3-30: Emergency Management

For all that the university liked to talk a big game in their brochures about their fancy new state of the art emergency management center, the place didn’t look all that impressive.

The building was a squat structure with absolutely no redeeming architectural qualities that’d been built back in the ‘70s when designs with absolutely no aesthetically pleasing qualities had been all the rage for some reason.

The only thing missing was lime green carpet and a tacky faux-gold sunburst mirror to complete the image and make you think Mrs. Brady could step out of the building at any moment.

It was nice and out of the way though, and they’d taken a building they couldn’t easily get rid of and put it to a use other than the business school that’d since moved to a palace on the other side of campus funded by the student loan bubble and the donations of successful former business students who wanted to show the world how rich they were by putting their names on plaques at the front entrance.

I strode into the building. A balding and overweight security guard looked up in surprise. The recognition was immediate. I hadn’t bothered to change into my Professor Terror outfit.

I didn’t want to go incognito for this one.

“You’re…”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, waving a dismissive hand before he could continue. “Night Terror. Greatest villain the city has ever known. Bane of portly security guards everywhere. So how about you let me through to the nice people working in this building and we don’t have any trouble?”

He stuck his tongue out of the edge of his mouth. His eyes flicked down to a gun at his side. It was better than the old fashioned six shooter they’d given the guard at that bank I boosted the day I met Fialux, but it wasn’t that much better.

“C’mon,” I said. “You work security. You have a cushy job sitting here playing games on your phone. You know bullets don’t do jack shit against me. Do you really want to try it?”

He grinned. That wasn’t a reaction I was expecting. Usually these security guards were headstrong aspiring or former cops, and that meant they were the kind to take it personally when a supervillain walked into their area of influence and started blasting.

There were so few who took their job for what it was: a way to get paid while catching up on their reading. Or gaming.

“I suppose you can go through, ma’am,” he said. “But if you don’t mind, it would help me keep my job if you let me hit the silent alarm.”

I grinned. It was refreshing to run into someone who still knew the score.

“You go right ahead…” I leaned forward and peered at his name tag. “Dave. I wouldn’t dream of costing you your job if we can avoid it.”

“Much obliged, ma’am,” he said, reaching up and tipping his cap.

His hand hit the alarm. I figured under normal circumstances that would’ve caused a heck of a lot of trouble for anyone who was a normal. The only problem with that was the silent alarm assumed they were dealing with some nutcase with a gun and not a supervillain the police couldn’t touch.

I strode through the building until I reached the nerve center of the school’s emergency management center. It wasn’t nearly as impressive as what they put on the brochures they gave to students who wanted the illusion of safety going to school in a city that was regularly a playground for super powered beings.

Those brochures showed a room that looked like something straight out of a Hollywood movie. The school paper had a field day when they discovered one of the smaller images used on the Emergency Management Center website was actually a screenshot lifted directly from the Matthew Broderick classic WarGames.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” I said, looking at an ancient rear projection big screen TV in one corner of the room that showed a standard definition image of the Starlight City News Network. “Busy monitoring the situation in the city, I see.”

Several people looked up from their computer monitors. They were flat screen monitors, at least, but they were the old square kind. It was clear the university IT department had decided to squeeze every last bit of value they could out of their technology, and this was one of the dumping grounds where old tech went to die.

Again, it was a marked contrast to the impressive stock photos they used to make students think the university was being continually protected from the constant threats hitting the city by a state of the art facility. Seriously. To hear the PR people talk about it, the people who worked in this building would do anything short of forming Voltron to defend the university from trouble.

“Night…”

I held up a hand and the older lady stopped in the middle of her sentence. “Yeah, I know. Night Terror. What’s she doing here? This stuff doesn’t happen to me. Please don’t hurt us. Blah, blah, blah.”

Looks were exchanged.

“Trust me,” I said. “I’ve been through this so many times before that I have the script memorized. So I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen next.”

“Um. What is going to happen next?” a balding guy with a pair of epic glasses that looked like something straight out of NASA in the ‘50s asked.

“Well, I figure what’s going to happen now could go one of two ways,” I said, smiling to try and put them at ease. 

From the way they shifted nervously in their ancient chairs that looked like they’d been requisitioned from a computer lab back in the ‘90s? The smile wasn’t working.

None of them rose to the bait I’d just dangled in front of them. I sighed. I guess that meant I was going to have to go ahead without a prompting.

“Either you all do what you’re supposed to do and maybe have a chance of saving some lives out there today, or you don’t do your jobs, and I go ahead and do what I was going to do and lots of lives are put in danger.”

“Um, that makes no sense,” the guy with the glasses said.

I held up a hand, then realized he was right. What I’d said didn’t really make much sense. I was so frazzled by everything that’d happened lately that I wasn’t thinking straight.

“Let me back that up a little bit. Usually I lead with a threat or something, but I promise I’m not trying to threaten you here. It’s just that I’m about to do some stuff that will probably result in a good chunk of this campus being turned into a smoldering crater.”

“How is that not a threat?” a lady with grey hair who looked like she’d seen some shit over the years asked.

