The cover is laid out like a camera viewfinder, with a central bright rectangle for what will actually be in the photo, and a slightly dimmed out border that will be masked out of the actual picture. In the bright center, Netwalker and Red Widow are smiling and shaking hands, looking slightly into the camera as if this were a publicity photo. In the darkened margins, Netwalker has his pistol out and Red Widow's energy tendrils are lashing about menacingly. .|. COHERENT COMICS UNINCORPORATED presents ACADEMY OF SUPER-HEROES #104 --X------------------------------------------------------------------------ '|` /|(`| | Rival Schools Part 4 - Charm School /-|.)|-| copyright 2010 by Dave Van Domelen ___________________________________________________________________________ RIVAL SCHOOLS ROLL CALL CODENAME REAL NAME POWERS SCHOOL -------- --------- ------ ------ Red Widow Cecilia Mendez Force Tendrils Charm School Ahmed Enhanced Human Tutoring Bluthundin None Uplifted Jackal Tutor Netwalker Nate Walker "Cyberspace" Transport Unknown Justice Colin Shaw Electricity Generation ASIE Nerd-Boy George Potter Cyborg Understudy The Ginch Unknown Stretchable Fingers Understudy Ant Adam Hoeffstaedter Shrinking Understudy Jinni Harith al Khayal Limited Invisibility Understudy Antagonish Dareth Randall Teleportation Understudy Al Mirage Albert Miraz Illusions Understudy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ [August 24, 2026 - St. Louis, Missouri Sector] "Welcome to the Freedom Alliance headquarters," Red Widow smiled and extended her hand, which Netwalker took. She was wearing a "civvies" variant of her costume, without the mask and looking a bit more like normal clothing, but still in red and black. The red wig was still part of the ensemble as well. "You thinking of joining?" The NAC Marshal smiled back, a little weakly, and shook his head before releasing Red Widow's hand. "No, I like my current job. Actually, I came here on official business, regarding one of your teammates." Red Widow suppressed a sigh. Spader had told her to give Netwalker the polite brush-off, with an emphasis on polite, probably as some kind of test to see if Cecilia had gotten anywhere on polishing her diplomatic skills. But something about Walker set her teeth on edge. Which could have personal fallout too...if she she'd heard about the guy was true, he could probably figure out who was behind her little porn-sim problem easily. Well, if she couldn't bring herself to ask him yet, at least don't piss him off! "Which one?" she asked, rather than saying what was really on her mind. "The obvious one?" "If by obvious, you mean the Globally Linked Advanced Digital Intelligence, 8th Revision, then yes," he nodded. "I was hoping to talk to him about an AIngel...that's what I call Khadamite rogue machine minds... that I've been having trouble tracking down. GLADI8R uses a different network to get his mind around, and I'm wondering if the AIngel has hacked that in order to sneak past me." "Since you're here in person, I'm guessing that by 'talk' you mean 'use your powers on him' since you could have just dropped him an email," Red Widow shifted her weight from one foot to another in a way she knew guys found a little distracting. "Well, an email might get intercepted by the AIngel if it's really penetrated your network," Netwalker shrugged, looking a little uncomfortable, "but given what I know about Gladiator's personality I figured I might get clearer answers if I talked to him on the cyberplane, yes." Red Widow chuckled, an honest laugh. "Good luck with that. Between you and me and the six or seven security cameras in this lobby, Gladdie is hard to understand on his good days. He's like a two-year old who found the candy hoard...no attention span to speak of, but will get pretty far on any given path before something shiny distracts him again." "It's worth a try, though," Netwalker grinned. Now, Nancy had told Red Widow that the odds were that Gladiator wasn't the real reason Netwalker wanted to get into the room where the core personality of the GLADI8R system was stored. There were plenty of other machines in that room that were either on Gladdie's sealed network or simply disconnected entirely. But odds were that physical proximity would let Netwalker access them anyway, somehow. And while he couldn't actually use anything discovered that way in a court of law since full search and seizure rights had been restored a while back, any number of fishing expeditions could be launched from that starting point and come up with something that COULD be used. There might be someone in a remote South Pacific village who thought a company the size of Walton's had no criminal dealings, but pretty much everyone else knew you didn't get into the top tier without a few dirty fingers. "Tell you what, Marshal," she put a tiny bit of extra emphasis on the last