Trying to figure out how this hero stuff works

Vincent winced when he saw the man get slammed into the ground a little too hard. This whole thing had gone horribly horribly wrong. What started out as a drug bust is now a three-way stand-off between Vincent, an extremely angry man in a winged suit, and a teleporter. A part of Vincent wanted to just knock them both out and solve this later, but he wasn't sure if either of them had anything that could catch Vincent by surprise. "Maybe I could try to deescalate the situation." He briefly contemplated. "Yeah... I'll see how that goes. I know superheroes don't usually try to deescalate the conversation by talking, but hey it's worth trying!"

"Armor guy relax." Vincent said as he walked towards him getting ready to dodge anything if Adam decides to attack him. "I don't think the teleporter wants to hurt us, and even if he did I'm pretty sure we could handle it."

He pointed to the warehouse the man was running into. "Besides if neither the teleporter or the minion don't know anything you might be able to find something in the warehouse he was trying to run into. Right?"

Travis watched as his client was thrown to the ground, he couldn't help smirking a bit from the pain he endured.  Travis quickly reviewed his job, "Either get them out or kill them, I just don't want them speaking out.  That's what the man said." he discussed in his head.  As the boy band one mentioned the warehouse, Travis pondered, "Did he say anything about the warehouse?  Warehouse...  Warehouse?  I guess not.  Ha!  I got it!."

Travis descended his arm and made a motion to the ware house.  He then confirmed the thoughts of the superboybandmember, by lying,

Yeah that's you want, they were meeting about something in that warehouse.  So now that we know that's what you want and I told you this information.  I would like you to either squash him like a bug or give him here.

"OK...  Let's hope this doesn't backfire...  Or else I'm going to have to do this the hard way...."  Travis hoped in his mind...  Standing in the same place waiting for himself to finally be done with job. Not realizing that his supposed lie, was actually the truth.

Adam took a moment to let his blood stop boiling and heart rate taper off. He shouldn't have done that. Not after the other time; the first time he had somebody defeated and defenseless. That night haunted his dreams for months, his consciousness for even longer. The sight of the man's chest rising and falling was cause for relief, but even that had to be measured because of the blood slowly pooling out from his head.

He needed medical attention but Adam wasn't going to take him. Besides, the teleporter had answered his question, hopefully truthfully. But what if he wasn't being truthful?...

Adam removed his foot from the limp body. "A deal's a deal...He's all yours."

He backed away from the scene slowly until he was next to the superhuman. The teleporter seemed to be alright with the man either escaping or dying, so he was most likely working alone and this guy in the hoodie was probably just being a good Samaritan. And Ariana told him over and over again that not everybody is out to get him; paranoia couldn't win."I'm going to check out the warehouse," he muttered to Vincent. "But can you make sure that he doesn't do anything funny? Please." With that, Adam turned, taking care not to hit Vincent with his wings, and activated his thrusters enough for a slow flight to the warehouse.

As soon as Adam flew away Vincent felt a wave of relief. "Thank God he didn't just try to kill the teleporter." he thought to himself. Realizing that Travis wasn't going to leave until he had everyone Vincent walked over to the man that Travis wanted, picked him up, and tossed him towards him. "Here take him we don't need him anymore." He began to fly into the air to meet Adam at the warehouse. "Oh and uh... by the way?" He said as he rose into the air. "Don't try anything. It won't end well for you." And with that he disappeared from sight to catch up with Adam.

Travis watched the two fly away. Puzzled, confused and convinced he had just taken an acid trip he grabbed ahold of the last remaining man and half heartedly shouted,

And I thought I had issues!  You guys need couples counseling!

With that he snapped his fingers and teleported to the safe room.  In the safe room most of the men were trying to get their bearings back together, but one of them was stumbling around a nervous wreck speaking gibberish.  When the nervous one saw Travis his eyes lit up,

"What are the mugs that knocked us out doing?"

"How should I know?  Now where's my money?"

"Where did you pick up Aaron?"  He exclaimed pointing to the practically dead man on the floor.

"Near that big warehouse thing, now where is my money?"


"Did those supers go near the warehouse?!?!"

"I think so, but the hell if I care!  Now where is my money?!?!"

