3-33: Monologues and Obvious Tells

I wasn’t sure what to expect as I made my way down through the hole that led to Dr. Lana’s lair. At least I hoped the hole led to Dr. Lana’s lair.

It’d be really awkward if I was flying down to, say, a buried wastewater treatment facility or something equally ridiculous.

Only the farther down I went, the more I felt like I was getting close to shit that had nothing to do with the literal shit you’d see in a wastewater facility. I finally broke through into a room that would’ve looked impressive were it not for the giant hole through the ceiling and floor.

The place was massive and shaped like an egg that’d been flattened at the bottom to allow people to walk around. Though in this case it wasn’t people so much as it was an army of humanoid robots that spread out for as far as the eye could see.

Which really was impressive considering she’d built this entire complex right under Starlight City University without anyone noticing. Or if they did notice, then she’d managed to bullshit some higher up administrator in the university bureaucracy that she was creating this room under the expensive basketball arena as part of some research that needed to be done.

Either way, it was an impressive accomplishment.

Even more worrying was the giant pinkish/purplish portal on the other side of the room. Dr. Lana floated in front of the thing, and she held Fialux up by the scruff of her neck. Fialux was struggling and trying to get free, but either the augments on her suit had been knocked out, or Dr. Lana was operating with some of the super strength she’d exhibited earlier.

I really wished I could figure out how she’d managed to do that. If she could do it to herself? That meant I could do it to Fialux and get her back in action.

I checked the readout from Fialux’s suit. I figured after our last fight it’d be a good idea for me to have a remote way to keep an eye on what she was doing. Maybe even a remote way to take command of her suit if I really needed to remove her from danger before said danger could hurt her.

I hadn’t told her about that little addition to her suit, of course. She’d be livid if she ever figured that one out. It was a last resort kind of thing. 

That little built in safety allowed me to get a good look at the current status of her suit, and the current status wasn’t good. Either Dr. Lana had knocked something critical loose during the fight, or she’d used some of the work she’d done reverse engineering my own suit to figure out how to disable them.

I’d have to proceed with caution. If she took out the suit with raw strength she might pull that when she was fighting me. If it was her reverse engineering my shit then it meant she could use my systems against me. Either way, I’d be well and truly fucked in a fight, and not in the fun way.

“I’m in her lair, CORVAC,” I said.

“Affirmative, mistress. It would seem that she is preparing an invasion of some sort,” CORVAC said.

“Yup,” I replied. “Looks like someone is planning on taking over the city the old fashioned way. I have to give her credit. A robot army might be cliche, but there’s a reason people keep going back to the old standards.”

“Night Terror,” Dr. Lana said, her voice booming across the massive room. “So we meet again. Though it would seem that this time around I finally have the upper hand in our little rivalry!”

I kept my mouth shut. If she wanted to gloat then she could gloat to her heart’s content. I had work to do.

I ran a scan for the signal she had to be using to control all these bots. That was the thing about working with robot armies like this. Sure it was possible to load the bots with firmware that gave them autonomy while they were out there destroying your enemies, but it could be dangerous to give a robot army autonomy.

Things carrying weapons that had the ability to think for themselves could always decide they wanted to turn those weapons against their creators, after all. There were more than a few villains who’d learned that lesson the hard way when their attempted rise of the machines ended up rising against them instead.

No, it was much easier to have a centralized control structure for the robots that allowed whoever was sending them out to control them more directly. Sure that led to its own host of problems. Like the fact that heroes could simply destroy the centralized control area to disable the army, but it was better than having a bunch of freethinking robotic death commandos coming after your ass.

“I always knew we would come to this, Night Terror,” she said. “I always knew there would come a day when the two great titans of Starlight City would face off against one another in mortal combat. Once you’re gone, I can ascend to my place as the city’s greatest villain and hero! No one will realize I am the one sending the very things I save them from, and they will love me!”

This bitch was crazy, but I wasn’t going to acknowledge it. She could go on about how we were destined to face off against one another in a game of Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition for all I cared. As long as she was talking, I could continue working.

The only problem was I was scanning on all frequencies, and the only thing I found was the campus wifi signal. A wifi signal, I might add, that was ridiculously strong for being all the way down here in a combo underground bunker slash villainous lair.

