Chương 73: Chapter 70: Later

The room was dead silent as Alex finished up retelling the events of the afternoon. Just as he'd feared. He'd agonized over the entire trip back to the hideout just keeping it a secret, perhaps only telling Lyn. Fuck, he'd just about considered hopping on a random bus, assuming any of them were still running these days, and getting out of town. Just damn the consequences entirely and get a little more breathing room from the League.

But he kept seeing Arex's cold eyes and the faces of the others in this room, knowing they were now a part of this. Godsdammit, the League had taken so much from him already, he wasn't going to abandon his team to them even if he'd never really intended to have this many people involved in the first place. He'd tried calling the Wakelands a few blocks away from the labs, but his call went to voicemail.

Probably for the best since once he'd managed to reach Starsilk Labs, he'd spent almost an hour in silence as he tried to figure out how to even start telling the others about the whole thing. The others had milled around him and chatted with one another about things that flowed off his brain while he tried to figure out just what he would say. Lyn had finally picked up on how quiet he was being as the group all converged to mingle before figuring out dinner.

Celeste had even emerged from her little hole in the back of the lab for it, which had felt like the perfect opportunity to spill the beans. His girlfriend had prodded him with a concerned question or two that he barely registered. When she finally got in his face and asked him outright what was going on, that had been just enough to start him talking. Admittedly, Alex probably shouldn't have began with "Arex almost killed me today." However, it did manage to silence everyone to listen to his story play out.

Well, it might've been Lyn shattering a ceramic bowl in her bare hands when he finished saying that which got the whole room's attention, but regardless he was able to tell them all without Turnaround blurting out any interruptions. In fact, the normally chatty villainess didn't speak throughout the entire recap, her green eyes glued to the floor and her arms held close against herself. All of the others displayed their own unique reactions to his story.

Lyn, as expected, bared her teeth while her fingers dug into the arm rests of the chair, nails almost cutting through the cheap material. Had she been in her half-spider form, her claws would've no doubt shred it by now. As it stood, this form was still threatening to get the job done just fine. Meanwhile, Celeste bent over her hands, her lips moving in sync with the tapping of her steepled fingers as she worked through her own thoughts by sub-vocalizing.

Sand Devil looked impassive as she simply leaned back in her own seat, but having been around her for awhile now, Alex could make out the way her brows were scrunching together. Val's fingers tapped away at her arm rest, eyes flicking back and forth between the others. Turnaround stood up abruptly, and clearly choked on her own words as her body shook with obvious fear. Then she spun, too unsteadily to have been using her powers, and made for the exit at a shocking speed.

An over-sized hand of black sand manifested between her and the door, holding it shut. The woman shrieked over her shoulder, "Move it out of the way, Kizi!" Before Alex could process that, Sand Devil rose quickly to her feet, "Tabi, it's-" This was really not how I expected to learn their names…

"No! It's not okay! It's all fucked! The fucking heads of the League put a target on our heads!" Turnaround shouted at her partner, but the glare she wore was aimed at Alex.

"He just pissed off fucking Arex! Did you forget that he tore apart Gigantax a few years back? Or bit the heads off Varsity Vulture and Freezeforce when they stood up to him? He's an actual godsdamn legend with a body count that includes actual fucking superheroes and villains! And he just pissed that fucker off!" She stabbed her finger at Alex while yanking on the door handle, curses continuously rolling off her tongue.

"You think the League was really going to just ignore us?" Lyn was on her feet, yelling as well.

"You think we weren't going to end up on their shit list as we try to conquer the world?"

"Get fucking real!" Turnaround exploded at Lyn, abandoning the door entirely to face her.

"We're bank robbers at fucking best! You honestly think we were ever really going to really make a real shot at taking over the world?! This was never going to-" Alex was the one losing his temper now, "It was always about taking over the damn world! That's the whole fucking point of this!" Turnaround scoffed, and that was apparently the bridge too far for Lyn, who leapt across the room faster than anyone could've expected, pinning Turnaround to the wall by her throat.

