Chapter 255: Book 4 Chapter 23.2: Die Harlan

“Keep working!”

One of their abductors raised a hand as if to strike Freddy, but another stopped him in his tracks, catching his fist mid-strike.

“Easy, friend,” the terrorist said. “This man is injured.”

The aggressive abductor backed off, leaving Freddy with the other man. He had been walking around giving orders and directing movements for a while, so Freddy assumed he was the leader. Right now he seemed to have an interest in Freddy, which Freddy did not like.

“I am sorry about him. He grows impatient,” the boss said. “Does your injury require any attention?”

“No, I’m fine,” Freddy mumbled.

“Good. Do speak up if you need anything,” he continued. “If my men are not being cooperative, tell them it is Alan’s orders.”

“Alan,” Freddy said. “Frederick Frizzle.”

“Nice to meet you, though I wish it were under better circumstances,” Alan said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

“Hold on a second,” Freddy said. He nodded towards the complicated device Alan and his compatriots were forcing him to work on. “At the risk of putting a target on my back...I recognize these components. I know what you’re after.”

“Do you now?”

“I do,” Freddy said. “This is a time machine. Or it wants to be, at any rate.”

The terrorists had obscured their intent by dividing his fellow students into groups and each giving them different tasks, but Freddy recognized even a small part of the whole. The technology was theoretical at best, but still designed to manipulate time and space. Alan dd not seem at all upset that his plan had been figured out.

“Well, if you are smart enough to see what it is, you must be smart enough to make it work,” Alan said.

“Maybe,” Freddy said. He put his hand on one of the components and grabbed a wrench with the other. “I’m also smart enough to breach the fuel core’s shielding and flood this room with enough radiation to kill us all.”

Some of Alan’s minions raised their guns at Freddy, but he stepped up and put himself between Freddy and the guns.

“Easy, my friends,” Alan said. “If Mr. Frizzle wanted to kill us, he would do so. Clearly he is looking for a reason not to.”

“I want to know what you’re going to do with this thing,” Freddy said. “I’m not helping you go back in time and help Hitler win World War 2, or something.”

“Is that what you think we’re up to?”

“Maybe.”

“And you think irradiating yourself is a reasonable response?”

“I’ve got my principles, I’ll irradiate myself before I help any Nazi’s.”

“There’s several people in this room that may not feel as strongly about that,” one of his fellow students said. Most of them gave the one who spoke up a dirty look. Alex found it a refreshing experience to be on the other end of such unanimous loathing. “What? The time machine’s probably not even going to work, I don’t want to get irradiated for ideological reasons.”

“For the record, I really don’t want to do this and if it does happen I will feel really bad about it,” Freddy said. “Now you can tell me what’s going on or you can say goodbye to having a functioning nervous system.”

“Relax, Frederick,” Alan said. “We’re only trying to correct a mistake.”

“That sounds like Hitler talk,” Freddy said. “I want details, now.”

Alex watched from the sidelines as Alan stepped forward and had a quick, whispered conversation with Freddy. The result of the conversation was not irradiation, but just Freddy rolling his eyes and putting the wrench down before getting back to work. Alan waved his men to relax, and everyone in the lab slowly started working again -except Alex, who did not know what was going on or what to do. She was more magic focused. She pretended to look busy and found an excuse to sneak over to Freddy.

“What did they say?”

“It’s not Hitler. Beyond that, you don’t want to know,” Freddy said. “Just keep working and keep your head down.”

“Well now I want to know more,” Alex said.

“Hey, you! Get back to work.”

One of Alan’s cohorts stepped up to grab Alex by the arm and drag her back in place. Alex stared at the device she absolutely did not understand for a few seconds.

“Well?”

“Uh. Just...getting my bearings,” Alex said. “It’s kind of hard to work at gunpoint.”

The terrorist lowered his gun. Alex continued to not work.

“Shit,” Alex said. “In my defense I never said I knew anything about this kind of stuff, you just assumed we were all the same kind of genius.”

“Not all of you,” the thug said. He grabbed Alex, locked her hands and legs together with some magic-blocking manacles they had brought along, and then dragged her towards an adjacent laboratory.

“No, no, please, don’t,” Alex said. “Please god, just shoot me, don’t-”

In spite of her many protest, the terrorist dragged her to the door and threw her into the lab.

“Well, I see they got sick of you already,” Michael Jr said. Alex let out a heavy sigh. The terrorists had realized pretty quickly that the Marine Biologists were not up to the task of building a time machine, and thrown them all into an adjacent lab. Now Alex was stuck in the room with all of them.

“I think this will go a lot better if we all agree to not talk,” Alex said.

“I’m here too, you know,” Skye said.

“Yes, but if you and I talk the peanut gallery will see a need to jump in and add color commentary,” Alex said.

