Side Dish #4

Anaand, Billy. 24

Anthon, Robert. 31

Gretson, Stephanie. 22

Major, Jeff. 44

W5

Roth, Cavan. 37

Roth, Bethanie. 36

Roth, Jerry. 12

Zac, Clarke. 67

SW4

Glen, Gr-

 

“Whatcha reading there stud?”

 

“Hm?” mumbled Maxwell, looking up from his tablet. The voice had come from his friend, coworker, and sometimes-lover Steph Watson. Currently she was playing up the lover bit, standing at the entrance to his penthouse’s kitchen in nothing but panties and a red apron that complemented her cocoa colored skin. Unprofessional to date a coworker? Maybe. But they weren’t exactly dating. More like a friends with benefits situation. In their line of work you didn’t get much opportunity for relationships, and those you did make tended to be fleeting, so you didn’t pass up a good thing when it happened.

 

“Oh nothing, just the morning paper,” Maxwell answered.

“You still read that thing? Well put it away for now, I made breakfast.”

“You can cook?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“For shame. I slave over a hot toaster and rehydrator and you question my skills?”

Maxwell chuckled and put down the tablet, following her into the kitchen, “How could I have ever doubted?”

“Damn right.”

 

Despite their teasing, Steph really could do a lot with a little, and they both tucked in with gusto. The rehydrated eggs were great, and whatever she had done to the bacon was divine (the real stuff, one of the few luxuries Maxwell accepted and even insisted upon). He tried to pester her into telling him how she cooked it, but she only responded with: “Nuh-uh, need to keep you on the hook.”

 

“Already there babe, already there.”

 

They ate, and flirted, and tried somewhat successfully to avoid work-talk. Right up until Maxwell’s earpiece beeped an alarm (he had forgotten to take it out last night, a frequent occurrence). Maxwell automatically lifted his hand to his ear and pressed the device in the correct way to receive communications, while Steph scrambled to grab her earpiece off the kitchen counter where she had left it.

 

Maxwell and Steph listened to an incoming report from Central, scarfing down the last bites of food before confirming that they were on their way. They left the dishes on the counter and ran for the elevators at the back of Maxwell’s penthouse suite, not bothering to dress. They grabbed separate elevators, slapping hands down on the keypads to register their fingerprints and unlock the doors. Maxwell snuck one final glance at the vision of Steph in just panties before he entered the elevator, and they both laughed when he saw she was checking him out too.

 

But then he entered the elevator and the doors closed, his expression quickly becoming neutral as his mind focused on the business at hand. He placed his hand on another (slightly more innocuous) pad, and said, “Guardian, dress protocol, rooftop.” A robotic woman’s voice answered, “The Guardian, recognized,” and the elevator ascended to the top floor of the Central heroes headquarters. Panels eventually opened, and pieces of his costume folded out on robotic arms that helped him dress in the skin tight material. Soon he was wearing his blue and white costume, with the emblem of Fortress City across his back. The small blue domino mask was the last piece, and he put it on himself. If it were up to him he wouldn’t have ever bothered with a mask; he’d once heard his father say “I can’t trust a man whose face I can’t see,” and those words had stuck with him. But, everyone from the marketing department, to military advisors, to lawyers, to retired capes had told him to put on a damned mask. That last one had been the real clincher, so Maxwell had settled on a thin blue domino mask that barely covered his eyes. He had guessed (correctly) that keeping a secret identity truly secret wasn’t really possible without extreme measures anyways (which he didn’t want to bother with), and instead he wanted to present an image that people could trust. It was important to him.

 

But he had to admit, the mask looked pretty darn good on him.

 

The elevator reached the top floor and the door opened, exiting into a reinforced observation room disguised as a rooftop electrical closet/maintenance shed. Next to him a second elevator opened, and out stepped the Silver Star.

 

Steph Watson to him.

 

Her costume was a bit more armored than his, looking more like one of those super compact astronaut suits that tinkers loved to make (he was half convinced the nerds made them like that just to see curves on the lady astronauts, an observation Steph had rolled her eyes at). The fact that her mask was also a full helmet with an opaque faceplate, and her power had her floating a foot off the ground, completed the impression that she should be bouncing around a moon somewhere.

 

“You ready to fly?” Steph asked, her voice slightly digitized by the helmet.

“Always.”

 

They stepped out onto the roof, and Maxwell released his power. His was one of those powers that never really turned off, he could only suppress it. Luckily suppressing it wasn’t difficult, and even if he didn’t it rarely caused problems. Now it covered him like a second skin, and with a thought he went from ‘standing still’ to ‘upwards, thirty-five degree tilt, five mph.’

