Once again, Mark found himself standing behind a door, waiting for a cue, and dressed in a costume.

  This time his costume was a tailored suit, shiny black dress shoes, and with a mantle made of adamantium shards hanging in the air over his shoulders and behind his back. Those shards were his helmet, disassembled, and with Quark at the center, like a square of silver among the black. Mark could slide those pieces into a proper helmet configuration at a moment’s notice, which was the point. Now that Mark had a fantastic helmet option he was never giving that up.

  But it looked pretty cool to have adamantium shards hovering behind his head so Mark wanted to keep that going.

  Mark kinda liked how Quark was a silver square with vein-like silver tendrils wrapping around the central part of his helmet, too… But… Mark glanced at the big display screens to the side, that showed the team lined up in front of the door, and he didn’t like what he was seeing. He was going into a battlezone. He should be wearing his helmet full time… Probably.

  Sure, this design looked neat. That counted for a lot in the ratings, according to the stylist JJ and the writer/director/producer Noel Oliphant, but Mark wanted the more secure option he had tried earlier. Maybe not the full helmet, but… Yeah. Let’s try that one.

  Mark changed his helmet up again, putting Quark into a half-collar that held on the back of his neck, half under the edge of his jacket collar, like some sort of secondary collar to his suit. Quark was right behind Mark’s neck with this configuration, and that allowed the little guy to wrap up along Mark’s neck, to poke into his ears once again.

  “Thank you, sir,” Quark said. “This is a much easier way to communicate. Would you like to adopt the monocle lens as well?”

  Quark seemed to like this configuration, too.

  Next to them, JJ was fussing with Isoko’s outfit. But he glanced at Mark, sighed, and continued to work on the hem of Isoko’s ballgown/miniskirt outfit. “The floating helmet pieces would play a lot better on the screen, Mister Careed.”

  “Yes, but it’s harder for Quark to talk,” Mark said.

  And Mark kinda just wanted to go for the full helmet, anyway.

  This was a nice compromise.

  JJ let the topic go, focusing on Isoko, looking her up and down as he pulled on her dress here and there. Wherever he touched the fabric changed color. The ballgown-miniskirt had been a white outfit and kinda airy, but now it was almost watercolor pink with black edges.

  Isoko stood out a lot wearing that outfit, and she loved it. She was completely focused on the way forward, though.

  On the other side, Eliot stood wearing a rather similar outfit to Mark, but with tech-like lights hiding in the underside of his collar and inside his sleeves and the hem of his slacks. He did have a half-visor thing going on, hanging over his left eye and ear. That was pretty neat, in Mark’s opinion.

  Eliot asked Mark, “You’re not doing the monocle, are you?”

  Mark shook his head. “No. That’s your look.”

  Eliot grinned.

  Quark whispered, “You should have a lens for communicating with me without the need for sound.”

  Mark wished he could have had months to train with Quark before all of this ‘Attack the Gate’ Hero/Villain Program had begun. If they had had more training, perhaps they could have come up with something better than any of the easy options. Mark didn’t want to intrude on Eliot’s look, though…

  But perhaps he could solve this issue another way?

  Mark asked, “Can you do contact lenses, Quark?”

  “… I do not know, sir. I do not believe so?”

  Eliot overheard that question and he kinda started thinking.

  Mark asked him, “Can you do contact lenses?”

  “Okay, so,” Eliot said, unsure, “I can help with that, but contact lenses are generally bad. They break all the time and your body is PL 60 but the materials I make from Earth supplies are all PL 0 or 1, if that, and that means that they can survive if you were a brawny with Tactile Telekinesis, but… Er.” He paused. “Actually...” He held up a hand. Two bits of plastic (or glass or whatever polymers Eliot worked with) flowed into being. He handed them over, saying, “It’s very bad to wear contacts unless the Power Level perfectly matches the Body of the user, or if the user can do TT. But Quark is your body, so if he copies these they might work for you, and rather perfectly, too.”

  Mark hadn’t realized that contacts would be a problem at all, but yeah, they would be a big problem. Use a high-tier material and you risk glass or whatever cutting the eyeballs. Too low of a tier and the contacts would break when a person closed their eyes too hard.

  Mark picked up the specialty contacts, though, saying, “I had never even considered that issue.”

  Quark reached through the air with a tendril of silver to touch the contacts and absorb them. He said, “Adopting new tech. One minute, please.”

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  Mark was suddenly hopeful that this idea would work. “Quark says that he’s adopting new tech, so this might work?”

