21. Signing Papers
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Pulling her phone out of her pocket with one hand while putting the bag of flour down with the other, a puff of white powder coming out the open end, Sarah looked at the screen before answering it. "Carol! Hi, what's up?"
There was a pause as she wiped her hand on her apron, then transferred the phone to do the same with the other one. Her cake mix gently absorbed the just-added flour into the existing material in the bowl as she listened. "I've got a problem," her sister said just as she was starting to wonder if Carol had called her accidentally.
"A problem?" she echoed curiously, moving to sit at the kitchen table. "What sort of problem?"
"A very strange and worrying one," the other woman replied, sounding… off.
Sarah frowned. "Explain?"
"I need you to come over. I can't talk about it on the phone."
Carol's voice was definitely tense and unsure, quite unlike her normal assertive manner. Sarah looked at the clock on the microwave, then her half-mixed cake batter, before sighing inaudibly. "All right. I'll be there in five minutes."
"Thanks." The call went dead, and she looked at the device in her hand contemplatively for a few seconds before shoving it into her pocket and moving to put the bowl into the fridge. It might be possible to salvage it.
Two minutes later she had taken her apron off and quickly cleaned up, and was flying rapidly towards the Dallon house.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Vicky met Amy's eyes, then both of them stared hard at Taylor as their friend came back out of her house's back door carrying a jug of lemonade. She was smiling in a sort of contented manner, as if she felt that things were going well. Arriving next to them, she refilled the glasses both held out wordlessly, then her own, before sitting down and putting the nearly empty jug on the ground next to her. A large dragonfly landed on her hair, causing Amy to look curiously at it as she was distracted momentarily.
"What?" Taylor asked mildly, sipping her drink.
Amy pointed. "There's a dragonfly on your head."
Rolling her eyes upwards, Taylor grinned. The insect turned slightly and seemed to look back at Amy. "Yeah, they do that. They're curious little things. I think they're pretty smart for insects. There's a small pond over the back fence between our yard and the next street up and there's loads of them there."
The glittering blue insect seemed content to stay where it was and Taylor didn't appear to mind, which Vicky found a little strange, as she didn't particularly want insects in her hair. On the other hand it was nothing like as intriguing as what had happened before Taylor had gone for more lemonade. She asked, somewhat suspiciously, "What was that phone call about? Who did you call?"
Taylor winked at her. "Someone who could help Amy."
The two sisters exchanged glances again. "How?" Vicky asked very carefully.
"And what's stage one?" Amy added, before lifting the glass she was holding to her lips for another drink.
Taylor stretched her legs out in front of her and crossed them at the ankles, leaning back in the chair and looking very relaxed. Even with a dragonfly sitting on her head. She grinned. "Let's say that about now your mother is having a slightly uncomfortable chat with some people who are expressing the concept that perhaps she should modify her approach to someone who is very important to certain individuals."
Staring at her friend and feeling a sensation that events were getting remarkably odd for reasons she didn't understand, Vicky thought hard. Amy was looking at Taylor, then her, with a somewhat confused expression. Another dragonfly, a green one this time, landed in her hair but she didn't seem to notice. Eventually the blonde asked somewhat tentatively, "Which individuals?"
"Well, me for a start. Amy's my friend. And you, of course." Taylor grinned again.
With a sigh, Vicky pointed at her. "You are hiding something. Something big. I can practically feel it. And that wasn't just a phone call asking for help. It was a call using a code phrase for god's sake! You had some sort of plan set up just to help Amy?"
"I have many plans set up for different things," Taylor smiled. "I like making plans."
"Most people who make plans are making plans on what to cook for dinner," Vicky pointed out somewhat acidly. "You appear to have plans that require minions. Where did you get minions?"
"The Minion Shop?" Taylor replied, looking amused. "Minions'R'Us? Minions for All Occasions?"
Amy giggled, apparently finding the whole thing surreal enough that this was an appropriate response. Vicky was right on the verge of pulling her hair out now.
"And who says I have minions anyway?" Taylor queried. "You're jumping to conclusions."
Putting her half-empty glass down on the grass, Vicky leaned forward. "You made a phone call, ten little words, and now you're looking as smug as a smug thing. Because you did something. Explain what you did, please? And how? Before I go nuts trying to figure it out?"
Taylor looked at her for several seconds, then at Amy as well. She seemed to come to a conclusion as the other two girls waited. "OK. You guys can keep a secret."
"How do you know?" Amy queried, sounding more like she was simply interested rather than denying this.
"I've seen your background check dossiers, of course," Taylor chuckled.
Both Dallons stared at her in disbelief.
"Background check?" Amy echoed incredulously.
"Yeah." Their friend, who Vicky was growing convinced was a lot more than she appeared somehow, pulled her phone out again and tapped the screen a couple of times, before putting it away once more. "They were very thorough."
"Who were?" Vicky demanded, feeling things descending into something that seemed more fit for a spy movie than real life.
"The government," Taylor told her with equanimity.
"Why would the government be checking up on either of us? And why would they let you see the results if they were?" Vicky knew her voice had gone rather shrill but couldn't help it. This whole conversation had left normality long ago.
"Because you guys know me, and they check up on everyone who knows me," the brunette replied, still smiling at them. "For reasons I can't tell you until you read and sign some documents."
"What sort of documents?" Amy asked faintly, apparently somewhat overwhelmed.
"Those ones," Taylor said, nodding to the side. Both the other girls looked in that direction to see that the side gate to the back yard had opened and a man in a suit was coming through it, a briefcase in his hand. He walked calmly over to Taylor and stood next to her like some sort of secret agent butler.
"We're ready, Miss Hebert," he said evenly.
"Thanks, Agent Charlie," Taylor answered. She finished off her lemonade and stood up, the dragonfly on her head flying away. "Come on, guys, I'll explain inside."
She headed for the back door and the man followed with a look over his shoulder at them. Amy and Vicky stared at each other incredulously.
"What the fuck is going on?" Vicky whispered. "Is she a cape or something?"
"No, she's definitely not a Parahuman," Amy whispered back as she also stood. She looked as confused as Vicky felt. "I'd have noticed. And I haven't got the faintest idea what the hell is happening." She paused, then added with an evil little grin, "But I suddenly have a very strong feeling that Carol isn't really having a good time for some reason."
With a shake of her head, Vicky hopped up from the chair, drank the last of the lemonade, put the glass on the tray Taylor had left on the ground, and trailed after her sister trying to figure out how a visit to a friend had turned into something that Jason Bourne would have found weird...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Danny looked up as Angus came into his office. "Taylor seems to have made a decision," he said, glancing back at the report on his computer screen.
