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Andante (Worm OC)
- Thread starter zarinthel
- Start date
5. Le Diable Amoureux
Instead of any type of vegan or non vegan coffee shop, they are instead semi-seriously trying to buy a laptop for James. As in, James is wandering around looking at displays while Giselle sits in a corner and focuses on finally holding up her end of the deal.
Finding Noelle is much easier the second time around. Most of the people Giselle assumes are Trickster's team are out-- so there's only three people. Health risk: severe drug addiction, powered, Health risk: UNSTABLE/ Heath risk: unstable. Found them.
Actually, there's more than three people. There's some unpowered people a few hundred meters over. How big even is this underground base.
Well, not her problem.
High amount of distance, low amount of information. Trickster is lucky she can do anything at all.
Giselle stares into the reflective surface of a high tech television screen, and her own dark eyes stare back.
Okay. What are the possibilities for Noelle? What could she be?
Monstrous. More monstrous. She could grow more legs, more arms, more teeth. She could grow hungrier. She's got the same brain damage in her that Trickster does, even though she's got more than one brain. The damage has been replicated in each brain, which is fascinating but not fixable.
Possibilities for humanity.
..
She could unweave... Giselle's brow furrows. Noelle can dissolve her own bones. That's a lot of potential to work with. She flexes her hands. Alright. If Noelle can do it, Giselle can do it.
With Nilbog's creatures, it had been 'unweaving', because they were constructs. Stitched together masses of things. In some ways, this is similar. But it's not like Noelle's body is meant to just fall apart.
It's meant to grow. Dissolution is just a way of transforming.
Trickster's directive had been "as humanlike as possible".
HEALTH RISK: UNSTABLE
Dissolve.
She hears the scream carried through the earth. It shakes the fancy laptop shop. James yanks her back out of the way as the screen she'd been staring at cracks and falls forwards.
She'd gone after the secondary heads first, the ones with brain tissue. Hadn't wanted them to suffer. The half-horse, half-dog head collapses into just another tentacle. The almost-human one collapses next. Dissolved into a tentacle. They're the easiest route.
Noelle tries to form more heads, and Giselle clamps down.
No. Heads aren't needed.
UNSTABLE
Hands aren't needed. Dissolve. Transform. Another tentacle. Hooves. Claws. Teeth. Mouths.
Another scream, this one louder.
Giselle vaguely watches James casually steal several laptops from the display while everyone's distracted from the mess. Okay.
"I need to get closer," she says.
James looks at her.
"We could get lunch," he says.
UNSTABLE//////////HEALTH//////RISK//////////
"You take care of it," Giselle says.
Dissolve. She needs to find something stable. Forget a human lower body, she needs to establish a stable framework. She needs to find a likelihood that Noelle will stop changing.
She needs--
Health risk: unstable.
She's doing this all wrong. Prioritizing humanity when what she should be doing is prioritizing weakness.
James takes hold of one of her sleeves, careful to avoid touching his bare hand to hers, and starts tugging her in some direction.
"I'll--" James starts.
"Get back!" Giselle snaps. "The lunch isn't in that direction!"
That's it, that's the key she's been looking for. Noelle's weakness is her stomach, all the limbs are just a distraction.
Giselle dissolves Noelle's stomach, and feels her own head begin to ache.
"Your nose is bleeding," James observes.
There's another health risk: powered (like Battery, why are they all like Battery?) Nearby that wasn't there before. Healthy man in his late thirties. Some old scar tissue.
Once the stomach is dissolved, everything else collapses back into an effort from the body to reconstruct the stomach. The tremors stop, the tentacles disappear.
Giselle speeds up Noelle's digestion to the point where she'll never be able to avoid using all her energy to keep her stomach operational in order to live and decides that counts as stable enough.
Wait, what if she eats enough people to get out of the loop?
..
That would be bad.
But Giselle really can't do anything else from this distance.
"There's the lunch spot," James says. She wonders where he stashed the laptops he stole.
He ordered steak to celebrate that he'd managed to find a non-vegan restaurant, and she has carrot soup.
She's not wearing white today, so it's fine.
The phone rings for five minutes before she picks it up.
"Giselle!" Trickster yells from the other end. She doesn't know his out of costume name.
