As grateful as I am (and especially in today's economy) to have a decently paying and steady job, there are times when I really wish I could win the lottery, and just QUIT. Because the mental stress and hassles is really starting to drive me mad.
Anyway...
As usual, discussions go
here.
Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite
*******
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE II: COURTSHIP AND CRIME FIGHTING
Chapter Two - It's Only Just Beginning
"So what now?" Statesman asked Raymond as he came back into the portal chamber, looking at the disarmed bomb with no small amount of trepidation. "Is it safe to move that thing?"
"At this point, probably, and better to have it away from here, at any rate," Raymond replied, rubbing his eyes tiredly. "We'll take it with us back to HQ and I'll go over it there." He got to his feet and stretched, trying to ease the adrenaline-fueled tension out of his muscles, then pulled on his helmet as the rest of the Phalanx re-entered the chamber.
Heading back up the elevator and through the D.A.T.A. offices, he found the Longbow officer and the ranking PPD members issuing orders to their subordinates. It was agreed that Longbow and the PPD would supply extra security at City Hall for the next week or so, while alerts were issued to other major facilities throughout the city. Several heroes also agreed to provide some extra security, or, as needed, additional manpower for investigative purposes.
For a moment, Raymond hung back to watch the activity outside. Even at four in the morning, there was still a lot going on - proof that heroism never slept.
"Sir!"
He turned to see the members of the PPD bomb squad approaching, carrying a large and empty container.
"Great, thanks. I was just about to come find you guys to ask for something to transport that bomb in."
"Sorry we weren't much help," one of the younger bomb squad detectives said apologetically, but Raymond waved away his remark.
"Don't feel bad, you did the right thing. Listen, we're going to take the bomb back to my lab and run it through a few forensics tests. I'll then compile the data and send it on to you guys and you can run it through your own records."
The next ninety minutes saw the Phalanx, the PPD, and Longbow dealing with the paper trail for the evidence. Everything had to be recorded - the security tapes of City Hall and the D.A.T.A. offices, the contact procedures for calling in the PPD, Longbow, and then the Phalanx, interviewing anyone who might be able to provide information about the attempted bombing, and detailing the handling of evidence.
Behind his helmet, Raymond halfheartedly smiled to himself.
On cop shows and cartoons, they make this part look so easy. If only they knew... Still, when it came to justice, such care was needed - all it took was one misstep in the judicial procedures and a savvy lawyer could get even the worst villain off on a technicality. For his part, considering what this bomb could have done, Raymond had no intention of letting that happen if he could help it, so he swallowed his exhaustion and pressed on.
Finally, at close to six a.m., matters were finally under control, the bomb carefully sealed away in its container for transport, and the Phalanx allowed to leave. Heading back to their main headquarters in Galaxy City, the five heroes were quiet, and Raymond guessed that they were either mulling over the current problem, or more likely too tired to make conversation.
And God, I just want to get some sleep, he groaned to himself during the quick flight from Atlas Park. The couple of hours' rest that he'd managed to get at Sorina's wasn't nearly enough for him. As he thought of her, he then debated calling her to tell her what was going on, but on the chance that she might have gone back to sleep, he chose to wait and call her later.
No sense waking her up now without more details to share.
Upon arriving at headquarters, Raymond took the bomb containment unit to his lab, but as he started unpacking it on his workbench, Sister Psyche wandered into the lab after him.
"You know, Ray, you should really get some rest first."
"I'm fine," he protested, although the effect was slightly ruined by his barely stifled yawn.
She leaned against the doorjamb, watching him as he pulled off his helmet to massage some of the tension from the back of his neck. "You're not fine, you look half dead. And especially after everything that happened yesterday, you need to get some sleep."
While Raymond rummaged through one of his shelves, grabbed a selection of tools, and pulled up a stool to his workbench, Sister Psyche quietly studied him.
"If you don't mind me asking, how come you didn't bring Dr. Tavarisch along this morning?"
Raymond's hands stilled, but he didn't turn around.
"It's actually something I meant to talk to all of you about later today," he admitted after a pause. "But... Sorina and I agreed to keep our personal and professional lives separate."
"Is that what you want?" Sister Psyche asked softly.
"It's what we need to do," he replied, finally turning to look at her. "When we were in the War Zone, Shalice, I realized I couldn't stand to see her in harm's way. It's not because I don't think she can take care of herself, I just... I just don't think I could handle seeing her get hurt."
"And I gather she feels the same way," Sister Psyche mused, and Raymond nodded. "I also gather something happened in the War Zone between you."
"Yeah, but... right now I'd rather not discuss it. Later though, I will." He met her calm green eyes. "And I mean that, Shalice. Your advice would mean a lot to me on the matter, but now's not the time." He waved one gauntlet-covered hand at the bomb. "I still have to deal with this."
"YOU have to get some sleep," she said firmly. "You're flesh and blood again, Ray. Get a few winks and
then deal with this. The bomb can wait, and God forbid another crisis comes up, you need to be rested."
