I didn’t want to bring out the big guns, but she left me with no choice. So at the start of the next class I fished inside my desk and pulled out a small orb.

  I let go and it floated into the air. Up into the middle of the room where a red light started to run around its equator.

  “Does anybody know what this is?” I asked.

  Blank looks. Of course. I shook my head. I figured at least some of them would have tried to hazard an answer at this point, but apparently I’d stumped them with this one.

  Some were looking up inquisitively, others were staring up in terror. As though they were wondering what fresh hell Professor Terror was bringing to the classroom today.

  I smiled. Hell certainly had come to the classroom.

  Also, Professor Terror? I was starting to like the sound of that.

  “What you see floating before you is a wide area matter dispersal bomb.”

  I paused to let that sink in. To enjoy the pregnant silence that settled on the room. To wait for the inevitable gasps as they realized what fresh doom was floating just above their heads.

  Blank looks again. Damn it. I shook my head.

  It really was my fault, after all, expecting a room full of journalism majors to understand regular science that told you to get out of line of sight when someone was attacking you. Let alone the super science required to realize exactly why every single one of them should be soiling their drawers right now as they stared at something where getting out of line of sight wouldn’t do a damn thing.

  “It’s an offshoot of teleportation technology. A rather nasty offshoot of teleportation technology, I might add. Most teleporters work on the principle of taking matter, scrambling it down to its constituent atomic parts, converting those constituent parts to energy and transporting them over long distances, and reconstituting them at a new location,” I said.

  I figured I needed to start at the most basic level even though most of this room looked like the type to watch enough science fiction to know what a teleporter was.

  Only science fiction became science reality when Night Terror was in the room.

  “This little device works on a similar principle, except it skips the second part about reconstituting everything at a new location. Saves a hell of a lot of power that way too. No, instead this takes every piece of matter in a given area and disperses it. No energy conversion or transporting or reconstituting.”

  They were starting to get the idea. Some of the more terror-prone students, and there were a lot more today after all my demonstrations than there were at the beginning of the semester thank you very much, were starting to glance nervously towards the door.

  Especially the idiots in the back who seemed to think a few rows of stadium seating would be enough to save them from yours truly.

  Amateur hour. And it really galled because of how much I’d taught them. How much I thought I’d taught them.

  I knew this was an intro survey course that a bunch of checked out seniors took on their way out, but seriously. This could save their life and they were sneaking glances at their phones under their desks?

  No wonder the mortality rate for recent graduates from the journalism program was so high at this school.

  On the bright side it meant the school boasted the highest employment numbers for a journalism program anywhere in the country considering the fast turnover thanks to that mortality rate.

  “You might want to put the phones down for this one kiddos. I’ve set this particular wide area matter dispersal bomb to go off within the confines of this room,” I paused for a moment to let that one sink in. At least something was starting to sink in for a change. “Why would I do that, class?”

  The real answer was that I was trying to lure out a superhero. I was trying to flush a goddess out from the sea of normals she was hiding in.

  Though I didn’t expect anybody in the room to get that answer. Except maybe Fialux herself.

  I wasn’t even sure she suspected my game yet, or if she still just thought I was a good teacher. If any of them did guess that answer they’d get an A for the semester right on the spot.

  A guy in the front row raised his hand. “To teach us how to escape it?”

  “No, I’m afraid that’s not it,” I said.

  I pressed my hands together behind my back and smiled, relishing the moment. “I’m afraid there is absolutely no escaping this one. It’s just like the speed of light, only worse. It could go off and you wouldn’t even know it was there as opposed to a laser weapon where you at least have a chance of seeing somebody pointing the damn thing at you before you die.”

  “So what’s the point?” That from a cute blonde girl about halfway up.

  “The point of these last few demonstrations before your finals is to show you there are going to be times when you go out there in the world, when you try to gather information, when you try to cover the big story and despite what you do, no matter how good your training is, that big story might kill you without even seeing the danger. Your lives are subject to the capricious whims of gods and goddesses fighting around you. You could be squashed like an insect in an instant, your atoms dispersed to the winds, and neither you nor the hero or villain who killed you might ever know. The only thing that would remain is a nice little engraved nameplate on the Starlight City News Network memorial wall. A wall, I might add, that they had to recently expand for the fifth time since they built the thing twenty years ago because it keeps filling up. Seriously. Those wall panels are ten foot by ten foot with a very small font. You can fit a lot of names on those things and they keep adding more of them.”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  I paused. This was one of the greatest villain monologues I think I’d ever delivered, and no one realized that’s what it was. They all thought it was career advice.

  “That sounds like a pretty depressing point,” someone muttered in the front row.

  “Exactly my point,” I said. “This is a dangerous business, and you’re going to get paid pennies on the dollar considering the danger you’re putting yourselves in covering these stories. As you get ready to embark on this career, as you get ready to finish this program, you need to seriously ask yourself if it’s worth it.”

