Chapter 241: Trouble Brews

“I’m sorry, but Solaris is away on business.” The nexus receptionist said, “Negotiating with Stacy Watt-powers over immigration.”

She shuddered.

“That little girl gives me the creeps.”

“Yeah, she’s got baggage.” Perry said, glancing at Solaris’s office door. “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“I was not informed, sorry.”

“No worries,” Perry said, worried. It was out of character for Solaris to leave Franklin city at all, let alone during High Tide. What could he accomplish in person that couldn’t be done over video phone with his old nemesis?

Other than killing her, he supposed. And even then, it wouldn’t take much time at all for a man who moved at the speed of light.

Something smelled fishy.

Perry glanced back at the receptionist. She didn’t have any tells of hiding anything, but that didn’t really mean anything. She could’ve been lied to.

She did, however, have the key to Solaris’s office, but there was so much security in place that Perry sincerely doubted he could get it from her without triggering something.

Dad had just demonstrated that while Perry was blazing fast, there were still things that were much faster. Like electromagnetism. And lasers.

Still, there was another way to check this: Perry pulled out his cell phone and called Stacy.

Calling Stacy…

“What’s up, Paradox?” Professor Replica asked, her voice squeaky and childish over the phone. Then again, it had been ever since the godlike roboteer had hermit-crabbed into the android body. The professor used to have the ability to give commands to his robots that defied the laws of physics and rationality.

If for example, he’d said ‘you are fast enough to defend me from with Solaris’, that would become the truth of their existence.

One of the old man’s only true rivals.

“Is Solaris there with you?” Perry asked.

“Yeah, we’re making plans.”

“Oh, what kind of plans?” Perry asked.

“Son,” Solaris’s voice said over the speaker, “If I wanted you to know, you’d be here.”

“Fair enough. Who’s in charge of the city while you’re out?” Perry asked.

“Locust is running the day-to-day, and the Anchors have been tasked with laying down the law for her.”

“Oh, thank god, I thought you’d say it was Chemestro.” Perry said, clutching his chest in mock relief.

“Now if you don’t mind-” Solaris said moments before his voice cut out.

Whatever they were cooking up wasn’t about immigration, that was for damn sure, but it looked like things were under control in Solaris’s absence, so Perry didn’t really have a leg to stand on to continue prying.

It was

out of the ordinary, but that didn’t immediately warrant a full-on investigation…yet.

Plus, He’d left his own family in the lurch, and after an hour, he was starting to get used to his new, expanded perception of reality. It was just a matter of giving himself time to adjust to himself and the world itself.

Everything looked different and deeper, but it was still the same world he’d inhabited. Just because he could see more didn’t mean it’d changed.

“Paradox?” The receptionist asked, drawing his attention back to the present moment.

“Eh?”

She gave him a professional smile. “I wanted to say, my friends and I kind of thought you weren’t very cool in high school, but I’ve seen the bill for damages passed around a couple times working here, and how much money you’ve saved the city. Big fan now.”

“In high school?” Perry asked, his voice choking slightly.

It’s only been four years.

“Yes?” She said.

how am I supposed to respond to that? Perry defaulted to a polite ‘thank you’ and made tracks.

Perry made his way outside Nexus before opening a portal back to Chicago. There were sensors inside the towering monolith that would unleash holy hell if they detected spacetime anomalies.

Focus on my family. I can do that.

***Professor Replica***

“Try again.” Solaris said, sliding the phone back across the table to her.

“I’ll try, but like I told you earlier-“

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“Then do better.” Solaris said.

Stacy rolled her eyes and turned to the surgeon, a relatively young doctor in his forties who’d been one of the early bio-engineered babies created by Bio-Master, who’d been one of Stacy’s plants decades ago. Back when she was still John Stevens, AKA Professor Replica.

“Alright, Doctor Herzogg. You have the power to cure Solaris.”

“Umm…no, I don’t?” The doctor said, glancing up from his work. “The brain is a complicated, delicate organ that is the intersection of dozens of different disciplines. This kind of damage, there simply aren’t any techniques available to-”

“You’re obviously doing it wrong.” Solaris said. “John could-“

“You are a giant duck.”

The doctor POOFED into a huge duck, looking around the room in confusion.

“You are Doctor Herzog, but you can fly.”

The duck shrank back down into a doctor, looking a bit woozy as he shook his head, casually levitating a foot off the ground.

“See?” Stacy said, motioning to the android. “Look, I know I used to be able to do a lot more, but it took a hit when I died. It’s gradually coming back, though. I think in another decade or so when this body matures, I should be able to-“

“I don’t have a decade. I need a fix now.” Solaris said.

“Why not get one of those fancy healers of yours?” Stacy asked. “I know you’ve got them in Franklin. I’m surprised you came to me first.

“Same reason I came to you first,” Solaris said with a sigh, sitting up in the seat, leaving behind a tray of melted brain-surgery tools. “Nobody’s been able to affect me with a power since I became Solaris. Except for you. Your bots almost gutted me once.”

“I was scared and running for my life. It was born of desperation,” Stacy said.

“Maybe if you were scared and desperate…” Solaris said, clenching his fists as he made eye contact with his former nemesis.

“You’re welcome to try,” Stacy said with a shrug. “But the power just isn’t there yet.”

“Maybe you should find who did this to you?” the doctor said.

