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Tales from Silicon City: Down in the Mines

By Psion

A Silicon City Story

All Rights Reserved

Somewhere in the American Rockies...

Deep below the earth's surface, under the dim glow of an incandescent bulb, dirt-streaked furs toiled in tunnels of rough-hewed stone. Every so often the darkened stone would light up, reflecting the bursts of light from a particularly flashy display of geokinesis or energy projection. Elsewhere in the tunnels, super-strong individuals turned their hands raw pounding away at solid rocks with their bare fists before carrying away huge baskets of molybdenum ore on their backs. Motorized conveyors carried the smashed rocks up to the surface where a small chemical plant performed basic processing so the molybdenum could be purified for use in the production of steel alloys and various chemical processes. Just another day in a mining complex hidden under the Good Earth Movers shell company.

Leaving his office in the surface compound, Sam smiled cruelly as the well-dressed red fox made his rounds with his two enforcers in tow. Non-powered laborers looked down at their menial tasks to avoid looking at the cruel overseer dressed in a tailored two-piece suit. Sam loved seeing them tremble in fear at the sight of him, it meant Alex and James were doing their job at keeping the workers in line.

"How are we doing at meeting the new quota?" Sam asked his henchmen nonchalantly as if this was a normal impromptu production in a perfectly normal business.

"It's a lot but Processing should be able to manage it as long as Extraction can keep the ore coming. We just got a new batch of grunts from Thailand to replace the ones that collapsed from the fumes." Alex replied, the mouse grimacing behind his respirator mask as he briefly fussed with the straps around his head. All three of them were careful to not use the "S word" as per their employer's instructions but Sam never understood the point. Anyone who couldn't figure out what they were talking about was either deaf or spoke as much English as the slave labor they were surrounded by. Still, the boss was paying them and paying them quite well. Best to humor her paranoia and keep collecting checks.

"Sounds promising, what's the story down in Extraction?" The head overseer nodded and continued on, looking to James expectantly.

The brute smiled wickedly, the toothy gray wolf always made Sam nervous. James never really elaborated much on where his abilities came from and regardless, the results spoke for themselves. Whether by random mutation, mad science, or macabre sorcery, James had a seemingly unbreakable set of teeth and the ability to acquire the strengths and abilities of other people by... the fox preferred to not dwell on how James recently became an earth controller. "There should be no problems, I made an example out of one of the feisty ones." He grinned broadly.

"Was that really necessary though? You nearly killed him." Sam scowled balefully. Replacing dead workers was an expense and The Boss didn't like overseers that couldn't keep their expenditures to a reasonable level.

James waved his supervisor off dismissively much to the other's aggravation. "Come on, that mole kid only needs one hand to use his geokinesis and I gave him a shot of those black market meds afterwards, he should be fine. You should have seen those maggots' faces afterwards, I swear they almost piss-" The wolf's report was abruptly cut off by a sudden lack of noise.

Until a few seconds ago, the main processing room had been filled with a nearly deafening amount of background noise produced by the array of grinders, mixers, and other equipment used in the process of refining molybdenum, a racket that Sam and his cohorts had been talking over. In an instant, the machinery all came to a halt. Sam looked at Alex who promptly barked an order to check the breakers in Siamese. A worker left his station to check the power box just as the main entrance was forced open with a crash. Sensing what was coming next, James moved to cover his eyes. A bit slower on the reflexes when they were not in control of the situation, Sam and Alex were blinded and deafened by a sudden flash of light and a loud explosion... flashbang grenades.

