“Pepper steak, Triple delight, four egg rolls and two orders of egg-drop soup.” The delivery guy from Peking Palace recounted the receipt stapled to the bag for JC’s behalf. “Thirty-four fifty.”
JC handed him two twenties and grabbed the bag. “Keep the change, man.”
“Thanks. Sorry it took o long: traffic’s a mess. I heard from a few people on campus that an army of weird monsters is attacking the riverfront—its’ got everyone panicking.”
“When are people going to learn just to chill the hell out, just stay out of the way and let the Descendants kick the ass of whoever happens to be screwing around town this week? You’d think they never saw a superhero before. He shrugged: then again, Virginia drivers: they flip their lid over drizzling rain and snow flurries too.”
The delivery guy shook his head and pocketed his money. “I think it’s just you being too laid back about this stuff.”
JC put the bag on his desk and dug out an eggroll. “Or maybe I just have more faith in our local heroes.” He closed the door as soon as the delivery guy headed out, no doubt rolling his eyes at JC’s attitude.
Within minutes, he had his Triple Delight open and on his desk beside a serving of egg-drop soup poured into a microwave bowl with a second eggroll shredded up in it. Lunch at hand, he un-muted the news feed he was using to follow the battle with the golems.
Pretty much every person he was close to was some kind of superhero or sidekick, or something related, but he’d come to realize it didn’t really bother him as much as he thought it would.
There were perks to being the Normal Guy. For example, if he missed class, as he was doing today, it was because he’d chosen to skip, not because a missing child alert came over the wire, or some insane man had built a machine to control the city’s pigeons and was making them treat city officials in the same manner they would statues.
JC was just responsible for himself, not then entire city. He couldn’t be hurt and couldn’t be blamed for others being hurt either. He was just a guy, and after a few months of being in the loop about the Descendants, that seemed like a nice thing to be, especially given Warrick’s… unique timeline troubles. Normal Guys rarely became aware of their own alternate lives.
Sure, it was frustrating knowing that his best friends were getting to live out the live he’d dreamed of since he was five, and more so knowing that his girlfriend was on the front lines of their battles and if she needed someone to help here in those moments, it wouldn’t be him.
But the fact was, she didn’t need him out there, nor did Warrick or Cyn. They were good at what they did.
And that was why he was increasingly disconcerted whenever the footage cut over to Occult to show her casting spells that little to no effect on the clay monsters. The best he’d seen her do was cause one to stop and seem to slump for a few seconds before it shook itself and started forward again to start punching the corner of another building.
JC’s worry tugged at him as another clip showed Occult finally losing her patience and just loosing a fireball on a pair of the creatures. They broke apart easily, but within moments, swirling white energy from inside was rebuilding them as good as new. He fought it down and ate a few spoonfuls of soup.
Fretting over her when she could easily take care of herself would be being a bad boyfriend. Where he couldn’t fight with her, he could at least be her number one cheerleader… guy cheerleader. He didn’t know if there was a word for that.
He was just convincing himself he wasn’t really scared for her when his palmtop rang. The tone was a heavy metal instrumental with lots of screaming guitar; not one he reserved for his friends and actually not one he’d ever expected to be on the receiving end of.
It meant that he was getting a call that was being routed through the Descendants’ comm system back at Freeland House. Despite almost overturning his lunch in the process, he answered the phone before it even got t the end of the short sound clip.
“H-hello?” It was a far cry from the official and serious voice he wished he could have answered with, or the cool, laid-back ones that the Mission Control guys on TV always had.
“You’re not gonna believe why I’m calling, man.” answered Alloy, who sounded out of breath, but still collected and together in the tradition of all action heroes—at least to JC’s ears coming off his own terrible performance. “Ready to save Mayfield?”
Even though he knew it had to be serious to risk calling him during a battle, JC couldn’t help but snort at the idea. “You can’t be serious.”
