Friday, 29th April – Brockton Bay, Downtown – Coil's base
I wanted nothing more than get home to have a chance to sort out my mind.
It was not to be.
Lady Photon politely, but insistently invited us to be introduced to New Wave. It would've been suspicious to decline.
"Hey, it's great to finally get to meet you," an exuberant blonde barely held herself back from intruding in our personal space.
Victoria Dallon, Glory Girl.
How self-absorbed did you have to be to choose that name? There was nothing glorious about capes, but it fit with the costume she chose.
She wore a white one-piece dress with a skirt. A bold choice as a flier, but that was what the shorts were for. Her golden tiara finished the princess look. It was utterly impractical. It valued looks over protection. She should've placed more importance on the later. Despite her pretensions of invincibility double tapping wasn't hard.
All of New Wave's costumes were like that, more glamour than function.
Knights in Shining Armour, pretending nothing was wrong.
Just like the Protectorate.
The entire setup was a lie Alexandria created.
Lady Photon used the distraction to take Brandish to the side.
Laserdream gave us a friendly wave, but left the vanguard to Victoria.
Shielder awkwardly glanced at BiriBiri, who was more interested in getting in a conversation with Manpower. Huh, Shielder was interested in her. Talk about a doomed endeavor.
Panacea hung back with Flashbang as far as she could. She barely kept from yawning and was mostly interested in getting back to her bed.
"It's nice to meet you as well," I lied through my teeth.
"I've never seen anything get the Protectorate to deploy the entire Triumvirate. Not even for Lung," Shielder looked towards Noelle's prison, "what has Coil gotten up to?"
Brandish swerved from her talk with Lady Photon. "That is a very delicate question that we'll discuss with the PRT-" "He abducted the mayor's niece, tried to kill us, knowingly hired containment zone escapees," BiriBiri counted off on her hands while Brandish glared at her. "Oh, and he advised at least three PRT departments as a civilian contractor."
Were the lacking checks that allowed his infiltration intentional?
Cauldron did not seem to have a hold on him except for the favors he owed.
"It's mostly the third that got him. No one likes a duplicator that broke out of a containment zone," BiriBiri continued unconcerned with Brandish' increasing disapproval.
"I trust you understand the ramifications of that," Brandish swerved her glare across everyone, "careless mention of that would lead to wide-spread panic."
The New Wave kids quickly gave her nods knowing she would not accept arguments.
"I thought you guys were about accountability," BiriBiri needled her.
"We are. There will be. The PRT will not get to pretend this failure did not happen," Lady Photon put a hand on Brandish before she could go off. "But there is a difference between raking them over the coals needlessly and ensuring a fair and complete inquiry into their failures."
"Organizations don't change without pressure," BiriBiri scoffed.
"There will be," she promised simply.
BiriBiri glanced towards me. "She means it," I told her. "I don't know about Director Piggot. Never met her, but Armsmaster won't need the motivation. This will eat at him. He'll leave no stone unturned."
That made her subside with minor grumbling.
How much pressure will New Wave cause before Alexandria intervened? She was intent on painting Coil only a local problem.
"Uh, anyway. I really, really wanted to thank you for arresting the Empire. It's beyond time to finally see them gone," Victoria tried to divert the discussion into much calmer waters.
It stayed somewhat awkward, but we did leave with phone numbers for Lady Photon and Victoria for all of us and Shielder gave his to BiriBiri. The poor forlorn soul. He was barking up the completely wrong tree.
Friday, 29th April – Brockton Bay, defunct Bowen Dockyard, Workshop
I mechanically removed my armored costume piece by piece.
It has been a long day.
Finally I get to sleep.
Get a chance to make some sense of what I learned.
Keiko stepped into my path. "What's wrong?" Keiko shattered my exhaustion.
"Wrong?" I tilted my head and put a slight frown on my face. "I'm fine, just a little tired. It's been a long day."
"Don't you lie to me," Keiko put her hands on her hips as she glared at me.
"But I'm not," I scratched my head a little as if I was having trouble figuring out what this was about.
Charlotte at least believed my act even if she was not confident enough to intervene, but my glance got Keiko to glance at her as well.
"Don't trust her body language," Keiko rolled her eyes, "she's not manton-limited, she can fake that and does."
I increased my frown and put a single hand on my hip.
"Oh, don't give me that," Keiko was not convinced with my feigned righteous anger. "You've been entirely too quiet the entire time we were talking to New Wave. That's what tipped me off, but it's not when you started, was it?"
