The Superhero's Son Omnibus Volume 3

Chapter Three-2

“And you,” I said. “I don’t remember you, either.”

All of a sudden, the girl burst into tears and slammed her face into her hands, in which she sobbed uncontrollably. I started and looked at Incantation wildly. “What’d I do?”

“Offended her,” said Hopper, causing me to look at him. He was looking at me like I’d just disappointed him. “Offended one of your best and oldest friends in the world.”

“But I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I just said I don’t remember her. That’s the truth.”

“How could you forget Sarah?” said Hopper. “Don’t you remember her? She was there when we first met on the playground.”

I thought about that, trying to see if I could remember what Hopper was talking about. I did recall seeing a girl named Sarah in my memory of my first meeting with Hopper, but the elementary school girl I saw in my memory looked almost nothing like the sobbing teenager sitting at the table with us. The girl in my memory, for one, had normal colored hair and was a lot thinner.

But I did see the resemblance, so I said to Sarah, “I’m sorry, Sarah. I didn’t mean to offend. My memory’s just been out of whack recently thanks to that accident I was in.”

Thankfully, Sarah stopped sobbing. She raised her face from her hands and looked at me, but there was still anger in her eyes, like I’d just kicked her favorite puppy. “O-Okay, but I still don’t like it.”

“Are we still friends, at least?” I said. I found myself strongly disliking Sarah the more I talked to her, even though we’d been friends since childhood. Maybe it was just her attitude at the moment that made me dislike her.

“I guess so,” said Sarah. She wiped away her tears. “Just don’t offend me anymore, okay? I can’t handle it.”

“Um, okay,” I said. “I’ll try not to do that, then. So what are your powers? I don’t remember them.”

Sarah looked like she was on the verge of tears again, but then Thaumaturge threw her a brief but pointed look and she just sniffled. I had no idea what that was about, but given that Thaumaturge’s look seemed to stop Sarah from bawling again, I didn’t question it.

“Telepathy,” said Sarah, looking at me. She sniffled again. “I can read minds and do other things with my mental powers.”

“She inherited the ability from her grandfather, the Visionary himself,” said Thaumaturge. “She’s therefore very important to Vision.”

“It’s also why she’s so emotional,” Incantation muttered to me, so low that only I could hear her. “When the Visionary was knocked into a coma and taken into custody by the government, it broke Sarah. That’s why she’s so easily offended; a lot of things remind her about her grandfather.”

“Ah,” I whispered back. “Gotcha.”

But I didn’t. Not really. Something about Sarah’s sobbing seemed too … practiced, like she’d done it before. Something in the back of my memory told me that Sarah had cried like this before at some point, but I wasn’t sure if I had actually seen her do that at some point or if my amnesia was just mixing up memories again. In any case, I decided not to worry about it for now, though I made a mental note to avoid offending her again.

I looked across the table at the guy with the tattoos. Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t a teenager. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties at most. He wore a dark cloak, looking like a sorcerer about to cast a dark spell on me.

Uncertain if this guy would also burst into tears if I accidentally offended him, I said, “So … who are you? Do I know you?”

“No,” said the man. “Not as well as your friends, at any rate, though I’ve been in Vision for a long time and was one of the Visionary’s first disciples along with Thaumaturge.”

“Then what’s your name?” I said. “I don’t remember it.”

“Call me Wrath,” said the man. “That’s the nickname that the monks who kicked me out of the monastery I used to work at called me, anyway.”

“Wrath?” I said. “Like the sin?”

Wrath laughed. “Worse than that, kid, worse than that.”

“Wrath is my second-in-command,” said Thaumaturge, causing me to look over at him. “Since I succeeded the Visionary, Wrath took my place as his right-hand man. You must show him the same respect you’d show me.”

“Okay,” I said. I looked at Wrath again. “What are your powers, then?”

“Emotional manipulation,” said Wrath. “I can make you feel whatever I want you to feel whenever I want you to feel it. And you won’t even notice it until it’s too late.”

Wrath sounded gleeful about that, but it sounded like a very creepy power to me. “Uh, okay. Are you using it on me now?”

“No,” said Wrath. He tossed an annoyed glance Thaumaturge’s way. “Because Thaumaturge told me that I’m not allowed to use my powers on fellow Visionists.”

“Because that would cause unnecessary division among us,” said Thaumaturge in annoyance. “Only a unified Vision can change society. Thus, there is no need to pointlessly antagonize one another with our abilities.”

