Trickster finds her and James standing in front of the recently shuttered clinic, debating over what type of sign might be used to show that this is now a cape owned business.
James had suggested a blood red handprint over the window, but Giselle thought it should be something white, since it's her place.
"Ribbons," Giselle says suddenly. "Satin ribbons."
Like the kind of ribbons that adorn pointe shoes. She can show places that are hers by having satin white ribbons shown in the area.
"Let's go buy some," Giselle says, so consumed by her new idea that she'd failed to react to the fact that Trickster had long since entered her range, his distinctive glitching as he progressed towards her with teleport after teleport making it obvious who it was even without the knowledge of his specific lung issues.
"You can just buy in bulk online," Trickster says, a lit cigar already in one hand. "Way cheaper than brick and mortar."
It's less fun to do it like that, though. But perhaps it might be hard to find white satin ballet shoe ribbons divorced from the shoes by simply attending a physical store.
"Jester," James greets, neutrality veering towards dislike.
"It's Trickster," Trickster sighs, before taking a very guarded several steps back from James after he realized who exactly he'd been speaking like that too. "Oh, uh! Didn't realize that was you. Hi. Anyway, Prog, there's been a slight change of plan. Well, not really a change in plan. Nothing's changed from your end!"
Giselle raises an eyebrow.
Trickster's eyes slide sideways.
"I talked to my boss," he says. "Oh, uh, if someone asks, I don't have one of those, by the way. Anyway, I talked to him. Said that I'd heard there was a new cape in town, maybe she could take a look at...? But something's got him spooked. He's not letting any stranger within a radius of the place. Told me that he was not letting an 'unknown Thinker/Trump', which I think is your official PRT classification, Thinker 2 Trump 1, onto one of his bases without vetting. So I don't know if..."
Trickster trails off as his observation of Giselle's official rating had caused James to giggle.
"But you don't need sight," he finishes quietly. "And I think you've got the range. So maybe I tell you where to look, and then you tell me if there's anything you can do that'll make it worth forcing the issue. Boss says that within a few months he could get Panacea, which would be a surer bet, but..." Again, he breaks off before he finishes the sentence, unwilling to discuss his hesitance over Panacea.
Giselle doesn't question why his girlfriend is in Trickster's bosses' base. Whatever the reason, the result is that he's more worried about her health than her safety.
"Where do I look?" She asks.
He looks so terribly afraid even as he tells her.
"And you have to make sure neither J--"
"Hob," James says sharply.
"Neither Hob here or anything he makes ever comes close to her," Trickster emphasizes on more time, giving up on his fear of the man in favor of desperately repeating this one point. "I understand he's staying with you but he can never meet her. Never."
Kind of overprotective, but not an unreasonable request.
"I understand," Giselle says.
She and James stop to look for satin ribbons on their way downtown. No luck. They do, however, find a charming newspaper stand with a large title font declaring
PRT RAID LEAVES BAKUDA DEAD, ONI LEE IN CUSTODY
"It's the best news I've got all week," the guy selling the papers tells her. Long term kidney damage. "It was Dauntless who really carried it, if you ask me. My wife she says, it was all Assault and Battery. But that's just because she's a sucker for cute couples, she's got no idea what she's talking about. Dauntless is a hometown boy, you know. So obviously it was him who really took care of business with the ABB. And about time!" Long term liver damage.
Giselle nods along.
There's no news regarding Ellisburg at all.
Everyone's talking about it the more they work their way through King's Market. The PRT finally following through with the stand they'd started when Armsmaster took down Lung. A proper reaction to Bakuda's indiscriminate bombing.
But there are other whispers.
Bakuda wouldn't have done that at all if Armsmaster hadn't fought Lung, isn't that right?
And the PRT had certainly made a mess of the docks when they went through hitting ABB hotspots. And they hadn't paid for repairs.
And what about Prognosis?
What about Prognosis.
Most of these whispers completely fade away when Giselle reaches the gentrified neighborhood that Trickster had sent her to. She steals a table and two chairs from in front of a vegan coffee shop and sits down to stare at the buildings that are under construction down the street.