A loud clang on the other end of the line made JC jerk the phone away from his ear. It was followed by some scuffling before Alloy got a chance to speak again, this time more harried than before. “Oh, I’m totally serious. I need you to get my tablet… I think I left it on my desk. You see it?”
JC got up to look. Warrick’s desk was a junkyard all its own; littered with figurines, dice, sketchbooks, odds and ends made of metal including some alloys that didn’t exist anywhere else on earth, a deck of cards, a collection of soda bottles in various states of emptiness, and finally, part of the uppermost layer of accumulated stuff, was Warrick’s tablet.
“Got it.” JC replied. Without prompting, he tapped in Warrick’s password. He wasn’t supposed to know it, but Warrick wasn’t the best when it came to digital security. “What do you need on here? Formula for some super-strong metal?”
“Ha. Already used that one.” said Alloy. “No, I need you to open up my Mythology textbook and go to the Jewish Mythology section.”
JC’s fingers tapped across the screen, dredging up the books folder, then the school books folder. It took all his will to ignore the one folder that was conspicuously just named with a string of nonsense characters. Finally, he came to the section Warrick was asking after. “Ooo, demon girl, she’s hot.”
“She’s the mother of all monsters.” Alloy said.
“Wasn’t that the one named after the spiny anteater?”
“Apparently there were a lot of mothers of all monsters.” said Alloy. “Get ’em all together and you could throw the scariest baby shower ever.”
JC cleared his throat. “You wanted me to look something up?”
“Oh. Right. Golems. I need to know how to take out golems.”
“That’s what those things on TV are? Jeez, if they’re anything like Deathgate golems, I can see where you guys have a problem: Mitigated Damage as a species trait, immune to magic, immune to poison, they can fight while dismembered…” JC continued as he flipped through the book.
Another clang and Alloy didn’t reply for a moment. He came back even more out of breath. “Yeah, in real life? They’re way, way worse. You can break ’em with a tack hammer, but they just regenerate, even if you grind them into powder. I sealed one’s pieces in steel and it came back steel plated!”
“Well at least that one should have been pretty easy for you to beat.”
“Except my powers don’t work on magic. And add to that the fact that these things have the strength of a thousand gorillas.” Alloy groaned. “Any luck yet?”
“Still looking.” reported JC. “Man, some of these angels are messed up. This one’s just a wheel with eyes and it’s on fire. What the hell, ancient peoples? Oh hey, Sammael—wasn’t that the guy that shot you with the metal feather?” Finally, he came to an image of a large, lumpy, clay man. “Got it! Let’s see… can only be created by people of great faith… reflection of God creating Adam from clay…wasn’t that the same way Won—“
“Any weaknesses?” Alloy cut him off.
“I’m still reading. There’s a lot of stuff about these guys. So does this mean you’re fighting and evil Rabbi?”
“No, it’s this guy called Warpstar. But he can steal… I don’t know—qualities?–from people. If it takes a rabbi to make a golem, he probably stole their…um… rabbi-ness.”
“Oh, we’ll definitely have to talk about that later. But I think I’ve got the golem version of the silver bullet right here. From the story of the golem of Prague: Rabbi Loew builds a golem to help people in the city, people get stupid and get the magic robot stuck in the medieval version of a GOTO 10 loop, and it has to be deactivated.”
Ally blew out a sigh of cautious relief. “Please tell me they say how.”
JC tapped to the next page. “They do! Okay, so a golem is brought to life by a word written on them: emet, meaning ‘Truth’. That’s the on button. To turn them off, just rub out the first character, turning emet or ‘Truth’ into met, which is ‘Death’. Ha! That’s actually pretty badass. From now on, I’m substituting off for ‘death where appropriate.”
“Word…” said Alloy. “You mean the sigils on their heads?”
“Give me a second…” JC went back to his own desk to watch some more of the news footage. “Holy shit, dude, the Barn Owl’s on the scene with Darkness! This is epic!”