“If you would speak intelligently, we wouldn’t have any need to correct you,” Dr. Professor Michael Watkins said. Alex turned to Skye, satisfied that her point had demonstrated itself.

“Just come over here,” Skye said.

Alex awkwardly waddled her way across the room and sat in a chair next to Alex. The room was relatively small, at least, so she didn’t have to waddle far, but the shackles on her arms and legs made sitting awkward, and her labcoat bunched up in odd places, as she struggled in vain to straighten it out.

“Let me get that,” Skye said. She popped her hands out of the manacles, adjusted Alex’s coat for her, and then popped them right back in. It took her a few seconds to realize Alex was staring. “What?”

Alex glared down at the manacles and then back up at Skye.

“Oh right,” Skye said. “I’m a supervillain’s daughter, Alex, I’ve been learning how to avoid being a damsel in distress since I was seven.”

“Why are we still in here, then?”

“Well, there’s only one door to this lab,” Skye said. She pointed at the sole entrance, which led directly into the workshop full of terrorists with guns. “I could maybe use hydrokinesis to pop a pipe in the wall and blow a hole big enough to get myself out, but I’m not leaving unless I can take everyone with me.”

Alex looked across the room at the Marine Biologists.

“Yes, everyone,” Skye repeated.

“Get the manacles off me and I can blow the entire wall down,” Alex said. “I’ll float them to safety and we work from there.”

“Well, the thing is, I don’t actually know how to get them off you,” Skye admitted.

“How do you not know?”

“Supervillain’s daughter,” Skye said, putting extra emphasis on “villain”. “My dad only taught me how to get myself out of trouble, altruism was not really on the agenda.”

“Fantastic. Then I guess we sit here and wait to be rescued.”

“I’m working on a plan,” Skye said. “We can’t all be as good at improvising as Vell.”

***

Meanwhile, Vell was improvising -and strategizing.

“Hello, Vell,” Kim said. “You beat all the bad guys already?”

“Quite the opposite. Turns out Helena’s still here, and she melted my fucking guns,” Vell said.

“That bitch. Are she and Kraid in on this?”

“No, entirely unrelated, she was just being a bitch,” Vell said. “I’ve got a plan, but I need to ask Lee something, can you patch me through to her?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“On it,” Kim said. It took about half a second.

“Hello Vell,” Lee said. “We’ve been watching the news, how’s the terrorist attack coming?”

“Not great. Helena melted my guns.”

“That bitch.”

“Yeah, I’ll deal with it,” Vell said. “Listen, I’ve still got my collection of runes I can pull up through my phone, but I need some mana to charge them.”

“Ah, you’ll be after the battery stockpile in the magikinesis labs, then.”

“Precisely,” Vell said. He was right outside the lab now, hiding in a closet near the entrance.

“Well the good news is it’s probably not locked,” Lee said.

“I’m not sure that is good,” Vell said. It sounded like irresponsible material storage, to him.

“It’s good for you, at least,” Lee said. “Do you remember my old research lab? Same hallway, two doors down on the left side. Do be careful, those batteries aren’t the only hazard stored in there.”

“Got it, thanks,” Vell said. “Call you next loop, I’m going to go fight some terrorists now.”

“Have fun, dear.”

Vell hung up, cautiously exited the broom closet, and headed down the halls. He stepped carefully, to make as little noise as possible. He hated quiet apocalypses. Being stealthy was a pain in the ass, and the silence was just unnerving. He was glad when he finally got to the door and found it unlocked. He was less glad when he found the reason it was unlocked.

Vell stared into the room at ten armed terrorists, and ten armed terrorists stared right back at him.

“Uh-”

Ten guns got aimed in his direction.

“Wait!”

“You want to surrender?”

“Well, no,” Vell said. “But can we move this fight like ten feet outside? There’s a lot of dangerous shit in this room.”

“You want to avoid a fight, you surrender now.”

“Okay, I surrender,” Vell lied. As soon as the guns relaxed even slightly, he grabbed a shelf near the door and tipped it over, sending the assorted vials and containers within tumbling down to shatter on the ground. One of the terrorists opened fire, but his bullets hit a rapidly expanding cloud of pink gas and turned into a flock of doves.

“What the fuck is-”

A spilled tray of liquid splashed against the terrorist’s toes, and he was launched off his feet as rabbits began to pour out of his shoe. Another tried to charge at Vell, then fell to the ground immobilized as long ropes of knotted handkerchiefs started flowing out of every hole in his shirt.

“Oh good, that was the parlor magic shelf,” Vell said. “I was really worried that’d be the one with the fire demons on it.”

“Fire demons?”

“Yep,” Vell said. He grabbed another bottle of a nearby shelf. “But this one just has ice magic!”

