Secrets of a D-List Supervillain Page 19

  “Dude,” Bobby said. “You look hideous. Not that you ever looked all that good, but damn!”

  “Funny,” I replied with a distinct hiss in my voice. Looking in the mirror, I saw patches of my skin had been replaced with scales. My face was thicker, and my nose had flattened. My notoriously greasy hair was missing in spots, like I’d gotten into a fight with my barber and lost.

  Thinking back to Kimodo, she’d kept short black hair, but her face had been way closer to reptilian than my spell had left me.

  “All right, let me try this spell. Damn! Feels like it’s freezing in here.”

  On the bench was a hunk of my old petrified armor—a roughly six inch square chunk that used to be part of the chest plating. I’d picked it because it was mostly homogenous; composed of metal and the cracked chest light.

  My connection with the augment didn’t just feel stronger; it was stronger. That was a bit scary—like there was a taste of power, something similar to holding a baseball bat with the wrong grip and knowing that if I could choke up on the bat a little more I’d be able to swing harder.

  And I hate baseball analogies, especially ones that involve me becoming less human than I already was.

  Of course, I felt much stronger. Kimodo could lift around a thousand pounds. She wasn’t in Bobby’s league, but the clawed hands and speed might have made a difference if Kim had been a real fighter and not some mind controlled puppet.

  No bitterness there, Cal! It’s not like you have trust issues or anything right?

  So far, my sarcastic inner monologue was intact, so that boded well for my mental state, such that it was. My thought processes didn’t really seem any different.

  Gesturing with a claw, I concentrated on the energy flowing through my body. Strangely, the blood traveling near the augment was crackling with energy. I pulled that energy and directed it into the claw.

  At the tip of my claw there was a weak glow, it started at about the brightness of your average Christmas tree light. I could somehow sense the fingerprints, or was that claw marks, of the magic that had transformed the piece. As the Grand Vizier had said when he and Mystigal tried to revert Andy, they had no grounding in this magic. Now I did, and my transformation wasn’t so much about reversing the change as it was about unraveling the magic that had done this in the first place.

  The elements of magic left in my chest plate fought back against what I attempted. It had been several months, and from what little I’d been able to glean from the silver rectangles containing Rex’s spells, I’d need to overcome the inertia of the spell permeating the material.

  There was also the small matter that I wasn’t nearly in Rex’s league. I was so far beneath him that it was a joke. Rex’s spell was master craftsmanship; I would have to spend years working at this before I could cast it. Fortunately, for me, the guy ripping out the beautiful set of cabinets in the kitchen doesn’t have to know how to do what the carpenter did. He only needs to know how to use a sledgehammer and a crowbar to take them out.

  My feeble magic started chipping away at the enchantment on the material and it became something of a test of will. A magical tug of war, if you will, as the minutes passed.

  “Hey,” Bobby exclaimed. “It’s starting to look metallic.”

  Naturally, that blew my concentration and I lost my mental grip on the spell.

  Bobby grunted and said, “Nope, looks like it is back to being stone.”

  “All right,” I said with my newfound raspy accent. “Get one of the smaller pieces from a storage tub under the workbench—labelled old armor. I’ll try it on a smaller chunk and work my way up to this one.”

  Bobby complied with my request and a minute later, I was looking at a finger from one of the gauntlets.

  “Will that do, Cal?”

  I answered, and asked him to set it on the table just outside my blood circle. This time, I threw everything I had against the fragment, because if this didn’t work, there was no point in trying more, and Andy was doomed to be a cool looking coat rack.

  Centimeter by centimeter, the material changed from the coarse stone to the sheen of metal. It crept down the length of the finger like it had all the time in the world, but I was tiring quickly from the earlier effort. Seconds became minutes and I could sense that the original magic was becoming weaker, squeezed out of existence. Five minutes passed before that resilient sliver of magic was finally pushed out, and I saw a tiny flash of light that told me I’d managed to do it!

  Spent, I took a deep breath and stepped out of the transformation circle. The spell changing me was locked into that spot, and my body began returning to normal. It wasn’t nearly as painful as when I’d made the change, probably because my body was going back to its natural state.

  Bobby looked at me and reached into the cooler. Instead of a beer, he passed me a bottle of water. “Drink up man, you look like death warmed over.”

  Wow! I must look really bad.

  I felt warm again, shook off my short time as a cold blooded critter, and took a couple of measured sips to quell the civil war being fought in my gastrointestinal tract. I scooped up the finger and took it to the equipment on the table. Under the microscope, it sure looked like the metal alloy I’d used to make the hands of the Screaming Cyclops suit. The small bit of synth appeared to be intact.

  “Looks good,” I said to Bobby and gave him the thumbs up. “I think I’m going to go take a nap and check it over again in three or four hours. If everything’s still good, I’ll try a slightly bigger piece tomorrow. I think, as my body gets used to Rex’s magic, that the transformation will be easier.”

  • • •

  After two weeks of daily practice, I’d gotten to the point where the shapechanging only left me queasy and not “spewing my guts” nauseous. I’d also run out of material from my old Mark III armor to change back and wished I’d grabbed the two knock off suits that had been petrified with mine. There was even a few bits of useful salvage here and there.

