System Supervillain, Chapter 143

Chapter 143 – Meeting

(El Extraño Encapuchado, Mexico City, Mexico)

The Cloaked Stranger was a bar and grill, run by the Guild. Because even superheroes and supervillains needed to eat, and the Stranger provided a place where they could do it without worrying about secret identities. A place where they could relax, and eat without needing to worry about ‘civilians’.

“Are you sure this is wise, chefe?”

Sibila smiled at the man sitting next to her. Gato Roxo was always concerned with her well-being. He was the combat leader of the Vindicadores, and, other than Mirela, he was the one who knew the most about her powers, and how much they could cost her.

Not physically. Her powers weren’t like some, that could eat away at their wielders. Sure, some of the ways her power manifested blinded her to the world, but she had other ones, which would give her glimpses into the future, allowing her to move more fluidly, or speak knowing the most likely outcomes to everything she said. If she turned her powers towards combat, she could make herself extremely difficult to hit, and lead her attacks so that they struck where the foe was going to be, rather than where they were.

However, that did not mean she was unaffected. She saw so many possible futures that it could fray at her mind. He knew that she had seen her own death, and the death of those around her, countless times. He also knew that she had sacrificed any kind of romantic relationship, because she always saw the futures where it went bad, either because the relationship didn’t work, or because it changed her, and made it so that she could no longer be the Oracle of Rio di Janeiro.

She could not risk the deep connections. Not from any such limitation to her powers, like had befallen poor Moonchild before she became Bloodmoon, but because those connections had the potential to break her. She was known and respected across Brazil because she was ‘neutral’. With her powers, it would be possible to track down any criminals in the city, and have heroes waiting on them, ready to throw them in jail the moment they stepped out of line. But doing that would lead her on the tyrant’s road, and she feared what her powers could do then.

Mirela, her assistant, spoke up from her other side. “You could still leave, Senhorita Rios. Say something came up. There are issues in the city that you put off for this meeting, after all.”

“Thank you, both of you,” Sibila said. “But I’ve been looking through the possible futures as best I can. Iceblade and his forces are powerful, yes, but they are not invincible. Even if the Guild provides him with a ship unlike anything we’ve seen before, the Empire is too large for one ship, one crew to deal with.”

“Interesting,” another voice cut in, just as Sibila had foreseen it would. Iceblade was standing there, along with Web Mistress and Serafina. Two supporters, as she had expected. Though she didn’t doubt that they were incapable of holding their own. Iceblade didn’t keep weak links around him. “So, you want to help put down the Gel-nak?”

“I have no desire to wipe out an entire species,” she corrected. “Instead, I would see Earth given the time it needs to defend itself from the Gel-nak. The ships in orbit might be torn down and refit within a year or two, but to truly be ready, they will need time for a chain of command to be formed, crews to be properly trained, logistics chains established, and so on. Not to mention the fact that the UN would need to transform into a functional world government in that time for any of it to have a chance at working.”

“And helping me to strike at the Gel-nak guides Earth towards one of the futures where that happens?”

“It puts Earth on the path where those futures are more likely than the ones where Earth falls. Nothing is certain until it is in the past, however.”

Iceblade nodded, and then looked at her companions. “I’m familiar with Gato Roxo from the news, of course, since he is the field commander of the Vindicadores, but I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with your other companion. A civilian? Or one of those supers who prefers office work to getting in costume?”

“This is Mirela, my aide, or caretaker, most of the time. She’s a civilian, yes, as well as a childhood friend of mine. She’s one of the few people I trust absolutely, in part because she’s known me before I had my powers, and been by my side since then.”

“A… pleasure to meet you, Mister Iceblade.” Mirela was less than convincing in her tone, but at least she was polite. “But what did you mean ‘supers who prefer office work’?”

The villain chuckled. “Not everyone has powers that are suited to combat, you know. And even some of those who do have powers that could be used in combat don’t have the mentality for it. Nothing to be ashamed of, honestly. You have to have a certain mindset to get dressed up in costume and engage in the activities we do, on either side of the law.

“It doesn’t matter if you have a near total immunity to damage like Indomitable did if you do not have the stomach for fighting, and just want to sit at a computer and work as a novelist, for instance. Or you might have powers that allow you to do math and statistics in your head in seconds that would take others using the calculators and computers hours or days to work through. That doesn’t exactly scream ‘superhero’ or ‘supervillain’, does it? However, they’d make a killing at any accounting firm.”

Gato Roxo nodded slowly, reluctant to admit the villain had a point about anything. “There’s a woman in Rio who has weak thermal control powers. Not enough to cause damage, but enough to ensure that any meal she cooks is perfectly done, and remains hot. She owns a food truck. Best podrões in the city.”

The villain nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind, if I make my way to Rio sometime. But your Oracle, here, is the reason I’ve never taken jobs in city.”

Sibila blinked. “Really? I did not think you would be afraid of me.”

“Afraid? No. Respectful? Yes. I do not know the specifics of your power, but I do know how you have broken any brewing gang war in the city before it could start by having individuals ‘just so happen’ to be in the area. How the Vindicadores show up so quickly that they might as well have been waiting when villains were up to anything that stepped over an invisible line. A line no one is quite certain where it rests.”

Web Mistress grinned as Iceblade trailed off. “You have a reputation in the hacker community, as well. You thwarted seven different attempts at major cyber-crimes, and you managed to get police sent to the homes of scammers doing ‘Nigerian prince’ scams and phishing scams, even though they were based all over the world. That’s beyond normal levels of competency.”

She could feel her cheeks flushing slightly. “Ah, well. Anyways, about the Gel-nak!” The others smiled, but let her change the subject. “There are two reasons I reached out to you, Iceblade. Though one predates the Gel-nak.”

