OUR BRILLIANT PLAN TO ATTACK OTHER GARY DIRECTLY
We broke into a Ultramart outside of Falconcrest City and picked up new sets of clothes. I wore a red hoodie with a white M on the side, which was part of the official Merciless™ merchandise line Other Gary was making millions off, and jeans with plain white sneakers. Amanda changed into a white summer dress and sunglasses. Mandy, by contrast, chose to wear the decidedly attention-getting outfit of leather pants and a corset from the goth aisle.
As the trio of us walked down the clean sidewalks of downtown Falconcrest City, I noticed she got the clear majority of attention from passersby. Not that I blamed them.
“Isn’t the point of this exercise to not be noticed?” I asked, leaning over.
Mandy shrugged. “I’ve been stuck wearing a floral print dress for five years. Besides, no one’s looking at my face.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m more worried about the cameras.”
Downtown had changed, in many ways for the better—just not for people like me. Gone were the bars, porn theaters, gun shops, pawn shops, and hundreds of homeless, replaced by cafes, boutiques, bakeries, and tourists. Everyone was dressed in high-quality clothes while robot cops were on every corner, scanning people. Drones flew over every few minutes and I saw security cameras everywhere.
“We should be unrecognizable,” Amanda said, looking over her shoulder. “The central computer system, S.A.F.E.T.Y, is not that difficult to hack in to if you know the right people. I’ve also got a personal jammer, which should keep us from being recorded. Even so, my safeguards are never good for more than a week.”
“We only need an hour more,” I said, looking to the corner that led to the Merciful Building. “Did he actually knock down the Nightwalker’s Clock Tower to build this place?”
“I’m afraid so,” Amanda said, sounding as disgusted as I felt. The Clock Tower had been a staple of Falconcrest City’s skyline. “He wanted to get rid of all the Brotherhood of Infamy’s occult beacons. The thing is, that may have made the city less of a supernatural hotspot, but it’s also been replaced by machines designed to create a low-level emotion spell on everyone.”
“Let me guess,” I said, looking at the cheerful look everyone was sporting in what was formerly the most cynical city on Earth. “Happiness. The entire town is on magical Prozac.”
“No, it’s on literal Prozac,” Amanda said. “He drugs the water too.”
“Great,” I muttered.
Amanda wasn’t done yet. “As for what the spell induces, it’s not happiness, but obedience. Tap the side of your sunglasses.”
Not sure I wanted to see just what the glasses would reveal, I did so. The world became black and white and the billboards sported subliminal messages. There was OBEY MERCIFUL, YOU ARE HAPPY, DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY, and MERCIFUL MAKES AMERICA GREAT.
I frowned. “OK, when the hell did Merciful even find time to watch They Live, much less rip it off?”
“They what?” Amanda asked.
I tapped my sunglasses to turn off the effect. “All I’m saying is we may need to call Keith David and Roddy Piper in on this.”
“Why is Merciful doing this, anyway?” Mandy asked, trying to stay on topic.
“Because he’s an extremist jerkass?” I said, noticing that several onlookers cast us dirty looks. “You saw what he did to us in Undertown. He’s turned Falconcrest City into a prison just like the one we were kept in. It’s just Undertown was a Super-Max and this is minimum security. Eventually, the whole world will be like the Village.”
“The what?” Amanda asked.
“Remember what I said about speaking exclusively in pop culture references?” Cloak said. “This is why.”
“It’s not my fault she has no appreciation for classic Sixties spy fiction,” I muttered. “You know, I always believed Number Six was actually a brainwashed Number One who was field-testing his own process.”
Mandy shook her head. “No, I mean, isn’t your doppelgänger trying to make his own universe? Why all this?”
“It’s called Motive Decay,” I said, citing the storytelling trope. “Basically, you have a villain like Sauron who wants to bring order to the world, except he ends up with Morgoth and suddenly he’s a werewolf-drowning Numenor. None of which ended up in the movies, to my disappointment.”
“Or you thwarted Other Gary’s original plan and he’s just making do with this world until he can figure a way to salvage it,” Amanda suggested.
“That’s possible too,” I said. “Making an entire universe requires a huge chunk of necromantic energy, and if I were Other Gary, I’d have this entire place draining away little bits of life force every day so I could continue my plan in secret.”
