The Superhero's Son Omnibus Volume 3

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

Our conversation pretty much ended there, since Triplet had asked me everything he’d needed to ask. Triplet told me that he would come back to me if he had any other questions, while Blizzard promised to stay in touch and let everyone else know how I was doing. We couldn’t hug or kiss goodbye; all we could do was press our hands against the glass. I felt Blizzard’s cold energy flowing through her hands onto the glass, but that was as close to actually feeling Blizzard as I was going to get for a long while.

Once Triplet and Blizzard left, the guards escorted me back to my cell, though they told me they’d be back with lunch later.

Ivan was awake when I got back, still lying in his bunk, occasionally flipping through the pages of Cat Weekly. It was still bizarre how the first and most vicious supervillain of all time was a fan of a magazine about cats, but in comparison to all of the other stuff I had to worry about right now, I decided it wasn’t a problem.

“Ah, you are back,” said Ivan, without looking away from his magazine, “how did it go?”

“Fine,” I said. “They didn’t know why I was in here, though, so I’m back to square one.”

“Indeed,” said Ivan. “I am sorry to hear that. The truth will be found sooner or later, I suppose.”

I nodded, but then a thought occurred to me. “Ivan, do you know who Mastermind is?”

Ivan, again, did not take his eyes away from his magazine. “No, I do not.”

“Oh,” I said, my shoulders slumping. “I thought you might know, since he’s a supervillain and you’re a supervillain and all.”

“Understandable, but I’ve been in Ultimate Max for thirty years,” said Ivan. “In fact, the thirtieth anniversary of my imprisonment is coming up next week. I’ve been trying to think of a way to celebrate it, but unfortunately, the guards will probably not give me a cake.”

“Thirty years …” I shook my head. “I can’t imagine being in prison for that long.”

“Of course you can’t,” said Ivan. “You aren’t even twenty. Sometimes, I miss my twenties. Life was more exciting back then, that’s for sure, but there is something to be said about enjoying the simplicities of life, such as magazines about cats.”

“Um, I guess so,” I said.

“And look on the bright side,” said Ivan. “You at least have friends on the outside who come to visit you. Most of the other prisoners do not.”

“Including you?” I said.

“Yes,” said Ivan. His voice became slightly tighter. “I have not had a visitor in thirty years, mostly due to my reputation. No one wants to be associated with the first supervillain.”

“So you don’t have anyone on the outside at all?” I said. “Not a wife or children or parents or anything?”

Ivan lowered his magazine, but still did not look at me. “When I first came to America so long ago, I did have a wife … but she died. I have not visited her grave in thirty years.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s nothing,” said Ivan. “And I do not want to talk about it. One must never be anchored down by the past. Always look forward, I say. It is what Anna, my wife, would have wanted.”

I could tell that Ivan hadn’t gotten over Anna’s death entirely, despite what he said. His words trembled, just slightly, and he was deliberately looking away from me. I thought I even saw him hold back tears. It made me feel sorry for him, because despite knowing who he was, I had a hard time thinking of him as a vicious supervillain instead of as one of my only friends and allies in this place.

“Besides, you have many problems of your own right now,” said Ivan. He raised the magazine back over his face. “You do not need to carry my burden on your shoulders as well.”

“Okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

I climbed up onto my bunk on the top and lay down on it. I was thinking about this Mastermind character. He was yet another piece in the puzzle of my imprisonment. I wondered if he was related to the G-Men or not. I wish I knew for sure, but as long as I was stuck in jail, I could only hope that Triplet would figure out the truth, because if I knew anything for sure, it was that the truth would set me free.

-

Over the next couple of weeks, I didn’t do much except wake up, eat, work out in the prison yard, and go back to sleep, only to repeat the process again the next day. Mimic and my other former enemies still wanted to kill me, but since I hung out with Ivan and Rime all the time, they never got a chance to even touch me. All they could do was glare at me from across the prison yard or mutter among themselves about what they’d like to do to me if they could get their hands on me, but honestly I wasn’t terribly afraid of them. They were afraid of a guy who read cat magazines, for Pete’s sake, though I guess it helped that Ivan could give them radiation sickness if he wanted.

But I did keep a very close eye on the TV, at least whenever the news was on. It seemed like every time the news stations began to focus on other topics, my doppelganger—who the Internet had dubbed ‘White Lightning,’ a term which had caught on with the general population and which the news stations were begrudgingly using—would attack somewhere and cause lots of death and property damage. His attack patterns were random; sometimes he would attack a major city like Houston or Los Angeles, but other times he would strike terror in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Cadmus Smith was on TV often, saying that the G-Men were working hard day and night to catch White Lightning and that the American people didn’t have anything to fear. Considering how the G-Men were always late to every White Lightning attack, however, I wondered how many people actually believed Cadmus’s reassurances and how many saw it as what it was: Government lies meant to make people think everything was okay when it really was not.

