Verbosity's Vengeance

Chapter One

A gruesome sentence flew toward the Grammarian, blasted from the barrel of Professor Verbosity’s latest weapon, the Concept Cannon. Festooned with a dozen hook-like prepositional phrases, the complex construct spun widely to ensnare the superhero. Anticipating the attack, twin thunderclaps exploded from the Grammarian’s gauntlets as he fired a powerful pulse of parentheses from one hand and a simultaneous shower of semicolons from the other.

The punctuations found their marks, creating nodal points that shattered the sentence into a cloud of fragments. With an electric shriek of memetic energy, the construct collapsed like an accordion. Discrete, unconnected phrases bent and flexed harmlessly around the Grammarian.

Give up, Professor Verbosity, he said. You should know by now that sheer weight of words is no match for the power of punctuation!

He shifted into a fighting stance and faced his opponent, who had backed to the far side of the room. Professor Verbosity lifted the Concept Cannon and pulled a lever. The barrel swiveled into an angular projection. Blue sparks shone along the length of the weapon as electronic circuits reconfigured themselves.

Is that so, hero? Let’s see how well you can withstand my Redundancy Ray!

You need a new bag of tricks, Verbosity. I’ve already seen that a dozen times. Now, give up!

The supervillain smiled in response.

You always try to bluff your way out of difficulty, don’t you, Grammarian? I can’t say I don’t admire the attempt to win with words instead of brute force, but in this case, I’ll use both. The weapon in his hand was now shaking with barely contained power, long plasma streamers flowing from end to end. True, my Redundancy Ray is an old favorite, but I haven’t shown it to you since I added the Rephraser Refractor!

Blue lightning exploded from the weapon. In less than a second, a million microfilaments of memetic concept energy wrapped themselves around the Grammarian. Knocked to the ground by the force of the impact, he had no chance to react before the energy coalesced into a single, coherent sentence. Within the densely convoluted word-construct, the Grammarian was immobilized.

It’s about time he pulled out a real weapon, the hero thought. If I’d had to duck and dodge much longer, he surely would have begun to realize that I was holding back.

Professor Verbosity laughed in triumph, delighted to see his foe struggling in the grip of the memetic energy his weapon was projecting. The Grammarian struggled even more vigorously and threw in a growl of frustration to enhance the effect. For a moment, he thought he might have overplayed the acting, but the hero could see that Verbosity was convinced of his triumph.

Supervillains are suckers for cliché, the Grammarian thought, every one of them.

You’ll never win, Professor Verbosity! He spit his archenemy’s name with obvious contempt. Pinned to the floor under the weight and complexity of shimmering word-memes, he fought for breath as his bonds grew ever tighter. Now, his gasping was only partly exaggerated for effect. Although allowing himself to be captured was part of the Grammarian’s plan to trick Verbosity into revealing his latest plot, Lexicon City’s smartest hero feared that that he’d underestimated his foe.

Professor Verbosity laughed. Ah, my dear Grammarian, he replied, I have already won, insofar as the first and most crucial step in winning is to render you utterly and completely helpless. These sentences are not only long and complex enough to entangle you while you try to parse out subject and object amid the subtending and supporting prepositional and participial phrases, they are also perfectly correct grammatically, which renders you powerless to break free!

Under the triumphant gaze of his nemesis, the Grammarian was indeed struggling, completely snared in the thick ropes of words. He tried to find some flaw, some grammatical mistake that he could exploit. With all his super-powered lexicographical might, he scanned and rescanned the sentence, though it was blindingly painful to do so. Being captured was part of the plan; being rendered unconscious was not. He wanted some avenue of recourse if he needed to go to one of his backup plans.

Unfortunately, Verbosity had gone to great lengths this time, figuratively and verbally. If only there were an inconsistent verb tense, a dangling or misplaced modifier, even an intransitive verb used transitively, but there were no grammatical mistakes to latch onto. The Grammarian needed to get to the bottom of his foe’s plot and time was running out more quickly than anticipated.