"Hi," She says. "Rick."
A single blessed moment of silence.
"My name," Trickster says. "Is Francis."
His real name sounds stupid too.
"But that doesn't matter, Giselle! What the fuck was that!"
James has ordered a second steak.
"I did my best," Giselle says. "Why don't you go over and see her."
"I would, but my boss is freaking out right now. Doesn't want his other major asset so close to my girlfriend anymore, does he." There's more than a trace of bitterness in Trickster's voice. "Saying that I'm the one who lied about how stable she was, when he's the one who promised he'd do everything in his power to help her!"
Had he just called her to rant?
"I have done everything possible to achieve without closeness," Giselle says. She considers it more. This has been a lot of dangerous work, but is it actually equivalent to her having asked Trickster to teleport her into Ellisburg? It's hard to say.
"She is always going to be hungry in exchange for less..." What on earth is she going to say about Noelle. "Less weight?"
Now she sounds like one of those shady plastic surgeons some of Heartbreaker's girlfriends went to.
"She uh..." Trickster swallows. "She was already. I mean--"
This conversation is ridiculously hard to make sound normal over a phoneline. But Giselle is eating in a public restaurant, so there's nothing to be done.
"She is no longer thinking with her lower half," Giselle says, which causes James to choke on the other side of the table. "As long as all of her consumption goes into maintaining her current...weight, she'll remain in this current state of affairs. So..."
"Don't let her eat anything spicy," Trickster says.
"It would be bad," Giselle says mildly. "But I have done what you asked."
She doesn't know if anything she's done will make it worse if Noelle goes out of control than it had been before.. Except, well, if Trickster becomes lax, and takes less precautions, then...
Well, this is what it's like to pay people's prices.
"No..." Trickster takes a deep breath, calming down from his rant faster than she'd thought he would. He's a mercurial man, Trickster. Never hanging onto anything for long-- except, it seems, for his remarkably unstable girlfriend. "This is... good. Thank you, Giselle."
It would be fine to hang up on him now.
"Francis," Giselle says.
"What?"
"You don't seem like the kind of guy who would have stayed with a difficult, overweight girl."
Dead silence.
"A lot can change, I guess," Trickster says.
Giselle wonders, for a second, if Noelle has ever thought that Trickster might leave her once she stabilized. Probably not. Most of the women she's known always think the opposite-- that they'll be left behind the minute they fall apart, have a single ugly day, break all their carefully manicured nails scratching and screaming at the walls.
It's true enough for them, since her father doesn't really feel guilt.
But if Noelle ever "recovers" to the point where leaving her would not be disastrous.
Her boyfriend seems quite flaky.
"Is your Earth really such a nice place?" Giselle asks.
"It's gotta be better than here," Trickster says, and hangs up.
James has eaten his third steak by the time they leave the restaurant. Giselle tips their waiter who has long term arthritis in their knees.
Probably because they are a waiter.
The next day at the clinic, a line longer than twenty people are there, including, fascinatingly, people who are openly wearing ABB colors.
"It's only twenty per day," Giselle says dully, but the end of the line doesn't leave.
Chopped off finger. Honestly based on the finger, Giselle would assume cooking accident, instead of gang violence.
"Please," one of them says. "There aren't any open emergency rooms in this part of town anymore!"
"The closest one told us they didn't have any open beds," another man says. He is sweating to the point where Giselle has to realize that her mask might be an actual sickness prevention solution on her part and not just an aesthetic choice.
She exerts a careful effort to stop the contagion from spreading through everyone present.
"Twenty per day," Giselle says. "For diagnosis alone."
Hob steps forward from behind her.
James does, in Giselle's eyes, a reasonable job at coming across as a non threatening guy. It's the combination of slouching, of being middle aged and badling and vacant, of seeming like he doesn't have the energy to really care even if someone spits in his food.
It is all, naturally, a lie.
He lifts a red hand in the air and suddenly every single person in that line is dead quiet. The red mask over the lower half of his mouth has split open so that people can see the teeth of his smile.
"It's easy to diagnose the dead," he says, and giggles, an eerie, hiccuping sort of laugh.
"Twenty people," Giselle repeats one more time, and then goes inside with the first in line.
