Mist of Shadows
patreon
Myst in DC part 23
🕑 Added 2019-09-27 19:23:26 +0000 UTC
Cyborg glanced over the group of heroes and magic users gathered in Megan’s ship as Myst handed out chocolate bars, he was disappointed that the duplicated Kryptonians and Starfires didn’t have enough of a solar charge to risk getting into a fight but Starfire, Connor, Karen and Kara should be more than enough heavy hitters without even taking into account the dozen Megans that had been added, apparently she was quite popular. He looked over at Harry and Zatanna. “And you’re sure you can hide the ship?”
“Easily,” Harry assured him after finishing a bite of chocolate.
Kara glanced at Karen then looked at Cyborg. “At which point we can haul the ship somewhere else.”
“I can feel the people on the island,” Megan spoke up as the island came into view on the horizon, her range bolstered by the additional selves.
“Can you sense the prisoners?” Myst asked then blinked as he got a vision of a Reach scarab warrior trying to kill Connor and doing a pretty decent job. “Shit, we’ve got an asshole down there with Reach combat armor that is going to try to kill Connor.”
Connor finished his chocolate bar. “How strong are they?”
“Strong enough that we’re going to have to be really careful,” Myst complained as he pulled the magazine of spells out of his inventory. “Did anyone learn the clothes to chocolate spell?”
Raven nodded. “I can cast it.”
“In that case, we’re going to need your help,” Myst said as he put the magazine back in his inventory. “If you can remove his armor we should be able to disable him before he kills us.”
“What does Reach combat armor look like?” Raven asked.
“Like a black and blue humanoid insect.” He turned to look at Harry. “Can you make Raven invisible?”
“I can disillusion her. Disillusion isn’t perfect, especially when you’re moving, but I left my invisibility cloak at home,” Harry replied, “so it’ll have to do. It’s like the alien armor from Predator, there is a blurring of the air when you move. Stick to the shadows as much as possible and you’ll be fine.”
“Cast the spell, I’ll upgrade it to reduce that.” Myst focused his precog on the upcoming fight. “The two Gordanians that went looking for the escaped prisoners are dead which leaves the scarab near the ship and a Gordanian tech that we’ll need to deal with, if we don’t want him setting the self destruct in a fit of spite.”
“Will he surrender?” Megan asked.
“Gordanians aren’t trustworthy,” Starfire warned as Harry drew his wand out of his arm sheath and cast the disillusionment spell on Raven, gently tapping her on the head, the magic spreading down from the point of contact, warping the light and hiding her from view.
Myst smiled as he figured out how to copy Harry’s spell. “She’s right, he’ll turn on us the moment he gets a chance.”
Hermione frowned slightly as she could still see a blur when Raven moved her arm. “I’m not sure that’s going to be enough against someone that is trained for combat.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Myst said as he spent mana to upgrade Harry’s spell. “That should take care of the blurring effect. If you check your rings, you’ll find one of the clothes settings include glasses, they should let you see their body heat just fine, bypassing that little problem.”
“That’s cheating,” Zatanna joked. “What kind of hero doesn’t let the villain get a chance to beat them?”
“A smart one. I heartily approve,” Hermione said.
“On that note, we might as well do the same for the rest of the team and leave the Kryptonians and Starfire visible as distractions,” Karen said thoughtfully.
“I’m fine with that,” Connor said, looking forward to a decent fight.
“Same,” Starfire agreed, not particularly worried about getting hurt.
Harry went around the room, disillusioning everyone other than Starfire, Karen, Kara and Connor while the rest of the group finished eating their chocolate bars. “That should help.”
Myst quickly boosted the disillusionment charms. “I’ll be with Raven; taking out the Reach operative is the first order of business then we hide the ship.”
“Are you sure we can’t negotiate their surrender?” Hermione asked.
Myst shook his head. “I tried that in my vision, it didn’t work. He’s basically breaking a major treaty by being here in the first place and he can’t afford word getting back to either his masters or Oa.”
“We’re here,” Megan said as they flew over the beach, slowing down to something more reasonable as they approached the prison she could see in the distance. The crashed ship took up most of the prison and looked like a weird combination of a bunch of flat plates and a large ring on the bottom of the ship with a bunch of scaffolding to connect everything in an ugly mess.