Stepped up your game, have you, Verbosity? Well, you always fall for a taunt, you windbag.

You’re insane! When I break free of this sentence, I’ll put a stop to your criminal circumlocutions!

Typically valiant words from my typically valiant nemesis, or rather, a defeated and broken man who once was a worthy adversary to my rhetorical skill and encephalitic eloquence… you mustn’t try to—

AHA! An ellipsis! If only I can grab it in time!

—struggle so, for as you can see, my confounding concordances of verbal envelopment are employed without flaw, a condition which encompasses the little ellipsis you spotted, as well as the en dash you forced me to use—entirely against my will, but without consequence to the strength of the bonds holding you—as well as the em dashes I just threw in, purely as a lark, not in the sense of a bird preparing to take flight, which would be completely inappropriate in this context, given your utterly earthbound condition, but in the sense of a jest, a jape, a witticism at your expense, Grammarian, for as my memes move to muffle the mouth you muster to mock me, you are now naught but an object of ridicule and contempt, the highest of the high made the lowest of the low, the mightiest of the mighty made the—

With a tremendous explosion, the skylight in the ceiling of the old factory burst inward, cutting off the flow of words threatening to choke the life out of the Grammarian. A gleaming, armored man did a graceful back flip through the rain of glass shards and landed perfectly in front of the supervillain. His sleek, silvery armor was airbrushed with an iridescent pattern that was part sunrise, part moonlight.

Verbosity recoiled. No, not you! Not when I was so close to—

Yes, the newcomer interrupted, it is me, the Avant Guardian! Now, Professor Verbosity, face the might of the Champion of Chic! I’m here to stop your evil plans, whatever they are!

On the floor, the Grammarian was furiously trying to shout at the armored hero, to tell him that his interference was going to ruin everything. Unfortunately, as the Grammarian was completely muffled by interlocking clauses, sub-clauses and parenthetical asides, his words were unintelligible. The Avant Guardian glanced down at the bound superhero and puffed his chest out a little more.

I shall also rescue my colleague, the Grammarian. There’s no way to escape, Professor Verbosity! At all!

The villain sneered, but shifted his memetic energy projector gun away from the Grammarian to point it at the Avant Guardian. Without the flow of energy, the sentence-bindings lost focus, and the Grammarian felt the bonds start to loosen.

"Au contraire, you metal-clad buffoon, Verbosity cried. Among the many ways to escape are—"

Save your speeches for prison, Professor! Punctuation marks erupted from the giant hero’s silver gauntlets, a blinding cascade of periods, question marks, hyphens, and exclamation points. A glittering stream of memetic energy flew like a Pelikan blue-black hurricane into the sputtering face of Professor Verbosity; the venal viceroy of verbiage stumbled backward, shouting a short, sharp sentence. The great splash of punctuation rained onto the prone form of the Grammarian. With a crackling release of energy, the serpentine syntax snare fell apart into discrete phrases and clauses as the terminal punctuation marks lodged among the tangle of word-memes. Each new sentence fragment glowed and hissed with latent memetic energy. Verb forms collapsed from gerund to infinitive to simple, while prepositional phrases folded back in onto themselves and evaporated. The Grammarian diverted his intelligence to augment his physical strength, thrashing violently. If he could get a hand free in time, he might yet be able to salvage the situation!

Verbosity crouched in a defensive stance and deflected another verbal assault from the Avant Guardian. With a snarl, the Professor responded with a tight string of overheated metaphors that caught the Avant Guardian in the thigh. His molecular-mesh nanotech armor flashed into a shower of molten metal as the beam raked across its surface. Sparks exploded as his armor short-circuited. The Guardian shouted and dodged, leaping sideways across the room. He landed heavily against a rack of tools and equipment, which collapsed on top of him. Professor Verbosity aimed his beam to follow, clearly intending to finish off the Avant Guardian. Before he could fire, he was knocked sideways by a wild accusation flung by the Grammarian.

