Published at 12th of August 2022 9:12 pm

Book 2: Chapter 21: A People Person

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

Screams tore through the laboratory, reverberating off steel walls and hardened glass. Echo watched from behind a reinforced viewing chamber as a man writhed on a table in sheer agony. The man’s arms and legs were chained, given just enough length to clatter as limbs flailed wildly. The collar around the prisoner’s neck glowed red hot as its power source began to expend itself. Echo chewed at his lip in frustration.

The door beside him opened, and Gateway entered. He was dressed in business casual, a simple collared shirt and slacks, with comfortable shoes. A far cry from his vigilante outfit, with its royal purple stripes and broad cape. The contrast had always amused Echo; Gateway’s eccentricities were more than tolerable given what he’d been through. Echo allowed the man plenty of leeway.

His faithful second stood by silently, both of them watching as the collar ended its torment, and the prisoner’s cries subsided to ragged gasps. Echo checked the readouts beside him. The vast array of scanners pointed at the room showed no changes in radiation levels.

“Still nothing?” Gateway inquired.

Echo shook his head solemnly. “Belief is a stubborn thing.”

“Don’t I know it,” Gateway replied wryly. “Has anyone spoken to him?”

Echo shrugged. “The standard fare. Our goals were explained. He took it poorly, of course.”

“Yes, well, kidnapping has that effect on a man,” Gateway said.

“It will all be worth it in the end,” Echo countered, and Gateway nodded sadly.

“I know. What are we hoping for from this one?”

Echo checked the scanner once more before answering, “Mr. Charleston is one of maybe a thousand people across the country with the ‘Roofme’ upgrade. His voice triggers a chemical reaction in the listener’s brain similar to the drug Rohypnol.”

Gateway snorted. “It is entirely unsurprising to me that such a thing was allowed past our government’s vaunted ethics board.”

“Money talks,” Echo agreed.

“So he is a rapist,” Gateway stated. “Suddenly, I feel like this is karma.”

“In a way. Mr. Charleston was somewhat infamous for kidnapping and ransoming the children of wealthy individuals.”

They both watched as one of the People’s lab assistants entered the room. Charleston thrashed wildly, nearly foaming at the mouth, as the man swapped out his collar’s power source. The assistant left, and the collar engaged. Charleston returned to screaming.

After a few moments passed, Echo commented, “I couldn’t help but notice the potential of his upgrade. It strikes me as somewhat similar to an old friend’s, if different in execution.”

It took a few seconds for Gateway to understand. “You’re trying to find a new Champion?”

The Champion of Chicago: the original founder of the People back when they were a team of like-minded heroes looking to keep their city safe. No one could ever replace him, in Echo’s mind. But his power, perhaps, was a different story. Champion’s voice, his methods of communication, verbal or not, demanded obedience. People did what he told them to do, and it was a credit to the man’s integrity that his use of such a power had never once been condemned, not even by his enemies. A well-intentioned idealist, whose naïve hopes were crushed by cold reality. That was the worst that history could make of him.

Echo doubted that Charleston could ever claim that same moral character.

He shrugged. “Not exactly. Not this man, at least. But if we can succeed the once, every following success is that much easier.”

“You think Champion would approve of that?” Gateway asked. From any other man, it might have seemed mocking, but Echo knew the question was honest. Gateway was as faithful as they came to the cause. He could afford to be honest.

“No,” Echo decided. “As far as I can recall, Champion never once used his power unless lives were on the line.”

“Lives are on the line,” Gateway insisted, laying a hand on Echo’s shoulder.

The heartfelt defense brought a smile to Echo’s lips.

“Champion did not think like that,” he confided. “He was much more grounded in the here and now. I tried to keep his eyes forward, on the future. My failure cost us all.”

They paused, contemplating the People’s grim history, a silence broken only by Eddie Charleston’s muffled screams.

“What was he like?” Gateway asked.

“Champion?” Echo considered the question. He consulted his memory of the man. The confidence and glory and sheer charisma of a man whose star burned too bright. The great plans he’d made, the ambitions, murdered in their cradle by an unfeeling society and the cold blade of betrayal.

“Larger than life,” he decided. It was better that the man’s flaws were forgotten by time. His blinding naivete, his sheer confidence in the goodness of others, his trusting nature that left him open to all kinds of exploitation. There was no need to dwell on these. His ideals would live on in the next generation of the People, and they would see him as the icon that he should be.

