Act Five, Scene Six
Act Five, Scene Six
First District
Greenrose was half-stable when she poured herself into Prudence’s fortress. She wished the weather could make up its mind. She liked sun and she liked rain, but she didn’t like weather that couldn’t decide which it was and these few weeks it’d been wobbling like crazy.
“What happened?” Mercy asked anxiously as she roared in.
“Everyone died,” said Greenrose shortly. “Prudence killed Bloody Lizzy, then Nicator led us into a trap.”
“Nicator says she’s Ilderia,” Catherine volunteered dumbly.
“And Livia’s troops are backing her,” growled Greenrose. “They tried to shoot at me.”
“... Did you kill them?” Melissa asked timidly.
“All who got in my way,” said Greenrose.
Melissa, somehow, looked less worried. “Lie,” she whispered. Catherine’s eyes twitched.
“You can’t mean everyone,” Mercy was saying to Greenrose. “No one would ever be crazy enough to try to kill Mom, and anyway she’s almost immortal.” Patience was still looking at Greenrose like she didn’t understand what had just happened.
“Not immortal enough,” said Greenrose flatly.
“That’s not possible,” said Mercy. “Why?”
Catherine was staring into space. Storm clouds were rolling in.
“To kill every cape in Novapest who wasn’t on her side,” said Greenrose. “So it’d just be a few kids and some guys hiding in corners for her to worry about. Nicator trapped us in a room and then poured explosive fire poison gas bullshit into it. She killed me a hundred times and everyone else once.”
Her appearance was still flickering, her powers pulsing in accordance with her emotions. Wrinkles ran down her skin; fingers split and reformed.
Mercy’s eyes were very large. “It’s true,” said Melissa, and Mercy rounded on her. “Thank you, that doesn’t help. If Mom’s dead -” She swallowed. “Patience, we need to run. Right now.”
“But Mercy - “
“Did she, or did she not, tell you to listen to me?” Her voice was punctuated by a roll of thunder.
“... She did,” said Patience, sounding close to tears.
“Okay,” said Mercy. “So we split up into teams, me and you, and Catherine and Elgolian. We use the homunculi for a distraction, and we go underground. Eventually she’s got to stop looking for us, right?”
Patience looked to Catherine for help, but Catherine was as silent as she was.
“That sounds fine to me,” growled Greenrose. “Just as soon as I get the cure Prudence promised me.”
“We can’t let her get away with it!” said Patience. The rain was pouring down hard and heavy -
“We can’t stop her,” said Mercy. “Not if she killed Mom and all the other knights! She was running this, and she told us to run if she died!”
There was one last roll of thunder, and then the rain stopped.
“I am Curtana, of the same steel and temper as Durendal and Joyeuse,” said Catherine. “No. No more running away. We don’t run. We conquer.”
“What?”
Patience was smiling up at her and Elgolian smiling down, but everyone else was looking at her as if she were insane.
“At this point there’s no war.” She looked around the room. “Either we win - instantly - or we lose - instantly. If we try to fight the Ten Thousand Perfect Rifles with Prudence’s homunculi, we lose,” she continued, talking very fast to try to get it out before it was misunderstood, “but that doesn’t actually matter because if we try to fight the Ten Thousand Perfect Rifles with my brother’s army we just win, all three of the people who could do something about them are dead. Only the blood royal can control the army and there’s a functionally infinite number of them. If we run around gathering allies we lose because Nicator might be able to crack the codes to get her control of them in a week or two, but not a day or two, and at the point I make it into the palace I have enough of an army to outgun everyone.”
“The only control centers for them are in the royal palace,” Mercy pointed out, five seconds behind the time.
“Yeah. And that’s why the four of us are going to sneak into the palace, past her security.”
“Four of us?” asked Patience indignantly; Catherine ignored her.
“We need some sort of cover,” said Catherine, “but we can work on that -”
“Or,” said Melissa quietly, “you could create a thunderstorm again.”
They all looked at her.
“You, uh, did notice, right? About the weather? It’s been kinda crazy for a few weeks. Especially right now. There was a thunderstorm about thirty seconds ago?”
They all looked out the window. The sky was completely clear.
Catherine froze.
“... Thank you, Melissa.” She gestured, clouds opened. Gestured, clouds closed. Smiled. “... Huh.” Well, that made a lot of sense. Why is it that you never notice when the weather is just right for your mood? How long had she been absolutely wasting her time when she could have been selling everyone in the Caribbean beautiful summer weather, no cost to her?
Then she shook her head, back to herself. “I don’t know how useful that will be inside, but it will get us in past Nicator’s guards if I can make a storm to give us cover. We don’t need to get to the top of the palace - just to one of my father’s secret entrances. We take the tunnel into his underground lab, grab some of my father’s best weaponry and my armor, my, my Curtana armor, and go over to the lowest floor that has a control station for the army, and then…”
“And then it takes care of our enemies.” Mercy nodded. She looked much calmer now. “That makes sense.
“And if Nicator tries to stop us?”
“If she’s collapsed all the secret entrances, we’ll need to do it as a frontal attack,” Catherine said, the words flowing, talking as fast as she could think. “But it’s implausible she knows where they all are and she hasn’t had much time to do it in. I’d have to see if I can spin up a tornado or enough lightning bolts to break in. I don’t know just what the limits on my powers are, but I can try. If she’s destroyed all the consoles for controlling the army, that won’t work, but we’ll be in the palace - we can grab my father’s best weapons and try to -” she sighed, slowed down, “try to assassinate her.”
