Infiltration 16.7
Once Mouse Protector calmed down, which only took a couple of minutes, we both walked into the warehouse. The insects around us were pushed to the side as I prodded them with Arthropod Control and Herb, mainlining Taylor's power, stiffly made them move as one while he held Taylor in place. Through the power, I could feel her Mastered attempts to use them to kill us all, and her self-hatred and despair at having to do so.
Walking into the darkened warehouse, I left the door open, the afternoon sun casting long shadows, and pulled some Light to my chest, illuminating the hallway. In the middle of the warehouse we found Herb, his Stand in front of Taylor, who seemed to be frozen, mid-charge, stance low, orichalcum baton out.
Stepping over to her, I reached down and carefully removed her helmet. Herb made an inquisitive noise, and I explained, "She's gonna hurl, it's part of the process."
"Full detox? Shit," my friend said, voice a little strained with effort, but undercut with sympathy. "Had to do that enough times for my mom. That sucks. Sorry, Little Bug."
I started to tell him he shouldn't be sorry, but I recognized it was a sympathy 'sorry', not an actual apology. Leaning over her from behind, threading one arm around her stomach to catch her, making sure her hair was caught between us, I reached up with my other arm and half hugged her, hand resting on her cheek. I started to heal her, and she started to shake, but she was still locked up like a statue.
"Keep the bugs still, release her," I ordered, and the girl went limp in my arms, spasming before retching, a uniformly bright pink fluid pouring out her mouth and nose as she tried to vomit, cry, and gasp for breath all at the same time.
Keeping her bent to let her get it out, when she started to dry heave I pulled her to the side, letting her stand, still holding her face as I extruded a cloth to wipe her off, the spasms slowly fading away. As soon as she could, she started apologizing, saying she was sorry over and over, how she was a horrible person, how she knew I could never forgive her.
Stupid shit.
"Hey," I said, turning her head up to look me in the eye. "You heard what I told Mouse?" She nodded into my hand. "The same applies to you. I'm big on personal responsibility, but the reason I hate Mastering is because it takes that away from you, while still making you perform the motions."
"But she didn't kill anyone!" Taylor cried.
Mouse Protector went 'Huh?', but I remembered the ABB attacks, and what we'd done. A quick sense of the outside through our shared power told me she'd taken that to the next level. "Mouse, what were the Merchant Master's orders?"
Karen twitched. "Protect everyone in a vehicle. Kill everyone else," she recited dully. She paused, before letting out a low, "oh."
"Yeah, oh," I agreed. Only a half, maybe two thirds of the Merchants had made it back to the cars before Taylor had smothered everything in insects. Looking through the eyes of the Swarm outside, she'd followed the Master's orders, killing them all, smothering them with biting, stinging insects that'd gouged flesh and crawled into every possible orifice, stinging and biting their way down.
There were a lot more corpses around us then than the ones I'd gathered here.
"And?" I asked Taylor, smiling a little to show her I didn't care.
"And?" the girl echoed, incredulous. "I killed them, Lee! It was easy!"
"And?" I asked again.
"And I killed them!" she repeated, starting to get hysterical, looking down and forcing me to twist not to break contact or force her head back up, which just felt like the wrong thing to do.
I stayed calm, knowing that getting frustrated that she wasn't getting it wouldn't help. "Why? That doesn't sound like something you'd do of your own free will."
"It wasn't! She made me, and I killed all of them!" she repeated, and I projected feelings of calm-acceptance-trust through our shared power. Herb twitched, before adding his own hesitant, understanding-sympathy-sorrow.
She shook, blaring self-hatred-worthlessness-despair. "No, don't, I don't deserve it!" she almost screamed.
"Uh, did I just miss something?" Karen asked, before shaking her head, walking up to Taylor and I. Mouse looked at my hand, where I still held her, and mouthed 'healing?', Taylor's sight hidden by her hair, which had fallen forward in a curtain, cutting off the rest of the world. I nodded.
Karen stood next to me, pulling Taylor's hair back and tucking it behind her ear, showing the side of her face I wasn't holding, causing the girl to flinch. "Listen, kid," the veteran hero said, "I've been around the block. A couple of decades has taught me a lot-" she paused glancing over to me. "And I've been doing this since I was seven because I'm only twenty seven. Vejovis," she stressed getting a somewhat choked laugh from Taylor.