  I couldn’t tell you exactly when I’d transitioned from using this class as an opportunity to get in a few not so subtle digs at anybody who decided to go into writing as their chosen profession to actually caring about my students.

  Don’t get me wrong. I still thought they were a bunch of shiftless lazy good for nothing slackers who went with an easy major that allowed for a busy partying schedule in addition to setting them up for a horrible career choice with a statistically quick end. The suckers were also paying a crap load of money to the university for the privilege of making that horrible career choice, but at the same time I didn’t want to see them smashed by some villain who had fewer scruples than I did about collateral damage.

  Especially considering the very literal meat grinder most of them would be fed into after graduating when they started looking for entry-level jobs at the local news outlets in the thriving superhero coverage business in Starlight City.

  Of course even if I did care, I hadn’t forgotten my original purpose for being here. Even if we did share lingering glances after class, I hadn’t forgotten that my ultimate goal was to get Fialux to reveal herself so I could test out my Anti-Newtonian stasis field on a non-mobile goddess. To try and capture her so we could sit down and have a talk about all those lingering glances she’d been giving me over the semester.

  About what the hell it meant that she went from flirting with me to talking on the phone with this mysterious boyfriend and forgetting all about me every time she switched to video chat. What the hell was up with that?

  It was driving me insane, and if it turned out it was all a big tease, that it was all part of some naughty professor fantasy, and it turned out she was Fialux… Well let’s just say I was going to have a difficult time not testing out whether or not my matter dispersal bomb worked on her invulnerable hide.

  But for now I had a part to play. I held up a remote and pointed it towards the matter dispersal bomb.

  “This particular matter dispersal bomb was designed with a red light that travels around the center to show you how close it is to detonating. The faster the light moves around that band, the closer we all are to being completely obliterated. By the time it becomes a solid line you only have a few moments to make peace with whatever higher power you happen to believe in.”

  I glanced up at the bomb. It was going at a good pace now, but nowhere near a solid line.

  “Whoever designed the thing obviously had a sense of style,” I said.

  I’d always been a firm believer that if I was going to go to the trouble of inventing a piece of technology that was decades or centuries beyond anything available to humanity currently then I was going to do it with style.

  I was particularly fond of that red light moving around the equator of the orb. I thought it had a nice retro look to it. A look that said this particular piece of technology had broken free from its human masters and was coming for you.

  I’m not sure why a moving red light gave me that feeling, but there it was.

  Now time for a performance that would make those idiots over in the drama department go wild. Theatricality was the key to any good villainy career, and it was time for a command performance.

  I held the remote up and clicked at the orb. I made sure to make the movement clear. Only the light kept swirling around the center. I made the clicking motion again, and the light kept moving faster and faster.

  Students started to shuffle and glance around nervously. Even the ones who’d obviously come to the conclusion that no one had actually gotten hurt so far so they were probably safe enough.

  That was probably part of what kept Fialux hidden for so long too, damn it. Some started to look longingly towards the exits and a couple near the back quietly started gathering their things and moving out those doors.

  I scrunched up my face and made a show of inspecting the remote. I even smacked it a couple of times. As though it was an unruly animal and not a piece of highly advanced technology.

  Why people thought beating a piece of highly advanced technology would make it work was beyond me, but I’d use the old stereotype for this demonstration.

  The actual shut off command was keyed to my voice anyway. I wasn’t going to leave anything up to chance. Including the chance one of the idiots in this class might do something stupid like grab the remote out of my hands and try to turn the thing off themselves leaving all of us screwed.

  Time to lay it on thick. I smacked it one last time. “Weird, they told me the button could stick, but it always came undone after a few smacks…”

  That was enough to set off screaming near the front of the room. People started scrambling over chairs. Panic was definitely setting in. I would’ve laughed if I didn’t know it would give away the game.

  Instead I continued staring at the remote as though it was an interesting puzzle and not the key to a device that was very shortly going to annihilate all life in this room, excepting perhaps Fialux since I wasn’t sure how this weapon would work against her.

  Oh, and me. I always wore my molecular descrambler scrambler. I was serious when I said these things could kill a person and they’d never know it, so I figured it was safer to have safeties built in against teleportation just the same as I had safeties to guard against mind control and random bullets flying at me, or making the laws of physics my bitch when I suffered rapid deceleration or took a heavy hit.

  I put my hands on my hips as though I was more exasperated than scared. I glared at the matter dispersal bomb. I glanced up into the seats where Selena was tapping a pencil against her desk and looking down at me with the corner of her mouth turned up in a half smile.

  Definitely not the panicked reaction I saw from everyone else in the room. Whether that was because she knew this was a put on or because she thought I wasn’t serious like every other time was beyond me, but it was infuriating how she was sitting there acting exactly how I’d expect Fialux to act.

  I knew what she was doing. Trying to psych me out acting like she didn’t care about a bomb that would off mere mortals. Annoying me by not giving away that she was Fialux by flying the bomb away from everyone else.

  She was a cool customer. I hated it.