"You have to fucking go back there and stop them from getting into that warehouse!"

"Fuck you I ain't doing that!  I was paid by your boss to keep these people out of the hands of so-called heroes, not to protect some building!"


"The whole fucking reason we were there was because of that fucking building!  Get your ass back there!"

"The hell I will!...  That's not my job!  But...  if you want to pay me a little extra I could squeeze it in."

"You gotta be shitting me, the only reason my boss wanted me to be saved is so he could kill me if someone else gets what's in that building."  The man before travis was at the point of despair, finally he gave in to Travis, "OK...  I'll pay you whatever you want, now stop them."

"Well about that, the supers are probably already entering the building.  So I can't exactly stop them from going in, but I could take whatever is in there away.

"It's too big for you to take away, but you can disable it and take the most important part!"

"Too big?  What the hell is in there?"

Adam placed a hand against the door. Whatever was behind this door had been giving off an incredible amount of heat when Adam viewed it through his infrared lenses, like it was a power plant of sorts. However, at no point was there a heat haze coming from the structure. And now that he was close, his armor wasn't detecting any increase in temperature. He felt a sigh work its way from his chest. This organization was so damn thorough and filled with intelligent people. Trying to catch them off guard seemed pointless. But he had to try.

Adam crouched and closed his eyes. He calmed his mind until he felt the faint channels connecting him with all the technology in the area. Out of the hundreds of connections, he focused on the 13 coming from the warehouse. He knew that most of them were likely to be encrypted, but he probed them all anyway. The only unencrypted ones were a box truck and a forklift, both sitting idle inside of the warehouse. However, upon further inspection, he found the lock to be protected by a weaker encryption in addition to a piece of technology designed to make the walls of the warehouse appear to be well over 120 degrees.

"Aha! So that's what was going on. At least there's no bomb or anything that's going to blow up when we open the door...unless they found a way to hide things from my technopathy."

Adam took a moment to wind his way through the encryptions and unlock the door. He stood and pushed through apprehensively. But there was no explosion or poison gas or death trap. With a sigh of relief, Adam continued into the facility, simultaneously concerned and amazed. Multicolored panels and computer screens lined the one of the walls of the warehouse. The rest were covered with shelves containing a variety of items from chemicals to boxes. Papers were strewn across the floor, surrounding several dollies. The truck was parked parallel to the back wall, flanked by more dollies and the forklift. But what was behind the truck was the real shocker.

"Woooah. What the fuck!"

Behind the truck was a massive tube, encasing an unconscious but massive horned alien suspended in transparent yellow liquid.

For the majority of the time that Adam spent walking around the warehouse Vincent was completely zoned out. He didn't really know what he was supposed to do here so he just went through the motions of following behind Adam. Now that he thought about why was he even here? He could've gone home after the teleporter left, but he decided to stay anyways. After some thinking he realized the only reason he was sticking around was because he had nothing better to do. "Good enough reason for me, I guess." He thought to himself.

After what seemed like forever Adam had mentioned something about there probably not being bombs or any weapons in the facility. Vincent was still half zoned out during this time so all he did was mutter something along the lines of "cool" or "alright".

Eventually when Adam revealed the horned alien in the transparent fluid all of Vincent's attention shifted towards it. Several thoughts ran through his head simultaneously. He wasn't sure how to approach this. The first thought was that he should just punch a hole in this things stomach immediately. There was no telling what this thing could do and Vincent could just nip this problem in the bud. On the other hand he wasn't sure if Adam wanted to do anything with it. If he killed this thing what if it pissed him off? A third solution that came to mind was dropping this thing off at some government facility and forgetting about it.

He thought about these three options for a second or two then decided that asking Adam what to do with it would be the best option. "So what do we do with this thing? Like do you keep it? Do I keep it? Do we kill it? Do we drop it off somewhere? I've never really dealt with something like this before, so I'm not really sure what the best option is here." Deep down Vincent kinda hoped that Adam would just let him kill it. To him it seems like the fastest and easiest option.

Snapping quickly, Travis appeared in the alley way with the warehouse.  They say curiosity killed the cat and Travis was about to test that theory.  He walked into the warehouse, considering he had never been in the place before, and proceeded to look for what the man told him.  As he turned a corner he saw it, an alien, freaking huge alien with some kind of horn thing on it.  Looking further he saw the two supers.

