Snek is a Good Boy Pt 18 (Patreon)

No Time Lost, No Lessons Learned

[A/N: This chapter commissioned by Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]


A Few Weeks Ago, In a Lab in Brockton Bay

Bakuda

"Lung is dead." For news so momentous, Oni Lee's emotionless delivery left it somewhat lacking.

Alice Takawara looked up from her latest project, which would have the capability (if she so wished) to black out all of Brockton Bay, or any other similarly-sized city. "I'm aware. I saw the footage, too. I wish I hadn't, but I did. What's your point?"

"He was killed by a giant snake. It ate him." Oni Lee sounded like a person who wasn't quite sure what righteous anger was, exactly, but was attempting to work himself up to it anyway.

"Yes," she said with all the patience she could muster (which wasn't a lot, really). "I absolutely saw that part, too. I'm going to ask you again, what's your point?"

"You will not speak to me like that." Now he seemed to be acting out indignation without quite understanding how it went. "With the death of great Lung, I am the leader of the Azn Bad Boys."

"Wait, what?" She shook her head. "No, I'm the leader of the ABB. What makes you think you are?"

He stared at her. "I have been in the Azn Bad Boys longer than you have. I was great Lung's second in command. Of course I will be the new leader."

"You were his only subordinate with powers until I came along," she countered. "By that logic, you were also the lowest ranking cape in his organisation."

"I am still the leader," he said stubbornly. "The Azn Bad Boys know me better than they know you."

She snorted. "You teleport and kill people. I make bombs that kill people in really inventive ways. I've got more imagination and creativity than you, therefore I'm the leader."

He pulled his pistol from the holster and pointed it at her. "I could kill you now. I am the leader."

"And I triggered deadman switches on most of the bombs in here when you started this argument. You wouldn't get out the door. I'm the leader."

The pistol did not waver. "You would still be dead."

He would do it, she realised. His death would not matter to him if she died too. And he probably thought he could get out in time anyway. "Okay, fine, you're the leader." Right up until I get the chance to do something about that.

"Good." He put the pistol away. "I need a bomb to kill the snake. What does this one do?" Reaching out, he picked up the nearest one. Which, as it happened, had already been activated as a part of her deadman switch. Moving it triggered the switch.

"Don't touch my—" But it was too late. The HUD in her goggles told her that the timer was now counting down. She lunged to grab it off him; only her (warm) fingerprint could shut it down in time.

He automatically recoiled, and her reaching fingers only managed to knock it out of his hand and send it rolling down the bench, bumping other bombs as it went.

Many of which she'd already activated with the deadman switch.

bip

bip

bip

bip

bip

bip

Red warnings scrolled up her HUD. Any single one of the bombs that had just been triggered, she could've shut down before it went off. Even three or four. But there were too many.

"Fuuuck! You've just killed us both, you moron!"

"Disarm them!" he shouted, pointing the pistol at her again.

"It takes five seconds per bomb, and we've got twenty seconds!" she screamed. "We don't have time!"

He dissolved into ash, and she heard him rattling the door handle. It was electronically locked, part of her deadman switch fuck-you. "Unlock this!" he bellowed.

"How about no!" He might be able to get away if she let him out, but he had two more doors to get through before he could get line of sight outside the blast radius. She figured the various bombs would take out the block, at least. As for her, she didn't have a chance. There wasn't enough time for her to reach the door, let alone …

Wait.

Time.

As the last few seconds ticked down, she darted sideways and grabbed one of the few bombs that hadn't already been activated. This was a time grenade: impact-detonated, it was to be thrown at the target, whereupon it would skip them through time for a given interval. She'd designed it to be used on annoyingly tough foes, so she could booby-trap their landing area with bombs that could kill them.

00:01.17

As she twisted the timer, an arm went around her neck and a knife touched her behind the ear. "Save us," growled Oni Lee.

00:00.83

There was no time left. She thwacked the grenade hard on the bench.

00:00.01

The lab vanished, to be replaced by a huge crater. They were falling. She screamed, suddenly aware of all the flaws in her makeshift escape plan.

The world blinked sideways, and she landed on rubble. Even the short drop was enough to knock the wind out of her, but she still had enough wits about her to watch two tiny figures fall all the way to the bottom of the crater. One of them was screaming in her voice, and flailing wildly. The impact sprayed blood across smooth vitrified glass … then the bodies and blood turned into ash that blew away with the wind.

