Alex fat fingered the damn keypad three times before it finally let him into his building. He barely held himself back from slamming the door shut.
While it was late and he was using the back entrance which he’d only ever seen three people use in his entire time here, he was still wearing most of his costume with only a few pieces of it stuffed into the bag hanging off his shoulder and didn’t need the attention right now. That small little thought was bracing his rage like a toothpick pretending to hold closed a vault door, its presence more a reminder than a motivating force, and one ready to snap the moment he was ready to let it loose.
The entire day floated back through his mind, one scene after another circling around his head. The rage began to fade and other emotions, ones that began to cut and bleed into him, started to fill in the gaps as it receded. Then came the numbing feeling of exhaustion and resignation.
This is worse than Orion, worse than what happened with Tha-
“Good, you’re back,” Ms. Song’s voice came from a door up the hall.
Alex froze. He had a coat on, but it would be fairly obvious that he was in a costume of some type with what it didn’t cover. While he was fairly sure that she knew he was clearly on the wrong side of the law, he had no desire to share exactly what that meant to his landlady of all people.
“Y-yeah, sorry. It’s been a day. I’ll get you the rent-” he began, wanting to avoid her as he headed towards the stairwell.
“Come here,” she called out to him.
He… he wanted to go there. To do as she asked.
Alex strolled up to and through the open door in a trance before immediately freezing in place.
Ms. Song relaxed in a plush chair to the side of a common room, nursing a small cup of something dark red. His landlady as always was dressed in a simple, comfortable looking outfit that somehow seemed a little more expensive than it should be, hints from the way the fabric moved or reflected the light which hinted it was made of something way outside of Alex’s usual price point for even a nice shirt or pair of pants. Her long black hair was loosely tied together, a few braids scattered throughout it. She wore a bemused yet somewhat detached expression as her silver eyes lazily swept over him. At the center of the room, atop a simple coffee table, was the rest of the Iron Menace’s gear.
And it was repaired.
“I can’t figure out what you did with this silly thing,” she scooped up his left gauntlet. “But the rest of it was fairly straightforward.”
“I can fix that with parts from a microwave. There’s a video on NewVid,” he explained after she gave him a bewildered look before he came to his senses. “What- Why are you doing this?”
Ms. Song languidly rose out of her chair and placed the gauntlet back on the table. She smiled at him, and a tingle ran down Alex’s spine.
“I don’t suppose that,” she gestured at the bag, “is your spoils for tonight?”
Alex winced, “No, it… This is just the rest of my gear.”
Song’s expression flickered, something darker behind it peeking out for a moment.
“So, you ran out with a barely functioning kit,” she slipped forward towards him, her words melodious but tinged with a danger behind them which he’d never heard from his otherwise friendly landlady. “I’m assuming to rob a gas station or something, only to have some nosy, busy bodied hero grind your nose into the pavement. That wasn’t very smart, was. It?”
She punctuated the last two words with taps on her glass, and Alex winced both times. He felt more vulnerable in this moment than being stuck to the wall less than an hour ago.
“Why did you do such a silly thing?” she asked and a pressure seeped into Alex’s mind.
It clawed at the truth inside him, gently pulling on it and twisting it up. He knew this was some power of hers but somehow it didn’t feel violating, more like a coaxing that seemed to reward him for leaning into it, and gods it had been such a day that the small reward of indulging it was more than enough.
“I’m in trouble,” he admitted, though despite the subtle praise he found from obeying the pressure, he held back the full details. “I needed to get out of town and needed funds for that, my gear, and rent.”
When she cocked an eyebrow at him at the last part, he added, “I didn’t want to raise suspicions so I wanted to leave on good terms with you and the rest of the people who knew me.”
“Hmm… more of a plan than I thought you had,” she grinned. “But still not good enough. And now you’re worse off than when you left tonight.”
Alex nodded. On the way back he realized how much worse, beyond just having to de-gunk his gauntlet. ArachNed was infamous for following up on villains if they crossed his path. A lot of his rogue’s gallery ended up in there because of a single meeting with the hero which seemed to spiral into to him constantly showing up to foil their plans. And if ArachNed did keep poking around, he might either find something out or get attention on the Iron Menace that he didn’t need at the moment.