"Welp!  I guess I made the right choice!" Travis exclaimed a good 15 yards away from them, "He wanted me to get this thing to him, but I realized this was not something I want to get myself into, plus this is not in his money range.  I just wanted to check it out, I honestly didn't believe him at first.  If you need me, I'll be at Club Al spending the cool 100k I just raked in, peace!"

With that Travis snapped his fingers and teleported to his usual spot at Al's.

Adam was in awe at the creature before him. It was truly massive, maybe 25 ft tall; but since it was in the fetal position, it could be even taller. The horn on its rhino-like head probably made it even taller. Its proportionally long limbs were powerful, scaly, and looked as if it could throw its massive body around in an instant. As Vincent entered the warehouse behind him, Adam turned to face him.

"We're not doing anything until we know what the fuck it is and why these guys wanted it. Who knows, it might not be able to be killed, it might rampage, shit, it might explode when killed or bleed fire. We don't know anything about this...thing."

With that, he strode over to the wall covered with consoles. The consoles were too encrypted for him to access with his technopathy and they most likely held the answers he was looking for, and hacking wasn't his forte...But it was one of Ariana's. The thought of involving his younger sister in more of this superhero business was as bothersome as it was humbling. But she's been involved since the beginning and has handled it with aplomb, plus that little girl was smart.

He bent over the keyboard of the massive computer as he remotely dialed her number and connected his phone with his suit. While it was ringing, he turned to Vincent.

"Um, could you check the truck and see if you find anything suspicious in there...maybe a manifest or some leftover equipment or something. Anything that might shed some light on what the fuck is going on. Also...I'm..." he wasn't sure if he should give him his real name or not. He still wasn't sure how much he could trust him. "I'm Titanium...what can I call you?"

"Uh... you can call me... um..." After a few seconds Vincent just shrugged. "I dunno I don't really have a superhero name yet. Just call me Charlie. I don't really care if you know my real name because you seem like a nice enough guy." With that, he began to walk towards the truck.

As he made his way towards the truck Vincent wondered if it was a good idea to just leave the thing alive for the time being. Sure Adam said that he might not be able to kill it, but then again he hasn't seen him go all out. And he thought for sure that the government might be able to do something with it. "Eh whatever. I'm pretty sure he has super intelligence and I don't so he probably knows better." He said as he ripped open the door to the truck.

Upon opening the truck Vincent realized that he didn't know what he should be looking for. He saw things that he knew for sure wouldn't be useful to Adam, like weapons. But for every object that he knew was useless there were a few pieces of tech that he couldn't figure out how helpful they were. "You know what? Fuck this." He squatted down and lifted the truck. "I'll just bring it back to him and he can figure out what's useful and what's not on his own."

Back at the warehouse Vincent managed to force the truck through the door. "So there's a lot of stuff in here that's not useful to you, but at the same time there's a decent amount of stuff that could be useful." He slowly brought the truck to the ground. "I'm too stupid to distinguish what's useful from what just looks useful so I just brought the whole thing here."

Adam nodded. Charlie. He trusted him enough with his name...perhaps he should do the same. He was never going to make connections in the superhero community if he greeted everyone with paranoia. It didn't matter now though, he'll see at the end of this whole ordeal. "How about Neutrino" he joked to Vincent as he left. "The way you tore through those guys...didn't even stop."

"Hello," Ariana picked up on the fourth ring.

"Hey, how soon can you get to my lab?" he made sure the urgency was heavy in his voice so she wouldn't get in her playful mood.

"Already there, what's up?"

Despite the hurry, Adam paused...what was she doing there? How did she get in? He left her in the apartment eating her breakfast. Actually, she should be in school! "Of course you are. We gotta talk when I get back, but for now I need you to patch into my suit's visual feed."

"Gotcha," and after a pause, "what for though?"

"I...need your computer science expertise. I found some weird shit here and I need information on it, but they encrypted it too tight for my technopathy to break--"

"So you run to your little sister to help you hack into an evil organization's files, huh? Our lives are something."

"Look man, just--" the screeching of metal on metal interrupted his chastising. He swung around to see this Charlie guy forcing the entire box truck through the door.

