Chapter Text
Wisdom. Strength. Charisma.
These were the three virtues that dominated the hero world these days. You couldn’t be strong and wise, strong and charismatic… You had one forte and you stuck with it.
Laserblast thought it was inane.
Which was bad, considering he was the head of the charisma discipline.
Of course, he had seen that distinction coming from a mile away- Greyman was the ‘brains’ of the team, undoubtedly, and Foxtail could crush someone just by looking at them wrong. He couldn’t deny that he himself had the most stage presence out of the P.O.I.N.T members. He had his massive army of fans to attest to that. He was so good at being a charismatic superhero, in fact, that only his fellow P.O.I.N.T members knew that his lasers weren’t even his power!
Pah. Charisma. He really was a dancing monkey. That’s all he was good for.
This wasn’t some kind of revolutionary epiphany from the likes of Laserblast, though. He had long grown tired of his inadequacy. What kind of hero needed to borrow from others’ power to fuel his own? It was useless at best, and villainous at worst. However, before he could build up the strength to voice his concerns to his team, P.O.I.N.T’s popularity exploded majorly. Foxtail had even been seeking out junior members, but the boom in activity had left them with nothing but hopeful heroes flooding their inboxes and voicemails, burying any real candidates in lieu of level-ones who wore Laserblast shirts and Foxtail capes.
The staff room still had the pictures, he recalled. Three framed photos of a candidate each of them had picked. Foxtail had her eyes on a certain Eugene Garcia, better known by his wrestling persona, ‘El-Bow’. Laserblast could see clear as day why she had picked him, and as an apprentice, too- When P.O.I.N.T had gone undercover to watch one of his wrestling matches, his signature elbow drop had been so gnarly that he could feel the pain from his seat. He was a spluttering fool when they had cornered him after the match. No wisdom or charisma to be found.
Greyman’s pick was the powerful- and very fetching- Carol Kincaid, or ‘Silver Spark’, as she insisted they call her. At first, Laserblast was confused. A natural-born fighter with seemingly no end to her boundless enthusiasm, she didn’t seem the type for Greyman to pick as his successor. Meeting her in person made it click immediately. Only a nerd like Greyman could find someone with encyclopedic knowledge like hers! She seemed to know everything about P.O.I.N.T. It was like meeting one of their many fangirls before the boom had even happened- but Laserblast couldn’t deny that her power was fierce. Fiercer than his. He’d have to avoid the girl. She made him so… jealous.
Finally, there was his own choice. Laserblast had admittedly gotten distracted, and totally forgot that they were scouting candidates. When Foxtail had asked him about his ideas, he panicked slightly and selected a marsupial martial artist who had made his acquaintance a while back- Rippy Roo. Sure, she wasn’t a paragon of charisma, like El-Bow for strength, and Silver Spark for wisdom, but she was just… Too dang cute! He wanted to squish her little cheeks so bad, and bop those large red boxing gloves.
Too bad he couldn’t, now that P.O.I.N.T was so busy. The annoying- er, adoring fans were the least of their problems at the moment. The popularity spike had caused Foxtail to come up with the brilliant plan to start up a school for heroes. A preparatory crash course for heroic work, that would be the only field of work that would understand why the teachers would have to bolt mid-lesson, but it still rubbed Laserblast the wrong way. Foxtail had gotten so caught up in this academy business, sometimes he wondered if she forgot that they were superheroes.
Nonetheless, it was fun enough, he supposed. The students of P.O.I.N.T Prep were promising young heroes, and he could feel the enthusiasm radiating off them, like a glorb freshly dropped from the Lakewood tree. There were a few special kids that would come visit him after class, yammering about that day’s lesson with such an innocent look on their face.
...Does he want children?
Laserblast shook his inner monologue out of his head. He couldn’t be sitting around doing nothing. He had a class to teach! Getting up, Laserblast quickly made his bed. Greyman loved to lecture him about how he ‘shouldn’t lounge in the bed if he wasn’t sleeping’. Luckily, Greyman wasn’t watching, and Laserblast could do whatever he wanted. He quietly adjusted his P.O.I.N.T Prep official uniform and went out the door.
Not before grabbing his helmet. Whoops!
The prestigious school building had long since overtaken P.O.I.N.T HQ, so it wasn’t a far walk for Laserblast. The building was tall, mighty… Almost majestic, in a sense. The true epitome of a school for the gifted and talented. He pushed open the doors, joining the growing crowd of students in the front hallway for the hustle and bustle of afternoon classes.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Laserblast!”
