Gecko 2.0 2

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I was a little curious to hear what the internet was saying about this fake Gecko. It’s not the first time a fake has popped up. This one keeps showing up to hit targets like protests or stealing the money from a bail fund. Not the sort of things I’d do nowadays, but definitely the kind of stuff that’s in my past back when I was a dog on a government leash.

The civilian internet was a mess, as usual. Some of the right-wing conspiracy sites simultaneously believed I was an agent of the evil Deep State and a patriot fighting a global pedophile cabal. Which reminds me, it’s been a bit since I punched a bishop. But since there wasn’t any porn, there wasn’t much reason for me to pay attention to that part of the internet. I was once again seeking the validation of my peers in the villain community

Top post, they were selling porn. I thought maybe stolen celebrity selfies and sex videos. Instead, someone’s claiming a team of villains broke into a vault in Fort Knox and found the United States Secret Stash. The Porn of the United States. There’s some very tasteful Jackie O on Marilyn Monroe in there, they claim. Sounds a little bit ghoulish to me, but then these are the same people who claim to have Benjamin Franklin’s old nude engravings of French women. Thomas Jefferson’s personal library became the Library of Congress. Ben Franklin’s got shoved under the bed and jacked off to.

VillaiNet is much like the regular internet. People were selling dick pills that fell off the back of a trucks or haunted Native American artifacts and jewelry. I thought that one might be a bit insensitive, but it’s a Native American villain selling them. Anyway, I wasn’t the main topic of consideration, which is biased against me and my ego. They had a little bit there about the “Return of Gecko?” Most of the other villains don’t buy that it’s me. Wish I could say it’s because of my actions, but the most popular evidence against the fake being me was the fake’s throwback armor. They don’t even know just how far beyond simple armor I’ve gone.

I decided to distribute some more robotic armors. Spare bodies require more maintenance. You have to wake them up, move them around so they don’t get bed sores, make sure they eat and shit, all that. The robot armors, formerly known as Dudebots, lack versatility but also lack the capacity to die if you neglect them for a few weeks. Think Super Roombas versus brainless cat my mind inhabits from time to time. Er, quite a bit of the time. Those people who stole the secret porn stash better stay away from those videos of me as a catgirl dancing to the musical Cats.

I’ve been tracking the fake and trying to plant robotic armors in major cities that the fake has appeared in or might appear in. Los Angeles, Empyreal City, and Washington D.C. Were top of the queue. The one on the way to L.A. Didn’t get there before the Fake put in appearance there.

Fake Gecko attacked some old summer camp outside of town, which seemed like a fun game to me. I always favored the victim density of cities. That’s just one of many advantages cities offer to rural locations, but I still enjoy the idea of stalking people at a summer camp and murdering them one by one.

The report came in from locals, but it took awhile to reach a threshold that anyone directed the info to the Federal level. I can’t pay attention to every Johnny Law out there, and I can’t see what I’m not looking at. Spread myself too thin and it hurts my head. Only so much mind to go around. And never enough where I need it. Cameras nearby showed Fake Gecko running out of a cabin and diving into a helicopter that rose and cloaked.

Of all the bits of my technology to trickle down, the American military has cloak capacity. That was my first thought. Then the cabin exploded and gave me something new to think about. The cabin exploded in a brilliant red light. An adult man in casual clothes ran up, raising his hands toward the light, containing it to the perimeter of the cabin’s remains. A young girl joined him and made a similar gesture that reduced forced the light into a smaller space, above some device. Then another group ran up, including a person in a bunny mask and a figure in a flowing robe. The robed person conjured up a staff and did some theatrical gestures. Then light they held back was directed upward, disappearing into fireworks.

Zooming back some, I saw there were a few other campers, some who didn’t look like baseline humans. Extra limbs, flying, either some weird clothes or weird bulk.

I became interested in the target and found it going back to an LLC that sounded boring but was the same as a business that maintained the Master Academy campuses. These were displaced supers from the destruction of the Master Academy’s original campus that was, uh, my fault. Kinda. I was possessed by a godlike extradimensional being at the time. Casualties were inevitable. Flying around, carving up a campus full of young supers learning to control their powers and make responsible decisions… it could happen to anyone.

Yeah… so… I didn’t quite bring it up with Medusa right away because of that. If anything, it really made me wonder just how much Medusa had a thing for bad girls.