And, of course, there was lots of speculation about White Lightning’s identity. In the early days, the talking heads were sure that it was me, but when it was revealed that I was in prison and had not left Ultimate Max since being interned, the speculation turned to focus on various supervillains, even though White Lightning looked like no known supervillain and no one claimed him as their own. There was also the occasional conspiracy theorist who would appear in the news and blame White Lightning on the government, but without any evidence to back that up, I didn’t consider it very likely.

No one ever mentioned Mastermind, but then, if Triplet had been telling the truth, no one outside of the NHA and maybe the G-Men even knew he existed. Triplet didn’t come and tell me about his investigation, but Blizzard visited nearly every day and told me that Triplet had disappeared again, as he usually did whenever he was investigating, but that he was probably okay, because he was in touch with Mecha Knight and Mecha Knight had not said anything to her to indicate that Triplet was in trouble.

But even though I avidly followed the news every day, I didn’t feel very well informed. There was a cycle to each White Lightning attack: It would happen completely out of nowhere, usually hitting a community center or business or some other building with a lot of people, with White Lightning killing and destroying as much people and property as possible in a short time. Then he’d leave just as quickly as he came, the talking heads on TV would offer their usually uninformed opinions on the matter, there would be a big national debate between people from the two main political parties about what we should do or they would just blame each other for the c*****e … and then things would just go back to ‘normal’ until White Lightning attacked again and restarted the whole damn cycle. It got really tiring after the third attack.

President Plutarch also made regular appearances on TV, promising that the G-Men, under his direction, would capture White Lightning and bring him to justice. While Plutarch always sounded so confident about this, the fact that the G-Men had failed to prevent any of White Lightning’s attacks since his first attack on the White House made his promises sound faker and faker with each passing day. His approval ratings, as a result, were on the decline and some people were even theorizing that he might not be reelected to a second term if White Lightning wasn’t stopped.

All the while, no one ever got a chance to talk with White Lightning. In fact, all of the footage and eyewitnesses of his attacks said the same thing: He never made a sound. He never laughed. He would strike, kill people and destroy things, and leave. He wouldn’t even mock those few non-supers who tried to fight him; he’d just fry them with a well-placed lightning bolt and then resume his rampage of destruction.

In fact, White Lightning’s attacks were becoming so frequent that a lot of talking heads were starting to compare him to Nuclear Winter. Apparently, Nuclear Winter had seemed just as unstoppable as White Lightning until he was eventually defeated, but the problem was that the G-Men had been invented precisely in order to nip these kinds of super threats in the bud. That White Lightning had so far evaded capture from the G-Men was starting to make people wonder what good the G-Men were for at all. Some might even be starting to speculate that Cadmus was in league with White Lightning, intentionally allowing my doppelganger to get away with anything for unknown reasons.

All in all, my doppelganger was causing way more damage than every other supervillain in the country. This was apparently leading to a spike in super crime, because the G-Men, NHA, and INJ were stretched thin trying to find my doppelganger, which left few superheroes available to deal with the other supervillains and criminals still free. It didn’t help that San Francisco was still undergoing reconstruction, though there was plenty of fear that White Lightning might strike there next, since the city was more vulnerable than ever in its reconstruction period.

As far as I could tell, the only consistent aspect of White Lightning’s attacks was that he always attacked places that lacked superhumans. But the reason why was hardly a mystery; after all, superhumans could potentially stop him, while normal humans were almost entirely useless against his might. More attacks showed that White Lightning’s power set was almost entirely identical with my own, though that didn’t mean he didn’t have more powers that he hadn’t used yet for whatever reason.

The other prisoners, by the way, loved White Lightning, because they saw him as attacking the society that had harmed them. Yeah, apparently a lot of the ex-supervillains in here thought that they were the victims of an unjust society. It was why most of the prisoners considered Ivan—who freely admitted to his own crimes—strange, because he didn’t spend his time railing against an ‘unjust’ society that had the audacity to have laws against insignificant things like murder and rape and to punish those who transgressed said laws.

In any case, I thought I knew what White Lightning was doing. He was no avenging angel casting judgment on America or striking against unjust institutions, nor was he your typical supervillain trying to become famous or increase his own power. He was trying to draw me out.