Ms. Song studied him, her expression beginning to sour.
“How long have you lived here?” she asked him with an edge in her voice.
Alex thought, “It’s been almost a decade now.”
She rolled her eyes, “At least nine years. And in those nine years, you haven’t changed much about your job, have you?”
She gestured at his bag and the pieces of his armor laying on the table. The armor plates and the gauntlet were largely the same as when he’d first started, the barest of upgrades patched onto them over the years.
“I- I’ve had bills to pay!” Alex lied.
In hindsight, that probably sounded a little too close to an accusation.
Her glare swept into him like a hurricane, almost knocking him over.
He knew the truth. The gear wasn’t the only thing he’d given up trying to improve on. After the first year when he became the Iron Menace in this city, he’d given up trying for upgrades and for bigger and better jobs, and had simply settled into the role he’d scratched out for himself: a villain of the day, not even of the week. He got away with jobs because he was in and out before the heroes showed up, or had temporarily joined up for a heist. When he actually beat anyone, it was usually a 2-on-1 or against a solo hero that severely overestimated their abilities or wasn’t even trying that day.
He’d become content with where he was at, happy to avoid having to fight more and more powerful heroes. He knew that if he ended up constantly upgrading his gear, becoming a bigger and bigger threat, he’d eventually find the point where he’d be too big to just let go with a warning… or worse, find out that he couldn’t keep up with the heroes. Better to set his own ceiling than to find the one he couldn’t break through, and only let his gear improve when it was the kind of thing everyone else was rocking by that point.
So he avoided even trying at all and kept to the kind of jobs both he and the cape sent to protect whatever he was trying to rob would both be able to shrug off the loss of after a week. No big schemes, no getting a raygun that shut down the entire powerset of some moderately big name cape in a neighborhood, no sprees that left a team of heroes stumped and frustrated with him, vowing to see him put to justice. He was a nuisance and nothing more. Just a menace, not a threat.
“So now you’re a pathetic little lamb and you can’t run away as the wolves begin to circle,” she accused. “So tell me, are you going to run to the heroes now and throw off your little gloves and swear to be a good little boy in exchange for them keeping you safe or cutting you a deal?”
Like that, the anger was back. An older rage than what he’d felt after being given pity by the guy he tried to rob tonight. Something from his childhood, where he remembered himself sat in a dark room with a screen illuminating his face as he watched the heroes he hated.
“No,” he growled. “I’m not going to beg them for help.”
Song’s twisted grin deepened, “Oh, so then are you going to throw yourself at the mercy of someone stronger than you? Maybe swap your red for whatever color matches their lackeys and finally bend your knee to your betters?”
Alex couldn’t tell if her powers were touching him, but he didn’t care. This buried anger, the one which had driven him during that first year in Victory, born when he'd been forced out of his home in Orion City, because of the stupidity and ego of a low ranking member of the League feuding with a hero, where he had to lose everything all because he chose to work for someone else.
He shook. He’d been afraid of the League as much as he hated them, but over time his hate had been buried under detritus of the simple life he’d built up. But it had never been smothered. And now that Song had brought up falling back into that pit he’d pulled himself out of, the fire was alight again.
“Never,” he held himself back from shouting, the words coming out in a barely restrained snarl as his teeth gnashed together.
“There you are again,” she said, an almost motherly admiration painted on her face. “That was the villain I met nine years ago.”
Alex blinked and looked her in the eyes. She chuckled.
“Of course I knew,” she laughed. “You think the rent here is actually that cheap? Actually…”
She sauntered over to a nearby desk and opened a drawer, quickly pulling out a folder and swiftly slipping it onto the desk. A pen flashed into her hand, and in half a second she’d written over half of it.
“There, you don’t have any rent for the next few months,” she returned her gaze to him.
Alex understood what felt off now. There was a predatory element to that gaze. Something that knew it was more powerful and saw everything around it as toys until they were food.
“Are you sure?” he asked, not willing to risk asking more.