He finally gave her a wry smile. "Are you always this pushy?"
"That depends on whether you're asking Justin that question or not," she admitted. Then she sobered slightly. "Or are there dreams that you'd rather not be dealing with right now?"
Raymond shook his head. "No, nothing like that. But you win. An hour."
"Four," she insisted.
"Two," he countered, but Sister Psyche shook her head.
"Four hours. No less. I'll tell the others to stay out of your hair."
Raymond ruefully rubbed his bare scalp. "Not that that's much of an issue."
Sister Psyche rolled her eyes at him, pointed at the cot, and then strolled out of the lab, closing the door behind her.
Grinning slightly, he disengaged his armor, and thirty seconds later it was carefully stashed away in its containment tube. Half-stretching, half-falling onto the narrow cot he kept in his lab, he yawned and rolled onto his side to stare at the wall. It wasn't the most comfortable place to sleep, especially compared to his own bed or Sorina's, he mused, but he was almost too exhausted to care.
For a few minutes, his brain was still busily engaged, going over clues and reliving moments of disassembling the bomb, plus going over his conversation with Sister Psyche, but with a grunt, he forcibly shoved all concerns out of his mind, rolled onto his other side, and promptly fell asleep.
*****
Four and a half hours later, he slowly emerged from sleep, then groaned and stretched before covering his face with his pillow. After enjoying a dream where he had been spending some quiet time with Sorina, waking up alone in his lab with a crick in his neck and eyes full of sleep dust was not his idea of enjoyment.
"Damn it," he said, his voice muffled. "I hate days that start off like this."
A second later, a loud banging on the door to his lab so startled him that he fell off the cot and landed on the floor with a curse, just as Steve zoomed in, a pot of coffee in one hand and a plate covered with plastic wrap in the other.
"Rise and shine, Oppenheimer. Psyche said you'd probably need this."
"You son of a-"
"Come on, get it while it's still hot." While Raymond picked himself up off the floor, swearing and groaning, Steve vanished in a blur and then re-appeared, heading straight toward the bank of computers that lined one wall of the lab. "Besides, we've gotten some info from the forensic teams at City Hall, and you'll wanna see it."
"Lemme wash my face and finish waking up," Raymond muttered, ducking out of the lab and down the hallway toward one of the HQ's bathrooms. He wished he had the time to shower and shave, but for now it could wait. Instead, he turned the sink taps to 'freezing', and splashed water on his face and the back of his neck to help wake him up. After a minute or so, he felt reasonably more alert, and he had to admit that the nap had helped.
"Okay, so what's the deal?" he asked as he re-entered his lab, detouring to the lab table to pour himself a cup of coffee. Looking at the plate, he saw that apparently the Phalanx had ordered in from one of the delicatessens near HQ. "And what kind of sandwich?"
"Reuben, though why you insist on corrupting it with sourdough instead of rye is still a mystery to me. I guess you can take the geek out of San Francisco, but you can't take San Francisco out of the geek."
"Force of habit from Stanford, and anything that keeps you from stealing my food has to be a bonus," Raymond replied, peeling back the plastic wrap and picking up the sandwich. "All right, what did I miss while I was asleep?"
The smell of the food made him realize just how hungry he was, and he finished half the sandwich while gulping down coffee between bites. While he ate, Steve talked.
"The press has been all over this since the story broke in the morning editions. Over a dozen different groups have supposedly claimed responsibility, but none were able to provide good enough details to really verify to who it might have been. Meanwhile, States-" Steve jabbed one thumb toward the door of the lab. "-has been doing what he can to keep the newshounds off our doorstep, with varying degrees of success."
"Terrific," Raymond remarked, swallowing another mouthful of sandwich. "How's the public mood?"
Steve looked thoughtful. "Well, mixed, I'd say. On the one hand, no lives were lost, we saved the day, hooray for our side. On the other hand, the fact that someone managed to almost pull a fast one has people worried. Requests for additional security are coming in from all over the city."
Raymond sighed to himself. So much for any hope of enjoying a little downtime with Sorina after everything that had happened recently. Admittedly, though, with the bomb scare, it was a good bet that the Star Patrol would be seeing some additional action as well. Then he realized Steve was talking again.
"And we also just got an uplink from the security team at D.A.T.A., they finally finished copying their security cam feeds and sent us over the relevant segments."
Finishing off the last of his sandwich, Raymond poured himself another cup of coffee and took a seat in front of his main computer terminal. "All right, let's take a look."
Five of the camera feeds were from the main portal chamber beneath D.A.T.A., two were of D.A.T.A.'s main office, and three more of the main lobby of City Hall. As the camera footage appeared on the monitors, they saw that all of them had the same time stamp - approximately three in the afternoon, the day before.
"Why a Sunday?" Steve wondered aloud, watching the playback.
