— Hello
I said it to my audience.
Apparently I was interrupting something. I think.
— And who the fuck are you?!
The brother — I assumed brother, or cousin, or clone, or whatever the taxonomic relationship was between the guy I'd landed on and the identical blue guy currently pointing what I could only describe as a minigun directly at my face — was not pleased to see me.
Rude.
I stepped off the unconscious one. He was out cold. Completely. Didn't even twitch. I looked down at him for a second with the mild guilt of someone who had knocked over a stranger's coffee — unfortunate, accidental, not entirely my fault.
— My name is Ric—...
Cough
— My name is Mr. Perfect Cell. Pleasure to meet you.
I moved toward him with my hand extended, perfectly cordial, the picture of diplomatic good faith.
The entire garden tensed simultaneously. I could feel it — every person in a costume shifting their weight, recalculating. I kept walking.
Before I got close enough to shake his hand, he looked directly into my face. Whatever he saw there — and I imagine what he saw there was not particularly reassuring — made something behind his eyes go very flat and very cold.
He pressed the gun closer.
— I don't give a damn about a dead man's name.
He pulled the trigger.
I heard someone shout no — a woman, somewhere to my left, the distinctive clang of armor moving fast — and caught a blur of red trying to reach me in time.
They were too slow.
The gun opened up.
Pow pow pow pow pow pow pow pow pow—
Energy rounds. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. They hit my chest, my face, my arms, in a continuous stream that would have reduced a car to component parts in about four seconds.
Hm.
I stood there.
The rounds hit and — nothing. Not pain. Not impact. Not even the suggestion of impact. It was like standing in a light breeze that had opinions about me. The energy splashed off my carapace and ricocheted outward in all directions, sparking off the lawn, pinging off the APCs parked at the perimeter.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught a red blur — fast, genuinely fast, the kind of fast that makes your eyes hurt — sprinting along the perimeter and pulling guards away from where the ricochets were landing.
Was that The Flash?
The blue guy kept shooting. And kept shooting. And kept shooting, with the increasingly desperate energy of someone who was cognitively refusing to accept information his eyes were actively providing him. Then he stopped. Looked at the gun. Looked at me.
Threw the gun away.
— Son of a bitch — he said, and came at me.
Full sprint. He was bigger than me — broader, built like someone had stacked two refrigerators on top of each other and given them a grudge — and he hit fast for his size.
I dropped into a boxing stance.
Come on then. I'm Mr. Perfect Cell. Let's see what you've—
Something hit him from the side like a freight train.
The woman in armor — discount Wonder Woman, the one who'd tried to reach me earlier — connected with a mace swing that had absolutely no chill whatsoever. The blue guy left the ground. He traveled a considerable distance through the air and introduced himself to one of the APCs at the garden's edge, denting it backward several feet on impact.
I lowered my fists slowly.
Then a shadow fell over me.
A man landed nearby with the easy weight of someone accustomed to arriving dramatically. Tall. Broad. The kind of jawline that belonged on a monument. He looked, I realized, almost exactly like Abraham Lincoln — if Abraham Lincoln had spent the intervening centuries doing nothing but lifting heavy things and being disappointed in people.
Jacked Lincoln, I decided immediately.
He didn't look at me. He looked at the battle.
— War Woman, Dark Wing — he said, in the voice of someone who gave orders the way other people exhale. — Handle the Mauler Twin.
Mauler Twin. So that was what I'd landed on. I had been prepared to call him Blue Dr. Hulk for the rest of my life, but fine.
Jacked Lincoln finally turned to me.
— The rest of you. With me.
The woman in green spandex, a large-headed alien, and a bipedal fish all turned and settled into combat stances, forming a loose semicircle. Pointed at me.
— Identify yourself, creature, and state your intentions.
I raised both hands, palms out.
— Easy there, Jacked Lincoln. I don't want any trouble. I'm just lost.
A pause.
— ...What did you just call me?
I couldn't tell if he was offended or genuinely confused. Possibly both. I filed that under deal with later.
The woman in green spandex stepped forward slightly, her voice measured, careful.
— Immortal. He hasn't actually done anything hostile yet. Shouldn't we try to de-escalate?
I pointed at her.