The Avant Guardian pushed away the debris and clambered to his feet. He drew a complicated-looking weapon and aimed it at the villain.

You don’t have a prayer against me, Professor Verbosity. And once I free the Grammarian with this sentence diagramming gun, you’ll be trapped good! And by that I mean bad! Trapped bad! On the floor, the struggling Grammarian moaned with frustration. Uh, badly! I meant badly! His weapon hummed in a rising pitch as it charged, green and orange indicator lights winking along its length.

Professor Verbosity didn’t respond, but swiveled his aim and blasted the floor underneath the Avant Guardian. A rebounding wave of energy threw the slab of concrete up to smash into the hero’s legs. He fell back into the debris as dozens of electric discharges erupted from the knee and ankle joints of his armor. The diagramming gun flew into the tangle of verbal bonds around the Grammarian where it was completely caught up in the argument. The weapon discharged, but with no rationality guiding it, the gun’s grammatical formalism only made the sentence structures more complicated without increasing clarity. Professor Verbosity aimed at the wordcloud and shouted quickly, pulsing memetic energy into the bonds to renew their strength.

Like two sides of the same coin, aren’t you? Two peas in a pod! Two birds of a feather! Well, this will take care of two birds with one stone! Reinforced by the power of overused metaphor, the tangle of grasping memes grew heavier and more leaden with every second. The Grammarian tried to speak, but the tightening bonds were again crushing the breath out of him.

From across the room, a wrench flew in front of Professor Verbosity’s face. Startled, the villain turned sideways, ducking under another flying tool. Half-buried amid the wreckage of the steel shelving and obviously not yet able to stand on his damaged legs, the Avant Guardian was grabbing and throwing anything within reach. A fusillade of hand tools rocketed across the room; Professor Verbosity dodged most and batted the rest away.

His opponent’s concentration broken, the Grammarian felt the bonds around his arms shift. He clawed away the muffling memes that masked his mouth. Through a gap in the energy bindings, he brought up his right hand and shouted, Full stop, Professor! He sprayed a wide stream of terminal punctuation marks, striking the furious villain a glancing blow. The Avant Guardian took advantage of Professor Verbosity’s partial immobility to grab another tool and drew back for a throw.

Guardian! No!

The Grammarian’s shout was too late. The heavy framing hammer tumbled end over end, flying forward. The Grammarian shot another termination beam at it, but hampered as he was by the wrappings of Professor Verbosity’s memetic energy sentence constructs, he missed the flying hammer by two feet. The head of the hammer ripped into Verbosity’s jaw, whipping his head around and sending a spray of blood and bone fragments into the air. The stunning force of the blow knocked him off-balance, his feet sliding on the scattered debris of the workshop.

Bellowing in agony, Professor Verbosity both hands to his face. Now fueled by his screams of hysterical, animal pain instead of his intricately convoluted verbal constructs, the supervillain’s memetic energy projectors overloaded explosively. The tightly coiled strings of binding energy turned into a single detonation of raw memetic plasma, purple-white with molecular incandescence. The power flowed outward in all directions, bringing down a cinder block wall on top of the Avant Guardian. The Grammarian’s ribs cracked as the mindless energy bonds crushed him with savage power. Professor Verbosity himself was thrown backward by the blast, smashing through a heavy wooden door onto the aeropad. He skidded across the floor and landed against his quad-rotor airship.

Desperate for breath, the Grammarian tried to move forward to catch him, but the same meme-bonds that had injured him were choking the life from the Avant Guardian. Cursing, he turned back to help the armored hero. Using a poetic device as leverage, he forced a wedge of em dashes into the bonds across the Avant Guardian’s face. The hero gasped as the Grammarian’s counter-energy beam drove apart the sentence wrapped tight across his throat.