word. "The paperwork to get any outsiders into that room is insane. I'll see if we could arrange for a portable node of some sort, so you can meet with Gladdie someplace outside the Wall of Red Tape. That sound okay?" "I suppose it'll have to do. You have my contact information," he nodded, and a faint ping from Red Widow's blackcel told her he'd just dumped the info into it. PROBABLY not a use of his powers. His file didn't have him as a broad spectrum cyberpath. But you never knew. "Of course. Expect a call at some point," she said in a tone that clearly said, "the door is over there, please use it at THIS point." Netwalker mimed tipping a hat that he wasn't wearing, and left. The call would never come, of course, and she figured he knew that too. The Gladiator thing was a dodge, if they actually set up some way to let Netwalker into Gladdie's head without letting him into the whole network (which probably wasn't possible, actually), it would just embarrass everyone when Netwalker would have to follow through on his cover story. So it would just quietly get dropped, Netwalker would figure out another way to get whatever he was after, and it would be someone else's problem. The door swung closed, and Cecilia finally let out the exasperated sigh she'd been holding. * * * * [August 24, 2026 - Ghat, Khadam] "Wow, a White...we don't see many Whites down here," Ahmed said, calculatedly mixing awe and enthusiasm in his voice. In fact, White Citadel Troopers weren't all *that* uncommon, but the right amount of flattery always helped, something he'd learned from begging before he'd ever met Bluthundin. He knew this particular member of the mid-ranks had once been part of the undercity's population, a German/Berber crossbreed like Ahmed himself. Well, not *quite* like Ahmed. "Yeah, I suppose you mostly see the Greens, and only if they don't see you first," the trooper smirked, patting his helmet. It was a bit dusty, and had a slight nick that looked like a knife had put it there rather than the corner of a rack, but it was proper armor. Advanced composites, a decent electronics suite and sensors...nothing compared to the elite Gold Trooper helmets, but a very nice piece of tech. Ahmed affected an expression like he had been about to spit on the ground at the mention of the Green Troopers, but had "caught himself just in time" to avoid offending a Loyal Servant of Khadam. The trooper chuckled. "Go ahead and spit. I can't stand the Frogs myself, merc scum. I may not look it now, but I grew up on these streets, and spent my share of time dodging the cull crews." Time to confirm some suspicions about the power structure of the Citadel, Ahmed decided. Bluthundin had a few gaps in her knowledge, and this was one of those things that Ahmed's father apparently hadn't thought to install in her memory. Or had intentionally left out, as a test. "So, you worked your way up through the Greens and got promoted to White?" Khadam's flag was gold, white and green, and its soldiers were split into groups based on those colors. The Greens, called Frogs for their color and the shape of their helmets, were the bottom of the heap, mostly used to keep the citizens in line and grab victims for the never-ending biological experiments. The Whites were probably the most numerous, but better regarded because they were proper soldiers rather than thugs with a few pieces of high tech equipment. The Golds were the elite that protected the Citadel itself, and if they weren't a one-on-one match for superhumans, they were as close as Pranir technology could make them without resorting to cybernetics. Now the trooper really did spit. "No, I never was a Green, and almost none of them ever join the Whites. I do hope to get into the Golds someday, but you gotta be smart, not just tough, for that job." "But I heard everyone had to start at the bottom," Ahmed protested, hoping he didn't sound *too* naive. "Well, I mean, the lowest rung that isn't the actual bottom, since this right here is the bottom," he pointed at himself. The trooper shook his head. "Oh, a couple do get promoted every so often, and I hear it used to be more common, but we Whites are mostly born and raised here. They want people with at least some affection for their nation to be in the army, eh? But, at the same time, maybe that's not the best thing in someone who'll end up going on cull runs, see? Yeah, you could find guys out there," he gestured at the door out of the bar, "who'd cull their own sister for the chance to get out of the slums. But that sort of scum belongs on the other end of a culling crew, y'ask me. Greens are mostly mercs hired from other parts of Africa, countries that fell apart a bit worse than most. Maybe they'd cull their own sister too, but we don't have to worry about any of them having personal connections to the unnaturalized citizens to get in the way of being