 

Vector control, the scientists had called it. Anything that came within a short distance of himself he could control the vector of, including himself. At this moment, he used it to fly. Easily his favorite part. He rose up into the sky, which today was cloudless if still a bit dark; the sun had barely started to rise into the sky, and several stars still shown.

 

“What kind of villain starts shit at six a.m. on a Sunday?” asked Steph, floating up to his side.

“I know right? Should be illegal.”

 

She laughed, and they took off in the direction Central command had indicated. While both of them were technically part of Central Sector’s hero team, things rarely went wrong in Central itself. It was mostly government facilities, and between the military police, private security companies, and the dozens of heroes who might be in Central at any one moment, no villain in their right mind would cause trouble there. The few not in their right mind who tried got put down rather quickly. As such, Maxwell tended to have his status marked as available to respond to the surrounding sectors instead, which was where he and Steph were headed now. The inner sectors were much smaller than the outer ones due to Fortress City’s design, but it still took five minutes of flight to reach S2, where a disturbance had been reported at a construction site.

 

The site in question was the top of a skyscraper, where a super brawl last year had sheared off the top couple floors. Maxwell remembered helping with clean-up for hours after that incident, but luckily no one had died. Now the half-reconstructed floors and support beams stood like an exposed bone from a wound. Work on the building had stopped part-way for one reason or another, and probably wouldn’t restart until several months after Odd Summer.

 

Of course, the large robot that was currently dismantling the work done so far certainly wasn’t helping things. It was twenty feet tall, with a cockpit that looked stolen from a bulldozer set into the chest. In fact, all of its parts looked like they were stolen from construction machines, making the mech seem like it had transformed from a bulldozer or earth mover not seconds ago. As Maxwell and Steph watched, the mech’s right hand reached out and (in a strangely calm manner) knocked down a cement wall, before stacking the rubble onto a pile to the side.

 

“What in the world is going on here?” muttered Steph.

“Not sure, but if he’s trying to steal materials he’s not being very subtle about it.”

“I don’t think he’s a tinker on a budget. See the way the joints move? There’s not enough supporting mechanisms.”

 

Maxwell took a better look at the mechanics of the mech. Steph was right, beyond a few moving hydraulics to complete the look, the mech might as well have been moving by magic. That meant it wasn’t a tinker device, or even a gizmo. It was a construct, animated only by its owner’s power. But if that was the case, why steal materials? Theft was the only reason he could think of for the systematic dismantling he was witnessing.

 

Maxwell and Steph circled the mech for a while, to gather information and hash out a plan. Then Maxwell approached cautiously and tried to address the pilot, who was semi-visible through the tinted window of the cockpit. From what Maxwell could see it was a guy in army fatigues.

 

“Sir, I’m a licensed Fortress City hero. I’m gonna have to ask you to exit the vehicle.”

“Buzz off,” came the reply. Not encouraging, but better than nothing at all.

“Sir, the destruction of Fortress City infrastructure is a felony offense. If you don’t cease and desist now, I am obligated to use-”

Maxwell didn’t get to finish his sentence, because the mech had swung one of its bulky arms at him. His power activated automatically, and deflected the swing straight up and away from him.

“Force it is then.”

 

Maxwell rocketed up and punched the arm that had taken a swing at him, ramping up his power as he made contact. He tried to rip the mechanical arm from its socket by sending it straight up on an even faster vector, but the joint held, and the entire mech went up a few feet before gravity protested, pulling it back down with a roof-shaking crunch. Definitely a construct of some kind, a normal machine would never have withstood the strain.

 

The mech’s second arm came at him, this one with two dirt excavator shovels giving it a ‘claw’ for a hand. It tried to clamp down on his leg, but the mech’s feet were suddenly pulled out from under it, and it crashed to its knees. Steph had entered the fight, and was using her telekinesis to restrain the construct. It struggled on hands and knees, but couldn’t stand back up with the Silver Star focused on it. Not surprising; while technically she was a ‘normal’ telekinetic, Steph was powerful, and Maxwell had personally seen her toss dump trucks like hacky sacks. Maxwell used the opportunity to get at the cockpit of the mech, and with a touch the door flew open, and nearly off its hinges.

 

“Stop! Stop! You don’t understand,” yelled the pilot. He was an older man, much older than Maxwell had expected. Once upon a time the man must have been very fit, his muscles still taunt under weather blasted skin, but now his army fatigues (real ones, threadbare and faded) hung loose on his bony frame. Scars criss-crossed his skin, including a particularly nasty one that came down from his right temple and landed somewhere in his bushy white beard. Around his neck was a set of dog tags (Panama tags, good lord), but what really gave Maxwell pause were the man’s eyes; a brilliant winter blue, they were full of tears, and the man had obviously been in distress for quite some time if the streaks on his face were anything to go by.