"You-!" was all she managed to say before a tidal wave of black sand ruptured between the two and split them apart. Lyn transformed as the sand attempted to restrain her, her massive chitinous body breaking free of the slowly forming cage. Turnaround wasn't so lucky, but Lyn was no longer fixated on her from what Alex could tell. His girlfriend was already leaping towards a surprised Sand Devil when Celeste screamed, "STOP!" Lyn reacted instantly, her many legs arresting her movement in less than a second.

Long white hair flowed forward to barely avoid brushing against Devil's red skin as the arachnid woman halted less than an arm's length from the demoness who herself was beginning to glow orange with internal hellfire. The mad scientist didn't say anything else, just looked at them all with pleading eyes. The room plunged back to uneasy quiet. Unspoken words hung in the air, thick with emotions that weren't truly aimed at anyone here in particular.

It was a lifetime of rage and fear bottled up that had been let loose with the force of a grenade. Everyone was breathing heavily, not trusting themselves to speak, perhaps not wanting to be the next spark to set off the powder-keg again. But eventually, the resentment building up at the center of Alex's chest spilled out of his lips. Quietly, he hissed, "He… didn't even care about the world. It was nothing to him!" He felt everyone's eyes on him, but he was looking down at the ground, not even seeing the floor.

Just… Arex's face as he said it.

"Who cares who rules one single tiny little mudball when it's just a stepping stone?!" And then… dozens of other faces. Supervillains all trying their hardest as the old footage distorted after being played so many times. They cared. They put their all into it. And no one thought of them as "nobodies" as Arex had spat at him. Even when they'd lost time and time again, no one shrugged them off or just assumed they'd lose. It didn't matter if Professor End Point was smaller in every single way than Mr. Wonder.

So what if Plasma Overlord's plethora of robots had all been shut down by Dr. Iridium's remote in their last fight? And no one cared that King Roach had gotten his ass kicked for years before he came back with an upgrade which let him control armies of bugs that could blot out the sky. When they were on that TV screen, they weren't losers. They were threats. They were important.

The whole world watched with bated breath, seriously wondering if this would be the day they took the reigns and plunged the world into a new reality. And you could see that drive in their eyes. The promise of a different world. One where they wrote the rules, even if just for a few minutes. A world where the people they were fighting weren't the inevitable winner, no matter how skilled she was at using her powers in that small dojo.

A world where all the people who had beaten them down and called them worthless or Garbage were made to see just how important they could be. And that dinosaur-fetishizing fuckhead just wanted to put him under his thumb so he could pick fights with other capes while calling all of that effort worthless. He slowly came back to reality, head drifting upwards at the other five. All of them were giving him different looks, but all Alex could fixate on was the restrained Turnaround and her sneer.

"So what?" she had the audacity to ask.

"You should've said yes and stabbed him in the fucking back! At least then we would've had something to work with! What the hell can we even do to start taking over the world like this?! You have a half finished Death Ray and a handful of minions!" Lyn snarled again but Alex was quicker than anyone else as he responded, "We expand. Build up further. That was always the plan after Vandal's job." It truly was. Honestly, the plan always consisted of "get bigger until you can take over the world" from the start.

Refine his tech, recruit villains, hire more henchmen, gather a bigger arsenal, everything was about growing into the operations he'd grown up admiring. But in the time since Vandal had brought up her crazy scheme to steal the Triumph Gems, Alex's mind had moved beyond more nebulous ideas and towards more concrete plans.

Making lists of labs and robot factories around town, shortlisting villains he figured he'd have enough sway with to potentially get them to sign on for a job, and starting a wishlist of upgrades for his suit. He'd come up with dozens of ideas while Lyn was off working with Sand Devil and his mad scientist was tinkering with his suit. But now, looking into Turnaround's accusing green eyes, a realization hit him: he hadn't bothered to commit to any of these.

Hadn't even tried to write down any of them like he used to do when he first started out as a villain. The days had passed and all he had to show for his schemes was a contract with a minion organization he'd already been in the process of hiring and a name change. All of his work on what came next after the Triumph Gems heist came down to "I'll make an actual plan if we manage to pull this off." If. Godsdammit, he was doubting himself just as much as Turnaround was.

Was he not bothering to actually plan ahead because he didn't truly think this would work? Was he really still hedging all his bets, even after getting this far?