She rolled her entire shoulders along with her eyes in response, “Please, most of the residents here are more than happy to give up their ill gotten gains to me. All I need to do is ask for a little more, and they’re happy to oblige.”
“This really is an apartment full of villains,” Alex grinned.
“Not those types,” she chided. “The ones that wear suits and steal with pens rather than lasers and silly gauntlets. There are only four real villains here.”
Alex had a strong suspicion that two of them were in this room.
“Anyways, this little bit of leeway comes with some new rules,” she said, holding up the file she just signed.
“Rule One isn’t really new. It’s mostly the same as it always has been: Do. Not. Bring. Your Trouble. Here.”
Though that was exactly the same as what she’d told him awhile back, there was something unspoken added to it that Alex knew better than to have her actually say aloud.
“Good, smart enough to understand that. Now Rule Two is simple, you need to be more than the Iron Menace. I’m long since done with hosting that failure. Oh, and no settling for plain old Alex Adams either. He won’t make it here long,” her cold words chilled his very spine. He nodded, not trusting his voice.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“Lastly, Rule Three. I need to know something. What are you planning on doing?”
He wasn’t ready this time. The words this time were more than just brushing against his surface thoughts. They were digging deep into him, questing for the truth. Like the knives of an amateur surgeon clawing around rather than the smooth waves that previously pulled on him, this question was vicious and cruel.
“I-I’m going to find someone to upgrade my kit,” he struggled to get the words out, doubling over. The pressure didn’t relent.
“And then?”
“I’m going to figure out a new name! Argh, a new identity…” his knees gave out and he dropped to the floor, his bag rolling off his shoulder and the contents sliding out.
“What are you going to do then?” her voice assailed him.
He needed the League to back off. They were relentless and petty, unwilling to stay away from anything but what they respected. If you became powerful enough, it was join or die. You didn’t just spit in their face and walk away.
Unless you were someone like Astralas or King Phoenix, villains no one messed with. Or groups like the Seven Beasts or the Ant Hive, organizations which banded together and put the world’s heroes through the ringer on their own. The type of people who were powerful enough to catch their attention but still could… who could…
As Song’s strange voice dug into his mind, Alex drifted back in his thoughts. A fragment of a memory pulled itself to the front of his mind.
It was one of the many times he was sitting around with his friend Roger from his time as a minion over a decade ago. The two would often end up chatting about their boss’s various decisions on the job. They’d meet up on patrols or after their shifts were over to compare notes on what they thought of the villain they worked for. A lot of time spent as a minion meant you got an eye for when your boss was about to kick a hornet’s nest and you needed to get ready to run once the heat came down.
This time, in this memory, it was a chat they’d had in the hallways of that secret island base between missions.
“It’s why you gotta do it!” Roger had explained after they, along with the entire base’s masked staff, had listened to their boss’s crazy master plan at the time and he’d called it over-ambitious. “If Frost Fiend1 takes over a city, he has like a month before the heroes come together to kick him out. He takes over a country, then he probably holds it until a rebellion or the League comes in to put him in his place. So you gotta aim higher!”
The declaration Frost Fiend had made was a classic one. A stupid dream that only the truly delusional had. One for children and idiots. Still, Roger had loved it and had been trying to convince him that it wasn’t just Fiend accidentally inhaling his own cryotubes.
His friend had beamed and looked him in the eyes as he explained the logic of it, the young man’s hands wrapped tightly around the helmet he brought almost everywhere even when they were off the clock, “No one actually expects you to hold onto it, just gracefully lose a fight and things go back to normal. But if you want everyone to respect you and then leave you alone, let you continue being a villain all on your own and never bother you again, then there’s only one thing you need to do, and you need to do it only once-”
Alex grinned. It was stupid. It was way over his head. But when he let himself dream stupid dreams, when he let himself imagine, it was what exactly what he’d wanted to do since he was a kid. Sometimes, back on the job, he let himself imagine it even while working as one of the many faceless minions of a villain hardly anyone remembered these days. He’d briefly thought about it when he first became the Iron Menace, planning to take Victory City by storm and dreamed of fighting even Mr. Wonder.
