Sunrise Over the Falls (Open For Now)

Niagara Falls, New York, 10:04 AM
Tower Overlooking the Falls

Locus, or John Smith as he was going by on this trip, polarized his glasses with a simple tap to the left temple. The morning sun was bright and orange, but he didn't like squinting to see through the glare. Crowds thronged the huge balcony overlooking the river in front and the Falls to the left. Only a chest-high railing was in place to prevent people accidentally falling off to their deaths a few hundred feet below. Of course, that wouldn't stop him from, say, throwing someone over the edge or jumping off himself.

A casual look around again revealed the two men who had been following him. Both were pretty big, muscular, and trained well. He guessed they were probably cut from the same cloth as the hitmen who came after him in London, or at least hired by the same person/party. They moved steadily closer to Locus as the three continued walking to the front of the overlook.

The amnesiac metahuman noticed a particularly large group of tourists pass behind him. Since he was close to the tower poking up through the overlook at the end, he used the temporarily broken lines of sight between the tails and himself to duck forward into cover behind a corner. The lead assassin approached cautiously, unsure where exactly Locus had gone.

When he was near enough and it didn't seem as through many people were watching, Locus poked out of hiding and pointed at the man. A sphere about eight inches in diameter shot out and hit him in the chest. With all but the lower section of the sphere being intangible, it acted like a blade and easily slid right under his ribcage.

The assassin choked, blood welling up in his throat. The sphere rotated so the solid part came up behind his sternum, then moved towards the corner Locus was behind, causing the man's head to loll and his feet to drag on the pavement. Locus dismissed the sphere after dumping the assassin next to the wall before peeking back out to look at the second one.

An advanced firearm of some sort was held in his hand, though he kept it down so others wouldn't spot it. Upon getting within two meters of the corner, the assassin brought his weapon up and started to ever so slightly pull the trigger. Locus darted out of hiding and kicked the gun arm to the side, sending a silenced round into the pavement. He followed up with a swift punch to the assassin's face, which didn't seem to face him that much.

The man delivered his own kick to Locus' stomach. He stumbled and rolled back vision fuzzy from having the wind knocked out of him. He destroyed the pistol with a small sphere, and noticed that the assassin's hand was only slightly damaged. That meant he was a metahuman. Great.

Such thoughts continued to churn within his mind even as the man drew and extended a wicked-looking machete and lunged. Locus erected a sphere around himself to deflect the attack, then made it partially intangible and moved it down and forward so it was right in front of the hitman in the ground. When he took his next step, the sphere jerked up like a catapult, tossing the man into the railing and off the edge. Locus took the opportunity to jump and pull himself over the railing as well.

Meanwhile, an elderly woman back up on the overlook--one of the few who'd noticed the quick fight--blinked and gaped at the spectacle.

Back with Locus, he noticed the assassin slow his descent with thrusters in his boots, but even then he crashed through several thick tree branches and landed hard. The man rolled it off, stood, and looked back up at the tower. Just in time too, since Locus had created a sphere around himself and was accelerating towards the ground at a high velocity. The assassin rolled aside to dodge the crash.

Sphere still surrounding him, Locus formed two more and shot them at the assassin. He dodged one, only for the second to hit him in the gut. The first moved up and around to slam into the assassin's back, flooring him. The spheres shifted so they were now encasing his hands, and two more flew out to encase his feet. The four lifted him into the air so he was facing Locus.

“Mind telling me who you work for or what your name is?” Locus inquired from within his protective sphere.

“Screw you.” The assassin muttered, dirt covering half of his face.

“Wrong answer.” The sphere at the assassin's left hand moved down slightly and turned intangible in a select place so a couple fingertips were poking through. The pass-through gap closed violently, severing the upper joints. “I can do this for a few hours you know. And I know the areas of the human body most susceptible to pain, even for metahumans.”

Locus drew the bolt pistol hidden in his pocket and aimed it at the newcomer to his right. In a second, the rest of the pistol had extended and activated, the end of the barrel glowing with a slight, soft light. Grey-green eyes met silver, and the former's narrowed slightly as he took in the unusual features of the stranger. It didn't look like she was wearing contacts or had dyed her hair, so the colors were natural for her. Odd, but he'd seen weirder before.

A quick look over allowed him to size up the woman pretty well: she was very well trained, had a high level of tech, and was probably a metahuman. That, and she didn't seem to be with the two hitmen, but that didn't make her any less potentially dangerous. She could be another assassin, sent to make sure he was taken out. If so, that meant they were pretty concerned about his progress; by they, he meant the people who had taken away his memories. However, he doubted that the woman was another assassin, but one couldn't be too careful.

He switched the pistol's setting to Stun with a minute twitch of his thumb and lowered it slightly.