“True, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a little fun,” said Wrath. “You’re sounding just like those monks that kicked me out of the monastery. Boring.”

Thaumaturge rolled his eyes. “We can discuss this later. For now, we need to start the meeting, now that everyone is present.”

“Is this everyone?” I said, looking up and down the table at all of us. “All of Vision?”

“No,” said Thaumaturge. “Our numbers are much larger than this, but we cannot all be in one place at the same time. It would make it far too easy for our enemies to crush us if we were all congregated in the same place at the same time.”

“Besides,” said Wrath, folding his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his chair, “we don’t need everyone for this particular meeting. We just need all of you.”

“Exactly,” said Thaumaturge. “As the Visionary once wrote, ‘not all houses need the same hands.’ We can accomplish this mission with only you five.”

“What is the mission, exactly?” I said. “What do you need us to do?”

Thaumaturge pulled out a tablet from his lap and placed it on the table. “Well, since we are all here, I might as well start.”

Thaumaturge tapped the tablet’s screen a few times and then it projected a hologram above it that depicted a tall, confident-looking older man wearing what looked like a wig on his head. He was dressed in a very presidential-looking suit, which added to his overall important appearance.

“You are going to break into the White House, where President Adam Lucius Plutarch, the current President of the United States of America and an enemy of Vision, is,” said Thaumaturge.

“Wait, we’re going to break into the White House?” I said in shock. “Why?”

“Simple,” said Wrath. He sat upright and leaned across the table, looking at me with a disturbing grin on his face. “It’s his fault that the Visionary ended up in a coma. This is our revenge.”

I frowned. “Really? How did that happen?”

“It was last year,” said Thaumaturge. “The Visionary was running for President under the name Barnabas Sagan. During his first debate with Plutarch, an assassin shot Sagan in the head, an assassin who had been hired by Plutarch. This assassin then took Sagan’s laptop and revealed Vision to the world, thus forcing us to go into hiding so the government couldn’t catch us.”

“Plutarch tried to kill his political opponent?” I said. “That’s crazy.”

“Plutarch is a mad man and a tyrant,” said Thaumaturge, shaking his head. “He is one of the most vile men to have ever lived. He was once the supervillain known as the Billionaire, but he never truly gave up his villainous ways even after he retired.”

“Even worse, he’s problematic and rude,” said Sarah. Then she added, almost as an afterthought, “And he put my grandfather in a coma, too.”

“He sounds awful,” I said. “But is that the only reason we’re trying to break into the White House? To kill Plutarch and avenge the Visionary?”

“No,” said Thaumaturge. “Your main goal is to get the location of our leader from the White House, though if you want to kill Plutarch too, you can.”

I frowned. “You mean you don’t know where our leader even is?”

“No,” said Thaumaturge. “After the Visionary was sent into a coma and his plans revealed to the world, the government took him into custody. We believe they took him to a secret government facility, but we do not know its exact location.”

“Believe me, we’ve tried,” said Wrath. “But the government really doesn’t want anyone finding him. We know he’s not in Ultimate Max, but beyond that we don’t know where they’re keeping him.”

“Why do we need to make Plutarch tell us?” I said. “Why don’t we have Technical hack the government’s systems? Surely there has to be a server out there or something that says where he’s being kept.”

“Hacking into government servers isn’t so simple,” said Technical. “We’ve tried, but they’ve beefed up their security recently. It’s not like hacking emails from some private server in a barn, you know.”

“Right,” said Thaumaturge. “We did have an agent inside the government who tried to get the files stating the Visionary’s location, but he was told that that information is on no government computer; instead, it is kept on paper in a folder in the Oval Office, which is inside a safe underneath Plutarch’s desk.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because it is more secure,” said Thaumaturge. “And since the Visionary’s location is on paper, it cannot be hacked by enemies.”

“So we’re supposed to break into the White House, kill Plutarch, get the documents, and leave?” I said.

“Yes,” said Thaumaturge. “Of course, it is fine if you only succeed in stealing the documents and spare Plutarch, but it would be best if you could do both.”

I frowned. “Have we ever done something like this before? The White House isn’t exactly defenseless, you know.”

“Come on, Bolt,” said Hopper, elbowing me in the side. “We’ve done loads of missions like this before, both before and after our time as the Young Neos. Breaking into the Oval Office to grab a folder will be a breeze.”

“Yeah,” said Technical, nodding. “I’ve been spending the last few weeks studying the White House’s security detail. With our powers and my technology, we should be able to break in, get what we want, and get out without being caught.”