"It was pretty much just a matter of time," his friend replied, shrugging. "It's been obvious for a while that she wasn't going to sit still and let a friend get abused. And once she got involved, the rest follows naturally. Neither of those girls is stupid, they'll have worked out something strange is going on without any trouble."
"True. Hopefully they won't get too upset about it."
"Taylor seems to think that won't happen, and she's a very good judge of character based on what I've seen," Angus commented as he sat in one of the spare chairs. "I expect they're going to find the whole affair fairly confusing, though."
With a slight smirk, Danny nodded. "I think that much is guaranteed," he snickered. Picking up the document that was lying in front of him on his desk, he went on, "I was hoping you could go through this with me and check my conclusions."
"Of course. Let's have a look." Angus leaned forward and accepted the pages, then settled back to read while Danny got up and started making some coffee for both of them.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
When Carol answered the door, which for some reason had a broken pane covered with cardboard, Sarah immediately noticed that she looked rather worried. And somewhat pale. "What's wrong?" she asked as she stepped inside. Closing the door, Carol slowly turned around, then walked past her sister without a word. Highly confused Sarah followed her into the living room, stopping in her tracks when she saw that there were two people she didn't recognize sitting on the sofa.
Inspecting them she immediately got the impression they were something official. The matching suits were somewhat of a cliché, but on the other hand they were a cliché because it really was a thing. She'd met enough government employees over the years to have seen it for herself.
This pair couldn't have looked more secret agent if they'd tried.
After a moment or two she looked at her sister, who had moved to sit in one of the chairs on the other side of the low coffee table between her and the mysterious duo. "What's going on?" she asked, feeling distinctly curious and somewhat apprehensive. "Who are they?"
"FBI," Carol replied shortly.
"And they're here because…?" The Pelham woman trailed off, giving each of the three people present a look.
"Agent Able, Mrs Pelham," the man said, his voice calm and neutral. "This is Agent Baker. We are here due to… issues… surrounding Amelia Dallon." He produced and held out an ID which she could see was real, then flipped it closed and returned it to his jacket.
"Issues?" she echoed, feeling more apprehensive now. She couldn't immediately think what they meant about Amy. "Is Amy all right? Where is she?"
"Miss Dallon is entirely safe and she and her sister are visiting a friend to the best of my knowledge," the woman, Baker, said in a cool voice.
Sarah stared at them, then at Carol, who was herself looking at a pile of paperwork on the table with a sort of lost expression that both baffled and intrigued her sister. "Someone needs to fill me in because I can't help thinking I'm missing rather a lot here," she finally said, walking over to sit in the remaining chair.
"Indeed," Agent Able nodded agreeably, his expression still entirely placid. "Essentially, it has come to the attention of certain parties that Miss Dallon is… shall we say, underappreciated in her family life?"
Sarah felt a sinking sensation in her gut as she gaped at him, then glanced sidelong at Carol.
"There have been a number of recent incidents that suggest that there is a considerable amount of internal friction in this household, centered around Miss Dallon's presence," he continued, causing her to look back at him. "Likely due to the somewhat irregular method of her adoption and who her biological father is, along with other… exacerbating… issues."
The sinking sensation dropped suddenly quite a lot faster.
"Amy's adoption is entirely legal," she replied after several seconds of silence as he and his colleague waited for a response, apparently interested to see what she said.
"The paperwork does indeed hold up even with the aforesaid irregularities," Agent Baker agreed. "Which is why nothing has been done up to this point."
"How do you know who her father was?" Sarah queried. She thought for a second, then added, "Why is this even a matter for the FBI in the first place, for that matter? Your organization doesn't deal with family issues. And if it's a Parahuman situation surely the PRT should be here, not the FBI."
"Mrs Pelham, the government is not entirely inept," Able said with what was almost a momentary small smile. "Despite what the media conveys to the public. We have a considerable amount of practice in discovering the truth when required. Marquis was a person of interest for obvious reasons. His daughter is also someone we have had on our radar for some time. Her abilities make her a potentially very valuable individual to this country, and a possible target for certain unsavory elements. But until recently we had no reason to step in."
He looked at Carol, who was sitting with her hands clasped in her lap and a slightly haunted expression on her face. "That situation appears to have changed."
Sarah tried to work out what the hell he was actually saying. She looked at each of them in turn, then her sister, before massaging her temples a little. "The government, in the form of the FBI, feels it necessary to take steps to get involved in our family because you think Amy is an important person who is in trouble here?" she finally said, speaking slowly and clearly.
Able nodded. "That is in essence correct, yes, ma'am."
"And for some reason it's not the PRT who's doing this, it's the FBI?"
"Also correct. This is not deemed a matter for the PRT at this moment in time."
"This doesn't make any sense," she muttered. "What the hell has been..."
Sarah stopped, then slowly turned her head to stare hard at her sister. "Carol. What. Did. You. Do?"
The younger woman swallowed a little. She looked entirely unnerved by the current situation and her normal confidence was notably absent.
"She won't obey me!" she replied in a voice that sounded like she was trying to snarl but couldn't quite make it work. "She spends too long at the hospital one day, then wants to take the next one off completely! And now she wants to… to… have a holiday or something like that! She argues every time I tell her to do something, she defies me to my face, and she'd got Vicky doing it now too! She stormed out of the house this morning and swore at me then ran off! The damn girl is out of control."
Her voice had risen as she spoke and she looked suddenly angry. Sarah listened with dismay.
The two agents exchanged a look but said nothing.
"And now somehow the fucking FBI is saying it's my fault and if I don't calm down they'll do something! Me! Calm down! I'm perfectly calm!" Sarah's sister grabbed the folder of paperwork off the table and shook it at her. "They've got all the records that were supposed to be sealed, and a lot of information no one should have on us..."
Tossing the papers back on the table, where half of them promptly slid to the floor, the woman slumped back in her chair as Sarah watched her feeling disorientated and worried. She hadn't expected… whatever this actually was. While Carol huffed to herself in indignation, Sarah retrieved the paperwork and looked through it.
She was shocked. It contained everything. All the adoption records, the ones that were allegedly locked away from anyone, the documents they'd gone to some effort to obfuscate in every way that they legally could. Admittedly some of those methods skirted the edge of not being as legal as one would hope for, but in their defense at the time their intention was at least as much to protect Amy from any danger that would appear if her heritage became known as it was to protect them from the distinctly unconventional way things had worked out. She couldn't deny that there was definitely an aspect of the second point though.
The whole Marquis affair was one of the driving forces that had actually ultimately led to the New Wave movement, in fact, as everything that had happened to the old Brockton Bay Brigade had made them sit down and think very hard about how they wanted to work in future. It wasn't a part of her life she was entirely proud of. Yes, they'd stopped a genuinely dangerous villain who had killed in cold blood a significant number of people and pretty much ruled half the city as his personal plaything, but the way they'd done it was probably not ideal. And certainly something that these days, a decade later, would have caused them much larger problems.