"Expand… of course," Turnaround broke the stare to gaze over at Sand Devil. She took a breath before speaking up, "Let me go."

"Tabi…"

"Kizagora," Turnaround said firmly.

"Let. Me. Go." With a pained expression, Sand Devil unclenched the hand she'd been holding at her side and the dark cage around Turnaround dissolved into a small ring of sand around her feet. The villain slowly reached over to the door behind her, casting a look over her shoulder at the rest of them when her fingers brushed the handle. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened the door, wincing as though the act had burned her hand. Alex thought she might bolt out in an instant, but to his surprise she lingered.

"I… Just…" she pulled her mask over her face with a shuddering sigh. A long pause filled the air, one which what felt like a million things should've been said. In the end, she chose to say only a single word.

"Later…" She slipped away, leaving the others to wonder what type of goodbye that meant. It echoed like the ringing of a bell in the small room. A few moments passed before the telltale sound of one of the teleporters activating drifted down to the kitchen. No one dared to speak, hardly seeming to breathe in the aftermath. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. Then a howl of anger jolted Alex out of his own head.

He turned, expecting to see Lyn raging around the room in frustration. Instead, he found her just as surprised as he was while they watched Sand Devil use a pair of disembodied hands to fling aside the chair her partner had left behind.

"Dammit! Dammit! Dammit! That fucking idiot!" she let out a wordless scream to punctuate her frustration before sinking into her own seat once more, trembling. After a moment, Lyn moved over cautiously, the previous fight between the two seemingly forgotten as she reached a hand out to rest on the demon's shoulder. The crimson woman seized up at her touch, before another angry noise ripped out from behind clenched teeth and she stood to her feet.

She stomped over to the wall and flung a fist into it, leaving a large crack in it while she let out another angry cry. Alex felt a rush of displaced air from the hit even across the room, and felt an energy in the air that threatened to spill over.

"Godsdamn idiot! Did she honestly not think we were going to face something like this?! Did she think I made an infernal contract just to play around?! She-! We were going to- Fuck!" She rounded on the others, her yellow eyes blurry as what looked like magma dripped down her face, sizzling when it hit the carpet. With deliberate effort, she squeezed her eyes and lips shut and after one more trembling shudder, seemed to regain her composure as she crossed her hands and stood tall once more.

"We need to present a united front moving forward," Devil said without a speck of emotion in her voice, her face looking more like a mask than anything anyone in this room had ever worn.

"My efforts with Terrorantula have already prepared me for the possibility of retaliation from agents of the fey courts, especially considering some of the targets we've been considering. And we always knew that we'd be targeted by heroes once our operations expanded. The League is unexpectedly early, but I have no desire to be sucked into their schemes, nor help any of them maintain the disgusting equilibrium they perpetrate with the heroes of this realm.

I agree with your decision to reject the collar they tried to loop around your neck. You have my support at least." The last few words held a bitterness that seeped out through the corners of her mouth. It promised trouble in the future. But it also promised way more of it should anyone in the room attempt to press the demon right now. She looked ready to snap over a simple "Are you alright?" Sand Devil appeared like a rigid sculpture at the moment, the ever shifting lines on her skin almost deathly still for once.

She was standing tall but gave off the impression that she might topple over at the slightest errant touch. Alex's eyes met Lyn's, the slight red gleam in the pits of black focused on him, and they seemed to share the same thought. Not now. Just… take the small win and try to smooth things over later. He sighed, only for Celeste's wavering voice to pierce his ears.

"H... How are we going to expand?" Alex turned towards the small scientist, who had her hands wrapped tightly around a small mug which she balanced on her legs. A robotic thumb gently traced the lip of it with a soft grinding noise that was barely audible. Her small frame shrunk into the seat as she bowed her head, her bright hair falling over her face. Alex noticed the other two staring at him as well and swallowed, thinking over his reply.

They were looking to him right now, and he felt like he already failed once already. He needed to be decisive and give them something solid. He thought over his half-formed plans and remembered the events from yesterday at the Tailor. It took a moment but something clicked. Now just to frame it the right way.

"While you were talking with Luna Lace about my costume, I had a small talk with Fencer," Alex said, knowing that this was about to involve some selective stretching of the truth. He'd certainly made some small talk with the middle-man which had even broached a few business inquiries, but he now needed to make it sound more concrete than that.