James looks at the flowers that are set at the table and then pulls one out and puts it in his pocket.
Giselle ignores him. This place is full of people, so she's got a lot of medical emergencies to wade through. Not a lot of rats in this part of town, but a lot of dying grass and nutrient deprived trees. It's Tuesday mid morning, so it's not super crowded. But there's always more life than you expect to find.
Trickster had said to look down, so she looks down.
It's almost the full block away from her. Trickster had seemed confident that she'd know his girlfriend instantly, even if he'd never explicitly been told how her power worked or even if she could sense capes at all.
That seems less surprising as she senses the full cluster of power located underground. Trickster is down there, having returned in order to give himself an alibi. And then...Health risk: paralyzed lower body. The wheelchair bound girl who'd been with Trickster when she felt him next door to her. That's not the girlfriend.. Hopefully. There's not a lot she can do about the wheelchair. But there's more of them. And another two of them have powers that are uniformly sick in the exact same way that Battery's was, and uniformly mentally troubled in the same way Trickster is..? Does Trickster have a mind manipulator on his team? And why is power in a binary state of health? It's bizarre. More data is giving her no answers.
There's got to be some kind of pattern to whose power is less healthy, but she doesn't understand it at all.
And beyond that cluster...
Giselle focuses.
A single person with health risk: powered like Assault. Health risk: drug addiction. Health risk... her power falters at this distance. Is this Trickster's girlfriend? They certainly don't seem well.
She frowns, focusing as she pushes even further down.
Health risk: powered.
HEALTH RISK: POWERED.
What?
There's... two more capes down there. Trickster's team is huge for a relatively unknown faction in Brockton Bay. But that's not what's hurting her head. She'd just had the thought that powers seemed to be binary, either sick like Battery or solid like Assault. But... this isn't sick like Battery, this is somehow more sick than Battery. And both of them are sick. Extremely sick. And malleable, she is informed, emphasized. So malleable.
So which one is Trickster's girlfriend???
HEALTH RISK: UNSTABLE/ Health risk: unstable
She tries to tell the two capes apart. One of them is just. Loud. The probabilities are so varied that it's kind of hurting her just to sense them. She can't really make sense of them. They could look like anything. They could do anything. They could shed more limbs than Giselle has and still be healthy (?). They are, actively, degrading. In some way. She thinks that maybe she's getting a distorted reading...
The other cape is quiet. They can look like anything within human limits. They can also do anything within human limits. They are in perfect physical health, and there is no probability that exists that they will ever not be. She can make it probable that they look like someone specific or no one at all, but nothing else is possible so there's not much else she can do.
It's odd, because Trickster seems like a shallow type of person, so she'd have thought he'd be dating the person who can look like anyone, but she has to assume, that since he was worried about health, it's the other...? Did he even say he was worried about health?
He was interested in if she could make a power weaker.
Well. She can. But with the more powerful one she really doesn't know what on earth is going on, so she's reluctant to try without Trickster giving her way more information. What the hell.
She's ripped out of her thoughts from hearing a solid crunch, and blinks. While she'd been busy James had managed to order some bizarre salad from the vegan coffee shop. Presumably a vegan salad. So, then, what are the white chunks...
Whatever.
"I'm done," she says.
James nods and continues eating.
"I thought I was getting the better deal when our friend agreed to get me through a few walls," Giselle says, voice dry. "But it appears he has his own large problems."
James pauses between one bite and the next.
"A jester has all the problems of a king, and yet their only crown is warning bells," he says.
Giselle thinks swapping out Trickster's top hat for a jester's cap would be a massive improvement.
But speaking of warning signs.
"I don't think a ribbon will be enough," Giselle says. "What if I just bought a pair of pointe shoes and hung them in the window? White ones." Trickster won't be dropping by to see what she can say til tomorrow, so the rest of the day can be spent on more important business.
The more important business of taking over a bombed out former Urgent Care facility and marking it as for personal use.
