The receptionist in the main office of the Goddamn Applied Sciences Department looked up with the practiced disinterest of someone who was used to seeing people coming and going all day long. The smile froze on her face as she got a good look at me standing there in my Night Terror outfit.

My mouth quirked up in a half smile. I was the only one in the room smiling, but I was used to that.

"Night Terror!" she breathed.

Her hand shot out for the phone but I shot out a localized stasis field that held her hand in place. No pesky phone calls to campus police. Not that it would've done her a damn bit of good if she did manage to get through to those puffed up security guards with a badge.

I leaned over her desk and my half smile turned to a full grin. Time to lay on the old Night Terror charm.

"Someone from this department has been giving away some of my old things, and I don't like that," I said. "And I'm not leaving until I find out who that unlucky soon-to-be vaporized son-of-a-bitch is."

I stood there for a long moment, waiting for the receptionist to realize she was in a whole heap of trouble. Her beehive hairdo seemed to buzz. Like there were actual bees inside the thing.

Then she started twitching. Like we're talking the kind of twitching that was usually reserved for people who were possessed by something from the other side.

Totally a real thing, mind you. I'd seen it happen a few times, for all that the real wizards and witches knew they needed to keep their shit out of my city, thank you very much. It turns out hokey magic and ancient sparkling rings were no match for a good disintegrator at your side.

"Um. Are you okay?" I asked, really starting to get worried as the lady twitched more and more. "Because I've done extensive testing, and if you're being possessed by something then a disintegrator works just as well as a cross and some Holy Water."

The twitching continued as the lady stood. We're talking she stood much higher than she had any business being. She looked down at me, and her eyes started to glow a dull yellow color.

"Okay, maybe a werewolf?" I said, patting at my sides. "I'm gonna be honest. I didn't bring any milk bones. Or anything with silver in it because it's daytime and I wasn't expecting a daywalker when I came in here to threaten everyone, but disintegration works just as well on y'all as it does on everything else so I swear to God if you come howlin' around my kitchen door…"

The buzzing was getting annoyingly loud. And then the reason for the buzzing became very apparent as a blaster snaked out of the woman's head on a telescoping arm and pointed at me.

"Why are you talking about people being possessed and werewolves?" Selena asked in my earbud. "Wait. Are you telling me those things are real?"

"Not the time, hot stuff," I said.

The blaster started to glow at the tip. An ominous hum filled the room. Which was totally something Dr. Lana stole from me. There was nothing better than a good ominous hum to teach someone the error of their ways.

Even if I didn't appreciate it when I was the one being taught the error of my ways.

I threw myself out of the way. That was the problem with calling your attacks. I only used the ominous hum when I was trying to get somebody's attention and send a clear warning. I didn't use it when I was actually going to attack someone.

A beam blasted through where I'd been a moment ago and took out a vinyl couch that looked like it'd been sitting there since the '70s. I rolled and brought my wrist blaster up. Only the robot was twitching again. Like that beam had used all her juice, and now she was recharging.

"Oh, fuck it," I said, and I let loose with a blast.

No ominous hum. I meant business.

She blew to smithereens the moment my blast made contact. There were a few more twitches from the robot receptionist, looking for all the world like a stop motion thing from a movie in the '80s, and then she was silent.

"That's more like it," I said, brushing my front and walking over to the thing.

"Seriously. You need to tell me if werewolves are real, Natalie," Selena said in my ear. "Those things terrified me when I was a kid, and I need to know if that's something I need to worry about."

"What do you mean you need to know if that's something you need to worry about?" I subvocalized, though I figured there was probably something in here that could pick up on what I was saying even if I was subvocalizing. "You're invulnerable. If one of them tried to take a bite out of you? You'd rip their lungs out, not the other way around."

"Seriously. This isn't like the time you tried to convince me vampires are real," she said.

"They are real. They just don't bother people in Starlight City after I figured out how to track them and loaded my drones with directed UV lighting," I said.

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There was a pause on the other end. I smiled as I thought of her sitting there at the big console in my lab trying to figure out if I was bullshitting her or not.

"There are seriously times when I'm not sure if you're messing me or not," she finally said.

I walked over to the robot. I plucked out a glowing blue power cell that looked like someone took a design I created when I was still here at the goddamn Applied Sciences Department and iterated on it in the most stupid way possible.

"And keeping you guessing is part of the fun!" I said. "But seriously. If there was anything supernatural out there in the world you don't need to worry about it. I make sure to keep my city strictly sci-fi."

I frowned as I picked the glowing power cell up and had a good look at it. That glow that was growing in intensity. My frown deepened.

The glow wasn't supposed to intensify. That glow intensifying never meant anything good with the power cells I'd created back in the day. I'd long since solved the issue of them exploding like a Pinto if they got even the smallest bit of rough contact, not the kind of thing you wanted in superscience that was going into battle with heroes, but I'd fixed that design flaw well after I struck out on my own.

