Chapter 104: Underhanded Balls

“Okay, the spell is locked in the vault and all mention of it is wiped from the record…now.” Perry said, pressing the ‘confirm’ button.

Paradox’s Elysian Enchantment was far too dangerous for the likes of mere mortal…teens.

“Ugh, my eyes are all bloodshot now,” Heather said, dabbing the last of the tears out of her eyes and whipping out a compact to fix her makeup.

“So obviously Sophie’s hair is not a good ballgown enhancer.”

“Ya think?” Heather asked as Perry wiped snot and tears off his shoulder.

“Hey, I’m not the bundle of repressed emotions,” Perry said with a shrug.

“Tell Nat and die.”

“Tell me what?” Natalie asked, poking her head into the lab.

“We were chopping onions.” Perry said.

“Lots of them.” Heather added.

“Magical ones.” Perry continued with a nod.

“You guys are full of shit,” Nat said before raising the heavy tome of etiquette with a grunt. “Hey, did you know military dress uniforms are considered acceptable garb to wear to a ball? We could wear our super suits!”

Perry and Heather shared a glance, the last vestiges of the Elysian spell creating a moment of perfect mutual understanding:

They both wanted to see Nat in that dress.

“Nah, super suits aren’t really a uniform,” Perry said with a shrug. “Plus your mechsuit would have a hard time dancing.”

Nat pursed her lips. “True.”

“Buuuut,” Perry said, holding up a finger and motioning Heather and Nat over to the massive growing tanks where he was growing their dresses. “We could make the dresses pretty awesome.”

“So I had the LCC scan you and made silicon molds of your bodies,” Perry said, pointing into the tank where rubber Heather and Nat were submerged in perry’s armor-growing vat.

“Now, I’m using lasers to superheat microscopic points in a woven pattern across the surface of the silicon to convince the material to grow the way I want it to. It’s almost the same material my armor is made out of, with a few tweaks to make it more fabric-like.”

“Was it too hard to just sew a dress together, so you had to 3-d print it onto a silicon mold that, quite frankly, feels like an invasion of privacy?” Heather asked.

“That’s so cool!” Nat said, peering down into the vat where the laser was making glittering points of light appear and disappear across the facsimiles of their naked bodies.

“She gets it,” Perry said, pointing at Natalie.

“Those get destroyed when this is over,” Heather said.

“Can I have them?” Nat asked. “They’d be great to prototype stuff.”

“Of course you can,” Heather said, changing her tune instantly.

“How did you get them to stand so still?” Nat asked.

“Well, it’s just silicon over a sheet metal skeleton,” Perry said with a shrug. “They are poseable, though. I put joints in them. They’re held in place by friction.”

“I always wanted a guy to have a life-size, naked, poseable doll of me.” Heather said.

“Oh,” Perry said, frowning.

“I can see it’s starting to sink in to that thick Tinker-fog brain of yours.” Heather said.

Normally Perry would be able to see the problem, but he’d been riding high on the Tinker Twitch for hours now.

“Well, when the dresses are done, you can do whatever you like with the models,” Perry said, turning away from the vat. “In the meantime, we need two more things. A guest list, and a venue.”

Ding!

Perry pulled out his phone and glanced down at it.

I will take care of the guest list and the venue. You are a debutante acting as the host, not the principle organizer. – Marigold Zauberer

“Well, my grandmother is listening to every word I say.” Perry muttered.

Ding!

Not at all, my dear grandson, it’s called magical predictive texting. -Marigold Zauberer

“I’m not really sure which is worse,” Perry said. “My grandma thinking I’m a failure, or her sudden interest in me.”

Ding!

My interest in you will undoubtedly prove worse, grandson. – Marigold Zauberer

“Cool.” Perry turned off his phone and tossed it across the room.

He glanced up and saw Heather and Nat giving him a strange look.

“Grandma says she’ll take care of the venue and guest list.”

Perry wasn’t completely naïve. Grandma had a tough-love, throw them in the deep end to learn how to swim kind of attitude.

That meant Grandma was going to invite someone, or several someones, that were unpleasant to be around, just to grow Perry’s character, maybe show off his pathetic new light spell to prove he was a ‘mage’.

Although by the strictest definition, Perry would call himself a wizard. Or perhaps some kind of hybrid, since he was powering his spell the same renewable way a mage would, with a symbiotic spirit at the core, in a dizzyingly complex combination of Gadrevan and Pecholard’s techniques.

Semantics aside, the ball was sure to be an unpleasant one.

Who could show up?

John Gabras, the nocul with a genocidal grudge against his entire family.

Chemestro, the guy with a stick up his ass who had to hold back in every fight he was in, rather than just turn Perry into dust.