Sickness, old age, infection.
The pregnant woman is back. She meets Giselle's eyes.
"Can you get rid of it?"
Giselle'd thought she should come up with a price for the second half of her services, but then promptly forgotten about it. In Montreal abortion was covered by provincial healthcare. No idea as to Brockton Bay.
She arbitrarily adds a number on the end.
"600."
The woman pales, but nods. So that's... expensive but not impossible? Giselle considers slashing the price, but doesn't.
"I'll be back tomorrow with that much," the woman says.
The rest of them are simpler.
So now, it's... time to go shopping!
"The bus isn't working today," a worker at the bus stop duly tells Giselle when she and James approach. "If you want to head to the Boardwalk, you'll need to find another way."
It's getting late in the day..
Maybe it will be nice to walk through the evening streets. It hadn't been worth it before, her being a pretty young woman and Brockton Bay being a dangerous town, but James is here now.
"You look like you're limping," Giselle tells the worker, even though he isn't. "Something wrong with your knee?"
"Huh?" he says to her leaving back.
There is something wrong with his knee.
Such a flaw in the human condition, the hinge at the knee. It's almost like kneeling is something unsuitable and harmful, yet it becomes the easiest way to reach the ground.
As the light continues to drain away, and Brockton Bay's failing street lights sag under the burden of pushing back the night, Giselle detects something more than the homeless and mice and the rats that have been pushed away from the Boardwalk into its neighboring streets.
Dogs.
Not that she needed her supernatural abilities. She can hear them howling.
James licks his lips.
Health risk: powered. Assault style, two of them.
"Another king rules here," James says.
Yes, yes, this is Empire 88 territory.
"Not much of a king," Giselle says.
James is still looking towards the howls.
He looks hungry.
"Steak not enough for you, Coppelius?"
"Will you let me make a little doll?" He asks her. He's gotten brave, being out in the city. Being with her. "Just a little puppy. It will dance and do tricks."
She gets more powerful the longer she's in close proximity to someone, the more she knows about them.
Giselle grabs James's wrist, and her fingernails dig into his sacs where he eats, and she rips them open as if opening suicide scars to let the rid vicious liquid fall uselessly to the ground as he screams.
"You don't get to make more things that can love, Coppelius," she says, voice soft.
He stares at her with wide eyes as she wipes her red hand on her white jeans and leaves a huge stain behind.
The dogs are powered too.
And like the dogs, the capes involved too can be heard long before they are seen.
"I'LL KILL YOU!" Hookwolf bellows, voice harsh and grating, metal on metal. "You'll fucking wish you were dead when I'm through with you, Bitch!!"
The only flesh of him that remains is his eyes. It feels absurd-- surely if he can hear without ears, he can see without eyes?
But perhaps that's not how he sees it.
Giselle smiles a little.
There's a cold snarl from a bloodied girl wearing a thick jacket with a fur collar and a cheap dollar store dog mask that makes Giselle's own surgical one look like she put in effort. On either side of her, dogs the size of motorcycles jump at Hookwolf only to be bashed down by his blades.
Health risk: powered, old scar tissue. Some mental strangeness, but not anything very far from baseline.
"Excuse me," Giselle says politely, stepping forward as James stays close. "I couldn't help but overhear you."
Bitch looks over to her first, nostrils flaring as she sniffs the air and then takes a very large step away from the two of them, eyes wary. What is she--
Ah, she's transforming the dogs.
Giselle can help with that.
"Fuck off!" Hookwolf snarls. "More idiots in my territory? Is this a full on war!"
"Stay out of my business," Bitch snaps at them. "This has nothing to do with strangers!"
It's a lively night.
Giselle looks over at James.
He looks disappointed. And his wrist is still bleeding.
"Hob heard some dogs and wanted to play with them," Giselle says. "It's unfortunate that you two seem so occupied..."
"You're damn right I am," Hookwolf says. He looks at her and licks a metal muzzle with a bladed tongue. "Just wait a second though, missy. I'll show you what a real alpha can do-- oh wait, should I pay? That your uncle or your john?"
"You couldn't afford to pay for a single one of my shoes," Giselle says, not unkindly.
Bitch laughs.