"Woooaaaahhhh! " Ariana exclaimed. "Who is that?"

"Don't worry about that right now. Er...thanks Charlie, I'll look at it in a sec." He turned back to the panel. "Back to the task at hand."

"Alright, so in order for me to break this encryption, I have to know what kind it is. In order to do that, we have to trigger it. And if we do that, they'll know what's going on and where. Now...we'll also need time since I'm not there myself, so you better tell the human jack over there to to cover you."

Adam nodded ."Ok. Hey Charlie, expect company...we're about to draw some attention." He turned and placed his hands on the console, doing what Ariana told him to do until, as promised, the console glowed red with a blinking"intruder alert" and a blinking red light at the top of the warehouse began an endless spin.

"I'll keep them from getting in then." Vincent flew out of the warehouse and began to wait on its roof. After a few minutes he saw a huge group of people, some flying and some walking, coming towards the warehouse. "Guess that was the company wing guy was talking about," he said as he flew down to meet them halfway.

Before he could say anything a woman with robotic arms and some sort of modification to her face had descended and is now standing right in front of him. Vincent noticed that the vast majority of the group seemed to have cybernetics of some sort. "You need to leave," she stated matter-of-factly.

"You need to leave," Vincent said in an attempt to tilt her by making fun of her tone.

The woman got closer and closer to Vincent until he could practically feel her breathe. "Do you really think you're in a position to make fun of me," she asked him "look around you idiot. You're outnumbered by over ten to one! You really think that we won't just fucking ki-," her little monologue was interrupted as Vincent simply punched through her stomach.

"Ah shit," he let her corpse slide off his arm and hit the ground. "Guess she wasn't as durable as I thought," he said with a shrug.

The group stared at him stunned. They knew he was strong, but no one had expected him to be able to just toss them aside so casually. After a while of just staring at Vincent he seemingly disappeared from sight for a split second before reappearing next to the closest cyborg. Before the cyborg could even register that Vincent was in front of him he made a swift chopping motion and cut his head clean off. "So are you guys going to attack me at all? Because right now it just feels like I'm murdering random people for no reason at all."

One of the ones towards the back of the group decided to try something. He jumped into the air with his arm extended outward and let out what was essentially a glorified sound blast. Traditional weapons weren't going to have any effect so it wouldn't hurt to try a more esoteric attack right? Vincent being the cocky asshole thought he could take it.

As soon as the blast hit Vincent he clutched his ears and fell to his knees in pain. "What the fuck did you do!" He shouted out. The attackers didn't respond. Instead they surrounded him and began kicking him while he was down. This proved to be a bad idea because even Vincent's angry twitches of pain were more than enough to destroy some of them, and he was slowly making his way to his feet. Seeing as their stomps and kicks were barely effecting him anyways they backed up and began shooting poisonous gases at him.

"Oh crap," Vincent thought when he saw the clouds of gas come out of the pellets shot at the ground near him. Not wasting anytime he ripped out a chunk of the ground and threw it at the cyborg using sonic attacks against him. With that out of the way all Vincent had to deal with was the gas. He knew he didn't have super breath, so he used his only other option. He clapped. As loud as he possibly could.

The resulting shock wave blew away most of the cyborgs, killed the ones that were closest to him, and shattered the windows of buildings for a block or two.

Muffled yelling, crashing, and a really loud clap all emanated from outside as Adam worked on the computer. "Ahh shit, It's really kicking off out there."

"Open up that folder for me. Let me look at the whole thing...So you think he can hold them? I'd rather not have to come all the way out to Chicago to save you...I will, I just don't wanna."

Adam chuckled. "You're not coming to Chicago to save anybody."

"For real? How do you know I haven't built my own suit of armor? Stop...delete that line of code second from the bottom of the screen."

"Ariana Rashida Ender, if I find another suit of armor in the lab, I will tie you up and leave you in the kitchen, I swear I will."

She let out a sinister, yet sincere cackle. "And you know I'll get out. Now exit that folder and let me look at the code.........yeah, now we're cooking."

"How much longer is this going to take? Things sound crazy out there. "

"Oh it's almost over; it's time for the coup de grâce. I picked up this badboy on the dark internet a few months ago and I've been waiting to use it. Now enter exactly what I say..."