“Hi, Mr. Laserblast!”
“Laserblast! Laserblast! Sign my POW card!”
Laserblast chuckled, grabbing a pen from a student’s outstretched arms. “Hi. Hello. Good morning. Sure!” He said, trying to reply to as many students as he could. Sure, they all had him as a teacher every once in a while, but he supposed he couldn’t blame them for getting starstruck.
It’s not like they knew the real him, anyways.
After apologizing quickly to some of his clingier pupils, Laserblast made his way to his classroom. He opened the door as he heard the bell ring, students trailing in behind him.
“Afternoon, students. I hope you guys had a good morning?” Laserblast said, a trademark catlike smirk forming on his face. “You guys ready for the big megafootball game coming up?”
The students all nodded eagerly, with a few of them quietly whispering to their friends about their plans for the game. He could pick out a few pieces of dialogue that was undeniably thanks to P.O.I.N.T Prep propaganda from Foxtail. Jeez. Her and her sports.
“Alright, well, you can focus more on the game when you’re in Foxtail’s class. For now? It’s my time,” he said with a grin, as he popped a trademark red sucker into his mouth. “And I’ve got a fun lesson prepared for you guys.”
Laserblast turned around and started sketching on the board. Any pupil of his would be quick to point out the almost scientific quality of his drawings. “Yesterday we focused on a lot of hero stuff. But today’s lesson focuses on a hero’s breakfast, lunch and dinner-“
He paused for effect, before drawing P.O.I.N.T’s old nemesis- or, at least, the creation of his that people would actually recognize. He had seem Steamborg a million times, so of course drawing him by memory would be easy as pie.
“Villains.”
“Today, we’re gonna focus on villainous charisma. It’s a two-way road, y’know! All those strategies we use- making a good first impression, instilling fear in villains… They can use it right back at us. So. A suave villain shows up, complete with this scary purple smoke. Wooooh,” Laserblast said, drawing some cloudy shapes below Steamborg.
“Destroy P.O.I.N.T,” he continued in a grumbly voice, doing a purposefully bad imitation of Steamborg. He grinned when he could hear laughter behind him.
“You don’t know their power level. They look pretty scary. What do you do?” Laserblast stopped. He turned around to face the class, and a wave of hands shot up. “Yes! You, in the front there.”
“The smoke is obviously a diversion. The villain must want to distract from something obvious. So they have a glaring weak point!” The student answered, nearly shooting out of their seat with excitement.
“Exactly! That’s why you can’t assume anything out of just an entrance… because sometimes?” Laserblast smirked, tapping a knuckle on the board. The chalk dust fell, and the chalk Steamborg was no more. “A villain might be all bark.”
The class cheered, and Laserblast gave a small chuckle. He wasn’t the discipline head of charisma for nothing.
A single person was clapping far beyond the time everyone else had died down, and Laserblast curiously scanned his class. Who could it be?
“Yes, yes, well DONE, Laserblast. But I have a question!” A mint-haired man piped up from the back row. Someone he didn’t recognize.
“Well, sir, if you have a question…” Laserblast put a hand on one of his helmet’s side discs. “You’re gonna have to raise your hand.”
The lad sighed, raising what looked like a chicken claw in the air.
“Yes.”
“My question, before you so RUDELY interrupted me, was this! You SAY that there are villains who are all talk because of their evil panache. But WHAT would you do if you find a villain…”
“WHO’S BARK AND BITE?!” The man cackled, slamming a button. “DARRELL! NOW!”
Laserblast was suddenly tackled to the floor by a blur of red and green.
“I got ‘im, daddy! Look! I got Laserblast!” The thing, apparently a robot, judging by the cold metal that touched his skin, took his attention away from Laserblast to brag to the man.
Big mistake.
The robot’s head was blasted off by a familiar red laser, and the man’s laughter ended very quickly soon after.
“Uh-oh.”
This time, it was Laserblast doing the tackling- but, of course, this little man had all sorts of surprises up his sleeve. He soon found himself getting lifted up in the air… Because the desk was flying?
How in Cob’s name did this guy manage to weasel in a flying desk?!
“Oh, did I make that good a first impression, HERO?” The man gloated. “I get it! You just can’t get enough of ol’ Boxy!”
Laserblast stopped. He had to choose between catching a villain or suffering a humiliating defeat… He had no idea how fast the desk was, or where it went. He had to drop it. The man, surprised, peeked down at Laserblast, who had dropped down onto the floor.
