Early Spring Semester, Late evening. The secret underground HQ of the superheroes known as the Infinite Seven.
Around a metal table sit all the members of the team; Dragonfly, winged martial arts master; Cazmonster, devastatingly powerful cyber-werewolf; Wrecking Ball, telekinetic dealer of destruction; The Adept, mystic teleporter and sorcerer in training; White Diamond, wielder of light itself; and the two newest members, last to join the original team, Palisade, bio-suited powerhouse; and Angela, vampire in search of a cause.
The Adept stood at the head of the table, his laptop hooked to a holo-projector, yet another of Steven "Palisade" Chen's wealthy father. The holo-projector currently showed an image of a bald man, a maniacal grin, hovering over the Dragonfly, White Diamond, and the Adept.
"This is threat number one!" The Adept said loudly. "Professor Sampson. He's responsible for living holograms that have caused physical damage multiple times here on campus. And he's openly challenged us. Yet we know almost nothing about him. Until now. Over the break, while he was healing from his run-in with another enemy, Aaron searched the school databases and came up with some interesting information, and a clue as to what might be motivating him."
Aaron stood up. His wounds from the battle with Anti-Man had totally healed, and he was once again in peek physical condition. His mask, not necessary now that his identity was totally public, sat on the table in front of him; he still wore it for the effect, even though most locals knew exactly who was under the it.
"Thanks, Rick. Professor Ebenezer Sampson – yes, that's right. Ebenezer. His parents must have seen the whole villain thing coming. Anyway, Professor Sampson was once a CIU science professor, specializing in dimensional physics. He also had advanced degrees in engineering and, you'll love this, the occult. Sampson had a falling out with several collegues; the reports are vague, but it seemingly had something to do with unethical conduct. Sampson was drummed out of the faculty, and wasn't heard from again. No one else seems to have hired him afterwards, at least not in this country. I did find an obit on Sampson's father, who died later that same year. Seems he left Eben a sizable inheretence. The professor sold his family house, and as far as I can tell, the money's not in any local banks. He just vanished.
"Now it seems Sampson's back, and he's interested in revenge on CIU. And now, because of our intervention, he wants revenge on us as well."
Rick nodded somberly. The others were strangely silent, except Steven Chen, sitting in his chair wearing his normal street clothes. "I say bring it on! There are seven of us now, not five. We can beat up one mad scientist no matter what doomsday device he's created." Cazmonster nodded assent.
Rick spoke next. "We need to be careful here. He's a student of the occult. This fits another piece of the puzzle for me. I've sensed something, a mystical signature each time we've fought these holo-creatures. I didn't know what to make of it, because it was far too weak to be the direct source of the creatures. But now, maybe Sampson has somehow harnessed a mystical device powered by scientific principles, a bastard of the magic and the mundane. If so, he could well be the source of the impending mystical event I gathered the team together to fight."
"Well," Cazmonster said, standing and knocking his small chair away from him like a toy. "Sorry," he said under his breath, the continued on. "We managed to smash these things in the past; they're physical enough. We can take whatever he throws. I say we find this guy, take away whatever toys he's using, and knock him into next week."
Chen reached out an fist-bumped Cazmonster.
"Caz is right, in a way," Rick continued. "We need to find Professor Sampson, and stop him. Preferably before he brings mystical doomsday down on Stevenson.
"How can we do that?" White Diamond asked from her chair between Aaron and Angela. "We don't even know where to being. Aaron and I have spent hours looking that stuff up on the internet, and between school, track, and preparation for college, my time has just become non-existent."
"Wait," Wrecking Ball said. "Let's put the peices on the table. We know Sampson is a scientist. We suspect he's using scientific devices to create his monsters. Rick can barely sense the magic of his creatures, which means they're not powered by magic. That means he has to be drawing energy from somewhere. And, because he's out to get us and the University, I'd say it's probably somewhere close by. It either has to be a source of power he's created illegally, in which case it should be easy to detect, or he's drawing power from the normal grid, in which case we should be able to track it by checking the power company's data."
"Good thinking, Tim," Rick agreed. "Let's start looking along those lines."
It was several days before the search bore any fruit. Aaron was now living the celebrity life along with Caz and Rick. Most of the people in Langley were pretty relaxed about the whole thing, but whenever they went anywere, even to class, someone would always come up and ask for an autograph, or thank them for saving so and so, or ask their help getting even with an ex-boyfriend.
Aaron tried to take it all in stride, but it was getting a littledistracting. And there was absolutely no way he and Emily could go out in public anywhere near Stevenson. Occasionally, they would sneak out of town on the train, but more and more, they just did things separately.
To be fair, Emily was deep in her college preperations, and Aaron was spending more and more of his time on computer systems, trying to find signs of power draining off the grid. So far, all he had come across was evidence of their own illicit use of power to run their secret HQ. Caz(monster) and Steven Chen were the other members of the computer team, searching every database, website, and darkweb site they could find to get information about power usage.
Meanwhile, Angela poked around in a different way. She'd gotten a job at the local power company, and was asking some tough questions in a very mesmerizing manner. Rick often provided a gate so the computer team could physically infiltrate an office to hack a database that wasn't online, often at the direction of Angela.
Tim O'Malley, AKA Wrecking Ball, was largely left out of the operation, though he did get a chance to do several fly-over recons using special cameras capable of detecting and recording exitensive power use (another gift from Chen's father).
Despite all their efforts, the Infinite Seven, as they had now named themselves, failed to find Professor Sampson. It wasn't until he used the machine again, this time to create an army of alien-like killers, that they actually found him. And it was pure coincidence that Emily Fine, Stevenson Highschool senior who spent more time these days sending out applications for college than fighting crime as White Diamond, was the first to become involved.
It was mid-April. Other than looking for Sampson and solving the odd crime on the CIU campus, the Infinite Seven didn't have a lot of heroing to do. Then, one school day, while Emily was at the CIU library working on her final report (the CIU library had millions more books than Stevenson High's), she heard a ruckus on the street outside. At first, she could hardly believe her eyes, and thought it might be a fraternety stunt or some bizaar parade. After the shooting started, she figured out it was real very quickly. Padding for her mask, she realized she'd left it at home. There was little she could do to stop the chaos outside, but there was one weapon she had in her arsenal that she had brought. Her phone.
"Rick, this is Emily. You need to meet me on floor 6 of Limner library, right now. I need a ride...
No comments:
Post a Comment