Cyborg winced when he spotted several overturned trucks and a lot of badly burned bodies, as the bioship ‘slowly’ approached the prison. He scowled as he saw some type of lizard like humanoid using one of the hatches of the alien ship for partial coverage as he repeatedly shot blasts of plasma from a staff at the soldiers that had shown up. “That’s going to be a problem.”
“I’ll deal with the Gordanian, just open the hatch,” Starfire said, eager to deal with the slaver.
“Best of luck,” Megan said as she mentally opened the hatch at the back of the ship.
“Slaver!” Starfire shouted as she dove out of the ship and sped down toward the alien craft.
“To battle!” Harry cried as he ran and jumped out of the ship, enjoying his new flight enchantment, staying away from Starfire as the Gordanian turned and started firing on her.
Starfire laughed as she dodged the plasma bolts and sent her own bolt of energy back at the Gordanian, forcing him to dodge behind the door for cover. “Surrender or die Gordanian scum!”
Myst teleported down to the ground as the rest of the team headed for the hanger. He silently teleported the Gordanian’s staff weapon to his hand when the alien popped up from behind the hatch to fire on Starfire again. He quickly stuck the weapon in his inventory then tossed himself to the side as his precog flashed a warning.
“There is no escape!” the black and blue insect like creature stated as he advanced toward the area where Myst was hiding.
‘Fucking advanced scanners,’ Myst thought as he teleported thirty feet behind the Scarab scout and Connor slammed into the alien like a freight train.
The scarab crashed through a brick wall, but quickly rolled back to his feet and shot Connor with a high pitched sonic attack causing him to scream and collapse.
Raven cast the clothes to chocolate spell on the alien, feeling it resist for a moment before taking hold, but as soon as the spell was complete the material started reverting, some alien tech reconverting it at a rapid pace. She blinked as several blades of light ripped through the alien’s head before the reforming armor could reach it. ‘So much for handing him over to the Lanterns,’ she thought dryly, but without much heat as she what she had sensed from him made killing him seem like the wiser option anyway.
Myst teleported the alien scarab off the warrior’s corpse to his hand and stuffed it in his inventory before it could attempt to take him as a host. He turned his attention toward the soldiers that had just arrived and had decided that firing at Kara was a good idea. ‘I really need a wide area stun spell.’ He started teleporting weapons out of people’s hands and stuffing them into his inventory. ‘We should have let the Gordanians shoot a couple more of them.’
Harry landed on the alien ship with Hermione, who’d had to rush to catch up with him. “Ready?”
“Ready.” Hermione started casting a weak muggle repelling ward on the area, relying on repeated castings to increase its strength, as they didn’t have a ward stone handy.
Starfire flew over and punched the Gordanian in the temple with a savage grin before he could reach for his backup weapon. She picked up the unconscious Gordanian then scowled when his head exploded, as one of the soldiers put an explosive round through his eye. ‘That makes things easier, but if I had wanted him dead I would have rather done it myself.’ She released the body and dropped into the ship to keep the soldiers from shooting her on the off chance they had something that could damage the outfit friend Myst had gotten her.
After disarming the last soldier, Myst gestured and created a fence made out of light around the soldiers to keep them from fleeing to their vehicles to rearm. “Surrender! I won’t ask again!” He scowled as several bullets bounced off his force shield from backup weapons that they’d just pulled out. “They are either high or stupid, probably both,” he muttered as he went back to stealing their backup weapons. “At least Snowflame isn’t here, they’d be natural converts.”
“I’ll deal with them,” Connor said as he ran toward the soldiers.
Harry looked at the multiple layers of repelling wards that covered the area. “That’s probably the best we’re going to do.”
“Hsinav!” Zatanna said as she gestured toward the ship and completely cloaked the ship.
Cyborg used his sonic cannon against the remaining soldiers that weren’t surrendering.
‘That went better than the Gotham mission,’ Myst thought as he worked on disarming the soldiers that were trying to kill Connor and mostly killing each other. ‘That’s going to look bad on the mission report. Where in the hell are they hiding all those weapons?!’ He reached out with his telepathy and started scanning the soldiers to see if they had any more weapons hidden on them, causing the soldiers to cry out in pain and grab their heads. ‘I might want to practice a bit more,’ Myst thought to himself.