He chucked it at the head of the nearest terrorist. It made a very loud crashing sound as it broke open on his skull, causing the terrorist to fall to the ground -with no other effect.

“Or it was just an empty bottle,” Vell said. “I really thought I recognized that one.”

One of his opponents got the bright idea to also grab a bottle and chuck it at Vell. Since he had far less experience chucking things in general, the terrorist missed, and the bottle crashed to the ground, shattering on impact. Vell briefly contemplated telling the school to invest in stronger bottles, then remembered they were in the midst of an ongoing budget crisis, and he was in the midst of an ongoing terrorist crisis. His first priority was whatever was in that bottle.

The broken shards began to vibrate, and a swarm of buzzing purple lights swarmed up from the shattered bottle.

“Hey! What gives, assholes!”

“Oh, hey pixies,” Vell said.

“Pixies? You guys had pixies trapped in a bottle?”

“We weren’t trapped, cunt, that was our house!” One of the glowing lights shouted. “We were right in the middle of lunch, too!”

“Vell, can we bite them?”

“Yeah, sure, just try not to break skin,” Vell advised.

“We’re going to anyway!”

The buzzing clouds of lights swarmed towards the terrorists, who started to run like their lives depended on it, which it might have.

“At least stay away from major veins!”

The pixies buzzed out of sight without acknowledging his request. Vell sighed, kicked glass out of the way, and went to grab some batteries.

***

“Okay, I think I’m armed again,” Vell said. He’d jury-rigged a rune-charging mechanism attached to his phone, which, combined with the same device that let him summon runes from his stockpile, should give him access to whatever runes he needed, fully charged. “But I still need a better plan than blindly charging at the lab. That’s going to get people shot.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” Agent Fleming said. “Drone surveillance shows they’re moving in separate groups. You pick them off one by one, it’ll make the eventual frontal assault much easier. On top of the group you already dealt with earlier, there’s one patrolling the island’s perimeter, one scavenging parts from the engineering lab, and one sweeping the dorms.”

“Ugh, that’s a lot of sneaking around,” Vell said. “I’ve only got like four invisibility runes, and they don’t last very long.”

“I’d use them to get the one patrolling the island,” Hawke suggested. “They’d be the ones most likely to see you coming.”

“And making sure they’re not out and about will make going everywhere else easier too,” Vell said. “Alright, where are they at?”

Vell heard a gun click just behind him.

“Nevermind, I think I found them.”

“Hands up. Turn around slowly.”

Vell complied, and turned to face the seven terrorists with an array of rifles aimed at him. He carefully started to move his thumb along the screen, hoping his muscle memory would be good enough to activate the rune-summoning app without looking at it.

“Drop the phone.”

“Could I just put it down instead? Phones are expensive, I don’t want to break mine.”

“Should’ve invested in a better case. Drop it.”

“Okay, just let me hang up,” Vell said. “I don’t want my friends to hear if I get shot.”

“We’ve heard it before, Vell,” Hawke said through the phone.

“What?’

“Long story,” Vell said. He tapped his thumb on the screen, and a rune popped out the back of his phone case, charged up, and dropped to the ground. The terrorists watched it drop, as did Vell. He was disappointed to see it was not the invisibility rune he’d been trying to call.

“Oh, ‘move’,” Vell said. He tightened his grip on his phone. “Brace yourselves, this is going to-”

Vell got launched fourteen feet to the left before he could finish his sentence. With no other runes in the sequence to direct its energy, the “move” rune simply started moving everything nearby in random directions at random velocities. One of the terrorists got launched upwards, two more got thrown in opposing directions and slammed into each other, and the rest got pushed every which way, along with the guns they’d been holding. The interval of chaos was violent but brief, and soon they were scrambling back to their feet, as was Vell.

“Okay, what’ve I got...Oh, ‘bubble’, that’ll work,” Vell said. He summoned the rune and hurled it at the nearest terrorist. On impact, the charged magic activated and enclosed the target in a spherical force field. “Okay, what next, uh, ‘heavy’?”

Another terrorist, bereft his gun, was charging at Vell to tackle him, and Vell slapped him with the rune before he could make impact. He immediately dropped to the floor as the shirt he was wearing increased in weight by a factor of ten. That made for two down, but the others were starting to grab their guns. Vell snapped through his list of runes and pressed the first one that looked good: Antigravity.

Vell chucked the rune at the ground near the terrorists just as the first one started to take aim. The energy burst upwards right as the gun fired, and the bullet sailed straight upwards. Seconds later, the terrorists started to drift upwards along with it. They lost their footing and flailed in the air, one of them managing to swing downwards just in time to grab a handful of grass and keep himself in place.

“What did you do?”