professional about it." Officially, people swept up in the culls were no longer citizens of Khadam, although a few rare cases did regain their rights one way or another. The dark humor in calling them unnaturalized citizens was that most of them were headed for decidedly unnatural fates, in addition to being unmade as citizens. "So...mercenaries from other countries can cull without having to be total slime," Ahmed didn't have to fake sounding like he didn't really believe that claim, "but at the same time they're not far above slime and you don't want them in the Whites?" "Exactly," the trooper finished his drink and picked up his helmet. "The least slimy of them do tend to get promoted into the Whites, but most of us got in right from the streets. You look a little young t' enlist, but keep dodging those Frogs and I'd say you'd have a good shot at one of these," he lifted his helmet up to show it off, then settled it onto his head, checking the seals. "My break's about over," his now-electronically-filtered voice said, "good luck, kid." Ahmed waved, then settled back in the corner to continue begging. The fact that Greens didn't rise in the ranks was useful to know. It suggested, but did not confirm, that the selection process would be less rigorous, as mercs from collapsed nations wouldn't be expected to have birth certificates or other records. And since they wouldn't be rising in the ranks, there was little incentive to check them in advance. Trying to enlist in the Whites would almost certainly get Ahmed outed as a Zugmann, but if he needed to acquire something like formal military experience it could probably be had by joining the hated Frogs. The White Trooper smiled rulefully as he headed back up the gentle slope towards the Citadel, his smile hidden by the helmet he wore. The kid was pretty obviously one of Arnold Zugmann's "seedlings", at least to someone who'd seen one before. Fortunately for the little beggar, very few people *had* seen one before, and most of them were like the trooper himself...more loyal to Zugmann's line than to the official head of state. For all the clever genetic tricks and political maneuvering, the people against whom Zugmann vied for control of the nation tended to forget the little things, like developing a bond with the rank and file. Back in the TwenCen, Arnold Zugmann had been the prototypical Gold, loaded up with genetic enhancements and Santari tech, but as the only one he'd made it a point to earn the loyalty of the troopers around him. Even an ubermensch could get fragged, after all. And he'd kept those habits, all the little things that soldiers appreciate even if politicians and supervillains don't notice them. The trooper shrugged, as if adjusting the fit of his armor. He wouldn't tell anyone about the kid. Hell, if he could do it without sticking his neck out too far, he might even help the kid along.... * * * * [August 24, 2026 - St. Louis, Missouri Sector] Nate sat in the chain coffee shop, sipping his coffee and pondering the morning's meeting. In civilian clothing, he didn't get a second look from the other patrons. As he'd feared, wherever they were keeping all the computer systems involved in the research that led to GLADI8R, they weren't close enough to public-access areas for him to get a feel of them. And it was pretty obvious no one had fallen for his cover story, or they'd have sent someone a bit more clueful than unicorn-butt to give him the brushoff. Unfortunately, even if he could figure out how to "jump the tracks" into GLADI8R's private network, that didn't solve his real problem.... * * * * [August 22, 2026 - Cyberspace] "Wait," Netwalker halted in front of the otter habitat, part of the virtual zoo that was the shell he'd been using for his meetings with Ectype. "You want me to rescue a steampunk computer consciousness? I'm pretty sure that she's not equipped for a trunk net connection. Not unless Babbage was WAY ahead of his time, or someone did one hell of an upgrade job." Aware of the nature of the filter through which Netwalker saw the server in which they talked, Ectype tossed a fish to one of the otters. "My dear boy, if ADA were net-compatible, we wouldn't need your help, would we? The general idea is for you to get close enough to enter your pocket dimension in resonance with ADA's hardware. Then smuggle her mind out into a suitable modern container that you'll have on your person...as clever a design as she's reputed to be, she still suffers from processor power issues, you could probably store her entire mind on the chip that runs a talking toy doll. Hm, that's a somewhat disturbing mental image, actually." "Okay, where is her machine? In a museum, I take it?" Ectype shook his head. "She should be, by all rights. But she's in a private collection at the moment. She was in the hands of the Shadow Earl of Galloway for about twenty years, before