Summus Proelium

I had no idea how much time had passed when I eventually snapped awake. There was no slow waking process, no chance to pretend I was still out of it. There was just a sudden rush of panicked adrenaline, as if I’d had a nightmare. Then I was sitting up, eyes wide as I practically hyperventilated while looking around wildly to see where I was. The memory of Pencil’s sack-cloth covered face staring intently at me as I passed out was fresh in my panicked mind.

He wasn’t in front of me anymore. I also wasn’t in that backyard. The room around me was fairly small, just nine feet by nine feet square, and empty. The floor, ceiling, and all four walls were made of cement. There was a heavy metal door straight ahead from where I was sitting, with one of those sliding window hatch things that someone outside could open to look in.

Um. This was bad. I was just gonna go ahead and say this was really bad. The Scions of Typhon, and Pencil in particular, were evil fucking psychopaths at the best of times, to anyone. But they had reason to be particularly annoyed with me. This… yeah, this was very fucking bad.

My helmet was missing, I realized belatedly. But I still had on my mask and the rest of my costume. The worry that I hadn’t always had my mask on blared in the back of my head, but there was literally nothing I could do about that right now. I had to find a way out of this place.

Wait, my phones! Quickly, I checked my pockets. They were there. So was the photo that I’d taken out of that car, but I ignored that for the moment. Instead, I pulled my Touched phone out and looked at it. No signal. Of course, why would Pencil and his people be stupid enough to leave me in a position where I could simply call for help? This wasn’t exactly their first kidnapping.

Okay, I had to find a way out of this. I had to. The Scions were not the kind of people who would just let me go. This was going to get a hell of a lot worse really quick if I didn’t get out of here. No one was coming to help me. No one knew where I was. I’d stubbornly insisted on dealing with this myself, while lying to Pack that I would ask That-A-Way for help. So neither of them knew I was in trouble, or where I might be even if they did figure that out. I was on my own.

How was I supposed to escape from a cement room? The purple paint made me strong, but not that strong. The red paint might be able to yank the steel door off its hinges, maybe. Or at least bend it enough for me to squeeze out. But if it did, what was on the other side? I could not deal with the entire team of Scions, Touched and Prev alike, all by myself, right in the middle of wherever they’d taken me. That wasn’t gonna happen.

But did I have a choice besides trying? What else was I going to do, sit here and wait for Pencil to get to the part where he tortured me for funsies? Plead with them to pretty please let me go? Yeah, like that would be useful for anything other than possibly making them laugh a little bit.

Getting to my feet, I ignored the mounting panic, the confusion over that whole picture with the Anthony kid and me, my guilt over getting Eits hurt and then lying to Pack about contacting That-A-Way, and everything else. The only thing that mattered right now was getting out of here.

To that end, I focused on that metal door. Using the red paint to tear it free, with help from purple paint for strength as I yanked on it, was my best chance. I didn’t see any cameras or anything, so I might be able to pull this off and take whoever was outside by surprise if I managed to get the door free before they could react to the sound. Wait, sound. Duh. Black paint. Okay, I would silence the door and the wall around it just to be on the safe side. Then I’d tear it free and deal with whatever was waiting for me. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was better than sitting here waiting.

Or… the sliding viewing hatch thing could move aside, revealing a pair of eyes staring in at me. There was a lingering pause as the eyes took me in for a moment, then the hatch slid closed and I heard the muffled sound of a voice calling out to someone else, “Hey, he’s awake!”

He. The person called me a he. That was good, right? It showed that my whole disguise wasn’t blown or anything. I was basically trying to latch onto anything remotely positive in that moment.

While I was still trying to orient myself from having my hypothetical escape attempt aborted so quickly, there was the sound of several heavy locks disengaging on the other side of the door. Really heavy locks, it seemed like. With a couple more dull thunks of metal settling into place, the door was hauled open. It pulled outward, revealing a figure standing in a dimly lit stone hallway.

“If Santa’s reindeer staged a coup, who would their leader be?”

Wait, what–Santa’s reindeer were… right, Dasher and Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid, and Donner and Blitzen. I’d always thought of the ones in front as the leaders, but would that be Blitzen? That sounded right, he was the last one mentioned so he was like the leader, right? Or would that be Rudolph? No, Rudolph was added last so there was no way he’d be the leader of a coup. Would he even be involved in a coup, or would he be too loyal to Santa to–

My hands were cuffed behind my back. Snapping out of my brief daze, I saw Cup, of course. She was in her white cloak, bodysuit, and the matching mask that covered the bottom half of her face while leaving the upper half, including brilliantly gleaming blue eyes, revealed. I saw a hint of dark hair mostly hidden within the hood as she winked at me. “Hiya, Colorboy. Is it my turn to break your arm?” Her tone was intentionally, almost mockingly light, but there was an underlying anger there. Yeah, she was definitely holding a grudge.