Monolith, the obsidian-skinned mobster that Perry had humiliated?

Some other fantasy creature with an epic grudge against the Zauberers? There had to be more than one.

Perry glanced over at Nat who was eagerly devouring the book on etiquette, excited out of her mind for the ball, and with no idea how awful it was going to be.

Hmm.

Up until that exact moment, Perry had been going through the motions with the simple, unambitious goal of surviving the ball and then washing his hands of it afterward.

“Heather, can I talk to you?” Perry said, motioning away from where Nat was absorbed in her reading.

“Sure,” Heather shrugged and followed him out of earshot.

“The ball is gonna suck.” Perry said. “My grandma’s gonna make sure there’s some kind of horrible thing that goes down and we have to deal with it. Her goal is probably to make me stronger through adversity or some crap like that.”

“Okay?” Heather said with a shrug.

“Our goal is to make sure Nat has a great time.” Perry said, motioning to the Tinker in the distance. “I don’t give a shit about my grandma’s plots and plans, but we are going to crush them so fucking hard that absolutely nothing goes wrong at the ball, and Natalie has a magical fantasy night she’ll never forget. Capiche?”

Heather gave a slow grin. “Sounds like fun.”

They excused themselves, waved goodbye to Nat and flew over to grandma’s clinic to wrench the master list out of the hands of the witch herself. It didn’t take much persuasion to give up the goods.

“How am I supposed to be a proper host without knowing who’s going to be there?” Perry asked innocently, making doe eyes at his grandmother.

“I’m not arguing with you,” Grandma said, handing him a sheet of paper. “Just didn’t think you’d take that much of an interest in it.”

“Nonsense. I love managing people and making sure parties go as smoothly as possible.” Perry lied.

“Uhuh,” Grandma said, watching him critically.

Perry gave her a jaunty salute then turned on his heel and retreated from the old hag’s clinic.

A few minutes later, Perry and Heather were poring over the list, with Perry manning the search engine while Heather called the names off.

The first dozen or two were the usual fare: Creatures (and people) who owed their survival to the Zauberer family and therefore were unlikely to cause a scene.

Buried in all that chaff was an unassuming name.

“Nathanial J. Herzog.”

Perry entered the name and poured through the entries. “Does it say where he lives or how old he is? That would narrow things…Nevermind it’s Mass Driver.”

Perry pulled up Nathanial’s driver’s license, the spitting image of Mass Driver, sans domino mask.

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Domino masks were a little pointless.

“Your grandmother invited Mass Driver to a ball? Is she freakin’ crazy?” Heather asked.

Perry leaned back in his chair and thought about it for a moment, chewing his lip.

“Nah, Mass Driver is a red herring. Gramma probably invited him because she knows we’ve had beef and she thinks I’ll waste time preparing to fight him or something. But Mass Driver doesn’t do anything if he’s not getting paid for it, let alone pick a fight. Hell, if Gramma didn’t pay him, he’s probably not even going to show up.”

Perry swiveled around in his chair and stared at Heather as an epiphany occurred to him.

“What?” Heather asked.

“He doesn’t do anything unless he’s getting paid for it.” Perry said.

“Yeah?” Heather said.

“flip side: he can be relied on to do what he’s been paid to do.”

Heather cocked her head, eyes narrowed.

“No…”

“Dude’s already got an invite.”

***Later***

“So let me get this straight.” Mass driver said, sipping his coffee.

“uhuh.” Perry said.

“You cut off my hand and humiliated me by forcing me to tango with a facsimile of you for over an hour….

It was the bolero, but who was counting?

“And now you want to hire me to do security at a fake ball?”

“Nah, it’s a real ball. You should’ve gotten an invite within the last day or two.” Perry said.

“Oh, I thought that was was spam mail,” Mass Driver stood up and walked over to the garbage can by the kitchen counter and pulled out an expensive-looking envelope with a cursive script ‘you’re invited’ on the front. It had an unknown stain from food scraps on the side.

Mass Driver opened the envelope and unfolded the letter, scanning the contents.

“Huh.” He grunted.

He glanced back up at Perry. “How much are you offering?”

“I guess that depends on how much my grandmother offered you.”

“That’s confidential information,” Mass Driver said, tucking the invite into his breast pocket.

“She didn’t offer you anything at all, did she?” Perry asked.

“Let’s start with five million.” Mass Driver said.

“Half a million,” Perry said.

“Five.”

“Isn’t negotiating done by meeting each other in the middle?” Perry asked.

“Sometimes, when neither party has leverage. Now that I know this party is important to you, the price to chaperone is five million, or else I smash it up myself.”

“Oh, that’s how it is, then?” Perry asked.

“That’s how it is.”

