“Can you believe they reelected that guy?” I mean, what the hell? No one put it together that the economy was headed for disaster if something didn’t change, if we didn’t get spending under control and balance the damn budget already? “I dunno, man. People like the guy,” pfft, as if. “No one I know likes the guy,” the conversation seemed to make Carl uneasy, but whatever. Being angry tends to make people not give two shits about making their coworkers unhappy. The door opened, closed, but Jimmy hardly noticed. His shift was nearly over, and there was one hell of a drunk brewing. Had the day off tomorrow, his buddies were meeting up at that new place in Lowtown with the mechanical bull and the already seedy reputation, even though it opened just a week earlier, and besides, everyone here was gonna lose their jobs soon, anyway. “Well, when the economy collapses I’m sure they aren’t gonna feel that way much longer,” f#$%ing Carl, he probably voted for the guy, too. Good luck paying the bills, putting food on the table and sending money to help Monica with tuition when Anne Scarborough lays half the staff off because those whiny liberals want the part time janitors to get free health care. No one really cared about the stupid social policy stuff, if the right could just lay off their gay bashing and casual racism and just focus on the fiscal economics end of things they’d win every election, but instead they insisted on appeasing the Southerners and those Midwestern rednecks with their bullshit, outdated, hateful weirdness, and now the economy was in peril because of it.

“Change the subject, man, --, you catch the game? We almost pulled it through, thirty one to thirty seven. Had five bucks on it,” yeah, that was a helluva game, at least Carl knew his football. “Yeah, did you see their line just fall apart in the second? What happ, --,” Err. He knew someone had come in, but it wasn’t really all that important to him. People came in through the door all day every day, and it was always the same old same old. In this building people almost never weren’t experienced enough to know not to leave change in their pockets or avoid taking off their belts or nothin’, they did this every f#$%in’ day, twice considering they had to go through the same shit to get back out, he was practically a paid chair-warmer. Supposedly research and development were designing robots to take over his job, and given the way the economy was going, Jimmy didn’t even doubt it. He looked up. She was young, pretty, blonde, taller than him in those boots by a good three inches, and he stood six feet tall. Everything about her was totally normal shit you’d see out on the street any given day of the week in downtown Halcyon City, she had one of those stupid haircuts with the bangs that cover one side of yer’ face kids these days like, probably cost her three hundred bucks too, nice clothes, really colorful clothes, like, strangely colorful, almost like they were backlit by LEDs or somethin’, odd digital blues and greens that didn’t seem like you could just dye clothes like that, technology these days.

Everything about her was perfectly within the realm of reason in this part of the city, --, except for the fact that this was a research and development building owned by Scarborough Enterprises, and the most attractive woman he’d ever seen walk through that door was twenty years older than this girl and dressed in a lab coat, just like every other person who had ever walked in through that door had been dressed. "Uhh..." He was speechless, if only for a moment. This was the most shocking thing that had ever happened in his twenty years as a paid chair warming security guard for Scarborough Enterprises, which come to think of it really hammered in just how depressing this job was, and frankly he couldn't for the life of him remember what it was he was supposed to do in this situation. "Miss, I'm sorry miss, but uh, I'm, uh... Gonna have to, uh, wand you, uh, okay?" Carl sputtered out after a few of the most awkward seconds in either of the two grown ass men's lives, he was obviously just as disturbed by this shit as Jimmy was. She smiled at Carl, pretty smile too, guess to live in a place like this, in a City like this, and wear the kind of fancy clothes she was wearing you either had to be pretty, or be smart enough to work at a place like this. “Of course, Mister Blake,” they both froze. How had she known that was Carl’s name? And, just as quickly, they both kicked themselves mentally for being f#$%ing assholes, he was wearing a damn nametag, they both were, f#$%.