Cup continued. “Those are stay-down cuffs, for the record. So don’t think you can just attack us and run off. You won’t get very far.” Her eyes watched mine intently, before laughing at whatever she saw there.

Another figure appeared in the doorway just beyond the psycho girl. It was Fork, the living porcupine guy with the explosive quills. He gave me a hateful glare before clearing his throat.

“Yeah, yeah,” Cup snapped without looking that way. Her eyes rolled as she spoke in a stage-whisper. “People are so impatient, am I right?” Without waiting for me to answer, she added, “Oh well, ready to join the party upstairs?” As if I had the slightest hint of a choice. “Pencil really wants to talk to you. And he’s even more impatient sometimes than Pokey there.”

Things had been bad before. Now they were worse. I had stay-down cuffs on, so even if I managed to get away from these two, I wouldn’t get very far. The cuffs would just yank me to the ground, and they were made to keep people a hell of a lot stronger than I was right where they were. Plus, with Cup and Fork here, not to mention whoever else happened to be near… yeah, I wasn’t going anywhere. Not yet, anyway. I was going to have to just go along with things and look for an opening. And try to keep myself from panicking too much. I had to shove the rising terror down, because it wasn’t helpful right now. I had to push it away and keep my eyes open. Bad as this was, something would happen. That, or I’d just make it happen.

As soon as I came to the decision not to try to fight right now, Cup immediately spoke. “And there it is. He knows better.” Somehow, she’d apparently read all of that in my eyes. Probably because she was very accustomed to dealing with people who felt hopeless and realized how totally screwed they were.

Stepping aside, the white-clad psychopath gestured for Fork to lead the way. “Let’s get him upstairs, before brother dearest has a conniption. You know how he loves his dramatic moments.”

Brother… wait, Pencil was her brother? Was that a secret? I felt like that was a secret. Which didn’t say much about their intentions for me, not that that was much of a surprise. Still, no wonder Anchovy had said that Pencil would be mad at me for hurting Cup. She was his sister.

We seemed to be in some kind of underground bunker, from what I could tell as we moved through the narrow corridor beyond the room that had been my cell. The whole time I desperately watched for an escape opportunity, but there just… wasn’t anything. Fork was ahead of me, Cup behind me, and there were various armed guards along the way who definitely weren’t just going to let me run off even if I could have escaped my cuffs. And that was the biggest problem anyway. Nothing I could do would let me go anywhere with these damn cuffs on. The second I tried to leave Cup’s range, I would simply be yanked to the floor. Damn it! Fuck, fuck, how could I be so stupid? I was still stupid, even after getting Eits hurt by asking him to help me. What was I supposed to do now? There had to be something, right? There… there had to be something…

But there wasn’t. Or at least, not one that I could think of before we turned left at a T-junction in the corridors, went through three different heavy steel doors in succession with a short six foot hallway between each, and emerged into… an apartment? Yeah, it looked like an ordinary old, fairly middle of the road apartment living room with an attached kitchenette in the middle of this bomb shelter, bunker, whatever it was.

Pencil was there, watching tv in a recliner while wearing a bathrobe over his regular costume, sackcloth mask and all. He held a tumbler of whiskey or something, swishing it around thoughtfully without looking up as we entered. His focus seemed to be on the television nearby, where someone on the news was reporting about some kind of fight between the state heroes known as the Spartans, and the Ninety-Niners.

Neither Cup nor Fork spoke or did anything to attract the man’s attention. Not that they needed to, considering the sound the door made when it was opening. He knew we were there, but ignored us while watching the screen, still swishing that whiskey around thoughtfully. Through it all, I was frantically trying to think if there was anything I could do, anything at all.

Finally, the man picked up the remote, muted the television, and addressed me without looking. “Do you know why we let you keep your phone and anything else you have on you? Do you know why you still have your costume and mask? Aside from…” He gestured vaguely toward the nearby table, where I could see my helmet sitting.

“Um.” I paused before guessing, “Because you really like a challenge?”

There was a slight chuckle at that, from both him and Cup. Fork was silent. Pencil finally stood from his chair, shrugging out of the robe before letting it fall as he stepped my way. Stopping in front of me, the man tilted his head, staring at me through the holes in that simple sack of a mask. “No, because it’s not a challenge. I’m sure you already tried calling for help, to no avail. You’re alone here, surrounded by people who… I promise, would very much like to kill you after making sure you suffer so goddamn much. And you have no way of escaping, let alone posing any sort of threat.

