Wednesday, 27th April – Brockton Bay, Downtown – Winter Street
I had to circle around a bit to stay in the shadow of buildings from the Towers, but within ten minutes I arrived back where the Nazis tried their ambush.
The jogging practice did pay off.
Keiko had called me, but my ears were still ringing too much to understand what she said. I had told her I was fine and was making my way back.
I was relieved when I got them in my range, they were unharmed, if rather nervous.
Hookwolf had gotten away. Fuck.
I'd make something special just for him next time.
At least everyone else was caught. I held back a sigh. This could have gone much much worse.
The teleporter and their accomplices had taken Hookwolf's arrest from me. I'd make them regret that.
More PRT vans than I ever had seen in a single place had cordoned the alley off. Their emergency lights illuminated it under their green light. The entire alley was teeming with PRT troopers.
Armsmaster was the first to notice my arrival. He took his attention off a few troopers who lifted Alabaster and Fog into one of the vans.
I was beckoned through the cordon with a grunt.
He was all business.
No one was impolite enough to mention the egg yolk on his armor.
He said something to me, but my hearing still hadn't recovered. My eardrums were likely ruptured.
I accessed the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe of the people around us to get around my deafness for now.
"How long does your hold last?" was what he had asked.
"Long enough, now that I am here," I answered evasively. They wouldn't have broken out of it even if I had died. Not ever. Not without active interference by a parahuman.
"Call Boston. New York too. We'll need their help," he addressed trooper Mullens, "we don't have enough cells for all of them."
His thoughts were whirling about what this arrest meant. All but one parahuman of the most major gang in the Bay were arrested today.
At that point Keiko caught sight of me. "Sparkles!" she caught me in a hug.
Charlotte awkwardly trailed behind.
"Sorry, I should have caught it in time for yours," she apologized for not preventing my teleport.
"You have nothing to apologize for. No one of us saw the teleporter coming," I shook my head.
"Damn straight. You held against Fog and Alabaster on your own," Keiko told her, "you got any idea how rare that is? You did great."
Armsmaster cleared his throat as he pulled his attention away from the preliminary results his new scanners showed about how my power affected the Nazis.
"To hold off Fog alone is quite a feat," Armsmaster agreed. He looked over the eerily still members of the Empire. "How did you manage to pull this off?"
"While I had hoped the recent removal of their moles in the PRT would let you slip the prisoner transport past them, I still kept an ear out just in case. So once I learned about their ambush, we decided to ambush it," I skipped completely over how exactly I learned about it.
"We could've coordinated if you came to us with that information," he gritted out.
"Evacuation of civilians takes priority for all squad members. Disrupt subject's senses with flashbangs wherever possible. Nonlethal truck emplacements are authorized," I quoted from my own threat assessment.
"How did you get access to that?" he demanded to know.
"Kaiser bought it with the same difficulty I buy my groceries," I complained.
"I'd say you're leaking like a sieve," Keiko scoffed, "but your bucket long managed to lose its bottom entirely."
"Why do you make threat assessments about us anyway? We aren't enemies," Charlotte was concerned.
"It's standard procedure. It has no bearing on your standing with the PRT," Armsmaster went for the easiest to address statement.
"Standardized stupidity is still stupidity," Keiko snarked.
I shrugged, but didn't disagree. Them making an assessment at all wasn't something worth fighting though. I knew a losing battle when I saw one.
I'd grill them for not securing it adequately though.
"Due to the PRT repeatably proving their data security severely lacking what we can in good conscience share with you is limited until such a time this has been remedied to our satisfaction," I faked looking apologetic with my power.
I deliberately did not specify what I meant with to our satisfaction. I would never share the details about my powers with them.
Armsmaster was too controlled to splutter, so he merely seethed.
I still told him about the unknown teleporter and the chimera, but not how I dealt with them.
At least he was appropriately concerned about the potential wet tinker.
The conversation was pretty much at an end with that and we stood there awkwardly while the Nazis got taken away.
Wednesday, 27th April – Brockton Bay, Downtown – The Towers
The wind whipped across the rooftop. This wasn't the rough sterility of the roofs one saw in the Docks. The Towers had higher standards. The flower boxes were well-tended to and placed for the aesthetics only. No one did that in the Docks, everyone who had a balcony there planted some food or spices. Tomatoes, lettuce, onion or chili pepper.
Both Winter Street and the Fortress Construction site were visible from here.
It was the last step before I'd go to my workshop and treat my wounds.
Psychic residue got lost with time, especially if the place wasn't of importance to the person.
"It should be here," Charlotte told me. She pointed a bit to the side of where I placed the sniper.
I had backtracked the sniper. She had backtracked the teleporter.
"Well done," I praised her and she visibly straightened.
I hadn't told her that I had managed to backtrack the sniper. She needed the boost in confidence.
I knelt down and placed my hand exactly where she had pointed and activated the same program I did to find out Yan had sent me the fake love letter. I used my psychometry much more rarely than my mind reading, but it did come in useful in cases like this.
The teleporter wore a black costume with a red mask. A top hat hid his hair and he looked through some binoculars towards Winter Street.