This whole thing was really throwing Jimmy off kilter. “Oh, uh,” Jimmy chimed in as Carl took a hesitant half step toward the girl, acting like she was a crocodile that was gonna eat him or some shit, “and he’s gonna have to see your ID bad, --,” Err. She’d put a bag through the luggage thingy? No one ever put a bag through the luggage thingy, it was used so rarely he didn’t even remember what it was properly called. The lockers were before this station, no one even brought their keys with them this far. He looked to the moniter for a second to see what was inside of the bag, but before he could be certain that there were even things in the bag she spoke, and drew his attention back to her. “Well, Mr. Vasquez,” the girl replied as she casually withdrew a Scarborough Enterprises blaster from her very obvious belt clip holster, “you see,” pffhut, thud, and as Jimmy cast his gaze momentarily to his right he could see that Carl was lying on the ground, bleeding and leaking grey, stringy stuff onto the once squeaky clean tile floor from the hole through what used to be his right eye socket, “I don’t actually work in this department,” she shrugged, blowing at her bang to reveal that the eye covered by her hair was not only not an eye, but something that looked like a neon blue butterfly, one wing above her eye socket and the other below, the two coming to meet in the middle as she blinked in response to the errant breath, and trained the blaster on him.

“Oh, yeah! Suck it, dickbag!” this game was the shit. Vicky knew it was a bad idea to play on her hardcore characters at work, the internet was spotty and sometimes just cut out in the parking lot, and one death from interweb shittiness and it was all over for dragintrixhxc3 the Demon Huntress. It usually cut out in the morning, anyway, this time of day most people were just starting to go home, and besides, she hadn’t had any real problems since she insisted on changing shifts after dragintrixhxc2 had gone the way of the dodo thanks to day service assholery. Mouse and mouse indicator flying in perfectly synchronized unison, the kind that only comes from hundreds of hours spent in front of a monitor, more clicks per minute than there were seconds by double at least, a half full, she was an optimist, double gulp of Plateau Dew, which she didn’t care what you said was hands down the best standalone soda, booze mix, and caffeine booster ever devised, and to top it all off that weird guy who worked the day shift had bought doughnuts from that place in Midtown, the one with the sprinkles and bacon and fancy homemade syrups and stuff drizzled generously on top of the cake doughnuts, and had left her a few when they switched out for the day. They were still pretty fresh, and only a little iffy for having come from him, well within her stranger danger parameters, --, he seemed more dorky loser who went to prom with his cousin then mess with food and give it to girl he’s super lamely, obviously crushing on.

Plus, she had tickets to the Panic! show, with special guest Pete Wentz, tomorrow! She almost spilled her drink on her laptop after having a total loser mini spasm in excited remembrance of that particular fact. They were cheap, and she got those close seats on the sides of the stage beyond the barriers because of her leg. “Suckers, just ‘cause it’s metal and plastic doesn’t mean I couldn’t have seen from the chairs past the floor,” f#$%, she could have danced around in the pit with the rest of the asshole kids in grown up bodies who would still go see Panic! at the Disco and the bassist from Fall Out Boy these days. I mean, her doctor’s wouldn’t recommend doing that, but shit, she played basketball with the boys wearing this same thing, what’s a pit compared to those assholes shooting semi-fair, beat-em-up hoops? They didn’t give two shits that she was maimed or half their size, either. Plus she was in the Panic! fan club, so they would have a thing with Brendan backstage, get pics and autographs and shit, and you just know Pete’s gonna poke up and do some stupid shit to mess with Brendon. She was gonna wear one of those Wounded Vets baseball caps, and make sure they could all see her leg, so when Pete poked up he’d just have to take a pic with her when she asked, casually toss the hat, take a cute as shit pic, and be golden fer hella days. Maybe he’d even talk to her for a bit, out of whatever that shit civvies do around vets is, guilt or something she supposed.