That seems to spur him to action.
The pavement rips beneath him as he launches forwards towards Bitch, apparently having marked her and James off as more annoyance than active threat. An afterthought.
It's not as though turning his back means showing weakness when his back is just more blades and meathooks. And she genuinely can't do much to him at all.
As in, she can't touch him.
The dogs are even easier than Lung. Bitch is already putting her all into having them grow big and strong, but don't they just have so much potential in them? Bitch's power seems a little rough around the edges in its work, but nothing that can't be smoothed out.
Sleek, symmetrical killing machines, better in every way than their opponent.
Bitch's whistle cuts through the air in moments as all three of them jump him, bite through him only for him to reform as completely flesh for a second, eyes white before he shifts back again. He'd had a swastika on one arm and an iron cross on the other. Greasy blonde hair.
"You'll pay for this!" He snarls, but he doesn't stick around.
He'd been a healthy man, too. He must have good healthcare.
James sighs softly.
He hadn't even gotten to touch the man. Well, that's his fault for being so passive. If he's going to play at being a Brute instead of a Master/Tinker...
"Hey, you," Bitch finally says.
Giselle looks in her direction.
"Hello," she says.
"What did you do to my dogs."
She doesn't seem very happy.
"Gave them a good prognosis," Giselle says.
Bitch's nose wrinkles.
"Some shady shit," she says, mood darkening.
The large dogs are now turning towards Giselle, low growls in their oversized throats, a snap to their long, prehensile tails.
Then Bitch pauses and sniffs the air again, lips twisting even further in disgust.
"You.. one of Regent's girlfriends or something?"
Giselle pauses.
"Or something. Why?"
"He's got that same stink to him sometimes," Bitch says.
She doesn't stink.
"I wear perfume."
Bitch looks kind of offended at the concept.
"Keep that away from my dogs too."
It's scent.
"It's weird that Regent would smell like this," Giselle says flatly. "It's a woman's perfume, and it's cheap for him. Less than thirty dollars per ounce."
She can see James mouthing 'per ounce' beside her. He has no idea what actually expensive perfume costs.
Clearly Bitch agrees with her, because she has no reaction to the price.
"But he does. So, what? Trying to get in his good graces through me? Useless. I hate that piece of shit, and he'd be happy if I died. And who are you, anyway."
Apparently Jean-Paul's teammate does not watch the news.
"I'm Prognosis," Giselle says. "This is Hob. We have a clinic in the Docks."
Bitch bares her teeth some more beneath her plastic mask, not even a flicker of recognition in her eyes.
But then.
"So... the dogs. You could heal them."
Giselle looks at her.
"These dogs are perfectly fine."
"Other dogs. You could heal them."
"Not for free."
Bitch stalls out a bit at that, chewing her lip as her eyes narrow.
"How much?"
Is a dog life worth less than a human life?
No, Giselle decides.
"It's 60 for a diagnosis, 600 for healing. Per dog. If you take them to the clinic, instead of an actual practice."
"You think they let me into a real practice?" Bitch, wanted criminal under her legal name, snaps. "Whatever, Regent's or something. We'll see."
Is he going to care if she spills?
"I'm his sister," Giselle clarifies.
Bitch jerks to a halt.
"You're his fucking family."
A very apt description.
"I won't help you track him down," Bitch says, voice dropping even further.
"I have his phone number," Giselle says. "I don't need help finding him, and he doesn't need help finding me. Like I said. Hob just wanted to see the dogs."
Bitch looks over at him.
"He can't touch them."
She's got good instincts. Or simply the right amount of paranoia.
There's a large swastika that's being painted over in front of the hospital closest to the Boardwalk as Giselle finally gets to the shopping district.
Most things are closed, but she can still window shop.
"The wolf will snitch," James says, voice soft. "The clinic might get..."
It's very difficult to find white high end purses that don't look horrifyingly over detailed and ugly. It doesn't seem like this shop is the miraculous exception.
"If I was capable of worrying about consequences to my own health," Giselle says, hand placed on the glass as she stares inside at the brightly lit clothes, "I would have a very different life."
Silence.
Health risk: powered. Walking slowly towards her.
Old damage from drug addiction.