“Yeah, maybe; torture never seems to be quite as effective as popular media portrays it,” Locus mused. “That being said, it does feel good to watch them squirm.” He looked back at the hitman, then briefly tightened his free hand's grip on the air. A fifth sphere was created and directed to go around the hitman's head, which was swiftly followed by the part around his neck solidifying, neatly decapitating him.

Locus twitched his hand. The sphere containing the hitman's head flitted away through the trees and dropped it out of sight with a muted thud. The four other spheres shifted so the man's body rotated in the air until his neck was pointed at the ground. Blood stained the dirt below, but he took no notice of that.

“So, are you also here to try and kill me?” Locus asked bluntly, pistol still aimed in the woman's general location. “Or was there yet another metahuman in the vicinity who just so happened to notice my shenanigans, hm?”

Locus automatically shifted his arm so the bolt pistol was aimed at the holographic projection of the AI. It's outfit was reminiscent of TRON, and the “body language” just screamed condescension and smartassery. He realized it would be foolish to try and damage the hologram in the next instant, so he moved it back to the mystery woman's center of mass. That was when the holographic numbers appeared over his head.

His eyes moved up as he looked at it. Even though it was backwards from his point of view, he could still read it. If he were a slightly wittier person who wasn't pointing a gun at someone else, he might have chuckled--the number had gone up by a few thousand since last he checked.

"Ah, interesting. So, should you tell me who you are or should I have Aiva tell me?"

Locus's gaze switched back to the woman and visibly hardened, several choice swear words flitting through his mind. He dismissed the spheres holding up the assassin's headless corpse, letting it drop to the ground in a tangle of limbs and blood.

“John Smith, obviously.” Locus said sardonically. “And I never liked smart alek AI's who rip-off TRON.” On the last syllable, he fired his bolt pistol thrice while willing the sphere surrounding him to fly backwards, hopefully allowing the trees to act as cover in case the Stun bolts didn't work. He figured the woman would resist or dodge the energy, but he didn't want to kill her. Not yet, anyway.

“That was only the stun setting, Jane,” Locus thumbed the HEV setting, still darting through the trees. “I have an ammo type specifically for metahumans.” As he said that, he sent a sphere about the size of a large marble to the side roughly a foot off the ground. It circled around to where it was behind 'Jane Smith', and quickly approached her.

“Shooting first is fun, isn't it?”

“Fun?” He activated his Mask, making the fabric-like material unfurl from the earpieces of his glasses and cover his face. The HUD scanned the environment and created a red outline to show where the woman was. “I'd like to think so. Especially since not shooting first often gets you killed.”

A few rounds the woman send his way destroyed the trunk of a tree right next to him, but he darted to the side to avoid the tree as it fell. Locus fired twice, making sure to aim the HEV bolts a decent distance apart so they'd be more likely to hit the woman if she dodged. The super-compressed rounds shrouded in energy smashed through a few tree trunks that were in their path. Right after that, he willed the sphere following her to rush in, then expand rapidly and detonate once it got within ten feet of the metahuman.

“And to think... I was going to offer you my services.”

“Oh really?”

That was when the sphere detonated, leveling a smaller tree near the woman. He paused and flew up, winding through the branches until he was right above the woman's head, several feet in the air. The bolt pistol was trained directly between her eyes, but he'd taken his trigger finger out and was resting it on the side of the guard; Locus was somewhat intrigued by what she'd said, and wanted to give the impression that he was willing to listen.

“You don't want to try and claim the fairly sizable bounty on my head, despite just having seen me torture and kill a man?”

“Congratulations, you figured out my name with help from your childish sidekick.” Locus said. He compartmentalized and holstered the bolt pistol, then crouched within his protective orb. The sphere descended slowly until the woman's eyes were roughly level with his chest.

“One of the strangest AI I've ever encountered, but that isn't saying much. Anyway, 'they' probably already feel like I'm too close for comfort, so your point's moot. As for why...I don't know.” He shrugged once. “I think you'll want to help me because of a few reasons. Curiosity is one. If that isn't good enough, I'm willing to bet you'd enjoy some of the various technological trinkets lying around that you could either use for yourself or sell for a decent price.”

His eyes moved down to regard the stomach wound. Any regular person would have been killed by that, so that left a few options. She was either some sort of human hybrid/lookalike, or had rapid cellular regeneration; superhuman durability was most likely out, since a tree branch wouldn't have been able to do that much damage. Or both. However, upon closer inspection with the assist of his HUD, he saw that her organs were pretty typically human, albeit with some different aspects about it. Further corroboration for the latter theory presented itself when he spotted minute changes in the skin around the entry wound start occurring.

“Or maybe...you're more the adrenaline junkie type. You want to inject some more thrill and intrigue into your life--fight bad guys, uncover conspiracies, save the day...that sort of thing. And you can withstand it all, because you are unflappable and pretty stoic, aren't you?

“So what will it be if you still want to offer your services?” Locus continued. “Curiosity? Money? Shiny new toys? Fun fights? Some or all of the above?”