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This message Premiere #29: The Last Science Hero was posted by This episode comes with a free adult content warning from... the Hooded Hood on Saturday, September 14, 2002 at 14:26.
Premiere #29: The Last Science Hero
NOTE: This chapter contains strong content in the form of graphic torture. Let the reader beware.
Premiere Archive (Previous episodes)
Who's Who in the Technoverse
The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Phase Shift & Windblossom á la Dancer and friends
Martin Hernandez was getting used to being out of his depth. Ever since the neophyte science hero had screwed up his courage and fought the villains that would have tortured Windblossom, Phase Shift had stumbled from crisis to crisis with a knot of fear in his belly and a desperate hopeless passion in his heart.
A few hours ago he had made a life and death decision. The Technopolis science villains had invaded the Hooded Hood’s stronghold, were slaughtering all around them, seemed unstoppable. They had captured Windblossom and Dancer and Sorceress and were dragging them back through Random Access’ teleportal to a terrible fate. Hatman, leading the Lair Legion, this world’s principal science heroes, had ordered everyone to protect the hundreds of wounded refugees, sacrificing the prisoners to save the greater number. And Martin Hernandez had disobeyed his orders and hurled his out-of-phase form through the teleportal before it closed and just before he had blacked out from his previous injuries.
He awoke still phased on the staging area where the attack had been launched. A few robo-drones were tidying up and cleaning the bloodstains and cataloguing the unused combat spheres but there was nobody else around. Phase Shift felt sick from the battering he had taken in the initial attack, sicker still to realize that the assault must have been successful or the teleportal would still be active. His actions might have caused the death of his newfound friends and of the refugees who looked to him for protection.
And Windblossom was a captive of the Red Watchman.
The thought hit him like a hammer in the guts and cleared his mind. He realized that he was straining to maintain his high-end phasing far past safe limits but knew it was his only defense against the rigorous security of the Science Council Hall. He gritted his teeth and pulled himself to his feet and went off to find the woman he… liked.
___________________________________
Kareen O’Connell, Windblossom, couldn’t scream since Dr Zalas had sectioned her tongue. Her left eye lay on her bloody cheek but the Head of the Science Council had left the optic nerve intact so she could see what he was doing to her body. The acid and the sutures and the pain nanites and the dermal torches had done their work and what was left bore no resemblance to the pretty brunette that had been strapped here only an hour before.
At the edge of sanity, experiencing pain she could never have imagined, Kareen clung to one thought: she had not betrayed her friends. Yet.
Zalas put down his scalpel and pulled his bloody surgeon’s gloves off with a snap. “Well, that was mildly amusing, Windblossom,” he told her. “As a starter.” He chuckled to himself, made a note on his datapad, and turned to the corner. “You can stop now,” he told Dreamripper.
The illusion which had seemed so real to Kareen shimmered away. It took the girl a few moments to realize that she was not disfigured, dissected, destroyed, that it had been one of the sadistic science villainess’ little mind games, directed and choreographed by Dr Zalas. She shed tears that she would never have believed she still had and screamed until her throat was raw.
“You may go, Dreamripper,” Zalas instructed the smirking psionic. “I want little Windblossom here to be quite certain that anything that happens to her from now on is the real thing. Of course, she must retain the desperate hope that it is another illusion to cling to, or the pain loses its poignancy. But you are dismissed. We have many other maladjusted metahumans who want to have their turn with our newest subject.”
“W-why are you doing this?” choked Kareen.
“Because this is what the Watchman made me,” answered the Science Councilor. “I suppose in part because seeing somebody else suffer relieves my own torment from what the Watchman has done to me. Because I can. And perhaps because you are just too good to be left unspoiled, hmmm?”
“I’m not. Unspoiled. I… I may be pregnant.”
Dr Zalas looked hopeful for a moment until he checked his mediscanner. “No,” he told her. “Not yet. Why did you think you might be?”
Kareen closed her eyes. “There was… we were in this illusion, caused by M-mad Wendy. We didn’t know who we were. We were just her toys. We forgot all responsibility. Didn’t know what we were doing. Didn’t consider the consequences. I think… I think I remember him… I think we…”
“Who?” Zalas leered, pleased to find another vein of sorrow to mine. “Who was it?”
