This message Premiere #3: Heroes and Villains was posted by on Saturday, January 26, 2002 at 18:34.
The Lair Legion ranged out around Premiere across the debris of Akron civic centre. To his left were Hatman and Sorceress. On his right flank were Dancer and Goldeneyed. Ziles was behind him, using some cloaking effect so good he could barely perceive her. Nats and Donar were in the skies. The massive dragon-form of the team’s leader Fin Fang Foom looked over the fugitive science hero.
“About time you people got here,” said Falcon, who had not relished taking on the man who had just finished off five powerful extradimensional bounty hunters single-handedly.
Premiere looked round him. The LL knew their stuff all right. There were no easy escape routes. There were only two ways out of here, and one of them would probably involve killing some of these heroes.
“You’re the Lair Legion?” he asked. “Nice work on that earthquake in India. You saved a lot of lives.”
“Not enough,” frowned Sorceress.
“You’re under arrest,” Hatman said. “We’d like you to come quietly, but one way or another you’re coming.”
“You’re this world’s defenders?” Premiere checked. “The heroes who protect it from meta-powered criminals and alien incursion and so on?”
“That’s the job description,” admitted Goldeneyed.
“So let me ask you this. What’s your policy on executing criminals?”
“We don’t kill,” Dancer insisted.
“Unless we have to,” corrected Fin Fang Foom.
“Or if they art trolls or fell giants,” added Donar.
Dancer glared at him.
“Premiere is wanted for murder in his own dimension,” Falcon explained to the LL. “He’s been tried in his absence and sentenced to death. The guys who were hunting him weren’t called the Death Squad for nothing. The last one was about to nuke Ohio to take him down, but Premiere saved the state.”
“You mean if we arrest him, his own people will kill him?” Dancer said, appalled.
“That’s no different to us capturing villains to face the electric chair or something in our own penal system,” Hatman pointed out.
“After a fair trial,” Ziles clarified. “This man wasn’t even there when they declared his sentence. That’s not just.”
“We can’t go around judging alien cultures’ legal and moral codes,” Goldeneyed argued.
Fin Fang Foom snorted. “This isn’t a debating society either. Save the ethical debates for later. Right now concentrate on the mission.” He looked down at Premiere. “That’s you, by the way.”
“I’d like to hear the ethical debate, if you don’t mind,” Premiere answered. “You see, I have to decide whether to surrender to you. If I don’t, I’ll probably have to kill some of you to get away. From what I’ve heard of you all so far, I’d prefer not to have to do that.”
“We don’t die easily,” warned Nats.
“I’m reading some amazing bio-signs from this guy,” warned Ziles. “He’s Donar-class tough, as fast as Nats, and he’s got energy readings in the Exile/G-Eyed range.”
“I was one of the first science heroes, back before they scaled down the genetic modifications to improve the survival rate,” Premiere explained. He didn’t add that he was one of three survivors out of five hundred volunteers who had endured the original process.
“I don’t see we have a choice, Finny,” said Hatman. “He’s a wanted, self-confessed murderer from a country we have an extradition treaty with. We’re here to uphold the law, not just the laws we like. We have to take him in and hand him back.”
“That’s like killing him ourselves,” Dancer protested. “Look, he just saved a million or more people. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“If we fight here, people will get hurt,” Premiere noted. “Innocent people.”
“Right,” Fin Fang Foom agreed. “And you don’t want that.”
“Of course not.”
“Then you’d better surrender.”
Dancer broke ranks and walked slowly and unthreateningly towards him. “Please?” she asked.
_______________
Premiere looked around the Lair Mansion enviously. “Nice place,” he said.
“This way,” Ziles told him. “We’ll get you set up in one of the guest bedrooms while we figure out what to do with you.”
“He should be in a holding cell,” Goldeneyed warned. “Or at least in power-dampeners.”
Premiere turned to him. “I already promised not to escape,” he reminded him. “No other restraints are necessary.”
“I’ll stick close to him,” Dancer promised, looking at those well-developed muscles under the black-and-white jumpsuit.
“I believe she will,” agreed Sorceress. “And I think we can trust him.”
“He’s a mass murderer,” Hatman pointed out.
“So I won’t give him the best guest room,” Ziles conceded.
“I’m getting on to Dan Drury at SPUD and then to the White House,” Fin Fang Foom decided. “We need clarification on the whole legal status thing. We need to see if the US will grant Premiere asylum while we check on that death sentence ruling. We need to find out more about this Technopolis place that has apparently been secretly trading scientific secrets with elements of our intelligence community for years now.”