Why not? He was dead if he didn’t anyways. Might as well shoot for the very top. Why not put all those little daydreams and imagined plots into motion?
“Easy,” he looked directly at Ms. Song as he rose off the ground, grabbing his helmet on the way up. She was grinning at him in a way that led him to believe she knew he’d say this before even he did.
“I’m going to take over the world.”
---------------------------------
After almost 12 hours in a single godsdamn meeting, Over Seer finally managed to retreat to her room.
She was clad in a long black dress that flowed past her feet and dragged along the ground as she tiredly floated over to a hovering chair in the middle of a candlelit room full of mystical tomes, dozens of screens, and more than a few empty energy drink cans. Ordinarily one of her many servants would’ve cleared them out, but they’d been just a little busy lately. Sure she had a lot of them, but only a few trusted enough to be in this room, and all of those ones were understandably off doing something important at the moment.
Being the spymaster of the League of Domination was somewhat lonely all things considered, and while she would never dare wish for a menial life that squandered her talents, it was days like today where she understood why several villains faked their own deaths and retired at their prime. She knew where half of those ones were but after three years on the job, she found that even if she needed to pull some strings to try and coax them back into the cowl, she’d actually feel guilty about it.
The massive eye made of silver flame that hovered in front of her blindfolded face rotated along the ring surrounding her head, taking in the massive podium nearby full of all sorts of enchanted stones, scrolls with upright pens digging into their vellum, and even several phones of various models ranging from rotary to smart ones. Almost every single one had a candle lit next to them, their eerie green flames flickering to let her know that one of her top spies had contacted her through the nearby object.
Her teeth ground as she began dreading how long it would take to go through all of them.
A normal day was already a burden only someone of her skills, talents, and expertise could handle. With 20 something members of the head council of the League all demanding information constantly from her2, coordinating with and spying on Overlab and the other sub-departments of the League, maintaining and manipulating their extraterrestrial and extraplanar “allies”, and attempting her own schemes under the noses of her superiors, she was usually stretched thin.
And then Maniacal had gotten himself killed and gotten Baron Zen and Stormfury captured, not to mention stranding Ikor and three other actual useful assets out in the field. Apparently, the Doctor also had never bothered to follow up on the many emails Seer had sent him either, so looks like he took the codes to the Overlab’s secret projects to his grave and she had to pretend not to already know them for at least a week or until one of her superiors told her to cut the pageantry so whoever they assigned could actually take over, but in the meantime she was obligated to deal with almost 40 mad scientists all pissed off at her, including some of her own agents who’d gone native.
Oh, and speaking of those superiors, the meeting with the council had been thoroughly unproductive in every way. Even after they’d finished grilling her for not knowing everything when she’d flat out told Maniacal that his stupid Ascension Machine would create a blindspot three weeks ago and he blocked out all tech surveillance on his own (apparently because 4 years ago, the only evidence of one of his missions was a shaky cam footage by a civilian that missed all the actual action in favor of hovering over an injured Viridian Paladin), this was her fault for not immediately knowing what was going on. And rather than dismissing her once she basically pulled no less than five separate agents from extremely important assignments to appease them, they’d kept her around on the off chance they needed her as they all just kept shouting at each other.
If it weren’t for the infernal contracts I helped them get, I’d have killed half of them by now, she mused internally, fingers running over her runed rings instinctively as she let her traitorous thoughts flow freely, safely behind the mind shielding wards they provided.
She was about to begin casting a few constructs, magical copies of herself, into existence to help her go through the urgent messages when her floating eye fell on one in particular, a blue phone whose adjacent candle was longer than the others.
Her hand flicked through a quick cantrip and pulled a laptop up to her chair, a wire already plugged into its side. There were multiple layers of security routed through her chambers and methods of communication and, while she claimed this was another, she simply had no desire to deal with this on a smaller screen at the moment. She opened up the laptop as the phone floated over to the cord, which came alive like a serpent and lashed forward to connect to the smaller device.
Leaning back in her chair, she motioned at some ritual components to begin arranging themselves to create her simulacrums to deal with the other spies. This one always tended to prove… enlightening.
