Chapter 29: Obfuscation Through Chaos

Chapter 29: Obfuscation Through Chaos

...

“What are you wearing?” Perry asked, glancing between Mom and Dad.

Dad was wearing a really slim power armor with none of the superfluous size and raw mass that he was known for. It was painted ivory with gold trim and a rising sun printed in gold on the chestplate, with fake washboard abs stenciled on the front.

It so far removed from Mechanaut’s brutal, unpainted pragmatism that Perry couldn’t quite comprehend what he was seeing. Which was the point, he supposed.

“I bust out the paladin armor whenever I’m out on a date with your mother. Can’t dilute my brand, you see.”

Mom...was wearing an outfit that would be at home on the floor of a strip club. She’d changed her skin, hair, eyes and facial structure. She was, for all intents and purposes, a different person.

It still weirded Perry out.

Perry rationally understood that it was a very effective way to separate his name from his parents and make sure they didn’t damage his reputation or allow super-groupies to connect more dots than they should.

It was necessary, but...

“Maybe this was a bad idea.” Perry muttered to himself. Heather looked equally uncomfortable as she glanced between the two.

“Can’t back out now, fellow teen supers,” Dad said, clanging his palm against Perry’s armored shoulder.

Perry plucked his dad’s hand off his shoulder. “You two just...take the other side of the building.”

“Alright. You ready for this, Glamour Girl?” ‘Paladin’ asked.

“Race you there!” ‘Glamour Girl’ said, blasting off into the sky, followed shortly by ‘Paladin’.

“I feel like I need to bleach my eyes.” Heather said.

“Yeah, this is definitely foreplay for them.” Perry shuddered.

Not important. What’s important is saving Brendon.

Perry squared his shoulders and took a deep breath orienting on Makazard’s lair.

Perry walked up to the massive iron door blocking the entrance to the squat concrete building that looked like it was designed to -and probably had- take a bombing.

A visor slid open and a pair of faintly glowing eyes peered down at them from a height of perhaps seven feet.

“We’re here for the auction.” Perry said.

“Password?”

“Wraith.”

“That’s-“

Wraith dove through the eye-slit, her body narrowing as she flew through the air, landing seamlessly on the other side.

There was a scuffle, and a muffled howl of pain as Heather presumably covered the guard’s mouth and gave him a love-tap with her superclub.

From experimentation, it hurt metaphysically as well as physically. It was very hard not to experience debilitating pain when struck by it, followed by a sense of listlessness and ennui.

A moment later, the door unlatched, revealing Wraith standing on top of a massive mutant with steely-looking scales.

Perry pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of his suit’s storage and tucked it in the man’s shirt-collar.

Heather glanced up and jumped into the clustered pipes along the ceiling, oozing through them nearly invisibly.

Perry raised a brow but decided not to mention the similarities to her father’s tactics. That wasn’t what she needed to hear. She’d deliberately hamstring herself if she was constantly trying not to do stuff like her dad.

Similar power sets had similar ideal moves.

Perry scanned the entryway and found a stand with name-tag stickers and a sharpie.

Hi, my name is....

Paradox

Perry filled out the name-tag and stuck it to the front of his armor. It would make him blend in with the other supers who’d gotten in legitimately for an extra couple seconds.

And it was funny. For several reasons.

Perry closed and latched the door to the street and propped the bouncer up against it.

Perry walked down the claustrophobic staircase right beneath Wraith oozing along the ceiling, with a confident swagger like he owned the place.

The security at the bottom of the winding staircase took one look at his nametag and waved him through. Thankfully the man didn’t have line of sight or sound to the bouncer at the top.

Although, security probably knows I’m here already.

Typically there was a security cam on the entrance, and their antics definitely wouldn’t go unnoticed.

That was where mom and dad came in. The experienced supers had the more vital task of finding and rescuing Brendon while the organizers scrambled to relocate him in a knee-jerk reaction to Perry and Heather’s sudden intrusion on their business.

Behind the second layer of security was a vast dome-shaped amphitheater, with a stage at one end, the focus of the entire room.

The auction stage.

There were only about sixteen other supers present for the auction, and Perry recognized a few of them.

The guy with fat flowing over his chair and onto the floor was Blobber, a super involved in underground fighting rings where they pitted supers against each other and anything else under the sun, from lions to replicators and prawns.

The thin man in the black coat with the sunken eyes was Dreamer, a junkie who could pull you into his own hallucinations. He was heavily involved in the drug trade, as both a dealer and super-heavy user.

