3-34: Ass Kicked

Dr. Lana stopped. She floated down from the portal behind her just a bit. She actually looked deflated. Just a little.

It was a look I could totally understand and sympathize with. After all, it was a look I’d worn myself on more than a few occasions. There was something about having a hero come along and poke holes in your plan that just plain sucked.

Not that I was a hero. Far from it. I was a villain. Acting like a hero got my girlfriend robbed of her powers and kidnapped on a couple of occasions. It led me on a series of misadventures that brought me to this moment because I hadn’t vaporized Dr. Lana the first time I saw her harassing Fialux on the Starlight City University campus.

All because I was under the influence of a pair of pretty green eyes and a body that wouldn’t quit.

It was time for me to be who I was. I’d worry about whether or not that might rob me of my girlfriend later. I figured I was definitely losing her if she kept getting kidnapped and nearly killed, whereas I was only maybe losing her if I ended up doing the whole villain thing again and it turns out she didn’t approve.

“Robots? Seriously?” I asked.

Dr. Lana blinked. She seemed so surprised that she didn’t even bother getting angry. “What’s wrong with robots?”

“That’s your problem. You’re never able to think of an idea that hasn’t occurred to someone else a hundred times before. Seriously. If I had a penny every time some two-bit wannabe villain tried to take over the city by breaking Asimov’s laws then I wouldn’t need to rob any banks to make money!”

I didn’t need to rob banks to make money anyway. Just parking my investments in a fund that followed the investments those assholes in Congress were making on the regular was enough to keep me in the money after my initial seed money robbing banks when I first got started.

But it was a nice bit of misdirection. I was all about that when it came to revealing tantalizing tidbits about myself.

“Big words from a woman who hasn’t managed to harness the very powers of a goddess!” she screamed. Then she went on in a more mundane voice. “Or conquer the city, for that matter.”

The woman had a point there. I didn’t like that she had a point. That made me want to go old school and start stabbing rather than firing plasma blasts at her. I kept a couple of sharp knives hidden in the old pattern buffer just for that purpose.

The only thing that stopped me was I figured sharp objects would do about as much good as the plasma blast in her current state.

She held Fialux up as she said it. Like Fialux was a prize of some sort, and from the way she glowered at Dr. Lana she wasn’t all that happy about being the damsel in distress.

Then again, the whole damsel in distress routine had never suited her all that well to begin with. She proved that when she started thrashing around in Dr. Lana’s grip and throwing elbows, and one of them actually landed.

I didn’t think that hit would do any good considering Dr. Lana’s boast about harnessing the power of a goddess, but the hit actually seemed to knock the wind out of Dr. Lana. I wasn’t sure how that was possible. If Fialux’s suit was dead then she shouldn’t be able to do something like that, but if there was an opportunity then I was going to take it without questioning my sudden good fortune too much.

So I used the momentary distraction to throw myself across the room.

I got right to Dr. Lana before she held up a hand and pointed down. I stopped immediately. If there was one thing I’d learned in my long and storied career, it was that when a villain starts pointing at things? It’s a good idea to stop and have a look at what they’re pointing at.

Sure pointing at the big old nothing behind an opponent to try and distract them was the oldest trick in the book, but I’d also backed that trick up with actually having something behind my opponent often enough that I figured it was at least worth some consideration if someone else was doing it to me.

I turned and saw that all the robots in the room had pointed their weapons at me. I was about to be on the business end of a point blank series of blasts from hundreds of cybernetic soldiers, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

Let’s be honest. I wasn’t exactly operating at one hundred percent, for all that I’d managed to somehow pull wins out of the jaws of defeat a couple of times this afternoon. Pulling those victories had involved taking a not-so-fantastic voyage through the lower GI tract of a giant lizard putting out the kind of radiation that made Chernobyl look like background radiation in comparison.

The point is I’d been absorbing a hell of a lot of nasty shit, and while I didn’t have any health bars that told me how close my cells were to calling it quits and reducing me to a shivering nothing that couldn’t control my bodily functions on either end, I knew it was only a matter of time before the radiation did its work.

Not to mention my systems had been working overtime through all these fights to keep me up and fighting rather than a shivering mess on the ground somewhere out on the university campus puking and shitting everything I’d eaten that day.

