Assorted villains are out there, most of them C- or D-listers who’ve come out of the woodwork to try and make a name for themselves. Harry gives them some advice after the inevitably short battle: “Just… just go home, and don’t do this again.”
It’s not what he’d normally say. It’s not how the HHL would have done it, nor his parents. But more and more, he’s starting to think that turning people over to the Tyran security robots is the worst thing he could do.
During a brief lull, Harry directs a question at the others. “Why are you three so excited about this ‘Q-Base’ thing anyhow?”
Andi looks at Harry like he’s suffered a head injury. “Dude. Didn’t you ever have a treehouse or pillow fort or something and pretend like it was a cool secret base or elite HQ or something?”
This baffles Harry. “Uh, no. I grew up around the HHL Tower though.”
Andi, Trace, and Fuko look at each other. “Child of privilege,” Andi tells them, ignoring Harry entirely. “Child of privilege,” they echo back.
Harry sighs. There’s no winning here. He decides to check in instead. “Mirage, status. Anything else for us to handle?”
“Not at present. However, I’ve found some disturbing information during my analysis of city news media.”
“Uh, what information?” Harry asks, feeling increasingly worried. Have the Seven Wonders started moving again?
Mirage projects a hologram through the team’s gear for them to watch in real time.
“It’s Hard To Know Who To Trust.”
“Tyran Enterprises announces a hero verification program. In cooperation with ASIST, heroes can register their identities and receive transponders.”
“City government has authorized upgraded security robots for street patrol. These units will apprehend anyone endangering civilians or causing property damage, using modern power-suppression technologies. Approved heroes will not be at risk of accidental apprehension.”
The hologram shuts off, and Harry breathes in a lungful of air to try and clear his mind.
“They’re straight up licensing being a superhero in Halcyon,” Trace murmurs. “That’s… that ain’t how it’s done here.”
Andi scowls. “If any of the Irregulators are doin’ this…”
She then realizes aloud. “Hey, we should check in on the gang.”
Andi has been working with Mercury lately. Armiger has been off helping Concord. When the group get ahold of the current team, they find five people: existing members Alloy, the Animal, and Telekinetian, and new members Dark Derek and Sloth.
TK has taken over the group in Andi’s absence. He sits across from her at the Latorra Street Pizzeria and Bowling Alley, with everyone else sitting or standing as the mood takes them. Everyone has pizza. Nobody is eating.
“You guys took off at a really inconvenient time. I mean literally took off.” The launch of the Quill Compound into space has been pretty well publicized. And TK doesn’t seem happy about it.
Andi looks pained, and folds her hands together. “I know. I’m sorry - we left you in a lurch. There’s reasons for that, but I ain’t gonna defend what happened. I’m just gonna say you’re right, and ask what ya want us to do about it now.”
This is a lot less aggressive than TK is used to from her. He sits back, and thinks about it for a moment. “Look. We saw the Stellar Six thing at the airport. We’re not doing the whole Tyran hero sponsorship thing. But the Chosen went all in. So with the Menagerie half dead and half disappeared, it’s just us and them to rep heroes here in town.”
He lets out a long, pained sigh. “We just need some folks on our side on this one. You were the team lead. Mercury’s obviously a big name. Everyone loves him.”
TK turns to Trace and Fuko. “You two were Chosen too. I don’t want to short the pair of you - your support would be amazing as well.”
He looks back at Andi, his anger having melted into exhausted desperation. “I thought when it was the three of us left, we were done for. We got a couple of new folks, but… five against a city isn’t good odds.”
Andi smiles. “Well, we’re with ya. We’re back now. And in fact, we need ya.”
She nods at Harry, who starts explaining the plan. “So basically we’re gonna go right after the Seven Wonders. If we deal with them, the pressure is off the city and we can take away Tyran’s influence.”
TK sits back in his seat, with an exasperated look on his face. “You can’t just fight the Seven Wonders. I mean no offense, sir, but it was you and your whole family and you tried and you failed.”