The world had changed a lot since that time.
She flipped pages, seeing photos of Marquis, of Amy, a DNA test report that proved she was his daughter, documentation on her work at the hospital, her work healing Parahumans, and much more. It was a fairly comprehensive look at a life that while not very long had in one way or another been quite complicated.
The entire thing was clearly the result of a lot of work over a considerable amount of time. And not one report in there was anything she could see as having originated from the PRT, which very much surprised her. She fully expected that organization to keep tabs on any cape they ran across, but she had never thought that other parts of the government were doing the same. Substantially more effectively as well, she suspected.
Sarah wondered uneasily how much more information they had that they weren't showing. And how much they knew about her, and everyone else other than Amy…
When she finally closed the folder and put it down, she raised her eyes to look at the two agents. Glancing at her sister for a moment, the other woman appearing frustrated but unable to quite work out how to express this, she asked, "What is going to happen now?"
"That depends on both your actions and Miss Dallon's wishes, ma'am." Agent Able was polite, but there was a certain feeling to his voice that made it clear he wasn't playing around. "As I have explained, Miss Dallon is considered by people well above my pay grade to be of considerable interest to the country. Her abilities are almost unique, and there are those who feel that losing access to them would be… suboptimal. Should her home life cause her sufficient stress to make that likely to happen, steps would be taken to rectify the issue. Obviously, Miss Dallon's own well-being is one of the primary considerations in whatever those steps would ultimately be."
He smiled thinly in a way that made Sarah feel a slight frisson of nervousness.
"We are well aware that Mrs Dallon is not as enamored of her adoptive daughter as one might wish," Agent Baker continued as smoothly as if they'd practiced it, "for personal reasons if nothing else. The situation is regrettable but not yet beyond salvaging. We are not yet quite at the stage where direct action is warranted."
"Direct action?" Sarah repeated, thinking that sounded more than a little ominous. "What sort of 'direct action?'"
"While emancipation of Miss Dallon is feasible, it could lead to other issues, so that's currently considered a last resort," the woman replied evenly. Carol's mouth dropped open but she seemed to think better of speaking when Sarah gave her a warning look. "Removal of her from the abusive environment and placement with a more suitable one would be more in keeping with her current best interests."
"You'd take her away frommmmph??"
Sarah kept her hand over her sister's mouth as the other woman tried to swear. "Shut up you idiot," she hissed into Carol's ear. The agents merely watched them.
"You consider this family an abusive environment?" she asked more loudly, feeling sorrow go through her at the thought.
"Unfortunately, based on recent actions, there is some evidence to suggest that, yes, Mrs Pelham," Baker replied. "I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that your sister is deliberately abusive, or has physically abused Miss Dallon, but our information does show that there is a certain level of neglect and… shall we say, excessive and overzealous expectations… present. This is clearly causing very significant amounts of mental and emotional stress to Miss Dallon, as well as to her sister. In the long term the end results could be… unfortunate."
Sarah released Carol when the other woman finally calmed down a little, but kept a wary eye on her. "I'm not certain that's entirely fair," she said evenly, but in her heart she knew it was. She'd seen how Carol treated Amy at times, and had hoped that was the exception rather than the rule. From what she was hearing she'd been fooling herself.
'None are so blind as those that will not see,' she thought as she glanced again at her sister. 'Why didn't I look into it more thoroughly?'
The answer was because she didn't like to think that a member of her own family could actually act like that, of course. Even though she knew full well that Carol had a very fixed attitude to certain things and was almost impossible to change when she'd made up her mind. And Amy had apparently been one of those things that Carol had made up her mind about.
"How can we fix this?" she asked quietly. "Amy is part of the family, regardless of what's happened, and why. I'm not going to abandon her. And Carol means well."
Her sister glared at her but she glared back. Eventually Carol looked away. Sarah thought that the presence of the two FBI agents had seriously confused her.
Which wasn't surprising, she was very confused herself despite what they'd explained.
"There are a number of possible paths to take at this point," Agent Able replied, pulling another folder out of the briefcase by his feet and opening it on the table. "Reduction of Miss Dallon's working hours to something more sensible goes without saying. She is working far more at Brockton General than advisable, or even technically legal for someone of her age. Despite her abilities she is still a teenager, after all."
"How many hours is she working there?" Sarah asked suspiciously.
He flipped a couple of pages. "In the last two months she has averaged sixty two hours per week, ma'am," he replied.
She gaped at him then rounded on Carol who shrank into her chair at the expression on her sister's face. "Sixty two hours a week? On top of her schoolwork? Are you insane?"
"She has a duty to..."
Sarah put her finger over her sister's mouth. "No. Not another word. You cannot let a sixteen year old girl work sixty two hours a week. I don't work sixty two hours a week. You don't work sixty two hours a week. She needs eight hours of sleep a day and time to herself. Our original agreement with the hospital was twenty hours a week and only if she wanted to do that. How the hell did that more than triple? And why hasn't someone stopped it?"
Carol looked defensive but didn't seem to have a reply. Sarah sighed heavily. Turning to the agents, she said, "Amy will not be working that long again, you have my word."
He nodded. "In addition, arrangements have been made to remunerate Miss Dallon for the essential and unique work she does at a fair rate as a Parahuman consultant." Taking a sheet of paper from his folder he held it out. Sarah accepted it and scanned the page. Her eyes widened.
"That… is a considerable sum," she finally managed.
"The market rate for such medical services is quite large," he replied with a small nod and a quirk of his lips.
Sarah held the page out where Carol could see it. Her sister looked at it and paled.
"What else?" she asked as she handed it back to him. He turned the page.
"This may take some time, ma'am," he said.
Waving for the man to continue, she settled back to listen, while wondering who the hell was actually behind this insanity.
And feeling very sorry for poor Amy, as well as quite peeved at her sister and herself in equal measure.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Sitting around a table in what Amy thought was probably Taylor's father's study, she, her sister, and Taylor herself, watched as the suited man her friend had called 'Agent Charlie' opened his briefcase. He extracted an official looking folder, then removed two bound stacks of paper which he handed to Taylor. She looked through them both for a few seconds, nodding in satisfaction, before placing them in front of her. Amy craned her neck and could see what looked like a government seal through the translucent blue cover.
"OK, guys." Taylor looked at them both. "Sorry about all this cloak and dagger stuff, but it's kind of required."
"Who the hell are you, Taylor?" Vicky asked in a highly confused voice. Amy felt exactly like her sister sounded.
