Okay, Okay, Enough Stalling

Here's what happened to the Eye.

Saturday, Saturday went exactly as planned. I got my ton of precious and rare metals and gems. And I got a visit from Quizzer. I let him enter, naturally, as I had known he was coming a good ten minutes before he showed up.

And, when he got here, of course, he started in on the whole, "what gives you the right to hold the city hostage, blah blah blah" speech. To which I essentially replied. "See that giant weather machine? That's pretty much what gives me the right."

He asked what was keeping him from just destroying the base then and there.

"If I shoot at you with my bracer and miss, I will sink this fortress. And when it hits ground, the fusion reactor will go off. And I don't think you want that on your conscience."

And then he fumed and stalked off. I watched AMC for a while. The Pink Panther was on. Good movie.

The next day, my bugs in Brannigan told me they had teleported some antigravity genius in from the mainland, someone new to the company, but smart enough to figure out a way to knock my fortress and weather control devices out of the sky.

Now, my first instinct was to do as I had promised and wipe New Vineyard off the map...but "new young antigravity genius from the mainland"...that gave me doubt. I knew a young antigravity genius who had been on a trip to the mainland, specifically in order to get a job at Brannigan. One who had emailed me the previous day to tell me she had aced the interview.

So, instead of destroying the city, I just made it storm really, really bad. The winds were much too high for jets, even those new half alien-tech planes the government doesn't think I know about....though, really, who doesn't know about those these days? Is the government even trying to keep them secret?

Anyway, back on topic. I was confident that, even if Judy was the expert, Brannigan wouldn't be able to reach the Eye, let alone hold steady enough to find a weak point in my antigrav.

I made some popcorn, watched an ungodly horrible made-for-tv movie about Mechanor's mass robot invasion. I swear, that guy gets more TV coverage...and he doesn't even notice, I'll wager. Mechanor may be a big bad super-robot, but he is boooring. "Television is frivolous," is what he'd probably say. I've talked to the guy before. Sticks are less wooden.

Alright, I'll stop stalling. This is just so embarassing, though. The supervillain is not supposed to be beaten because of a girl. Girls are supposed to be what supervillains kidnap in order to convince the hero to stand down.

Most of the way through the movie, the security camera on Device Four gave me the warning, "Speed." The camera itself, of course, showed only an empty, grey sky.

I'll explain. "Speed" is not "it's going too fast." It's, "someone is looping or interrupting the video feed to make the same image play over and over again". Y'know, like in the movie Speed. Heroes always think they're soooo clever and original when they try it, too. Amrican Steel once tried it twice. In half an hour. And expected it to work both times. That's the sad part--they never learn that maybe we've seen that movie too.

Chuckling, I switched over to that camera and overrode the recursive feed.

I'm going to reiterate here that someone named "Quizzer" has no right being as powerful as he is.

A team of scientists was there, standing on, and in, an invisible dome that also surrounded the weather control device. Quizzer was at the center of it, obviously straining as he kept them up while they studied my improvement on their invention. They even had tables and chairs and laptops. And a goddamn coffee maker. Seriously.

I started to imput the command to fry Quizzer with a lightning bolt--I could have, too. That's the worst part. He was just floating there, cross-legged, concentrating completely on that dome. No telekinetic force field around his body.

But, the sight of one of the scientists stopped me. I bet you can guess who.

There she was, perfect and pretty and making notes of all of the exploitable flaws in my anti-gravity system in a laptop computer. Which she would know, since she had a hand in designing the bugger in the first place.

It was odd, though. She looked almost resigned to be doing it--like she knew she had to, but obiously didn't want to. Hmmm.

I knew this plan had a time limit then. I also knew they would find a way to ground me before I could collect my next tribute.

So, I set the other three weather devices to drop onto the city and self destruct, in that order. Right before, though, I sent Quizzer a message, via a hologram from the device they were analyzing.

"Alright, Brannigan, Quizzer, you've won. I'm beaten. In fact, I'm just going to drop everything right now. Of course, I'm going to drop everything onto the city and then detonate it, but, really, that's just semantics. Ciao."

And then Brannigan used some kind of emergency teleport, and sent all of its employees and the weather device to Brannigan HQ, leaving Quizzer free to try to save the town. And me free to try to hit him with a lightning bolt from the Eye.

And that's when everything went wrong. When Quizzer reached the first weather control device, he threw it at the Eye with his telekinesis. Its fusion core detonated on impact. Which caused the Eye's fusion cells to detonate.

...and then I woke up naked in Michigan six hours later.

As far as I can tell from examining the craters, the explosion knocked me down at an angle at a tremendous force, with enough heat that, when I impacted the earth's crust at the bottom of Lake Michigan, it went briefly molten, and my armor was ruined and left behind, my yellow suit having burned up much earlier. I then bounced, probably on my shoulder, and soared through the air for a bit until finally hitting the ground on the coast of the lake in Michigan. Probably on my chest, which was already beaten up from taking the full force of the explosion.

If I was not invulnerable and able to absorb all that heat, I'd be a few carbon molecules embedded in the duranium of my armor right about now.

Oh, and speaking of absorbing that energy, my eyes are putting off all of the extra energy as more glow than usual. It's like I have two red flashlights beaming out of my face. And I have a date to meet Judy at Steak and Shake in about twenty minutes. It's the first time we've seen each other since she went to Chi town for her meeting with Brannigan.

I have a feeling this is going to be reeeeeeal awkward.

Insult to injury: the Eye didn't even land in New Vineyard. It landed in the Lake....and apparently detonated then, according to bystanders. Which is wierd, because I remember it (and feel it) differently. Maybe one of the fusion cells was late in going off. None of the weather control devices hit or blew up anything but water, either. I did manage to emergency teleport the wreckage and most of the captured device, though.

Off to meet Judy.