“...You’re not going to chase me or anything?”
Laserblast shook his head. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m in the middle of a class here… ‘Boxy’.”
The man’s face flushed a bright red. “That’s- That’s LAD BOXMAN to you! I’ll be back! And I’ll interrupt your stupid class again!” And with that, he zoomed away, the noises of Boxman’s sputtering desk growing quieter and quieter, soon to be replaced with the sound of Foxtail’s booming footsteps. He worried about that woman sometimes. Juggling being a discipline head, the acting dean (she claimed she’d step down as discipline head as soon as she got El-Bow as a candidate, but that hadn’t been working out very well), AND a P.O.I.N.T hero… that couldn’t be good for her.
Well, it wasn’t him, so he wasn’t cracking under the pressure. That was good. What was less good was Foxtail poking her head in the classroom, prompting a few students to wave.
“Laser! Why’d you let ‘im go? This classroom’s a mess, too!” She said, prodding Laserblast’s chest with her finger and staring him down- not too seriously, of course.
“He had a flying desk, Foxtail! I didn’t wanna ditch class!” He argued back, scratching his head bashfully.
She sighed. “That’s fair. At least he didn’t cause too much damage. Hey, do me a favour n’ clean up here, alright?” She patted Laserblast’s shoulder, and they shared an affectionate smile with each other.
“Sure thing, Fox.”
Laserblast turned back to his students and was about to address them after all that tomfoolery, but it must have been his rotten luck that made the bell ring. Ah, well. At least it’d be easier to clean without them in here. He said his goodbyes to his class, and took the opportunity to start tidying up.
Cob. How could he have been so stupid? Just letting that villain go like that… he could tell Foxtail was judging him for being the weak link that he always has been.
Scooping up the headless robot that he had blasted only a few minutes ago, he surveyed its weight in his arms. It was quite a fine specimen, actually.
At first glance, the yellow piece in the middle looked like a weak point, but once he touched it- he didn’t know why he did that, if it really was a weak point it would have exploded in his face- it flew open on a hinge, revealing a dimly glowing cyan sphere.
“A… glorb?” Laserblast said, eyes widening under the helmet. Maybe this villain really was more competent than he thought. He quickly tucked the glorb into a container. It was still full of juice, thankfully, but the simple act of powering the robot had made some of its power disappear. After he took care of the rest of the mess in the classroom, Laserblast decided to head back to his room. This was a matter he needed to look into.
The glorb floated in its container. Laserblast stared at it. This had gone on for quite a few minutes now.
“I don’t get it. You have a GLORB, of all things, and you waste it on a cheap robot? Unless you had more, you wouldn’t…” Laserblast trailed off, putting a hand to his temples.
Power comes from glorbs. And he needed power. This villain used a glorb on a robot, but he had no way of knowing if he just got lucky-
Or did he?
Laserblast quickly darted out of his room, locking the door behind him. He didn’t need to go all the way back to the school, thankfully. What he sought was right in HQ. The rooms’ golden nameplates were hard to read at the speed he was going, but he had been in this building long enough to know where the one he needed was. Finally, he came to a halt, opening the door to the trophy room. To be more precise, the battle trophy room.
The actual trophy room was across the hall and a bit to the right. This room was what the team could use if they wanted to keep anything of a villain’s they had come across during one of their epic battles. After an embarrassing incident with Greyman last year, they all made sure to be extra careful checking that there wasn’t any tracking device.
Laserblast made his way over to his side of the room. It was the biggest by far, and his teammates had more or less assumed that he kept so many ‘battle trophies’ to gloat. That wasn’t the kind of person he was at all, but it was a lie he let them believe. The real answer was a bit less palatable. He’d study these villains’ powers, their methods, their-
Ah! Here we go.
Laserblast lifted it up in the air with a grin. It was a robotic fish, long depowered, but not rusty. He gave the lower end a squeeze, and the fish’s jaws hinged and unhinged. He could tell it wasn’t an advanced model, so he didn’t bother looking for a glorb slot, but he did know who had made both this fish and the robot he fought earlier.
He turned the fish over on its belly, and read the shining silver text of a trademark.
‘JUNKFISH: Brought to you by Boxmore’
Just like that, all the memories had come flooding back. The obnoxious Lad Boxman had been one of P.O.I.N.T’s newest regulars before the boom caused an influx of villain challengers! He couldn’t even count how many times he had got bitten by one of that guy’s Junkfish. He always had so many of them, too…
Boxmore, huh?
