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"Alberto's Mistake: An FI Mini-Story"
 
   Monday, June 5, 2395
Tesladyne Industries
2227 Westinghouse St.
New Avalon, Zeta Cygni

Unlike most of the buildings in the Millrace district, the four-story red-brick structure at 2227 Westinghouse was not a purpose-built apartment block built to look like it had been converted from an industrial building. The painted sign above the doors wasn't just there as a decoration, to help enhance the illusion of the building's industrial origins.

Inside, the building had only two floors; the ceiling of the ground floor was three stories high, with the fourth floor above set up as offices. In the great room on the ground floor, the proprietor of the establishment stood at one of the worktables, welding together a metallic structure the purpose of which was not immediately apparent. All around him, in the largely bare room, stood pieces of esoteric equipment ranging in size from big to whopping. Most likewise lacked an immediately apparent purpose, though they did tend to convey a sense of heavy industrial purposefulness.

Like any good inventor, the building's proprietor did not immediately notice that someone had entered his workshop. Not until he finished a weld and looked up from his work did he see the visitor, a tall, broad-shouldered man with slicked-back black hair and a narrowish, rather cruel-looking face. The man wore a dark double-breasted suit with a rose in his lapel, and he walked into the workshop with an easy, arrogant gait, as though he owned the place.

The inventor switched off his welding apparatus and put the welding gun down, pushing his dark goggles up onto his forehead with his other hand.

"This laboratory is not open to the public," he said.

The visitor's face took on a faint smirk. In a deep, commanding voice, he said, "I'm here for your new particle beam amplifier."

"It's not for sale," the inventor replied calmly.

The man in the dark suit chuckled at that, reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, and removed a cigar. Without his producing a lighter or matches, the cigar's tip flared to life, then settled into a steady glow.

"I didn't say anything about buying it," he said, drawing on the cigar.

The inventor narrowed his eyes slightly. "I don't permit smoking in my laboratory," he said. Stepping away from the workbench, he untied his welder's apron, removed it, folded it neatly, and put it down next to the piece he'd been working on. Beneath it, he was in shirtsleeves, wearing braced trousers, collared shirt, and tie of a curiously archaic style. He was a taller man than the visitor, but much lighter of build - skinny as a rail, in fact, which exaggerated his height further.

"I shall have to ask you to leave," he told the visitor, still calm. When the visitor made no movement toward leaving, he added with the slightest of edges in his voice, "Now, if you please."

Shockwave Alberto, one of the most feared members of Big Fire's Magnificent Ten, smirked less faintly. "You don't know who I am, do you."

Nikola Tesla raised his right arm with the back of his hand facing Alberto, displaying his Lens to the archvillain, and replied cordially, "I could ask the same of you, sir."

Ignoring the remark, Alberto idly picked up a device from the other end of the workbench and looked it over. "You know, you really shouldn't have set up shop out here in the city. You and your inventions would have been a lot safer in the basement of IPO Headquarters with all the others."

"I prefer my own space," Tesla replied curtly. "I am not by custom a violent man, sir, but if you do not leave my laboratory immediately and undertake never to return, I shall make an exception."

Alberto shook his head, chuckling. "What is it about geniuses?" he asked rhetorically. "You always seem to need to learn your lessons the HARD way!"

So saying, he clenched his fists at his sides, seeming to expand slightly within his suit, and then burst into motion, lashing his hands forward to unleash twin crackling torrents of his trademark black-and-scarlet energy.

"HAAAAAH!" Alberto roared as his double blast tore the worktable in half and engulfed Tesla. "Maybe this will teach you to - ... wha?!"

Tesla raised his hands, not - as Alberto initially thought - in a reflexive, futile attempt to ward off the attack... but in a deliberate, successful attempt to ward off the attack. The red-edged black lightning crackled and splashed from the inventor's open palms like the stream from a hose against glass, spalling the concrete floor and blowing out several of the overhead lights.

While Alberto gaped in astonishment at this, Tesla smiled very slightly and thrust his open right palm forward - and an invisible something smashed into Alberto like a wrecking ball and catapulted him straight back out the way he'd come in, taking the door with him. He hurtled clean across Westinghouse (fortunately, not a busy street) and came to rest against the front of the vacant warehouse at number 2228.

Coughing and sputtering, Alberto pulled himself to his feet, brushing brick dust from his clothing. Across the street, Tesla stepped through the hole and out onto the sidewalk, fitting on a pair of bulky metal gauntlets. With a hair-raising high-pitched noise, his gauntlets energized, the studs on their backs beginning to glow with a bright blue light, and little crackles of electricity started playing over the corners and joints of the plates.

"Now then," he said, settling his welding goggles back over his eyes. "I trust you'll be leaving now. Technically, I imagine I should arrest you in the name of the International Police, but I have a great deal of work to do and frankly I can't be bothered."

Alberto snarled, tugged the knot in his necktie loose by an inch, and launched himself toward Tesla, fist drawn back for a punch. To his faint surprise, Tesla matched his charge, meeting him over the middle of the street, Electro-Gauntlets trailing lightning. The explosion of their meeting cracked windows all up and down the block. Both men rebounded from the blast, landed on rooftops on opposite sides of the street, and immediately took off again, throwing themselves at each other once more.

Once they began, there seemed to be no stopping them. The two men hurtled from point to point, springing from rooftops, flagpoles, the sides of buildings, the tops of delivery trucks, and whatever else was handy, hurling themselves against each other's defenses again and again. The fight ranged from one end of the Millrace to the other, eventually spilling over into Puckett's Landing.

