“Hello everyone, thank you for taking the time to care about this uh… I guess it’s a press conference? You guys don’t really know me… at least… you don’t really know who I am when I look like this. Add some muscle… throw on a purple and gold costume, slick back my hair… add two other heroes to go with Calypso standing next to me… might be a bit easier to recognize me then…”

  There were murmurs that went across the crowd as realization clicked in. What had initially been maybe mild curiosity at best had turned to full on interest. Cameras were raised, phones held out, and more than a few people were ready to ask questions.

  “Please, if you’ll hold all questions until the end, I promise I’ll answer every single one of them with the one thing I should have used from the beginning of all of this: honesty and transparency. I’ve learned that telling all this is best if I just get through it, because I promise questions will only raise more of them and some things will get answered… I can’t promise my answers will satisfy you. I can’t promise that my answers will make sense. But I can promise that every bit of what I’m about to tell you is true to the best of my knowledge.”

  “My name is Christopher Kirkman and for the last ten years, the world has known me as The First. That name was one I took because, much like people commonly believed, I was the first Augment. That’s not because of some random chance… er… actually… sorry scratch that… Technically speaking, most of what led up to me getting Augmented was random chance…” Christopher stumbled over his words slightly. “Sorry… let me start from the beginning…”

  “A little over twelve years ago, I, along with a few friends, were trying to develop an online roleplaying game based completely on super powers…”

  *****

  Andrew was tapping a pencil on the desk, moving a hand through the air as a new blueprint started to form in front of his eyes. While Barracuda had proven altogether unsuccessful in his attempts, there were still more than enough ways that Andrew could still worm his way in now that he knew for sure where Mr. Factory was hiding away. The giant Pangolin was certainly going to pose a problem, but he’d dealt with annoyances like that before. It was only a matter of time before he had Mr. Factory’s printing capabilities under his control once more.

  There was an alert that came in on one of his monitors, though Andrew didn’t bother to look over at it. Ever since the newest Wave had entered their second phase, the department he led had been constantly busy reacting to the chaos that had been getting unleashed and frankly speaking, he was getting a little annoyed by hearing the little ding every few minutes.

  Pulling both Frigid Air and Gas Giant out of hibernation had worked out well so far. More field officers were being deployed, and the cloned versions of the two Augments using the research gained off of testing on SnakeBite were proving that it was possible to make small armies of Augments with a specifically chosen powerset.

  The only part of it that was really aggravating Andrew was that his and Curdle’s research only seemed to work on living subjects and ones that were actively… well… living. They’d tried on subjects still in cryostasis and even those that were, let’s just say recently deceased, but without a living, breathing subject, the powerset serums simply didn’t work on the Vat-Borns. And then there was the… self-destruct feature.

  Another alert came through his monitor and Andrew reached over, searching for the volume button. He really didn’t have time for this when he still had to analyze why every single Vat-Born injected with one of the powerset serums decided to die the moment they even were KOed. He’d never be able to convince the Defense Department to start relying on his forces if they were so easily destroyed and there were only so many employees with no family that he could… convince… to be test subjects.

  There was a rapid knock on the door to his lab and Andrew’s head popped up, now officially a bit annoyed. Everybody in the office knew that from ten in the morning to two in the afternoon he was not to be disturbed. Whoever was on the other side of the door wasn’t letting up, the knocking coming quicker until Andrew finally got to his feet and walked over.

  “What is so damn important that you’re interrupting my–”

  “Sir, is it true?” the younger man, an intern named…. Andrew wanted to say… Harry? Regardless, whoever this idiot was was looking up at him with a mixture of shock and… wait was that disgust?

  “I’m sorry, do I look like I can read minds? Is what true?”

  “The– it’s– the news sir? I thought you had a– oh, I see your screen is off,” Harry said, practically shaking as he looked into the dark workshop.

  Andrew smashed his teeth together as he pushed past the intern, pulling the door shut behind him as he marched up the hallway toward the main monitoring room. What in the ever loving hell could be so damn important that an intern would have the nerve to actually interrupt him? At this point, he had to know before he decided if Harry would get the privilege of being the next serum test subject. Unless the Array itself was falling, Andrew couldn’t imagine a single thing that could–

  There was a familiar face standing with dozens of microphones held toward him… and that face was completely unmasked.