"But, I've dealt with Masters. Not a lot, thank Cheesus, but enough," Mouse Protector told the girl, unable to resist the pun, and I could feel Taylor's mouth twitch to a momentary smile, though it dropped just as fast. "Everybody says 'oh it's not your fault, it wasn't you it was the Master', but most don't mean it. They look at ya different, knowing what you could do, but don't, thinkin' there's no difference. Those people? They're assholes. Even the heroes. Especially the heroes. People don't like capes because of 'what they could do', and we deal with that shit every day, but then you pin someone to the ground and make them sing 'I'm a little teapot' for two hours straight because some asshole Master got you and said 'stop them', and suddenly you're the bad mouse!"
Taylor giggled a little, the sound wet from her runny nose, both from the vomiting and the crying.
"But this big lug, you know what he asked me to do?" Karen asked incredulously.
"K-kick his ass again?" Taylor asked, stuttering a little.
"Exactly!" the older Heroine grinned. "And think about how many people this guy's killed. Bad people, yeah, but still people. You think he's gonna judge you for that?"
"Judge her performance, maybe," Herb offered, continuing in a faux-cultured tone that sounded nothing like me. "'Oh, wasps and spiders everywhere? You have tools Lady Bug, use them with grace, not willy-nilly like some common ruffian. We have standards with our group that'," his impression dropped, "Fights people who are tryin' ta kill ya all the god-damn time."
That got more laughter, and my, "I do not sound like that!" just got more.
"You do sometimes," Taylor disagreed, trying a bad posh accent of her own, "'Use your scouts as scouts, don't use flies to attack, that's what the biting and stinging insects are for, Taylor!' You're helping, but, yeah, that, that's you."
"Hate. You. All," I declared, shaking my head. "You okay on healing?"
Taylor hesitated, before nodding, and I pulled my hand back, manifesting a cloth as I leaned down and removed the splashed, bright pink sick from her shins and shoes.
It stank, but I'd been smelling worse on a regular basis. Frowning at the pink powder that was left behind, I wanted to grab a sample, but I also didn't want this stuff anywhere near my team-mates.
Standing up, I let the rag fade, and floated Taylor's helmet back to her. "Okay, so, that happened, and we. . . we didn't get our asses kicked, but we got blind-sided. Mouse, new rule, we only banter with known quantities when we've got nothing better to do, and never with groups larger than. . . four."
"Why four?" the woman pouted.
"Five or more and they might try something, or have a hidden cape. I tried the cops-and-robbers, kid-gloves bullshit like you asked." And she winced, having talked to me about the need to 'play the game when we can'. How if we did, the other side would too, and it'd make things better. It hadn't.
I was aware that I'd been defaulting to a more. . . hardline stance in my fights, but, given what I'd been up against, it'd only made sense. I knew that going lethal wasn't what was expected of heroes, but given how that'd been going for not only us, but the entire world, I was becoming more and more sure that doing what everyone had gotten would just mean we'd get more of the same.
That said, I'd been willing to give it a shot. I'd thought that, against low-level villains like Merchants, she might even have been right. So I'd listened to her, as I was trying to do with others, and it had backfired, as it always seemed to. I knew I wasn't special, that I wasn't intrinsically, innately, and uniquely smarter than other people. What I was doing wasn't that hard, but every time I listened to other people, be it Herb, or Karen, it seemed to blow up in my face.
And now, it had fallen to me to stop another catastrophe. It had fallen to me to undo the damage. We'd pulled through with no-one injured, the dead all our enemies, but if it'd gone just a little differently? "How did doing it your way go, Mouse?" I asked. "Two of our own were Mastered, and if it were three then. . . Herb, how long does a. . . I'm gonna say cocaine high last. It was a powder, but everything she makes is the same color. And I really don't know drugs."
"From snortin, like half an hour, tops, but, uh," he motioned to the pile of bright pink sick. "That's more than someone snortin'."
"How did that even work?" Taylor asked, incredulous, the despair not quite gone from her tone, emotions like that tending to stick around, but slowly being replaced with confusion. "My bugs smelled it. How'd it get in me?"
I'd only caught a glimpse of the power Drug Control but it was enough to garner the basics. "Drug's a targeting vector. To the power, you are the bugs you control, LB, just like how Gallant's beams themselves don't actually mess with your head, they let his power pick out your brain to mess with, out of all the others in the world." I turned back to the one member of the party I knew had knowledge of this. "With that much of, well, anything in your system, how long would I be affected?"
"Shit man, this is weird power bullshit. I don't know, two hours? Mind the smell though, 'cause I'm pullin' that outta my ass," he offered.
"Okay, let's say it was two hours," I nodded, going along with it and thinking how I'd take those orders. "If I was affected I would. . . I'm gonna say depopulate the eastern seaboard. Maybe just all of New England if I could fight it, or maybe just every single goddamn person in a hundred-mile radius if I could finagle it to let me over-focus. But If I slipped, it'd be the Big Apple-sauce."