Mask on, James had had to further modify the outside of his boots, and had then simply walked up the side of the wall in order to hang the pointe shoes and have other stuff done. Giselle made the bare minimum choice to close off all of the hallways that led out of the room except for one that could work as an alternate escape route, and then settled into her spot at the receptionist desk, exactly as if this had been the clinic that she used to work at.
She walks back out when she realizes that there were three different people standing outside the clinic that weren't James.
One of them is even sort of familiar.
Fresh surgery scar in the head.
Though, that's not a huge way of ringing any bells when it comes to names. It's good that he got the bomb out.
All three relax much more once she walks out.
"Prognosis," one of them says. "Is that man..."
Giselle tips her head to the side.
"That's Hob," she says. "He's..." What is he doing up there. "Helping. Hob, what are you doing?"
James looks down from where he'd been sitting on the roof.
"Looking around," he says.
"He's looking around," Giselle says. "Is there something you need...?"
None of them have pressing health risks. One has a high risk of heart problems in the future. All have some traces of drug and alcohol use.
Nervous looks pass between the three men anyway.
"You'll be selling healing?" Surgery scar asks quietly. "Here?"
What an excellent question. What Giselle does is largely both undetectable and ambiguous, but she does intend to more or less charge for it. Also, what on earth is pricing. How valuable is knowing you are unlikely to get cancer for the next five years.
..
Well, pricing will be whatever she wants it to be, whenever she wants it to be.
"I'm not Panacea," Giselle says slowly. "So here's what will happen here. I'll charge a flat fee for diagnosis, that is, telling people what health problems they have. Then, since that part is easy but actually doing something about it is hard, the money for me personally to try and fix it will spike dramatically, because I'd prefer if you just went to someone else and all I ever do is the easy part."
Oh, this is basically a sales pitch.
"Sixty each," Giselle says, picking a number out of a hat. She likes sixes. She'll put a second zero at the end if they seem annoying and another if they seem rich and annoying.
Sixty dollars for a health checkup is basically free. She could charge six hundred and it would still be free. She could charge six thousand and a lot of people would still think it was worth it.
Not people around here. But if she, for example, did this where Parian operated. The rich part of Brockton Bay where the Empire Eighty Eight ran things.
But, of course, she's not over there.
Too far away from her house.
One hundred and eighty dollars in crumpled twenties get pressed into her hand. Ah, she's going to need to set up a... money box. Or a way to accept credit cards. No, she gives up. This is a cash only activity.
"Your surgical scar is healing fine, low risk of infection." Since he'd been talking to her, this is easier than ever. Or maybe she's getting better at this. Is that good? She doesn't exactly like knowing so much. She thinks she's actually really gotten better than her first night as a cape. Hopefully she's leveling off. "You've got some damage from long term alcohol use, but nothing unusual or dangerous, at least nothing that will be dangerous for the next twenty years."
Anything else?
Some drug use, some childhood malnutrition...ah, the teeth. That's unfortunate. Not life threatening, though.
"I'd go to a dentist," Giselle says slowly. "In the next month." She does a slight nudge to reduce the risk of nerve loss, but it's not really going to help him long term keep the tooth. She's not a dentist.
She does much the same for the other two. One of them has really fucked up ankles. Well, also bad knees. Burns on his hands. Quite a lot, all told.
Easy money.
She doesn't intend to have regular hours, either.
There's a patrol that loops around the neighborhood and brushes in and out of her awareness, but she doesn't pay much attention to it. Flying, so nothing to do with her earthbound self.
The next morning, the neighbor's tv wakes her up to a loud retelling of the fact that Armsmaster had apparently gotten into a rematch with Lung and then lost. Badly. Tinkertech strewn around the street badly.
Apparently, even without the rest of the ABB capes Lung was still capable of single handedly throwing down. Not that anyone had thought otherwise.
Except, perhaps, Armsmaster.
"The walls are thin," James observes. If he'd said it differently, Giselle might take it as a complaint. But it doesn't really seem to be.
"It's that type of place," Giselle says.
James nods.
"It's lively," he says.
Isn't it?