"Not as many people there," Raymond replied, his eyes moving from one monitor to another. "Which could work both ways, I suppose. On the one hand, fewer people there to notice you. On the other hand, fewer people there to serve as a distraction, either."
Togther they watched the monitor feeds, focusing primarily on the ones in the portal chamber until at 3:42pm, they both saw a faint flicker of movement in the area where they had later discovered the bomb.
"There," Raymond murmured, freezing the playback. "So at 3:42, whoever it is actually gets to the portal."
Steve was already going back and rewatching the other feeds at superspeed, working in reverse to see when the intruders might have entered the building, but even after going back fifteen minutes, he found nothing. With a grunt, he switched it back to normal play. "Nothing. It's possible that whoever it was teleported in there."
"Invisible teleportation? It's possible, but you'd then be putting out energy on two fronts instead of just one," Raymond mused, studying the screens. "I suppose we could ask them if they detected any abnormal energy spikes or signatures in that timeframe, but..."
He shrugged. "It'd be a damn inefficient way to go about it. No, whoever got this thing inside either teleported in exactly at 3:42, or entered the building just before then."
The footage continued to play on the monitor, with the two heroes occasionally pausing the playback to enhance an image, double-check it, or try to get another angle of view, with no success.
Then Raymond heard Steve draw in a sharp breath, his eyes staring at one of the cameras positioned inside the D.A.T.A. office facing the portal access elevator.
"Steve?" He glanced up at his roommate. "What is it?"
"Go back on that one..." Steve pointed to the monitor. "But take it down to half-speed."
Raymond rewound the footage and then played it back, wondering what had caught Steve's eye.
Nothing.
He rewound it again and slowed it this time to one-quarter speed, but it still wasn't enough.
So he shifted to frame-by-frame progression, manually clicking forward one frame at a time.
Then they both saw it - in the space of a single heartbeat, a shadowy figure had materialized in front of the laser identification system.
"Quick, advance that other footage to the same frame," Raymond snapped, but Steve was already ahead of him, this time using the camera feed that was mounted on top of the elevator facing the laser barrier. Within moments, they had an alternate view of the individual.
"Now, take both feeds forward frame by frame," Steve said, and Raymond advanced the footage one frame at a time. In the next frame, the figure seemed to go translucent. In the next two frames, it moved forward through the laser barrier. Three frames after that, it had reached the elevator door. Then it passed through the still-closed door and disappeared.
"What the-" Steve's mouth was slightly open.
"Of course," Raymond said, his voice betraying his frustration. "Invisibility doesn't mean intangibility - he had to disable his shroud to shift out of phase just enough to clear the barrier. That couldn't have been more a fifth of a second." He glanced up at Steve. "If you hadn't have caught that, we might never have noticed."
Turning back to the keyboard, he backed up to the initial frame where the intruder had appeared, then began zooming in on the image, sharpening it to bring it into focus. However, even zoomed in, the figure seemed to still be shrouded in some kind of darkness, though it was clear that the figure was tall, powerfully built, and judging by what they could see of its build, presumably male.
"What about downstairs?" Steve asked, pointing to the other monitors while still staring at the close-up of the intruder. "If he went intangible, he could just drop down the inside of the elevator shaft."
Raymond brought up the five camera feeds from the portal room, then found one that gave a decent angle on the elevators. Again advancing the footage frame by frame, soon the intruder appeared to 'ghost' out from the closed doors, then vanished again.
"So that's when he got in, but I didn't see him carrying the bomb." Raymond rubbed his eyes and looked again, but still nothing, so he continued to advance the footage, this time keeping his eyes focused on where the bomb had appeared.
"There!" Steve said, pointing, and Raymond saw what almost looked like two lens flares on the screen, except that in the next few frames, they brightened, then dimmed, and disappeared, with the bomb now in place.
"The bomb was teleported in, and the intruder teleported out," Raymond said slowly, studying the frozen image. "Two nearly simultaneous transmissions - one indicating the saboteur's location. Those coordinates are used first to start his retrieval, and once his teleportation is begun, a second is started to send the bomb directly to those coordinates."
"Back up three frames," Steve said, his voice sounding strained, and Raymond glanced sharply up at him to see that the blood had drained from his friend's face.
"What the
hell-"
Steve shook his head fiercely, staring at the screen. "Do it."
Raymond backed it up to where the second lens flare had appeared.
"Now zoom it in again."
He did, and this time, he saw what Steve had seen. The briefest image of a face on the intruder... if it could be called a face.
Snarling teeth in an almost skull-like, animalistic visage glared back at him out of the darkness that surrounded the rest of the intruder's body.
"That's him..." Steve whispered, one hand unconsciously drifting to his ribcage and looking as though he were staring at his worst nightmare.
"Who?"
"The one who almost killed me."
To be continued...
Lol, BAB tweeted about my article on MMOsite (here) about why CoH should be worried about CO. It appears he missed the previous article on why I think CoH will hold its own just fine though (linked in my signature).
