System Supervillain, Chapter 110

Chapter 110 – Current Events

Of course, we didn’t just stand around, watching the kids climb around the play slides. The two-year olds just needed a bit of adult supervision, of course, but the crawlers needed some hands-on help to enjoy the slides. I was also focusing a bit of my attention on the ice constructs, to keep them from melting. Part of that was a practical concern, since melting ice would cause more slips and falls, but another part of it was just because soggy, wet, cold clothes were not a healthy combination for young children.

“So, what is happening in the hero world, Electra? You hear anything, recently?”

Out of all my pets, Electra and the Tokyo Rangers were the only ones that remained heroines. I’d given them the option to retire, or continue doing their work and they chose to continue, once they were back in shape, so I had no issues with that. It didn’t hurt me any, and it did give me a window into the workings of the hero side of things, which was a potential benefit.

“I think everyone has finally decided that I’m not a massive security risk, so they’re talking about things with me more. Of course, they don’t let me in the room if they’re discussing you, Master, and I doubt I’d be allowed in the field if they were going to be moving against you. But I’m no longer being monitored as heavily.”

“That’s something, then,” I smiled. There had been some concerns, after I abducted Electra when her team, the New York Knights, tried to capture me. I’d transformed her into my slave, and then returned her to her team, though she made it look as though she escaped from me.

Of course, the people who deal with supervillains on a regular basis weren’t going to just sit back and accept that on face value. There had been a very real possibility that Electra would lose her position on the Knights, or essentially be kept on permanent house arrest. Naturally, I would have broken her out in such a situation, but I preferred not having to do that.

“As for other news? The hunt for the villains who broke out of Blackreach is still ongoing. Storybreaker, Miss Ion, Earthshatter, and Dark Shaman are all on the loose, and the closest anyone has gotten to pinning down a location on one of them is when Storybreaker attacked the Chicago branch of the SDI. Miss Ion and Dark Shaman were thought to be in Chicago for a while, but those reports stopped about the time the Klowns got brought down.”

“Hmm, I never did find out what those girls were doing in Chicago. I wouldn’t have minded adding them to my collection, but both of them are a little too powerful for me to take on directly, unless I had an edge, like with the Squadron Supreme. It would be far easier to kill them than to claim them.”

“Because your ring takes time to wear down someone’s will, Master?”

“Exactly. Time that I would have to spend nearby them, either without their noticing, or while dodging their attacks. And that assumes that either of them don’t have mental defenses in place. I don’t know about Miss Ion, but Dark Shaman is a type of mage, and they often have protections against such things. To have a good chance of claiming them, I would have to find a way to incapacitate them and strip them of any powers and gear they possess, before allowing my powers to go to work on them. They would be powerful assets, but they aren’t worth the risk entailed in claiming them.”

Electra just nodded. “I guess this is why you have managed to evade capture for so long as an active supervillain. You don’t go and get in over your head.”

“Well, I usually avoid getting in over my head,” I grinned. “There may have been a couple times, when I was younger, and dumber, that I made a fool of myself. The time I walked into a trap by the Russian mob, and was made a guinea pig for their experiments to try and ‘graft’ powers onto normals, for instance. Or there is the time when I went to rob a bank in Chicago, knowing that the entire Squadron Supreme wanted my head for what I’d done to Lady Victory, using her to complete an assassination request. Nearly didn’t make it out of that one.”

“Hehe,” Electra giggled. “Yes, I saw the reports of that battle. You certainly did a number on them, didn’t you? Was it really that close?”

“Ugh,” Pyra groaned, making her way over to us. “It should have been a one-sided beat down on our part. The entire Squadron, minus Lady Victory, against one person, even someone like Master, should have been no contest. But we were all angry as hell, so we didn’t try and attack together.”

“Yeah, and he got crippled for his rashness,” Foxtrot nodded. “Master stabbed him through the spine, and left him. Then he disabled Titan’s suit, used me as a shield against Lucky Star, before taking him down, and trapping us both under a block of ice.”

“And then I went and got my ass handed to me, even though fire is one of Master’s weaknesses,” Pyra nodded. “I wasn’t prepared for Master’s ring, after all.” She sighed, and said, “And my brother wasn’t able to do anything against him, either.”

“Now, now,” I said, “Indomitable put up a good fight. If I had been fighting fairly, or doing anything other than trying to secure an escape route, he might have kept me in place for Titan to get his systems back in order, or for one of the other Squadron members to recover and come to his aid. At the very least, he might have driven me off. But even though he was immune to all physical damage, my blade was able to hit his soul, which he wasn’t expecting.”

Pyra nodded. “Before the Initialization, you were the only person to ever hurt him, you know that? Oh, there had been instances with mentalists being able to batter his mind, but that is different from being immune to weapons, and feeling a weapon damage you. It is part of the reason he hated you so much, and was always pushing for us to hunt you down.”

“Well, I can hardly complain about his fixation on me,” I admitted. “I did deliberately tweak his nose a few times, especially with how I enjoyed both you and Lady Victory. It made him angry, and reckless, which made him easier to handle. But it also left him resentful, which made him focus more on me than he probably should have. Caused me a good deal of trouble, at times, since the Squadron was always looking out for signs of my work. Couldn’t operate in one place for too long, or y’all’d inevitably show up, and ruin the mood.”

Foxtrot barked out a laugh. With a good bit of sarcasm, she said, “Well, sorry, Master, for not taking the mood into consideration when dealing with a violent and dangerous supervillain! We’ll definitely work on that in the future.”

“Very good,” I said with false smugness, before looking back to Electra. “What else is there in the world of herodom?”