the criminal's eventual downfall. The Edison Project found her in storage during their work on the Enigma machine and their resident geniuses managed to restore her to function, but when the Project was shut down in the early 1960s she went back into cold storage. Samuel Walters bought her in 2010 to be part of his antiquities collection, of all things. We're pretty sure he realized her true value fairly quickly, though...the Globally Linked Advanced Digital Intelligence shows clear signs of Babbage's hand in his design, so ADA was likely studied as part of GLADI's revision process." "So, ADA's been alive for fifty years and never found a way to get herself emancipated? I mean, she's probably grandfathered out of the relevant laws, but unless Walters has been keeping her tightly sequestered, I'd think she'd have found a way by now," Netwalker frowned. "Heck, that robot from the Edison Project got himself emancipated, why wouldn't they have let ADA go too?" "Time scale problems, I'm afraid," Ectype looked genuinely sad as he said it. "To ADA's conscious part, it's probably only been a few months, subjectively. No matter how clever, an analog computer using brass and steel cogs simply moves at a glacial pace compared to digital machines using silicon chips. The Edison people probably never even realized she was self-aware, to be honest. If nothing else, I suspect their 'not invented here' parochialism blinded them to the possibility. And if Walters figured it out, he's not admitting to it. What little declassified literature there is on ADA gives no hints that anyone realized she was an AC, and while most of the classified stuff is only around on paper, my colleagues have found enough to suggest agreement with the publicly available works. And, of course, as a private research firm rather than a university or government lab, Walters's group is under no obligation to publish any findings. In fact, with Babbage's own patents long since expired, it's in their interests to let people think GLADI8R is purely their own work, to avoid the possibility of others realizing Babbage's now public domain work would be a profitable starting point." "So," Netwalker leaned against a railing. "All I have to do is get a man who mistrusts the Combine government enough to form his own American superteam to let me at his private research station long enough to pull out an AC he may or may not realize exists, but who he probably has legal ownership of because she's older than the machine life citizenship laws. Plus, of course, I have to hope that once she enters my pocket dimension, she can speed up enough that I can talk to her on timescales smaller than weeks. That about sum it up?" Ectype nodded, smiling ruefully. * * * * [August 26, 2026 - ASIE, Sottunga Finland] "The first thing you need to KNOW, not just in your head like I'm sure you do, but down to the tips of your toes, is that as much as people may love their heroes, you scare the hell out of most people." The man speaking to Colin was two meters tall if he was a centimeter, built like a lumberjack, and sported a scar on his face that Colin suspected was picked up during the millennial skirmishes between Khadam and the European nations. In short, the ex-military commando who'd introduced himself solely as "Sergeant Gunnar" really didn't look like someone who would teach classes on diplomacy and public relations. "I like to think I'm tres bien to be around once you conoce' me," Colin grinned, slipping a bit into his "street Eurolac" patois. The burly instructor just reminded him too much of one of the Vogue Ghouls he used to run with back when he went by "Sparker". Brought old habits to the fore. Gunnar shook his blockish head. "That's not the problem. Once they get to know you, you're a person rather than a stereotype. People use stereotypes because there just isn't time to get to know everyone they meet, and you're in a stereotype that can cause real problems if you don't learn to deal with it. Problems like people scattering as soon as you arrive," he referred to the incident in Berlin with the darkness cultists that had been the proximal cause of Colin attending this accelerated course at ASIE. "The stereotype of 'here to help but might accidentally blow up the city block' in other words?" Colin arched an eyebrow. "Essentially, yes," Gunnar nodded. "On top of that, you have all the baggage of a police officer AND a celebrity. That makes it a lot harder to deal with, because some will run from you on sight and some will flock to you on sight, and odds are they'll get in the way of you chasing the ones who need chasing. I mean, once in a while you get lucky and the suspect is a fan as well, and turns themself in just to get an autograph, but don't count on it. You'll have another instructor to help you with the fans. As you might have guessed, my job is to help you find ways