Chapter Text
Morgan whistled while they rifled through the pockets of Leader USA, their sister's ex-husband. The plan had been to pickpocket him, but… well, the plan had gone awry. Morgan was devastated. Really. Truly.
“You can at least pretend you’re not enjoying this,” said Paige, the aforementioned sister. She was adjusting the gas masks everyone wore to not die. Hers was Standard Issue-Heroic Personnel, and thus was a bright, construction-worker orange. It clashed terribly with her hair.
“I’m taking this very seriously,” Morgan said. His mask was painted a mix of army green and hot pink. He had built and painted it himself.
“You’re whistling the Pink Panther theme.”
“I take whistling very seriously.” He very pointedly whistled the last eight notes.
“You’re going to get us caught.”
“Probably,” said Morgan, pulling a key card out of Leader USA’s pocket and using it to lock the hero's body in the office behind them. He checked his watch. “It’s not like this plan is foolproof.”
Paige stopped in the middle of the concrete hallway. “What? You’re just telling me this now?” she hissed.
Morgan grabbed their sister’s arm and pulled her along their planned path until they reached the storage closet that was their next destination. “Kiddo, don’t stop in corridors when we’re working very hard to stay between patrols,” he said.
“What are we missing?” Paige hissed.
“An exit strategy,” said Morgan, pulling out a screwdriver and unscrewing the HVAC vent from the wall. “They really should have done something about these massive vents, now that the HVAC system doesn’t even work anymore.”
“It could work, they just diverted power to perimeter defenses instead,” said Paige.
“And, now that we’re past those defenses, thank you by the way-”
“You’re welcome.”
“Anyway, now that we’re past those defenses, it’s just a big old security flaw. Easily exploited.” Morgan hoisted themselves into the small space. “They don’t even have laser grids protecting the vents.”
“They’re really mostly relying on the perimeter defenses and also the fact that most of the world doesn’t know this facility exists.”
Morgan started to marine crawl forward. “Ugh, when was the last time they cleaned in here?”
“Probably sometime before the world ended.”
“Gross,” said Morgan.
They kept crawling forward. Paige followed behind them.
“We don’t need an exit strategy,” said Paige. “If it all goes to plan, we can just blast our way out. Stealth isn’t necessary.”
“Shh,” Morgan hissed. “Sound can travel really far in vents like this.” Also, Paige was probably right. But… Morgan didn’t have to like it. And he didn’t. Like it. At all. Morgan wasn't a "blasting" sort of person. Meaning, once they’d done what they’d come to do, he’d be useless.
Carefully, Morgan popped the vent out and slithered out of the vent head first. They tried to catch themselves with their hands, but one hand slipped and they ended up rolling ass over teakettle into a set of chairs.
The chairs had people in them.
Two armed guards immediately leapt from their posts, only to freeze in place. Morgan sat up to see the shimmer of Paige’s forcefields around them both, like she’d vacuum-sealed them in.
“Can they breathe in there?” asked Morgan.
One guard after the other turned red and their eyes rolled back in their sockets. “Only if I want them too,” Paige said. Once they had both passed out, Paige released them and they slumped to the floor.
Morgan stared. “How the fuck are you only B-Tier?”
“Misogyny,” Paige said.
“Speaking of,” Morgan started going through each of the guards’ pockets and pulling anything that looked useful. “Did the Retaliators ever teach you to take guys out with your thighs like Dark Spider does? Because that’s a really cool move,” He found two magnetized keycards, two sets of keys, and some junk like $34 in Old World money and a really, really old lotto ticket (97 43 80 01 71 or 67.) He didn’t take their guns. Guns would be pretty worthless if everything went to plan. And only slightly more than worthless if everything went to shit.
“No,” said Paige, looking through the computers that the men had been sitting at, typing something with the lightning speed Mom had drilled into her in middle school.
“Why not?” Not that Morgan had been hoping Paige would teach them how to take out guys with their thighs or anything.
Paige sighed. “Dark Spider and I are very different. She’s offensive, and I’m defensive.” His sister walked to the far wall and pressed her palm flat against it. Her force field punched a finger-sized hole through the wall. Then, as Morgan watched, the field expanded on both sides of the wall, applying so much pressure that the concrete was quietly crushed into rubble between the two large disks.
“That looked pretty offensive to me,” said Morgan.
“Cons of being on a team,” Paige said, stepping over the powder and steel rods that used to be a wall. “You get pigeonholed. Honestly, I’m quite looking forward to going solo.”
Morgan coughed lightly and kicked some rubble on the floor, unable to make eye contact as they followed her into the room. They reached down and grabbed two of the steel bars.
The next room was relatively small, maybe twelve by fourteen feet. But the ceiling was pretty tall. Probably twenty feet up. No vents in this room, which meant it was sweltering. Morgan was starting to sweat behind his gas mask. Only one door. A single camera, one that went to the computers in the room they’d just been. In the middle of the room sat a large circle of metal, sitting on its side. A dimension portal. It was currently non-functioning. “Okay…” Morgan walked to the door and wedged the steel bars across it. “You know, kiddo, your "impossible heist" has been pretty easy so far, actually. Can you turn the thing on?”
“Yeah, well in the Old World, this would have been a lot harder,” said Paige. “The Terrific Trio made sure we all knew how to work the dimension portal, just in case they died.”
“Did they die?” Morgan asked. He hadn’t heard anything about them since the world ended.
Paige froze from where she was manipulating a control panel set into the wall next to the door. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said eventually.
“That’s cool,” Morgan said.
“Okay, I’m almost done.” She typed some numbers into a keypad and the circle revealed itself to be three concentric circles, one of which spun clockwise, one anti-clockwise. The third spun around a completely different axis, nearly smacking Morgan in the head, before they jumped back.
“Hold on to your butt,” Paige said.
“Wha-” but they were interrupted by the sound of the portal blasting from the center. When it reached the edges of the rings, all spinning stopped, and Morgan was looking into a… well it looked like a bunch of smoke trapped behind some invisible barrier.
“Go for it, cupcake.”
Morgan hesitated. “You know, if this works, they’ll be naked.”
“So don’t be a perv,” Paige said. “Are you incapable of that? I wouldn't be shocked.”
They took a deep breath through their nose. Siblings. You can’t live with them; you can't kill them. He screwed his eyes shut and pictured the S-Tier villain in his mind. “Alright,” he said, bringing up his fingers. “Here goes nothing.”
Snap