Thankfully, he remembered how distracted Celeste had been at the time, which had been part of the reason he'd retreated from the drafting table as the two of them had begun to ignore his input on pauldron designs, turning to the man who had shot him a sympathetic look to occupy himself.

"He didn't outright say it, but he implied he already knows about our upcoming job and would be more than happy to take one of the Gems off our hands for a significant price, provided we do manage to break a record," Alex informed the team.

"Won't Vandal be upset we're selling one of her prizes?" Lyn pointed out, her voice under control as she clearly was trying to help shift the tone of the conversation. Silently he thanked her for the help as he shook his head, "Vandal only wants the theft to happen. She doesn't care about the Triumph Gems themselves. The others she's recruiting will probably want their own cut so I don't think we're going to be able to hold onto all of them, but one or two is probably a safe bet.

I've heard they're magic, but nothing too fancy. That means there's no reason for us to hold onto them so we might as well cash out as soon as possible. Which is good, because Fencer has a few things we'll need for our next operation." Here's where things got tricky. Alex watched as the others perked up. His words managed to pierce through the gloom that Turnaround had left this room smothered in. He now needed to make Fencer's banal price sheet sound like the two of them had been conspiring in a big way.

An inspiring way. Something crazy enough to excite them enough to forget that it felt like their hearts had just been torn out of their chest after acknowledging the giant boot poised above their heads. After all, a crazy plan of world domination had snapped him out of his own depressive spiral awhile back, time to make them believe they were on the verge of a breakthrough there.

"He's willing to trade the gem for some Intangi-Packs, ¹ demo-charges, and teleportation pads," Alex 'embellished,' deciding to go for broke here in more ways than one. Fencer hadn't actually put a real price tag on the Triumph Gems since the two of them had been speaking around them while in Luna Lace's home, so this was Alex trusting that he could selectively negotiate for these crucial upgrades. After watching Fencer's reaction to that ratty old costume, he had a good feeling about this.

Sure, the man hadn't put a price on the Gems during their casual conversation, but he had told Alex about those particular devices at the time along with their prices – a series of numbers that almost had caused the villain to cry. At the time, he'd resigned himself to his next upgrade being a little more affordable, but now Alex figured he could find a way to twist Fencer's arm enough to get him to agree to a deal.

After all, those pieces of tech would be the perfect opportunity to take a few of his nebulous ideas and make them into a reality. Sure, it was a reality that depended on him managing to convince a multitude of other villains to part with a magical gem or two, trade that to one of the most shady middle-men in the business for some very expensive hardware, and still work out the exact details of a break-in at a secure location with less intel than he usually had for these kind of jobs.

But that was better than not committing to a plan at all, right? He took a deep breath and really hoped his face didn't show any hesitation, "We can use those, and the Death Ray to immediately take advantage of the ensuing chaos following our heist to perform a job that will let us double, no… increase our strength ten-fold!"

"The Death Ray isn't finished!" Celeste protested.

"And… that assumes-" He couldn't let her point out the obvious, so Alex interrupted, "This plan only assumes we steal enough of the Gems. Ideally, we accomplish Vandal's goals of getting all of them, but just breaking a streak should be enough to accomplish what we want from this heist: setting ourselves up as rising stars of the villain world and embarrassing Amberheart enough to quash that alliance Vandal warned us about."

Lyn leapt to his defense, "The whole point here is that the League can't come after us publicly if we're the center of attention. No matter how pissed Arex is at Menace, it would be seen as violating their own charter. They exist to support anyone calling themselves a villain." Obviously, that wasn't a guarantee. Like Arex had implied, they couldn't let the villain world assume the League wasn't necessary.

So who knows how the rest of the council might react to a group of nobodies pulling off the crime of the decade under their noses, even if that's only the crime of the decade for a single city. But also Arex was clearly trying to kill off the rest of them, so who knew if that was a trustworthy view into their heads?