“Eh?” Solaris grunted, glancing up at the doctor.

“From what I was able to see before you melted my tools, the damage appears to be man-made. It did a lot of damage before you halted it. Did anyone deliberately infect you with a designer virus?”

“Let me just check my calendar for ‘designer virus infections,” Solaris said, rolling his eyes as he pantomimed flipping through an imaginary calendar. “Oh wait, I’m made of light, and every time I move, it burns every possible virus out of m-

He froze mid-flip.

“Son of a bitch. I’ll be right back.”

***Chris Stevens, AKA Scrape***

Chris was in a good mood. He was dancing around the piles of leftover takeout, music blasting in his ears as he worked through the Tinker twitch.

He’d recently acquired some DNA from a brawl between Tung-Stan and a cute young brunette who went by Para-Legal.

Now the question was, should he inflict her with a crippling disease? Fun, but he’d done it a hundred times already…or should he modify her sense of smell to make her unreasonably aroused by Scrape’s scent? Unreasonably terrified?

Por que no los dos? Scrape thought with a grin, moving the sample over to the decoder that used his proprietary algorithm. He’d never tried modifying his prey to that extent before, but he was feeling inventive, and the Tinker Twitch was practically begging him to unleash it.

His super suit was a rental, he didn’t have physical prowess to speak of, but his algorithm could work miracles with a simple RNA virus, and was more than enough justification to call himself a Tinker.

But one day…you’ll be known to the entire world. Scrape’s lips stretched around a handful of his remaining teeth.

“Nice place,” a too-familiar voice jolted Chris out of his groove.

“Shit!” Scrape shouted, turning to see Solaris standing behind him, in the flesh.

“How’s the work going keeping soldiers on the wall healthy and vaccinated?” Solaris asked, glancing around the room, his gaze lingering on the picture of Para-Legal on Scrape’s monitor. “That’s what I released you for, anyway.”

“You know, you’ve got an amazing power on your hands. Truly. You could’ve been the next Bio-Master, but your mind is narrow, your view limited to the next high, the next petty grudge, the next pretty face.”

Solaris appeared in front of Scrape, moving instantly without sound or light betraying his presence.

“Your teeth and brain are rotted by meth.” he said, tapping Chris’s temple, causing his heart to jump into his throat.

He doesn’t know. He couldn’t.

“You would know about rotting brains, wouldn’t you?” Solaris said.

He does know. Shit. I’m dead.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Scrape said, defaulting to denial even thought he already knew he was a dead man. It was how he dealt with authority.

“Scrape, there is only one way you survive this: This is Truthslayer,” Solaris said, motioning to a woman in black hyperweave stepping out of the darkness of Scrape’s ‘lab’.

“She’s going to torture you until you make a cure for the shit you slipped me when we shook hands at your High Tide muster. Once you do, you’re free to go.”

“Bullshit,” Scrape spat on the ground.

“You think when I won the lottery and scraped a flake of your blood off the engine of a truck, that I worked for months to clean the sample up so that it could be used…That I designed a perfect fucking end for you…just so I could pussy out and roll over the second you come at me?”

“What did you do?” Solaris asked, his fingers shaking for a moment before he clenched his fists. “Why is it still in my system even though I burned everything out?”

“You don’t know shit about how viruses work. It modified your DNA, asshole!” Chris crowed, emboldened by the horror on Solaris’s face. “The virus is gone. Disappeared the first time you did your vanishing trick, but your body’s been trained to attack itself. You’re FUCKED!”

Solaris stepped closer.

“Fix it.” he said, looming over Scrape. “You can avoid a lot of pain if you do.”

“Nah,” Chris said, sensing weakness. When big dogs like Solaris start to bark like little chihuahuas, that was when you could take them for everything they were worth.

“Fuck that. I’ve got all the power here,” Scrape said with a victorious grin. “If you don’t give me everything I want, I’ll just do nothing, and the world will know me as the man who took down Solaris.”

Solaris’s gaze went dead.

“No. It won’t.”

A cold sweat broke out on Scrape’s forehead.

“Wai-“

Scrape dissolved into ash in a flash of light.

“He was bluffing, Tom!” Truthslayer shouted, shaking his shoulder.

“I know, I know!” Solaris said, pressing a trembling hand to his forehead. “Damnit.” It was getting harder to control his emotions. Soon he might not even be aware of it anymore.

“What do we do now?” She asked.

“Sic the Anchors on it. The ones we can trust. Quietly.” Solaris said, looking at his shaking fingers. “I can’t be trusted to handle this.”

“Should we keep you in the loop?” she asked.

“…No. If you make The Decision, I don’t want to see it coming,” Solaris said. “More likely to work that way, too.”

“True.” Truthslayer said, vanishing into the darkness with one of her sub-powers. How she did it was anyone’s guess.

A moment later, Solaris was left staring down at the ashes of his best shot at survival.

He glanced up at the picture of the bright young woman fighting Tung-Stan displayed on the supervillain’s desktop.

“Silver linings, I suppose,” he muttered, spitting on Scrape’s ashes before pulling out a cigarette with his trembling fingers and lighting it with his thumb.

The nicotine didn’t do anything to him these days, but the act of smoking was nostalgic and calming, reminding him of simpler days playing cat-and-mouse with the FBI.

And Solaris needed all the calm he could get.