She opened the screen and quickly inputted a one time use password based off the prompt on the screen. She realized with how easily she could remember the cipher, she’d need to have a new one created soon. It had already been in use for a few weeks now and was well past when she’d prefer to keep it around. She opened up the messenger program on the computer and was instantly greeted with a message.
blue: lol why did u guys kill ur own?
Okay, maybe she’d thought too highly of this one. Perhaps they needed to die.
She quickly finished her spell and over a dozen copies of herself materialized in the air woven from ash and green flame, though all of them were missing her distinctive floating eye brand. They busied themselves with gathering the other objects on the nearby plinth as she grumpily reclined further in her seat.
“Don’t even start with me right now,” she dictated, the words automatically typing themselves on the screen. “I just got out of a 12 HOUR meeting and it wasn’t any of them.”
blue: it was totally thunderer tho.
SeeredSteaks: No, they were fighting magical girls below Tian.3 Solid alibi especially since they managed to get one of the three tablets they’ve been after finally. Not that it stopped Arex from yelling about it for almost 3 hours.
blue: isnt he a conspiracy freak? he still believes in the atlanthean moon theft thing right?4
Over Seer smiled. Okay, so this was the real reason she loved taking messages from this one in particular. In a position like hers, there were very few opportunities to talk shit about her bosses.
SeeredSteaks: Yeah, he’s still trying to get us to approve a mission to either Nautalia or to the Nations Union to kidnap someone to make them tell the “truth”.
blue: lol
blue: it was red lightning tho
Over Seer groaned, the exact same issue that came up in the meeting.
She repeated the statement yet another time, “Almost 30% of all magic is red. If it was an overload from his machine, any magical coloration would taint the color of the resulting lightning. Based on everything we’ve seen, it all points to it being an issue with the containment field ending up breached and the filtering process breaking down. He basically boiled the ambient power he was trying to steal, it fed into a natural storm, his shield failed due to incompatible magic, and boom, crispy doctor.”
Even with just the footage she had access to, as a well versed spell caster it was plain to see what happened. Maintaining wards when you worked with external pools of arcane or primordial power was essential if you didn’t want to immediately get cooked by that energy rushing to fill a waiting vessel. Something about the ability for an object or person to contain power drew magic to them, regardless of if the vessel could handle the full amount headed their way. There was a scientific name for the principle, but most magic users just summed it up as “power seeks a host”.
One of her clones finished up and put the scroll it had in its hands back on the table and snuffed the candle next to it. It crossed its arms and vanished with a pop, and suddenly the memories it had flooded into her. This method was great for managing so many fires at once, but the mental load meant that Over Seer would require almost an hour’s extra sleep for every clone that she created. Well… if you didn’t use some spells to push your exhaustion to your subordinates and siphon some of their own rest from them. She had an entire division of people located in Avalon who had signed a magical contract without realizing it who thought they were in a sleep study all of whom would feel like getting to bed an hour early tonight.
blue: apparently all the magic made it so the library cant figure out anything on his corpse either
blue: wait is he gonna get back up? u guys have that contract
Ah yes, the other thing that the council didn’t like learning about and blamed her for.
SeeredSteaks: Nope. Despite explaining to him so many times, he refused to sign the infernal contract we had drafted up. So unless we can find someone to delve into hell and get him back, that corpse isn’t going anywhere.
Maniacal had been deeply opposed to trusting his soul to the demon the League had contracted for their “backup plan” and had refused multiple times to sign the (literally) damned contract, despite the many explanations Over Seer had to covertly send his way on how the League planned to betray the demon and the steps taken to deal with the chain of “I was expecting you to do that” which would follow as the two continued to work through their backstabs at the moment of truth. Apparently while he accepted that he’d probably be burning for eternity if he did die, regardless of the contract, he’d assured her that he had something in mind to make that irrelevant, scientifically of course. Obviously, it hadn’t worked.
She was about to tease “blue” with more details about that contract since they’d been interested it in the past, betting she could coax some more details out of them with their guard down, before she realized something.