At the foot of the airship, blood flowed through Verbosity’s fingers where he clutched at his shattered jaw. Moaning and staggering, the supervillain half-climbed, half-fell into his airship and slapped at a control panel. The quadrotors roared as the craft lifted and launched jerkily forward, clearing the edge of the big doorway by less than a foot. The Grammarian saw his nemesis through the open door, hanging on with manic strength to keep from falling out of the open door as the airship yawed around and began to climb into the night sky. Whatever kind of autopilot Professor Verbosity had for the airship was doing its job. The Grammarian had a final glimpse of the escaping criminal holding onto a safety harness with one hand, gripping tightly at the ruin of his blood-soaked face with the other.

It was the only time the Grammarian had ever known Professor Verbosity to leave without making some kind of speech.

The pounding of the quad rotors faded and stillness came over the wreckage of the villain’s hideout. As he worked to free himself, the sentence memes that bound the Grammarian evaporated with the hissing crackle of static discharges going to ground. The Avant Guardian struggled against the same bands of coherent energy, but with much less success. Without a memetic lever—a counter-argument, a sharp rejoinder or even a retort—he could fight these circumlocutions for hours without getting free.

The Grammarian wanted to kick him.

You didn’t do any background research on Professor Verbosity, did you? he said. You just came charging in here like you were—

Stop talking and help me get free! the Avant Guardian shouted. Verbosity is getting away!

He GOT away. You stuck your nose in and screwed up everything.

Are you kidding? I saved you!

The Grammarian ground his teeth and shot a stream of acid remarks from his left hand, washing them over the Guardian. One after another, the meme-bonds were cut off in mid-sentence. When Professor Verbosity’s arguments were full of holes, the armored hero pushed aside the mess of evaporating sentence fragments and freed himself from the pile of collapsed rubble.

Now that the adrenaline was fading, every movement and every breath was stabbing agony for the Grammarian. He ran his fingers along his side; at least five, maybe as many as seven ribs were broken. It took him a moment to focus enough to direct a soothing drone into the broken bones. The pain eased and he took a deep breath. Maintaining this energy field would be draining, but now that Professor Verbosity had escaped, there was nothing more to do here. Except…

He redirected his attention to the Avant Guardian, now standing and kicking aside the last of the cinder block pieces. Though he looked like hell, his armor’s self-repair functions had finished restoring minimal functionality to his leg servos. The suit was battered, but the Grammarian knew it would repair itself in time.

Through a split lip, the Avant Guardian smiled at the Grammarian, and gave a hearty laugh, stinking with comic book bravado. Such a melodramatic touch was the kind of thing the Avant Guardian thought all superheroes did after a battle. The Grammarian shook his head.

What an idiot!

Striking a heroic pose, the Avant Guardian followed up the laugh by saying, I guess my cutting-edge stylistic weapons were no match for his pendantry!

In response, the Grammarian spit out some lingering brick dust and muttered under his breath. He grimaced, prying at the remains of a thorny, left-branching sentence that clung to his cowl.

Eh? What was that, old friend? The Avant Guardian kept smiling, as though they were sharing a moment of triumph.

"I said, it’s pedantry, not PENdantry! Furthermore, he was no match for you, not the other way around!" It didn’t matter that the Avant Guardian couldn’t help being a moron; the Grammarian was furious.

What? The Avant Guardian looked confused. Did I say that backwards? Ah, well, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is, you’re free—I’m happy to help a fellow hero! He bent to retrieve the sentence diagramming gun. Damaged in the fight, it was sparking from a crack along the adverb/reverb circuit.

The blood rose in the Grammarian’s face until he was nearly purple. He hissed his words through clenched teeth. I didn’t WANT your help!

Huh? Well, what’s that supposed to mean? said the Avant Guardian. All I was doing was—

The rest of his sentence was cut off when the diagramming gun exploded in his hands. Blue-white lines of raw memetic energy lanced outward at different angles. The Avant Guardian shouted and dropped the weapon.