Amanda and Mandy stared at me.
“Oh, what’s the likelihood of that happening?” I said, looking up at the skyscrapers and noticing they were sporting strange-looking antenna.
“About 100%,” Cloak muttered. “But it doesn’t matter since you’re going to kill him.”
“Are you OK with that?” I asked. “Superheroes don’t historically kill people, though they don’t usually take over the United States either. I know you avoided killing anyone while you were still alive.”
“That’s not strictly true, as I killed members of the Nazi Party and Imperial Japanese during World War Two. I’ve also been forced to kill alien invaders as well as sentient machines,” Cloak said, sounding regretful. “I hold human life and the lives of other species sacred, but that doesn’t mean I am willing to let others die to satisfy the strictures of an absolute moral code. Other Gary has murdered literally billions of people and is an existential threat to humanity. I have no doubt he has the means of destroying the earth—and he would—should it become necessary to restore his world. He’s also corrupted the Society of Superheroes.”
I stopped by a newspaper stand, which was just giving away newspapers and magazines published by the city government. One of the headlines was FORTY-ONE DAYS WITHOUT WAR, with the subheading SOCIETY OF SUPERHEROES CONTINUES KEEPING THE WORLD SAFE.
“They do seem to be keeping the trains running on time, though,” I said, shaking my head. “Or zeppelins, in this case.”
“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, but they do not outweigh the needs of the one because the many are each individual,” Cloak said. “I said that to Leonard Nimoy once. I think he suggested it to a writer.”
I wasn’t paying attention to Cloak at that point. Instead, I was staring upward at Merciless Tower. We’d finally arrived, and the sight of it was both breathtaking and horrifying. The building had indeed replaced the Falconcrest City Clock Tower, but that wasn’t the part that surprised me.
Instead, the thing truly was made of crystal and shined with all the light in Falconcrest City. It was also a living sun of magic. Standing almost a mile tall, it was the largest building I’d ever seen. It pulsated with supernatural might above even the gods I’d encountered.
The magic was beneath the surface of the crystal, compromising it, but I could feel it. It was like someone had concentrated all the magic in the world into a single location and covered it up in plastic wrap. Other Gary had hidden the life force of the billions he’d killed in plain sight, in his skyscraper headquarters.
“What the hell is that?” Mandy asked, staring.
“Wrong direction,” I said, recognizing it from the books I’d read while researching a way to restore Mandy’s soul. “Heavenly crystal. Other Gary actually went to the Land Upstairs for the material needed to store his magic.”
“Who let him in, I wonder,” Amanda muttered, also staring.
“Life,” I said, shrugging. “If Death is on my side, it makes sense Life’s on his.”
“Please don’t make me doubt which side I’m on,” Amanda said.
“You mean because the Society of Superheroes, the majority of the population, and the Primal possibly in charge of Heaven are all behind Other Gary?” I asked. “I can’t imagine why you’d think we could be the bad guys in all this.”
The look Amanda gave me could have killed trees.
“Good and evil aren’t absolutes, even in a world of black and white capes,” Mandy said, sighing. “I’ve wanted to help people my entire life, but the bad guys are people and the heroes are flawed. It’s why you have to focus on being true to your own code rather than society’s labels.”
“If I could make a ‘The More You Know’ rainbow to go with that, I would,” I said, gently mocking Mandy’s statement. “For once, I’m going to disagree with you. I may be bad, but Other Gary is evil. He allied with a Nazi, and that’s just an automatic ‘game over’ for me.”
“Technically, he just made use of President Omega,” Cloak said, sounding generally angry. I suspected it was more over the Society of Superheroes assisting Other Gary than anything he’d done to the president, though. “He betrayed him multiple times and did nothing to save him.”
“Don’t muddy the issue, Cloak,” I said, staring back up at the tower. “So, this complicates things.”
“Oh?” Mandy said, covering her eyes as she tried to look at everything. “How so?”
I was little more than a hedge wizard, equivalent to a mage who had a community college education in the subject. OK, more like a GED, but still enough to know just how much juice was inside this thing.
“Well … “ I tried to think of a way to describe it. “If Other Gary has access to all of this mojo, then he can’t properly create a new universe.”