 

“I can’t let them erase him!” yelled the aging veteran.

“Sir please, I’m willing to listen but you have to disembar-”

“HE WAS MY SON!”

 

The old soldier swung at him, giant robot forgotten. Maxwell’s power activated and brought the flying fist to a gentle standstill, and the next punch, and the next. Eventually the punches ceased, and the soldier practically deflated in front of Maxwell as his willpower finally broke. He sank back onto the pilot seat and dropped his face into his hands, weeping openly. Once Steph realized the fight was over she joined Maxwell, and together they helped get the old man down out of the construct. A few minutes later Central sent a skimmer to pick up the man, which gave Steph and Maxwell breathing room to discuss what had happened.

 

“He said this was about his son?” asked Steph.

“Apparently so, which makes it strange that he’d decide to dismantle a construction site.”

“Maybe his son died in whatever caused this?”

“No, no one died in this one. This was the one where Piffle and his group tried to set up that mind-control tower that didn’t work. Happened last year.”

“Oh right, that one you talk about all the time. That was here?”

“Yeah, I remember it because no one died and-”

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“-you were stuck cleaning up the whole afternoon, even after the sector head congratulated you. You may have mentioned it,” finished Steph.

“Heh. Yes, I may have mentioned it,” his smile faded a bit, “which raises the question again: why’d he target this place? Obviously it was personal.”

Steph tilted her head in thought, “You don’t suppose… his son is Piffle?”

Maxwell raised his eyebrows, “I… suppose he could have been. Piffle got life for this incident. Most parents wouldn’t be happy about that, even if their kid deserved it.” The idea didn’t really mesh in Maxwell’s head though. A conniving sociopath like Piffle being the son of that old veteran? It didn’t fit.

“Tell you what,” said Steph, “I think I’ll follow the skimmer in, and maybe I’ll get the chance to ask him.”

“You sure? I could go.”

“Nah, I can already see you twitching to get on with patrol. Maybe I can convince them to go easy on the old guy while I’m at it; it’s not like he hurt anyone. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

“Thanks Silvy, I appreciate it,” said Maxwell, using his work nickname for her.

 

They split up, and Maxwell headed out on patrol. He usually flew along the outside edge of the first ‘ring’ of sectors; close enough to reach Central sector inside five minutes while skimming over as many sectors as he could. But, since he was already out in the second ring he decided to straddle the line between the second ring of sectors and the third. Technically speaking he didn’t need to be doing patrols outside his assigned sector, but while Central was a bit bigger than the surrounding sectors due to being the center of the city, it wasn’t worth it to patrol there; nothing ever happened, and if it did they’d call him directly. In fact, if Odd Summer wasn’t active the inner sectors tended to be rather dead from a crime standpoint. Oh it still happened, but patrolling was a waste of time then. It had always irked him that as he got promoted they kept moving him inward towards Central. On one hand it gave him more resources and a better location to intercept major threats to the city, but when those disasters weren’t happening it left him with too much time on his hands. So much so, that some of the other teams had complained about having the ‘big guy’ looking over their shoulders all the time.

 

Until Odd Summer rolled around. Then having a flying bruiser around (who could reach the surrounding sectors in less than ten minutes) was suddenly on everyone’s wishlist.

 

He patrolled for the rest of the morning, cruising at a leisurely fifty mph. The street he followed marked the switch from the second ring to the third one, and if he followed its gentle curve he’d eventually make a complete lap of the second ring. He wondered how many laps he’d be able to make before something happened?

 

The answer was two. Then he got to witness a car suddenly blur, ghosting through the stalled traffic in front of it in a burst of speed, before slamming on the brakes and skidding out, eventually fishtailing into a traffic light pole. He was there in seconds, pressing his communicator once just to inform that he was occupied with an incident.

 

He approached cautiously, but once he had eyes on the driver he hurried to get to her. She was a middle-aged woman in a business suit, and was gripping the steering wheel in a death grip while staring out of the front of her car with wide eyes. Obviously she hadn’t expected the sudden power display. He tapped on the window to get her attention, making sure that he had on his most winning smile, the one Steph called his ‘Boyscout smile’. The woman’s eyes opened even wider, if that were possible, and she hurriedly fumbled for the button to lower the window.

 

“Oh my god, I’m sorry. Oh my god. I didn’t, I didn’t mean to! I was just late for work. You’re the Guardian! Oh my god, the Guardian. I’m so so sorry. I… I don’t…”

“Calm down ma’am. Deep breaths. You aren’t in trouble, and no one was hurt.”