“I know, right? Whitecoat’s here too, plus some other New York heroes. So is the Ape Knight… who I realize now you don’t know about… and his squire. And I wouldn’t bet against Zero Point and Majestrix being on the way once the news on this goes national. It’s a superhero free for all.” Alloy said. It was possible to tell just by how he said it that he was bouncing on his heels with excitement.
JC grinned as he finally saw what he was looking for and paused the feed to compare it to the text on the tablet. “And they’re all going to have to bow down to your awesome heroing skills, boy: It’s hard to tell with all the glowiness, but those aren’t sigils on the golems’ foreheads, it’s writing in the Hebrew alphabet. One guess what it says?”
Alloy grinned under helmet. “Truth.”
“Sic ’em, buddy.” JC said, collapsing into his chair.
“Thanks a billion, man. Keep an eye on the news and in just a second, we’ll see if my hunch was right.” Alloy hung up and dropped his emergency mission phone into a pocket formed into his armor. From atop his wall, he sighted down his arm at the nearest golem. “Alright, Osp. You heard the man: sic’em.”
The tentacle, having long grown bored and frustrated with fighting things that it couldn’t definitively beat, put minimum effort, but maximum viciousness into the attack, spearing the golem right through the first letter engraved on its head and coming out the other side in an explosion of clay chips.
For a moment, it looked like nothing happened, but then the remaining letters, met suddenly flashed to a sickly green and faded, followed thereafter by the white energy in the golem’s eyes and swirling inside. Animating force gone, the golem stood as a broken statue; one that Osp was more than happy to then form into a sledge and smash to bits. None of those bits reformed.
Alloy jumped for joy as best he could in his armor and practically screamed, “Got it!” into the comm. “Attention Descendants and distinguished guests: this is Alloy. We figured it out: destroy the first letter on the golem’s head and nothing else to power them down. After that, they go down with one hit.”
There was a flurry of back and forth on the comms before Barn Owl came on. “Confirmed. I just took out two. Looks like you train a good sidekick, ‘Coat.”
Then Codex patched the comms in to the MPD and marines. “Urgent to Mayfield Police and military forces engaging the attackers: target first symbol on the contact’s forehead, one shot only. You must leave the last three symbols completely intact or they will not be disabled.”
***
As the news of the golems’ secret spread among the defenders of the city and some of those defenders started up a body count contest, Damsel half-chuckled to herself. It was nice to hear Alloy getting credit and respect from the other heroes. Even where she came from, he wasn’t often fully taken seriously in the hero community because of his personality. He met it with good humor, but she always hoped he’d put everyone in their place one day.
She gave Shuck a scratch on the head. “You hear that boy? Their magic’s on their face.” She grinned as four golems came into view, all facing off against Lucian, who was slowly being overrun. By the time he destroyed the fourth, the first was up and tromping toward the gates again.
Damsel grinned ferally, a trait she got from one of many honorary aunts. “Go for the face, Shuck! Go on, go for the face, boy.”
Shuck’s body vibrated with the throaty growl he gave, which preceded a deafening howl as he threw himself into a flat out run at the golems. His ears lay back flat on his head, his lips pulled back into a snarl and all semblance of the ‘sweet puppy’ Damsel saw in him vanished beneath millions of years of predator evolution and a century of Tome’s genetic meddling.
One of the golems sensed Shuck coming and turned to swing a brutish, overhand fist down on him. Shuck leapt smoothly to his left, allowing the fist to crack against the pavement before pouncing over the overextended limb to snap his jaws closed around the golem’s head. By weight alone, he drove the golem to the ground.
Lupine teeth scraped harshly against clay until a flash of green light came from his jaws and the golem went still. Damsel let out a whoop of triumph. “Great! Now finish him!”
Shuck obliged by wrenching the head free, then crushing it in his powerful jaws, eying the other golems as if sizing them up for similar treatment.
Damsel beat him to the punch, sending out her mechanical tentacles to punch out the first letters on the two golems to Shuck’s right. When the one on the left turned to attack them, she twisted in the seat, drawing something from a hidden compartment in her vest.