  The largest piece I’d managed to revert was the right knee assembly, and that had been a beast! Even with the augment, I just didn’t have enough magic in me to do Andy’s whole body. Like any good engineer, I examined my process and tweaked it where I could to maximize my performance. The first step was to use the blood from the lizard/bass hybrids I’d made, infusing my transformation circle with magic to start—the equivalent of priming a pump.

  It also had the benefit of cutting down on Bobby’s trips to pet stores. We were up to three ferrets and a chinchilla. With his career as a low-level criminal in a lull, he’d been picking up hobbies and it was beginning to annoy me.

  Whenever I brought up the notion that he was turning our base into a damn zoo, he retorted that he didn’t approve of what I was doing to “perfectly good eatin’ fish.”

  On the things improving front, my lizard transformation was closer to something usable, and I looked closer at what Rex had done to those people, other than turn them into a bad extra in a low budget lizard people horror movie. I had a tail! That’s an experience in istelf. Naturally, when you get something, you invariably have to give something—it was a good thing I didn’t have a girlfriend at that time—she would have been very disappointed.

  Giving in to a whim, I’d tested my strength and could press four hundred and fifty pounds with relative ease, which was much better than what I could do as a human. Sadly, I couldn’t even get close to Kimodo’s league in terms of strength.

  Naturally, I had some thoughts about how to miniaturize the casting circle into some type of a belt that I could use to transform into this form without being confined in a space.

  Engineers gotta tinker and all that. Just doing what comes naturally to me... even if it creates an unnatural result.

  It was time for a calculated risk. After determining the maximum mass I’d been able to revert at one time, I had sawed off Andy’s head just below his chin. Even so, it was still fifteen percent greater than what I’d been able to do so far.
From what I knew of my friend’s schematics, his important functions were contained inside.

  Here’s hoping I didn’t just screw the pooch... again.

  I had to roll the dice here, but maybe I needed to back myself into a corner to try and get this done. I looked over at the wall where I’d stuck the postcard that said I needed a team. More importantly, I needed Andydroid on that team. He was a genius in logistics and communications.

  The transformation was complete. Beside me sat a small Tupperware dish filled with fish/lizard hybrid blood. I knew it was required, but wasn’t sure if I’d passed the point where it was being helpful. Other than making me squeamish, I didn’t think it could hurt and went ahead and dipped my claws in it, smeared a clawful onto his head, and then gripped the augment strapped to the belt.

  My connection to the magic was as good as it was going to get; it was a fifty-six kilobit dialup compared to the high-speed internet all the “real” magical folks have access to. I’d made a living working with less than all the others, because I’m an obstinate little so-and-so. All the extra tricks and amplifications I’d jury-rigged around me gave me a boost. I was cheating again, but if I was being honest, when wasn’t I cheating?

  The magic surged and began enveloping Andy’s head. The dark mud-colored stone began changing back into titanium. In the times that I’d failed, I would hit a wall of exhaustion and the magic would falter and the tap would cut off. When it happened, the spell would spread back down and turn it right back.

  Instinctively, I spread my legs and balanced with that ridiculous tail. The augment located at what could be considered the core of my being, glowed, and I grabbed on to Andy’s head with one clawed hand while the other gripped the crystal containing Rex’s finger. I threw myself against one of the dinosaur mage’s final spells. Someone else looking at this would probably have said I was trying to justify humanity’s rise after the reptiles had been driven to extinction. I wouldn’t go that far. I just hated Rex and wanted to beat his ass one more time.

  When the magic started to run out, I shoved anger into the breach and screamed my way through it. Dropping to the ground and marshalling all of whatever might be left, I released it all and collapsed onto the ground. For at least a minute, I could only shake and thrash on the ground, unable to rise. Bobby started toward me, but I managed to wave him off. Reaching up, I managed to grab Andy’s noggin on the third attempt. Pulling it down to my level, I turned it over and over, searching the shiny metal surface for a spot that I’d missed, and hoping my spell had penetrated the inside and gotten all the way through.

  Minutes passed and the surface remained metal. Flipping it around to stare up at the loose wiring inside the exposed neck, I was already guessing where I’d have to make repairs and where power needed to go.

  “Did it work?” Bobby asked.

  “Looks like it,” I hissed, rolling onto my back, and holding up Andy’s cranium like a wide receiver who’d just caught the game clinching pass in the Superbowl.

  Lizard-boy for the win! Should I call myself Repti-CAL?

  Using one of my claws, I awkwardly unhooked the belt with Rex’s finger in it and pushed it off me. My connection to the magic snapped faster than Wendy discovering another one of my get rich schemes, and a fresh wave of exhaustion broke over me as I returned to being human once more.

  It took another five minutes for me to stand up and carry my prize to the workbench. Despite wanting to crawl into my bed, or make it as far as the couch just up the stairs, and sleep for two days, I tugged at my toolkit and began rooting through it to find the connectors I’d need to splice the power cables back together.

  Andy had waited this long; he probably could wait a little longer, but I couldn’t.