In the reflection of the window, Giselle sees Jean-Paul wave at her, and sighs.
He's the same as always. Black t-shirt, white overshirt, distressed jeans, the same hair, the same eyes.
"Fancy seeing you here," he says, as if he hadn't come down to meet her.
"It's where I always go," Giselle says.
He stares at her, flat black eyes trying to discover everything that could explain her to him. Such evidence does not exist.
"Yeah," he says. His eyes flicker over to James. "This is..."
"Picked him up," Giselle says.
Regent's eyes widen and he takes a firm step further away from the man.
"Why the fuck does he have... does he look like a relative?"
He was going to say "why does he have Heartbreaker's eyes."
She looks over at James.
"I wanted eyes like a ghost," James says.
"Pick someone a little more dead, then! Jesus Christ."
James doesn't respond.
"Did your friend say that I showed up," Giselle says. She thinks she might be supposed to say Rachel, since it's back to civilian names, but it's impossible for her to think of Bitch of having another name.
"No, but I got the idea fine. You really put people off themselves, Giselle. She was giving me the weirdest looks and even hung around until someone else put on the news."
Giselle waits for Jean-Paul to get around to whatever he'd actually come to find her for.
Since he values neither her time nor his own, this takes a while.
"It's weird that you're healing people," he says.
Is this still a tangent?
"It's an expensive service."
"You're in the local news. You should be charging triple. You'd probably be overrun by people from uptown if they weren't so put off by the fact you work in some shady warehouse in the Docks with bloodstains on the walls."
So?
"Why are you even down there? You like places like here. The Boardwalk."
It's true.
"This is E88 territory," Giselle points out.
"Who gives a fuck? You're white enough to be fine. Dye your hair blonde if you're still scared."
Her eyes shift away.
"I was working in one of the emergency clinics when Bakuda went for it," Giselle says, conversational.
Jean-Paul's hand drops back to his side.
"You had a real job. You."
Had he thought she'd keep up sleeping with men for things after she left their father's house? It's just more difficult than he realizes. And more dangerous without her father's distant protection.
She had slept with her supervisor at the clinic, though.
Then he'd died in some gang thing, and she'd kept the job.
"I sent emails," Giselle says gravely.
He still looks disbelieving, probably due to the fact that he's only ever done 'jobs' for their father, and now for whoever his current boss is.
"It's actually very easy," Giselle informs him.
"No, yeah.." Jean-Paul shakes his head. "Then you got hit, huh."
"Lost power and everything."
"Must have been nostalgic," Jean-Paul says distantly. "Dad used to lock you up all the time."
It happens.
"It's your fault for getting set off like that," Giselle says. "Gave him ideas."
Jean-Paul rolls his eyes.
"I don't have any ideas to give," he says. "Besides, if that were it, it would have worked on you years ago. Though, maybe..."
He trails off without finishing the thought. Due to him not having any ideas, no doubt.
"You know that guy I put you in contact with."
"Francis."
"Wow, you got his real name. Did you--"
Did she sleep with him.
Not that it's any of his business.
"I have more expensive things to trade now," Giselle says.
"Yeah," Jean-Paul mutters. "He's shortening your name."
To Prog.
"I assume it's some sort of 'video game' reference," Giselle says.
Jean-Paul starts to laugh.
"You are such a fucking alien," he says. "Whatever, I won't explain it until there's someone who can understand how nerdy he is. Just know it's stupid."
She had already come to that conclusion.
"Your expertise on the matter of stupidity is noted."
"Hey."
Finally, he turns serious.
"My team's being asked to do a big job earlier than I thought we would."
"Too big?"
Jean-Paul gives her a jerky smile.
"Balance of power's swinging hard with Lung being the sole guy in the ABB, and Armsmaster super fucked up," he says. "Think some people on our team are seeing this as the only shot to step up before--"
He gestures at another iron cross present on the Boardwalk.
"Someone else takes the first swing."
Giselle gives him a long look.
"I can't protect you," she says.
"No duh," Jean-Paul says. "You never could."
Giselle waits.
This is still a tangent. He won't have come here to talk about any of that.
"Your power," Jean-Paul says distantly. "It's like mine, isn't it? It's not like his, it's like mine. The more proximity, the more knowledge."