The fellow in grey hyperweave in the front was Mass Driver.

He could manipulate the inertia of himself and anything he came into contact with, allowing him to fly or become immune to physical damage simply by cranking up his inertia such that no normal physical force could act on it.

Bad one to get into a fistfight with.

Mass Driver didn’t have a section of organized crime he favored, simply working as a fixer for wealthy cowls who needed to rent a trump card.

There were a few small-time cowls that Perry didn’t know of filling out the rest of the audience.

The assembled supers cast him an idle glance then turned back towards the stage. To them, he was just another guy in power armor.

Paradox was nowhere near a household name at this point.

Perry took a seat, propped his feet up and waited for the fireworks to start while Wraith clung to the ceiling above, doing overwatch.

It wasn’t long before a spotlight brightened center stage, and an announcer strolled up to the podium, idly flipping through a deck of cue cards in his hands.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!” he said with a bright smile. This was Makazard. A young, passably attractive man with fine features, blue eyes and an undercut on his dark hair.

“Tonight we’ve got some great goods in store, the kind of stuff you can’t get on the marketplace, and maybe even a few surprises!”

Surprises probably refers to me and Heather.

Following proper villain protocol, Makazard would announce that there were intruders and offer a reward to whoever subdued them, and then proceed to sell them on the stage to a jeering crowd.

Perry stifled a yawn and scrolled through his wiki while Makazard hyped up the crowd.

Makazard.

Energy type: Sonic. Can emanate and absorb sound from entire body, can fly. Is proficient at producing sounds at many different resonant frequencies.

Weak against insulative materials. Was once beaten by a speedster with a dump-truck filled with foam. Does not have inhuman stamina, and powers suffer when exhausted.

Makazard’s internal physiology must be interesting, from a physics standpoint, as when vibrating at a human body’s resonance frequency, he should be harming himself, but we see no evidence of that. Is the cowl immune to his own powers physically, or simply deadening the vibrations before they reach his body? – PushesUpHisGlasses

A massive creature peered into the dome through the portal, smoke wafting from its gigantic nostrils. Perry would call it a dragon had it not had a strangely humanoid face, perpetually pinched in disgust.

Heather detached from the ceiling and bashed the summoned creature’s nose in one smooth movement, causing it to reel backwards in pain.

Perry picked up a chair and whipped it up at one of the dots of light, destabilizing the spell instantly, and closing the portal to whatever hellscape Mr. Myst had been contacting.

When Perry looked back, Mr. Myst and Makazard were already gone, disappeared behind the curtain, along with Brendon.

A heavy impact bowled Perry over as Mechanaut smashed him into the ground, their suits digging massive furrows into the concrete flooring.

“You two got Brendon?” Perry asked, aiming a punch at his dad’s helmet, barely rocking the heavy iron back. Mom and dad had a presence in the backrooms and would be in an ideal situation to catch Makazard and Mr. Myst off guard. If they were actually faking being caught.

“We’re out of our restraints and good to intercept,” Mechanaut said, confirming Perry’s thoughts as he raised his fists to smash. Perry kicked him off.

Well, he more kicked so hard that it forced him out from underneath Mechanaut like a slippery watermelon seed, without appreciably moving the massive armor at all.

But free was free.

Perry stood and looked back towards the stage and saw it melt into a kaleidoscope of colors.

The entire world turned sideways, and Perry collapsed sideways, attempting to keep a hold on the world as it spun away from him.

Reflexively he kicked on his stabilizers, which drove him head-first into the ground.

Ow. Perry thought as the world spun around him.

He glanced up and spotted Dreamer, waving to him with a pipe trailing a thin trail of smoke that seemed to be an umbilical cord to something further up in the sky. Some formless, horrifying mass watching the ongoings with amusement.

“You better hope this doesn’t stop me from getting my new pipe, Paradox.”

Dream’s voice vibrated through his eyelids and Perry struggled to stand up as the world shattered into geometric shapes.

I think I’m gonna throw up, Perry thought, buckling down to his hands and knees.

Stay in school and build your Stability kids! A magic schoolbus floated past his gaze, travelling the umbilical cord smoke like a road. It ain’t fancy, but it keeps you playing the game of life!

The creature just above his eyelids crunched into the bus with the sound of twisted metal and screaming children.

In the distance, Perry heard an explosion, and from the stage, which looked tiny and sideways, he barely made out the form of Paladin and Glamour Girl.