Yanking the gas mask off, she sat up then vomited copiously, voiding her stomach of everything she'd eaten the day before … however long ago 'the day before' was. Because they'd surely been jumped through time, exactly as the grenade was intended to do. How long it had been, she wasn't sure; she'd just spun the timer as far to the right as it would go, and hoped against hope that it would work.

"Where are we? What did you do?" Oni Lee, when she looked around, had at least sheathed his knife. He stared around at the altered scenery.

"I saved our lives, just like you said." Alice wiped her mouth and chose to ignore the fact that he'd then saved her life. He wouldn't have been able to do it if she hadn't done it first. "I jumped us forward in time. That crater is what's left of my lab after you started playing lawn bowls with my bombs."

"Forward in time?" He paused for a moment, and she wondered if she was going to have to carefully explain the concept of time travel to him, using crayons and flash-cards. "How far?"

Oh, good. He still has a couple of functioning brain cells. "Not sure. Wouldn't be hours or days, they'd still be examining the hole. Probably not years, or there'd be water and dirt collected in the bottom. So … weeks? Months?"

"The Azn Bad Boys will believe we are dead." He retrieved an old flip-phone from a pouch. "I will inform them that their leader is alive."

"Well, while you do that, Imma find out what we've missed." Getting up, Alice spat a few times to get the last of the taste of the vomit out of her throat, then pulled the gas mask back down over her face. Then she took out her own phone, smugly pleased that she'd set it up with an autopay feature, drawing from her main account, and woke it up.

A couple of firmware updates called for her attention, but she put them to one side. Then she checked the date. It was Tuesday, the twenty-fourth of May. Jeez, more than a month.

Now she knew when she was, she started scrolling through the news sites, mentally noting the headlines as she went. This came to a screeching halt a very short time later, as she stared at the feed. "Son … of a bitch," she croaked. "Lee, you need to see this."

Oni Lee came to her side. "I need your phone. Mine isn't working."

She glanced at his screen, where it was saying that it was out of credit. "How do you pay for it?"

"I buy prepaid, monthly."

Somehow, she wasn't surprised. "Yeah, it's been more than a month. Your credit ran out. Gonna have to buy more. But you need to see this." She showed him the screen.

He looked at the screen. "It says the snake ate Leviathan."

"Well, yeah. The snake ate Leviathan. It ate him. Doesn't that say something to you?"

Oni Lee did not hesitate. "It means we need a bigger bomb to kill it."

She shook her head. "I'm pretty sure you're taking the wrong message away from this."

"It killed Lung. I must kill it. You will supply the bomb to kill it with. Or I will kill you."

For a one-note asshole, Alice decided, Oni Lee knew how to make his point. "Okay, fine. You've convinced me. I'll build you a bomb."

Hopefully, her secondary workshops wouldn't have been discovered by the authorities yet. Because if Oni Lee wanted her to build him a bomb, she was going to have to build him a damn bomb.

Now, what type to make that would actually kill the damned thing …?

<><>​

Four Days Later

"Holy shit. It actually worked." Alice stared off the edge of the roof at the gigantic reptile, entirely trapped—and motionless, thank all the nameless gods of science, mad and otherwise—within the sparkling field. "We got the bastard."

She'd thought they were dead when it looked in their direction just before Oni Lee threw the bomb, but it had worked perfectly, even cobbled together from substandard materials as it was. Oddly enough, she'd also thought she'd seen someone riding astride its neck, but there was nobody there and the field would've trapped anyone like that inside it. The only weird thing was the hat it was wearing in the middle of its broad head. She had no idea what that was about.

Looking back over her shoulder, she called out, "Hey, it's okay! We totally got it!" Oni Lee had immediately teleported away after throwing the bomb, but he'd left her behind. Which was absolutely something they were going to have to address, going forward.

He appeared beside her an instant later, looking down at the trapped creature. "Yes, but it is only trapped. How long will it be trapped for, and how do we kill it?"

"Oh, that bit's easy." She grinned inside the gas mask. "I can rig up a bomb that'll free its head only, and leave the rest of its body in stasis. Its heart won't be beating, and its lung won't be working either. Five, ten minutes tops, and we'll be able to start skinning the fucker. I'm thinking a snakeskin jacket would look real nice."

"No."

The single word, spoken from behind them, carried a level of power and gravitas that Alice had never heard before, even from people like Alexandria who were good at that sort of thing. She turned fast, just as Oni Lee did, wondering who could've snuck up on them like that. Part of her was impressed with how fast Lee got his pistol out and trained on the newcomer.

