Over the past decade he’d lived in Victory, Alex had only been to the Red Rum Pub maybe a dozen or so times for anything other than a bite to eat. Most of those times had been for a short meet up before a job to look another villain in the face and tell them what gadgets you were bringing, maybe dropping off a small package you could smuggle inside your pocket. Every one of them had almost always been the kinds of things you could usually just stroll in through the front door for. Sure, the heroes on rooftops were probably giving you the stink eye, but as long as you were in your civvies and weren’t actively wanted for anything, they couldn’t do much.
So it was kind of odd to be back below the pub twice in only a few weeks time, navigating through the tunnels with the intention of meeting someone in the depths. It felt like he was in the classic gangster era of the post war, slinking around the underground of bars to dodge the inquiring eyes of the law.1 The effect was ruined anytime he caught sight of his interim costume, a slapdash replacement for his Tech Crash look while he waited for Celestial Scientist to get him his new gear. The homemade gauntlets, a repurposed and heavily modified bike helm, and cheap body armor were definitely closer to what he wore in his early years as the Iron Menace than Tech Crash, but he’d glued on enough sleek and shiny bits that it still felt almost a century out of date for him to be palling around with fedora wearing wise guys with Tommy guns.
Not to mention the person he was here to meet wouldn’t fit the theme either. Vandal Eyes had arranged the meeting here without mentioning a dress code, but Alex had no doubt from his few times seeing her that she’d be dressed in her punk rocker aesthetic. Other than that, he didn’t really know what to expect.
He’d managed to get in contact with her easily enough. He’d popped over in costume at Frankie’s, one of the many favored spots for the lowest on the totem pole of the villain world in Victory and traded some words with good old Laser Badger. The prick had gotten his laughs out about Tech Crash’s failed heist and shitty new costume, and he’d gotten his licks in about Badger’s dumpster diving habits. An offer to buy a drink for the bastard had gotten him the number for the rising information broker.
When he reached out to her and mentioned a mutual friend with the initials of I and H, she’d quickly cut the chat short with directions for him to meet up here along with the time and hung up. Between Laser Badger of all people laughing at him and how curt she’d been over the phone, Alex was now certain that Tech Crash was a dead end of an identity he’d need to trash. Despite beating two heroes and making his escape, everyone had clocked his heist was a wash and that even if he could pack a punch in a fight, no one would want a teammate that scrambled the job for you. “Low B” or “high C” as Aegis had put it wasn’t important if you couldn’t do better than an average D-lister on his second week in the job.
Well, let’s just show up, fail to impress and get this noose off my neck, he thought.
He was following the green triangles today, keeping an ear out for anyone else coming down this way. Unlike the past week, the doors he passed were dead quiet. Likely everyone who had wanted to team up or buy tech in preparation for the incredibly delayed manhunt already had. No more backroom deals needed to be cut, just gotta wait for the League’s call that blows the powder keg sky high. That caused his neck to itch slightly. Everyone was tensed, waiting to pounce, but the League was still quiet on that front, though apparently there were rumors of something about to go down in Uropa of all places. If he didn’t know any better, it would’ve felt like the League wanted to just move on from this, but they weren’t the type to take a hit on the chin like this and walk away without drawing blood.
His thoughts drifted and he almost ran directly into someone as he turned a corner, having missed the sound of their footfalls.
“Sorr-” he began.
“Oh, well this shit is fucking hilarious…” a cruel voice chuckled. “I can’t believe I finally see your ass here of all places.”
Alex’s eyes fixed on gelatinous face of Ikor whose stone-like teeth gnashed together into a wicked grin.
“Tech Crash! The fucking guy everyone thought my ass was cosplaying as!” Ikor’s laugh was the textbook definition of false camaraderie with a tinge of spiteful mirth to it. “Heard your last job didn’t go too hot. Shame, could’ve used your dick hanging out in the spotlight to keep those shitheads from wondering where I was.”