Charleston’s screams died down once more, as the collar expended the last of its charge. Gateway watched him moan with a pitiless gaze. “Should I speak to him?”

“If you’d like,” Echo offered. “Perhaps share your own story. Living proof might go a long way towards what we are trying to achieve.”

Gateway tapped his chin for a few moments, then vanished in a flash of purple light and a burst of heat. Echo absently waved away the smell of ozone that the man’s teleportation always left behind. He turned his eyes towards the makeshift laboratory. Several seconds ticked by, before Gateway flashed into existence beside Charleston. He held a spare battery in his hand, the brief delay having been spent retrieving it.

Charleston moaned at his presence, and attempted to scrabble away. The chains held fast, straining and rattling. Gateway held out his hands, mouth moving, and Echo deactivated the sound dampeners.

“—continue to deny your own potential, Mr. Charleston. This upgrade of yours is nothing more than an artificial lock placed on your soul, by those who would seek to control you. You have the key, Mr. Charleston. You need only use it.”

“Go-o fuck yours-s-self,” Charleston spat back, and phlegm splattered across Gateway’s clean shirt.

Gateway sighed, fishing a handkerchief out his pocket and wiping away the spit. Echo caught a flash of discoloration around his subordinate’s ear canals. Good, he’d remembered to put in his earbuds. Charleston’s upgrade required direct, somewhat prolonged exposure. Electronics disrupted it easily.

“I was like you, once,” Gateway revealed. “Blind, trapped, and afraid. But I learned the truth. There’s so much more to you than you know. Won’t you at least try?”

“I’d r-rather put out a campfire w-with my face!” Charleston snarled, lunging off the table as far as his chains would allow.

Echo sighed to himself. Gateway was truly horrible at this. There existed a certain subset of people that he could convince with pretty words and promises, but Charleston was not it. The man was incredibly stubborn, used to getting his own way, through force or guile. It would take time for him to break. He checked over the readings one last time, just to be sure. They told him what he already knew: no changes. No changes in radiation, no sign of the tell-tale burst of cosmic energy that signified ephemeral chains snapping.

He pressed on the intercom. “That’s enough Gateway. Return.”

Gateway paused in his attempts to sway the man, giving out a helpless shrug. “Duty calls,” he offered in explanation, before vanishing in a flash of purple fire.

He reappeared inside the viewing area. “Sorry boss. No luck.”

“Yes, well I wasn’t expecting much. Mr. Charleston is a very headstrong man.”

“What now?” Gateway asked.

Echo briefly deliberated, before deciding, “I’ll speak with him, briefly. It’s best he understand his position sooner, rather than later. You stay here, keep an eye on the monitors.”

“Alrighty.”

Echo made his way down the stairs of the viewing chamber, and into the corridor leading to Charleston’s cell. Might as well call it what it was. He slipped in his earbuds, and activated them, before snapping his fingers beside his ear. Sound filtered in with an electronic tint, and Echo nodded in satisfaction.

He entered the room.

Charleston glanced over. The man was attempting to curl into a ball. The fetal position was an instinctual response to painful stimuli, and the collars stimulated nerves evenly across the body. He was likely in a great deal of agony. Echo contemplated what he could say, to make that pain useful.

Once, he would have offered platitudes. Explanations. Maybe a speech: To die in service of a greater cause, was the best death one could hope for. He would speak of humanity’s potential, and how it had been stifled. He would speak of the future, and how bright it could be if only they would believe in it. He would speak something positive, encouraging and meaningful. Something to blind the person to that onrushing inevitability. Something to foster, if not trust, than at least understanding. It was the closest Echo could come to mimicking his mentor’s ability to connect to a person. A pale, frail shadow of something greater.

Trial and error had proved that approach wrong. Sympathy had earned him nothing but spite. Now he offered the truth to those who would die for a cause that was not their own. There was but a single avenue of escape. The way of nature, the way of man. Evolve or die.

He laid it all out for Charleston, in a few practiced sentences. Upgrades were nothing more than a trick of the mind. The pain will continue until he breaks his own limits. Life or death, it was his choice.