I came to that conclusion because of what Grandfather had told me, about the two ‘gods’ fighting each other over a city. I doubted that White Lightning knew about it, but he was clearly looking for a fight. It would explain why he kept randomly appearing and disappearing; he was trying to provoke me to fight him and he apparently thought that the best way to do that was to go around killing innocents and destroying property.

And I had to admit, it was working. Every time I saw another news report about yet another White Lightning attack, I wanted to jump off the couch and fly to wherever that bastard was. I wanted to put an end to his reign of terror once and for all.

But I couldn’t. The guards of Ultimate Max would never let me leave. Master Chaos may have been able to escape on his own, but it was doubtful that I could, because Ultimate Max’s security was some of the best in the country. Even with Rime and Ivan’s help, I didn’t think that I would be able to escape. I would have to wait for the Warden to decide to let me go.

Speaking of Warden Glass, I saw him for the first time the day after I spoke with Triplet and Blizzard. It had happened during the day, when all of the prisoners had been in the prison yard. As usual, I was with Rime and Ivan, lifting weights with them because I had nothing better to do. Mimic and his gang glared at us from across the yard every now and then, but as usual, the other prisoners gave us a wide berth and there wasn’t too much commotion, all things considered.

That all changed, though, when one of the prisoners—a guy known as Edge, because he could turn any part of his body into a ridiculously sharp blade—attempted a break out. He pretended to get hurt in a mock fight with a couple of his fellow prisoners, a ‘fight’ that got so vicious that a couple of the guards had to step in to break it up.

But when the guards got close enough, Edge turned his fingers into knives and slit the guards’ throats. Before anyone even realized what happened, Edge stole the keys from the guards and unlocked the shackles around the wrists of him and his friends, thus freeing them.

Then Edge and his two friends ran toward the exit, intending to make a getaway. None of the other prisoners tried to stop them, although a handful did try to get the keys from them, but Edge apparently wasn’t into sharing because he just took the keys with him.

This all happened so fast that Edge and his friends probably would have escaped if Warden Glass hadn’t appeared. The rest of the guards were too surprised by this sudden attack to react, and by the time they recovered, Edge and the others were already at the exit and would have escaped into the halls of Ultimate Max.

But, as I said, that was when Warden Glass appeared. I didn’t recognize him at first, because I hadn’t seen him before. He was a huge man; not fat, just really muscular and ripped, even more so than most of the prisoners who worked out all day. He wore a standard prison guard uniform and was completely bald, which made him look like the other guards so much that I didn’t even realize it was him until Edge and his friends tried to attack him.

That turned out to be a mistake. Despite his size, Glass easily dodged their attacks. He took out the first guy by grabbing his tongue and turning it into glass; it was like magic, watching Glass’s fingers touch the guy’s tongue and instantly transmute it. The guy suffocated and died on the spot.

Then Glass grabbed the second guy by the hair, turned his hair into glass, and then smashed it with one fist. That sent shards of glass cutting into the second guy’s skin, causing him to scream in agony and fall to the ground clutching his now-bleeding skull.

That left only Edge, who apparently thought he could succeed where his friends had miserably failed and went for an all out attack against Glass. But Glass didn’t try to dodge. He actually caught Edge’s blade arms with his bare hands, which were covered in a thick layer of strong glass, and then rapidly turned Edge’s entire body into glass. Edge had maybe a second to scream before his face and head turned into glass.

Once the transformation was complete, Glass just shoved Edge backwards and Edge’s glassy form shattered into pieces against the ground. It all happened pretty quickly, but by the time it was over, none of the other prisoners even tried to fight Glass. Even Rime and Ivan just avoided looking at Glass, like they were afraid that he might turn them into glass if they looked at him in a way he didn’t like.

I now understood why most of the prisoners here had not attempted to escape Ultimate Max. With someone like Warden Glass walking around turning people into glass sculptures if they tried anything, that would put a damper on my desire to escape as well.

And it did … sort of. I had been planning to escape sometime, but I hadn’t factored Warden Glass’s powers into my plans, mostly because I hadn’t seen them in action before. But having now seen them in action, I realized that Glass might be the biggest thing standing between me and freedom.

Because the fact was that I couldn’t just sit around in Ultimate Max waiting for Triplet to figure out the truth or for the G-Men to let me out. At this point, it was pretty obvious that I was the only one who could stop White Lightning, so I would have to break out sooner or later in order to get him out into the open where he could be caught.

And, despite the obvious dangers, I started to plan my escape.