This message Premiere #7: Freedom or Death was posted by on Tuesday, February 19, 2002 at 10:07.
Phase Shift had just effectively committed suicide. One of the newest Science Heroes he had barely had his Obedience Chip fitted by the Science Council when Red Watchman had taken control of them and the city of Technopolis. Phase Shift hadn’t even had time to report that his ability to make things intangible had accidentally affected his Chip, that it had fallen out the first time he had used his powers. And then the Red Watchman had used the override codes to control all the newer Science Heroes and turn them into his personal slave army. Frightened and alone, Phase Shift had gone along with it.
The young man had been assigned to the former prison installation, a place where those older unchipped Science Heroes and key technicians were now confined by the new regime. Phase Shift had seen what the released Science Villains were doing to their old adversaries – slow public torture and humiliating death. He had thought he could just stay quiet. All he had to do was stay quiet. He could survive.
Before Windblossom.
Her real name was Kareen O’Connor, and when she had undergone the metamutation process she had gained the ability to make plants grow. Not, as the Science Council had hoped, to grow aggressively suitable for combat use, but simply to grow quickly and beautifully, full of fruit and fragrance. Windblossom was put to work in the technician’s wing where she used her abilities to tend the hydroponics gardens that fed Technopolis.
When half a dozen Science Villains dragged her screaming from her cell and held her down to have their fun then Phase Shift had to do something. He didn’t really know Kareen, but she was a gentle, loving soul who didn’t deserve this death. A hero would have done something. A hero wouldn’t have been frightened of dying like all those others who were victim to the Red Watchman’s atrocities. A hero would save Windblossom or… and die trying.
So he reached out to their leader, AniMutant, and made his cardiovascular system intangible.
Which was tantamount to suicide, since the other five Science Heroes oriented on him and set about his destruction. Sonic Lance disoriented him. Waveform shattered his phase defence. Icewatch pulled heat from his body until he could hardly move. And then Crowmeat came in for the kill. “This is what we do to hero-boys round here, sonny..."
Then Crowmeat was a red smear across the far wall. Icewatch exploded into flame. Sonic Lance almost had time to loose a sound bubble before he was propelled into Waveform at lethal speeds for both of them. And just like that the battle was over.
Windblossom picked herself up and ran over to tend to Phase Shift. “Martin, right? Are you okay?” she asked him.
But Phase Shift was staring past her, and past the slim, metallic silver-suited woman who had entered the prison block, to the ravaged and blood-crusted man beside her. “Premiere?”
The first and greatest of Technopolis’ Science Heroes wobbled and propped himself on the doorway. “Yes,” Victor Brooke admitted. “What’s left of him.”
Windblossom looked up at the hero with wild hope in her eyes. “Premiere! We’re saved!”
“This man is almost literally dead on his feet,” Ziles pointed out. “He’s saved you. Now you have to save others.”
Phase Shift struggled to stand up. Premiere gently used his heat blast to defrost the near-frozen young man. “Sir, this is a great honor. We always looked up to you, to your example, and…”
“Shut up,” Premiere snapped. “I’m not the example you thought I was.” Then, seeing the shocked hurt expression on the face of the young Science hero he added, “but if I was that man, then I’d be… I’d be damned proud of what you did here.”
Windblossom shuddered in reaction to her recent danger, but she looked over at Phase Shift with fresh appraisal.
Ziles examined some of the sensor probes she somehow concealed in her skintight silver uniform. “We have a problem,” she admitted. “There are still over a thousand prisoners in this complex, presumably the Science Heroes and support staff that the bad guys couldn’t suborn. But most of them have been tortured. They’re hurt, some of them really badly injured.” She looked worriedly at Premiere. “If you were looking for an army to start the revolution, it isn’t here.”
Suddenly the video screens on the detention room walls all burst into life. Each one showed the same reflection of a harsh-featured man of perhaps fifty, with graying red hair and eyes flecked with fire: the Red Watchman.
“And it just gets worse,” the ultimate Science Villain promised. “Hello again, Victor. I’m afraid I’ve just authorized the use of omega-class weapons against you and your little friends. Or you can surrender again and keep the peripheral casualties down to the thousands. Your choice.”
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Space Ghost’s ray weapon was special in that it impacted upon its target with sufficient force to shift it violently; whatever the force required. It had the same effect upon a naughty child or a Celestian Space Robot. And S. Ghost didn’t like being woken up from a particularly interesting dream as some fumbling supervillain blew open the door to his broom closet in the Lair Mansion.
So S. Ghost demonstrated his ray weapon, and Spinoid ended up fifteen miles out in the Atlantic Ocean. And when Fleshcrawler and the other super-thugs who had come to secure the Lair Legion’s headquarters objected, they were sent to join Spinoid.