A sloppy tendril of ooze shot forth from where his shoulder should be only to slap against his cocked hip like he was resting a hand on his waist. Meanwhile his other “arm” ended in an approximation of a hand that snapped back and forth as if flicking a dismissive gesture at him.
The man was shaped into the vague silhouette of a bipedal humanoid formed out of an almost black viscous substance that reflected an iridescence in its edges like oil. His form seemed to be held together by sloppily filling out a set of baggy pants that tucked into abused work boots after cascading down from a sleeveless jacket that was cropped just above where a human waist would be. Everything he wore had the reflective shine of waterproof material, all of it waxy and plastic-y if it wasn’t outright rubber. An appendage rose upwards out from the top of his torso, almost shaped correctly to be a head on too thin a neck. A face continuously formed, melted away and reformed around its only stable features: a pair of caustic orange orbs which seemed to be his eyes, sunk behind barely opaque lids which didn’t so much close when he blinked as much as they seemed to swallow his gaze temporarily only to retreat back like waves. Currents ran down from the top of his misshapen head to fall down the sides, forming the semblance of hair. Scattered throughout his body were what looked like a dozen or so remnants of a melted skeleton, though they never seemed to stay visible for long.
“I never claimed to be you,” Alex told the slime man firmly, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt.
Ikor was one of the League’s veterans. While he wasn’t the type to threaten a city all on his own, he’d thrown hands with a lot of heroes over the years and had even gotten Overlab to turn him into a giant monster once to rampage across the western coast of Azania, causing the heroes of five separate cities to have to band together to beat him. He’d definitely killed more than a couple of heroes, villains, and civilians over his career, so antagonizing him in a cheap temporary suit that barely had working gravitor generators almost literally taped to his arms was probably asking to be buried in a shallow grave.
“Relax, man,” a pseudopod mimed waving away Alex’s words, almost forming fingers for a second. “I’m not mad, just disappointed or some shit. I was hoping you’d last a little longer before you got spent. It would’ve been nice to come back to Over Seer with more than a fist full of fucking nothing, especially since Zen and Stormfury got their dicks clapped, is all. I can still recommend you to her for running distraction ops if you want. You can blow yourself up as much as your little heart wants and maybe you’ll actually help us do something worth a shit. You know how it is: serving your betters the best way you can.”
Alex grit his teeth under Ikor’s verbal abuse. An intrigued expression quite literally formed on the face Ikor.
“Huh, you gonna swing with that?” he gestured down at a fist Alex hadn’t realized he’d balled.
Alex should’ve said nothing. Apologized maybe to just get this over with quicker and have Ikor just chalk him up as nobody worth paying attention to. But he was on a string of bad mistakes and apparently was due for one more.
“Not today,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “But I’ll make sure it hurts when I do.”
Ikor’s eyelids peeled backwards in surprise for a moment. Then his smile grew, far larger than it should on any normal person’s face, “Alright then. Maybe you got something left in you after all, firecracker. I’ll keep an eye out then. Hey, fuckass, he’s all yours, I’m headed back. Give me a call if you change your mind.”
Ikor flipped a wave behind him as he breezed down the hall, his form sloshing around to avoid bumping into Alex even as his boot landed inches away from stepping on the other villain’s feet. Alex looked past the League stooge to see a neon eye symbol hovering in the air at a junction ahead. Upon being seen, it began to float lazily away. With a backwards look at the other villain who was confidently strolling away, Alex began to follow the eye down the passage towards a nearby room.
The symbol fizzled out right as it reached the threshold. The moment Alex was about half a dozen strides from the door, it swung open to reveal Vandal Eyes in all her alternative glory. Her scowl told Alex whatever meeting he’d just missed had gone as poorly as you could expect a chat with Ikor could go, even if you were willing to look past learning every expletive the Avalonian language had to offer repeated ad nauseam.2 There was something else to her expression though, though the particulars of which he could only guess at, having to fill in the blanks left by the blindfold. Judgment, maybe?