James grimaced as he got ready to defend himself, unlike those two idiots he worked with, he knew this wasn't going to end well. The "Big Boss" might have promised legal assistance if they got raided but the wolf thug knew the truth, camps stung by the feds were cut loose and hung to dry. Any lawyer that showed up was only going to be there to bury them and deny any connection to the lady buying up all this ore. Good thing his powers made him fairly unpredictable to his opponents

Deafened but not blinded, the power thief decided that honor among thieves was overrated and tried to make a break for it. With shock baton in his hand, James ran for cover and quickly took stock of his options as he knelt behind a machine that had been abandoned in the chaos. Letting the geokinetic energy flow through him as his hearing slowly returned, he "felt" the location of one group of intruders then another as their armored boots impacted with the concrete floor. The front entrance was block off, the loading docks were as well, but it looked like no one was watching the elevator that led down to the mines. If he could just get down there, he could probably bully one of the kids into digging a tunnel up to the surface. It sounded just crazy enough to work...

His hearing has just returned in time to hear the sound of a glass skylight breaking as someone tried to come in through the roof. Looking up and catching a glimpse of a familiar suit of police blue body armor, the wolf felt his blood run cold. Rivetgal... The FBI brought the DSA in on this sting. And if there was one DSA hero here, there were bound to be more. If there was one thing that cobbled together mess of registered idiots was good at, it was hedging its bets to make sure it always came out on top.

The canine female in the patriotic blue armor landed in a crouch and raised her iconic custom rifle to her shoulder, the barrel of the gun pointing in James' direction... just as the wolf raised a wall of concrete, dirt, and rock directly in front of her. Feeling his stomach briefly growl in protest, that maneuver ate a lot of his built-up "charge," the super-powered thug rose to his feet and disappeared down into the mine proper....

The access elevator arrived at the bottom of the mineshaft to... nothing. The conveyors had stopped working with the rest of the equipment and by now the sound of gunfire and flashbangs had echoed down the elevator. Seeing that their employers were in trouble, the miners stopped working and disappeared. James gritted his teeth as he grabbed a flashlight and made his way down the tunnel. Goddamn kids, of course they wouldn't make it easy for him.

The tunnel soon widened out into a four-way intersection and that's where he found them. Well, where he found most of them at any rate. Five of the miners, all teenagers and "tweeners" that recent came into their powers, stood facing him from about fifteen feet away. Judging from the expressions on most of their faces, most of them were clearly expecting someone else. But their leader... goddamn Raymond, ever after getting his hand bitten off that mole brat still hadn't learned his lesson. The half-starved mole youth stared back at him, blue eyes glistening with a mix of hatred and psychic power. Black and gray fur that would have blended in well with the inky blackness of the mine was it not for the stained bandage wrapped over the stub of his left wrist.

"Where are the others?" James barked, causing several of the diggers to step back and hide behind Ray.

"Gone, they're afraid the cops will take them back to their families... families that sold them to you in the first place. I think they're trying to dig a way back up to the surface down the tunnel behind me." Raymond replied calmly, as if his master had casually asked him for the time.

The savage lupine wanted little more then wipe that cool demeanor off Ray's face but at the same time... several of the kids were already digging a tunnel to the surface. James smiled and took a step towards the children waiting for the feds to save them and promptly tripped on a dip in the floor that he knew wasn't there a second ago. Raymond's pupils disappeared as his eyes began to positively shine with a green half-light. Suddenly the rock around them began to come alive and shape itself to the mole boy's will. Ray wasn't particularly advanced with his powers, his earth shaping was limited to basic geometric shapes yet James, in a moment of the kind of blind arrogance that only slavers and similar abominations could possess, grossly underestimated how effective that could still be.

Attempting to take his foe down with a "gridiron"-style tackle, the wolf slaver charged and... collided into a wall of Rocky Mountain stone like a cartoon character. Dazed, James didn't even have time to scream before a solid pillar of rock came down and crushed his legs. The other freed slaves watched their friend as he stared at the pinned thug, reaching feebly towards the mole as he fought to avoid going into shock. "That was for my parents you fucking shit." He spat at him just before Rivetgal appeared in the tunnel with the super-strong donkey Dozer at her side. As the adrenaline in his body slowly subsided, Raymond looked at the armored canine. "Is it over?" He asked, suddenly so very tired...

Two weeks later...