SeeredSteaks: Wait. You said the Library can’t get anything off him either?
The Multiversal Library Of True Knowledge And Enlightenment For The Betterment Of All was nothing to scoff at, even if they rarely gave answers directly when asked. In Victory City, their “branch”, Secret Keeper, had at least two dozen monks amalgamated into themselves, with at least four sages readily available on the surface. If the ward breach really had scrambled most of the lingering traces of magic, there was a good chance most of Over Seer’s spies would be useless here. And some of her best would truly struggle to get anything without revealing themselves in the process.
blue: relax lol
blue: well know more tomorrow. promise. ive got some
Several minutes passed after the message abruptly cut off. Over Seer stared at the screen the whole time growing agitated. A few more clones of hers popped in the mean time, the stories from the various objects on the table flowing into her. One of her cells that she’d hastily relocated during the meeting to appease her superiors reporting that heroes had figured out their espionage due to their hasty retreat. Another confirming that Thunderer had been in Tian personally. A few other various reports played out in her head, none of which could properly distract her from what her spy had been telling her before being cut off. Her clones had given directions to them based off what she would tell them to do in the situation, so there was nothing more she needed to concern herself with for those.
After a few more moments, she cleared her throat to begin to ask what had happened before a symbol popped up to let her know that the other side was typing again.
blue: sorry. had a call i had to take. need to keep being important or this falls apart
blue: anyways ive got someone ready to look at the body tomorrow and they know a few more tricks than even the library does
Over Seer tapped her fingers together. This wasn’t exactly what she needed. She’d been hoping they’d have something more solid than a promise, especially one to outperform Secret Keeper. However, this contact had been reliable so far and they’d proven themselves time and time again.
“Fine,” she responded, the keys tapping to her voice. “But I want to be the first to know whatever you find out. The council wants blood and by this point so do I. If you get a name, feel free to let the other heroes know their name only after you tell me.”
The contact signed off in the affirmative and she closed the laptop and levitated the phone back to its place on the pedestal. Her hands steepled as she thought of the punishments she’d inflict on the fool that dared to challenge the League and ruin her day.
1. Frost Fiend was an ice themed villain who plotted elaborate heists, ransoms, and eventually a threat against the Nations Union with a Polar Bomb. He was thwarted and defeated finally by the Protectors of the Globe who realized that the hidden base he was using at the time was actually in a tropical region that disguised his abnormal heat signatures. Oddly despite always operating with several security forces, mercenaries, and even “minions”, no one else was present at the time of the confrontation, and there were no traces of others living in the facility outside of the large amount of empty rooms that were clearly intended to be living spaces.
2. Based off information gathered from the various hero guilds, it has long been suspected that since as early as the 70’s, the position of Spymaster has been barred from holding a seat on the League of Domination’s head council. Apparently, the actions of Sorcerer Sinister had involved blackmailing most of the council into forcing the League to obey his whims, up until they secretly conspired against him and ended with his capture.
3. The eastern nation of Tian was founded and subsequently ascended sometime around 500 PTE. The Heavenly Emperor allegedly managed to reach heaven through enlightenment in the mountains of his home country whose name has been erased from history and declared that he would bring humanity to the heavens through his own strength. While he only raised the land of Tian with his abilities, it has remained levitating to this day through unknown means, baffling scientists, sages, and sorcerers to this era. The lands below Tian are known to house all sorts of artifacts of power along with strange creatures that guard the land. Due to the dangers posed, multiple eastern nations have treaties to help defend this region to keep the dangers locked in the shadow of the floating nation above it.
4. There is absolutely no evidence that a third moon, nicknamed Wolt, ever existed or that it was stolen by the god Cyses whom the Atlantheans both worship and host. Allegedly, it was said to grant mankind even more strength and the subaquatic people could not benefit from it with all the water between them and it, so this god of the seas took it to enable his favored people to flourish. While originally considered just a myth, it became a heavy conspiracy theory during the turn of the century with some suspecting that it was meant to fuel anti Atlanthean sentiments and some suspecting its spread to be part of a conspiracy by the League of Domination, especially with Arex’s actions to prove it.
