New York, New York, United States of America
There were two reasons to watch the live broadcast of the Tyrant’s un-retirement, each one given by one of the Six after the disaster. Minerva never missed any speech by a national leader, and the Smith had been watching the end of the short retirement of his father’s nemesis.
(If you saw John Smith, you wouldn’t think you saw much. A thin, dusty man with thin, greying hair, looking forty or so in his early sixties, his eyes oddly hollow when he wasn’t smiling the smile that made his face glow with light. His battlesuit had grown out of his father’s work clothes and he was one of the only two members of the Six who could go outside without a mask and not be recognized.)
When he saw the broadcast he saw it with Lucy next to him and they both reacted at the same time and the Smith hit his panic button - as he discovered later only half a second after Minerva had, which in future times he might be somewhat proud of.
They’d argued about what to do when this day came long before, about what the Six should do when the Tyrant died. He was older than all the mortal members (he’d tutored the Smith in math before his powers came in) and they all expected that if he didn’t die by violence natural causes would catch up with him eventually, debating it over and over in the old chamber in the Highport with eighty picture frames and forty faces for them, the Survivor growling and Minerva estimating the odds and Tidebringer always urging action now. The dissention turned into order, as it always did, and men and women biting their lips and accepting compromises as they worked out a plan of action that would get them most of what they needed without moving them past two dead members a decade, and now when news came in it was ready to move.
First step was putting on his spacesuit (it wasn’t his full battlesuit, but it could be deployed from a neck pack within a second and a half), and then the second was taking a few steps ana. From there he could download the data dump from the monitoring devices he’d placed on the Tyrant’s extradimensional defenses, then up kata in turn and back home with the update then forward it to Minerva.
Across the northeast, the rest of the Six were moving, gearing up as fast as they could for the coming war. The Survivor was driving home from watching his great-granddaughter’s softball game, Tidebringer was finishing his ‘fight’ with the Chosen of Mars, Minervae were doing force field flood relief and fighting the Secession Seven and containing a forest fire and checking Luminosa’s latest plea for assistance (among others), Paladin was saying goodbye to her children and Evenhand was changing into his battlesuit.
And while all this was happening they were readying for combat and contacting allies, an expediture that they knew would be -
- almost certainly meaningless.
They’d debated it already. Nobody had needed to lay out the stakes; two million souls lived in Novapest, the newest and smallest of the world’s nuclear powers. Sandor Balog’s rule had been harsh but efficient and, by and large, peaceful, letting the shadow of his reputation deter his enemies without any need for violence, yet the odds that the situation would continue even this favorably under a successor were negligible. “There aren’t very many men like Sandor,” the Smith had pointed out.
(”Fortunately,” Paladin had said.)
However clever the new ruler, he would have dozens of supervillains who either needed to be paid or fought, and without the Tyrant’s genius where would the money to do that come from? Novapest wouldn’t be the first country to replace a competent dictator with a brutal fool, nor the first to turn to infighting or conquest when the conditions that sustained a miracle of economic growth ran out. More than ten thousand people had died in the last civil war and tens of thousands more had been injured, and the next war might not be nearly as quick to end. And, worse, the Six knew who the leading candidates for the throne were, and none of them had the Tyrant’s ability nor even his rudimentary ethics. The next few years would determine the country’s fate...
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... And the Atlantic Six had no more power than anyone else to alter it. The Tyrant’s shield was impervious, and the Smith’s survey confirmed the existence of an astonishing array of defenses readied to stop him in particular. The Six could try to assemble a multinational coalition to liberate the country from the Tyrant’s successor, working through American Association of Superheroes contacts, asking for help from all the people they’d saved and appealing to the President and to Congress directly, and whoever succeed him would put his shield up and wait for the next crisis to distract the world (they were due) and the soldiers would all go home and no one could do anything about it.
And as the most powerful superhero team in the world prepared for war and surveyed Novapest’s defenses, they knew what they would find long before they saw it:
That if they were going to actually get through, they’d need a miracle.
Jacksonville, Florida
There were, by general consensus, three major difficulties you had to overcome if you were going to make it as a superhero in America. First, you needed to be able to get to problems to solve them before someone else, such as the police or the fire department, did it for you, second, you had to actually be able to provide solutions that made these problems stop being a problem without replacing them with even worse problems, and third, you had to be willing to do all of this for about minimum wage plus disaster insurance, free health care and the occasional parade. The traditional solution to these three problems was to only deal with those rare problems a well-equipped SWAT team couldn’t handle and get a full-time job, making occasional excuses for why you had to vanish from work and always having a tiny part of your brain being worried your AAS membership would get pulled for never stopping any crimes and another part being unhappy about that part.
Jacksonville went for a division of labor: Sunburst zapped things with ray guns and built shield devices, Warpdrive teleported them places, and they split the rent. Since Minerva introduced the triple-blaster back in ‘64, the number of people immune to every setting on a well-built ray gun had been very small and mostly just consisted of well-built powered armor, a couple lucky bricks and the most completely absurd beat-everything people. Therefore the partnership combined speed and efficiency to neatly solve the first of these problems without requiring the police department pay a tinker to maintain experimental gear prone to exploding or to make regular purchases of expensive technology from a country the United States still liked to feel, deep in its republican heart, it had successfully embargoed. Sunburst was taking all the risk, and as a superhero he was a known crazyman.
Unfortunately, all that was getting Sunburst right now was the right to do extra paperwork. Two days ago he’d had the opportunity to foil a bank robbery, but that was two days ago. If you lived in one of the towns without a factor and didn’t have a few rogues out for your blood or touring supervillains regularly passing through, you’d spend ten times as much time writing the necessary use-of-force reports and uploading documents to your AAS member page as you would engaged in heroic feats of derring-do. The bank robbery had taken six minutes, not counting the time spent wanting to ask him if he had a reason to pick a city with an active teleporter or if he was just dumb.
Warpdrive was across the living room on her laptop, a short woman who (aside from the mask and costume) looked more like the only woman at a tech startup than she did the stereotypical picture of a circus-suited strongwoman, short black hair and narrow eyes and precise hands, eyes intent on her keyboard as she typed out her report. As teleporters went she wasn’t that strong - she was a warper, not a survivor like Gateway, and without combat-optimized powers it took her a second or so of focus per teleport. She couldn’t use her powers to catch bullets and put them somewhere safe, so she wouldn’t be going to the A6 anytime soon - but he liked her.
“Minimum necessary force was used to apprehend the suspect...”
“We teleported in, you stunned him and we left?”
“That’s included, yup. 5% chance of concussion, 0.001% chance of a heart attack,” he said in the voice of someone reciting it from memory. “Better safe than sorry.”
“Better safe than sorry,” she said, with a sigh. “Great heroes we. Did you hear about what’s been going on in Baltimore? They’ve had a vampire breakout and a Dweller invasion almost at the same time -”
“And they’re up in BosWash so everyone’s an hour’s drive from them and they got beaten lightning fast.” He sighed. “Let’s face it, Sunburst, we picked the wrong city if we wanted to be excited. Everything interesting happens in Miami these days.”
A brilliant figure appeared in front of them, glowing like the sun.
“Hi!” Luminosa said. “Want to help overthrow a tyrannical government and save two million two hundred thousand people from supervillains?”
End Act Two