She knew me too well, even though Charlotte considered her paranoid now.
"You definitely were already faking when talking to the Protectorate. We know you don't have to ask questions. You already know everything Coil knew," she went on. "You also know what they thought about it." I saw realization hit her. "You went out of your way to make them think you did not know. You're scared. Scared of the Protectorate."
She was too smart for her own good.
"You'll sleep better not knowing," I tried. I dropped my control. I hugged myself and shivered.
Keiko hugged me. "Stop being stupid," she chided. "Spill. You're not putting this onto yourself."
Charlotte was shuffling around uncomfortably. "Oh, you come here too," Keiko told her.
She put an arm around us. Keiko pulled her fully into the hug.
It took me a bit to gather myself, but eventually we separated.
Where to begin?
"Bad or Worse?" I asked. Cauldron or Scion.
"Not good news, bad news?" Charlotte tried.
I only gave a grim look. "That's not on offer."
"Worse, get it out of the way," Keiko decided.
A short moment later the holographic projector on the table showed a memory. Not quite mine, but I wouldn't know who else to attribute it too.
The purely visual representation couldn't quite demonstrate the vastness of those dancing motes. Placing a human as comparison just wouldn't do, they wouldn't be a single pixel. Humans simply weren't wired to grasp planet-sized. Even in our own solar system it varied by several orders of magnitude what that meant.
"Those things give powers?" Charlotte frowned at the hologram, "Are those struts?"
"Looks like it," I answered following her gaze to those metal bolts that had skewered my power.
"These things are connected to us?" Keiko asked.
"Not to you. You do not have a Corona Pollentia or Gemma," I shook my head. "But every parahuman has one. Myself included, though mine doesn't seem to do anything aside from the moment it connected."
Information went inside my own Corona Pollentia and Gemma. But unlike other powers it did not do anything in response to it.
"What do they want?" Charlotte studied the hologram.
"I have no idea," I switched to the final frame that had been etched into my memory when I triggered. "But someone else thought it was worth fighting."
The hologram showed a city of skyscrapers and wind turbines.
Many of them were fallen over. Some suddenly ended. Not like construction had stopped, but like someone had erased them. Molecular disintegration.
Plants hadn't yet begun to reclaim those ruins. This was recent when it happened.
The white-haired boy, the brown-haired girl and the spiky black-haired boy were facing off against Scion and his silver female counterpart.
"They are fighting Scion," Charlotte fidgeted. "Why are they fighting Scion? Sure, he isn't all there, but he's the guy rescuing kittens from trees."
Because he's what will kill us all.
I did not tell her, she had to come to that realization on her own.
"Is he the source of powers?" Keiko guessed. "And who's the silver chick he's protecting?"
The old man in his lab coat merely watched. I noticed he had a prosthetic hand, now that I had time to look at him. His gleeful face was the most disconcerting thing here. Everyone else was angry, sad or determined. He looked like he was having fun.
"It's my best guess and I have no idea respectively," I told Keiko.
"Huh, she has your eyes," Keiko was looking at the final person present. A blond girl that.. sad did not encompass how she looked. Despairing wasn't quite it either. Like someone who thought their life was already over?
"I suspect it's more accurate to say that I have her eyes," I looked at the remote she held. Then at the strange green frog plushie which hung from a strap on her handbag. A third of it was singed. Yet she had kept it. It must mean something to her. Her other hand held a book, though it was fuzzy as if her attention wasn't on it when she created this memory.
"Those are Japanese street signs," Charlotte shrunk a bit into herself. "Uh, but it looks too advanced. More like the tinkertech you make."
"You're right. It is exactly the technology I can make," I told her, "This can't be our Japan."
"Aleph, it's another world like Earth Aleph," Keiko said.
"It's the only way such a fight could've happened without making international news," I agreed. "Though it's yet another one, not Aleph."
Those are two ongoing Level 6 shifts. The power that was wielded there beggared belief.
No way that would've stayed quiet if it happened here on Earth Bet.
No wonder the city was in ruins.
I let the hologram display another memory in addition to the current one. Side by side.
"This, is what Dinah meant with everyone dying," I told them.
"Are those the twin towers?" Charlotte looked at the miraculously intact towers considering what had happened to all the others in the scene I decided to show.
Manhattan was a ruin.
"Oh fuck," Keiko was looking at where some of the neighboring skyscrapers simply.. ended. No rubble. No cracks. She looked back to the other scene. Which had a building just like it.
Charlotte had followed her gaze and made the same connection a moment later. "It's him. Oh."
