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If the definition of insanity was trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, Fundy must have gone off the deep end a long time ago. He tilted his chair against the wall again, pressing the back of his head against the metal and concentrating, and for the fifty thousandth fucking time he came up blank.
He knew there were gaps in the walls, at least for circuitry. He understood on a scientific level that no expensive flying air base, regardless of the inconceivably short-sighted loans that a twopenny villain took out to fund it, could avoid the infestations that came of living in the world: weevils and cockroaches in henchman’s pantries! Drain flies in the bathrooms! Fucking fruit flies because some asshole lab tech let an apple rot in the back of the biohazard refrigerator! There should have been something. Ants in the vents. Mice. Something.
And yet Fundy had been squirming in his bonds for an hour now, broken rib twinging, nosebleed starting and stopping according to no pattern he could follow, and his powers hadn’t snagged on anything.
It didn’t make any sense. The villain who had captured him was so low priority that Fundy wasn’t even sure of his codename– maybe because he seemed like he was from a different city, maybe because he hadn’t confronted Fundy in person but sent some henchmen to beat the shit out of him instead. He shouldn’t have known about Animus, who was also kind of low priority according to the HOA, not to the extent that he annihilated all animal life within range. Actual germaphobes with a terror of bed bugs couldn’t do that, and Fundy had seen some of them try.
He would have given his left arm, or alternatively the tip of his pinky finger because he was attached to having an arm actually, for a nest of bed bugs right then. Creepy, crawly bodies to slip his consciousness into. If he had enough insects, he could pick locks with them. He could steal a keycard and have a way to open the door.
Relatedly, if it turned out Wild Card wasn’t in the fucking base to start with, Fundy would scream. This was the last rescue mission he’d do for that guy, that was for sure.
“You should come help me before they make me tell them things, Animus,” he muttered, bonking his head against the wall. The motion upset his balance; he tipped forward with a thunk, rattling his teeth. Ow. “You’re a professional, Animus. You’re brilliant, you can save the day instead of being a villain for once–”
What Fundy really needed wasn’t a collection of drain flies. He needed something to cut himself free and let him spoof the locking mechanism, or alternatively attack the door hinges that some moron had put on the inside of the cell.
A screwdriver. A knife. He’d take a cheese grater at this point.
Plus, if some benevolent god decided to drop Fundy a knife, he could use it on the next henchman to come in. Stab them and make a break for it, slash their throat so they’d stop freaking hitting him, there was a wealth of options–
Clink.
Fundy stared down at the knife by his feet. He looked up at the solid, untouched ceiling. He looked down again. He looked up again.
“Wild Card?” he ventured. No answer. He glanced around again, inched his foot– he’d wriggled his feet free, at least– toward the knife and dragged it closer. “... God?”
God also did not answer. Considering that Fundy lived a life of crime, this was not a surprise.
Fundy caught the knife handle between his feet and flipped it up into his mouth, a fun party trick that anyone could learn with barely a few urgent care visits in between. He contorted himself unpleasantly to get it to his hands, then sawed himself loose and stretched, vertebrae popping.
The hinges on the inside of the door proved more durable than Fundy had expected.
“You know what would be nice right now?” he said to no one in particular. “A blowtorch, right on the ground in front of me. With fuel! A working blowtorch with fuel.”
No dice. Fundy considered the chain of events that had led to the throwing knife in his hand, nicely weighted now that he considered it, and said, thinking out loud, “Another thing blowtorches can be used for, it just occurred to me, is explosions and skin melting–”
A blowtorch clattered to the floor in front of him. Fundy whooped, shot a guilty look at the camera watching his cell– weird that nobody had interfered so far, actually, what was up with that– and grabbed it to melt the hinges fast, kicking the door until it gave up the ghost and crashed into the hallway.
The empty hallway, free of responding henchmen or, in fact, anyone. Fundy heard alarms shrieking in the adjacent hallways, saw red lights blinking near the ceiling. The sound hadn’t penetrated the soundproof cell.
“This isn’t weird at all,” Fundy told himself, hunching his shoulders and glancing around. “This is normal. This is usual for villain lairs."
He’d robbed too many of them to believe that, but that was a question for later Fundy. Current Fundy was looking neither gift escapes, gift knives, nor gift blowtorches in the mouth. He skulked forward, peering around corners before he darted to the next defensible position, and the halls stayed empty.