“What?” he asked, a little too much irritation in his voice.
“What happened between you and the Incredible Cussing Ooze?” she pressed, suspicion plain in her voice.
“It’s fucking Ikor,” was all Alex said in explanation.
It’s all that should need to be said to be honest. “It’s fucking Ikor” explained a lot. Told a complete story with understandable character arcs and a defined mood in three words.
Vandal rolled her head and Alex guessed that also meant she was rolling her eyes behind the blindfold. He really shouldn’t be the guy to complain about missing microexpressions given that all of his costumes completley concealed his face, but it definitely made these kinds of things harder to read.
Regardless, she waved him inside but kept her… well she kept her head pointed directly at him the whole time, her suspicion clear even without her eyes visible. Alex was a little indignant at that to be quite frank. It was clear she was the one who had been meeting with Toxic Talker there first so the attitude felt entirely unjustified.
Just get this damn thing over with, he told himself and strolled as far into the room as he dared to.
Unlike the previous room Alex had reserved, this one wasn’t lined in concrete and lacked the repurposed mannequins left abandoned as volunteers for weapons testing. Instead it resembled a cleared out wine cellar, aged wood creaking under his footsteps as he walked through a relatively small gap between two large shelves pressed against the walls. The shelves had large indentations on them, the hollow spots seeming a perfect fit for barrels. The narrowness of the room tickled a sense of claustrophobia he rarely experienced. Weak lights dangled from the ceiling, seeming to cast as much of the room in shadow as they illuminated. All of them swayed slightly with his steps to make the inky blackness seem to pulse slightly as though it was a sleeping beast.
Turning back, he saw Vandal shutting the door, still fixed on him. A few of the eye symbols patched on her outfit glowed slightly in the dusty light. He couldn’t tell if she was standing in front of the door to block him from leaving or to bolt the moment he moved in the wrong way. She seemed to be studying his every move, weighing him.
He sighed, “You want to tell me what this is all about?”
In response, a glowing eye sigil burned into existence nearby, seeming to gaze him up and down. It fizzled from existence a few moments later.
“Alright, you’re clear,” Vandal huffed. “Can’t be too careful with Ikor. Don’t need any little jelly eavesdroppers.”
She strode into the room and walked past him as she spoke, no longer bothering to fixate directly on him, “I’ll try to get to the point here, as much as I can: I want you for a team to tackle some projects. You all will be running a few jobs for me. Mostly on your own so don’t worry about having to play nice too often. Pay will be decent and it won’t be grunt work.”
Alex rolled his eyes behind his mask as she basically told him nothing. Not the first time he’d done this dance. The key to get them talking was never to ask, but rather complain. It tended to make people more likely to try and seem important.
“Not that I have much of a choice here,” he grumbled.
Vandal paused and turned back to face him, “Ah, fuck, of course... Hawk probably threatened you, didn’t he?
“You mean you didn’t tell him to do that?”
Alex was still wondering who was in charge here. There was no way it was an even partnership, not with a veteran hero and a brash young villainess probably styling herself as the upcoming queen of the information. Either Hawk had clamped down on her and was exerting control or she’d found her own blackmail on him and was shuffling his catches into her network.
“Of course not!” she huffed. “But the jackass refuses to play nice with the people I’ve been trying to recruit.”
Well, that sounded like the latter. Still, something about that statement was different than what he’d expected.
“‘Been trying to recruit’? That sounds like you wanted to scoop me up even before the chase.”
“Well, yeah, I happened to check out your hit on Lockwide’s truck. I also happened to have eyes on Reddins that night and caught a little bit of your escape too,” she explained. “Clearly you need to go back to the drawing board for how to armor your dimensional manipulator gloves but otherwise it’s clear you know how to handle yourself and can reliably source some decent toys.”