"Your friend, Taylor Hebert," the brunette replied with a smile. "That hasn't changed. But before I can tell you anything else, at least about what you really want to ask, you need to read these, understand them, and sign them." She looked at the two sets of paperwork, then up at Amy and Vicky. "Or you can pretend none of this happened, we can go back out into the garden and finish the lemonade, then go for an ice-cream and a movie or something."
Amy studied her. Taylor looked back, smiling a little, but Amy got the impression that her friend was hiding a certain amount of worry under the usual cheerful expression. She glanced at Vicky who was chewing her lip, clearly desperately curious but also cautious. They'd heard enough from Carol to be wary of signing anything at all without someone trusted checking it over.
Amy herself had signed a lot of NDAs over the time since she'd Triggered, probably more than almost any Parahuman in the city, and was very familiar with the process. This seemed different somehow.
"Is this because your dad is the CEO of Gravtec?" Vicky asked.
"That's part of it, yeah," Taylor admitted with a nod.
Vicky looked at Amy. "I don't know about you but I'm as curious as fuck about this," she said wryly. She turned back to Taylor. "And I trust you. Mom would probably say I'm being an idiot..."
Amy sighed, then reached out and snagged one of the documents. She opened it, staring at the first page.
She'd never seen so many official seals on anything before.
She didn't even recognize half of them.
The warnings under that were fairly bloodcurdling. In essence it suggested that turning the page was a capital offense if one didn't immediately sign the document. She exchanged a look with Vicky, who had accepted the other one from Taylor, her sister looking back with wide eyes, then both of them flipped to the next page.
Reading what turned out to be a pretty comprehensive NDA with a number of clauses that were both simple to read and quite worrying in the penalties mentioned for breaking them, she scanned through the entire thing twice. It basically said that once she'd signed it, she could only divulge anything that Taylor saw fit to tell her to someone else who she knew had signed the same document, or who Taylor herself, her father, or the Department of fucking Defense allowed her to.
What the fuck?
It made the ones the PRT relied on look like the work of an amateur.
"If you have any questions about it, Agent Charlie can explain them," Taylor said. "Or I can if you don't trust him. Or Dad, but we'll have to call him and ask him to come home."
"It looks straightforward enough," Vicky said a little weakly. "Not nearly as complicated as some legal things I've seen are."
"There is no intent to lay traps in legal wording, Miss Dallon," Agent Charlie put in. He'd been sitting there watching in silence up until then. "The document is deliberately as clear and concise as possible. Allowing misunderstanding would be entirely pointless."
Vicky nodded, then read the thing again. Eventually she turned to Amy, who was staring alternately at her copy and Taylor, their friend sitting there and waiting patiently. "What do you think, Ames?" she asked.
"I think I trust Taylor," Amy said as she decided. "Because she's my friend."
She took the pen Taylor handed her with a smile. Signing her name on the last page, she passed the pen to her sister, who took it, hesitated, then repeated the process herself. Taylor retrieved the papers and also signed them.
"Thank you," Agent Charlie said. He accepted both documents and put them in his briefcase. "It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I'll leave you to it." Standing, he nodded to Taylor. "I'll let myself out, Miss Hebert."
"Thanks, Agent," she replied, watching as he left. Moments later they were alone in the room.
Both Dallon girls looked at each other, then turned as one to stare at Taylor. She looked innocently back.
"So? Spill, girl. Now that we've signed our souls away, we need to know why," Vicky demanded.
Taylor chuckled and stood up. "Follow me," she said mysteriously, leaving the room and beckoning them after her. They got up and followed, not without a certain amount of apprehension and deep curiosity.
The tall girl led them a door halfway between the front and the back of the house, under the stairs. She tapped a couple of places on the frame, and put her hand in the middle of the door itself. A click followed, then she pulled it open. Amy noted there had been no visible or audible indications of some sort of high security lock, although there obviously was something. Taylor disappeared down the stairs that were on the other side, clearly leading down to a basement.
Both Dallons followed.
As they descended far enough to see the surprisingly large room that lurked under the house both stopped dead and gaped in shock.
"Holy shit!" Vicky breathed in amazement. Amy couldn't even manage that.
Both numbly went down the stairs to the bottom, looking around at the largest and highest tech collection of equipment either of them had ever seen anywhere. It made even a movie look like it wasn't really trying very hard. As she turned on the spot, Amy saw more computers than any normal person would consider sensible, half a dozen of the biggest monitors she'd ever seen, a couple of ultra-high-tech microscopes, possibly thousands of little drawers full of parts, and any amount of other technological gear.
And that was only the stuff she could more or less recognize.
At least half of what was there was entirely unlike anything she'd seen before. She got the distinct impression that Armsmaster would have been extremely envious by what was hiding down here.
In the middle of it, Taylor was sitting in a large and very expensive chair, the sort you found in very high end offices, with her feet propped up on a piece of equipment that was full of oddly glowing widgets that were strangely hard to focus on, a small point of silver light hovering above it and somehow giving a weird impression of watching them. She was grinning at their expressions.
"Holy shit." Vicky repeated herself. She turned to Amy. "Holy shit!"
Both looked at each other, before staring at Taylor. "You're a Tinker?" Vicky asked incredulously.
"Nope." Taylor's grin widened a little. "I'm better than a Tinker. Because I know what I'm doing."
She gestured widely. "I'm a professional supergenius. Welcome to my workshop."
Amy sat on the bottom step and simply examined her friend with a sensation that things had abruptly got out of hand. A moment later a rattling sound made her look up, to see a dragonfly circling above her head. It landed on her hair. Taylor giggled.
"It likes you."
"Where did that come from?" Amy asked, her head whirling with so many different questions only this one managed to come out.
"It landed on your head in the garden earlier," Taylor remarked.
"And it was there the entire time?" Amy glared at the girl. "Why didn't you say anything?"
Taylor shrugged. "It looked happy where it was." She picked up a small oval machine that was sitting on the bench by her elbow and smiled at them. "Want to see something cool?"
She pressed a button on the thing before either of the other girls could reply and let go. They stared as the machine just hung in the air without moving.
"Yeah, so you know that stuff Gravtec makes?" she said, scratching her nose as they looked incredulously at the flying ovoid. "I kind of invented it..."
Amy put her head in her hands and sighed. Vicky audibly suppressed a hysterical giggle.
"Why do I get the feeling that the really weird shit is going to start about now?" Amy grumbled.
Taylor snickered then began telling them some fairly ridiculously crazy stuff.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"The Slaughterhouse Nine are dead?"
Rebecca stared at Fortuna in shock.
"It is decidedly so," the woman in the hat replied calmly before walking off humming.
"How?"
"Better not tell you now," came the reply, then she turned the corner and vanished.