So the next thing to do was finding Wild Card. Fundy could do that. He had schematics– okay, he’d had schematics, but he also had a great memory, so he had them, present tense, in the sense that they remained within his brain– and now that he’d explored some of the base, he knew where he was within it. Interrogation rooms would be higher up in the floating ship, close to the surface so Whatsisname could threaten to throw prisoners over the side. He liked doing that, since his powers let him control air and he could sweep people back to the ship after scaring the shit out of them. Fundy knew this because he did his research and didn’t have such a predictable routine that he could be scooped up by any villain on the street. Unlike some people, who harassed him with invitations to maid cafes and would otherwise remain unnamed.
The elevators looked risky, so Fundy took the stairs, pressing back beneath a flight of them when a pair of henchmen rushed down with weapons in hand. One of them was clutching an arm erupting with blue scales, flesh rippling in a way that flesh should never have rippled; the other one seemed sort of fine, except she for sure had a concussion and kept banging into walls.
Neither of them so much as glanced at Fundy’s hiding place. He darted out and flipped off the door they’d gone through, still pissy about the whole beating up a helpless prisoner thing, and scrambled upstairs before anyone else could come by.
There was black sludge spilled across the floor between Fundy and the next hallway. Fundy slowed, eyes flicking up to the cameras again– he was starting to doubt anyone cared enough to come after him, which meant that either a greater issue was happening or that he was walking face first into a trap, about to step on a tripwire like a fool stepping on a rake and getting smacked in the face– and it bubbled, shifting sideways into a mass that coalesced against the wall.
“Oh, what the fuck,” Fundy yelped. He jerked back and brandished his blowtorch like a pistol. “Stay back! I have fire, I’m basically as well-armed as a, as a caveman, you do not want to mess with this!”
The sludge formed an arm, groping up the wall, leaving slug tracks with its malformed fingers. A mouth and nose twisted out of the goopy mess, burbling, splitting in two, teeth popping up in rows like floating corks and sliding apart, and Fundy fucking lost it. He ran and leaped, aiming for literally anywhere past the oil-slick-maybe-person, and a sticky arm lashed out and caught at his ankle– he slammed into the floor, bruised rib shrieking for justice– it gasped nonsense, groped at his ankle and pulled him back–
Fundy twisted and slashed at the arm with the knife, except it wasn’t a knife anymore. It was a longer blade, like a machete but sharper, like the hero tech he’d seen that could slice stainless steel like melting butter, and it cut through the sludgy arm with insulting ease. Fundy got to his feet and bolted.
He bashed the keypads to the interrogation cells with a hammer that came out of nowhere, and the locks hissed open before the sparks stopped flying. “Come on, come on, come on,” Fundy muttered, bouncing on his heels and casting twitchy glances over his shoulder. More cameras in this hall. Someone had to have noticed, someone would be on their way–
He yanked the door open. Hbomb jerked upright when he did, stumbling and catching himself with his upper arms as whatever head wound he’d acquired made itself known. That was an unfortunate amount of blood on his temple. A suboptimal amount of bruising, for a man of Hbomb’s size. The bars of the cell bent wonderfully easily once Fundy applied his hydraulic rescue tool, which had fallen into his hands the moment he considered bludgeoning Hbomb over the head with them.
“Fun– Animus, I meant Animus?” Wild Card blurted, looking a lot more panicked than Fundy had thought he would. Fundy’s fear spiked just from association, since if Wild Card was freaked out there was probably a reason for it, which he was missing– an important reason that might kill him very dead. “What are you doing here? When did you get here?”
“I,” Fundy said indignantly, “have been here for hours, trying to save you! Like you asked me to using copious amounts of flattery! I fought a slime, Wild Card! It grabbed me! I barely escaped!”
“You beautiful, beautiful man,” Hbomb said in great relief. Fundy glowered at him, then helped him through the mangled bars so he wouldn’t careen into another wall. “Have you seen that, uh, that main guy here recently? The person whose base this is?”
The indignation grew. “You mean he talked to you? I never met him.”
“I wouldn’t recommend the experience,” Hbomb informed him. “Are you feeling what I am? Not romance, not talking about romance, I’m talking about powers?”
Fundy faltered. “What about powers?”