“They’re gravitor generators,” Alex sighed.
“First up, please don’t test me on tech, I know that gravitor generators are impossible to miniaturize to that size,” came the response of another non-believer. “Secondly, we both know something wonky went down that wasn’t a hidden tesla shot going crazy in those things, and it wasn’t Jam’s fault either. I’ve got more than an ounce of magic know-how, and I can tell you what happened wasn’t the Scroll going sparky from his lame levitation work.”
Godsdammit, a faulty dimensional manipulator actually was the perfect way to easily explain away what had happened but he realllllllllllllllllllly didn’t want to give any more ground on his gauntlets than he already had these past few weeks. Still, Alex had read all of the public reports from Spelljam’s interrogation (mostly to make sure that his stupid fucking power wasn’t exposed), and it all thankfully pushed the conversation away from magic being the cause of the blast. Sadly, that meant that all of those reports concluded by blaming his tech instead. Trying to disagree on this point with an information broker seemed like a great way to get all sorts of people digging where they ought to be minding their own fucking business.
Dimensional manipulator tech tended to be a little more fragile than what he was actually working with and would explain the failure in a way that didn’t make Starsilk look like fucking idiots, which “unexplained tech failure” tended to do. While Alex wasn’t planning on announcing his personal mad science supplier to the world and “Tech Crash” as a whole was being thrown out pretty soon, it would at least salvage any reputation for being linked to this job. The one downside was that if by some misfortune someone figured out his new identity was a rebrand for Crash, any future team-ups would basically scratch him out of being a front liner or even having any plans involving him standing too close to anyone else on a team.
Even though he’d tossed the grenade launcher out of the gloves in the very first point of revision of his new suit, there wasn’t a villain alive that would want him standing within 30 feet of them knowing his gauntlets would start shorting out after taking less than a minute of a beating in a profession like theirs. The risk of malfunction was still too great and dimensional manipulation tech tended to fail in a way that typically involved the phrase “radius of effect.”
Barring that potential drawback, it was a solid cover story though. Just one other major issue: it also meant ceding ground once again on everyone else being wrong on his gravitor generators.
So Alex compromised by petulantly saying, “Whatever, if you want to call them dimensional manipulators that’s fine.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
There! Not actually giving up the fight. Just… moving it to another day.
Vandal shrugged and shook her head, thankfully not pushing the point.
“So this team… Are we working for Ice Hawk?” Alex prodded.
Vandal scowled, “No one is fucking working for Hawk!”
O...kay… So either Vandal was absolutely being manipulated by Ice Hawk and was plotting her betrayal or something else is going on. Regardless, save pressing that button for later.
“Sorry,” she apologized, “just… look, I get how this looks. You probably think one of us is trying to dance with the other team to control crime or sneak a traitor into the heroes or some shit, right?”
“Uh… yeah. Exactly that,” Alex admitted.
“Look, we’re not idiots,” Vandal told him before pausing. “Well, I’m not an idiot. Hawk… Whatever, I know how that story ends. No, this isn’t about doing heel work to make a hero team look good, or being good little villains who only commit crimes on weeknights, or me trying to rule Victory from the shadows. You’ll be doing actual jobs. Don’t worry about Hawk or his team, but also don’t expect him to let you go a second time if you run into him again.”
“I don’t get it-” Alex began.
“Good,” she pointed a finger at his chest while the eye symbols on her costume flared in warning. “Keep it that way and I’ll make sure that ignorance is profitable. Just think of this as me pulling a favor to keep your ass out of the fire and you owe me at least three jobs in return. Actually three jobs and a favor.”
While he still felt like he was being played somehow for something bigger than she was letting on, her pressuring him for a favor was at least familiar ground for villain bullshit. Sure, it was annoying as hell to watch someone butt into your job and act like you owed them for it, but this felt more in his wheelhouse than secret back alley deals with heroes or whatever shadow war shit he was wondering was about to be cooked up.