A flash of steel was followed by a flash of green and the golem went still with a thumb sized, angular throwing knife neatly marring the first letter.
“Boy would my dad be upset if he learned I kept that around just in case.” she commented in the aftermath.
Lucian gave her a broad smile only an orangutan could offer and used his lance in quick succession to dispatch the things for good. “I, however, am quite proud of the swiftness and efficiency with which you dispatched your foe.”
Stars practically flashed in Damsel’s eyes. “So can we rethink my codename?”
With a throaty chuckle, Lucian turned Embarr toward the sounds of more golems. “After a few more favorable showings like this? We can discuss it.”
Damsel slumped against Shuck’s back. “Aw man!”
***
Augustus sat down heavily on the lip of one of the fountains in Riverside Park and cursed himself.
The second it looked like Warpstar was losing, he ran as hard and as far as he could. Riverside Park seemed like a great place to escape to because it was large, public, and open enough that even Warpstar couldn’t sneak up on him like he seemed to do every other time.
What he hadn’t accounted for was the golem-prompted evacuation of the area. Riverside Park was almost completely empty, meaning Warpstar could easily find him and would have to problems just coming and grabbing him.
“I didn’t ask for any of this.” he complained, wishing someone in charge was listening. “All I did was pick up an old book due to be scanned in and now my entire life is screwed forever! How am I supposed to deal with any of this!?”
He put his hands down on the fountain, only to find that his right hand had landed on soft, aged leather instead of the concrete of the fountain. There was no price in the world that could have convinced him to look because he already knew what was there: the Book of Passions.
“No.” He said, then more forcefully added, “No. No, no, no, NO!”
The scent of something on fire reached his nose as he was in the throes of denial. Looking up, he saw the air distorting in an effect that was like watching film burn in reverse. From that appeared Warpstar, who gave him a look like a teacher regarding a particularly dumb child.
“My last parting gift from Columbia’s psionic community.” he said. “Now you’d better pick that up, Auggie: we have work to do.” At the look on Augustus’s face, he laughed. “Don’t look so surprised. I left you alone knowing you’d run for it. That was plan ‘B’ because as the Chosen, there was always a very good chance the Book would come to you in your hour of need… And so it has.”
Augustus’s heart was hammering inside his rib cage. “I-I don’t want to do this. Just take the book and make it pick someone else. I’m not your guy.”
Warpstar scowled, creasing his face considerably. “I don’t think you understand, Auggie: you have no choice. You’ll do what I tell you because no one is going to save you this time.”
“You really did forget you were here, in Mayfield of all places with half the superheroes on the East Coast, didn’t you?” Facsimile dropped out of the sky and tackled Warpstar into the fountain. Both came up sputtering, but Warpstar lashed out at her with Codex’s martial arts. When he struck her, however, his arm sank into her chest to the wrist and stayed there.
Facsimile narrowed her eyes at her captive. “I know that kung fu. You stole that from a friend of mine.” Those same golden eyes flicked toward the stones in his chest. “One in three chance I take it back on the first try.” In a flash, the orihalcite claws were out and Warpstar was sent flying back into the statue of John Liedecker at the center of the fountain.
Grunting, he levered himself out of the water, then looked down at himself in shock. His center-most stone was missing, leaving a hollow socket lined with amber colored crystals like an exotic geode. Across the fountain, he saw where it went: Facsimile was holding it in her fist.
“Now hold still while I take out the rest.” She said. “The good news is once they’re all out, you’ll probably go to regular jail instead of a literal Supermax.”
“The tree was a long enough stay in prison for me, thank you.” said Warpstar, clutching his hand to the empty space in his chest. “And Auggie: we’ll meet again.” And then, like burning film, he dissolved into the air and disappeared.
Landon Porter is the author of The Descendants and Rune Breaker. Follow him on Twitter @ParadoxOmni or sign up for his newsletter.
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