Clenching her fists, Rebecca looked around the empty corridor, then stomped off.
This was getting way past the point of being annoying...
There was a pause as she wiped her hand on her apron, then transferred the phone to do the same with the other one. Her cake mix gently absorbed the just-added flour into the existing material in the bowl as she listened. "I've got a problem," her sister said just as she was starting to wonder if Carol had called her accidentally.
"A problem?" she echoed curiously, moving to sit at the kitchen table. "What sort of problem?"
"A very strange and worrying one," the other woman replied, sounding… off.
Sarah frowned. "Explain?"
"I need you to come over. I can't talk about it on the phone."
Carol's voice was definitely tense and unsure, quite unlike her normal assertive manner. Sarah looked at the clock on the microwave, then her half-mixed cake batter, before sighing inaudibly. "All right. I'll be there in five minutes."
"Thanks." The call went dead, and she looked at the device in her hand contemplatively for a few seconds before shoving it into her pocket and moving to put the bowl into the fridge. It might be possible to salvage it.
Two minutes later she had taken her apron off and quickly cleaned up, and was flying rapidly towards the Dallon house.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Vicky met Amy's eyes, then both of them stared hard at Taylor as their friend came back out of her house's back door carrying a jug of lemonade. She was smiling in a sort of contented manner, as if she felt that things were going well. Arriving next to them, she refilled the glasses both held out wordlessly, then her own, before sitting down and putting the nearly empty jug on the ground next to her. A large dragonfly landed on her hair, causing Amy to look curiously at it as she was distracted momentarily.
"What?" Taylor asked mildly, sipping her drink.
Amy pointed. "There's a dragonfly on your head."
Rolling her eyes upwards, Taylor grinned. The insect turned slightly and seemed to look back at Amy. "Yeah, they do that. They're curious little things. I think they're pretty smart for insects. There's a small pond over the back fence between our yard and the next street up and there's loads of them there."
The glittering blue insect seemed content to stay where it was and Taylor didn't appear to mind, which Vicky found a little strange, as she didn't particularly want insects in her hair. On the other hand it was nothing like as intriguing as what had happened before Taylor had gone for more lemonade. She asked, somewhat suspiciously, "What was that phone call about? Who did you call?"
Taylor winked at her. "Someone who could help Amy."
The two sisters exchanged glances again. "How?" Vicky asked very carefully.
"And what's stage one?" Amy added, before lifting the glass she was holding to her lips for another drink.
Taylor stretched her legs out in front of her and crossed them at the ankles, leaning back in the chair and looking very relaxed. Even with a dragonfly sitting on her head. She grinned. "Let's say that about now your mother is having a slightly uncomfortable chat with some people who are expressing the concept that perhaps she should modify her approach to someone who is very important to certain individuals."
Staring at her friend and feeling a sensation that events were getting remarkably odd for reasons she didn't understand, Vicky thought hard. Amy was looking at Taylor, then her, with a somewhat confused expression. Another dragonfly, a green one this time, landed in her hair but she didn't seem to notice. Eventually the blonde asked somewhat tentatively, "Which individuals?"
"Well, me for a start. Amy's my friend. And you, of course." Taylor grinned again.
With a sigh, Vicky pointed at her. "You are hiding something. Something big. I can practically feel it. And that wasn't just a phone call asking for help. It was a call using a code phrase for god's sake! You had some sort of plan set up just to help Amy?"
"I have many plans set up for different things," Taylor smiled. "I like making plans."
"Most people who make plans are making plans on what to cook for dinner," Vicky pointed out somewhat acidly. "You appear to have plans that require minions. Where did you get minions?"
"The Minion Shop?" Taylor replied, looking amused. "Minions'R'Us? Minions for All Occasions?"
Amy giggled, apparently finding the whole thing surreal enough that this was an appropriate response. Vicky was right on the verge of pulling her hair out now.
"And who says I have minions anyway?" Taylor queried. "You're jumping to conclusions."
Putting her half-empty glass down on the grass, Vicky leaned forward. "You made a phone call, ten little words, and now you're looking as smug as a smug thing. Because you did something. Explain what you did, please? And how? Before I go nuts trying to figure it out?"
Taylor looked at her for several seconds, then at Amy as well. She seemed to come to a conclusion as the other two girls waited. "OK. You guys can keep a secret."
"How do you know?" Amy queried, sounding more like she was simply interested rather than denying this.
"I've seen your background check dossiers, of course," Taylor chuckled.
Both Dallons stared at her in disbelief.
"Background check?" Amy echoed incredulously.
"Yeah." Their friend, who Vicky was growing convinced was a lot more than she appeared somehow, pulled her phone out again and tapped the screen a couple of times, before putting it away once more. "They were very thorough."
"Who were?" Vicky demanded, feeling things descending into something that seemed more fit for a spy movie than real life.
"The government," Taylor told her with equanimity.
"Why would the government be checking up on either of us? And why would they let you see the results if they were?" Vicky knew her voice had gone rather shrill but couldn't help it. This whole conversation had left normality long ago.
"Because you guys know me, and they check up on everyone who knows me," the brunette replied, still smiling at them. "For reasons I can't tell you until you read and sign some documents."
"What sort of documents?" Amy asked faintly, apparently somewhat overwhelmed.
"Those ones," Taylor said, nodding to the side. Both the other girls looked in that direction to see that the side gate to the back yard had opened and a man in a suit was coming through it, a briefcase in his hand. He walked calmly over to Taylor and stood next to her like some sort of secret agent butler.
"We're ready, Miss Hebert," he said evenly.
"Thanks, Agent Charlie," Taylor answered. She finished off her lemonade and stood up, the dragonfly on her head flying away. "Come on, guys, I'll explain inside."
She headed for the back door and the man followed with a look over his shoulder at them. Amy and Vicky stared at each other incredulously.
"What the fuck is going on?" Vicky whispered. "Is she a cape or something?"
"No, she's definitely not a Parahuman," Amy whispered back as she also stood. She looked as confused as Vicky felt. "I'd have noticed. And I haven't got the faintest idea what the hell is happening." She paused, then added with an evil little grin, "But I suddenly have a very strong feeling that Carol isn't really having a good time for some reason."
With a shake of her head, Vicky hopped up from the chair, drank the last of the lemonade, put the glass on the tray Taylor had left on the ground, and trailed after her sister trying to figure out how a visit to a friend had turned into something that Jason Bourne would have found weird...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Danny looked up as Angus came into his office. "Taylor seems to have made a decision," he said, glancing back at the report on his computer screen.
"It was pretty much just a matter of time," his friend replied, shrugging. "It's been obvious for a while that she wasn't going to sit still and let a friend get abused. And once she got involved, the rest follows naturally. Neither of those girls is stupid, they'll have worked out something strange is going on without any trouble."