“We really need to find out why the government allowed five psycho Death Squadders loose with a nuke in one of our population centres,” advised Falcon.
“And we need to hear Premiere’s side of things,” insisted Dancer.
“Thanks,” the science hero smiled. “But the thing is that I…” Then his head jerked to the side and he turned away with a distant look. “Uh-oh!”
“What’s wrong?” demanded Nats.
“People screaming,” reported Premiere. “In the city over the water there. There are some big armoured war machines ripping through walls towards some sort of precious metals store…”
“What? Are you telling me you can sense what’s happening miles away?” Hatman demanded sceptically.
“Of course not,” Premiere answered. “I can only see and hear it. It’s a place called Gothametropolis First Bank. We’re needed.”
“This has got to be a trick!” Hatman scowled.
“I’ll go check!” Goldeneyed said, vanishing in a bright flash. He was back a moment later. “We’re needed,” he warned. “Looks like a high-tech bank robbery. About six B.A.L.D.-made war vehicles ripping into the vault.”
“You’ve got to let me help,” Premiere insisted. “Let me have parole.”
“Sure,” Dancer agreed before Fin Fang Foom could stop her. Premiere flew off at the speed of sound.
“Get after him,” Foom told Nats. “G-Eyed, ‘port me and Donar over there. Rest of you to the Lairjet!”
By that time Premiere was already over the ruined bank. He picked up the first of the caterpillar-tracked war machines and used it to pound a second one into the ground.
The other combat vehicles recognised an incoming threat and unleashed their arsenals at him.
“That stings!” Premiere objected, melting the legs of a third machine with his thermal blasts and hammering his fist through the chassis of the fourth to tear it like paper.
Nats arrived and literally picked up the fifth machine, flying it high in the air even though it was a dozen times bigger than him. Then he dropped it.
Goldeneyed, Donar, and Fin Fang Foom arrived in time to pound the sixth device into scrap.
By then Premiere had dragged the pilots of the war machines from their ruined crafts and was hovering a few feet from the ground, holding them by the scruffs of their necks. “I don’t know the procedures for assigning criminals to the brain-reeducation centres here,” he admitted.
“We’ll… take it from here,” Fin Fang Foom assured him. “You just go back to being arrested in the Mansion, okay?”
“Very well.” Premiere saluted to the crowds that were gathering. “Glad to have been of assistance, citizens,” he told them, and blurred away.
“Mr Foom!” the press called. “Is that your newest member?”
The dragon ground his fangs together.
_______________
“Very little is known about this new hero filmed here saving the First Gothametropolis Bank,” the TV newsreader explained. “Speculation is growing that he may be a new candidate for the Lair Legion, but so far there has been no comment from the LL press office. In other news, the dollar had a bad day…”
Dancer found Premiere still awake and watching the news in the Mansion’s lounge even though it was three in the morning. “This must all seem very strange to you,” she suggested.
“Yes. Your world is very different from mine, and I admit it feels odd not to be instantly recognised. But you have a very lovely planet.”
“That’s a line I’ve not heard before.”
Premiere flushed. “That’s not what I… I wasn’t attempting to…”
Dancer laughed. “You don’t seem like a mass murderer, Premiere.”
“I am though. At the time I was… very angry, very hurt. At the time it seemed like the thing to do, the best way to save my city, the only way to… Anyway, I killed people. There’s no escaping from it. I tried to kill myself, walking into the dimensional projector. I didn’t know it would be me here. I deserve the death penalty they gave me.”
“Don’t your people believe in second chances?”
Premiere thought about this, but never answered because the Mansion alarm klaxon went off and Fin Fang Foom burst into the room.
“What the heck…?” demanded Dancer
The dragon flicked the monitor onto another channel. Behind him the suddenly-awoken Lair Legion started to hurry in. “Look at this,” Foom told them.
The screen was filled with an aerial helicopter shot down on a vast, futuristic city which sprawled out for thirty miles in every direction. Sleek silver towers grew up from crystal domes. Monorails and transport tubes twisted through the complex interconnected architecture.
“Technopolis!” breathed Premiere.
Foom flicked on the sound. “…still puzzling about how this structure could suddenly appear in place of Billings, Idaho, and what may have happened to the missing city and its residents. Experts have yet to find a way past a mysterious energy barrier cordoning the complex and…”
“Technopolis… is here?” Premiere gasped.
“They really want you back, don’t they?” whistled Nats.
“Technopolis is here,” Foom agreed. “The question is, what do we do about it?”
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