I put a hand to my forehead and massaged my temples. This seemed like a good moment for a nice temple massage.

“I’m sorry. Again, that came out wrong. I’m not going to reduce parts of campus to a smoldering crater because I have anything against campus in particular. It’s just that the head of the Goddamn Applied Sciences Department has sort of kidnapped my girlfriend and is threatening the city with giant radioactive lizards.”

“What does that have to do with reducing campus to rubble?” a younger guy, he looked like he was maybe a student worker or something who was reconsidering going to work for the Emergency Management Department, asked.

“That’s where things get complicated,” I said. “You see, she’s the one opening all those portals letting giant radioactive lizards overrun the city, and I figure that’s something that needs to be stopped. The only problem is in order to stop her there’s going to be a lot of damage, and I figured it might be helpful if you guys activated some of your emergency systems to get college students into their shelters or evacuate them before things really start to go bad.”

A couple of them swallowed and looked to the TV that was still playing a feed of the Starlight City News Network. There wasn’t even a cable box on top of the thing. Like it was wired directly into the wall with a remote that allowed a person to surf the channels the old fashioned way without a guide.

I guess there was a good reason why the school didn’t actually include tours of this joke on their campus walkarounds they were always pulling with prospective incoming freshmen.

“Look, are any of you assholes going to help me out with this, or do I need to take matters into my own hands?” I asked, tired of all the bureaucratic bullshit. “I don’t know why you haven’t already done it. Those things are going to be coming this way soon. The only thing stopping them right now is my megalomaniacal robot.”

They still stared at me, unblinking. Clearly I wasn’t getting through to them.

Oh well. I’d discovered a nice way to cut through all the bureaucratic bullshit a long time ago. It was at the end of my wrist, and it was humming ominously and crackling with the promise of lots of pain for anyone who decided to cross me.

They all jumped into action pretty damn quick after that.

“What do you need Miss Night Terror?” the guy with the glasses asked.

“I need you to put out an emergency broadcast, or whatever the hell it is you do, to all the students on campus. Tell them they need to evacuate if they can. Get out of here in the next ten minutes and go to the west. That’s very important. I have a friend who’s drawing the giant lizards to the east.”

“And if they can’t get out in ten minutes?” the grey haired lady asked.

“Then they need to hunker down and do what they can to survive,” I said. “I don’t know what this fight is going to look like, but it’s not going to be pretty, and I want to make sure everyone has a chance to get out of here.”

I couldn’t believe I was even wasting the time to do this. There was a time when I wouldn’t have bothered with something like this even though I did my best to avoid collateral civilian damage.

Fialux really had softened me up. I needed to watch that. I needed to be hard if I was going to do what needed to be done to get her out of her current situation with Dr. Lana. Even if that meant potentially reducing the campus to rubble.

But I had a soft spot for these kids. It was impossible for me to teach my Surviving A Heroic Intervention class and not get a soft spot for them. They were more to me than anonymous faces in a terrified crowd fleeing from the horror of the week. They were my kids, and I was going to protect them.

Besides, CORVAC was doing well enough with that holding action against the lizards. I wasn’t sure what he was doing down there in the Applied Sciences Department, but I figured if he told me he was holding the fort then that meant he was holding the fort. He might be a once-traitorous bastard who’d tried to sell me down the river, but he didn’t lie about business.

“How’re we doing, CORVAC?” I asked.

“About as well as can be expected,” he said. “She has an army of cybernetic exoskeletons she is using to keep me from breaching what I think is her main research lab, and I believe she is also planning on using some of those to march on the city.”

“Great,” I said, rolling my eyes. She was going for a rise of the machines, but with her very human intellect running the show instead of an artificial intelligence who’d gained sapience and a burning desire to burn its creators off the face of the planet.

That was good. I could use that. Rogue AI could be difficult to take out, CORVAC was proof of that, but if the asshole running the cybernetic soldiers was human then the invasion was nothing a blast to the brain couldn’t fix.

At least normally a blast to the brain would fix things. I guess I couldn’t be sure about that now considering her weird healing abilities.

I looked around the room. To their credit, once they had their marching orders these emergency management types seemed to know their shit. They were typing into their ancient computers and lifting old fashioned phones that were attached to wires, though no rotary dials were in evidence. Which surprised me considering the outdated state of all the other tech.

A moment later sirens went off all around campus. I would’ve thought the sirens would already be going on considering the city was under siege from a bunch of giant radioactive lizards, but apparently it took yours truly arriving to light a fire under their asses to get things going.

“Right. I’m going to leave all of you to do your work here,” I said. “Good luck with this. We’re all going to need it.”

I strode out of the office, having done my good deed for the day. From here on out I was no longer Night Terror the maybe-hero. I wasn’t Night Terror the antihero. I wasn’t Night Terror who was reluctant to hurt someone because it might upset someone.

No, I was Night Terror the villain, and there was someone out there who’d hurt somebody very near and dear to my heart.

It was time to remind the world why that was a very dangerous thing to do.