Megan flew over toward Myst and Cyborg. “Now what?”
Myst scowled as he found a memory of one of the soldiers raping a woman in France. He teleported a small amount of air into the man’s brain then moved to the next soldier as the previous one started twitching and flopping on the ground. “They’re guilty of various crimes in a number of countries, I say we take a little road trip and clear some case files.”
“That sounds better than turning them over to the local authorities, considering they basically work for the local authorities.” Cyborg glanced toward the prison, wondering if Bane had been in the prison when the alien ship crashed into it. “How damaged is the ship?”
Myst looked at the invisible ship with his upgrade ability. “It has a rather large hole in the side and the power conduits to the engines are damaged.” He glanced at Hermione as she flew over to find out what they were doing now that the battle was over. “Do you need to understand what you’re repairing?” he asked the brunette witch.
“It helps but isn’t required,” Hermione said, knowing that Mr. Weasley had repaired various electronics without having a clue as to how they worked, either that or he was just trolling everyone about not understanding how to pronounce electricity.
“We are trying to figure out some way to hide it while keeping it some place convenient so Cyborg can study it.”
“I need a bigger garage,” Cyborg complained. “I wonder if I could purchase the Happy Harbor football stadium if I promised to buy them a new one?”
“Too public,” Zantanna said. “We need a permanent way to hide the ship itself.”
“Well…” Hermione said slowly, “the fidelius would be ideal for that, but it’d take time to arrange for someone to cast it, it’s fairly obscure and wickedly difficult to cast.”
“Or we could ask Harry,” Myst said.
“Harry?” Hermione asked doubtfully.
Harry dropped down next to her. “What?”
She squeaked and jumped. “Don’t do that!”
“Do what?” Harry asked confused, wondering why she was pretending to be surprised when the first thing he’d learned was to keep track of your surroundings when in hostile territory… or in new places, and old places… and everywhere really.
“Never mind that,” Myst said, waving it off. “How’s your skill at casting the fidelius?”
“Pretty fair,” Harry said, “John had me practice hiding whiskey stills in Ireland for some friends. I can’t cover more than a few acres, but the spell should hold up nearly a century even if left alone.”
Hermione stared at Harry in disbelief, it wasn’t that she didn’t believe him, she was just shocked that he could cast such a complicated spell.
“Well, a prison isn’t exactly a private brewery, but could you cover this property?”
“Do you own it?” Harry asked.
“Hmmm,” Myst said before nodding to himself as an idea struck him. “I claim this property by the right of conquest!” he proclaimed. “Any who would contest that speak up, you have five seconds!”
Everyone stared at him speechless.
“And five,” Myst said making a show of looking around before turning back to Harry. “Yes I own it. It’s not much, but I like it.”
Harry chuckled. “Sure, let’s give it a shot.”
0o0o0
Myst was left wondering how long they’d get to keep the ship as he walked through the off white halls of the alien ship with Hermione and Sabrina thinking it resembled a human naval vessel in some ways. “I can’t shake the feeling that some alien threat will cause us to have to stupidly sacrifice the ship in a few weeks or that the Green Lanterns will protest us keeping the ship. We should probably report it destroyed to The League and just keep it hidden.”
“You’ve been watching too many bad science fiction shows,” Hermione teased.
Sabrina snickered. “You’d probably have more trouble from various governments freaking out about civilians having starships than you would from the Lanterns.”
“Fair enough.” Myst glanced at the alien words above the door then stepped into the room with the stardrive. “Hopefully I can figure out how to duplicate…” he trailed off as he noticed one of power conduits had been melted by some sort of energy blast and wasn’t glowing like the rest of them. “At least they didn’t hit the drive.”
“They probably didn’t want to strand themselves on an alien world,” Hermione said as she walked into the less than spacious room. “This would be easier if they’d left a repair manual lying around. I’d rather not repair the conduit without knowing how to turn the drive off.”
“Just in case it’s like a printer?” Sabrina asked with amusement.
“Basically, we can’t be sure if the drive has memory or a record of commands waiting to be executed as soon as it’s turned on.” Hermione didn’t want the ship to jump into the middle of the planet or back to a Gordanian stronghold with them on board or anywhere else for that matter.