Someone in the campus IT department really deserved a bonus for creating a network that could penetrate this deep.

There had to be something. A radio signal. Anything.

“This makes no sense,” I muttered.

“What is the problem, mistress?” CORVAC asked.

“She has to have some signal she’s using to control these things,” I said. “Surely she wouldn’t be stupid enough to give each of these bots autonomy.”

Then again there’d been numerous times that I’d underestimated exactly how stupid Dr. Lana’s plans could get. She had a surprising and dangerous combination of being just savvy enough with technology and innovation to surprise me while at the same time being just stupid enough that she never managed to take full advantage of her ability to surprise me.

There was something to that. She did things that surprised me, but she did it in the stupidest possible way. So there was always some glaring weakness that could be used to defeat her. Which was pretty standard practice for most villains in Starlight City, to be honest.

I wasn’t ashamed to admit that even I’d fallen victim to that trap a time or two.

“She always does something I don’t expect, but then she turns around and makes a mistake I’d totally expect,” I muttered. “Every time we’ve gone up against each other, that’s what happened.”

“Mistress?” CORVAC asked.

“Dr. Lana. She’s always coming up with new things that surprise me, but then she’s always making sloppy mistakes in the execution that end up being her undoing. It’s your classic villain behavior. She’s so convinced of her own superiority that she can’t admit that maybe it’s her own hubris that defeats her every time.”

“I cannot imagine living life like that,” CORVAC said in a tone that left no doubt in my mind who he was talking about.

“Stuff it, CORVAC,” I growled.

“Of course mistress, but if I might offer some advice?”

“Of course,” I said. “What grand advice do you have for me that’s going to blow this whole situation wide open?”

“…are two grand titans duking it out for the soul of the city!” Dr. Lana raved on in the background, her voice rising. “Only I’ve found something grander than simply being the ruler of this city alone! No, I am destined for so much more!”

I tuned her out again. All I cared about was that she was going on with her monologue. The particulars of a monologue never mattered as much as the fact that it was still happening, which still gave me ample opportunity to figure out a way to defeat her.

It’d happened to me often enough in my early days, after all. Back before I’d learned the value of shutting the fuck up and shooting a hero rather than explaining in great detail how I was going to shoot them before I got around to it.

“You mentioned that her mistake is always obvious,” CORVAC said.

“Right.”

“And you mentioned that the only signal you are picking up in her buried underground bunker is the campus WiFi which, if it is operating under the standard physics of broadcast signals, should not be able to penetrate this deep under campus.”

And there it was. 

“CORVAC, you’re a fucking genius,” I said.

“I do try, mistress,” he said.

I tapped into the campus WiFi. Surely it couldn’t be this simple. Surely she couldn’t be using the campus wifi network to control her robot army. Surely she wouldn’t be stupid enough to put that control out over a network that could be shut down by a grumpy overpaid sysadmin who didn’t like the idea of someone hijacking his network bandwidth to control an army of robot soldiers hellbent on overthrowing the city.

“Scan that network, CORVAC,” I said. “I’m patching the signal through to you now.”

“I appreciate it, mistress,” he said. “And it would appear that it is not the campus network. She is merely using a name similar to the campus network in order to hide what she is doing.”

“Security through obfuscation,” I muttered. “That is something I’d expect from her.”

“Dare I point out that it almost worked, mistress?”

“You could dare if you want me to vaporize all of your critical components,” I growled.

“Might I point out that a threat like that assumes your ability to discover where my critical components are housed which, if past performance is any indication, has been difficult for you?”

I sighed. I hated to admit that the bastard had a point, but the bastard had a point.

“And so I present to you something you’ve never managed to do before! My grand robot army that will march and set me up as the supreme ruler of a world!”

I turned back to Dr. Lana and arched an eyebrow. I wasn’t sure what she was on about. What I was sure of was it was time to disabuse her of a few delusions of grandeur she’d picked up.

“Are you fucking serious?” I asked, heaping those four words with as much scorn as I could muster.

It was time to interrupt her monologue and show her who was boss in this city. Who was boss on this planet.