"True. Hopefully they won't get too upset about it."
"Taylor seems to think that won't happen, and she's a very good judge of character based on what I've seen," Angus commented as he sat in one of the spare chairs. "I expect they're going to find the whole affair fairly confusing, though."
With a slight smirk, Danny nodded. "I think that much is guaranteed," he snickered. Picking up the document that was lying in front of him on his desk, he went on, "I was hoping you could go through this with me and check my conclusions."
"Of course. Let's have a look." Angus leaned forward and accepted the pages, then settled back to read while Danny got up and started making some coffee for both of them.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
When Carol answered the door, which for some reason had a broken pane covered with cardboard, Sarah immediately noticed that she looked rather worried. And somewhat pale. "What's wrong?" she asked as she stepped inside. Closing the door, Carol slowly turned around, then walked past her sister without a word. Highly confused Sarah followed her into the living room, stopping in her tracks when she saw that there were two people she didn't recognize sitting on the sofa.
Inspecting them she immediately got the impression they were something official. The matching suits were somewhat of a cliché, but on the other hand they were a cliché because it really was a thing. She'd met enough government employees over the years to have seen it for herself.
This pair couldn't have looked more secret agent if they'd tried.
After a moment or two she looked at her sister, who had moved to sit in one of the chairs on the other side of the low coffee table between her and the mysterious duo. "What's going on?" she asked, feeling distinctly curious and somewhat apprehensive. "Who are they?"
"FBI," Carol replied shortly.
"And they're here because…?" The Pelham woman trailed off, giving each of the three people present a look.
"Agent Able, Mrs Pelham," the man said, his voice calm and neutral. "This is Agent Baker. We are here due to… issues… surrounding Amelia Dallon." He produced and held out an ID which she could see was real, then flipped it closed and returned it to his jacket.
"Issues?" she echoed, feeling more apprehensive now. She couldn't immediately think what they meant about Amy. "Is Amy all right? Where is she?"
"Miss Dallon is entirely safe and she and her sister are visiting a friend to the best of my knowledge," the woman, Baker, said in a cool voice.
Sarah stared at them, then at Carol, who was herself looking at a pile of paperwork on the table with a sort of lost expression that both baffled and intrigued her sister. "Someone needs to fill me in because I can't help thinking I'm missing rather a lot here," she finally said, walking over to sit in the remaining chair.
"Indeed," Agent Able nodded agreeably, his expression still entirely placid. "Essentially, it has come to the attention of certain parties that Miss Dallon is… shall we say, underappreciated in her family life?"
Sarah felt a sinking sensation in her gut as she gaped at him, then glanced sidelong at Carol.
"There have been a number of recent incidents that suggest that there is a considerable amount of internal friction in this household, centered around Miss Dallon's presence," he continued, causing her to look back at him. "Likely due to the somewhat irregular method of her adoption and who her biological father is, along with other… exacerbating… issues."
The sinking sensation dropped suddenly quite a lot faster.
"Amy's adoption is entirely legal," she replied after several seconds of silence as he and his colleague waited for a response, apparently interested to see what she said.
"The paperwork does indeed hold up even with the aforesaid irregularities," Agent Baker agreed. "Which is why nothing has been done up to this point."
"How do you know who her father was?" Sarah queried. She thought for a second, then added, "Why is this even a matter for the FBI in the first place, for that matter? Your organization doesn't deal with family issues. And if it's a Parahuman situation surely the PRT should be here, not the FBI."
"Mrs Pelham, the government is not entirely inept," Able said with what was almost a momentary small smile. "Despite what the media conveys to the public. We have a considerable amount of practice in discovering the truth when required. Marquis was a person of interest for obvious reasons. His daughter is also someone we have had on our radar for some time. Her abilities make her a potentially very valuable individual to this country, and a possible target for certain unsavory elements. But until recently we had no reason to step in."
He looked at Carol, who was sitting with her hands clasped in her lap and a slightly haunted expression on her face. "That situation appears to have changed."
Sarah tried to work out what the hell he was actually saying. She looked at each of them in turn, then her sister, before massaging her temples a little. "The government, in the form of the FBI, feels it necessary to take steps to get involved in our family because you think Amy is an important person who is in trouble here?" she finally said, speaking slowly and clearly.
Able nodded. "That is in essence correct, yes, ma'am."
"And for some reason it's not the PRT who's doing this, it's the FBI?"
"Also correct. This is not deemed a matter for the PRT at this moment in time."
"This doesn't make any sense," she muttered. "What the hell has been..."
Sarah stopped, then slowly turned her head to stare hard at her sister. "Carol. What. Did. You. Do?"
The younger woman swallowed a little. She looked entirely unnerved by the current situation and her normal confidence was notably absent.
"She won't obey me!" she replied in a voice that sounded like she was trying to snarl but couldn't quite make it work. "She spends too long at the hospital one day, then wants to take the next one off completely! And now she wants to… to… have a holiday or something like that! She argues every time I tell her to do something, she defies me to my face, and she'd got Vicky doing it now too! She stormed out of the house this morning and swore at me then ran off! The damn girl is out of control."
Her voice had risen as she spoke and she looked suddenly angry. Sarah listened with dismay.
The two agents exchanged a look but said nothing.
"And now somehow the fucking FBI is saying it's my fault and if I don't calm down they'll do something! Me! Calm down! I'm perfectly calm!" Sarah's sister grabbed the folder of paperwork off the table and shook it at her. "They've got all the records that were supposed to be sealed, and a lot of information no one should have on us..."
Tossing the papers back on the table, where half of them promptly slid to the floor, the woman slumped back in her chair as Sarah watched her feeling disorientated and worried. She hadn't expected… whatever this actually was. While Carol huffed to herself in indignation, Sarah retrieved the paperwork and looked through it.
She was shocked. It contained everything. All the adoption records, the ones that were allegedly locked away from anyone, the documents they'd gone to some effort to obfuscate in every way that they legally could. Admittedly some of those methods skirted the edge of not being as legal as one would hope for, but in their defense at the time their intention was at least as much to protect Amy from any danger that would appear if her heritage became known as it was to protect them from the distinctly unconventional way things had worked out. She couldn't deny that there was definitely an aspect of the second point though.
The whole Marquis affair was one of the driving forces that had actually ultimately led to the New Wave movement, in fact, as everything that had happened to the old Brockton Bay Brigade had made them sit down and think very hard about how they wanted to work in future. It wasn't a part of her life she was entirely proud of. Yes, they'd stopped a genuinely dangerous villain who had killed in cold blood a significant number of people and pretty much ruled half the city as his personal plaything, but the way they'd done it was probably not ideal. And certainly something that these days, a decade later, would have caused them much larger problems.