Fuck that, dude, I just wanted free school, I’m no hero, but Vicky sure as shit would take advantage to get to Pete Wentz. There was static coming over the handheld, followed by someone yelling at someone about something, didn’t matter. They were all on the same frequency, the security people, including the ones like her who spent their days valiantly manning the f#$%ing parking lot ticket booth. The day shift kid always left the thing on, she always flicked it off, well, more accurately turned the volume down super low, which she did without a second thought. Yeah, she’d get in trouble if she got caught doing it, but seriously? They had never once called over to the parking lot booth person. She doubted any of the middle management security people even knew her name, probably just called her, “Wobbly,” or something to differentiate between her, the morning guy and the night guy, Drippy and Droopy. Assholes. I mean, there was a callsign they were supposed to respond to, ‘South Lot Booth Four,’ it was written in big ass bold letters right in front of their shared chair in case they forgot, but seriously she’d been here near on a year and the only contact she had with any supervisor was when she called to say she was starting her shift. Beep. Vicky hit the button, without looking up, like she always did. I mean, why she even needed to hit a button to put out a ticket she couldn’t say, what, was someone gonna roll up into the parking lot in a car that said, “Don’t let me in, I’mma cause trouble for y’all peeps?”

There was literally nothing that could pull in that would make her not hit the damn button. This particular vehicle, some rumbly motorcycle from the sound of it, pulled forward a few feet and stopped at her window. It stayed there a few seconds, too, someone she knew? She looked up. It was a big, badass custom thing, all midnight blue with LEDs, real pretty, and its driver was some woman, definitely a woman, in a full body getup that matched the bike, helmet included. The driver put down the kickstand, and took off her helmet, some Asian chick she didn’t recognize, cute pink haircut, real punky, really stood out against all that blue. She opened the window, “Yeah?” didn’t mean to sound as curt as she had, but I mean, she was in the middle of something and it wasn’t normal for someone to want to talk to her on this end of things. She must want to turn around or something. “Diablo?” the driver asked. “Uh, yeah,” wow, that chick must have hella good eyes. The driver pointed to the picture she left on the desk, make it seem more like home. “I was at Davison,” no shit? This chick games, and she served? “Add me, it’s victory belladonna zero, one word, no caps,” sure she’d add her, what a coinky dink, right? “Sure dude,” she turned back to the laptop and started typing. Just as she did she saw the light on her panel was blinking, the one that means you’re supposed to lockdown the site. Must be something going on, she turned back to victorybelladonna0 and saw a blaster barrel in her face.

“What’s that bitch thinking, putting us on the ex, oh, seven project? With the eight, oh, four deadline coming up? We’re getting buried in all this work, couldn’t do it with twice as many engineers on the team, let alone with what we’ve got. Not well, anyway,” she really was pissed, too. Yeah, they’d make the eight, oh, four deadline, but barely; there wasn’t a shot in hell of the twelve of them finishing the project, and getting ex, oh, seven to the point that Anne would be expecting it to be at the same time. They were already being run ragged; she hadn’t even gone home in three days. Just worked, eighteen or twenty hours in the lab, an hour in the mess hall split between four or five short breaks to shovel food down and clean up, and a few hours of sleep, usually in front of her computer though she had a fold out couch bed thing in her office, and do it all over again after waking up in a half terrified, half confused daze. The coffee ladies were giving them pills, some kind of stimulant, and you might stop and think, “oh, but isn’t it dangerous to take stimulants from random coffee ladies? Is it the same coffee lady at least?” well, kiddos, you shouldn’t take stimulants in the first place, if your work load is so heavy you actually need them you should look into an alternative form of employment, but if your referring to them being total strangers as the primary reason it might be dangerous? Those pills have a big ass, “S,” marked on the side of the capsule.

And yes, that, “S,” means that they’re coming out of one of our labs. Not any of the ones on this property, but Scarborough Enterprises labs none the less. Anne would, of course, deny that she was giving stimulants to the coffee ladies to distribute to her engineers, for legal reasons, but it didn’t change the fact that she was at the very least in the loop, and wanted her engineers and lab techs working around the clock bad enough that she was willing to accept the, what would no doubt become, invariable lawsuit filed by the collective lab employees against their employer. It was only so long at this point before someone took a handful of the things and just coded on the floor. I mean, she dolled them out at regular intervals, and no doubt her doctors and pharmacists had told her exactly how much to direct the coffee ladies to hand out to each individual scientist on the team, but it didn’t matter; how long can anyone take this kind of workload and use this amount of drugs before someone just has an aneurysm and drops dead? And, yet, no one walked away, and no one was going to. Not yet. This was incredible, unbelievable work; everyone here would be writing books about the things they had been party to in this building, in a handful of years this work would change the world. So they all knew that Anne was working them hard enough that she had to keep them stimmed up to keep up the pace, and that at this pace someone was going to die, but it would make their careers.