  Eliot said, “I hope they work. Contact lens screens aren't used often for a lot of reasons. TT can solve most of those issues, but they’re still tech right on your eyes, and a competent Tinkerer or whatever could augment your reality way too easily. Or do something worse. But Quark is immune to that.”

  Mark grinned a little. Quark was pretty neat! “Timetable, Quark?”

  Quark turned on some exterior speakers and spoke from Marks’ collar, “One more minute, sir.”

  Sally spoke up, “There’s an enchanted item that you can buy that makes a retinal display, but I never got one. They’re supposed to be immune to normal hacking.” She looked at Eliot. “But they’re still vulnerable to hacking, though?”

  Sally was wearing a sparkling black dress made of sequins that showed off her upper body. A big slit ran up the side of her thigh, showing off her freshly shaved legs. Her makeup was glittery black, and Mark wondered if she was going to be cold, but he was already in a Union with all three of his people, keeping them warm, and the weather on Earth was not magically penetrating like it was on Daihoon.

  Isoko was also helping everyone stay warm.

  “We have Necklaces or Diadems of Retinal Display at the settlement, and I can hook you up with one,” Eliot said, “But the tech-side of those things are still vulnerable to hacking, yes.”

  Sally frowned as she hummed. “That sucks… Yeah, no, I don’t want one.”

  Eliot nodded softly as he looked forward.

  Sally stared ahead.

  Isoko breathed a few times, calming her nerves. JJ did one final adjustment to her pink and black miniskirt outfit, and then he nodded and stepped away.

  It was too close to go-time.

  The display above the door flashed a great big “1:00 MINUTE!”, and then it started counting down.

  59.

  58…

  Noel clapped his hands together once and then announced to the room, “Cameras up and active. Party is active. Lights are a-go. Action in 50 seconds!” Then he asked Mark and his crew, “Any last minute concerns?”

  There were concerns. A lot of them.

  From the Villains of Memphi attending the party, all of which were real villains, to the paladins of the Collective at the party, who were playing nice right now but they had still butted in, to Blackthorn, the archmage himself, who was currently very high and having a grand time with his harem at the back of the party, to whatever was going on with Tartu and them… Mark had no idea where the ‘real heroes’ of the evening were. Some place far away, or at least far enough away that Mark couldn’t sense them.

  But tonight was a big deal, and the Attack the Block scenario was only one of many different events, all happening at the same time.

  It was Mark and his team meeting the superheroes and supervillains of Memphi; the people they would be fighting alongside during the kaiju fights that would be happening every month, when the gate finally opened up. It might have been an HVP event to start, but it had rapidly bloomed into a full blown party.

  Mark was a little unnerved.

  It’d probably be easier to handle when the fighting started in like, an hour or two. After Tartu showed up at midnight, or whenever, and started blasting, or whatever.

  Which, let’s be real, was not going to go as planned.

  Despite all of those concerns, Mark answered Noel’s question with a simple, “No questions!”

  Sally shook her head.

  Eliot said nothing, steeling himself.

  And Isoko fluffed up her mini-skirt dress, flickering herself to Full Platinum and then back, all of the color draining as she became a perfect mirror for a moment, before she turned back to a too-cheerful villain, saying, “Ready to kick some ass!”

  Noel focused on Isoko, and then on all of them, and said, “If you want to spar with someone then ask them about it. If they say yes then we’ll get a scenario whipped up fast. Do not engage the heroes for spars, though. They’re here to have fun. The villains are fair game. I’ve got a few things lined up, like we talked about, but there are lots of storylines happening out there tonight and Attack the Gate is only one of them.”

  And now the timer was at 5 seconds remaining.

  Noel retreated backward, into the camera banks and the coordination zone, calling out to everyone, “We’re up and going in 3! 2!”

  He never said ‘1’.

  At 0, the double doors opened and the warmth of the studio trailer shattered under a flurry of snow that whipped across the ground, into the staging zone. It was practically powder, for the night was cold and the rain was more like a heavy fog.

  Mark and Isoko didn’t let the cold bother them.

  And then Blackvein was out the door, into the night, into the dark of the artificial alleyway.

  Bright lights loomed past the gloom. Music pounded in the cold.

  Fireworks burst overhead, illuminating the edges of the dark roofs overhead. Stage lighting subtly glowed in time and color with the fireworks overhead, illuminating the team for just a moment. Camera drones floated in the air all around them. The ground was ice and all of them were dressed to impress, and the light caught upon them from multiple angles.

  Isoko’s platinum skin made her seem to glitter in the glows.

  And then the lights faded, and Blackvein walked forward, through the darkness, guiding the way to the light.