The world had changed a lot since that time.
She flipped pages, seeing photos of Marquis, of Amy, a DNA test report that proved she was his daughter, documentation on her work at the hospital, her work healing Parahumans, and much more. It was a fairly comprehensive look at a life that while not very long had in one way or another been quite complicated.
The entire thing was clearly the result of a lot of work over a considerable amount of time. And not one report in there was anything she could see as having originated from the PRT, which very much surprised her. She fully expected that organization to keep tabs on any cape they ran across, but she had never thought that other parts of the government were doing the same. Substantially more effectively as well, she suspected.
Sarah wondered uneasily how much more information they had that they weren't showing. And how much they knew about her, and everyone else other than Amy…
When she finally closed the folder and put it down, she raised her eyes to look at the two agents. Glancing at her sister for a moment, the other woman appearing frustrated but unable to quite work out how to express this, she asked, "What is going to happen now?"
"That depends on both your actions and Miss Dallon's wishes, ma'am." Agent Able was polite, but there was a certain feeling to his voice that made it clear he wasn't playing around. "As I have explained, Miss Dallon is considered by people well above my pay grade to be of considerable interest to the country. Her abilities are almost unique, and there are those who feel that losing access to them would be… suboptimal. Should her home life cause her sufficient stress to make that likely to happen, steps would be taken to rectify the issue. Obviously, Miss Dallon's own well-being is one of the primary considerations in whatever those steps would ultimately be."
He smiled thinly in a way that made Sarah feel a slight frisson of nervousness.
"We are well aware that Mrs Dallon is not as enamored of her adoptive daughter as one might wish," Agent Baker continued as smoothly as if they'd practiced it, "for personal reasons if nothing else. The situation is regrettable but not yet beyond salvaging. We are not yet quite at the stage where direct action is warranted."
"Direct action?" Sarah repeated, thinking that sounded more than a little ominous. "What sort of 'direct action?'"
"While emancipation of Miss Dallon is feasible, it could lead to other issues, so that's currently considered a last resort," the woman replied evenly. Carol's mouth dropped open but she seemed to think better of speaking when Sarah gave her a warning look. "Removal of her from the abusive environment and placement with a more suitable one would be more in keeping with her current best interests."
"You'd take her away frommmmph??"
Sarah kept her hand over her sister's mouth as the other woman tried to swear. "Shut up you idiot," she hissed into Carol's ear. The agents merely watched them.
"You consider this family an abusive environment?" she asked more loudly, feeling sorrow go through her at the thought.
"Unfortunately, based on recent actions, there is some evidence to suggest that, yes, Mrs Pelham," Baker replied. "I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that your sister is deliberately abusive, or has physically abused Miss Dallon, but our information does show that there is a certain level of neglect and… shall we say, excessive and overzealous expectations… present. This is clearly causing very significant amounts of mental and emotional stress to Miss Dallon, as well as to her sister. In the long term the end results could be… unfortunate."
Sarah released Carol when the other woman finally calmed down a little, but kept a wary eye on her. "I'm not certain that's entirely fair," she said evenly, but in her heart she knew it was. She'd seen how Carol treated Amy at times, and had hoped that was the exception rather than the rule. From what she was hearing she'd been fooling herself.
'None are so blind as those that will not see,' she thought as she glanced again at her sister. 'Why didn't I look into it more thoroughly?'
The answer was because she didn't like to think that a member of her own family could actually act like that, of course. Even though she knew full well that Carol had a very fixed attitude to certain things and was almost impossible to change when she'd made up her mind. And Amy had apparently been one of those things that Carol had made up her mind about.
"How can we fix this?" she asked quietly. "Amy is part of the family, regardless of what's happened, and why. I'm not going to abandon her. And Carol means well."
Her sister glared at her but she glared back. Eventually Carol looked away. Sarah thought that the presence of the two FBI agents had seriously confused her.
Which wasn't surprising, she was very confused herself despite what they'd explained.
"There are a number of possible paths to take at this point," Agent Able replied, pulling another folder out of the briefcase by his feet and opening it on the table. "Reduction of Miss Dallon's working hours to something more sensible goes without saying. She is working far more at Brockton General than advisable, or even technically legal for someone of her age. Despite her abilities she is still a teenager, after all."
"How many hours is she working there?" Sarah asked suspiciously.
He flipped a couple of pages. "In the last two months she has averaged sixty two hours per week, ma'am," he replied.
She gaped at him then rounded on Carol who shrank into her chair at the expression on her sister's face. "Sixty two hours a week? On top of her schoolwork? Are you insane?"
"She has a duty to..."
Sarah put her finger over her sister's mouth. "No. Not another word. You cannot let a sixteen year old girl work sixty two hours a week. I don't work sixty two hours a week. You don't work sixty two hours a week. She needs eight hours of sleep a day and time to herself. Our original agreement with the hospital was twenty hours a week and only if she wanted to do that. How the hell did that more than triple? And why hasn't someone stopped it?"
Carol looked defensive but didn't seem to have a reply. Sarah sighed heavily. Turning to the agents, she said, "Amy will not be working that long again, you have my word."
He nodded. "In addition, arrangements have been made to remunerate Miss Dallon for the essential and unique work she does at a fair rate as a Parahuman consultant." Taking a sheet of paper from his folder he held it out. Sarah accepted it and scanned the page. Her eyes widened.
"That… is a considerable sum," she finally managed.
"The market rate for such medical services is quite large," he replied with a small nod and a quirk of his lips.
Sarah held the page out where Carol could see it. Her sister looked at it and paled.
"What else?" she asked as she handed it back to him. He turned the page.
"This may take some time, ma'am," he said.
Waving for the man to continue, she settled back to listen, while wondering who the hell was actually behind this insanity.
And feeling very sorry for poor Amy, as well as quite peeved at her sister and herself in equal measure.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Sitting around a table in what Amy thought was probably Taylor's father's study, she, her sister, and Taylor herself, watched as the suited man her friend had called 'Agent Charlie' opened his briefcase. He extracted an official looking folder, then removed two bound stacks of paper which he handed to Taylor. She looked through them both for a few seconds, nodding in satisfaction, before placing them in front of her. Amy craned her neck and could see what looked like a government seal through the translucent blue cover.
"OK, guys." Taylor looked at them both. "Sorry about all this cloak and dagger stuff, but it's kind of required."
"Who the hell are you, Taylor?" Vicky asked in a highly confused voice. Amy felt exactly like her sister sounded.