The rest of her brain was taken up with asking herself, okay, who the hell is this guy? Because it wasn't any cape she'd ever heard of or seen pictures of, though there was a passing resemblance to Myrddin. However, where the Chicago Protectorate leader put on a good 'wizard' act, this guy hit it right out of the park. There was the funny-looking hat, the long robes, the cool-looking wooden staff and the grey beard, but that wasn't all. There was something deeper down, something visceral, that gave her a powerful gut feeling that this guy was absolutely the real deal.

But then again, so was she.

"And who the hell are you supposed to be, buddy? The snake police?" Ooh, that was a good one. She'd have to write that down, later.

"No. I am the Master of the Castle, and Snek is my familiar." The wizard guy gestured with his free hand toward the trapped snake.

At the first move, Oni Lee shot him. Or rather, he pulled the trigger. There was a flat crack, a muzzle-flare, and a bullet flying out of the muzzle.

This last bit, Alice had never seen before. She'd also never seen a bullet slow down and stop in midair before, so that was new as well. And all the guy—the Master of the Castle, who she'd definitely never heard of before—had done was move his hand a bit.

Oni Lee was already acting. Yanking one of the grenades off his bandolier, he pulled the pin and let it go. This was something Alice had seen before, but always from a much greater distance. She knew how Oni Lee did this sort of thing; he would've started the teleport-clone thing before he ever pulled the pin, so the new version of him, wherever he ended up, would be holding a safe grenade, pin still securely in place.

All of which would've been perfectly okay—Oni Lee had honed his technique, and it worked for him—except that by doing so, the asshole had left her in the firing line again. Much more of this and she'd start to wonder if he even had her best interests at heart. Biting off the urge to yell something extremely unkind at him, she went for the only place she could see that would escape the explosion: off the roof. Hitting the pavement from twenty-plus feet up would hurt, but not as much as taking a grenade to the face from five feet away.

Alice was no stranger to high-adrenaline situations, and occasionally she'd even encountered the sensation where time seemed to stretch out to eternity when she was trying to evade danger. But this time was different. Normally, all she'd have time to think of was 'this is going to hurt' or something similar before the cracked and worn concrete stopped looming up at her and became part of her new life. But now she was halfway off the roof and had taken several breaths, and she still hadn't fallen.

She took an experimental breath, then another. Falling still hadn't happened. The grenade still hadn't gone off. Neither had Oni Lee—just barely visible from the corner of her eye—dissolved into ash. "Okay," she said out loud. "What the hell?"

And then things seemed to rewind a little. From her panicked dive off the roof, she was pulled back until she was standing in front of the wizardly cape again. The grenade was there as well, hanging in midair, with the case open and the bits and pieces spread out like a how-to manual.

"As I have already said, I am the Master of the Castle." The wizard tapped the gnarled staff on the roof of the building once, and both the grenade and Oni Lee's pistol vanished. So did all the other grenades on Oni Lee's bandolier. "I do not countenance such treacherous attacks on Snek with good grace. Bakuda and Oni Lee of Earth Bet, what have you to say for yourselves?"

Alice tried to move, but discovered that everything below the neck was totally unresponsive to her commands. From the way Oni Lee's head was twitching, he was suffering the same problem. Which meant they were dealing with a terrifyingly powerful Master, not to mention a Shaker and whatever he'd done to vanish the grenades and the gun. And Oni Lee still hadn't dissolved into ash, which strongly suggested that he couldn't.

"The snake ate Lung." Oni Lee's voice cut into Alice's frantic attempts to think of a way out of this. "It attacked the Azn Bad Boys. For that, it had to die."

Fuuuck! Fuck fuck fuck! Alice discarded her earlier notion that Oni Lee had brain cells to spare. Apparently he'd just used up his last one. "Ignore him," she blurted. "He's got a thing. His head. Brain damage or something."

The Master of the Castle glanced at her, then back at Oni Lee, his gaze piercing and knife-sharp. "So I see. You parahumans and your addictions to power. Even when they drain your very thoughts and drive you to attack one another, you cannot help but use them."

Stung, Alice struggled uselessly against her invisible bonds. "I'd like to see you do better," she spat.

"Were you to know me for who I am, you would not pose such a challenge." His voice was calm and reproving, before he raised it in a command. "Snek! Your Master calls!" Again, he tapped his staff on the rooftop.