Which meant whoever stole this from me didn't steal the safety update. Shit.

"Sci-fi with people who can fly around and have super strength?" Selena asked.

"So I allow things that are genre adjacent to sci-fi in my city," I said.

I had no doubt some of those supernatural things were still lurking out there in the city trying to get around me, but that was fine. I didn't have time to play Van Helsing as long as that shit stayed in the shadows where it belonged.

And I had bigger problems right now.

"Hello, Night Terror," a familiar voice said.

A panel behind the reception desk winked to life, and not only was I hearing a familiar voice. I was also seeing a familiar face sitting there in an outfit that looked like something straight out of some crappy Internet knockoff store's idea of what a supervillain suit should look like.

"Dr. Lana," I said, nodding at her as I glanced nervously at the power cell.

The thing was really starting to glow now. I knew from hard won experience that when they glowed like that it meant they were about to go out in a blaze of glory. And unlike Mr. Bon Jovi, I didn't want to go out with the thing in that blaze of glory.

"I'm sure you're realizing by now that while I've managed to improve on your power cell design considerably, there's still the issue of them blowing up when somebody handles them a little roughly," Dr. Lana said, leaning back in her chair that looked like she got it from the gaming section of a big box retailer.

It seriously looked like the kind of thing you'd expect someone to play World of Warcraft in while they reflected on how empty their life was before they went on a Molten Core raid on a Classic server where they could pretend it was the old days before their college significant other left them for playing a damned game so much they had to drop out.

Not the kind of chair someone would use when they were out there threatening the world and trying to build a supervillain lair.

"You managed to improve it?"

I looked down at the thing again. Sure enough, it'd lasted a lot longer than the power cells used to when they started to degrade. I suppose if you were someone who thought in terms of delaying the degradation rather than stopping it entirely then that looked like a win.

"You really are the worst, you know that, right?" I said.

"I like to think I'm the best," she said. "Especially since I've been taking some of your designs and improving them!"

"Seriously, Natalie," Selena said. "You need my help!"

"I said you could watch the feed and listen in if you promised not to intervene until I needed the help," I said.

"And you need the help," she said.

"I don't," I said.

I held the power cell up. Then I did some calculations and triangulations. It took a little longer than it would've in the days before CORVAC decided to betray me, but I was still able to get a pretty good idea of where Dr. Lana was hiding.

"Who are you talking to?" Dr. Lana asked. "I don't appreciate it when one of my students is talking while I'm delivering a lesson! You should know that."

"I'm not one of your students," I said.

I did some quick thinking. I reversed the polarity of the Anti-Newtonian field I'd come up with specifically to deal with Fialux. Back before I realized the best way to deal with her was to do some heavy making out in the middle of my lab.

Sure it'd almost killed both of us when our sidekicks decided to betray us, but totally worth it.

I put the power cell into the field and fired it off with what I hoped was just the right velocity. Again, the sort of thing CORVAC would've been able to do without bothering his circuits all that much. It was the kind of calculation I could do in my head easily enough, for that matter.

But there was always a margin of error. There was always the possibility the quick scan I'd done of the building was being blocked by something. Dr. Lana had proved to be pretty damn clever so far, after all.

I also hoped she hadn't changed the yield on those things when she updated them. The last thing I wanted was to accidentally blow up more than the empty radius I saw around her in that video feed.

"If you're talking to who I think you're talking to then by all means have her join us," Dr. Lana said, leaning forward and licking her lips in anticipation. "I've wanted to have another chat with her for some time now. I've wanted to pick up our conversation where we left off when…"

She frowned. The wall behind her exploded. Revealing a bright and shiny power cell on the verge of overloading.

I smiled and reversed the polarity on the Anti-Newtonian field again. Amazingly enough, it worked. Even at this distance. It would suck if I went to all the trouble of sending her the defective power cell only for the explosive power to be absorbed by my tech that was so sufficiently advanced it was indistinguishable from the magic those robed assholes I chased out of the city at the business end of a wrist blaster liked to throw around.

"I thought I'd send your power cell back to you," I said. "See if you can figure out how to stop it from going critical. I figured that one out a long time ago. I figure you have about five seconds to do the same."

She turned and glared at me, her eyes narrowing. Like she knew she'd been bested, and there wasn't a chance for her to get out of what was coming.

"Night Terror, I'm going to…"

There was a rumble from somewhere distant in the building. Oddly enough, she'd been up on one of the higher floors. I figured she would've been deep in the tunnel complex that'd been carved out back in the day when the Applied Sciences department got its start with some funding from the Manhattan Project.

I really hoped there was nobody near her. It looked like her villainous lair was isolated from the rest of the building based on that video feed, but if it was on one of the upper floors that wasn't a given. I hoped she wasn't using a custom background that cut out, say, a lab full of students behind her.

Oops.

Still. There was no more signal. I figured not even Dr. Lana could survive something like that. So naturally I expected her to show up and continue our fight at any moment.

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