Myst grinned as he walked over to the terminal that someone had left on and read through the menu options, once again happy that he could actually understand the alien script. “Oh, hey schematics. It can’t be that easy, can it?”
“Were you expecting intelligence from a bunch of slavers?” Sabrina asked sarcastically.
“If I was designing a drive system for a three man crew of slavers/pirates, I’d want the systems to be easy to understand and repair or at least easy to swap parts out as needed,” Hermione said as she looked around the room, noticing the lack of places to store said extra parts. “Of course, that’s just me,” she muttered as she walked over to look at the screen.
“That would make sense,” Sabrina agreed.
“The schematics have been dumbed down so the idiots could work on them, but at least it gives me a decent idea how to set things up.” He flipped through menu options until he found the drive controls. “I don’t see a destination in the buffer, but we should probably leave the lines destroyed until we have Cyborg walk through the computer system.”
“He should be able to tell us if it’s safe to put in orbit though the island wouldn’t be a bad place to keep the ship,” Sabrina said. “It would give us a reason to deal with more of the drug dealers while Cyborg tries to reverse engineer everything.”
Myst turned his attention toward the Star-Slide drive, more than a little impressed with how insanely fast the drive was. ‘I’m fairly sure most of the races in Star Trek would kill for something half this fast.’
“Do you think Cyborg can copy it?” Hermione asked as he pulled up a bare bones schematic of the drive.
“Probably,” Myst said as he continued looking through information, “he’s the tech junkie for The League and probably outclasses the majority of the human race when it comes to these things.”
“I wonder where the slaves are,” Sabrina said as she ran a hand along a console, excited to see the insides of an actual alien spaceship.
“That… is a good question,” Myst said. He reached out to Starfire with his telepathy. ‘Have you found the prisoners yet?’
‘We’ve just been dealing with the soldiers and freeing the inmates that survived the crash. Did you know they had a lot of underground cells?’
‘I wasn’t aware though I guess it makes sense considering the age of the prison.’
‘Karen and Kara are trying to figure out the best places to drop the various soldiers off, we’re leaning toward France and Britain. Most of the people in the lower prison were only here because they refused to be part of the drug trade or because their families did not wish to.’
‘Have you told the rest of the Megans that you need assistance?’ Myst asked.
‘No, we’ve just been trying to deal with the problem. More Megans would help.’
‘Fortunately we have more Megans, it’s nice how that works out. I’ll head to the ship and let them know that their assistance would be useful.’ Myst smiled at Hermione and Sabrina. “They need the rest of the Megans to help sort through the survivors.”
“Let’s go, we’re pretty much done in here anyways.” Hermione grinned and apparated outside.
“That’s cheating,” Sabrina complained with a mock pout.
Myst grinned then looked through the ship and teleported with Sabrina to collect the rest of the telepaths.
0o0o0
Batman looked at Myst’s image on the screen. “Is there something you’d like to report.”
“Ah yes, I’d like to report that the ship was completely destroyed and won’t be falling into any villain’s hands,” Myst said with a grin.
“So the ship is destroyed?” Batman asked, not trusting Myst’s grin.
Myst shrugged. “Officially the ship vanished, we activated the drive. I expect a number of governments to breathe a sigh of relief that they won’t have to be involved in the kind of political brouhaha that would result from them trying to argue over the ship and on an unrelated note, Cyborg has gotten a sudden fondness for the island and will be spending all his spare time there.”
Batman considered what Myst had said and how it was phrased before giving him a simple nod. “Anything else that you’d like to report?” he asked.
“I can’t think of anything else I’d like to report,” Myst admitted, thinking about the fact that they basically owned Santa Prisca because they’d defeated the aliens that had killed Bane who had been the previous ruler of the island and that it now had a small population of aliens who were very friendly and very thankful to the people who had killed their captors.
Batman waited to make sure nothing else was forthcoming before saying, “I think a League presence on Santa Prisca would be useful in reducing the power of the cartels in the area. I’ll have a Zeta station installed to make commuting more convenient. Let me know where you’d like it placed when you get a chance.”
“Will do, Boss man,” Myst said cheerfully.
“Boss Man, Out,” Batman said and cut the transmission before Myst could reply.
“Did he just make a joke?!”
Comments
Mist of Shadows
Thanks, it was fun to write.
Robert Buniff
This was a fun chapter. Keep it going !