Jessica Washington exhaled as she sat at her desk at the DSA's West Coast offices in Silicon City. Two weeks and she still hadn't seen the end of the paperwork from her last assignment. Paperwork to her boss, paperwork to the DSA's offices in Washington, and paperwork to the FBI's offices in LA, everyone wanted an account regarding this or that. Two slavers captured, nearly two-dozen illegal immigrants smuggled in from all over Southeast Asia, and about a dozen miners that were basically children.

The blond Golden Labrador Retriever shook her head; some days it was pretty easy being Rivetgal, the icon of America, but that raid was definitely not an easy day. For not the first time today she checked her day planner. One more week, one more week and it would be time again for that exchange program with Australia and the closest she could come to a vacation while still working. She wasn't sure what it was lately, but recently there was a rash of sapient trafficking cases with some kind of metabeing involvement, the DSA had been involved in a number of high profile cases that ended in multiple arrests and leads to about several more. Standing up and looking out the window at the afternoon skyline, she continued to shake her head. What she wouldn't give for a proper classic comicbook supervillain some days, just some nitwit trying to take over the world with an army of robotic toaster ovens or something.

If only there was something to that rumor about a troop of vigilante chefs and bakers with gadgets and superpowers that G.L.A.M. occasionally jabbered about. Hell, right about now she wouldn't mind rumors of those spoiled superpowered supermodels plotting another screwball scheme. Not that she didn't love the Aussie hero Impact, but a little variety in how she broke up her routine would have been nice; just something else to remind her that there was more to her work then gloom, gloom, and more gloom.

So wrapped up in her thoughts, she didn't hear the sound of someone knocking on her door at first. Turning around, the canine heroine was surprised to see Raymond standing there. The mole boy looked nicer now that he had a chance to take a shower and put on a fresh change of clothes but still, why was he still here? Last Washington had heard, Ray was being sent to live with his uncle in the Midwest; she didn't think he would want to stay around after being trapped in a mine for a month. After it was discovered that the slaver he had killed in the tunnels, James Glade, had murdered his parents in order to capture him and bit off his hand, no one was particularly interested in pressing the matter further, writing it off as "self defense." Still, it took all she had to not cringe every time she saw the stump of his left wrist.

Nodding her head, she walked over to let him in. "Raymond, how are you? I thought you left California already." She asked, her tone trying to be cheerful but not quite cutting it.

"Well... my parents are dead and I'm really glad I'm right-handed." He began sarcastically, then snorted and smiled. "Thank you, I would still be down there if it weren't for you. Doctor says the pain from my... amputation should be gone in about a week and even better, I'm eligible for cybernetic surgery. Meaning there might be a nefarious Dr. Moleclaw coming soon to your rogues gallery." He laughed for a moment, making light of the technophobe stereotype that only supervillains got mechanical prosthetics. "Anyway, yeah I think that sums up most of it. Getting a cybernetic hand and moving in with my uncle until I finish up enrolling."

"Enrolling?" Jessica asked; her curiosity clearly piqued.

"At Easton, they're accepting my application." He beamed proudly.

The Easton Academy for Extraordinary Youths in Minnesota. One of the good things about the Registration Initiative, the ONLY good thing as far as the critics were concerned, was the establishment of several schools across the country for youths with superpowers, a place where they could safely learn to control and develop their powers while also studying the things teenagers normally went to school for. Like pretty much everything else related to the American Registration Initiative, the schools were fairly hit or miss. Some barely made the grade, pun not intended, and at least one was under investigation for a laundry list of crimes. And then there was Easton... Easton was everything the program's architects envisioned, a vibrant school with a well educated and civically minded student body. Why even a fourth of the graduating class was being talented scouted for... Washington stopped and looked at Raymond. The mole smiled. "Like I said, thank you. Maybe after I graduate I'll be able to save people like you saved me."

Now it was the canine's turn to smile. "Call me when you graduate, I'll write you a recommendation. We could always use a few more good people around here." She chuckled. Maybe the upcoming week won't be so bad after all....