If he’d been uninjured, leaping out of the way would have been no challenge for the Grammarian’s superhuman reflexes, even after the hours he’d spent struggling in Professor’s Verbosity’s energy bindings. However, he had a mass of broken ribs and remnants of Verbosity’s tangling sentence memes still clinging to him. The hero tried to dodge, but fell against a fully-laden work shelf. The main part of the blast impacted the shelf, shattering it and the wall behind. Fragments of metal, pieces of electronics and chunks of plaster fell with a crash on top of the Grammarian.

The Avant Guardian stammered incoherent noises of apology. He offered his hand to help the Grammarian to his feet, but his gauntlet was still crackling with sharply delineated parts of speech. The Grammarian waved him away and got up unaided, gasping with pain and trailing blood from a fresh gouge to his right leg. It meant more concentration, more pain suppression, more energy expended. Despite the memetic overrides he’d placed on his peripheral nerves, the Grammarian groaned as he stood. The residues of the sentence memes that still clung to his costume were electrostatically sticky, and the electronic components hung onto him like ornaments on a sloppy Christmas tree.

Listen, Grammarian, said the Avant Guardian, I’m sorry about that little accident, but I still don’t know why you’re upset about how this evening went. We both took a few lumps, but the important thing is that I just rescued you from Professor Verbosity! I’d have thought you’d be grateful.

Grateful? For your interference? I had everything under perfect control! I didn’t need you crashing in here messing things up. As he spoke, the Grammarian pulled the sharp-edged bits of circuit boards and sub-assemblies from his clothes. A high-density capacitor snagged on his cloak and caused a small rip in the smoky gray fabric. He flung it to the floor and watched it bounce away. Something caught his eye.

It sure didn’t look like you had things under control, replied the Avant Guardian. Actually, it looked to me like you were on the losing end of the stick.

The Grammarian bit off a coarse reply while he crossed the room and bent to examine something on the floor. He said, It appeared that way to you because you don’t have Professor Verbosity as an archenemy, while I have been battling him for years. He’s planning something big, something whose scale is far beyond anything he’s attempted previously. I was trying to learn what it is, and the only way to do that is to trick him into revealing it. The object on the floor was covered in blood, but the Grammarian had no trouble identifying it.

The look of confusion on the Avant Guardian’s face was complete. But you were losing, he said.

With difficulty, the Grammarian took a deep breath and counted to ten before speaking.

I lost this fight on purpose. I couldn’t make it look too easy, or Professor Verbosity never would have fallen for it. The verbal bonds he used on me were stronger than I expected, but that’s beside the point. He never would have let me die because I’m too important to him as an audience. I’ve been fighting him for years, and I know his style. He’s an arrogant blowhard. Lording his triumph over his victims isn’t just half the fun with him. It’s more like nine-tenths of the fun.

As he spoke, the Grammarian took out a plastic evidence bag and, wrapping it around his hand, gently picked up the object on the floor. He sealed the bag and secured it in a pocket of his tactical armor vest.

Once it was clear to him that I was helpless, the Grammarian continued, Verbosity would have taken me to the location of his latest project, shown it to me and explained it in excruciating detail. And before you even say it, Guardian, yes, I’m aware that it would have been excruciating in the literal as well as the figurative sense of the word. Still, it would have been worth it to crack this case. Now the work of months is completely undone, thanks to you. He scowled, checking himself for remaining bits.

Oh. The Avant Guardian stood with a dark expression. The effort at strategic thought was plain on his face. Is that really how you work? You track people down for a long time before you move on them? That doesn’t sound like much fun.

"As opposed to your ‘smash in the window without a second thought’ modus operandi? That stops muggings, Guardian, but it rarely works against supervillains."

The Guardian frowned, obviously trying to understand the strategic advice. Then, with a start as he noticed the Grammarian’s careful movements, he said, Hey, what was that thing you picked up? Did Professor Verbosity leave a clue?