"You could," Mouse added. "Kinda. That's why I could fight you, and leave the little one," she reached up and messed up Taylor's hair, now that the girl was standing up straight, "alone. 'Cause, don't take this the wrong way kid, but I'da killed ya in about five seconds."
"If that," Taylor easily agreed. "I saw your fight."
I sighed, "So that means my immunity to drugs of any kind is the only reason I'm not coming to in the wreckage of New York City, and getting myself declared the fourth Endbringer, after killing everyone I care about in this world." I could picture it too, all too easily. "That's. . . a level of lucky I'm not comfortable relying on. I need someone or something that can stop Master powers, and I need it yesterday. And if it's shareable, yes, everybody's getting it. Problem is, most of them are just another variation of 'get Mastered by someone else'."
"So, existential crises aside, what's with the caskets?" Mouse asked.
I blinked, "Oh, I thought it was obvious. We'd planned to construct a mass grave/memorial/park for all those who fell during the Leviathan fight. I know we can't get them all, or even most, but I've been working to try to grab as many as I can."
"How many did ya get?" Herb asked, seizing upon the topic change, looking at the rows upon rows of floor-to-ceiling caskets, several stacks deep.
"I don't know, I didn't bother to count," I shrugged.
Taylor frowned, and I could feel the bugs outside dancing around, even as a majority of the Swarm left to go back to where she'd pulled them from. "Several hundred," she stated.
I shrugged again, "Sounds about right."
"How long have you been doing this?" Mouse Protector asked, an eyebrow raised behind her helmet.
"Three or four hours-" I started to respond.
"You did not do this in four hours!" Herb objected.
I shot him a 'duh' look. "As I was saying, three to four hours a day."
"For how many days?" my friend asked apprehensively, which didn't make a ton of sense. It was just something I needed to do, and I really didn't understand the sudden inquisition.
I thought about it, but everything had started to slide together, the days no longer having the crystalline quality they'd had before Leviathan had attacked. Without a pressing deadline, it just didn't seem as important. "You know when I asked Quinn to make the facial scanner?" I got a nod from the group. "He got it to me pretty quick. I think the same day. Since then."
"Dude," he said seriously. "That was weeks ago."
I winced, "Yeah I know. I'm racing putrefaction here, and I'm losing, badly, but I can't stop helping everyone else to focus on it. This bullshit is a really good example of why. If I wasn't strong enough, or if everyone else wasn't as well trained. . ." I shuddered.
"Dude, let me help," Herb told me.
"The only reason I can do it is that I can screen the air. The smell is. . . bad. Even with that. Besides, to recover the bodies nowadays, you need Dryad, and you can't use her powers," I told him. "And it. . . dude, it sucks, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone."
"But you're doing it?" Karen asked.
I shrugged, not really knowing what else to say. "Yeah? I mean, if I was a better fighter, or just not as dumb, we could've kicked Leviathan out before this happened." Mouse frowned, not finding any flaws with my argument, and Taylor just looked sad. I could empathize. Herb just looked constipated, but I honestly didn't know what he was thinking half the time.
"You three go back to base and wash up. Mouse, if you could grab Kayden, Theo, and Amy, I'd appreciate it. We're gonna have a meeting after dinner on what to do about. . . this," I announced, pausing as I realized I wasn't using all my resources. "Actually, Overwatch? What happened to the Merchants after they left?"
"They drove to the wall, and Skidmark made a pad that launched their vehicles over it. Other Merchants with trucks were waiting, and the vehicles that didn't survive the jump were left behind. The gang members from the disabled trucks were moved to the getaway vehicles," he summarized. "Panacea was able to stabilize the wounded and return them to perfect health. Do you know what happened to the Anomaly?"
That. . . was a good question. I looked to Taylor, and she shook her head. Feeding her a bit of power, her range expanded, and I piggybacked the connection, finding it. "It's back in the Yellow Zone. Looks like it decided discretion was the better part of valor. If you see it cross the wall again, tell me and I'll kill it."
"I will. Should I inform the others of the team meeting, and approach Toybox about anti-Master measures?" he requested.
"God bless you," I smiled, having not thought to ask them. "Yes to both. I'll make sure to have you look over anything before I use it, in case there's any. . . backdoors. Then maybe a joint project with Bell Tolls to see if there's any way we could adopt it for mass production?"
"I look forward to it," Quinn informed me.
It was a nice feeling, having others support you without asking, but without trying to manage you either. I didn't mind supporting others, but it all seemed so one-way sometimes. Not that I minded helping others, but sometimes you just got. . . tired.
And I was so tired these days.