Modern technology. It was a wonder.

“Go ahead,” Dr. Lana said. “Make my day.”

I rolled my eyes. It was a natural reaction to a line like that, but apparently it was a natural reaction that someone like Dr. Lana couldn’t appreciate.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she asked.

I regretted that she’d managed to get her breath back. I’d liked her a lot better a moment ago when Fialux had her on the ropes. I pined for the halcyon days of five minutes ago when I’d been flying at her and she couldn’t talk and I didn’t have a bunch of robots pointing their guns at me while I was slowly succumbing to high doses of radiation.

“Why did you do that?” she snapped.

“Do what?” I asked. “Launch myself across the room at you? I’d think that’d be obvious. You were incapacitated and I figured I’d take my shot.”

She let out a growl. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Why did you roll your eyes? Why are you always rolling your eyes at me? What the hell is your problem?”

I blinked a couple of times. Of all the things for her to get upset about in the middle of a fight, that was the last thing I figured she’d pick up on, but if she wanted to go there…

“Um, probably because I don’t respect a single thing you’ve managed to achieve as a villain. I think everything that passes your lips is such a storm of cliches that it sounds like you’ve plagiarized all your speeches in addition to plagiarizing some of the best ideas better villains than you have come up with.”

“Stop saying that!” she shrieked. “I did not plagiarize anyone’s ideas! I will not have you talking about me like that!”

Oh boy. She was getting furious. Furious could be good. Furious could mean she was on the verge of making a mistake.

Then again, furious could also mean she was on the verge of having her robot army reduce me to so much ash. Which would be bad, but I was going to take any chance I could get.

Besides, I figured I at least stood a chance of fighting off the robot army. I wasn’t quite so sure about doing the same with this crazy bitch.

I might be able to monologue her into doing something stupid though.

“Let’s face it, Dr. Lana,” I continued. “You’re the B-movie that plays after John Wayne saved the day. You’re the Go Bots to my Transformers. You’re the Filmation Ghostbusters to my Real Ghostbusters that disappoints kids because the TV Guide doesn’t know the difference. You’re the RoseArt to my Crayola. You’re the…”

“Enough!” she shrieked.

She flew forward just a bit and backhanded me. Which was a hell of a mistake, I might add, because when she flew forward she left Fialux hanging there midair, totally free and clear.

Huh. That was odd.

Granted I was a little distracted from Fialux because I was flying through the air feeling just a touch of pain considering my inertial compensators were reaching the point they could no longer compensate for hits like that. We’re talking that bitch was hitting as hard as Fialux used to hit.

I would’ve given a pretty penny and a good chunk of the illegitimate funding I used to pay for all my wonderful toys to figure out how she pulled that one off.

Still, that pain wasn’t enough to stop me from wondering exactly how Fialux was floating in the air when she didn’t have any power going to her suit. I’d been certain the thing had been incapacitated. I’d checked and double checked, and there hadn’t been any signs of life from that suit. Which meant she shouldn’t be able to fly under her own power, or do anything to save herself if she got in trouble.

And yet there she was, floating in the air as sure as a zeppelin. Though maybe that wasn’t the best example considering zeppelins had a bad habit of blowing up spectacularly and she didn’t look like she was about to do anything of the sort. She did look a touch surprised that she was floating though.

Huh. Interesting. Though I did have more pressing matters to worry about at the moment than why my girlfriend was floating when she should be falling.

I managed to right myself just before I hit some of the robots. That would’ve really hurt with some of the licks I’d already taken. It would’ve been touch and go even if I had my shields and inertial compensators working at full tilt, which they most definitely weren’t at this point in the fight.

No, this was the point in the narrative where I was down for the count and on the verge of having my ass handed to me. Where it seemed certain the villain had the upper hand.

I always hated this part of the fight. Not because I was ever truly worried I was going to lose, but mostly because it always hurt like a motherfucker. Not to mention I was more used to being the villain who had the upper hand.

Though in that narrative I was always curb stomping the heroes. There were no miraculous last minute comebacks for heroes fighting Night Terror.

Though as I looked at the robot army gathered around me and up to Dr. Lana who seemed ready to kill me I had a hard time coming up with a way that I was going to make a comeback and get out of this fight alive.

Crap.