Alice saw glowing rainbow ripples spread out from the impact point, across the roof and down the side of the building. She could not move her head to look over her shoulder, but a few seconds later she heard the dry rustling sound of the snake's scales. The huge blunt nose edged over the rooftop beside her, and she found herself under inspection by a gold-fringed eye as large as her head. Then the mouth opened to exhibit its extraordinary dentition as it spoke. "Hello, Masster. Thank you for ssaving me. Iss buzzy-bug girl well?"

"She is indeed, Snek." Where the Master's expression had been stern and forbidding the whole time he'd been talking to her and Oni Lee, for Snek he produced an austere smile. "She was quite concerned about your well-being. You have found good friends. I'm proud of you."

"Ssnek thinkss sso too, Masster." The snake seemed to preen at the praise. "Ssnek hass much fun chassing bad men with buzzy-bug girl and with Mouss. Monsster Lev-i-a-than wass alsso tassty." It curled its head around to survey Alice and Oni Lee. "Masster hass caught bad man and bad woman who caught Ssnek in trap."

"Yes, I have." The Master took on a pensive expression, one that Alice didn't trust for an instant. People with that level of power didn't do anything without having all their moves planned far ahead. "However, before I decide what to do with them, there is one other thing I must do. For fairness, if nothing else."

"Wait, what are you going to do?" Alice had already figured out that they were thoroughly screwed, but that last bit sounded ominous as fuck. "We've got rights—"

"Rights which you ignore whenever convenient," he interrupted. "However, set your mind at ease. You, I will not touch. Your comrade, on the other hand, has been sorely misused by his power."

Reaching out, the bearded man tapped Oni Lee on the forehead of the Kabuki mask he wore. A shimmering silvery glow settled over the black-clad assassin, then gradually faded out of view. Oni Lee shook his head as though dazed. "What … what did you do to me? My mind feels so clear."

"It was a simple enough spell." The Master of the Castle smiled briefly. "I reversed the damage done to your intellect by those perfidious powers you all seem to swear by. Now then, I offer you each a choice …"

<><>​

Taylor

With my mask tucked away in my storage pack, I munched on a pastry while I watched the show. I wasn't really sure who'd done the cooking but it was extremely tasty, and Snek had enjoyed larger pieces that had evidently been prepared with him in mind. "So, this happens a lot?" I asked Snek, as both Riley and the Master of the Castle were busy.

"Yess, buzzy-bug girl," Snek replied. "Ssometimess, Ssnek bringss bad men and women to Masster and he takess away problem powerss and ssendss them out into the world. They sseem happier there."

"Huh." It made for an odd kind of sense, but considering the number of villains that had simply vanished after encountering Snek, I could see how it worked. "Do you do this with every villain you catch? Because some of them are pretty nasty, just saying."

Snek didn't answer for a moment, and we watched as Oni Lee's powers were decanted from his head and stored in a large crystal-clear glass jar as swirls of flickering darkness. There were more than a few jars of this type lining the shelves of the laboratory.

"No, buzzy-bug girl. Ssome bad people, Ssnek jusst eatss." His tone was completely matter of fact. "But all otherss have chossen to losse powerss and sstay on Masster'ss world."

I tilted my head. "Aren't you worried that they might … well, go and be criminals here, too?"

The Master of the Castle placed the jar on the shelf next to Bakuda's and turned back to us. "That is always a possibility, Taylor Hebert of Earth Bet. There are indeed those who are predisposed to crime from the beginning. However, it is my observation that when removed from those influences—both inward and outward—that placed them in such a situation, many will rethink their ways. I offer that chance. And for those that choose the way of banditry nonetheless?" He chuckled dryly. "Here, justice is swift and efficient."

"Oh." I figured, in hindsight, that a world with magic might not be as medieval and backward as popular culture might describe. "Um … so. Snek, are you still up for that patrol?"

The large head came up and he smiled. "Ssnek iss always ready to have fun with friendss."

"Awesome." I handed the plate back to Riley, and retrieved my mask. "Thank you again for saving Snek."

The Master of the Castle nodded in my direction. "Thank you for being his friend."

I swung my leg over Snek's neck. "That's no problem at all. He's a good boy."

"Thank you, buzzy-bug girl." Snek turned and started wriggling toward the door. "Buzzy-bug girl hold on."

"Kick their asses for me, Taylor!" called Riley.

I gave her a thumb's up over my shoulder, just before the door opened and Snek opened a portal on the other side of it. "Totally."

And then we were gone again.

Part 19