“Please.” He said, bravely. It was the best sort of bravery, I could tell. It was the little wet trickle down his hind leg that gave it away.

“Why haven’t you gone to you-know-who with this request?” I asked.

“I-I ha-have, “ He stammered, “She said no. She wanted to change my brain!”

I nodded. “It means that doing so wouldn’t be satisfying. Yet you’re here making a deal with the proverbial Devil. It’s going to be painful, you know. How will you feel when you’re confronted with a harsh truth?”

“I know.” He whispered. “You c-can have my soul after. Torture me in Tartarus, forever. Just let me see my son one last time!”

“Not that sort of harsh truth. What if you don’t approve of what your kid’s become?”

“Nothing will ever stop me from loving my son.” The look in his eyes didn’t lie, this pony who had come to the Devil.

“Tell you what, old man. No charge, this time. Just one condition: Keep that love in your heart”

Processing at the beta site had gone as smooth as could be hoped. Cheques had thrown together a quick modification of the Faraday cage. We had started with a pair of nested cages with a detector inbetween. It was just a simple fractal deal Cheques had designed, but as a broad band detector it was elegant to the edge of beauty. For simplicities sake we just put two more pairs inside that original cage, and added detectors to each dead space. Two devices required two clean spaces to work.

My contact in the Family was a man named Carlos. He was a short, young Latino man of Cuban descent. He barely ranked OG, but that was acceptable. He was unsurprised that the government had been listening in on phone calls illegally- that had been public knowledge for years. I’m certain that he was skeptical about the step up in vulnerability, though. It didn’t matter, as long as he kept networked devices away from me and his mouth shut. I had impressed my seriousness on the matter by EMPing his cell phone the first and only time he had failed to comply.

Carlos had passed my instructions down the line, and we had secured a first gen pad to dissect. That turned out to be… informative. He bagged it, thought he drained it of power, and then brought it to beta. After Carlos had cycled it through the "airlock" of nested cages into the main workspace I opened the containment package. Containment was essentially just two hollow blocks of lead with a cover. Simple and effective. There was no point taking a chance on this thing being x-ray sensitive.

I isolated each half in their respective isolation chambers and ran Cheque’s first protocol on both of them. Then all hell broke loose. There was some sort of motor or something in the base, because it MOVED. It thrashed back and forth, like a snake with no head, managing to physically tear the thin foil of its cage. It took me half a moment to realize it was some sophisticated variation of a simple bimetal strip, probably to keep the thing oriented right without breaking immersion. I cursed myself as a fool and grabbed half the container.

The pad itself had started smoking. I had defiantly triggered a failsafe. It was either destroying itself to keep from falling into enemy hands, or it was overloading trying to force a signal through multiple layers of Faraday cage. Probably both. I got my half of the container under it before it melted through the workstation.

Carlos had gotten the base into the other half of the container, and was moving to throw it under the melting pad.

“You fool! Keep them apart!” I screamed, grabbing and slamming the lid over the base as what was left of a ponypad dripped through its cage. I kicked the supports out of the station to seal its wieght against the lead container. I pulled two thermitite charges, and opened the lid a crack to drop them in with the flailing base. Overkill wasn’t enough to calm my racing heart on this one.

It was all over. All that was left was the cleanup, and analysis. Good Goddess what serendipity and laziness did deliver. A ruined workstation that would need to be decontaminated, quarantined, and replaced. Then whatever remained would need to be resterilized with thermite just in case it left any signature complex molecules. A torn cage that will need to be replaced, and upgraded a little sturdier. The data we must have gotten. It was worth it, so worth it. Even the wide eyed gang-banger.

“What the fuck man? What the fuck!” He was hyperventilating, clearly in a fight or flight response.

“It seems our precautions held, barely, this time. We were lucky my friend. Next time we will be more cautious.”

He just looked at me. He didn’t know if he should piss himself or just be pissed. The thermitite cracked and sputtered. We were going to need more lead tomarrow.

“Good thing there wasn’t a cell phone in the room, or we would have been fucked, “ I needled. Angry and scared was a usable combo. The connections I drew now would solidify once he calmed down. “Considering what they could do with just a children’s toy. “ No need to say who they were.

He breathed real fast to calm down. He clenched his teeth, forcing out “Yo, this is above my pay grade.”

I gave him time.

“Jus’ …. Just what the hell are you that you even know about this shit, man? I mean, hell. You roll up on us like you’re out the comic books and pay us for some paranoid bullshit. It’s crazy, but what the heck we roll with it. Taking care of the crazies a community effin’ service an’ the cops don’t care none about. Then we get paid on top of that, no heat or nothing? I shoulda known it was too good to be true. This though, makes me feel like the crazy one for not, you know? So who are you? Wait. No. Screw that. I only gotta know one thing. No bullshitting. Just tell me this one thing and I ain't gunna ask no more questions. Are you the Devil come to take my soul? Oh, lord, mamma please tell me if I was stuck with the devil when computers came to life to kill me.”

Holy Shit. He was serious. Maybe it was some weird way the drugs interacted with adrenaline and religion. Maybe he had breathed some fumes before we managed lockdown. Maybe my paranoia was rubbing off. In any case, there was only one rational way to respond.

“No, I’m not the Devil,” My monotone mechanized voice said. I grasped the edges of my cape in my gloves and brought it up to shoulder height, booming, “I'M BATMAN!”

Author's Note

They say that every writer has a few thousand bad stories in them. I apologize, for I've realized that this is one of mine. I will still be finishing it, though, in case anyone wants to see the end. Notes for this chapter:

I realized I had forgotten the scene in the previous chapter where I meet with a lieutenant for the Family. The only thing that adds is revealing the pseudonym being used in the super-hero persona.

Thermitite is just thermite with a binding agent to make it "sticky."

Carlos isn't grammatically correct. This is intentional, and he get better with the cussing as he calms down. Re-rating mature due to language, and possible future violence, language, and sex.