11: Railroading

“This is stupid!”

“Lanka…” Jamie trailed off at the back of the car. “Calm down.”

Ryan listened to their bickering while peeking through his car’s window. Dynamis’ Star Studios—which won a prize for name originality—spanned roughly two and a half square kilometers of surface, located east of New Rome. They had an entire open park dedicated to them and roughly seven warehouses. From afar, Ryan noticed the staff moving cardboard cutouts, interns carrying coffee to their superiors, and stuntmen prepping themselves. The studios only had one checkpoint entrance, and few guards; they clearly didn’t expect an attack.

Still, the group had parked outside the studio’s confines, unable to find a path inside without security cameras in the way. Ki-jung napped with her head against her boyfriend’s shoulder, her eyes closed. While the group remained at safe distance from the studios, she had sent her rats to do scouting work.

From what Ryan understood, Chitter’s enhanced rat family acted as relays, allowing her to control a swarm of vermin over a large area. Ryan suspected that instead of true telepathy, which was a Blue power, Chitter physically modified her rats into an extension of her own nervous system. On one hand, it meant destroying her main rats would cancel her power for a time, but on the other hand, her vermin familiars could act independently without her direct input.

“I mean, why would we risk ourselves fighting Wyvern, aka the dragon shapeshifter who can take on the Boss, so he,” Lanka pointed an accusing finger at Ryan, who made an offended pose, “can earn himself a personal favor?”

“Because Vulcan wants it, and she’s one of the Capos,” Jamie replied, “and with luck, we won’t have to face her. I doubt she has time for actor work.”

“What happens if you’re wrong? None of us can take her on!”

Thing was, Ryan had a bad feeling too.

He couldn’t explain it, but the courier had developed a strong intuition over his various loops. And right now, his sixth sense warned him of danger, of someone watching him. Yet their current location should be a blind spot for the security cameras.

He should install a radar in his car.

A bit distraught, Ryan put on the radio and activated the special feature, hoping to find good old-school music to drown out the noise. “—in other news, the Roman Republic is still under curfew, after Gaius Julius Caesar’s assassination—”

Again with Caesar? It had been two thousand years! “What news channel is that?” Jamie asked, curious. “I don’t recognize the speaker.”

“It’s my Chronoradio,” Ryan explained, changing the channel. “It listens to channels across space and time. But for some reason, it usually defaults to the Roman Republic era.”

“You should work on your stories, blabbermouth,” Lanka taunted him. “They didn’t have radios two thousand years ago.”

“In one version of the past, they did.”

“You can’t have multiple versions of the past.”

Ryan looked at her with a deadpan look. It was wasted effort with his mask on, but still. “That’s not how time works,” he said, with the same tone as an adult talking to a petulant child.

“Fuck you, Einstein.”

“Whenever you want,” Ryan replied, before finally finding the Post-Apocalyptic Blues channel. Ki-jung chose this moment to wake up.

“So?” Jamie asked her.

“Wyvern isn’t present,” she said, scratching her neck. “Someone’s filling in for her.”

“See, I knew she didn’t do her own stunts,” Jamie told Lanka, vindicated. “She’s probably too busy with fieldwork.”

“There’s no guarantee she won’t fly in after somebody calls the alarm,” she replied, opening the window and lighting a cigarette.

“The bad news, however, is that Wardrobe replaces her for the stunts,” Ki-jung continued, “and Atom Cat is there too.”

Jamie didn’t sound concerned about Wardrobe, but instantly bristled when she mentioned the other Genome. “Wardrobe gains power based on her costume, right?” Ryan asked, trying to stir up his memory.

“If she dresses as a vampire she drinks blood and burns in the sun, if she dresses as Wyvern, then she can fly.” Ki-jung nodded. “It’s a very weak version of the real thing, so even if she dresses like Augustus you can still hurt her, and the effect lasts only as long as her clothes are relatively intact.”

“Yellow Genomes are bullshit,” Lanka complained.

“I can understand Wardrobe’s presence, but Atom Cat?” Jamie asked his girlfriend.

“He’s doing a guest appearance in the movie,” she replied, showing concern. “Do we abort?”

“Abort?” Ryan turned his head around. “Why abort? He’s that powerful?”

“Atom Cat is… was, one of us,” Jamie said.

“He’s a spy?” Ryan asked. “Like James Bond?”

“No. It’s complicated.” Jamie joined his fingers, trying to find the right words. “He’s having a teenage rebellion phase, but he’ll come back into the fold, eventually. His parents are part of Augustus’ inner circle, and we’ve been explicitly forbidden from endangering him in any way.”

“Don’t let him touch you, blabbermouth,” Lanka said, “or you go boom.”

“He can transform anything into a bomb, but only with direct skin contact,” Ki-jung added.

“Interesting,” Ryan lied, before asking the really important question to Ki-jung. “CGI, special effects, or stop motion?”

“They use CGI.”

The courier put his head on the steering wheel, mourning the loss of cinema’s golden age.

“So what do we do?” Lanka asked Jamie. “We go in gun blazing, make a ruckus, and then bolt away?”

“No,” Jamie replied, turning to his girlfriend. “Here’s what we’ll do. You flood the studios with rats from afar, make a ruckus, then we immediately drive away.”

Ryan immediately understood the obvious flaw in this plan. “Wait, we don’t fight anyone?”

“No.”

“Betrayal. Betrayal!” the courier pointed a finger at Jamie. “You can’t do this to me!”

“I won’t let you get in a firefight with Atom Cat, Quicksave,” Jamie replied. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want any trouble on that front.”

“You ask too much!” the courier said, his fellow Genome sighing in defeat. “You’re killing me, Jamie! You’re killing me!”

“You’ll live through it.” The swordsman shrugged, before turning to Ki-jung. “So?”

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“I’m your girl,” she said, falling asleep. Ryan turned to Lanka for support, but she simply looked out of the window, finishing her cigarette. He couldn’t blame them since they weren’t immortal, but damn, it sucked all the fun out of this mission.

As minutes passed, Ryan noticed agitation near the studio. People getting out of the warehouses, screaming.

Then they came crawling.

Hordes of thousands of black and brown rats. They escaped from the warehouses, breaking windows under their sheer weight. There were so many of them, that the rodents had to climb on one another to advance, forming waves and walls of fur.

Ryan almost felt pity for the poor Dynamis trainees, confronted with this terror while they toiled without any hope for a paycheck. Obviously, panic spread all around the area, the staff fleeing in all directions, coffee cups being spilled, guards desperately trying to shoot the rodents…

“My, my…” Ryan whistled. “This city has a rat problem..”

“That should satisfy Vulcan,” Jamie chuckled. “Now, let’s go home before the Private Security arrives.”

The courier couldn’t agree more, especially since he still felt uneasy.

Ryan pushed the accelerator pedal, abandoning the vermin-infested studio for the city’s broad lanes. As he drove all the way to the group’s shared house, he almost hoped for Wyvern to come from the skies, or Atom Cat to track them down on a motorcycle for an epic car chase. Or even the Meta to ambush them.

Instead, they returned home without a problem.

Frankly, New Rome’s heroes disappointed the courier. Perhaps Leo Hargraves’ Carnival had given Ryan a false image of what superheroes should be, since they were brutally competent, but Dynamis’ corporate champions didn’t impress him much.