“We learned how to succeed through that failure,” Harry insists. “We have a comprehensive strategy for every member of that team.”
Here’s the part he hates admitting. “Thing is, we need you and the Chosen both to help execute it.”
His fears are justified, as TK looks suspiciously back to Andi. “So that’s what this is. You come back when you need our help–”
Everyone is a little surprised when the normally reserved Fuko bursts in, interrupting Telekinetian. “We’ve always needed your help. And the truth is that you need ours too. The Menagerie taught us that. Don’t you remember that joint training session from a few years ago? Don’t you remember everything they did for us since then? What they taught us?”
The Menagerie trained with the other teen hero teams in “MASKS #23 - TRAIN & SHIP” – Ed.
"They always went to bat for us. JHHL or Chosen or Irregulators. And we forgot that lesson too.”
“We didn’t call you when we went against the Seven Wonders before. That was our mistake."
She draws breath, and looks around. “Listen. I went to Mercury. I asked, can you help me get a little more popular? I felt invisible as a hero, and I felt hated, because I was half Atlantean. And it was miserable. I wanted people to see me, and like me.”
She leans over the table and looks TK in the eyes. “You don’t just want to be used and discarded. You don’t want to be isolated. I know. I see you. I hear you. But this isn’t about that.”
She stands back up, and looks at the others, one by one. “This is about us, together, as Halcyon City heroes, doing something good for the city. Some of us might not make it out of that, and that’s really scary.”
“We don’t have support from most of the adults. Some of us never did.”
She spares a sympathetic glance at Trace, whose relationship with his father Nautilus was never good by anyone’s definition. He smiles back, in brief appreciation, and she keeps talking.
“Well. We’re the adults now. So you can say no, that’s your call. But say no to what we’re really asking for, not just what you assume we’re here for.”
Telekinetian is silent. The Animal, currently in the form of a lorikeet, scratches nervously at the seats of the pizza parlor’s booth. Alloy rubs the back of her bald head uncertainly. The two new members, Sloth and Dark Derek, look at each other uncomfortably.
Finally TK speaks up. “Mercury. You said you got a plan.”
Harry nods, hoping to god he’s projecting some kind of confidence. “Yeah.”
“For all of them?”
“Yeah.”
A smile slips onto TK’s face, almost unseen. “And do we get to hang out in your clubhouse too?”
Harry grins widely. “Yeah. Whether you help or not, Q-Base is open to everyone.”
TK raises an eyebrow. “Q-Base…?”
He looks over at Andi and understanding dawns. “Your idea.”
Andi grins back at him. “Course.”
TK looks back at his friends and teammates. All of them seem cautiously optimistic. He turns back and offers Andi a handshake. “Alright. I think ya got the Irregulators. Now good luck with the Chosen.”
The Chosen have likewise gone through some roster changes since their origin as the JHHL. Kinetica and the alien Scraaseetotabobah are the only originals left. Kid Kelvin has left Halcyon City for unknown reasons. Ninjess and Stingray are working with Harry now. Superchica has been working with Concord, and is only rarely seen in town. In their place, the Chosen have recruited two heroes named Briar Rose and Nitrogene.
The Chosen never had a strongly defined team leader. As they were essentially the feeder team for the HHL for awhile, they took their cues from the adults. Now that the HHL are essentially disbanded, that had to change. Kinetica seems to be the leader by default, and Harry lets Stingray do the talking - with a caution not to talk up the anti-Tyran angle. Just in case.
At the end of a cordial conversation, Kinetica still says no.
“Listen. We respect you guys. Trace, Fuko, you have to do your own thing. I get that. So do we. This is our chance to regain some respectability with the city. We can’t do that if we’re dead. And I don’t have faith that you guys can handle the Seven Wonders, no matter what you say. Everyone who’s tried except the original HHL has failed, and the HHL is no more.”