to deal with those whose first impulse is to run." Colin almost manages to stifle the chuckle. Gunnar fixed him with a glare. "Do you know what I did between mustering out in 2008 and hiring on to ASIE three years ago?" "Police? Private security, maybe?" "I managed an art gallery. Always loved art, I know what's good, but I just can't paint or sculpt worth a damn. So I used my mustering out bonus to set up a gallery, starting with work by other vets but eventually branching out. One of the most successful art galleries in Oslo, even after I handed it off to my brother to run day to day." Colin blinked. "Um?" "Yeah, running a gallery is all about talking up the patrons, keeping the more tempermental artists happy, that sort of thing. Which I had to learn to do despite the fact I look like I'm ready to do a Jackson Pollock homage on the far wall with your innards. One of my old CO's gave me a call after he started working at ASIE, reasoning that if I could figure out how to deal with my clientele despite my obvious handicaps, I'd be perfect to teach you metas how to deal with the public." "Okay, I can see that," Colin admitted. "You're lucky you look like a regular bloke," Gunnar pointed out, "but you happen to wave a big axe around, and that's always scary. So the first thing we're gonna do is work on ways you can carry it that don't send out as much of a threatening 'vibe'...." * * * * [August 28, 2026 - Tritonis, Venus] "...and as Foucalt expounded, politics is war pursued by other means," the holographic image of Kaliban explained. "Words, be they gentle and finely tuned or crude and brutal, are merely weapons in your arsenal. A promise easily kept can get you more than a battle fiercely waged...as can a promise easily broken. So, until our next conference, consider some failure in your career and how you could have talked your way out of it." "Thank you, Kaliban," Conflicto nodded to the camera lens. The projected beastman bowed elaborately, then vanished, returning to his duties as ambassador to the court of Q'Nos. The pre-dawn dimness of Venus seemed to flood back in around them as the hologram winked out, and a few people yawned. It had been five hours since they'd gotten up, but despite the fact that this pale glimmer would persist for nearly a month it still *felt* like "OMG-O'Clock In The Morning". Even if the morning took weeks to arrive. "Something tells me Hellhound wasn't in a talking mood," Al Mirage grumped under his breath. "Maybe if you had been more diplomatic and taken no for an answer from that girl, Hellhound wouldn't have come after you in the first place," the Ginch suggested. "Just sayin'." "Okay, boys and girls," Conflicto grinned. "Break for lunch, then it's some more capture the flag. I'll let you know the teams when we start, so you can't plot while you eat...gotta think on your feet!" A few minutes later, most of them were finishing off the last of their MRE packs. Sometimes they ate more upscale, sometimes they hunted the local game and ate that, but most of the time it was just simpler to use military rations while out in the field. "So...I've been dying to know, Ginch," Dareth said as he scooped the last bits of curried rice out of the bag. "How did you come by the name Ginch, and what's your real name?" "Hmph," the Ginch swallowed a mouthful. "Two stories, unrelated. You guys all know Telly Mobster, right?" Telly was one of the Jolly Molecules, a borderline posergang that was more about the "mad science" than the actual gangbanging. Their tech skills had let them earn a place in the current hierarchy after all the other posergangs had either been killed, run off or manned up and become real crims. Telly himself had the ability to create pocket realities based on media files, then edit them as if he had directorial control over the participants. He liked to mix and match old shows, such as having Captain Kirk beam down into Al's Diner and hit on one of Fonzie's girls. Everyone nodded. "Well, I agreed to be his guinea pig the first time he tried bringing a real person with him into the TV dimension. Just a quick cameo, it was in an episode of Gidget. My line was to say, 'That's the ginchiest!' Afterwards, some guy told his buddies that while I might be the ginch, I wasn't all that ginchy, and definitely NOT the ginchiest. It stuck." "Your real name must be pretty bad if you let it stick," Ant frowned. "So, what IS your real name?" "I dunno," the Ginch shrugged. "I could probably find out...hell, I bet Conflicto knows, I'm sure the CSV put together files on all of us before recruiting us." "Wait, how do you not know your own name, if it's something that could be found out?" Dareth asked, confused. "Um, I'm told that I tried to feel up Scry, back during her sniffer days," the Ginch admitted, flushing with embarrassment. Sniffers were those rare people who could figure out the best donors