He gave a performative sigh, still hoping to see if Vandal would slip up and let him figure out what secret schemes she was hatching with her secret team, and asked, “What’s the favor?”
He saw her nibble on her lip, clearly anticipating him pushing back on whatever she had to say.
“I need you to ditch the ‘Tech Crash’ name and costume,” she finally told him.
“Yeah, obviously,” he let a sarcastic tone bleed into his voice, having expected more than this. “I’m already figuring that out.”
“Oh thank gods,” she visibly relaxed. “I was really worried you were too attached to it. It’s just-”
“I know,” Alex waved her criticism away. “I am well aware. I’m working on it.”
“Look, I trust you. I wouldn’t have told Hawk to send you my way otherwise. Just-”
“Got it.”
“It was kind of a lot of valuable stuff in that bag-”
“I. Got. It.”
“Okay, cool,” she stuffed her hands in her coat pockets. “So… what have you got cooking?”
Alex rolled his eyes. He’d been hoping his next name after Tech Crash would be a little more intimidating, but still wasn’t sure he could justify working in a “Doom” or something like that if he was going to pretend to be new on the scene. It set expectations too high. He had been stuck on adding “Killer” to his supernym for the last few days but figured he’d come off as too lethal sounding. He didn’t mind the idea of offing a supe in a fight, but didn’t really need people assuming that he was a walking collateral machine which gunned down civvies and mandated a quick and violent reaction to showing up somewhere lest the helpless hordes walk directly into his lasers.
“I’m still figuring it out,” he admitted. “I thought I’d wait for my suit to be done and see if it gives me any inspirations.”
Vandal blew a raspberry, “That’s backwards. You’re supposed to have a name and color your costume appropriately. Oh! I know! How about Iconoblast?”
He blinked, watching the cultivated detached persona Vandal had been sticking with disappear as she let her playful nature out. He was having a harder time feeling the implied blackmail she’d been leaning on this entire time weigh on him.
“Uh… I mean, I see where you’re coming from with that,” he told her. “Doesn’t fit quite right. Kinda feels a little hero-y with ‘icon’ in the name.”
She puffed her cheeks, and the last vestiges of “shadowy criminal mastermind” melted away as she took umbrage with his critique. Granted, the Broker hadn’t managed to do much better, having once asked Alex to help him pick something off his Odyssey wishlist to impulse buy after a previous meeting had worn him down. Watching the guy who LARPed as a shadowy gangster pull out a shitty phone and palm through some tacky knickknacks for your opinion on what sub-20 deck piece of plastic would give him a dopamine rush kinda ruined the feeling of an unknowable figure of the underworld moving vast stacks of cash around.
Vandal recovered faster than he did and began listing off other options she’d quickly thought up, “Cobalt Crusher? Megahurtz? Vortex Blitz?”
These weren’t any worse than the suggestions Celestial Scientist had offered when he told her he didn’t have a particular name in mind. She’d been texting him a few while she worked and Alex had a suspicion she was beginning to crowd source them. Still, he was wondering who the hell had given her “Zapvalance” or “Lasersmash”.
Alex went through Vandal’s offerings, “I feel like there’s been too many blue supes in Victory lately, so I kinda want to avoid that, even if my costume does end up that color. Megahurtz kinda feels like a step down from Tech Crash. The last one’s really cool but I feel like I need to theme my kit around it. Like, if I don’t have anything that spins, kinda feels like a waste. That or I’d need to be a speedster I guess. Are there many ‘Blitz’s that aren’t speedsters?”
She pouted and threw up her hands, “Well, why not just go back to the Iron Menace?”
“Because I-”
Alex’s head whipped around towards her the moment his mind caught up to what she’d said.
“How-?” he started to ask, only to catch her expression.
A sly smile split her face and Alex noticed her subtly pump her fist in celebration. He realized that she hadn’t been 100% sure on that one and he’d just confirmed it. Shit!