Yes, he left it behind, but I doubt that it’s any use as a clue.

Are you sure?

Pretty damned sure. It’s a chunk of jawbone with two molars attached.

Seriously? Wow.

If he were in custody, there would have been a good chance to have it reconstructed and implanted back in his jaw. Now, though, I’ve got to get it to Lexicon City General Hospital and hope for the best. Maybe they can preserve it somehow. The Grammarian tucked the plastic bag into his vest. No wonder he took off like that. I’d hate to see the condition of his face.

Well… he is one of the bad guys, right?

Yes, he is, but I wanted him captured so he could stand trial and be put away, not maimed with blunt trauma so he could go bleed to death in a hole somewhere. Have you ever heard of self-restraint? Do you even know what constitutes excessive force? Do you?

The Guardian didn’t respond.

I’m leaving, said the Grammarian. I have a lot of work to do, or rather work to do all over, thanks to your exploits of this evening. He swirled his cape around himself, the nanofabric rippling into a perfect camouflage. To the unaided eye, it was as though he began to blur, fading into invisibility, all except a large, irregularly shaped patch around his knees. Small sparks were crackling around the hole torn in the fabric; the invisibility effect was flickering like a bad fluorescent bulb. The Grammarian gritted his teeth.

The Avant Guardian said, Hey, Grammarian?

Near the doorway, a dim, shimmering outline with a big flashing patch at its knee paused, waiting to receive an apology.

If you were going to be wrapped up and helpless when Professor Verbosity took you to his secret hideout, how would you have escaped once you were there? What would you have done?

From the outline came the sound of someone drawing a deep breath, holding it, then exhaling quietly.

Even if none of my contingency plans were operable, I would have thought of something, Guardian. Thinking is a good strategy in this line of work. You should try it sometime.

With a swirl of light and darkness, he was gone, disappeared into the night.

• • •

The Grammarian pulled off his half-mask and flung it at the wall of his shop. A voice called out, Good evening, sir. Would you like a cup of tea?

I want that interfering imbecile to stop screwing up my work!

I’m sorry, sir, came the response, I didn’t understand you. Would you like a drink?

He pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath. Concentrate, concentrate! The motorcycle ride back from Professor Verbosity’s lair had been a fog of suppressed agony. Without a steadily increasing flow of mental energy to hold his rib cage together, the wracking pain from his chest would be completely debilitating. He needed to get the healing process started soon, or he might as well check himself into Lexicon City General.

Yes, Mrs. White, he said, I would like a drink. He sat on the locker room bench, disengaged the interlocks on his armor and began to pull his boots off, bending at the waist as much as possible.

Would you like coffee, tea or something else?

The right boot came off easily, but the calf-clasp on the left boot was bent.

Damn!

In a surge of anger, he thought about blasting the clasp off with a memetic tightbeam, but he was too tired to make cutting remarks. After a moment, he cursed, got up and clumped over to the workbench to get a pair of pliers.

I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t understand you. Would you like coffee, tea or something else?

I want a double vodka martini, dry and dirty. With two olives. The pliers did the trick, although the clasp was wrenched badly enough that he’d have to fix it or replace it entirely. This was his last pair of undamaged boots, too.

A double vodka martini, dry and dirty, with two olives. Is that correct, sir?

Yes, Mrs. White, that’s correct. He tossed the boot onto the bench. Also, I am injured.

In what way are you injured, sir? Is this an emergency?

No, it’s not that bad. Mostly just the usual cuts and scrapes, but several ribs are broken. I want you to chill the healing tank. I’ll have my drink while I’m healing. He pulled a large magnifying glass from a drawer and limped across the room.

Very good, sir. Chiller and recirculators are on maximum. The tank temperature is now 64F. I estimate it will reach 50F in twenty-one minutes. Shall I warm up the CAT scanner? Are you suffering any internal injuries?

No, nothing like that.

Deep lacerations? Will you require stitches?

