A brief sense of respite ... - Part 1
Even with the ministrations of Drone's drones, on the Bastion Satellite, it would still be weeks before Kyle could return to action and Caitlyn missed him more than she could say. Of course, once Fear and the rest of the Bastion team members returned from their space adventure, Pho-Boy would return to his partner's side and to Bohemia City. Fighting crime alone was what Caitlyn had to look forward to, anyway.
In the two weeks since the battle at the warehouse, Caitlyn had seen no sign of Fiend, however. She had no illusions that the villain had given up on their questionable course of revenge, but the silence both unsettled Caitlyn and gave her a momentary sense of relief. Fiend was planning something and it couldn't be good.
Sat atop the rusting hulk of Machina's combat suit, she awaited the arrival of the NHPD. They had come to a, kind of, understanding, no doubt due in part to Chief Watson's influence, but they still treated her with suspicion. Machina made it eight super-villains, in somewhat rapid succession, that she had faced recently. She began to wonder if there were no end to them.
"Machina, huh?" Chief Watson popped a piece of gum from the packet, tossing it into his mouth as he leaned down to look inside the cabin of the combat suit. "I thought he'd retired. Good work, kid."
"Any word on Fiend?" She hopped down, seeing the wary eyes of the NHPD officers beyond the cordon. "They've tried to frame me before. Anything odd that could point to me?"
She knew it sounded paranoid, but she had a right to be. She still felt the repercussions at school from the first couple of attempts. With a slow shake of the head, Chief Watson confirmed her fears. Fiend had gone silent, for whatever reason. In the meantime, Caitlyn still had the normal gamut of villains to occupy her time, Machina would not be the last.
In the past few weeks, she had encountered GraveDancer, Equion, Studious Rex, Bellerophon, and others. Her training from Trooper Jane had helped no end, and so had the remote instruction from Kyle, but it was Fiend that occupied her mind more than not. She lifted herself into the air, preparing to leave and return to patrolling.
"Take the win, kid. Doctor Blood would disappear for months before coming back to plague Black Staff. If I know villains, and I do, Fiend'll return when they return. Don't put your life on hold for it." He grimaced as he chewed on the gum, what he called a poor substitute for cigarettes, but healthier. "Hey, Morrison! Thank the young hero for not hospitalising you. Dammit, Joe! You're too old for this!"
"Thank you." The pathetic moan came from inside the combat suit cabin. "I have bills to pay, Jim. Insurance don't cut it no more and ..."
"'And' what?" Watson crouched beside the combat suit, holding up a hand, urging Caitlyn to wait. "Joey? Come on. You were saying?"
"I can't, Jim. I ... are we alone?" The last words came in a whisper and Watson leaned down, closer to the cabin, and nodded. "It's a new guy. Paying big bucks to some of us schmucks to give the new hero a workout. I mean big bucks, ya know? I got bills. Hell, my heart medication alone! Forget about it. That's all I'm saying."
Caitlyn hovered lower, scowling beneath her mask, until she came back into sight of the old man in the combat suit shell. His eyes flickered between Caitlyn and Chief Watson, features turning from panic to anger that the Chief had lied to him. A ring of flaccid hair surrounded a liver-spotted scalp, a nose that looked like the old man had taken to drink and patchwork teeth showed his age, but he had still given Caitlyn a hard time.
"A new guy?" Still hovering, she crouched down beside Watson, fearing the answer to her next question. "Grey skin? Bulging yellow eyes? Laughs at, like, literally nothing? Flies around on some kind of platform?"
"Yeah!" Joe Morrison tried to point at Caitlyn, stopped by the cable ties keeping his hands away from the controls. "That's the guy! I gotta tell ya, scares the hell out of me and, hoo boy, he hates you. Pays good. In cash. I can take a few new scars for that kind of money."
"And this guy? You're sure it was a guy?" Watson had taken out his notebook, licked the end of the pencil, and started writing. At the last question, Machina gave a noncommittal shrug. "So, not sure. What, exactly, did this guy hire you to do?"
"Fight Blood Obsidian in Schuster Square." He said it as though that were obvious. "Can I get arrested now? These ties are chaffing and I really need the bathroom. I made this outfit when I had a younger bladder, you know what I'm sayin'?"
Caitlyn looked away from the robotic body of Machina and began to turn in a circle in the air. She saw the cordon, the cadre of officers, their squad cars. Beyond them, she saw the gathering crowds. Cell phones held high, taking pictures, filming the scene. Reporters and photographers and news cameras. It had all become something of a routine.