“Relax, I might be an information broker, but that one I’ll keep secret,” she grinned. “It does at least answer the question on where you ended up. Considering that the last time anyone saw you, you were getting your ass kicked by Ned the day after the Broker screwed everyone in this town... not to mention Badger’s been saying you were ‘emotionally devastated’ for some reason...”
Note to self: Kill Laser Badger.
“There were concerns you might’ve… uh…”
She put two fingers to her chin and mimed a rather morbid set of motions with her head whipping back quickly along with a “recoil” from her hand.
“Holy shit,” Alex shook his head. “No! I mean... fuck, do people really think…?”
“Oh! No!” she quickly answered. “To be honest, outside of people who have their ear to the ground like I do, I don’t think your disappearance caused too much morbid speculation.”
Vandal Eyes probably didn’t mean that to hurt nearly as much as it did. Probably.
“Anyways, got distracted there. I’m assuming that given your history of doing the smart thing in Victory that you’re in,” she told him, though he noticed that she made her symbols glow regardless.
This still felt like he was being strong-armed into it. Despite his prodding, Vandal had given him nothing to assuage him that this wasn’t the type of backwards dealing that was going to blow up in everyone’s faces. Fact was, he still had no idea what kind of work this was actually going to be. Not to mention she’d basically yanked out his biggest secret in front of him and dangled it around, and he still couldn’t tell if that was meant to be a threat. His spine tingled and he once again wondered if he could skip town. Too late for that though…
“Fine,” he accepted, watching as a sick grin split Vandal’s face. “But I’ve got a previous engagement this week.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard you’re going to join up with that job Turnaround was pulled into,” Vandal informed him as she began handing over a card with her contact information and getting one of his burners’ number.
Information brokers…
“And there,” she finished up. “I’ll send you your first job after you finish up with that.”
Translation: I’m not giving you anything to barter with Amberheart or the Arrestors for a lighter sentence if this goes sideways. Alex sighed and moved to leave.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he warned. “Your predecessor had his own plans too, it turned out.”
She dismissed his concerns with a self assured grin, “Don’t worry about it. I promise you, if you knew what I had planned, you’d be begging to help me.”
Alex rolled his eyes from behind his mask. And people thought he was arrogant for wanting to take over the world.
---------------------------------
Vandal watched Tech Crash – actually, the Iron Menace – shut the door as he left and waited a few seconds while she listened to his footsteps fade away.
Then she cheered, “Yes! Yes! Yes! Fuck yes! I did it!”
Holy shit, she finally got Menace on her team! She’d been hoping to poach him since she first became Vandal Eyes two years ago but it had seemed impossible. A new information broker in a town with the Broker in it? Forget about it!
The Iron Menace wasn’t exactly reclusive so it’s not like she couldn’t have tried to get in contact with him, but he clearly only worked with known fixtures in the villain community. She’d tried to get his attention indirectly, making sure to try and work with some of the people he seemed to team up with a lot and offering lower rates, but it still hadn’t gotten him to bite.
It wasn’t like she could go up to him and go “Hi! You’re one of my biggest inspirations for getting into this job! Want to work together?”
Oh gods, she’d actually come close to that. Hell, she’d managed to track him down after one job and had considered doing something that stupid only to learn that he lived in a place owned by the Serena Song. Of course he did! Holy shit, people did not know how cool he was! This was a guy who had worked with just about every dark cape who had ever started out on the street level and had freaking dimensional manipulator gauntlets! He constantly lied about them to throw people off track about how smart he actually was, so Vandal didn’t take it personally when he denied it once again, but she’d still gotten him to reluctantly admit it! Oh and he was finally upgrading his whole suit now! This was it! The big moment!
Vandal almost forgot as she was daydreaming about what he was going to show off next that she’d been hired to track him down. Right… yeah, need to let Terrorantula know.