Stingray shakes his head. “You’re giving up the city to them, then. Tyran is the only other force in town, and the Seven clowned on their cloned heroes. We all saw it.”
“Tyran can afford to fail and try again, over and over,” Kinetica points out. “Yeah, I absolutely don’t like the idea that they can just manufacture cloned heroes from real people. I don’t like that and I don’t ask you to. But they’ve got super suppression tech. They’ve got new robots - we’ve seen them, you guys do not want to play around with them. And real people aren’t getting killed when Tyran goes up against the Seven.”
“So yeah, maybe we are sitting back in one sense. I prefer to say that we’re doing what Tyran isn’t, and dealing with other less dangerous villains in a more humane way, before the robot patrols get them. The people who don’t need to be doing 20 years for robbing a bank with powers, just because having powers went to their head. Folks like that need guidance, not incarceration. So we can inject some humanity into the process of law enforcement. Which really, isn’t that what being a superhero should be?”
Stingray has to accept this. But he leaves Kinetica with one question. “During this hero registration thing you all did… Did they take a blood sample? DNA samples?”
At first, Kinetica doesn’t think anything of it. “Yeah, of course, for pattern matching, so the robots…”
The implications of the cloning program sink in, and her face darkens. “Oh.”
“We’ll see who’s in the next batch of Stellar Six, won’t we,” Stingray remarks. But everyone knows this is the end of the conversation, and the two teams go their own ways.
“Footage of the new security robots is available,” Mirage radios down, as the team is considering its next move. “Your friend Kinetica was onto something.”
Footage appears again.
D-list villain Fred the Barbarian, whose power is transforming into a hyper-muscular version of himself, is caught on a security camera trying to car-jack a businessman’s BMW.
Out of nowhere, a pair of quadrupedal robots - looking like big, feral wolves - spring, and surround a suddenly surprised and fearful Fred. A snake-like robot literally drops out of the air onto him and begins constricting immediately. As the wolves leap away, a wasp-like robot descends. Its stinger extends and sinks deep into Fred’s skin. The stinger retracts. In seconds, Fred’s power reverses, and he shrinks back down to normal.
Mirage gives her analysis. “The robots work in combination. Isolate, immobilize, and neutralize. The Tyran robots appear to be equipped with a power-suppression chemical. General forms of chemical power neutralization are known, such as ZN-94T and RykoTek P9-V2. None of them are long-lasting. However, followup teams could apprehend a powered individual and employ more long-term containment solutions.”
“They took that guy down in seconds,” Stingray mutters. “Not just knocked him out - they shut him down completely. Why aren’t they going after the Seven Wonders with that?”
“Motormouth and D-SOL-8 have powers that could neutralize or even co-opt the robots,” Mirage answers. “The others seem difficult to pin down via the robots’ tactics. It is likely that the robots are not intended for use against the Seven Wonders, but are rather being deployed to put pressure on the city’s heroes. They are essentially weaponizing their own PR failure with the Stellar Six: ‘we tried playing nice and now we are forced into tactics like this’.”
Harry lets out a long sigh. This whole thing is really making him appreciate, against his will, just what kind of moral challenges the HHL faced.
“The thing is, we want the Seven Wonders restrained. We don’t want them in Tyran’s hands, though. But Tyran is the only game in town for villain containment.”
He calls up. “Dr. Zap. These chemicals are being used to suppress superpowers in human beings. It’s biochemistry. Do you think that if we got you samples of this stuff, you could synthesize it? Enough to keep the Seven Wonders suppressed long enough for us to get them into someone else’s hands? Someone trustworthy?”
“Eminently possible, young Mercury,” the squid scientist announces enthusiastically. “I shall need both samples of the chemicals and samples of the biochemistry in which they should operate, but I’m confident any of you would be willing to donate a small bit of tissue.”
Harry nods to his friends. “Alright. Well, it sounds like our next job is to go pick a fight with some Tyran security robots.”