“Thanks, SG,” Lisette sighed as the last of the invaders was blown away. “That was… that could have gotten nasty.”
“A very timely rescue,” Valeria agreed.
S. Ghost shrugged, looked unhappily at his cupboard door, went back inside, and made the whole closet vanish.
“Is he supposed to be able to do that?” Amber St Clare asked worriedly.
“Never mind that,” said Amy Racecar. “Those goons will be back, or more like them. We’ve got to get out of here and hide.”
“I’ll activate HALLIE’s evacuations and data securing protocols,” Lisette agreed, pressing the emergency codes into the console that operated the Lair Legion’s computer. “But where can we hide? Can we get to one of the LL safehouses?”
Valeria opened the door to the Lair Mansion basement and the older cave systems beyond. “Down there,” she suggested. “They’ll never find us. The house won’t let them. Let’s go.”
“But we have to help the Legion,” Lisette objected. “If they’re in trouble…”
“Then we can’t do anything for them,” Amy argued. “They’re on their own.”
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Chronic was in a burned-out squat in Seedy Town, staring at the cracks in the ceiling and feeling depressed. Then the ceiling came down on top of him, and by the time he had recovered enough to reach for his demonic guitar there was a bald, emaciated man sitting on his chest with one sharp fingernail under his chin.
“Hi. I’m Count Armageddon and I’m looking for a few bad men,” the leader of the occupation forces in Parodiopolis introduced himself. “And you’re drafted.”
Over in the shadows on the other side of the road a lithe black man crouched and spoke into a stolen comm-unit. “DBS to dull thud. You can tell Sênor Psycho that they’ve taken the bait.”
“Okay,” came the crackle back. “I’ll, uh, pass that on to Messenger. More or less.”
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There was a black dome of swirling energies where pleasant Ridge, Mississippi, used to be. Inside it was a bio-hazard caused by the fall of an escaped Science Villain called Deathspore and the majority of the Parodyverse’s principal superheroes, the Lair Legion.
On the perimeter was a man in an advanced flight suit designed to look like a bird and a worried-looking civilian scientific advisor.
“Well?” Falcon said.
Al B. Harper looked up from his instruments. “Well… It’s force field technology about two hundred years in front of our current understanding – which is roughly, ‘gee, I wish we knew how to make force-fields’.”
“So?”
The scientist sighed. “So I’ll need a couple of hours,” he conceded.
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Warning klaxons sounded throughout the Technopolis prison complex.
“What’s happening?” Ziles demanded. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“It isn’t,” Phase Shift told her. “That’s the warning for nerve gas release. It’s a final solution to prisoner escape.”
“It won’t kill me, but it will kill almost every other survivor in this installation,” snarled Premiere. He snatched up Phase Shift. “Come with me, kid.”
There was no time for Martin Hernandez to object. Before he even worked out where he was, Premiere had smashed through reinforced walls to reveal the massive nerve gas tanks that were about to be discharged. “Phase them,” Premiere commanded.
“These? But they’re huge! I can’t…”
“You wanted to be a hero? So do it.”
“Y-yes, sir!”
A second alarm noise joined the first.
“The self-destruct warning!” Windblossom gasped. “They’re going to destroy the whole installation!”
“Maybe was can defuse it?” Ziles suggested, but Premiere was already burrowing down to the explosives packs. He had another use for them.
There was a huge explosion and the building rocked.
“Are we dead yet?” Ziles asked as yet another warning siren joined the cacophony. Then they all fell silent as the lights went out.
“That was a nuclear core overload warning in the main energy reactor station for Technopolis,” Windblossom worried. “They must have had to shut down the whole power grid to contain it. How could that have happened?”
“Well, at a guess I’d say Premiere found somewhere else to plant those self-destruct devices,” surmised the Xnylonian. “Sneaky.”
The whole complex lurched and shifted to one side. Tie beams shrieked as the massive weight of the prison installation moved. Doors popped as walls deformed under the sudden pressure.
“What… what now?” shrieked Windblossom.
And underneath the complex, Premiere continued to concentrate, holding up the entire structure. And then he began to fly.
The massive wrecked building rose high over the city. Premiere had a window of perhaps ten minutes to get the prison block and all those in it away from the automated aerial defenses while the city’s power grid was being reset and the city’s metahuman guardians were averting nuclear holocaust.
It wasn’t easy. The blood-loss made him nauseous, and he was pulling on reserves of energy he hadn’t known he had. Even the power he was using to maintain his essential metabolic functions was failing, a deadly cascade.
It was all a matter of will now. “Like you told the kid…” Premiere reminded himself. “You wanted to be a hero…?”
Victor Brooke screamed in pain as he propelled the quarter-mile long security block away from Technopolis. It crashed to earth in the Bighorn Mountains west of Sheridan, Wyoming, and Premiere was under it.
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