"Your friend, Taylor Hebert," the brunette replied with a smile. "That hasn't changed. But before I can tell you anything else, at least about what you really want to ask, you need to read these, understand them, and sign them." She looked at the two sets of paperwork, then up at Amy and Vicky. "Or you can pretend none of this happened, we can go back out into the garden and finish the lemonade, then go for an ice-cream and a movie or something."
Amy studied her. Taylor looked back, smiling a little, but Amy got the impression that her friend was hiding a certain amount of worry under the usual cheerful expression. She glanced at Vicky who was chewing her lip, clearly desperately curious but also cautious. They'd heard enough from Carol to be wary of signing anything at all without someone trusted checking it over.
Amy herself had signed a lot of NDAs over the time since she'd Triggered, probably more than almost any Parahuman in the city, and was very familiar with the process. This seemed different somehow.
"Is this because your dad is the CEO of Gravtec?" Vicky asked.
"That's part of it, yeah," Taylor admitted with a nod.
Vicky looked at Amy. "I don't know about you but I'm as curious as fuck about this," she said wryly. She turned back to Taylor. "And I trust you. Mom would probably say I'm being an idiot..."
Amy sighed, then reached out and snagged one of the documents. She opened it, staring at the first page.
She'd never seen so many official seals on anything before.
She didn't even recognize half of them.
The warnings under that were fairly bloodcurdling. In essence it suggested that turning the page was a capital offense if one didn't immediately sign the document. She exchanged a look with Vicky, who had accepted the other one from Taylor, her sister looking back with wide eyes, then both of them flipped to the next page.
Reading what turned out to be a pretty comprehensive NDA with a number of clauses that were both simple to read and quite worrying in the penalties mentioned for breaking them, she scanned through the entire thing twice. It basically said that once she'd signed it, she could only divulge anything that Taylor saw fit to tell her to someone else who she knew had signed the same document, or who Taylor herself, her father, or the Department of fucking Defense allowed her to.
What the fuck?
It made the ones the PRT relied on look like the work of an amateur.
"If you have any questions about it, Agent Charlie can explain them," Taylor said. "Or I can if you don't trust him. Or Dad, but we'll have to call him and ask him to come home."
"It looks straightforward enough," Vicky said a little weakly. "Not nearly as complicated as some legal things I've seen are."
"There is no intent to lay traps in legal wording, Miss Dallon," Agent Charlie put in. He'd been sitting there watching in silence up until then. "The document is deliberately as clear and concise as possible. Allowing misunderstanding would be entirely pointless."
Vicky nodded, then read the thing again. Eventually she turned to Amy, who was staring alternately at her copy and Taylor, their friend sitting there and waiting patiently. "What do you think, Ames?" she asked.
"I think I trust Taylor," Amy said as she decided. "Because she's my friend."
She took the pen Taylor handed her with a smile. Signing her name on the last page, she passed the pen to her sister, who took it, hesitated, then repeated the process herself. Taylor retrieved the papers and also signed them.
"Thank you," Agent Charlie said. He accepted both documents and put them in his briefcase. "It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I'll leave you to it." Standing, he nodded to Taylor. "I'll let myself out, Miss Hebert."
"Thanks, Agent," she replied, watching as he left. Moments later they were alone in the room.
Both Dallon girls looked at each other, then turned as one to stare at Taylor. She looked innocently back.
"So? Spill, girl. Now that we've signed our souls away, we need to know why," Vicky demanded.
Taylor chuckled and stood up. "Follow me," she said mysteriously, leaving the room and beckoning them after her. They got up and followed, not without a certain amount of apprehension and deep curiosity.
The tall girl led them a door halfway between the front and the back of the house, under the stairs. She tapped a couple of places on the frame, and put her hand in the middle of the door itself. A click followed, then she pulled it open. Amy noted there had been no visible or audible indications of some sort of high security lock, although there obviously was something. Taylor disappeared down the stairs that were on the other side, clearly leading down to a basement.
Both Dallons followed.
As they descended far enough to see the surprisingly large room that lurked under the house both stopped dead and gaped in shock.
"Holy shit!" Vicky breathed in amazement. Amy couldn't even manage that.
Both numbly went down the stairs to the bottom, looking around at the largest and highest tech collection of equipment either of them had ever seen anywhere. It made even a movie look like it wasn't really trying very hard. As she turned on the spot, Amy saw more computers than any normal person would consider sensible, half a dozen of the biggest monitors she'd ever seen, a couple of ultra-high-tech microscopes, possibly thousands of little drawers full of parts, and any amount of other technological gear.
And that was only the stuff she could more or less recognize.
At least half of what was there was entirely unlike anything she'd seen before. She got the distinct impression that Armsmaster would have been extremely envious by what was hiding down here.
In the middle of it, Taylor was sitting in a large and very expensive chair, the sort you found in very high end offices, with her feet propped up on a piece of equipment that was full of oddly glowing widgets that were strangely hard to focus on, a small point of silver light hovering above it and somehow giving a weird impression of watching them. She was grinning at their expressions.
"Holy shit." Vicky repeated herself. She turned to Amy. "Holy shit!"
Both looked at each other, before staring at Taylor. "You're a Tinker?" Vicky asked incredulously.
"Nope." Taylor's grin widened a little. "I'm better than a Tinker. Because I know what I'm doing."
She gestured widely. "I'm a professional supergenius. Welcome to my workshop."
Amy sat on the bottom step and simply examined her friend with a sensation that things had abruptly got out of hand. A moment later a rattling sound made her look up, to see a dragonfly circling above her head. It landed on her hair. Taylor giggled.
"It likes you."
"Where did that come from?" Amy asked, her head whirling with so many different questions only this one managed to come out.
"It landed on your head in the garden earlier," Taylor remarked.
"And it was there the entire time?" Amy glared at the girl. "Why didn't you say anything?"
Taylor shrugged. "It looked happy where it was." She picked up a small oval machine that was sitting on the bench by her elbow and smiled at them. "Want to see something cool?"
She pressed a button on the thing before either of the other girls could reply and let go. They stared as the machine just hung in the air without moving.
"Yeah, so you know that stuff Gravtec makes?" she said, scratching her nose as they looked incredulously at the flying ovoid. "I kind of invented it..."
Amy put her head in her hands and sighed. Vicky audibly suppressed a hysterical giggle.
"Why do I get the feeling that the really weird shit is going to start about now?" Amy grumbled.
Taylor snickered then began telling them some fairly ridiculously crazy stuff.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"The Slaughterhouse Nine are dead?"
Rebecca stared at Fortuna in shock.
"It is decidedly so," the woman in the hat replied calmly before walking off humming.
"How?"
"Better not tell you now," came the reply, then she turned the corner and vanished.
Clenching her fists, Rebecca looked around the empty corridor, then stomped off.
This was getting way past the point of being annoying...
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