Laserblast ran a finger over the silver text once more. “That’s not a name… that’s a company.”
A made-to-order company, for sure. And a company like that meant a robotics lab, and a glorb supply. If Laserblast could convince this Boxman to share a workspace with him, he could finally start his research for real! All these years of being a weakling, and Boxman would be the key to fix him! Laserblast grinned, almost dropping the Junkfish out of excitement as he ran out of the room.
-Nope, no, holding a Junkfish is too suspicious. Back it went.
Now he’s out!
Luckily, all his teammates were busy, so they didn’t see Laserblast swing by the garage and contemplate about taking the Powitzer. He decided eventually that it’d be too suspicious, plus it was way too tacky for his liking. Why didn’t the team have their own cars? He would have liked to have a convertible. Those are nice.
Guess he’s walking.
Laserblast made his way out of HQ, ducking into a nearby forest. He’d taken the trail there many times, and knew exactly where to emerge so that he was far away from P.O.I.N.T, but not so far that everyone would see what he was about to do. Laserblast quickly wrapped a scarf around himself, popping some sunglasses on at the same time. He exchanged his helmet for a baseball cap, and pulled a trench coat out of the backpack he had brought, gently putting the helmet inside instead.
The perfect civilian disguise for a hero who’s never shown his full face to begin with.
Wandering without his helmet wasn’t something Laserblast got to do often. If he constantly ditched the helmet, one way or another he’d be found out. He supposed that made this hunt for Boxmore a rare treat, where on the way he could finally get his favourite coffee without it getting too crowded, or look at the animals in the pet shop, because Cob, they were cute, or hang out near the fountain without being asked for pictures…
It felt weird not being noticed. Sure, the paparazzi annoyed him to kingdom corn, but any attention was good attention. Passing people in the street without them giving him so much as a glance made him so… powerless.
No. He had to stay undercover if he wanted to find Boxmore and become the powerful hero he needed to be. He could survive without a little attention for a while. Laserblast continued to wander the streets, looking for anything that could be related to Boxmore. He passed a local wrestling ring, and looked away, feeling a twinge of guilt. Poor El-Bow. The school had gotten in the way of the guy’s admittance. He had no time to dwell, though, because he saw something on the other side of the shop. On the inside of a store window was what looked like a robot cutting hair!
Bingo.
The door opened, and he could hear a ringing bell. The robot who was currently cutting looked up, still maintaining a perfect flow.
“Greetings, customer! Welcome to Logic Cuts. Please be seated- I will be right with you!” He sounded chipper, despite his fairly monotone voice.
Laserblast cleared his throat. “Actually, I’m here for directions. Would you happen to know where Boxmore is?”
The robot almost stopped cutting, he seemed so surprised. He looked away for a bit, before turning his head back to Laserblast. “We… are not an affiliate of Boxmore, friend. I am sorry.”
Laserblast chuckled awkwardly. “Ah… My bad.” Did he dare to push on further? He didn’t want to offend the robot, but he was getting tired of looking. “...You don’t know where it is, though?”
The robot paused again, the sound of scissors snipping filling the silence. “Yes, I know where it is. It is three streets up, where you must turn left into an alleyway. Boxmore is on the lot there.”
He grinned. “Hey, thanks, bud! You’ve been a great help.”
The robot raised his scissors. “Are you certain you do not want a touch-up before you go?”
“Nah. I’m good,” he said, dropping a tip into the tip jar. “Consider that a thanks, too!” And with that done, Laserblast made his way out. What a nice robot.
After a bit more walking, Laserblast knew he had arrived. What other person besides a villain would have a giant, evil factory with BM on the front? Thankfully for this Boxman, P.O.I.N.T has the courtesy to not go raiding hideouts. He knew he had to get his mind off his team, though- this was his errand, after all.
He ducked back into the alley, and got to work. Coat in, helmet out, et cetera, et cetera. In no time, Laserblast was looking like his good old heroic self again. Thankfully, nobody had seen him, but he knew perfectly well what this looked like- a sting operation that the noble Laserblast was about to finish.
It couldn’t be further from the truth, but what did he care?
Laserblast finally made his way back up to Boxmore’s front entrance, staring at the large, imposing doors. He breathed in, bouncing from one foot to another.
Well, he had come this far. To chicken out would be stupid.
He knocked on the door