Phase Shift ghosted through the wall and appeared in front of the scientist. He seized up one of the medical instruments and plunged it into Zalas’ eye. “I guess that would be me!” he admitted
___________________________________
Martin Hernandez dragged Windblossom as far as one of the ventilation ducts before collapsing with her onto the polished floor and coughing his lungs out. “Sorry…” he told her. “Can’t take us any further…”
Kareen O’Connell shivered and ran a soothing hand over Phase Shift’s sweat-plastered brow. “It’s okay, Martin. We’ll… we’ll rest here and then…”
“I’m so sorry - for everything,” Phase Shift told her. “I… I heard what you told Zalas. About Mad Wendy’s dreamscape. I… I hadn’t realized that was really you. I thought you were… a dream.” A perfect dream, he thought. “I… Prime Mover, Kareen, I never meant to rape you! Honestly.”
“It wasn’t exactly rape,” Windblossom admitted. “We were both… overcome.” She started to shiver. “Anyway, it all seems a long time ago compared to what we’re facing now.”
Martin was suddenly very aware of his companion’s nakedness. He hurriedly slipped off his jacket and passed it to her. “It’s stained,” he warned her. There was blood from his previous struggles spotting the dark fabric.
“We all are,” Windblossom admitted.
The alarm klaxons echoed down the metal tubing. “Kareen, I don’t think Zalas was dead. In any case they can use the monitor recordings to find out it was me that pulled you out and they have my vibrational signatures on file. Now they know what to look for they can easily find me and neutralize me.”
Kareen nodded numbly. “I know. I’m sorry too, Martin. But please… will you kill me?”
“What?”
“Please Martin. A fate worse than death is more than a cliché for me. Zalas had hardly started exploring the things he could do to me, I know it. I… I couldn’t bear it, Martin. So just… kill me now. Quickly and cleanly. Please.”
Phase Shift’s face hardened. “I’m sorry you didn’t get a proper rescue, Kareen. I’m sorry I couldn’t be a proper hero for you.”
“Oh, but you are!” Windblossom argued. “You don’t realize it maybe but you are. If that trap they set for poor Premiere is as nasty as they think then maybe you’re the last hero. The last hope. You have to find Dancer and save her like you did me, and then get out and look after our people. You must.”
There was the sound of lock seals unfastening at the end of the duct and Phase Shift realized that they had been found. And he knew that although his natural state was to be slightly phased he wasn’t strong enough any more to shift Kareen out of there.
“I’m sorry for everything I’ve done, and how badly I’ve failed you,” he confessed, reaching out for her neck. He couldn’t tell her that he loved her. After all he’d done he didn’t have the right.
“Perfume,” said Windblossom. “Dancer was wearing a floral essence. I can track it. I know where she is.”
The service hatch slid open and the first science policeman leaped down into the duct. A shimmering strand of psionic barbed wire hooked around the soldier’s neck and yanked him terminally from the entrance.
“Outta the way, pig. I’m lookin’ for a little fun here,” Razorbarb chuckled, slipping in to the space he had cleared. “Real shortage of heroes to flay these days, so this is gonna be a treat!”
Phase Shift tried reaching for Windblossom but the tangled threads of needle-sharp wire bound them both, slicing into their flesh and dragging them apart. The standing energy field the science police had set up was calibrated to prevent him phasing.
“Noooo!” Martin Hernandez struggled, not caring how badly the wire tore him up. He had to get to Windblossom, had to kill her. He was her hero, however flawed and useless, the last hero, and he couldn’t give in.
Razorbarb laughed.
Then the duct around the science villain crumpled as if pinched, crushing Razorbarb even before the gout of searing heat sealed off the corridor and forced the science police to retreat from the molten shaft. There was a rending of tempered plasteel and a rip appeared beside Windblossom and Phase Shift.
“Let’s go,” said Premiere. “It’s payback time.”
The last science hero had arrived.
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