“I can’t tell which one you have right now,” Hbomb said, and he sounded a little hysterical, which was weird because sounding hysterical was generally Fundy’s job. “I thought it was a suppressant drug, but that guy whose name we both forgot and/or never knew freaked out too because he could control air and then he couldn’t but he was shrinking and growing uncontrollably, and his second in command with the color change ability started throwing lava everywhere, and things got really, heh, heated, so–”
“Wait, wait, wait, is that why I haven’t been able to sense any animals? I thought this was just an oddly sterile environment, even free of rats and shit. This makes so much more sense.” Fundy thought about it for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “I will bet money that I traded powers with someone. Who do you know who can summon things but only if they can be used to hurt people?”
“Imp,” Hbomb said at once. “HOA member, kind of annoying, should probably be in school if we’re claiming to be responsible members of society.”
“You’re a part-time catmaid, you stopped being responsible ages ago,” Fundy retorted. He let go of Hbomb’s arm, eyeing him in case his balance took another nosedive. Hbomb wobbled and gave a thumbs-up.
“I still can’t believe you rank the catmaid stuff as more weird than the criminal activities,” he complained. “What else can you summon? Can you summon a ham?”
“Why would I do that? Why would I ever do that?”
“Close your eyes and imagine murdering someone with a frozen ham,” Hbomb suggested. “I always thought Imp’s power was fascinating, I’d love to analyze it in more detail– think spiral sliced. Think honey glazed.”
Fundy groaned. “I’m thinking I liked you better as a damsel in distress.”
Hbomb snickered.
Fundy’s getaway plan had included a pair of parachutes stashed by a Canada goose he’d briefly possessed– and wow were those some chaotic minds, he’d never look at pre-sliced white bread the same way again– but that plan required going back through the hallway with the sludge person, and anyway the supervillain who owned the base had probably found that shit by now.
Their next best bet was to steal one of the supervillain’s helicopters, which required going to the roof of the base and hoping for the best, but that plan crashed and burned as soon as they reached the airstrip.
Two of the helicopters had been melted to red-hot slag, fuel combusting freely in puddles around the flight deck. A couple of corpses laid a few feet from the entrance, burned unrecognizable and surrounded by warped metal. Several people faced off at the other end of the deck.
Something was going down, clearly.
“Shrinky guy’s the one on the left,” Hbomb muttered, sizing up the villains and tugging Fundy behind one of the helicopters’ remains. He yanked up his shirt collar and breathed through it, trying not to gag at the stench of burnt flesh. “I think, uh, lava lady’s obvious, she’s deducible from what we’ve been given, not sure about the others but one of them should have had ice powers if I’m recognizing that face as well as I should be? But not anymore, wow, I’m extraneous. Have I been phased out of the market?”
“That’s fucked up for you, I’m upgrading to a better product,” Fundy told him. Lava Lady had molten rock winding around her like a pair of pythons. Fundy clocked three guns, good luck with those, and a fourth weapon– maybe a laser gun? Individual villain tech? Whatever it was, it looked cool-- in the hands of a man shouting words that the great engines holding the base in the air carried away before Fundy could hear them. All of the villains were between them and the parachutes he’d stashed.
“They don’t see us,” he said, more of a prayer than a statement of fact. “They do not see us. We have no way out and we’re going to die, what the fuck, I hate my life.”
The sky stretched out around them, dizzyingly blue. The air was thin and dry and hurt his lungs to breathe. He could see the city in the distance, a grayish line of horizon, but closer was a roiling brown-black mirror, the surface of a lake Fundy had lived beside all his life. There was so much e.coli in those waters. So many floating plastic bottles. Fundy wished he was down by the boardwalk instead of up on a fuckoff huge villain base, but he couldn’t always get what he wanted, could he.
“Alright, this is doable,” Hbomb said. “Think about useful things. What could you kill a guy with besides a hang glider that also flies?”
“ Excuse me?”
“Look, a hang glider doesn’t seem murderous enough, and they might notice a parachute!”
“You could strangle someone with a parachute, though,” Fundy argued.
“A parachute will go into the engines and chop us into culinarily useful bits if we try to jump off here,” Hbomb pointed out, and okay, yeah, that was a gruesome way to die that Fundy would prefer to avoid. “Consider a fighter jet.”
“You could shoot someone with a fighter jet,” Fundy tried. One of the people with guns was looking their way, making hand motions he did not like the vibes of. Their timeline for Fundy utilizing the power of his imagination to save the day was rapidly compressing to seconds. “You could use missiles! Run someone over! Run it into another fighter jet, I’m picturing it now, I can’t fly a jet but I’m picturing it now– they’re coming this way–”
“Let’s jump,” Hbomb said, higher. “Let’s just– I think we can– shit!”