The screams started up again, the moment he left. He continued away from the cells, following the corridor as it inclined upwards. Gateway appeared at his side, holding a phone in one hand. He offered it to Echo, with the brief explanation of, “Coldeyes has arrived.”

Echo nodded, and took the phone.

“Bring him to my study,” he ordered simply.

Coldeyes. What a buffoon. How Echo lamented the need to work with men like that. Criminals, degenerates, nonbelievers. The faithless, out to seize a piece of the world for themselves, damn the rest of them. Had circumstances been different, it would be Coldeyes on the table in that lab, screaming as they pried the secrets of his power out of him. But that was no longer possible.

Anastasia had pushed them too hard of late. Something had breathed new fire into that old hag. She’d found a source, somewhere. A leak, or a new natural capable of tracking the People. The former was unlikely, few knew how their cells connected with each other. The latter, however, was always a possibility. It might have made Echo smile at the boundless potential of humanity, had that potential not been directed at his organization. His organization… which was dedicated to furthering that potentail. The irony of it did make him smile, before the reality of the situation brought him back down.

They had enemies aplenty. He could ill afford yet another one. Especially one willing to work with them, price or not. And what a price he asked! Coldeyes truly was a fool. Money was nothing, something transitory and fluctuating. Manpower, less so, but the goal was so… small minded. His ambitions were laughable. A tiny kingdom to himself, a little slice of Earth dedicated to Coldeyes.

Echo wanted to uplift the human race.

His feet found the elevator entrance, and he adjusted his clothing as it climbed upwards. He had cast away the frills of his old costume. He’d put aside the excess. No flair, no style. A simple black tuxedo and a tailcoat. Echo was an old man, now. He’d outgrown those childish things. He drew a masquerade mask out of his coat pocket, his sole concession to the past.

The elevator opened, and he stepped out, Gateway faithfully following in his footsteps. The doors shut behind him, looking for all the world like a bookshelf. Echo padded across the wooden floors of his mansion, finally ending in a large study. He ran his fingers across the hardwood desk, tracing the building blueprints that lay across it.

They called it the Fridge, and it was the coldest place on the planet. It also resided directly beneath one of the hottest. The subterranean facility was buried at the center of Death Valley, surrounded by miles of automated turrets, barbed wire fence, and land mines. A satellite was parked directly above it, looking downwards at all times. Dozens of sophisticated sensors lined the lone hatch into the facility. Within, however, was a different story.

Cold metal and darkness. And the prisoners. There could be nothing else. Nothing else could survive. It was here that the United States government kept their most dangerous villains, and their most valuable. Those whose powers might one day be studied, and mutilated into upgrades. And those whose powers made them impossible, or impractical, to kill.

Some were old friends. Comrades, partners. Mercenaries. Some were enemies. Some were something in between. Kyoma. Blacklight. Avenger. Fortress and Warhead.

Cannibal.

Naturals who had carved bloody trenches through the country, who had fought for their ideals and lost, who had become too powerful or influential and had to be sealed away. Those whose powers were too tempting to condemn to oblivion.

And the man who made it all possible: Cold Star. The slumbering man’s aura froze the world around him. He lay at the very bottom of the Fridge, powering the cryostasis chambers that sealed so many old legends. It was utterly inaccessible. Its climate, beyond deadly. There were three people alive, that Echo knew of, capable of breaching the site, to add and withdraw prisoners. Two of them were enemies of the People. The third was Coldeyes. He wondered if Anastasia understood the depths of the man’s power.

Coldeyes was immune to changes in temperature. Not resistant, not highly tolerant. He was immune. His internal temperature did not fluctuate unless he allowed it. As far as Echo was aware, the man didn’t even understand why. His focus lay on the more overt of his powers, yet even still he was pathetic. Coldeyes’ gaze could break the laws of thermodynamics, and he used that power to become a petty gangster. How Echo wept for the state of humanity. How he despised the people who had brought it about.

A knock on the door.

“Enter,” he called.

Someone stepped in, one of the many loyal guards who patrolled the mansion. “Coldeyes here for you, sir.”

Echo nodded, and breathed in a slow breath. He let it out, allowing his emotions to fade into the background. He was who he needed to be. An echo of another, greater man.

He pulled on that nostalgic memory, drew a familiar smile across his face, and said, “Show him in.”

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