“Really? Let’s start with that one, then.”

“Ahem. Well, my foresight is not always controlled. I will randomly get visions of my own personal timeline at times. I’ve used this ability to identify potential romantic entanglements, and break them off before they could start. I can’t allow myself to have those kinds of entanglements, since they have the potential to corrupt my visions, or my actions. There’s too much at stake for me to do otherwise, you understand.”

Iceblade nodded. “And I assume that I came up in these visions of yours?”

“Shortly after you formed Devastation,” she nodded. “I’ve broken that chain of events several times, but it kept reforming every time you added a new member to your harem.”

“Master,” Serafina said, “you came after me because you saw a need for a healer on the team. Did you consider getting someone with foresight, as well?”

The villain shrugged. “Obviously, I did. Especially one who has a proven track record of being correct. However, things kept coming up, and it never seemed to be quite necessary. Though I didn’t write it off.”

“Yes, that is what I suspected,” she nodded. “However, as I said, those visions repeated, and have continued to repeat. The last one I had was a couple days ago. I saw myself, amongst the members of Devastation, on an alien world, where the sun shone red through a green sky, and where the plants were all shades of blue. Química identified the chemical components, light wavelengths, and so on that would be required to create such a display, but I must admit that I do not understand even a fraction of it.”

“Interesting. And what were we doing on this alien world? I’m assuming that the Gel-nak were there?”

“Yes, but they were not dressed as the ones we saw in the attack. They were all female, dressed in leather armor, and carrying spears. I do not have the full details, but there was something about them being part of a secret order, which kept samples of the pre-change Gel-nak DNA. And they knew of other orders, throughout the slave species, that kept samples. The last thing I remember before the vision cut off, was my future self suggesting the possibility that the Gel-nak and all their slave species could be changed at once, throughout the Empire.”

“Master,” Web Mistress said carefully, “something like that, if it were possible, would fundamentally alter the entire equation. The Empire would fall apart. Right now, despite your message, the slave species are biologically incapable of rising up against their masters, and the different castes are conditioned against such things. We still don’t know what type of weapons the ship the Mechanics will get for us will have. Even if they have some kind of sun-killer or planet-cracker, using a weapon like that too often goes past the point of making you too dangerous to take on, and into the area of ‘existential threat to be dealt with’.”

“I agree,” Iceblade nodded. “Though I’ll still wipe the Gel-nak from existence, if they don’t get it through their skulls that trying to take Earth is a bad idea. I won’t allow anyone to threaten my stuff, my women, or my children.” He glanced at her, and said, “I’m sure you ‘saw’ that as the reason I got involved in stopping the Gel-nak, yes? They tried to contact me, because I was a System Administrator. Offered to let me pick a few slaves out of those I knew to keep for my own if I surrendered. As if I’d limit myself like that, or submit to their controls. They actually thought I’d be stupid enough to answer their System message, and open myself up to getting altered by them.”

She frowned. “Being a System administrator allows you such leeway, that you could change an enemy combatant in the middle of a war?”

“Not directly. Rules against that kind of thing, automatically reviewed at higher levels, it seems. However, if someone opens a help ticket, then any Administrator in the star system can deal with it. They wanted me to open a help ticket, so that they could alter me, hoping I wouldn’t know about that.”

Gato Roxo had been mostly silent, until now. “These administrator powers. What if a member of a species whose genetics had been forcibly changed brought unchanged DNA to you, and opened a help ticket to ask you to change their DNA back? Would that work?”

Iceblade and Web Mistress shared a series of looks. To Sibila, it looked as though an entire conversation was playing out, despite no words being said. She’d seen it before, in siblings or childhood friends, which made her wonder about the relationship between the two, before Web Mistress had became one of Iceblade’s women. Either way, it was clear that they made a solid team, from that interaction alone.

Iceblade looked back at Gato Roxo. “Unknown, since something like that hasn’t been tried, at least in the information dug up so far. However, it isn’t impossible. That kind of thing would DEFINITELY get brought up for a review with whatever overseers are involved in System Administration, so things would have to be ironclad before I would risk it. Multiple help tickets, per species, with concrete evidence of the changes, and the pre-change DNA. But, maybe.”

“Then you will take me with you, when you leave,” she said, surprising everyone. Sibila shook her head. “Web Mistress’s talents and your access to the System will only get you so far. With my talents, there may be a chance that you will not need to shatter worlds to make your point. At the very least, I should be able to help point in the right direction.”

Web Mistress spoke first, breaking the stunned silence. “Does your costume include the Life Support power? It will be necessary, if you’re going to be with us, unless you wish to trust one of the others to cover you.”

“Yes, I have protection from poisons and chemical warfare agents, diseases and biological warfare agents, zero gravity, high pressure, high radiation, intense cold, intense heat, vacuum, and the self-contained breathing ability, but it does not work on unholy ground.”

“Good enough,” Iceblade nodded. “But there will be restrictions. You’ll be in costume whenever you are out of your cabin on the ship, assuming that proper controls are in place. This is for your protection, against passive effects that the rest of the team will be immune to.”

“Let me guess, the immunity comes from being one of the women you enslaved?”

“Yes. Does that bother you?”

“I would be lying if I said it didn’t. But why tell me this? Why not just trick and claim me?” Her eyes flicked from Iceblade’s to Gato Roxo as she spoke, signaling to the villain who the question was really for.

“Because my reputation is for dealing fairly with those who have not crossed me. All my pets either submitted freely, or were targets, either because of their job, or because they’d tried to attack me. I’ll admit that some of them were seduced into submission, but the point stands. You have done me no harm, and too many heroes would be incensed if I did not give you this warning.”

Gato Roxo grumbled, but said nothing.