"And we trust you to get the Ray finished," Lyn added, striding over to put a hand on her friend's shoulder. The tiny scientist jolted at her touch, but placed her own hand over the talons fondly. Alex took a deep breath before continuing, wanting to move past the subject of what the League might do to them. Vandal assumed they'd be neutered by the heist, at least for a little bit in Victory as the local villains got a solid win to rally around.

Given what little Alex knew of League politics from his brief stint henching with them, that sounded right, but he wasn't keen to have the team begin to question it too much.

"So where are we targeting?" Sand Devil asked, a slight strain in her voice threatening to crack through. Alex bit his lip, looking between them all. In truth, the moment he started spitballing all of this in his head, he'd had two ideas on where to target, both equally bombastic. He considered offering both of them an letting the team choose, but got the impression that he needed to present this as a singular vision.

A definite plan that he absolutely had been thinking about for weeks now rather than quickly mashing together on the fly. Which meant that he'd need to shelve the idea of a trying to break into ASTRAL's alien tech storage facility, even if his 3am drunken internet sleuthing a couple years back had revealed how easy it was to find out just what was stashed there. ² He had a feeling the team would be more likely to balk at hitting a place like that more than Option B. Plus… he had a little more to go off here.

That said, he wasn't quite sure about selling this next part, not sure they'd be on the same kind of crazy he was. Still, he had to try. Alex looked around the room and finally said, "Ironwall Penitentiary." This prison break was a scenario that he'd run through his head over the course of countless showers over the past ten years, and he'd even gotten some out-of-date schematics off a darknet site once to play it out. It wasn't quite his white whale of crimes, but it was one he'd kept coming back to.

He'd spent so much of his villain career tiptoeing around that place, careful to avoid anything that might land him in the slammer. And yet he kept getting drawn back to this job whenever he let himself daydream. Imagining himself somehow waking up with real powers one day or his stupid magic finally working in a way which would allow him to spring a bunch of its residents from there.

Every time someone he knew got sentenced there, he snooped on their court data and learned exactly which cellblock they got assigned to. That was easier to find than you'd expect, and honestly wouldn't be too hard for him to rummage up again. The villains there were mostly local, which meant less crazies than you might find in a federal clink or Nation's Union blacksite, and more likely to adhere to what honor counted among thieves.

At least they would probably be willing to sign on for a job or two to pay back the debt of breaking them out of their sentence. Alex even bet that the other villains in this room no doubt had a few connections of their own who were serving time which they could strongarm into joining the team. He walked through a modified version of his plan-slash-daydream, explaining exactly how the pieces fell into place.

To his surprise, something lit up in the eyes of the other three and the four of them began to trade insights and ideas. Slowly, something began to form to scab over the wound left this night. After several hours of talking and scheming, Alex could see something in the others' eyes as the plan went from a desperate gamble using a lot of half-promises and wishes into something concrete. Names being written down. Phone calls scheduled for later.

A grumpy mad scientist rearranging her sleep schedule into something that scared the other three. And eventually, in the deep hours of the night, the group parted, with Lyn and Celeste offering Sand Devil a bed for the night. Lyn pulled Alex aside as the other two headed off deeper into the lab, one destined for bed and the other obviously avoiding it.

"This is risky," she told him, out of earshot of the others after spending the last few hours stopping both of them from getting caught up on the obvious issues with his slapdash scheme.

"I agreed with you that the hero response time was probably going to be slow enough to make this work, assuming things go well with the Amberheart heist, but there's still a bunch of reasons why no one but the League stages larger prison breaks." He nodded, "We can do this. We can't take things slow anymore. Not with the League paying attention. Vandal's plan will buy us time, but they're not going to give up. We need to be strong enough." A clawed finger stroked along her chitinous chin, "I know…

Same reason I joined the Eight back in the day. Fine… you made your case, even if we need to talk later about what you actually got Fencer to agree to." Alex held up his hands, knowing he'd been caught, but Lyn just gave him a smile and a kiss on the cheek before heading off to her room. Alex sighed and looked over the empty kitchen, deciding to clean up the discarded plates from when the group had opted to break for dinner before joining her for the night.

As he set them in the sink, something about the number of them bothered him. There was a hollow feeling as he put the four of them down under running water, watch the filth get washed away by the unrelenting stream. When he looked at the counter, it finally hit him as he saw the six mugs sitting on it.