Trickster is already in front of their newly claimed space when Giselle and James meander their in the late midmorning. Fascinatingly, he's not even the only one hanging out in front of the bombed out clinic.
There's a line.
Well, she'd known there was a line due to her ability to have eyes. And also due to her inability to not know where every living being within the block is in relation to her.
But still.
There's a lot of familiar prints, and more besides, women with an anxious twist to their expressions and one hand on their wallets.
Giselle makes an effort to guess as to their worries, thoughts struggling and grinding to a halt due to the proximity of so many people. They... think she'll raise pricing? Maybe? Some of them are gracing Trickster with deeply unhappy looks. Though that could be because he's chain smoking.
Maybe they are all worried she'll just turn around and go home. Which is a great idea.
"Kings listen to only a certain amount of denizen issues on every open day," James says softly.
Good point. Though she doesn't know where James gets his history from.
"First ten people come inside," Giselle says, resigned. Even though this was her idea. "Then I talk to Trickster. Then..."
Ten people per day is $600 per day which is, honestly, plenty. Alright, maybe if she's really planning on buying a lot of cute things, twenty people per day is alright. Twenty and she goes home. Reasonable.
"Then ten more. That's it for today."
There's not more than twenty people here right now, which helps.
God. She needs another sign.
A chalkboard or something. Fuck, maybe she can just scrawl on the wall. Why does everything require logistics? Why has being a cape made her need to contemplate how to communicate simple concepts?
"Hob," Giselle says, simply forcing the problem onto someone else. "Make sure they know."
The money goes into the case, the women all seem desperately relieved. Except for the one who is pregnant.
She seems... well, Giselle doesn't think she's thrilled.
Giselle could very definitely and easily cause an abortion. Her thoughts falter a little bit at that. Is that. That's an expensive service, isn't it? Well, if the woman comes back and asks for the second half of what Giselle is theoretically offering, she'll think about it.
She once again reaffirms the need to pretend like she can only affect people when she touches them.
Speaking of that lie.
"Trickster," she says. "I'm going to need some clarification of which of the people I sensed was your girlfriend. So I'll lay it out: it's not the person in the wheelchair, or the person with a severe drug addiction, but the person with--" What was that flinch even for? She hasn't gotten to the bad part yet.
How is she going to phrase this.
"Well, there were two people who seemed unstable, but the one who was more.." Giselle runs out of words, unable to really describe the information she has in her head. "Full of biologic potential."
Trickster barks out a single short laugh that turns into a pained wince.
"Yeah," he says. "That's her."
Great.
"So," Giselle says. "Now that I've done a preliminary look. Trickster. What is it that you want me to do?"
"You mean, you can do something?" There's this hit of shock in his voice, though what on earth else he would have expected her to say is a mystery. His hands shake as he lights another cigar.
"No smoking inside my clinic," Giselle says.
He drops it.
"And, yes," Giselle says. Obviously, she can do something. Once she knows what Trickster even wants. "So, you mentioned power weakening. That's the request?"
"It's.." Trickster falters. "I..."
This guy.
"I can't tell you what's doable until you tell me the ideal scenario," Giselle says for the third time. "Trickster, this is your one shot before I start charging you for every conversation. I already gave you a downpayment that was incredibly annoy--"
"The ideal scenario," Trickster mutters, bitterness dripping from him. "Is that you can send me three years back in the past and I can kill myself before I make the worst choice of my life. But I think I'll describe the second best scenario. "Noelle-- that's her name, Noelle-- looks completely human, no extra bits and pieces. Her power is weakened to the point where it may as well not exist. We find some miraculous portal cape and they send us all back to Aleph. And I never have to see this city ever again."
That is quite a scenario.
"Is touching her on the table," Giselle says.
Trickster's face twists.
"I know you can do some stuff from a distance," he says. "It would-- everything that you can achieve from a distance would be more than worth doing first."
Even though it's harder.
But...well. Giselle tugs at the brim of her hat. Honestly, weakening her might be easier than making her look baseline human. The odds that she's going to miraculously go back to having just two legs is...her body would perceive that as the aberration to be healed.