I felt a little uneasy about this. “You guys sure sound confident about breaking into one of the most secure buildings in the country.”

“We must,” said Incantation. “It’s the only way we’ll be able to save our leader.”

“Indeed,” said Thaumaturge. “If we can save the Visionary, then Vision will rise again, more powerful than ever before. And no one, not even the government, will be able to stand before us.”

As confident as Thaumaturge and the other sounded, I was still harboring a lot of doubts myself. Saving the Visionary seemed like a good idea, but something about it seemed wrong to me, too. And it wasn’t because I was worried about being caught, either, though that was definitely a concern. It was more like I was being told to do something that I knew was morally wrong while being told by everyone around me that it was actually a good thing. It was probably just my amnesia making me feel weird again, yet it didn’t seem to affect my memories too much, aside from the fact that I didn’t even remember what the Visionary looked or sounded like. Perhaps I just hadn’t interacted with him very much before he was captured by the government.

“Okay,” I said. “What’s the plan?”

“Hopper will transport you and the rest of the team to the White House,” said Thaumaturge, “while Technical will stay here and disable the White House’s defenses from a distance. It will then be up to you, Incantation, and Sarah to enter the Oval Office and retrieve the documents.”

“Should all go according to plan—and, as we all know, it never does—you should hopefully avoid running into any G-Men, Secret Service, or miscellaneous superheroes,” Wrath said sardonically. “Easy peasy.”

Thaumaturge just rolled his eyes at Wrath’s sarcasm. “Some support would be appreciated here, Wrath, given the seriousness of the mission.”

“I know,” said Wrath. “I’m just pointing out that our perfect plans don’t usually go perfectly in practice.”

“Right,” said Thaumaturge. “Any questions?”

“Yeah,” I said. I pointed at Wrath. “What’s he supposed to do?”

Wrath smiled. “Backup.”

“Backup?” I said. I frowned. “You’re our only backup?”

Wrath shrugged. “Someone has to be.”

“Wrath is one of our most experienced members, so trust me when I say that he will make good backup,” said Thaumaturge. “Of course, if the mission goes as planned, you won’t need his help.”

“That would be boring,” said Wrath. “Very boring. Let’s hope the plan goes south so I can go north.”

Wrath seemed a little too eager to help, which meant that he was either a devoted follower of the Visionary or he really wanted to fight someone. Given his nickname, I thought that there was a very good chance that the latter was the case. I didn’t see how useful his powers would be in a fight, though.

“Okay,” I said. “When do we leave?”

“At midnight tonight,” said Thaumaturge. “We cannot do it in the middle of the day, when the Secret Service is awake and alert. And it will have to be quick, because once the White House security realizes what is going on, they will no doubt move to quickly neutralize the threat, which is you.”

“There’s a good chance they’ll call in the G-Men, too, given that those idiots are based in Washington just down the street from the White House,” said Wrath. “If you see Cadmus Smith, please punch him in the face for me, okay?”

I had no idea who ‘Cadmus Smith’ was, but I nodded, because I figured this Cadmus Smith guy was probably an enemy of Vision.

“All right,” said Thaumaturge. “Because it is quite early in the morning at the moment, you should spend the rest of the day getting ready for the mission. I will call you out to the garden behind the mansion tonight to start the mission. Until then, this meeting is dismissed.”

Thaumaturge stood up from his chair and walked away, quickly joined by Wrath, who began earnestly talking with Thaumaturge about something I couldn’t hear. I assumed it was probably related to the mission, though, because I heard them mention something about ‘Visionary’ and ‘Plutarch.’

“What are we going to do for the rest of the day?” I said, looking at my friends.

“Well, I’m going to go and study the White House’s security systems so we’ll be prepared for the mission,” said Technical. She looked at Sarah. “Want to join, Sarah?”

Sarah nodded. “Okay. But just as long as I don’t have to actually do any work. I hate computers.”

“What should I do, then?” I said. “Sleep?”

“Get ready for the mission, of course,” said Incantation. “Why don’t we go outside and have you test your powers? Playing around with your powers might help with your amnesia, which will be helpful for the mission tonight.”

“All right,” I said. “Will you be coming out with me?”

“Of course,” said Incantation. “And Hopper will, too.”

“I will?” said Hopper in confusion. But then he suddenly shook his head and said, “Uh, I mean, yeah, of course I will. I’m your best friend. Why wouldn’t I come out with you?”

I looked at Hopper in confusion for a moment, but then shook my head and said, “Okay. Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go outside.”