  *****

  “And that made up the core team of people that would work on the project for those first two years. While I was the first one to actually test out the process, something I do realize was idiotic and reckless, it was that very department head from the NSA that took the leap next…”

  “Andrew always had his own goals… ones that he kept from me and I naively believed I’d be able to stand in the way of, even without the full picture. This too is a way I’ve failed. Calypso here… one of the few people who constantly tried to steer me on the right path, has investigated and watched Andrew for the last decade as he consolidated his power under the guise of research for the government. As TechWarden, Andrew tricked multiple new Augments into trusting him… only to kidnap, torture, and experiment on them against their wills. I believe he is still doing this now and is working to create a version of the Augmentations that he alone controls.”

  The longer that Christopher talked, the more people seemed to be listening. It wasn’t just idle curiosity holding onto them any longer and it was clear that the audience was listening to his every word on bated breath.

  “This is in no way me trying to deflect your attention. Every death… every person’s life that has been ruined in the last decade because of Augments… is on me. Regardless of who else joined me…I’m the one who opened Pandora’s box. I set rules in place to keep the game a secret all because I was afraid of the repercussions of my actions. That’s not what a hero does. If I want to even live up to an ounce of what I hoped to accomplish as The First… that starts with doing the right thing here… and now.”

  “Shouldn’t you have done that from the start!?” one reporter yelled out the moment Christopher seemed like he was going to let the silence linger for a moment too long.

  “Yeah what changed? Why are we only learning about this now?!” another yelled once the flood gates seemed to be open.

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  “Are you seriously telling us everyone with super powers is playing a GAME?! Is literally no one else focusing on that part?!”

  Christopher held up his hands, hoping to quell the rising shouts of questions. While a few people did listen, the most belligerent of the onlookers continued to press. Christopher shot a hopeful look over at Calypso, though he was hesitant to have her use her abilities to calm them, it was an option. Still… using powers to control others would only lead to mistrust… and that wasn’t something Christopher wanted to do.

  “Please, please, I’ll answer your questions but I can’t do it if you shout over each other,” Christopher said, waiting for the noise to quell. It took a few moments, and the murmuring didn’t fully die off, but it quieted down enough that he didn’t have to worry about having to repeat himself. “Let me back things up one more time. There’s just a bit more that I need to tell you all… because it’s important for you to know how one action acted like a domino to get us here… and it took less than three weeks.”

  *****

  Phones were ringing in every corner of the room and Andrew could even see the phone icon in his display shaking with one of the few numbers he had attached to his internal system.

  What in the ever loving hell had he missed this morning? First those damn meddling kids stole Barracuda out from under his nose, not that the illiterate Augment had really been of use to him just yet, and now apparently Christopher was revealing… he was…

  Andrew’s chest felt tight as he stared at the man who had stood in his way all these years. Regardless of the fact that they never actually clashed in a true fight, Andrew really did see Christopher as the one standing in the way of a brighter future. Had the man just stepped aside from the beginning, Andrew would have never had to work under the cloak of secrecy for so long.

  “Sir… your phone, Director Gilbert is attempting to contact you. Are… Are you actually an Augment?” Harry asked, having stepped up next to him while he was distracted.

  Andrew’s eyes darted from the television screen with Christopher continuing on about quite literally everything that had happened, back to the young intern who was holding out a phone and slightly shaking.

  The boy was scared… that had potential. Andrew looked around the room, his gaze sweeping over all of the workers who were starting to look at him with caution and it was all because Christopher had just told the world that he was Augmented. Something that he had very purposefully hidden from the world while he rose to his position of power.

  Mentally, he felt for his powers, thankful the main building was under a Null Zone that only prevented Axio from connecting. The building had more than a few defenses that he had very purposefully had built into the place. Ostensibly, the defenses had been built as a precaution in case one of the Augments that they had captured for containment broke free. But in reality, they were for so much more than that.

  While Andrew’s powerset wasn’t the most offensive, his Adaptive Engineering gave him a host of abilities, least of which was his ability to interface with any piece of equipment he left one of the hundreds of Engineering Nodes his power was able to produce and maintain at a given time. They might have had to be a bit closer to him than he would have preferred, but it still meant he wasn’t defenseless. Which also meant he had a way to show force.

  For years he had wanted to be able to tell people about just what was going on. He could radicalize the most fervent of the lessers obsessed with Augments and recruit from a far, far wider pool. He just had to make a move now while uncertainty was still holding a grip on the room… he had to turn the people in the room around him from employees… to followers. One of his hands flexed as he felt for the nearest of the defenses as he sized up the room.