“This way Glamour Girl!” Paladin said, posing as he pointed towards the exit, Brendon safely ensconced between them.

“I paid good money for that woman! She’s not going anywhere!” Mechanaut roared, tackling...himself.

There was a brief exchange of blows, and Mechanaut overwhelmingly dominated it, ignoring the puny armor’s pathetic attacks before backhanding Paladin, causing the presumably empty suit of armor to go tumbling across the room, smashing Dreamer violently from the side.

Perry blinked.

“Ugh...” Dreamer groaned in pain from underneath Paladin,

I guess everythings’ back to normal, Perry thought, looking down at his hands on the floor. The room was no longer spinning, there was no monster hovering above his eyelids and the magic schoolbus was safe.

Perry shook the remains of the drug-induced dream out of his head and leapt to his feet, helping Paladin to his feet while giving Dreamer another kick to make sure he stayed down.

“Paladin, help!” Mom shrieked, her feet kicking as Mechanaut threw her over his armored shoulder.

“I’m coming, Glamour Girl!” Paladin shouted, leaping into the air only to be smacked down again, incidentally smashing into a cowl giving Heather trouble across the room.

If was one thing mom and dad were good at, it was obfuscation through sheer chaos.

“HAHA! The woman is mine, and I shall do with her as I like!” Mechanaut crowed.

“You fiend!” Paladin shouted.

“Nooooooo!” Mom shrieked, really hamming it up, her feet kicking futilely against Mechanaut’s armor.

“Save yourself Brendon!” She said, her voice fading as Mechanaut tromped away with her over her shoulder “Don’t worry about me!”

“I’m coming Glamour Girl!” Paladin rushed after them, while Brendon ran out the exit after them.

Paradox met Wraith’s gaze, and the two of them shrugged, then got back to work. Brendon was technically extracted by Hexen and two of Mechanaut’s armors, although he didn’t know it.

The fight was going pretty well, and the two of them were mopping up until Perry felt a grip on the back of his neck.

“Paradox,” Mass Driver said from behind him.

“Mass Driver.” Perry said, a cold sweat erupting on his skin.

A floating armament bounced off Mass-Driver’s temple.

“You realize you’re costing a lot of people a lot of money,” the veteran cowl said, not even acknowledging the attack.

“I figured.” Perry admitted. “I’ve got my own priorities too, yaknow?”

“Well, it’s bad form to kill you for doing your job, but you’re going to have to learn a lesson.”

“Like wha-“

HP: 0

SNAP!

“AAAGH!” Perry’s left arm snapped where the cowl poked it, the metal of his suit deforming instantly.

“You’re not invincible.” Mass driver said.

“That was weird,” Mass Driver continued “Took a lot more effort to do that than I expected.”

“Hey Asshole!” Wraith shouted, leaping through the air towards Mass Driver. The Cowl watched her approach with a raised eyebrow, not bothering to defend himself.

Heather bashed the haunted iron reinforced by Perry’s perk across said eyebrow.

“OW!” Mass Driver shouted, dropping Perry to the ground and stumbling backwards, clutching his bleeding eyebrow. “I stopped it! OW! What the heck was that!?”

Heather followed up with another strike but Mass Driver zipped backwards like he’d been tugged through the air on a string.

Heather’s arm extended out and whipped Anya out towards the cowl’s face again. The older super caught Heather’s arm and twisted, sending a violent shockwave through Heather’s entire body.

“Gah!” Heather shouted in pain but dropped her club into her other hand and caught the cowl across his ribs.

“AGH! Okay, that’s enough.”

Mass Driver held out a hand and a wall of wind plastered Heather against the far concrete wall.

“Didn’t sign up for this crap today, Nobody’s even paying me...” Mass Driver muttered, clutching his ribs as he floated through the exit door.

“You alive Wraith?” Perry asked, unable to straighten his broken arm because the metal was locked in a completely unnatural position.

“Technically,” She groaned, returning to her normal form.

“Wanna get outta here?” Perry asked, scanning the chaos, and bodies of cowls littering the auction house, hearing the distant sirens gradually getting stronger.

There had been some big dogs in the crowd tonight, and Perry was feeling it with his whole body. The man blew through three HP like it was nothing.

“Yes,” Wraith said, staggering to join him in the center of the dome. “Yes I do.”

***At the Zauberer residence***

“You’re mine to toy with, Glamour Girl!” Mechanaut shouted, tossing the scantily clad woman onto the oversized bed. "Paladin can't save you now!"

“Kyaaa!”