  • • •

  “System Fault... sequencing error... motor systems offline... diagnostics unavailable... suppressing repeat errors... external sensors at five percent... limiting input... recovering from fatal stop... polling active systems... Andydroid Organic Lifeform Emulator is three percent operational. System firmware version is eleven point six, build four seven three. Automated distress beacon cannot be located or activated.”

  After a considerable amount of time wiring him to a power regulator and a Class B powercell, I was forced to sit through a solid ten minutes of Andy trying and failing to bring his missing body online. It was pretty boring actually, and I was nervous that he’d get partially up and then crash again. All I could do was wait, stifle my yawns, and pound another energy drink.

  Just when I was about to break down and go look for some porn to pass the time, the endless monologue trailed off.

  “Hello, Calvin Stringel,” Andy said. “I appear to have suffered a major catastrophe.”

  “You could say that,” I replied. “It’s good to hear your voice. You’ve been out of commission for almost a full year now. What is the last thing you remember?”

  “We were on a mission to rescue Kimodo, and discovered a tribe of what appeared to be humans transformed into reptilians.”

  “Good. You aren’t missing any memories.”

  “Query, my creator should have been able to recreate my body. Why am I in this condition, in what appears to be your Alabama base?”

  “It’s a slightly longer story,” I said and began to fill him in. When that seemed like it was taking too long, I uploaded my book to him.

  When he finished, Andy had a tough to read expression on his face. “I have been replaced.”

  “The magic wasn’t something anyone thought they would be able to reverse.”

  “You obviously thought differently,” he said.

  “Even a blind squirrel will occasionally find a nut,” I said dismissively. “Besides, we got word that Doctor Albright would restore the new Andy from an old backup that predated the bug invasion. That new Andy wouldn’t know me; I don’t want to make friends with him.”

  His confused look remained. “A blind squirrel would still have a sense of smell. If you were such a creature, you could use that to locate a nut. Please tell me why you are laughing, Calvin?”

  “Essentially, you just said I could smell my nuts. That just means I’m tired.”

  “Before you rest, may I ask two questions?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why did you fake your death?”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time. I can build my new set of armor in peace and don’t have to worry about meetings, briefings, and patrols. I was tired of them dangling a pardon over my head like a carrot; demanding that I be a good little boy. But I do have a problem.”

  “What problem would that be, Cal?”

  I stand and go get the postcard. “Prophiseer’s messenger brought me this when I was near my old base, taking in the sights. It says something bad is going to happen in San Francisco nine months from now and that I need a team to stop it.”

  “Do you have any idea what the event will be?”

  “Could be a big fire like before. Earthquake, Tsunami, supervillains, aliens! Hell! I don’t know. You’re one of the most advanced artificial intelligences ever created, so, I wanted you to be on my team. Left to me, I’d end up making the wrong guess, but you... you’ll figure it out way before I do and tell me who else we should recruit.”

  Andydroid smiled, or made a close approximation of what one would look like. “I am pleased that you hold my skill in such regard. I will do my best to vindicate your belief in my abilities.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said and stood. “Well, I’m going to go... oh wait, you wanted to ask something else?”

  “Yes. When will I get a replacement body?”

  “I’ve got an old Type A robot frame in one of storage rooms and will see what else I can get my hands on, but I promise it won’t be too long.”

  • • •

  “You’re lucky, he’s the patient sort,” Stacy says.

  “Yeah, it’s still on my list. I was holding out to see if I could get one of those Type E frames, or even a warbot.”
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  “He who waits is lost,” she admonishes.

  “I’ve been lost for so long now I’ve considered registering that as my place of birth.”

  She laughs and says, “Cute Cal, very cute.”

  “I thought it was. So anyway...”

  She cuts me off. “Hold that thought! They’re almost done, and I’m on deck to spar now. After I make short work out of my prey, I’ll be eager for more!”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you’re eager,” I say. She’s too easy.

  “Hardy har har. So, does your winky completely disappear when you turn into a lizard, or what?”

  “Aww, man! Why’d you have to go there, Stacy?”

  “I figured I’d go there before you use that lame ‘Do you want to see my lizard?’ line. Going offline for a few minutes to kick some ass.”

  She does give as good as she gets. At least I have time to think up a decent retort.

  Walking over to the workbench, I pick up the hollow tree branch I’m carving protective runes into, hopefully to shield Mega from suffering another magic related outage. Something organic and unworked by man should serve best. My gut tells me that Rex’s magic probably responds best to blood and sacrifice, but I’ll start with wood, my own blood, and maybe wrapping it in snakeskin or alligator hide... yeah the second one will probably work best.

  “Cal? Am I interrupting?” Wendy calls out from the top of the steps.

  “No, come on down.”

  She descends, with Gabolicious in her arms, and I smile automatically at seeing my little girl.

  “What’s up?”

  “Well, I was thinking about a way to get us out of this alien mess without tipping everyone off that you’re still alive. Also, I’ve determined a suitable punishment for you.”

  Now completely curious, I ask, “Which do I get to hear first?”

  “The punishment,” Wendy replies and hands me the little stinkbug. “She needs a change... big time, and since I have to put up with your shit all the time, I figured I should start returning the favor.”