A mercenary lay on the ground next to him. His sniper rifle was pointed at the construction site.
A second mercenary stood next to the sniper, an assault rifle hung from his neck while he looked towards the construction site with the same model of binoculars as top hat.
Gotcha!
Wednesday, 27th April – Brockton Bay, Tenement Building in the Docks (Keiko's home)
The smell of the minced meat sauce wafted throughout the flat.
"The spaghetti are nearly ready," Charlotte informed me.
She insisted on helping out. Apparently she took comfort in cooking, unlike Keiko who took comfort in taste testing.
"Perfect timing. The minced meat sauce is as well and the Kimuras are almost here too." They had just entered the building and were making their way towards the apartment.
We plated the food on the table just in time for the door to open.
Ms. Kimura entered first. She rushed towards Keiko and caught her in a hug.
"Mom," she groaned, "I'm fine."
I knew no good mother who ever took those words at face value.
Ms. Kimura certainly did not and studied her daughter for anything that would give the lie towards her words.
Mr. Kimura glanced towards me and I sent him a reassuring smile and nod.
"Welcome in our home," he greeted Charlotte.
I had made it clear she didn't have to be here, but she did want to be part of this despite it outing her towards Keiko's family.
"Thanks for having me," she replied bashfully.
I winced as pain shot through my chest without adrenaline coursing through my body.
Ms. Kimura looked at me with concern. In my distraction she had managed to go from checking on Keiko to checking on me and I hadn't managed to hide it as she hugged me.
"We had a complication. I'll live," I tried to mollify Ms. Kimura, "I'll be completely recovered by morning."
The healing nanites I injected would see to that. My lungs were the worst off, even if my ear drums were more noticeable.
She didn't look impressed.
"She's still using other people's ears to hear," Keiko threw me to the wolves. How had she even noticed that?
That earned me a glare.
"You can't hear?" Charlotte looked surprised.
"Keiko went toe to toe with Hookwolf," I returned the favor.
Ms. Kimura pinched her nose in frustration. "You will tell us everything that happened," she demanded.
"Let's eat first," Mr. Kimura granted us a reprieve, "we'll want the time to go into detail without the food getting cold." Or he was merely boxing us in.
We all dug into the food as I noticed a melancholic look on Charlotte's face. I decided not to dig into that. It wasn't right to go rifling through a friends thoughts on a whim.
"Ah, right ear's back," I told them with a smile as I heard the pop.
Wednesday, 27th April – Brockton Bay, Tenement Building in the Docks (Keiko's home)
After we were finished with the dishes we cleared the table. I had placed a holographic projector courtesy of what I had learned from Bakuda's camouflage bomb.
It flickered between the chimera, the teleporter and the two mercenaries and we explained what had happened.
Ms. Kimura glared at the faces that had tried to kill me, then glanced towards the counter.
"First of all," Mr. Kimura addressed us, "well done. I hadn't hoped to see the day where the Empire 88 would be gone. You've dealt them the worst hit they've ever received."
We did that, I let myself feel that pride. Though we still had to bring it home. The PRT always had difficulty making arrests stick, but with all but Hookwolf and a bedridden Purity they might manage it for once.
"Yeah! We did it," Keiko pumped her fist.
Charlotte merely smiled. She tended to be more subdued like myself.
"With the adulation taken care of this leaves the complication," Mr. Kimura gestured at the hologram.
"Those mercenaries fit with what Kaiser knows Coil tends to field," I told them.
"But Coil doesn't field capes," Charlotte interjected.
"Coil doesn't publicly field capes," I corrected, "we caught him out before with the Undersiders."
"The bank robbers?"
I nodded. That was their most public caper.
"The cape's Trickster from the Travelers. A mercenary team for hire. They never stay anywhere for long. They were last seen in Boston," Keiko told us.
She had posted a picture of him on PHO on a throw away account and asked if anyone knew that cape. It didn't take long for the Guys/Girls In The Know to get us an answer.
"In hindsight the chimera was likely Genesis. A changer with a lot of variability," I had the hologram flicker some of her known forms in addition to the scorpion. A knight in shining armor, a gargoyle with talons and wings that could fly and breath out smoke like Grue.
"Those aren't all of them, they have three more members. Sundancer," I showed a girl in body armor emblazoned with red suns burning her way through a concrete wall, "can burn her way through pretty much anything. Ballistic," the hologram flickered to a guy whose costume had some similarity to a football player's, "can throw entire cars at you at high speeds. Perdition," a guy in a red and black costume which would've had him taken as a Nazi in this town, "can reset you back in time a couple seconds."
Now that was a power I itched to get under my scanners.
"Why didn't they use Perdition against you?" Charlotte asked.
"Perhaps his range is more limited than Trickster's?" Keiko guessed.
Time was far from trivial to manipulate, so that was possible.
"Anyway, I do know were Coil's troops and the Nazis tended to clash, so we have a point to start looking for them," I told them.
I had no desire to leave the initiative to them, they had come too close already.
"After you've finished your homework," Ms. Kimura interjected quickly.
Keiko groaned.