No, just the tank.

Heavy contusions? Torn ligaments? Concussion?

No, damn it, it’s only a few broken ribs. Just let me know when the tank is cold and I’ll be in shortly.

Sir, I should point out that your drink will extend the time required for you to make the necessary cellular repairs. Alcohol impairs your ability to concentrate.

I’m aware of that, Mrs. White. Don’t nag.

Very good, sir. I recommend you begin taking the glucose tablets prior to entering the tank. Or would you prefer something more substantial to eat?

He sighed. After all this time, he should know better than to try to get a rise out of Mrs. White. No, nothing. The glucose tablets will be fine.

Very good, sir. Please let me know when you’ve finished your shower. The voice clicked off.

One of the glass-fronted cabinets opened at his touch, responding to his thumbprint on the handle. The Grammarian, having begun the mental shift back to Alex Graham, took off his cape to examine it closely, particularly the torn section near the bottom. The nanofibers had begun repairing themselves on suit power alone, but the gelcell would run dry before the repairs were complete. The tear was big, crossing several control sectors of the cape’s circuitry; on a normal charge cycle, it would take at least twelve, perhaps fourteen hours before they were even partially re-meshed, and that would be little more than a patch, minimally functional. With a sigh, Alex carried the cape to the deep-cycle repair cabinet and hooked up the half-inch cables from the high voltage power supply. With the heavy, insulated door closed, he programmed the repair cycle while he waited for the gas-phase liquid nitrogen to start hissing into the chamber. Once it was down to minus forty degrees, the nanofibers could start drawing some serious power and regenerate much more quickly. A full repair, recalibration and recharge cycle would take five hours, although with no other demands on the circuitry, it would be repaired enough to use again in an hour or so.

He sighed. It’s not like I’ll need it in an hour.

I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t understand you. Are you in need of medical assistance?

I wasn’t speaking to you, Mrs. White. I’ll call you if I need anything. Please don’t bother me otherwise.

Very good, sir.

Alex sat on the bench again and for a moment, leaned his head against the wall behind him, eyes closed against the overhead fluorescent lights. After a while, he sighed and stood to undo the clasps on the rest of his body armor. Shoulders, chest, waist, hips—the familiar unlocking sequence was made awkward with the pain of his injuries. In front of the open costume cabinet, he let each piece slip off, examined it and put it on its reinforced steel hanger. As he hooked up the charging connectors to the breastplate, he ran his fingers along the dark gray surface. The nonreflective coating was scratched and dented, with a long knife gouge near the left shoulder. One of his other breastplates looked even worse than this one, with a star-shaped dimple where he’d been shot last week. The bioreactive fleximesh had saved his life by absorbing most of the impact. He ran a hand across the speed-healed wound; before tonight’s injuries, it had progressed to the point that he’d no longer winced at the touch. After tonight, though… he made a mental note to put ibuprofen back on the shopping list.

He powered down and removed the rest of his costume. When the chargers were hooked up and the armor sections were all put away, he realized the sort of condition everything was in. It could only be described as marginal. He really should set aside a few days to get his gear back in shape. The armor, his power-boost leggings, the capes, the enhancement masks: all his costume elements were looking decidedly the worse for wear. Not just this suit, either. Everything was scratched, patched and shabby.

It’s no wonder I’m in such a foul mood, he said aloud. If the clothes make the man, I’m in trouble.

With the Avant Guardian having completely blown more than two months of the Grammarian’s hard work, Alex was left with the dubious silver lining of having ample time to get everything back up to fully operational repair status. Normal usage was hard enough on his equipment, but with his high-level investigation of Professor Verbosity’s activities occupying almost every spare moment these last weeks, the wear was all well above normal. Some of Verbosity’s associates played rough, and they’d all required unusual levels of persuasion before they divulged the information he’d been after. Worse, because of the time constraints involved, he’d been forced to make do with stop-gap repairs on everything. Efficiency and functionality