“I’m sensing a but here,” Amanda said.
“He can probably do just about anything else,” I muttered, wondering at my doppelgänger’s self-control. “If I had this place, I could have restored Mandy’s soul. Hell, he could probably resurrect all of his family and friends in an instant.”
“Then why doesn’t he?” Mandy asked.
I thought about what I would do in Other Gary’s place. I couldn’t imagine losing everyone I’d ever known or ever loved, but I’d lost Mandy and it had driven me insane. I could imagine falling to the desperate lengths Other Gary had to save my loved ones, but I couldn’t ever imagine facing them again after that. Maybe Other Gary needed to bring back his other universe so he could hide his crimes from his loved ones forever. Bringing them back to this world would mean that he’d eventually be discovered. Which lowered my opinion of my doppelgänger. A true villain owns up to his dirty deeds.
“Your morality makes no sense at all,” Cloak observed. “I just want you to know that.”
“No argument from me. I’m Team Chaotic Neutral. The old-school kind that made no sense and was just there to make sure there were nine alignments. Listen, guys, if we go into that skyscraper, Other Gary will be able to do anything he wants to us. It’ll be like trying to fight Q from Star Trek while not being Benjamin Sisko.”
“So, we just leave?” Amanda asked, blinking as she tried to process all of what I was saying.
Mandy answered for me. “No, I think this might be the best place on Earth to fight Other Gary.”
“Eh?” I asked. Being right in front of the building where my doppelgänger r controlled his micro-empire was making me feel uncomfortably exposed. We were in the middle of Falconcrest City Square with a jumbotron showing nothing but good news. There were also a lot of robotic police. Cyborgs too. Technology had changed in my five-year absence.
“Can we destroy the building? Let all the energy loose?” Mandy asked.
“No,” I said, remembering what the Spellipedia article on heavenly crystal said. “The stuff is tougher than Ultranium and can only be warped by magic. Second, if we did release all that energy at once, it would annihilate a few galaxies. Starting with ours.”
“Maybe we can block him from accessing it,” Amanda said. “I mean, we can’t access …”
She trailed off. Mandy and Amanda stared at me.
“What?” I said.
“Oh no,” Cloak muttered. “Please tell me you can’t access the magic inside.”
I raised an eyebrow, considering the possibility, then reached out to mentally touch the energy inside. I could.
Then I laughed. A proper supervillain laugh. “Bwahahahahahahahaha.”
“Smoke him now,” Mandy said, reaching over and putting her hand on my shoulder. “End this two-hundred-year nightmare. Then we can go back to being Mandy and Gary, Oddest Couple of Them All™.”
I smiled. “We have to get to the epicenter first, but yes, I’d like that. This place is in serious need of a criminal element.”
“Please don’t say that in front of me,” Amanda muttered. “I’m unhappy with assassination as a means of societal change as it is.”
I had to admit my admiration of Amanda. She’d been through the wringer as a superhero. Her mother had been sacrificed to an evil god by her father, and she’d watched Falconcrest City turn from a wretched hive to a zombie-ridden necropolis to the Brave New World theme park version of itself it currently was. The fact that she was still standing here, having outlived her mentor Sunlight and her fellow resistance fighters, made me realize she wasn’t Nightgirl or Merci-Lass. She was Nightwoman.
“I’m very proud of you, Amanda,” I said, trying to bond with the one uncorrupted hero in Falconcrest City.
“Your approval fills me with shame,” Amanda said. “So, you can protect us if we go in?”
“I think so,” I said. “If not, then he’ll just erase us from existence.”
“Good enough for me,” Amanda said.
Her determination made me pause. “Who was he … or she?”
Amanda didn’t move for a second. “Wyatt Jones. He was my mechanic and partner as Nightgirl. Other Gary didn’t brainwash him. He just used his Life powers to make his insides grow until he died horribly.”
I had no comforting words for her. If I argued that vengeance was hollow, I’d be a hypocrite, because the only satisfaction I had about my brother’s death was that his killer hadn’t lived long after. It didn’t end the pain of your loss, but it gave you the satisfaction of knowing your enemy wasn’t enjoying life.
“Let’s go get him,” I said, walking toward the front entrance. “Let’s go lobby scene from The Matrix on these assholes.”