“Just turned off gravity for a while, you’ll be fine.”

“Fine? I’m going to float into space.”

“There’s a dome over the island,” Vell said. He pointed up, where some of the terrorists had already hit the bubble surrounding the island. “The effect wears off slowly, so you’ll drift right down.”

“I’m still scared of heights,” the terrorist whimpered.

“And I’m scared of terrorist attacks on my school, so you know what?”

Vell kicked the terrorists hand, knocking loose his grip on the grass and sending him floating upwards.

“Enjoy your flight,” Vell snapped, as the terrorist started screaming. “Now, where to next?”

Vell summoned an invisibility rune, just to have it on hand, and dropped it almost immediately as a gunshot rang out. The dirt around him turned invisible, which, coupled with the next round of gunfire, made Vell panic and started sprinting in a random direction. He dodged and weaved and managed to summon another invisibility rune in time to lose the tail of gunfire and duck behind a building. He poked an invisible head around the corner to examine the situation. Apparently the group searching the dorms had heard gunfire and come running. They had posted up in the windows, guns aimed in every direction, vigilantly watching for any sign of Vell.

After doing some mental math, Vell decided to cut his losses. He was already down two invisibility runes, and the ones he had left would only barely get him in range. Vell opted for a different approach. He scanned through his phone and summoned a few different runes, calling up basic concepts like “circle”, “empty”, and “move” to link them together. He had a few combat-ready rune sequences ready to go, but he had to manually combine more esoteric combinations like this one.

A few minutes later, when the terrorists came looking for him, they found nothing but a hole in the ground leading to a subterranean network of basements.

“Can he just make holes whenever he wants?”

“Like a fucking Looney Tunes character, apparently.”

***

“Okay, maybe if I try this-”

Skye fiddled with the lock on Alex’s handcuffs to no avail, and threw her hairpin to the ground in frustration.

“God damn it.”

“How was lockpicking not in your supervillain curriculum?”

“Because of the ‘super’ part,” Skye said. “If a supervillain wants to something unlocked they blast it with a disintegration ray.”

“Fair enough.”

The door slammed open, and Skye quickly jammed her hands back into the handcuffs as Alan poked his head in.

“Please keep it down.”

“Well we don’t have much else to do but talk,” Skye said. “You could at least give us a board game, or something.”

“Just talk quietly,” Alan said.

“Alan,” someone shouted, loudly. Alan rolled his eyes and turned to face his troops. “We lost Micah and Lonnie’s teams.”

“What? How?”

“One of the students is loose on the island.”

“One student took out two squads of armed men?”

“Yes! We don’t know what happened to the group that went after the batteries, but Lonnie’s entire group is...floating, or trapped in bottles, or stuck to the ground. He did something with runes, and-”

“Ha!”

Skye could not contain herself, and both Alan and his subordinate turned to her.

“Sorry, sorry,” Skye said. “Let me guess, tall, skinny, wearing a blue hoodie?”

“Yes. How do you know?”

“Because that is my boyfriend, and you are fucked,” Skye said. “You might as well just put the guns away and go lie down, seriously.”

“You are remarkably confident in your boyfriend,” Alan said.

“Vell Harlan has dealt with worse things than terrorists before lunch,” Skye said. “He seems to be working a little slow, so I’ll assume he’s got some kind of handicap...it’s like four-thirty or something right now, yeah?”

“Four forty-five.”

“Okay, so this should be wrapped by seven o’clock, at the latest,” Skye said.

Alan grunted in frustration at her defiance and turned back to his men.

“Track him down and deal with him,” he demanded. “We don’t want him to get close. But if he does...we have leverage.”

It took Skye a few seconds to realize she was being leered at.

“Who, me?”

“Yes, obviously you, you’re the girlfriend of the man trying to ruin our plans.”

“Oh, and you think threatening me is going to make things better for you?” Skye asked. “I’m going to go ahead and bump that timeline to six o’clock, this’ll be easy.”

With Skye showing no signs of being intimidated by him, Alan stormed out of the room to avoid his authority being further undermined. Skye got back to her seat, popped her handcuffs off, and started scratching at her wrist. The manacles were kind of itchy. Alex knew that firsthand, so she held her wrists out towards Skye.

“Want to take another crack at my handcuffs?”

“Oh, do we have to?” Skye said. “I meant everything I said, Vell will have us all out of here pretty quick.”

“Still, I don’t believe in sitting around and waiting for-”

Alex paused long enough to look at Skye’s face, and she raised an eyebrow.

“This is doing something for you, isn’t it?”

“Not to get weird, but it really is,” Skye said. Ideologically she was opposed to being a damsel in distress, but the idea of Vell fighting his way through an army of terrorists to rescue her was, tragically, kind of hot.