No, no one was going to walk away, not until someone dropped dead anyway, least of all Doctor Piper Hamlin. She was still young, thirty four, healthy, no family history of heart conditions. She wasn’t going to be the one who died, not a chance. Franco Rodriguez, Doctor Rodriguez, yeah, he was f#$%ing screwed. Everyone knew he had worked his family away, he didn’t even have an address anymore; his wife had left him and taken everything, he signed it all off without much of a fight. It wasn’t an uncommon thing in this line of work, no one had a happy marriage if they managed to be in something approaching a relationship in the first place, and besides, he was old and tired, had a pacemaker, yeah, these stims would put him in his grave. Hell, she couldn’t think of the last time anyone had touched her, let alone the last time she’d been on a proper date or, Science forbid, had a real boyfriend. Shit, she worked eighty hours a week in a normal setting, and on this project? It must’ve been about a hundred forty. When you can’t remember the last time you got more than a few hours of sleep at any given time, wanting sex, love, friendship with people who aren’t coworkers and don’t know a thing about advanced robotics, it all pretty much goes out the window and becomes one of those afterthoughts, best reserved for momentary contemplation in those darker moments between shoveling food down your throat when you ask yourself where things went wrong and why you didn’t just go to med school like your parents wanted you to.

The work they were doing, though. When she got a minute to just sit back and wonder at the possibilities this held for the world, the future, the things that accomplishing this might mean. There aren’t words to describe it. The closest Piper could venture to guess would be asserting that this is how Einstein must have felt when he had the first draft of the general theory of relativity finished and stopped to consider the implications it would have on the world, both within and outside of the scientific community. This is stuff that she should have been working on at the end of her career, twenty or thirty years, maybe even fifty down the line, not anything that seemed like it should be possible given the current technological state, but the, ‘asset,’ Anne brought them was proving that not everything could be easily tabulated and stored away within the neat little corners of Piper’s mind. “Oh, there’s the coffee lady, thank Science,” it was time for another dose, she’d have another nine hours or so before she could stop and get a few hours of sleep. After all, if they were gonna fail their deadline, she may as well take the luxury of planning a few hours of sleep on the fold out couch rather than convince herself yet again that she’d work through the night this time, same shit she always told herself nowadays. This particular coffee lady seemed younger than the usual, blacker too, most of them were Puerto Rican, but she seemed smiley enough and had the standard Starbucks cardboard cup holder. Wait, what the… Was that a scythe on her belt?

“On your left!” too late, he hadn’t fallen yet, but he was a dead man walking. Harris, the once college football quarter back, once marine, once husband, once father, was now meat, taking up space on her line. They’d toss him over the balcony, or push him back behind them, but either way he would be moved, and another would take his place, just like Jones and Wilder before him. She’d lost three of her best within as many seconds. There weren’t enough of them to deal with something like this, and Ashley knew it. She was a mom, a wife, a sister, an aunt, and right now, none of that mattered. Right now she was a blaster rifle, a commander of other blaster rifles, and she knew that her rifles weren’t enough to deal with the super bitch they were engaging. These weren’t your standard rent a guns, either, everyone on her team was trained and experienced in one thing; making living enemies dead enemies, before they could make you dead. Right now it didn’t matter who they were outside of that one aspect of their personality, that one unifying bond shared by all on this team. They were the one percent of the one percent of the two percent, that bracket of the population that excelled in making their fellow human beings cease being, usually against their will. This was just something else, something her and her people had never engaged. You can’t simulate a situation like this. She’d had her turn in the holo room, she knew more about engaging supers than practically any living non super, but it’s not the same as… This.

