Chapter Five – Predictable

The heroes were, for the most part, predictable.

He hadn’t always seen it. Not before he had his powers, when he watched TV and saw all the propaganda about how being a nice person was good and all the movies where the good guys always won.

No, back then he wasn’t able to see the wider picture. It wasn’t until some time after he gained his powers and was part of some gangs for a while that he started to notice things.

This one guy, in the first gang he joined, was an absolute lunatic. Obsessed with conspiracy theories and the like, and while Kevin was pretty sure that there wasn’t anything in the milk that reduced a person’s chance of gaining powers, he did listen to the guy sometimes, and sometimes he was right.

As time went on, he started to notice a pattern.

Heroes always followed the same predictable moveset.

In this case, the moves they’d make were so easy to predict that they were probably lifted right out of a textbook.

He shook his head as he watched the TV bolted to the wall. He was staying in a motel on the edge of the city. Just a temporary spot for now. He didn’t exactly have a ton of money to burn on nice accommodations. At least, not yet.

That was going to change soon.

On the TV, the leader of the local HRF, some thin, tall woman with greying hair and a mean look to her, was telling a gaggle of reporters the usual platitudes. The HRF was on the case. The villain would be caught soon. No one had to worry about anything. Blah-blah.

He could have muted it and still understood the whole thing.

Point was, they were trying to reassure people, and that meant that they were playing things by the book.

He noticed that the camera often panned to the right where three heroes stood. He only recognized one of them. Silver Fox. The same guy whose masked face was on Kevin’s shampoo bottles.

Small world, he thought. Just a day or two ago he was beating up the guy’s apprentice at the HRF headquarters for the city.

Oh well. He got up off of the motel bed, finished his lunch with a couple of bites–he was eating microwavable meat pockets, with the edges on fire and the centre somehow still cold–and then got dressed.

He was going to head out in-costume again, though he’d wait to put his mask on until he was closer to his objective. He left the room with the TV still going, the news milking the local event for all it was worth.

Charlotte was waiting for him outside, the bench a little wet from a bit of early evening rain that had just started to calm down. He sat down, kicked up the jiffy stand, then took off.

The heroes, if they followed their playbook–which they would–were all going to be at that press conference. They were probably hoping that he’d move while they were there, maybe attack the gathering.

Which would be stupid.

So he was going to hit something else.

Not too far from the end of the city where he was was a small bank. It was the only branch, in all of Eauclair, of a major nation-wide chain. There were plenty of other banks with plenty of other locations, but for this one bank, this was it when it came to this little nowhere city.

Kevin drove past the bank and eyed its front. It had clearly not always been a bank, having at one time been someone’s home before it had been converted and modernised. It was made of locally sourced bricks, and looked perfectly boring on the corner of a busy intersection next to a road filled with restaurants and little shops.

He parked Charlotte in an alleyway a little ways down, one where he couldn’t see any cameras. Then he put his helmet on and pulled his trusty baseball bat out of Charlotte’s back and thumped it against his palm a couple of times. Yeah, he’d need a new one, the bat had a small kink in the middle. It didn’t resonate as well when he struck stuff with it.

Well, it’d be usable for this job, he figured, so that’s all that mattered.

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Fixing his mask on, Rattles headed to the bank.

Not the front, obviously. He wouldn’t mind taking on the cops and the HRF and even the local heroes again, but not in such an open space. That would be stupid when they knew what to expect.

Nah, he walked up to the back of the bank building and looked up at the undecorated rear wall. He looked up at a camera and winked at it, then, putting his full body into the swing, he smashed his bat into the wall like a striker aiming for a home run.

The vibration rattled his teeth until he bit down on it and pushed against the tremors. They rammed into the wall, and he saw a ripple cascade across the bricks as if they were no more than water.

Of course, bricks weren’t designed to ripple at the best of times.

Mortar came spitting out from between the brickwork and he stepped back as bits of masonry came crashing down around him. The wall now had a large circle crushed into it, the centre no bigger than a quarter, but it spread out until it hit the edges of the wall with fewer and fewer cracks as it went.

He judged it to be a decent hit. So he struck the wall again, then again, each smack of his bat accompanied by more cracked and snaps as the entire brickwork came apart. The moment a few bricks broke completely, the rest came crashing down all in one go.

He stepped out of the way, letting them pile up at his feet. When the dust cleared, he found himself looking at a chubby woman staring back at him with wide eyes and a phone in hand. She was crouching next to her desk. “Yo,” he said.

She whimpered and pressed herself further back. He shrugged. Most of the time people ran, but whatever. He walked over the pile of bricks and into the bank proper. Or at least its rear section.

Already, he could see secretaries and bankers and… other office workers, cowering. He was actually kind of impressed by how quickly they all ran to hide; usually he had to threaten them a little.

Twirling his bat around, Rattles headed for the front where the vault was located. It would be a simple matter of vibrating the front door until its locking mechanism gave out. And if that didn’t work, then he could probably crack the metal of the door the same way he’d destroyed the wall. Though thick steel would take considerably longer to break through that a few old bricks.

“And who might you be?”

He stopped, then turned around to stare at a man standing on the counter at the front of the bank.

A man in a costume. He was dressed like someone out of a ren-faire, with a poofy shirt and tight pants, his face covered by a cloth mask. He was also holding onto a long, narrow sword. A rapier?

“Are you a hero?” Rattles asked. His grip tightened on the handle of his bat.

“… I was in the middle of robbing the place, so no, I daresay I’m not a hero at all.”

Rattles blinked. “Really?”

“The actual heroes are busy on the far end of the city, so yes.”

“Right, same reason I came,” he said with a gesture over his shoulder towards the hole in the wall. “Well, this makes things awkward.”

“Nonsense,” the man said. “I am Fabien the Fabulous. Swordsman extraordinaire and Eauclaire’s greatest bandit. You must be Rattles. The nefarious villain who has recently fought the heroes at their own base.”

Rattles grinned, then bowed back to Fabien. This guy was putting on a show, and he could appreciate that. “Well met, Fabien. Now, how do you want to do this? We fight over the winnings?”

Fabien stared at him for a long moment. “No. Let us, instead, split them equally between us. Do you have a way into the vault?”

“I do,” Rattles said.

“Well, I have a way into the registers.”

Rattles nodded. He would trust this guy as far as he could throw him. But something told him this Fabien was a new villain on the scene, and Rattles liked his chances if it came down to a fight. Besides, it would be nice to make a few new friends in a new city.

“I like the way you think, Fabien. Come on, that money ain’t gonna rob itself.”

***

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