Act One, Scene Six
The plane banked into a turn, and Catherine put aside her book and looked out the window at her home city. She took a class about supervillains once, because she thought it would be useful to know what ordinary people thought about he family, and it had included a book about Novapest. It had been a disaster - not even knowing that they would be wrong about everything had prepared her for how wrong they were and the book had stayed at college when she left, resold to another student who would hopefully find some entertainment in the extremely bitter margin notes and little cartoon doodles of faces with steam coming out of their ears. The book had left her with a sneaking suspicion that every other book of history, sociology and biography that she had ever read was just as morally bankrupt, and also one line that had stuck: Sandor Balog broke every record failing.
Novapest - the world’s third-greatest city-state by GDP and first-greatest city-state by military power, the single largest concentration of supers on the planet with the barely possible exception of New York - looked from the sky like a grey cube leaking grey-black smoke into the blue sky. Some of the skyscrapers had different heights than others, giving detailing to the cube and rendering its cubicness slightly imperfect, but the day the Tyrant secured his independence he’d set his stable of tinkers and their vast hordes of robot construction laborers to building him a city, and that day the towers had started to rise. They were five to eighty stories tall, towers of glass and steel and cement built to be stable and sturdy and habitable, apartments and office space and barracks for soldiers, and among them space cleared for factories - the first of these raised by Patrick Michael Bryne, once wanted for theft, murder and insurrection, and now Count Steelstorm of the Eighth and CEO of Steelstorm Industries - to turn raw iron into steel and melt sand into glass to build more and more towers higher.
They’d risen quickly, paid for by the national treasury of a state that no longer existed and by advance payments on the tinker weapons that Steelstorm Industries would soon pivot to producing, and after them had come immigrants and a massive network of docks spread across four counties to accept those immigrants, and with the wages that Steelstorm Industries and the network of plants that fueled it paid they kept on coming. Novapest imported raw materials, iron and nickel and titanium, wood and wool, oil and coal and opium, and exported stunners and powered armor and combat drones (eighth district) and coats and chairs and cars (fourth and second districts) and heroin and cocaine and guns with no serial numbers (tenth and eleventh districts) and some of the thirteen districts had gotten rich and some of them had stayed poor, and the rich ones built their grey towers higher and the poorer counts sold their seats to new-come robbers and bought Steelstorm Industries powered armor and went back to their lives of crime knowing there would be a haven if they ever found themselves one step ahead of the law, and the Tyrant counted his money and refused to sign extradition treaties and started refining uranium.
Novapest wasn’t a nation for the information age. Its only university was the internet (the Tyrant had never cared enough to censor it) and primary education was a matter for counts if they bothered and the counts usually thought health care meant not forbidding people from hiring whatever doctors they pleased, but Novapest was the world’s fastest-growing city and not just because it was somewhere that supervillains across the planet could run home to and shout BASE when they’d robbed six banks and needed to spent the proceeds.
And it was a grey cube. Her grey cube, maybe; assuming her father settled on primogeniture she was third in line for it. Feudalism was, of course, a terrible outdated system that would only bring misery to the populace and a complete waste of all her father’s brilliance, but so far Catherine was pretty sure the people who lived there preferred it to wherever they came from, as evidenced by the fact that nobody stopped them going back.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Of course, she’d known all that before she ever took a class in it. Her B grade had been on the strength of her earlier papers, on proto-supervillains like Bonnie and Clyde and the Dillinger gang, on the Wehrmacht super-soldiers and their cousins in the Regio Esercito who, faced with a defeated employer and the condemnation of the world from Ontario to Okhotsk had turned to a career as mercenaries, and on the early years of the ‘new breed’, the ‘honorable men’ and ‘great men’ of the sixties and seventies. Prince Eugene, Doc Fenris, Corax the Conqueror - by the end of the decade the Titanium Tyrant could call himself ‘Monarch of Crime’, and only the Atlantic Six could stop him and his Royal Court. His lieutenants in the Court had once been one-hero rogues without a hope against a team, people like Blitz and Heavyhand and the Gorgon, but the Tyrant picked the ones he could trust and that trust was rewarded, and they called the Court the second of the Nine Nightmares. But all that was true and known to be true, and her final paper had gone down in flames of red ink asking her for citations for perfectly obvious facts because they were only true. The professional analyses had called the Tyrant’s resumption of feudal titles one more quirk, one more supervillain idiosyncrasy like Sec II’s obsession with symmetry or the Numismatist’s with silver, and when Catherine had written about the nature of supervillain psychology - to be a Count, one must have a king - she’d gotten “that sounds interesting, citation?” from her professor, who was willing to consider the possibility for an afternoon but who only intended to believe things published in a journal.
And now she was heading home, and looking at a grey cube she’d never seen before.
She knew what Novapest looked like. Thirteen districts, some islands of America that might have been streets in New York or New Tokyo where people of every country spoke well-honed English and looked out from high-rises between high-paying jobs and drank high-priced lattes, some enclaves where Mexican and Venezuelan migrants trudged to work twelve hours a day for wages not much better than they’d get at home, each with their own laws, customs, traditions. Thirteen districts and a palace district and a handful of isolated islands where some knight or count had built a park were what she expected to see.
She hadn’t expected three of them to be nearly missing. The city looked like a boxer’s smile, full of broken teeth. The fifth district was burned out ruins and shattered concrete. The few buildings that remained standing were low and rickety, or else lucky survivals jutting out of the ruins. The third was all new construction with steel frames rising and the wooden shells around them only half cleared away and that was bad enough, but the great crater that stretched across half of Cursed Fourth took her breath away. She’d made a joke when Helen took it up, about bad luck - Helen had foiled the last count’s plot against the Tyrant, all the papers had crowed about it, he’d been the third count and that made her the Fourth of Fourth and she was dead, and now the only question was whether Bloody Lizzy Balog would get sucked in like everyone else. Catherine hoped so. The Third was already almost back on its feet; presumbly Julius was listening to his godfather, and Steelstorm would have somewhere to sprawl his factories and warehouses out to.
The buildings were growing below her, and she moved her jaw to clear her ears. Elgolian was still in the seat across from her, sheathed sword across his lap, rifle over his shoulder, eyes on her.
“Woolgathering again,” she said.
“I would not think an airplane was the best place to harvest sheep, Princess,” he said, deadpan.
She gave that the sigh it deserved. She’d recover eventually.
“Glad to be home?”
“I wish I’d never left and I wish I’d never come back. Who’s right?”
“The one who loves her mother,” he said.
They landed on a cleared field in the palace grounds, a small runway with room for one plane at a time. The palace guard and the Royal Knights took standard positions by the walls, Elgolian proceeding her down the stairs. There were surprisingly few unwanted onlookers - a few of her friends; Jay, fashionably dressed as always, slouching against a wall behind the armed cordon. (A wave of the hand to her.) Good to see him as always, but she still wasn’t sure why he’d come this far.
Under the watchful eyes of her staff, she was bundled into a car with all her luggage and without any onlookers getting to question or shoot her. Elgolian was driving again. For someone who had issues touching cold iron, he spent quite a lot of time behind the wheel.
“Straight home, princess?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
There was a pause as he navigated.
“It looks like rain,” he suggested.
“Clouds have been gathering all day.”
“Physical or metaphorical, your highness?”
“Is there a difference?”