"Billions dead, her power tells her. Probably everyone," I told them bleakly. "He'll go off if he sees me."
Keiko fell back in the camping chair. "We are so fucked."
"Why only you?" Charlotte asked. "Dinah mentioned only you."
I blinked at her. That wasn't the reaction I expected.
"Why not any of us? You said our powers are different," she went on, "Why is it only you?"
"I.. have no idea." It was a good question though. Why only me?
"Probably blondie's fault," Keiko pointed at the blonde girl next to lab coat gramps, "she must've pissed him off somehow. It would explain why no one's ever heard of the silver bitch. And oh boy would that have him pissed."
I raised my finger to object. Then lowered it. "Maybe?"
Did she actually succeed in killing one of them? If so, it would've been great if she told me how.
"What can we do about that?" Charlotte looked at my as if I had the answer.
Die.
"I am open to ideas," I said instead. I'll even take bad ones.
Silence. As expected.
How the fuck did you kill a god?
We didn't come up with anything.
It took us a moment to gather the will to tackle the merely bad problem after that.
The hologram showed a dark-skinned woman in a doctor's lab coat. She held a white plastic clipboard with both hands.
"This is Doctor Mother-" Keiko snorted "– which is a stupid name, yes – she is the leader of Cauldron. An organization which makes and sells power granting vials. They do cost money, but more importantly they do cost favors."
Which was the more insidious part of it. The way they went about it made it easy for them to create sleeper agents which were perfectly hidden. Until a favor got called in.
"They seriously named themselves cooking pot?" Keiko raised her eyebrow. I ignored it.
"The entire Triumvirate knows about the power granting vials. At least two of them got their powers from them, probably all of them," I began, "They're looking to bury any investigation into it. They have done so before. It won't be hard for them, what with Alexandria being the Chief Director of the PRT and Legend leading the Protectorate."
I had the hologram station put Alexandria and public images of Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown next to each other.
"Will they bury us with it?" Small flickers of lightning cracked through Keiko's hair.
"What they think I know has already been shared with everyone present," I shook my head. "Legend will paint the Travelers as unreliable due to the Simurgh involvement. He expects Coil to keep his mouth shut. He thinks he is more afraid of Cauldron than the PRT. And if not he plans to leave a small note from Cauldron in Coil's cell to remind him he really should be. I don't know what he's planned if that fails. I could only get so much in the brief time I had."
"They've lied to our faces from the beginning," Charlotte was clenching her teeth. "The PRT is supposed to be the oversight. Instead the inmates are running the asylum. We must tell people."
"We wouldn't survive printing the first line," I sighed, "If we had any proof at all."
"What. Why?" Charlotte forced her fists open.
"They have been at this for thirty years. They have sold powers for thirty years. They will have kept ties to the ones who got the best powers. Made sure they felt positively towards them. Made sure they'd help them out. They'll have done that for every single power category, including all kinds of thinkers."
"How can you be so sure about that?" she asked.
Because I did that.
First I chose my best friend. Then I found someone who I believed wouldn't abuse their new power. But more importantly I chose someone who was isolated. Alone. Who'd latch onto an offer of friendship unseen. That was not an accident.
I hated that similarity.
"Legend did not think about doing it for favors. He thought he was doing the right thing. He has chosen a side and it's not the Protectorate," I explained instead. "He won't be the only one."
"Fuck."
"On the bright side they are not omniscient. They'd already be here for once," Keiko half-joked. "They can't have set their thinkers to anyone merely knowing about them. They do want to be known some, or they couldn't sell their powers."
"Most likely they're looking for sudden and vast changes," I agreed. It's why no tinker-tech plague had succeeded so far. It was a bright signal flare for any precognitive.
"Can we really do nothing about this?" Charlotte was pacing. She might as well have said 'about this too'.
"There's a thread we can pull," Keiko looked towards me.
"Faultline is looking into rumors about them," I grimaced. I doubted she was eager to talk to us after we've gotten rather friendly with the heroes.
"The villains?" Charlotte frowned.
"Mercenaries," Keiko insisted. "The US' own fault for having shitty parahuman labor laws."
Charlotte did not look convinced.
"Oh, and Chevalier can see when people have parahuman powers. He's confused cause he saw nothing with you two," I remembered the final item of note and derailed that argument before it could get going.
A/N.:
This chapter fought me tooth and nail. But now it's done. Finally.
I also hid some hints towards what happened with Eden (the silver one), though I doubt they are easy to understand.