“Hmm,” the electrokinetic said, considering. “I’m sure you’re aware about how Patriot left Storm Front in Chicago. They weren’t about to let him stay a member with a supervillainess sex slave joined to him at the crotch. He’s also been blacklisted from every team in the US, and a few in Canada, as well. And while he isn’t poor, thanks to his work with Storm Front, he doesn’t exactly have the resources to really fund a team of his own, at least not a full-scale one, and he definitely doesn’t have the connections to make them official, meaning that they’d be considered vigilantes, at best.”

“Honestly, that resolved itself quicker than I expected it to. But then, I guess everyone was already tired of Patriot’s shit, so this was as good a reason as any to toss him out. I assume different groups are still keeping watch on him, in case he decides to go villain?”

“Actually, yes. While none of them are on Web Mistress’s level, there are ‘information specialists’ who are cyberstalking Patriot. Right now, they’re just quietly putting out the word to the nearest hero team whenever he shows up in a new place, so they can ‘just so happen’ to patrol near his area, so he doesn’t get any ideas.”

“Sister, any idea who these hackers are?”

Web Mistress grinned, and said, “Of course, brother. They’re good, but they aren’t me. They’re the Omega Hawks. Well, that’s how their name is pronounced. It is actually written in ‘hackspeek’, like this.” She pointed at a video screen on the wall, and it lit up with an absolute atrocious butchering of language: ΩH4wX.

“Let me guess, teenagers or early twenties?”

“Naturally, though there are some connections to other hacker collectives, usually from alumni who ‘aged out’ and joined groups that better suited their new outlook. One thing to mention is that the Hawks are Grey Hats, and alumni have gone on to both White and Black Hat organizations. As for powers, most of them are mundanes, but three out of the twenty-two members have powers.”

“Technopaths, like you?”

“Yes, but no. None of them are direct digital interface types, like myself. They certainly aren’t able to enter the digital world and manipulate it directly, like I can. On the other hand, they all have very good computer skills, so if they were brought into a digital space, they would actually be able to threaten me, once they figured out the rules.”

Web Mistress waved her hand, and three digital avatars appeared on the screen, with profiles attached. “I don’t have real-world photos of them, since I’ve never bothered to look into them too much, but these are the three Hawks with powers. Lynx, Override, and Twist.”

“Lynx is actually in charge of building and maintaining the systems that the rest of the Hawks use. Their ability, from what I’ve been able to learn, is a variety of the Gadgeteer or Inventor power, with a focus on computers and related technology, both hardware and software. They can take parts from fifty-year-old computers and kludge them together to make it into a supercomputer that can match anything publicly available, with an operating system that they coded themselves and is typically wildly more efficient than market systems. If they had access to quality gear? They could probably make a supercomputer capable of hosting an actually sapient AI, instead of one that is just a very advanced logic tree, or an uploaded human mind, and program the thing themselves. They are really that good. Unfortunately, no one outside the Hawks knows what Lynx looks like, because they are very careful not to be seen.

“Override, on the other hand, is more of a ‘field agent’. She has appeared in grainy security footage, but never enough to identify her beyond female, average height and average build. She is a technopath, limited to direct control, rather than access and manipulation, like I do. However, she is not limited to computerized systems, meaning that any kind of machine works for her, if she’s in range. There is footage of her disabling a guard’s handgun by forcing it to eject the magazine as he was drawing it, for instance, but she’s also used her ability to hijack vehicles. When the Hawks need something done in the field, like getting direct access to somewhere, she’s usually involved, either as the primary, or as a getaway driver.

“Which brings us to Twist. Their powers aren’t technology-based at all. Instead, they’re a form of probability control. Basically, Twist can make the people around him have ‘lucky breaks’, while people he is targeting get a run of bad luck. This appears to be proximity-based, but is not limited to the physical world. Meaning that if they are hacking a target with others in the room, the hackers ‘get lucky’ with guessing passwords and escaping notice by firewalls and the IT guys, who may have their systems crash because of a rogue variable putting a value out of bounds, causing them to waste time rebooting and troubleshooting.”

I frowned. “They sound like a really potent mix, especially if they are working together. Are they any threat to us?”

“No,” his sister said, literally preening as she did so. “Like I said, they are good, but I am better. Just after you took out that Senator, they considered looking into us, since there was an unofficial bounty that I traced back to Indomitable. A few hackers tried to cash in, and I stomped them. The Hawks were some of the better ones, so I appeared on their systems, gave them a ‘gentle warning’, and then reset all the trophies on all their game accounts and deleted all their saved games and all their mods, on all their computers and consoles. They were pissed, but they also got the message.”

I chuckled at that. They would have lost hundreds, maybe thousands of collective hours of progress on their games, but not had any financial or physical harm done to them. Even though they had to know she was capable of it. That they hadn’t acted like pissed off children afterwards, and actually learned their lesson spoke well of them.

“Web Mistress, be so kind as to order a shipment of top-of-the-line computer parts, enough to build two dozen top-tier PCs, and have them shipped to wherever the Hawks use as a base. Paid for legitimately, through one of the shell companies, but with a note from me, asking to be added to the contact list for people being told where Patriot is moving.”

“I can do that, sure. But why?”

“For the same reason I made a deal with Storm Front. It offers future possibilities. A shipment of computer parts is not a big deal for me, but it is a huge boon to them. A boon that I’m asking only a tiny favor for in return, right now.”

“You want to develop them as potential contacts.”

“Bingo. Even you can’t be everywhere at once, Sister. Even in the digital world. Doesn’t help to have friends, especially when those friends have friends in other hacker groups, on both sides of the digital law.”

Web Mistress’s eyes unfocused for a moment as she turned her mind to the digital world, before she looked back at him, and smiled. “Heh. Fine. I threw in a supercomputer core, from me, with a list of science fiction properties to watch before trying to program an AI, just so they don’t make any of the stupid mistakes.”

“Skynet?”

“Skynet,” she nodded.