That's just like what she's meant to do with the clinic, though. Panacea should be perfectly capable of fixing something like that. The powers, that's all on Giselle.
Where does the biological diverge from the power? Does she really feel like revealing she can weaken powers from a distance to Trickster. He's not terribly trustworthy. On the other hand, if he's at all smart he already has a good idea, just because he's seen her do a little more than just tell people interesting medical facts.
If he wanted to tell people she was scary, he's got worse things to say.
"I don't," Giselle says carefully. "Want this to be a surprise to her." She's not exactly going to ask if Noelle is okay with this: this is Trickster's payment, so she'd do it even if Noelle wasn't okay with it, but she'd prefer if Noelle was not actively resisting.
Trickster goes a little pale.
"No," he says. "No, uh. I'll make sure it's not."
Great.
"Tomorrow at the same time as yesterday," Giselle says. "I'll pick a closer restaurant."
"Not vegan," James says from behind her.
"A closer non-vegan restaurant."
"You two are so..." Whatever he was going to say, Trickster clearly changes his mind. "There's something else that I forgot to bring up," he says. "I thought I mentioned it, seriously. Do either of you guys want some fake IDs made up? I know people. I'll throw it into the deal, since you're actually capable of doing something. You can make a quick trip to Boston next week and pick them up."
Such high praise. Such lackadaisical capability.
"We'll need to borrow your car," Giselle says. She's not buying one, that's clothes money she's earning.
Trickster makes a deeply strangled groan.
The patients-- uhm, not the right term. Applicants? Supplicants? Customers. The customers are more easy to deal with when Hob is in the room. She doesn't tend to process it, but she can understand how her own dark eyes staring out from his face in a dreamy, but still..predatory way, can make people decide not to linger.
Giselle had brought her laptop with her to the clinic, and for the rest of the day she pulls up some of her downloads of Russian ballet performances and watches them. When she finds her file with Coppelia she forces James to watch as well.
He's got more plant matter in his hands that he plays with as he watches, mushing it into nothing and then tucking it into the material that's pretending to be his gloves. He does it regularly, pulling a bit of biomass together into some small living fragment before collapsing it back into the "fabric".
"Pretty easy for your first day on the job," Giselle says. Though even as she says that, she feels like she's jinxing it. There is the sense that a powered individual is pacing around her block. A new one, not one she's met yet.
He's circling through the whole docks, she thinks, not deliberately pacing around her. Walking. Biologic in a specific way. Tattoos.
James looks over at her.
She doesn't know why he picked crimson red for his mask and gloves. Some fairytale reason.
"I was alone in the apartment," he says suddenly.
He has very definitely not been left alone in her apartment.
"My apartment," James says. "In Ellisburg."
Giselle nods.
"I looked up my wiki page," James says. His voice is aimless, cold. "The city still had electricity for a while. They said I triggered because I lost my job. They wrote think pieces."
Giselle imagines someone writing up her reason for her power and resists the urge to dry heave.
"They're all wrong," James says. "It wasn't getting fired. It was three weeks after that. It was the apartment. It was..." he falters, and that moment of clarity fades away. "It was cursed," he says. "The apartment was cursed."
"My computer died," Giselle says.
Her lips twitch.
"It must have been cursed, too."
Severely cursed, for her to have stopped paying attention to where Lung was. Giselle's eyes widen as she realizes that he's still well within her range and heading closer in a straight line.
Health risk:--
Giselle slams down on his probabilities before he can grow more than a foot taller than his baseline, probabilities flexing in her head.
Stop that.
She looks up to see James breathing in a rather tense breath. Does she have some physical cue when she's putting more than her default effort into something?
"I think Lung wants to talk to us," Giselle says.
He's certainly started walking faster since she stalled him out.
James gives Giselle a blank look. She doesn't think he knows who Lung is.
"He turns into a dragon," Giselle says.
Sudden interest.
She stares at him.
"Do you want me to let him turn into a dragon."
Contemplation.
"I'm not doing that. We already claimed this building. It'd be a pain to find a new one."
