large floor tile, which slid away and revealed two black adults wearing lab coats, both of whom resembled my friend quite a bit.
I grinned behind my mask, then reached down and pulled them out as they began to scream.
To ensure they didn’t escape while Farah worked, I quickly reached down and applied pressure to one kneecap each until they popped, then I went back to standing guard while they screamed, quickly taking a few shots to spook the braver scientists.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Where had he gotten another cancer-inator?!
{[X]}
Yua began to shine, and time slowed to a crawl as her heartbeat sped up.
She saw, in an instant, how the small cloaked figure wrapped a rope around Billy’s airborne ankle and shot some kind of nail into the ceiling, ensuring that he wouldn’t fall all the way after being kicked off the roof.
That single act of mercy bought the cloaked figure’s life, and so Yua stopped going for a knife and instead dashed forward, lashing out with her fist and striking the enemy square in the chest.
It wasn’t totally effective. With an extremely precise movement for someone with no power that she could sense, the cloaked figure caught her fist in two bandage-wrapped hands. With their feet off the ground after landing a flying kick on Billy’s face, they were free to push off of her high-speed blow, sending their body flying off in the air.
The cloaked enemy spun in the air and landed on the edge of the rooftop access in a crouch, moving like an assassin, moving like a member of the League.
They — he, Yua could see it was a male figure, young enough to be called a boy — scowled at her from under his hood, speaking up in a prepubescent voice.
“Grandfather warned me that your clan was hardy, but I thought five weeks of poisoning hitting all at once would be enough to slow you down. I’ll need to refine my approach going forward.”
What?
“Then again,” the boy continued, producing a remote from inside his dark green cloak, “That’s what backups are for.”
He held his breath as he pressed the button and Yua rushed forward, but she wasn’t faster than light and she was just barely slower than the mechanism that suddenly came on. Hidden tubes surrounding the rooftop went off, releasing a thick cloud of purple mist.
Much more obvious than the subtle sleeping gas that had been flooding the air around them, this one was heavy enough that it pooled down after release. Its effects on her body were instant.
The sleeping gas had already been mixing with impurities, ones she hadn’t noticed due to their subtle-build up. With the addition of the new gas that she arrogantly breathed in, they combined into a poison so foul her power immediately rushed to keep her alive, something that took most of her focus.
Most of it. With just enough left over for her to throw a knife, which the enemy dodged with contemptuous ease. The boy produced a gas mask from inside his cloak and affixed it to his face before jumping down.
“Tt.”
That was the last sound Yua heard before everything went black, the boy’s foot lashing out against her chin.
No matter. She’d gotten the word out.
Sam and Farah would find her knife — the expensive and fancy one they’d gifted her last Christmas — and then figure out enough to avenge them.
That was all a walking corpse could ask for.
{[X]}
When my friend was done, another hidden compartment opened. I had to wonder if STAR Labs just gave their employees those or if Farah’s parents had installed those. Both seemed equally likely.
From inside, Farah produced… a red cube. With a couple ports on the side.
I raised an eyebrow at it, but Farah gave me a very serious look and nodded.
I shrugged, then tilted my head at the computers, to which she replied with another nod.
With no further ado, we pulled our guns and started shooting at every computer, wrecking them as her parents started screaming again, more desperately this time.
Mrs. Kane tried to stand up on her one working leg to tackle us, but Farah just pistol-whipped her across the temple. She stared at her mother as she crumpled to the floor, then she straddled her body and started hitting her over and over again with the pistol.
Mr. Kane tried to intervene, but pressing my foot down on his broken knee was enough to stop him while Farah worked.
I watched dispassionately as my friend beat her own mother half to death, then she stood up and looked over to her father.
I stepped off his knee. He tried to run.
He didn’t get far.
The exit from the labs were easier, since this time I decided to just throw desks through walls until we were outside, and Weather Wizard was making it rain frogs and scorpions so no one wanted to chase after us.
We got in the car (which had all its windows covered in frog and scorpion gore) and I started driving as fast as I could.
We didn’t unwind until we were on a different state, at which point I finally allowed myself to take off my mask and Farah turned her phone back on. Most of her focus had been and continued to be on the mysterious cube, though.
The radio started playing a new songjust before it started to rain. The falling drops let the gore slide off my windows, and I watched as I tapped the tune into the driving wheel, my thoughts elsewhere while my eyes focused on the door.
Then, after a few minutes, I just had to ask, “What the hell did he need two cancer-inators for?”
A snort escaped Farah. She looked away.
“Hell, what the fuck did he need one for?”
She snorted again, then giggled.
“I think your parents worked with assholes.”
Farah threw her head back and she started full on laughing. Hard enough that tears started coming out, she clutched her sides and bent over, the cube falling between her legs and into the footwell as she shook with belly laughter. She was having a hard time breathing, air coming in only through gasps.
Then the gasps turned into sobs, the tears fell harder, and she remained curled up in her seat, sobbing as her hands wrapped over her mouth as if the grief would be too much for her body, too much that it’d climb out her throat and escape. In a way, it did, and she howled with pain.
Farah did not like being seen as weak. She did not like being pitied.
I turned up the music and looked away.
And then I offered her my hand. Because she was my friend.
She took it. Because I was hers.
Someone commissioned for the series to revive for two more arcs, at least. I'll make shorter chapters to avoid burning out again, but I'll try to update regularly.
Also, next chapter has Sam/Cass lewds.
Comments
Cameron Burchett
I’m worried about Billy and Yua, but I’m also dying of laughter cause the Reverse Flash has photoshopped nudes of Barry’s mom, and I can’t stop thinking about what he’s gonna do with em. “IT WAS ME BARRY, IT WAS ME!”