This girl wasn’t some punk with minor control over pyrokinesis, or some super strong wall smasher who was just as susceptible to blaster fire as any other meat suit. She was a Class S, reality warping, shit stomping badass who didn’t seem to have the usual aversion to killing as the standard super. Even super villains usually didn’t waltz around blasting security teams, they preferred to use silly ass tricks and smoke bombs and misdirection, all that nonsense, sending the less well trained security forces scrambling and simply engaging in fist fights with their fellow super freaks when they eventually caught up to them, and they almost always did. More power to them; let the regular humans play at their tactics and laser weapons, and the supers fist fight and throw cars at each other without regard to the use of the conventional human stuff. That was the way things usually were, and she along with the rest of the world were happier for it, everyone remembered the things that happened when supers decided to play at war like the rest of their species, if you can still consider them human to begin with, and none of it was very good for the normal old war fighter’s wellbeing. When supers started to combine conventional tactics and weaponry with their incredible advantages, well, things just got taken to levels that couldn’t be planned for, couldn’t be assessed beforehand, and the best thing to do once that kind of shit hit the fan was bow out as graciously as you could and just step away with as many of your bits intact as you could fight to hold onto.

Then again, Ashley didn’t think this chick was going to be inclined to letting them go if she put up a white flag, hell, she didn’t have a white flag to put up, anyway. This was like something out of a nightmare, like those Japanese cartoons her kids watched on the TV, except they didn’t seem so bad until you were facing something that could do the kind of shit those characters could. Jones had drawn a bead, and just before he fired on the bitch she caught a glance of him out of the corner of her eye, spun the blaster around and out of his hands, and the thing’s just floating there in midair for a split second before it lights him up, ten, twenty blasts to center of mass, from a few feet away, all within two seconds and entirely without their being so much as a finger on the f#$%ing trigger, like it just decided to grow a conscious mind of its own and realized Jones had always been an asshole. Jones had been an asshole, Ashley was aware that he had been accused of terrible crimes during the war and was entirely sure knowing the guy that he was guilty as shit of all of the things people had accused him of over the years. Maybe this was their karmic destiny, after all the shit they’d done over all these years, but when she’d walked away from her old life and taken this job working for Anne Scarborough she’d stopped believing in Karma. After the things she’d done to people, if there was karma it shouldn’t have let her get this far.

Couldn’t believe in it now, either, couldn’t think about the kids, stupid Japanese cartoons, any of it. Right now all she was, could be, was a rifle, a commander of rifles. A nod, and someone was getting Harris out of the way, and she was going to make sure they didn’t take a round in the process. She popped up over the cover of the balcony, laying down suppressing fire once she found the bitch. She was wearing a scarf, all neon blue, just the nuttiest thing, like it was electric or something. There were butterflies just taking off and floating around, coming off of the scarf before they just disappeared into nothing, ephemera. They weren’t illusory, either, this chick really bent reality around her, casually creating and destroying life, matter, without even thinking about it, just as some eye candy, costume jewelry. The girl didn’t seem to care about the lasers flying around her, should’ve been hitting her but of course they weren’t, and threw a bag to the wall before she just vanished. A flash, and Ashley was blind, deaf, figured she was dead, except everything was white and painful, and there wasn’t any fire anywhere. Her eyes started working, picture coming back into focus, and she could see that half of the far wall was gone. That shit was thick, too, must’ve had something on the other side go off simultaneously. Just then some chick wearing a rabit head as a mask came through the maw in the wall, blaster rifle in hand, and geared her attention, along with her weapon, on none other than Ashley herself. Did that mask just blink at me?

It was all over already, there was no reason for all of this bullshit. Just theatrics at this point, or so Gerry supposed. They had already won, Ashley’s team were down, the lobby was taken, along with the South parking lot for some reason, and the ex, oh, seven team were either locked down in the lab or standing right in front of him, under armed guard. They’d obviously come for the asset, and the protocol zero team wasn’t responding, so clearly they’d either disabled comms to the lab, or the team had been wiped. Now they’d torture him for a bit, he’d refuse to open the doors to the lab, and the Guardians would swoop in and save the day. Why these girls had come in like this he couldn’t say. There was no way into the lab except through him, and they’d have to know he could hold out for the minute or so it would take for the supers to show up. I mean, shit, Anne Scarborough had them on speed dial, and even if she didn’t want them to know about the asset she must have planned for this contingency. This wouldn’t end well for him, he’d be down a few fingers and toes before the day was over and done with, but it wouldn’t end well for these bitches either, and that knowledge would get him through this momentary agony. He’d been trained for this, was mentally prepared for this, had great life insurance for this exact situation, could and would hold out, no matter what they said or did to him. A bridge over troubled waters, or however that saying went.