The villainess had requested a wellness check on Menace after he’d vanished, mistakenly believing that he needed one as opposed to the obvious that he’d clearly try to disguise himself in order to ambush and defeat ArachNed without getting stuck in his rogues gallery, clearly being above arching for a single hero! Had his gauntlets had been working and he hadn’t been distracted escaping, he totally would’ve done it too!
She’d been frustrated watching that whole thing play out. She’d been keeping an eye out ever since Menace had premiered his new look with the Lockwide heist (it had taken an embarrassing amount of rewatches to figure out it was him and she still hadn’t been sure until just now) to see where he’d pop up next and had groaned when she tagged him at Reddins right after the Knuckledusters had made the sudden swap with Aegis. She’d only learned about it that morning but still could’ve warned Menace if they’d been working together! That mishap had ruined everything about the rematch!
Thankfully she’d still managed to get Ice Hawk over there with a favor he owed her to help bail him out. And she’d even gotten to arrange this meeting at the same time! Oh man, she felt like godsdamn Over Seer pulling that off! Well, assuming that bitch was a singular person, which the more she’d been working this job, the more she doubted that.
While she gnashed her teeth thinking about the League again, she shot an encrypted message over to her rig back home which would work on piping the news over to Terror via some back channels. Doing so pulled her out of her funk and forced her to think about her client for a moment.
Huh… the two of them had done a few jobs in the past together and worked so well together. Now they shared a common enemy. Oh this could be so good!
Vandal had previously been shipping Menace with Life Tyrant before she’d started this job. Her “Metal Leaf” fic had been her masterpiece – at least of the works she published publicly – even though it was solidly losing in ratings next to few of her other works starring better known villains. Unfortunately, after losing interest in anything related to the League lately, she’d lost all interest in that particular pairing.
But Terror? She was another solid fixture around Victory who had gotten a younger Vandal fantasizing about the villainous side of things. Vandal had always been a Terror x Ned truther in the face of the millions of ArachSquid shippers (or at the very least a Terrorantula x Wither Wasp advocate as her runner up pairing), but the idea of the two brought together by the same foe…
Stop. Professionalism insists you don’t assume your clients’ romantic intentions, she reminded herself. At least not while you’re still trying to get them to buy more info off you.
She didn’t need to misread anything here and make the wrong guess. Part of being an information broker was being sure that the stuff you tease was what the client really wants to pay extra for. Offering the wrong thread you thought they’d want to pull on unprompted was a good way to lose the trust and mystique you were hoping to build.
Vandal still made a mental note regardless to look back at a few of the tapes of their previous jobs together and see if there were any looks the two were throwing each other. Well… Terror at least. Menace's helmets always covered his eyes (which had always been part of the appeal as part of a ship).
She also mentally cursed herself for promising to keep Menace’s identity secret. Well, obviously she wasn’t going to betray his trust, but it did mean she couldn’t do her usual strategy of enticing Terrorantula for more details other than “he’s alive and still planning to be a villain”, which kind of ate into her bottom line. She sighed.
Oh well, at the very least she would be getting a hell of a show soon. She had wanted to tell Menace all the details about her own job but didn’t want him distracted trying to plan two things at once. This time, everyone would see him at his best and recognize what she’d known all these years.
She failed to hold in her excitement, practically skipping as she left the room with a goofy grin on her face. Oh this was gonna be so cool!
1. During the decade immediately following the Great War, the northern AU saw an increase of illegally smuggled alcoholic beverages from Atlanthea and Junea (known as moonshine having been smuggled from the moons of Junea). Many of the earliest villain hideouts in the transition to the new era are due to the hidden speakeasies and distilleries that were created in this time.
2. The Avalonian language’s proliferation throughout the world oddly has nothing to do with Avalon’s former days as an empire and more to do with first contact with the Juneans when they landed in Circlegard, confusing the monument for a landing pad.