Lava sprayed in their direction, eating holes in the floor and searing Fundy’s skin as Hbomb yanked him out of the way, rolled them behind another pile of slag. Bullets pinged the floor around them.
“Why can’t infighting last longer?” Hbomb demanded. “They should get back to that, alright, that’d make more sense. Do we look like threats to them?”
“We’re serving as a teambuilding exercise,” Fundy shrilled, and more lava sank into the metal beside them with a hellish hiss. His skin was starting to blister from the proximity. “Bad, bad, this is bad, we need to go–”
“On it,” Hbomb blurted, grabbing his hand and running for the side, and Fundy thought chop them up with the engine crash it into their face drop them from up high and they were plummeting–
It was weird, what happened next. The wind hit Fundy’s face like an eighteen-wheeler. He screamed. Hbomb screamed. He imagined a fighter jet as hard as he could, the sleek metal, the roar of the engine, the inside of the cockpit, and he swore he felt controls under his hands. He swore their fall leveled into a controlled glide, engine sputtering, jet hitting the lake with a spray of water and bobbing up, slamming Fundy’s head into the dashboard, Hbomb cursing beside him–
And the next thing he knew, he was lying on a smooth, rippling surface, staring at the shape of the floating base as it blocked the sun. His head pounded like it had been split open by a boulder. He licked his lips and tasted blood.
“Am I dead?” he said weakly. “I don’t want to be dead. That would be unfortunate if it happened before Breath of the Wild 2 came out.”
“You’re not dead,” Hbomb said, sounding dazed. Fundy clambered upright and caught him staring at the palms of his hands where they touched the water, the currents emanating from where he connected. Hbomb flexed a finger and summoned droplets upwards to orbit them like planets. “You just passed out for a minute. Nice work with the jet, by the way! It disappeared, but it got the job done.”
The lake surface shifted under Fundy’s knees like the mat of a trampoline. In the distance, the city glimmered in a lovely display of severe, ecologically damaging light pollution. “Huh,” he said, and attempted to peer beneath the newly solid surface. “Do you think it sank? Also, whose power is that?”
“Nereid,” Hbomb said after a long moment, oddly hesitant. Fundy narrowed his eyes, sensing secret knowledge . Hbomb gave him a guileless look. “I think. What do you say you summon a boat and we get out of here?”
“I don’t know that I can,” Fundy said, blinking against the pressure in his skull. He wanted to lie down and sleep for days. Weeks, possibly. “That jet took a lot out of me.”
“Dang,” Hbomb said, and squinted up at the air base. An alarming plume of smoke was pumping out of one of its engines. “We should probably move, though. Are you able to walk?”
“Fuck you, what am I, a toddler?” Fundy snapped, struggling upright, and overbalanced. The water’s surface nearly bounced them both off their feet. He imagined hitting Hbomb over the head with a frozen ham, and a wrapped piece of meat fell between them and knocked them both down again with the ripples. “Oh, come on, why does that work but a boat doesn’t? Do you think it’s mass?”
“Complexity?” Hbomb suggested. “But then, organic matter is complex…” He flexed his hand, and a tube of water delivered the ham to him. “It looks edible.”
“Good, we’ll have snacks for the journey,” Fundy grumbled. “Are you okay, H? No serious symptoms that will lead to death?”
“Not unless sudden new powers count,” Hbomb said, wobbling to his feet again, “and I’m feeling good about these. I could get used to this.”
Fundy thought back to the weapons he’d called up, the sheer possibilities inherent in being able to summon any small object if you were creative enough. He took Hbomb’s offered hand and levered himself upright, stared across the lake at the city lights and distant docks. Everyone powered in the entire city could be having these problems. They would be confused, disconcerted, stupefied. Vulnerable to, say, being robbed by a guy with endless lockpicks and his friend who owed him a favor now.
Not to mention the people he could show this off to. The future sparkled with possibilities.
“You know what, H,” Fundy said, “I think this might be the best day of my life.”
“I’d put it in my lowest five, personally,” Hbomb mused, forming a ball of water into the shape of a hand and then a rubber duck. “ Maybe an honorable mention for cool water powers.”
“Shut up and carry the ham,” Fundy told him beatifically, and set off on the long, long walk to shore.