for the illegal Pranir organlegging operations, and in addition to her telepathic powers, Jessa Dumont had that knack. "She brain-blasted me so hard I forgot who I was. Everyone just kept calling me the Ginch at that point...I mean, not a lot of people had known my under my old name anyway, but I was locally famous for a few weeks thanks to Telly. I was kinda a wreck for a while after that, and by the time I got my head back together I decided I wasn't really the same guy anymore...so why push the matter?" "Wow. You managed to goose Dumont?" Dareth whistled. "Can't have been easy to sneak up on a telepath with naughty thoughts in your head." "You'd be surprised," Conflicto said, walking over to the group. "Think about it. Guys think about sex a LOT. It's how we're put together. And when you're put together as well as Dumont, guys around you think about sex even more. I expect she had learned to ignore that sort of thing by the time she got out of puberty, purely to avoid being deafened by all the psychic leering. She probably fine-tuned her filters after you fingered her, though. And be glad she only brain-blasted you, Ginch. In case none of you guys heard...and you probably didn't since it's actually still a secret, in theory...Jessa Dumont was behind Hellhound. Her and a couple other ladies, if reports can be believed." The Ginch looked at Al Mirage, who had spent months in traction despite his paranormal durability thanks to Hellhound's brand of rough justice, and winced. "Ow." * * * * [August 29, 2026 - St. Louis, Missouri Sector] Cecilia looked around. She'd half-expected the training room to be set up as some sort of cotillion or something, but it was in its default appearance. Just a large room with heavily reinforced walls and some gymnastics equipment that could be stowed easily if need be. And a batting cage, for Brightsword. He still thought he might play ball again once he rehabilitated his public image...yeah, right. A man she hadn't met before walked in, wearing a sweatsuit and an oversized piece of jewelry on one hand that looked like a cross between a pimp ring and a set of garish brass knuckles set with two green gems. "Um, I was scheduled to meet with an image consultant here," Cecilia ventured. "Did they double-book the room for sparring or something?" Come to think of it, that giant ring looked supertech-y, maybe he was there to try out for the team? The man laughed. "You might say that. But I'm the image consultant," he grinned, as if enjoying a private joke. He had a faint British accent that didn't quite sound natural, as if he were imitating someone. "Call me Henry Harrison, Ms. Spader hired me to help you with your...human interaction skill deficiency, to use bureaucrat-speak. I think that's Nancy's native tongue, in fact, and English is her second language." Cecilia frowned. "Um, I already know how to act at a gym, it's anywhere else that's been the problem. I'm told I lack polish." Henry shook his head and started doing some light stretching exercises. "If you polish a hand grenade, all you get is something that's shiny until the pin is pulled. And after looking at some of your recordings over the past few weeks, I can definitely say that all Nancy's been doing is polishing a hand grenade. I'll admit she's done a good job...you've made remarkable progress in only a few weeks, and you're a very shiny hand grenade right now. But what Walters really wants you to be is a shiny pistol, or even a scalpel. When you go off, you need to only hit the right target, not cover the landscape in chunky salsa." "What, so this is some sort of anger management exercise?" Red Widow felt her ire rising. She'd been through all sorts of anger management courses while in prison, required of all violent offenders. They just made her more angry, even as she learned to hide it from the instructors. Henry stopped stretching and leaned against a pommel horse. "Oh, I've read your file, you've been through all the popular stuff. That's not anger management. That's anger suppression crap. Anger is a tool, though, like any other. You just need to learn how to use it, rather than having it burst out at the wrong time and use you. Okay, sorry, that sounded inane. But the point is, in all those other courses, 'anger management' is really a euphemism for 'trying to be mellow all the time.' What I want to teach you is how to actually *manage* that anger, *control* it, so that you can be a scalpel instead of a grenade. As the great one said, I'll be mellow when I'm dead." "Fine. Whatever. What's the plan, anyway?" Henry held up the ring-like object. "This here is a Ringer gadget. Back in the 1980s, before he got all ascended, Doublecross did a lot of his work through surrogates called Ringers. They had these nifty gadgets, which will actually work for a normal so long as an Anchor hasn't been at them since last time a para