“Alright.” Perry said with a shrug. “If five million is your price, then five million is your price. That begs the question, though…How much are the tapes of you dancing with me worth to you?”

“Eh?” Mass driver said.

“I…let’s say…liberated the raw footage of our battle from the news stations and wiped the data from their computers.” Perry said. “I’m willing to sell it to you for the right price.”

“Half a mil.” Mass driver said.

“Eight.” Perry countered.

Mass Driver cocked a brow, a moment of tense silence hanging between them. Mass Driver knew his reputation was directly linked to how much he could charge for mercenary work, which meant keeping the tapes buried was worth that much. Or more.

“Call it an even trade?” He asked.

“Sure,” Perry said, producing the original tapes and placing them on the wood between them. Mass Driver reached across the table and seized Perry’s hand in an iron grip.

“Nice doing business with you, kid. See ya at the party,” he said, shaking Perry’s hand with the irresistible force of heavy machinery. “Now get outta my house.”

Perry nodded and headed out of Mass Driver’s apartment, stepping into the fresh air of the exterior-facing hallway, where Heather was waiting for him.

Perry heaved a giant breath and shuddered from head to toe. Mass Driver could’ve crushed him like he was made of soft-serve anytime he wanted. HP be damned.

It was like haggling with a one-ton bull.

“You sure that was a good idea?” Heather asked.

“Hope so. He wasn’t even planning on attending, like I thought. Now I gotta hope I’m right about him being a good mercenary, too. With any luck, we’ve turned one of Grandma’s liabilities into an asset.”

“Well, things will be interesting, at least.” Heather shrugged.

“Who’s next on our list?” Perry asked, glancing over at the list of problem characters that they’d drafted.

***Elijah Methas***

Invite ME to your grandson’s debut ball, will you? Elijah thought, vitriol swirling in his veins as he designed his ‘plus one’: A battle golem capable of turning the ballroom into a blender of chunked meat.

Decades after we arrived on Earth, after you stole everything from me…after your daughter snubbed my son, you invite ME!?

I suppose you think me toothless. Harmless! You’ll rue the day you forgot about Elijah Methas, Master Enchanter!

Seeing her son wearing his golem as armor and using Earth-based techniques for flight and attack had given Elija a jarring burst of inspiration. He was no longer stuck in the old country. In the old mindset.

How ironic that Paradox would inspire the new techniques that will be his undoing? Lasers, gunpowder, high explosives, oh my!

Even if his golem, dubbed ‘Lona’, failed to kill Paradox, the sheer destruction it wreaked would be the end of Paradox’s career as a royal, and a black eye to Marigold Zauberer, The master of evil in the guise of an old woman.

Just a bit more testing and adjustments, and Lona will be ready to fulfill her life’s goal.

The golem looked like his daughter had when she was young, and no one would question it too hard if his ‘plus one’ was his granddaughter. After all, Elijah Methas had tried to wed his son to Claudette. Why wouldn’t he try again with this young man?

It was the perfect disguise. The fake soul was a looped recording of a young woman reading a mindless romance novel, but it only needed to fool Marigold long enough to get close to her grandson.

Then, yes, then…Elijah would have his revenge. He would end the Zauberer line then and there, and regardless of what came after, Elijah would be content in the knowledge that he had stopped the spread of their blight upon Earth!

BOOOM!

Elijah was tossed halfway across the room as the side wall of his arcane laboratory was reduced to concussive shrapnel. The protective amulet around his neck grew hot against his chest.

Elijah shoved himself to his feet, but what he saw stopped his heart.

Standing in the hole in the wall was a black, armored figure, like the shadow of death himself.

“Good evening, Mr…Methas.” The suit of armor said, with an unnaturally deep voice, striding forward as it referred to a clipboard with a sheet of paper filled with names. “You’ve been randomly selected for a preliminary ball attendee screening.”

The suit strode forward, crushing his steel golem underfoot like it was made of soft clay. It flipped to another sheet of paper on the clipboard, and produced a pen from its wrist.

“Let’s start with question one: Do you have any plans to make trouble at Paradox’s debut ball?”

Elijah shook his head violently.

“Uh-uh, nope, not me, I’m perfectly happy with the Zauberer family. They saved us all, and all that.”

“It says here Marigold took your life’s savings and all your business assets in exchange for her daughter’s hand in marriage to your son, and when the marriage fell through, she refused to return the money.”

“Ancient history,” Elijah said hastily. “I’ve moved on since then.”

“Good, good,” Paradox said, before glancing down at the squished murder machine under his feet. The blades and gun barrels had popped out of the golem’s crushed chest, revealing its murderous intentions.

“Oh my, I seem to have accidentally crushed your toy.”

“It’s fiiine,” Elijah wheezed.

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