— Thank you, Hot Spandex Lady.
She looked immediately uncomfortable.
— Sorry. My bad.
The moment stretched. Jacked Lincoln — Immortal, apparently — looked at me with the expression of a man running calculations he didn't like the results of. I looked back at him pleasantly. Behind us all, the sound of the other fight continued: impacts, shouting, the particular noise of very strong things hitting other very strong things.
Then Dark Wing arrived from that direction. Horizontally. At speed.
He hit the iron fence with a sound like a car crash, crumpled against it, slid down. Stood up. Wiped blood from the corner of his mouth with the practiced composure of someone this had happened to before. Stepped onto a hover board that descended behind him and turned back toward the fight.
I watched him go.
That looked like it hurt.
Immortal made a decision. I could see it happen — the subtle shift in posture, the reluctant reprioritization. The Mauler Twin who'd been unconscious in the crater was stirring, pulling himself upright. The Guardians moved. The fight reconvened and organized itself around me like a river splitting around a rock.
---
I'll be honest — I had no idea what Invincible was, but the more I watched, the more I became convinced it was some kind of DC parody that nobody had told me about.
You had your Superman analog — Jacked Lincoln, excuse me, Immortal — leading the charge with the humorless authority of a man who had never once in his life been told to calm down.
You had your Wonder Woman, swinging that mace with a commitment that was almost artistic.
Dark Wing was clearly the budget Batman, hovering around on his little Hoverboard and doing Batman things with Batman energy.
Green spandex lady was probably a Green Lantern or some shit.
The alien was Martian Manhunter and the fish was self-explanatory.
They were good. Genuinely — watching them move together had the cohesion of people who'd done this long enough that they'd stopped thinking about it. The Mauler Twins were massive and brutal and clearly not amateurs, and the 'Justice League' were handling them.
Mostly.
One of the Twins — I'd lost track of which was which, honestly — had pulled War Woman into a grapple that had her attention fully occupied. The other one, the one I'd cratered, had spotted the opening. He was moving. Not toward the fight. Toward the building.
Toward the White House.
I looked at the building. Looked at the Twin.
I sighed.
Fine.
I didn't think about it too hard. That was my mistake — every disaster I'd had so far today had started with not thinking about it hard enough, and here I was, not learning. I just looked at the distance between me and the Mauler Twin and thought I should probably intercept that and started running.
The problem with Cell's body — and this is something the anime never really prepared me for — is that the power isn't distributed the way human intuition expects. When I pushed off the ground I wasn't running. I was launching. My legs didn't carry me across the garden so much as they briefly interacted with it on my way to becoming a projectile.
I crossed the distance in approximately no time.
The Mauler Twin heard me coming — to his credit, his reaction time was genuinely impressive — and started to turn.
We met in the middle.
The impact was not elegant. There was no technique. It was just me, moving at a velocity I hadn't intended, hitting a very large blue man with every pound of Cell's dense biomechanical frame. The sound it made was enormous. We went through the garden fence like it was a suggestion, out onto the street, through a parked car — sorry— and then, because physics is persistent, through the front window of the establishment at the end of the block.
Glass. Tables. Chairs. The specific smell of espresso and floor wax. A barista somewhere behind the counter making a noise that was less a scream and more a pure expression of surprise.
We came to rest in what had been, until recently, the interior of a coffee shop.
I sat up slowly. Blinked. Looked around.
Exposed brick walls. Chalkboard menus. Little succulents on the windowsills that had somehow survived.
The Mauler Twin was not moving. He was on his back in a pile of destroyed furniture, and he had the look of someone who would be having a headache later, in the future, after he regained consciousness.
Okay, I thought. Durability and speed confirmed.
I stood up. Brushed a coffee cup off my shoulder. Stepped through the hole we'd made in the front wall and back onto the street, squinting slightly in the afternoon light.
I looked up.
White and red. A cape. A symbol — a bold, clean O on the chest, the kind of insignia that meant something to someone.
He was hovering maybe thirty feet above me, looking down with an expression I couldn't fully read at this distance but that contained, I was fairly certain, a significant quantity of concern.
I looked back up at him.
He looked back down at me.
— J. JONAH JAMESON?!—