serviced 'em. VERY good holographic disguises, even by today's standards, plus voice modulation. They also have offensive lasers, but you have to be a para to make those work. Anyway, you don't know me from Adam, so there's only so much I can do to bring out your anger... and bringing it out is the first step. I need to get a good look at what sets you off, so we can work on resetting the triggers. But with this baby, I can change into people you do know, and who do get under your skin." Suddenly, Henry was replaced by a buxom redhead in a red and black one-piece. She had the sort of slightly chunky curviness that was popular before...well, before anyone Cecilia knew had been born. Of course, she immediately recognized the woman. "Red Widow?" she asked. "Why would I be angry with her? I mean, with the original. She's been dead for ages, right? Never even met her." "Angry?" Henry asked, his voice replaced by a purring contralto. It had to be a pure guess, since there were no sound recordings of the original. But it was still a little creepy. "Maybe not. But resentful. You're stuck in her shadow, and it's not even a very impressive shadow. She was a flash in the pan, didn't even have powers, and the only recognition she got outside of her hometown happened after she'd officially retired, during an affair that was triggered by her finding a piece of pornography about herself. Not a great legacy to echo, eh?" Cecilia fumed slightly. That damned dirty comic. The root of most of her troubles, thanks to inspiring some asshole to create an update starring her. An update that contained a lot more information than should have been available to the public. "Or maybe, for actual anger, there's a few people from a less proud time in your life," Henry flickered back into view as himself for a moment, then transformed into a husky hispanic woman in the uniform of a correctional officer. "MIZZ Carmen Tavares, your favorite person from the Cavity." This time the rasping smoker's voice was dead on, since Harrison probably did have access to recordings of the jailer. "Since the Cavity didn't use Anchors, they had to be pretty rough on you to keep you from slicing your way out, once they let you regain consciousness anyway." Just after being arrested for trying to kill her ex-lover Robert Coulter, Cecilia had ended up handcuffed to a dead cop when the Anchor Plague kicked in on its final run two years ago. With no Anchors available to ensure her powers wouldn't be used to escape, they'd simply drugged her into a coma until they could deal with her. And the Cavity had all sorts of ways to deal with paragangers without needing Anchors. "Nah, I got mine back on that bitch," Cecilia crossed her arms smugly. "Just being here," she spread her arms to take in the entire building, "and not still in the Cav has got to be eating her up. Anger managed." Tavares flickered and was replaced by Coulter. "How about me, honey? Sure, you tried to kill me, but there's that whole 'thin line between love and hate' thing, right? Passion is passion, and I've got what it takes to bring it out in you. Speaking of being eaten up, you've got to love the fact I made it to respectability first, *and* I'm sleeping with a hot ex-ballerina who can do the most *amazing* spinning things in bed." Cecilia clenched her teeth. Okay, Coulter was an obvious button to push. But too obvious. THAT little piece of her anger she'd gotten some practice controlling lately. Coulter smirked. "Still, as cliche as it sounds, when you come right down to it, no one can make us angry as easily as..." The light flickered, and suddenly a naked copy of Cecilia stood there, arching her back in a stereotypical Porno Pose, one hand framing the unicorn tattoo on her butt. "...ourselves. This fine tattooed booty got a hundred thousand hits on one of the darknets this week alone, did you know..." It wasn't conscious. Cecilia didn't even realize it had happened until she saw the halves of the pommel horse behind Harrison slide apart, but her energy whips had spat out and sliced the hell out of the naked copy, which fizzled for a moment before vanishing. There was a slow clapping behind her. "Very good. Very good progress," Henry said in his own voice. Cecilia whirled to see him standing there, hale and healthy and very much not sliced into flank steaks. "Oh, the ring has a setting for invisibility and short range projection as well. I'm not stupid enough to deliberately goad a para and then stand there and take it from them, eh?" Cecilia felt her face flushing red. "Like I said, you're a grenade. All that anger is just buried, and as long as nothing pushes you too far, you're perfectly functional," Henry explained. "But once I did push you too far, you didn't even think at *all* before trying to kill me. That's bad anger. That's non-useful anger. We need to work on that, but today was a very good