She had decided, not long after becoming Blood Obsidian, that she wanted to be seen. Not through narcissism, or ego, but because she wanted people to know that someone was out there, protecting them. Black Staff had stayed close to the shadows, but that wasn't what Caitlyn wanted people to see. She wanted people to see her hopefully in the same way they saw Principle. As someone who truly wanted to help.
That may have been a mistake. She floated higher, turning her gaze further away, past the crowds, to the surrounding streets of Schuster Square, to the office buildings and shops. To the rooftops. She saw movement. Birds taking to the skies, figures inside the buildings going about their daily lives, unaware of, or uncaring about the battle that Caitlyn had fought here in the square. Nothing that she could identify as Fiend, but Caitlyn felt certain they were there. Watching.
"Kid? Kid!" A hand touched her foot, the sensation passed to her through the suit, and she looked down to Chief Watson. He must have jumped to reach her foot. "I know what you're thinking. Maybe you're right. Maybe Fiend is here, somewhere, but you won't find them. Like I said. Take the win."
"I ... I have to go." She took a last, long look around the square. "I have a date."
Distracted or not, she should not have said that. If Fiend was watching, maybe even listening, Caitlyn had just given them a vital piece of information. Someone else the villain could use against her, but there was no way Caitlyn was not taking this chance. She had been waiting for this date for weeks.
-+-
At an Ald-Tech medical facility ...
"What do you mean Doctor Rucka is missing?" Raymond stumbled into the chair, collapsing back as the other doctors began to attach sensors to his body. This wasn't the first examination he had had to go through. "He created this damned synthetic Element! He said it was temporary! That the nano-liquid would become inert. And now you tell me there are still trace elements in my blood?"
"Please, Mr Alden. We're doing our best, but Doctor Rucka appears to have taken all his latest notes with him. Doctor Starlin is attempting to reproduce the research, but Rucka was a genius on another level. We ..." The doctor winced as Raymond gripped the front of his white coat. "In the meantime, we need to monitor the elements already inside you, measure replication rates. We may be able to force them to become inert, we just need more information."
Alden had heard everything the doctor had said, but he couldn't concentrate. The pounding in his head had only worsened and he began to wonder whether Rayna should have simply allowed him to die. At least then he wouldn't have to suffer any more. He laid back in the chair and felt the prick in his arm as they extracted even more blood from him.
He couldn't call them incompetents because he knew quite well that they were not. He only hired the best, but, being the best did not stop the fact that more than a few of his leading scientists had gone missing over recent weeks. Starting with the rash of break-ins at the now defunct weapons division facilities, all the way up to now. Rucka was a genius, and so was Starlin, but the work Rucka had done was something on a very different level. Next generation. Only he had the expertise to end Alden's suffering.
-+-
That night ...
Despite the fact that, somehow, the suit kept Caitlyn clean at all times, she still felt the need to have a deep, long scrub under the shower before she even attempted to get ready for the date. And it was a date. A real date, with a real person, in a real place and it made Caitlyn more terrified than at any other time in her life. Literally, more terrified than anything she had experienced. Even against Fiend, and she knew exactly how ridiculous that would sound to anyone that she could tell.
Finding out what to wear was the next problem. A dress, or a skirt? Casual jeans? Yoga pants so tight that she could practically guarantee that people would be staring 'down there' instead of looking at a face that had suddenly become the source of all the salt water in the world? She settled on a pair of black, straight-cut pants, neither over-sexy, or staid, a plum coloured blouse. Hair tucked into a messy rear bun, the edges flaring up like a halo behind her head. A little out of fashion, but it wasn't as though she had even a passing relationship with fashion.
Aunt Mary had seen her to the door! Fussing and adjusting and gushing about how she remembered her first date with Uncle Richard and saying, several times, how they had both decided they would wait until they were married before they did 'anything', making it perfectly clear what she meant when she said 'anything' by saying it slowly and giving Caitlyn a solemn nod. Not that embarrassing. At all. But at least no-one else had seen the terrible attempt at giving advice.
Travel to the restaurant, before going to the movie theatre later, passed by in a series of flashing lights from the inside of a cab, not wanting to sweat while swinging and fast-floating. She had to do this right. The flower, in the plastic box, wrapped with intertwined gold and pink ribbons was Aunt Mary's idea. Paying for the cab by tapping her phone against the meter, Caitlyn took a deep breath before turning toward the restaurant and only just managed to avoid the tumbling bricks and broken glass as a monster crashed out of the building into the street.
And the monster carried Rayna in its clawed hand.