Judging my ex aside, I’m going to wake up to an entire factory full of chickens home to roost. Anyway, that bunny mask reminded me of another alternate Earth I’d been to, one that didn’t have me in it. Maybe this was this Earth’s version.

With all that, the robot armor I sent was just not close enough in time to do anything

Not enough eyes, not enough mind, not close enough. For all my power, I am still beholden to physics. No, not just physics. Geography!

I knew where the nearest military bases were, though. Geography, bitches. And physics, since I knew whatever system they were using to cloak an entire helicopter would be eating into their primitive power systems. Once again, it strained the mind to keep an eye on the nearest two I felt it could reach in time while also sweeping the airspace between them. I just couldn’t brain enough. It was mentally exhausting. Closed my eyes for a minute and then exciting things happened.

The base I had left off staring at was the absolute closest to the camp. The guards were scrambling to alert everyone and man defenses because of a group of kids and teens out front using their powers. You know how it is, presenting their powers to look intimidating, throwing a car or two, maybe freezing a gate and then smashing it open. The army rode deep, with some bigass guns. The kids tried charging the base and the guns opened up.

A big guy tried to take some of the hits, but he tried to cover his face and ended up kneeling after a pretty tough hit to his groin. Another kid ended up gutshot. Others hid behind one of the cars the big guy had shoved around to look strong.

Meanwhile, at the other base, a familiar helicopter materialized overhead and landed. My robot armor was minutes a couple of minutes from either one, depending on how I adjusted its trajectory. If Fake Gecko got away, he’d kill more than some small group of kids. If he was getting away. For all I know he thought he was in the clear and had no reason to flee.

Damn Medusa and everyone else who had a hand in giving me a conscience, thinking about the choice I made. I didn’t want to.

I watched as a group of soldiers approached, moving into positions, one with grenade launcher. Covering fire kept the heads of the young heroes down. The big guy, meanwhile, had folded his body around the wounded kid, shaking as a grenade rolled to a stop next to him and blew up. It shredded his clothes and left his skin red and raw.

Then the explosion overhead drew the soldiers’ attention. The being falling out of the sky was grey and yellow, slowed only by glittering liquid-metal wings. The wings pulled in as it closed to the ground and knocked the grenade launcher out of his hands. A shriek ripped through the soldiers’ radios as the armor stood up, paralyzing all of them and flopping them against the ground. A similar paralyzing scream struck the other base, where Fake Gecko was, but didn’t stop the Fake or hardly anyone else.

Back in the armor, I ran for the kids. “Bigness, get up.”

The big guy looked around and raised a hand to hit me. I slid underneath and to the wounded girl. I lifted her up, the nanomachines wrapping around her wound. “Easy. This is going to hurt doing it this way, but you don’t want to be here when these guys wake up.”

“Let go of her!” her protector yelled.

The others were all peeking from behind their cover. Someone stood up with a ball of frost in hand. The girl in my arms screamed, but I let her loose and set her free now that her wound was closed. The large fellow chasing me went for a clothesline at the back of my head. I disappeared and he stumbled to a stop when all he hit was air. He looked funny when I lifted him up overhead and tossed him in the back of somebody’s civilian truck parked near the entrance.

“Go!” I said as I reappeared, waving them to the truck.

Behind me, someone pulled himself into a prone shooting position. I turned and got him right in the face with a blinding grenade. I formed the nanites into a horn on my head with the laser mechanism inside. I probably should have just melted the tires, but I blasted the engines of every humvee I could see like a majestic laser unicorn of destruction. Note to self: start a band named “Majestic Laser Unicorn of Destruction.”

The kids finally got the hint while I was doing this. Big fella climbed down out of the truck and gathered up with the rest of them. Then one of them stretched an arm out fantastically long and wrapped it around my waist. I stopped firing my laser when I got tugged off my feet and toward their little circle that shot out of there. We raced out of there. It was less voluntary in my case, being dragged through the air behind the group.

We stopped at a fast food place off the interstate. Or I stopped. I turned to see what was up and they were gone with a Road Runner-esque puff of smoke drifting through the air behind them. A note drifted through the air in messy writing. “Thanks for patching me up, but we don’t know you.”

Well, ok. I cloaked and checked out the other base, the one where all the choppers, cars, APCs, and hummers were fleeing from. Better yet, they had their radios turned off or something, because that paralytic scream did nothing!

Congratulations, you little shitbirds, you cost me a chance to kill the Fake. Eat shit and live.

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