VV4, 67 - Six Degrees
Tanner steepled his fingers in anticipation, his knee bouncing with enough force to power a small refrigerator. A bevy of screens were arranged in front of him, windows into the world outside his headquarters. His headquarters where he sat with his special item for the event.
Soon he’d be up against his ‘alternate reality’ rival Dextra Black. The assault would no doubt be relentless; a coordinated chessmaster ready and willing to perform every trick in the book. Tanner couldn’t hide the wide smile on his face.
Coming up with Dextra’s counterpart had been simultaneously easy and hard. Easy because the villain’s alternate was pretty much Dextra Black but a good guy. Someone who saw a business world rife with dirty tactics and used it to his advantage. Instead of joining everyone under the table, he flipped it. Exposed the corruption and then picked up the pieces for pennies on the dollar.
Still ruthless, but much more heroic.
The hard part was the power. How did you spin super intelligence in an interesting way? Thomas had explained that Dextra’s power was basically a wiki search. They had the ability to find out anything with enough research. Which fit, but boy did it make it hard to find something similar but not too similar.
But eventually, he found it.
Strangely enough, the comparison to a wiki was what did it. Links embedded in articles that led to other links inside articles. Connections leading to connections. And suddenly Tanner figured out his power.
He called it Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The game just called it Super Inference, like a boring computer.
His power let him see connections and let him dive into the links, chasing the information he needed as long as he followed it. An absolutely disorienting power at first, due to the insane number of lines leading from any object at any time. He got the hang of it eventually, and then proceeded to turn his headquarters into the deadliest game of tower defense that he could muster.