It feels something like constantly unweaving a piece of knitting, keeping Lung from growing in strength. But instead of getting harder, it's actually getting.. Easier? Whatever had been pushing against her going dormant instead of doubling down.
"Go open the door for him," Giselle says.
Lung has to duck to enter the building. His metal mask of a snarling dragon is illuminated by the brilliant molten orange of his eyes, which further reflects of the tattoos on his bare chest. When he breathes, ashen smoke filters out.
No health risk to him, though.
"A dragon," James says, sounding the happiest she's ever seen him short of that first apple he ate.
Lung snarls, and Giselle clamps down again. His head jerks in her direction.
"You," he says.
Giselle stands up and steps away from the laptop to minimize the risk of it getting slagged. She walks up to him, unsure if she should offer a handshake. From her that might actually be considered...
Aggressive.
"Hello," Giselle says politely. "I'm Prognosis, and this is Hob."
"You're not local," Lung says, which is quite a thing to say. He's not local either. "Come over here because you're more scared of those freaks in the Empire?"
"Scared of the rent in their part of town," Giselle corrects.
He doesn't think she's funny.
"This is my turf," he says. "You work for me, or you get out."
Even restrained from transforming, he thinks he can take them. She admires that.
"You put bombs in your own people's heads," Giselle points out. "I don't want to work for you."
That. What. Is he offended at the implication? He did do that.
"Bakuda has already been taken care of," Lung dismisses, which is a very funny way of saying "been killed by the Protectorate". Unless he did kill her and the Protectorate took the credit. But she thinks he wouldn't have let that slide if it had happened. "And you wouldn't be working for me. You aren't qualified to join the ABB. You'd simply... Be paying dues."
No.
"I don't want to do that," Giselle says. "I hope we can come to an arrangement where I have this building, and you don't do anything to it."
Hob steps forward as Lung balls up his fist.
Keeping Lung at baseline human is as much as Giselle is really willing to do to him-- short of inflicting some kind of long term cancer, which will not help anything-- but then she has a different idea. A less permanent idea.
She can do something.
"This is probably going to hurt," she says.
The probability that Lung will turn into a dragon is the most direct type of probability imaginable-- but she can think of some alterations. What if, instead of the careful rollout that he defaults to, each feature smoothly feeding into the next, his bones grew before the rest of him could? She thinks about that.
And Lung screams.
It's an awful sound, but it's an awful experience. He can't stand, falling to the floor as white bone bursts from his skin and then is healed over by his own healing factor before bursting through again.
Giselle hastily pushes the baseline back to human. That was.
She's going to have to consider the morality of torture, which she really doesn't want to consider. Morals aren't her strong suit.
James crouches down to offer Lung a hand up.
Lung swears at him in Japanese, coughing and hacking up blood as his body does its best to reset and re-heal.
Finally, Lung finishes staining the floor with his blood and stands back up.
"She do that to you?" He asks James.
"Worse," James says.
Lung nods as if that's a good thing before he turns his burning gaze back on Giselle.
"You could be a major player," he says. "You don't have to hide in the docks."
Giselle can still see the potential of him, how big he can grow, how fast, how strong, how dangerous. He could flatten this city.
"So could you," she says.
A sneer.
"No need to fight for it," he says, as if it's obvious. "The biggest fish in the pond are Endbringers. Pretending like any other territory is worth a damn-- pointless."
Endbringers, huh. She's never even thought about that. But she supposes, if she could do what Lung does, she would have to do a lot of thinking.
What could she do against an Endbringer? She has no idea. Potentially nothing. If their default state is "unkillable", then...
But that's not what's important right now.
"I don't want to protect territory," Giselle says. "I'm just making money."
"You'd make better money anywhere else."
That's... true.
Giselle gives up on explaining her reasoning.
"I'm not moving," she says.
Lung laughs, but she can still feel how angry he is, how she's still the only thing stopping a giant dragon from exploding in the reception area.
"This isn't over," Lung says.
"Hob," Giselle says. "Escort him down the block, yes? You are empowered to negotiate on my behalf if he changes his mind."