  “Well… I suppose the mask is off,” Andrew said, spreading his hand out as several of the defenses sprung out of the walls, guns swiveling rapidly as they kicked on. “Yes, it’s true, I’m an Augment, one of the smartest in the world even and you’ve all helped me progress our research greatly over the last–”

  There was a click that echoed in the room causing Andrew to stop midsentence as he lost his rhythm and looked for the source, ready to make an example to instill just a bit of fear into the room if he needed to. To his surprise, Harry– the young, shaking intern– was holding a gun up, leveled directly at Andrew’s head without an ounce of hesitation and his hand completely steady.

  “You should have just taken the phone call Andrew, it would have made things much easier.”

  “Oh I was hoping for an example,” Andrew said, several of the guns swiveling to point right back at Harry. “I’m not sure who you think you are and I do admire the sheer audacity, but you’ve really chosen the wrong moment to think you need to play the hero. I was asked if I was an Augment and I’m showing that I am.”

  “By leveling weapons at everyone here,” Harry replied, refusing to lower his weapon even as several large turrets pointed in his direction. His thumb noticeably moved back to the hammer of the gun, a revolver of all things now that Andrew actually took a moment to look at it. “You’ve been lying to everyone and-”

  A single shot was fired from the turret, followed by several sudden screams of panic coming from around the room that immediately stopped as turrets swiveled back around the room, abruptly cutting off the panic as several people covered their mouths in an attempt to hide their fear.

  “Well this is really not going how I wanted it to, is it?” Andrew said, reaching up to pinch at the bridge of his nose.

  “No, it really isn’t.”

  Andrew jumped, actually taken by surprise as Harry started to stand back up. In the blink of an eye, there were six more Harrys all leveling matching revolvers surrounding him, the large bullet hole where the turret had hit him vanishing as if it had never even hit him. Andrew’s head swiveled quickly, trying to take in the cloned forms as he tried to let his vision highlight the man to figure out who the hell he was, except every one of the clones he highlighted returned a jumbled name, with the level hopping wildly from Level 1 all the way up to Level 150 sporadically.

  While this might have been a problem for other people, Andrew knew of only one Augment with a Hidden Power that could have caused that and he grit his teeth in frustration.

  “And here I thought you were on the other side of the planet Alice,” he spat and all of the Harrys smiled at the same time. When he finally talked, his voice came out far more feminine, and seemingly from all around Andrew.

  “For what it’s worth, you just earned me a pay raise. I told Director Gilbert that you'd panic the moment you thought you were going to lose control and, well, look at where we are,” the voice said tauntingly before the forms all shimmered, a rainbow of light passing over several of them before a single one of the identical forms morphed. In one of the Harry’s place stood a lithe black woman with her hair pulled into twin pom-poms atop her head. Behind a thin black mask, the irises of her eyes spun with a rainbow of light and she wore a vibrant opalescent lipstick that shimmered and changed colors as light bounced off of it. While Andrew certainly could have lashed out and tried to attack, he’d be a fool to believe an illusionist as powerful as Colorful would simply show where she really was. “Now, you have exactly two options as I see it.”

  “Oh really?” Andrew asked, hesitating to make a move as he tried to piece together where Alice could be hiding if she wasn’t in place of one of the clones. If he could puzzle that out, then he’d be in the clear. He just had to keep her talking. Andrew had no idea how long Alice had been spying on him, but the fact that she was already in place before this happened… no, there was a piece of information that he was missing, he knew it. “And what, pray tell, are those two options. I’d love to see if I disagree that those are the only options available to me.”

  “Well, Christopher there did us such a great favor by implicating you as the driving force for all of this and that really is the crux of the issue as I see it. Now, Director Gilbert was more than happy to leave you be for as long as I continued to ensure that you were making progress on your research. It would have been beyond valuable to us if you and Curdle were actually able to be successful,” Alice explained, practically purring.

  “But see, your impulsivity here… that’s a liability. You make dumb, rash moves like a rat backed into a corner– with surprisingly little push by the way– and that’s going to cause problems for us. So…. you can either shut your mouth and do as you're told like a good little Augment, realize that all of this… the sudden reveal and all, is nothing more than politics and continue your research for us… or you could be the scapegoat that we throw to the wolves. It's really that simple.”

  The horde of employees not involved were all watching carefully, several having even crouched to hide behind their desks to watch. Any possible momentum he could have made had been lost, that much was clear and Andrew knew he’d be a fool to try and make a move now. Alice had called it out perfectly. The smallest provocation had caused him to panic and while he might have been able to work his way out of that situation under normal circumstances… well… this was far from normal circumstances.

  “Well TechWarden?” Alice asked, watching Andrew like a cat watched its prey. “What’s it going to be?”