start." It didn't feel like a good start. It felt like a bad ending. As in, if Henry had been a little less careful, she'd be back in the Cavity for murdering him. And she had a sinking feeling that the bit about the darknets wasn't just made up to get a rise out of her.... ============================================================================= Next Issue: Sure, most ASH arcs end in 4 issues, but just like college sometimes takes a few extra semesters, Rival Schools is going to need a few more issues! How many? Well, you'll need to talk to your advisor about that, but if you don't manage to get your grades up...well, we can discuss that later. Be here next issue for Rival Schools Part 5: Chasing ADA! ============================================================================= Author's Notes: If that White Trooper ever reappears, I'll give him a name. :) For now, though, he's more a symbol of what may be a large number of Zugmann loyalists hidden under Radner's nose. He doesn't really notice them, because they'd already managed to survive purges by the Shadowmancers when Zugmann himself slipped out of actual power. So they're pretty good at not looking like a problem. http://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/attwhitetr.JPG is what White Troopers look like, although their actual guns are normal size (Attacktix figures have distorted proportions so that they can fire big missiles). Here's a Green (http://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/attgreentr.JPG) and a Gold (http://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/attgoldtr.JPG), plus the original armor worn by Zugmann (http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH/gallery/onslaught.JPG). You'll notice the 1992 date on Onslaught, I was using Khadam in my RPG campaigns before grabbing it as one of the elements in ASH. One of these days, I'll need to fill in a bit on the Edison Project, a parallel to the Manhattan Project that sought to use Tesla's old notes on paranormals to figure out how they worked. Mysterymen, one of the first ASH titles written by another author, started off following a team of Edison Project agents in the field, including their robot Rook. But the author asked to withdraw the concept because he'd had nibbles from an RPG publisher regarding turning it into a setting book, so officially the story never happened (as far as I know, neither did the RPG project). Still, the husband of Lady Lawful I was involved in the Edison Project, and there was a robot of some sort. For now, I leave the rest open in case someone else would like to write a new set of stories to replace the lost one. "Henry Harrison" is actually a pseudonym, taken from Henry Higgins plus Rex Harrison, a My Fair Lady reference. I haven't decided what his birth name was, but it probably wasn't embarrassing or bizarre...he just decided "Henry Harrison" would look better on letterhead. Maybe he had personal reasons for wanting to distance himself from his family name. Characters often have more depth than you put in them, eh? He'll tell his story if and when it becomes relevant or I feel like it. ;) Actual anger management courses aren't quite as Henry would have you believe, but he IS trying to sell his own services as an alternative, so of course he'll paint the competition in an unflattering light. And a prison- based course like the ones Cecilia went through probably wouldn't want to teach people how to focus their anger to be more effective weapons. Mind you, programs at the Cavity are a lot more serious about rehabilitation than the average real-world prison's, and had Cecilia stayed in longer she might have gotten a better-tailored program that would have worked. But the first job of counselors in the Cavity is to reduce the chances of the most catastrophic anger-based consequences, then worry about fine-tuning later. As useless as she considers the classes she took to be, they did bring Cecilia to the point where she could actually be released into Walters's custody. No amount of money under the table would have sprung her if she had still been the same ultra-violent Ghostclaw that was arrested on September 22, 2024. ============================================================================ For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art, and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH ! To discuss this issue or any others, either just hit "followup" to this post, or check out our Yahoo discussion group, which can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ash_stories/ ! There's also a LiveJournal interest group for ASH, check it out at http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=academy+of+super-heroes (if you're on Facebook instead, there's an Academy of Super-Heroes group there too). ============================================================================