“You have your mask because, while I could have taken it away from you, it will be so much more fun when you give it to me yourself. Taking something from someone? Any buffoon with a knife can do that. Making you give it up yourself? Making you give me your mask, tell me your name, your age, the names of your family, your friends? Making you do all of that in the desperate hope of sparing yourself some… small measure of pain, that’s just… that is the real power. I could take everything from you in a single moment. But that’s like playing a game with all the cheat codes on. It’s fun for about five minutes, but you don’t get the real experience, you know what I mean? No, the real joy is in stretching things out, in truly earning that submission. You are going to give that mask to me yourself, along with everything else I ask for. And that is far more fun than simply taking it from you like some sort of thug.”

It took me a second to find my voice. I was supposed to be brave and basically spit in the face of danger, but it was hard to find a witty retort in that moment. I was terrified. I knew what the Scions of Typhon did to their victims. I knew just how sadistic they could be. Trapped here, alone, surrounded by several of the most dangerous, monstrous pieces of shit in the country? Yeah, a quick, pithy retort didn’t come immediately to mind.

But I also didn’t want them to know just how easily they could get to me. So I finally found my voice, the only response that came to mind being to basically echo his words with as much disbelief as I could manage. “You think you can hurt me enough to make me just tell you who I am and sic you on all my friends and family?”

Somehow, I resisted the urge to tell him that he might be surprised at just how hard taking on my family would end up being. I was going to say nothing that might give him a hint about my situation, or anything about me.

“I think,” Pencil replied, stressing that word in a sort-of mocking way, “that you’re very new to this, but you’ve had some early success. I think you’re a very special person, and that I’m going to have a lot of fun, maybe the most fun I’ve had in a long time, breaking that down.” I could see his smile through the hole in the mask. “I think making someone watch you kill the people they care about is a pretty good time. But convincing them to tell you who to target? Making them press that metaphorical button themselves and ask you to please spare them a little pain by hurting someone else? That’s how you really break them. Everyone thinks they’ll be strong, that they’d never betray someone they love. But you know what? Most people do, given enough incentive. How much is enough for you? I guess we’ll find out.”

“Do we get to play with him now?” Cup asked, her tone pleading. “I was soooo good!” She stepped around me and embraced him tightly, rubbing up against him. “Please let me play with him now. Throw a treat to your little sister!”

Well, that was kind of an odd thing for a sister to do to her bro–

Then she tugged her mask down a bit (faced mostly away from me so I still couldn’t see her face) and kissed him. Like, full on the mouth. Not just a peck either, it was far more than that. They were… um, yeah, busy like that for a few long seconds.

What. The. Fuck.

Was this the torture starting? I felt like this was the torture starting.

Finally, the man pulled back, rubbing Cup’s shoulders, back, and then, ahhh… lower in a still-very-very-very-not-brotherly way before focusing on me. “Not yet,” he said flatly. “First, I want to see if he’ll answer one question.” His tone darkened. “How do you know Robert Parson? See, he’s been a reeeeeeal pain in the ass. Took me a long time to find his name, even longer to get any kind of lead on him. Then I find out some kid’s out there looking for the same name. Turns out he’s got an address of Robert Parson’s mother. Dead for a year now, rest her soul. So, I sent a couple friends out to convince the kid to give up the goods. They get interrupted, but manage to take his phone. We get the address off that, show up to look for clues about where Parson himself could be, and who do we find there? You. Little old you.

“So you tell me, kid. Do you know where he is? Because that could spare you a lot of trouble, I promise. Hell, I might even be convinced to let you scoot along on your own, nice and healthy. I may be annoyed with you, but Robert Parson is one that I’m willing to dismiss an awful lot of grudges for. Everything I just said a minute ago about all the things I could put you through, and I’d just let that go in exchange for telling me where that son of a bitch is.”

Well, that one I could answer honestly. “I’m looking for him too,” I replied simply. “The… the boy your pieces of shit attacked was finding an address for me.” I couldn’t keep the anger about that out of my voice, and I didn’t really try.

There was a smile from the man. “Is that right? Now why, exactly, would you be looking for Robert Parson?”

Before I could say anything to that, Fork suddenly looked up from the phone he’d been studying. “Boss,” he started, “they’ve got something. Guy sent a letter from some place near Lake Victoria, north-east of Lansing. Contents were burned or tossed, but they found enough of the envelope in the back of the fireplace to make out the address.”

That slow, Cheshire smile that showed off Pencil’s teeth appeared, as he murmured, “Really, now? Lake Victoria. What’s that, couple hours from here?” Abruptly, the man gave a sharp whistle and swatted Cup on her backside. “Go warm up the car, babe.”

While she slinked off to do just that, he looked to me and curiously asked, “Tell me something, kid. What kind of snacks do you like?

“Cuz we’re going on a car ride.”