By the time they reached the vicinity of Knights Field, both of the combatants were bloodied, winded, and bruised. They alighted on the tops of two buildings on opposite sides of the street, a block over from the baseball stadium, panting and sweating. Tesla's goggles had gone, blasted from his head by a blow that nearly scalped him even with his Electro-Kinetic Body Field Generator at full power; Alberto was nursing a cracked rib from a particularly solid body shot.

Tesla seized the moment's respite to take stock of his situation. The battle had carried him out of the limited range of the energy broadcaster back at Tesladyne, so his Electro-Gauntlets were running on internal backup cells. The EKBFG didn't have that problem, since it could, in part, power itself from the very attacks it was shielding him from, but he could tell from the disagreeable sensation against the small of his back that the coils were beginning to overheat. It wouldn't do to deflect another of Alberto's blasts of energy only to go up in flames from a coil flashover.

Most troubling was the sluggish, heavy sensation he felt as he heaved himself to his feet. It wasn't fatigue, though he was feeling plenty of that as well. It meant that his Bergenholm generator was running even lower on reserve energy than his Electro-Gauntlets, and without the ability to cancel inertia, he would lose his ability to match Alberto's maneuvers (and shrug off the physical impact of his blows). And then, an EKBFG coil flashover would be the least of his worries.

Alberto straightened first, wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of one hand, then smoothed his disheveled hair.

"Your toys are impressive," he called across the street, "but they're still only toys. They can't hope to outlast real power."

"On the contrary, my dear sir," replied Tesla, drawing himself to his full height. "I place my faith in technology every time." With a tiny smile, he added, "Unlike human vanity, it always knows its limits."

"Enough!" Alberto snarled, summoning his power to sizzle around his fists once more. "Time to send you back where you belong, dead man! HAAAAAAH!"

Tesla didn't move this time; he remained where he was and let the furious villain come to him. As Alberto hurtled across the street, Tesla slammed his Gauntlets together, setting up a sizzling nimbus of energy around both fists; when he pulled them apart, the left one had gone dark and all the lightning was concentrated solely on the right.

Alberto, still bellowing in fury, swooped down out of the sky with his own power seething all around him. If this punch connected, with all the force of his rage behind it, he was determined that it would sweep his foe completely out of existence, clever forcefield or no.

Tesla took one smooth step to the left and reversed his Bergenholm. Alberto's punch flickered past his right ear, missing his head by less than an inch. Tesla, his normal inertia hugely increased, unloaded everything he had left in a single counterpunch of his own, lashing upward in a tremendous uppercut that connected with a flash and boom like thunder.

Shockwave Alberto hurtled upward and back in a spray of smoke and blood, the left side of his face a mask of hatred and the right side completely obscured by smoke. His hands clawed at the air, sending streaks of his power raking up and down the rooftop and splashing from Tesla's flickering bodyshield - and then he reached apogee and plummeted parabolically into the Oxbow River.

Tesla switched off his Bergenholm, yanked off his spent Electro-Gauntlets, tugged out the tails of his shirt, and whipped off his smoking EKBFG before it could brand the outline of a resonance coil on the small of his back. Without hesitation, he reared back and threw the device after his foe. It had just begun to glow, its leather casing burning away, when it plopped into the river and exploded like a depth charge, sending up a huge fountain of spray and foam.

Half an hour later, disheveled, bruised, and slightly tattered, Tesla arrived back at his workshop to find a small crowd of curious onlookers looking at the hole where the door had been. Sighing, he made a mental note to call a builder.

For the moment, though, he went upstairs to the small apartment he kept next to the offices for emergencies, washed up, put on fresh clothes, and then went downstairs to clean up the mess.

Fortunately, though Alberto's first blast had split his workbench in half and scattered its contents around the laboratory, it hadn't destroyed any of his notes. He spent ten minutes gathering them up and putting them back in order, and had just finished tapping the pile square and putting it on top of the Energy Broadcaster's control console when someone else appeared in the hole where the door belonged.

Tesla opened his mouth to deliver his "not open to the public" line again, then realized that the new arrival was not another villainous interloper nor a curiosity-seeker. It was, in fact, Tesla's recently completed Greatest Invention (until the next one, anyway): a nuclear-powered, heavily armored, automatically intelligent construct he had dubbed his Atomic Robot.

"Hey, boss," said Robo, holding up a box bearing the Megadonuts logo. "Sorry it took so long, the main bakery was closed and I had to go clear to the one in Elstree to get - whoa! What'd I miss?"

"Alberto's Mistake" - a Future Imperfect Mini-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
Special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2009 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


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Alberto's Mistake: An FI Mini-Story [View All] Gryphonadmin Feb-01-09 TOP
   RE: Alberto's Mistake: An FI Mini-Story drakensis Feb-01-09 1
   RE: Alberto's Mistake: An FI Mini-Story mdg1 Feb-01-09 2
      RE: Alberto's Mistake: An FI Mini-Story Gryphonadmin Feb-01-09 5
          RE: Alberto's Mistake: An FI Mini-Story VA_Wanderer Feb-02-09 7
   RE: Alberto's Mistake: An FI Mini-Story Matrix Dragon Feb-01-09 3
   RE: Alberto's Mistake: An FI Mini-Story Meagen Feb-01-09 4
   RE: Alberto's Mistake: An FI Mini-Story BZArchermoderator Feb-01-09 6


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