Adam shook his head as he bent over the console. "We gotta get you healthier hobbies."

In the cyborgs defense they did way better against Vincent than they had any right too. Sure he was cocky and had his guard down, but the almost killed him with a combination of sonic attacks and some poisonous gasses. I cannot place a huge enough emphasis on the word almost though.

Now Vincent was taking them seriously. He was running through the group, hitting a cyborg hard enough to kill them, and then moving on. There were no jokes, no making fun of them, nothing. Now to the cyborgs credit they did often try to use the sonic weapons against him. Unfortunately for them every time one of them raised their arm to try to target Vincent he would run up to them and tear their arm off.

After realizing that Vincent wasn't going to stop killing them all the cyborgs decided to try to take him down with them. They all bum rushed him attempting to latch on and self destruct. This had some mixed success. The vast majority of them were destroyed before they could even grab on, however five or six did manage to latch on and kill themselves before he could rip them off.

It didn't matter though. Had they done that when his guard was down in combination with the gasses and sound attacks they might've been able to take him down, but it was too late. There were too few of them left to do any significant damage.

Realizing that they were all dealt with Vincent walked back into the warehouse with some burn marks, a destroyed hoodie, and bleeding ears. "Hey so can we expect more or do they just give up after one try?"

Ariana's program worked! It shut off all security measures while it wormed its way through the computer and decrypted every file it came in contact with.

"You did it! You're a genius!" Adam started clicking through files for a second before realizing he could do it much more quickly with his technopathy. He closed his eyes and focused, letting his mind follow the winding channel into the computer. There was an insane amount of information to sort through; if he let his mind wander through this rabbit hole, he might find himself lost in here for days. However, a series of files, accessed very frequently and very recently, served as a beacon in the virtual space. He quickly those 4 files and all of their contents.

Ariana chuckled on the other side of the phone. "I'm aware of this, now tell me what I just helped you hack into. It's only common courtesy...Adam....Adam....Adam!"

Adam's eyes shot open. This was terrible. "Err...I'll tell you later Ari....or you'll hear about it on the news, either way, I gotta go." Head spinning, Adam ended the call without waiting for a response. Ok......plan...?

There's nothing you can do. You might as well sit back and let these guys take over the fuckin world.

Adam did his best to ignore the voice, but it made a convincing argument. Aliens weren't anything he was prepared to deal with...he didn't even know they existed! Charlie's question nearly made Adam jump.

"It doesn't even matter," he turned to Charlie. "We got a problem. The reason they kept this thing in suspended animation is because it can't die!" he let the words sink in. "Or at least they haven't found out what kills this thing. They discovered it years ago and kept it sedated...experimenting on it and shit. But it's extremely durable to most forms of damage, but when it is damaged... it heals within a minute!" Adam began pacing to keep his stress from overwhelming him.  "I've never seen or heard of anything like this... and that's not even the worst part....What's fuckin worse is that they're trying to splice its DNA with one of their other random experiments to make a bioweapon that's just as strong and can't be killed...and they'll be able to control this one! If that happens, they'll have an enforcer that can challenge any superhero and who knows what else maybe they can topple nations. We gotta put a stop to this."

Adam hoped his voice didn't convey the desperation he felt. But he absolutely needed this guy's help if we was going to do this. He saw what Charlie could do...he was strong, stronger than anyone he's seen maybe...even if he was untrained.

Vincent stood there and tried to process all the information Adam had just told him. The thing in that giant test tube being super durable and the organization tried to splice it's DNA with some of their other experiments? Vincent could probably handle that, that wasn't that a huge deal. What really was worrying to him about this alien was the fact that it could regenerate from whatever he threw at it so quickly. Vincent is assuming that the best way to kill this thing is through total annihilation. His powers weren't suited for that. Part of him wanted to just leave and let someone else deal with it. He floated up an inch in the air before he realized that even if there was someone to go deal with it, by the time they arrived this thing probably could've destroyed most of Chicago. "So what's the plan then?" Vincent asked while he tried his best not to sound nervous. "Do I just try to beat this thing down until it's regeneration fails it? Because that's the only real way I can deal with this thing."