There were four of them, all young women, the blonde with the neon clothes and butterflies, some rabbit headed freak, and yes, he had at first been convinced that it was a mask, but upon further inspection was more than satisfied that no, it was not a mask but rather her head, the black girl with a shield and sickle sword, and then there was the last one. She seemed to be their leader, at least from the way the other three were treating her, but she didn’t seem all that impressive to him. She was mostly just dancing around like a lunatic while the rabbit held a knife to his throat and the black girl told him that she’d, meaning the freak, cut his nose off if he didn’t give them the code. Why was there a code to get in despite the lockdown? For one, simple reason; the code was the only thing that could open the lab, ever. Short of actually taking a drill truck to the thing, one of those claw through mountains kind of machines that are mounted on modified tank treads and burn hundreds of gallons of diesel an hour, the people, experiments, and information in that lab would be buried in an underground death trap from which they would never escape, at least while still breathing. The rooms didn’t have their own air systems, to keep out those supers that could change size or become gaseous. They’d all be dead within the hour from lack of fresh air if the system remained on lockdown. Of course, the Guardians would show up well before that, and clean up the riff raff.

Once the problem was dealt with, most estimates placed the time to about three minutes after lockdown protocols had been enacted, the door would be opened by Anne or someone she’d call down to with the code if she was unavailable. It wasn’t public knowledge, but just in case she was unreachable there was always someone who happened to have the code. Now, as to how they had put together that he, Gerald Oberlin, the mild mannered personal assistant to the personal assistant of the manager of the in house food court, happened to be the only person, to the best of his knowledge, besides Anne Scarborough herself who happened to know said code, he couldn’t say. There was no paperwork that would have his name anywhere, he didn’t exactly collect more money than anyone would normally expect of a personal assistant to a personal assistant. He would get his payment after he retired, and on the same day the code would be changed, too late by the time they’d know he knew. He had never signed anything, this was a deal passed down from Anne to some executive to some management to some middle management to some supervisor to, well, the secretary, basically. They hadn’t even known what they were passing down, couldn’t have come from any of them, and he sure as shit never said anything about it to anyone, hell, despite knowing about the crazy shit they were really doing around here, he’d never even met Anne Scarborough face to face. It must’ve been done by some supernatural means, which though it was hardly unheard of, still seemed incredibly odd and hard to believe.

How long had they been planning this shit? Long enough to have gotten this far, he supposed. Maybe it was all that extra training he’d received, their tip to his knowing the code, but even that was under the cover of totally standard company stuff, classes on management and PR things. He’d even done the reading, on his own time of course, in case anyone asked about how the classes had been and what they were about, and the people who had actually trained him had never met Gerald Oberlin, or even seen his face, no, they knew subject eighty seven, a potential dark ops recruit. They’d put a lot of effort into this, whoever these girls were, or whoever they were working for most like. He wasn’t really paying attention to them even as the rabbit headed freak put the tip of her knife into his flesh, starting her work on his nose. He was far away, listening to A Song For You on a beach somewhere, midnight, brilliant full moon over the water, a tumbler of bourbon in his hand, and life was beautiful. It wasn’t until the lunatic walked over, pulled his phone out of his pocket, and mentioned a name that he came back to reality. “Sandy, that’s her name, right?” how had she, “There he is!” she poked him between the eyes to emphasize that she realized she’d gotten his attention before she continued. “I broke your phone’s encryption, psyPhones, so unreliable,” she shrugged, “Apartment 201, 4901 Elm, right? She’s your neice? You raised her after your sister and her husband died, no? Says here, ‘Thanks for always being there, Uncle Gerry,’”.