Mercy looked to Catherine. “You’ll do that.”
“I’ll have to start some time,” Catherine said. “Now. If someone tries to stop us before we make it in, we need to not stay put. If we get to anywhere I can issue verbal commands I can get us all entered as Friendly on the lab’s defense systems, so then they aren’t targeting us and are targeting our enemies. In that case we need to try to split them up, lure them into as many traps as possible and slow them down, so we have as much time as it takes to get an army of robots and for the lab’s defenses to whittle them down. If you can find a way to take a one-on-one fight, do that. None of us have any experience fighting together and American black hats and Ilderia’s knights do. If a bunch of them trail you, run them into traps...”
“Yes,” said Greenrose. “I’m sure that will be great for you.”
She held out a hand, flexed it. Pointed it at Mercy; the hand was now a nest of thorns. Some of them had grown two feet in under a second.
“What I don’t see,” she said, her voice strained, “is what it has to do with me. Prudence offered me a cure for my powers; now she’s dead, and the only one who knows where the cure is is someone you’re proposing to send to her probable death. If Nicator’s synthetic hellfire can’t stop me, nothing you can do can, either, so either Mercy is going to give me the potion - and the right potion, because I’m pretty good at telling when someone’s lying to me, and she doesn’t need both her arms for this - or I am going to start murdering people.”
“I doubt it,” Catherine said, and Greenrose’s eyes whipped towards her -
“If you lied about killing Livia’s soldiers you’re lying here,” Catherine said. “If you wanted to run off in the past twenty years, you could have done it. You stayed for good reasons.”
“And what were those?”
“Because you want to be a good person. The thirteenth district is the fourth richest. That’s enough to put it ahead of most of the other candidates, and - I don’t mean to offend you by saying this - but if you’re not a tinker or supergenius you have to actually try to make that happen. You care about the city you were born in and you care about the people who live in it. You can call yourself a hero or you can call yourself a patriot or you can call yourself ‘just a decent person’ -”
“None of those things.”
“- you can call yourself whatever you want. I’ll give you Prudence’s potion when the city’s saved, or Mercy can give you it if I die, but you’re doing this because you care. Just because my father talked you into doing evil once in your worst moment doesn’t mean you want to keep doing it for the rest of your life.”
“And replacing Nicator with you would be good for Saint-Andrews,” Greenrose said. “That’s what you want me to think.”
“Do you actually think I approve of the way my father’s been running this country?” Catherine waved a hand in annoyance. “All the problems we’re having right now - all the problems we’ve always been having - are because my dad doesn’t actually care about Novapest. He cares about keeping his old supervillain buddies happy. Being actually successful requires rules that are predictable and consistent and courts that are at least moderately hard to bribe and an independent central bank and a division of power between interest groups who are competent at things other than robbing banks, and appointing people to government positions because they’re honest and know economics, not because they punch people hard, and you need some way of tracking popular opinion because that’s what actually tells you if you screwed up, which means elected officials, you cannot just rely on the immigration rate as sole proxy that is way too lossy. A state doesn’t need two hundred supervillains hanging around, and as we are currently discovering having them here is very bad for the country!”
“Are you serious.” Greenrose’s voice was completely flat.
“Yes, I’m serious! The only reason our rulers are ‘about a hundred supervillains, who occasionally fight wars’ instead of either a clique of smart people or the population at large is because Dad wanted them to be! The entire country is an employment program for Dad’s old friends! You’d think he never even planned for the succession.”
Everyone was staring at her, Greenrose included.
“Yes, I have thought about what I would do if I got absolute power. I just didn’t want it because taking and holding power violates moral norms I respect. But since I need to do it anyway if I want my country to not go to hell, and I don’t need to kill my friends and family to do it, I mean to actually try to do a good job as Queen of Novapest, which is going to involve trying to restore democratic elements to the system so I know what the people are thinking and because my kids, if I eventually have them - courting as Queen of Novapest is going to be so much worse than just doing it as a princess - might be idiots and I’ll need a safety valve for if they are, and that means enough democratic elements so they can’t go all Kaiser Wilhelm on everyone.”
“How long have you been thinking about this?” Mercy asked.
“Since I was six,” Catherine said promptly. “Pointing it out just got me teased. But to hell with that. Nicator is here to do whatever’s needed to take power because... Zero doesn’t want to go to jail? Because people just generally like power? I’m here to take power because someone has to actually make sure the country I grew up in isn’t a disaster. The whole kakocracy around the crown has killed my father, my mother, both my sisters, my godmother, and nearly everyone else I grew up with, and probably tens of thousands of my family’s subjects. Now I’m going to killed it right back.”
“Sure,” said Greenrose, “fine.”
“Great,” Catherine said.
“Right,” said Patience, wiping a hand across her face. “But I’m coming too.”
“You are absolutely not,” said Mercy.
“Look,” said Patience angrily. “Do you have any idea how many stories I’ve read? Do you know what happens when they leave the kid sidekick behind? She gets loose, sneaks after them, and ends up being integral to saving the day. So let’s just skip to me coming with you.”
“... I have no good answer to that,” said Catherine carefully. “Or, more practically, no good way to stop you from following me.”
“All right,” said Mercy. “You’re in. Melissa, do you want to come?”
“No?” she said cautiously. “I did coordination and cameras. I can do that for you, if you have earbuds.”
Mercy pulled six pairs of earbuds out of thin air. “Let’s do this.”
“All right,” said Catherine. “Six for the throne.”
She grinned.
“No more waiting.”