Had he ever explained that part of his power to her before? She doesn't think so.
Jean-Paul starts to laugh harder than she's ever heard him.
"I always knew you liked me best," he says.
"I can't love you best," Giselle says.
"Yeah, so what, I can't love anyone no matter what!"
He still seems happy, though.
"About that favor," he says carelessly. "You're getting actual good fake identification made, right? I want one too. I never bothered."
"What name?"
"Alec Willis."
She'd been going to suggest something like Alvaro for the first name, but somehow it seems inappropriate.
When she goes to the clinic the next day, there's yet more trouble.
Assault and Battery are both smiling brightly and trying to not upset the line of other people in line-- again, more than twenty--
The two protectorate capes are receiving a lot of hostile looks.
"Hi, Prognosis!" Assault says cheerfully. "Long time no see!"
Has it been a long time?
"Hello," Giselle says.
She looks between them and the line.
"You don't mind waiting?"
Battery opens her mouth and Assault steps on her foot.
"Of course not," he says. "Another twenty minutes or so won't hurt."
She doesn't really appreciate being put on a deadline.
Health risk: virus in the lungs, can be escalated to a deadly level.
Giselle has Hob take the money.
"You need to go to a hospital," she informs the man. "Get your lungs looked at."
"It's just a cough," he mutters.
But he moves aside and out of the way, so the line moves quickly enough. The woman is back with 600 dollars, crumpled and smelling like weed.
Giselle puts her gloved hand on the woman's shoulder. Pregnancy ended.
She keeps her hand there for another few minutes since she's being watched.
"All done," she says.
The woman breathes out a huge sigh of relief and practically bolts out of there, leaving only the capes behind.
Assault has been examining the white pointe shoe hanging from the window very closely, so it's Battery who first approaches her.
"You seem much more settled in," Battery starts.
Giselle nods.
"We would have come back sooner, but--"
"Our bosses just take Master/Stranger protocols so seriously," Assault calls, rolling his eyes. "Especially for trumps like you."
Then shouldn't it be Master/Stranger/Trump protocol.
"I understand," Giselle says.
She waits.
"You're absolutely sure you don't want to join up?"
Giselle looks over at Hob. Yeah, she's sure.
Battery follows her gaze.
"Having one piece of muscle is not going to be enough to protect you from a supervillain that doesn't like your attitude," Battery says, genuine concern slipping through. "No offense."
James looks away from Battery and Assault.
"I'll wait outside," he says.
Giselle also looks outside for a second. She can feel a familiar presence once more prowling around the block. Lung doesn't like her visitors.
She looks back at them. It will be polite of her to warn them that they'll need to start running once they leave her clinic.
Depending on how polite she feels when they leave.
"Not very reliable, is he?" Assault says. "I wouldn't leave a client alone with the cops."
Battery elbows him.
"Don't scare her," she says. "Prognosis... your trump and healing abilities have been cleared with PRT security. So if we pay you-- could you boost our capes? Like you did with me?"
Oh.
"It's more limited than that," Giselle says, for once telling the truth. "Some capes, it's hard to tell unless I'm very nearby..."
She has done research, though.
"Aside from you, I could probably do something for... Aegis. Browbeat."
"You're not cleared for minors," Battery says.
"Aegis and... Triumph," Giselle edits. "Not sure about Triumph."
There is not a lot of publicly available information on PRT heroes, and none of it on whether their powers work through biology or through whatever is happening with Assault.
"We are prepared to offer you--"
"60,000 per," Giselle says. "Cash."
She blinks slowly.
"If the PRT is paying."
It's still cheap.
She's charging more than that if a supervillain asks.
"That's the big hangup," Assault says, and snorts.
Battery rubs her forehead.
"We'll see if that's doable," she says. "The other thing... Prognosis. You're not like Panacea."
Yes?
"So does that mean you're alright with treating head injuries?"
Is this a trick question?
"The bombs were in people's heads," Giselle says. "What a useless thing if it couldn't do head injuries."
Battery winces.
"So," she says. "How much would you charge for healing Armsmater?"
Giselle does the math.
600 for a basic healing. 6000 for being a cape. 60,000 for being a rich cape.
"Would I have to go somewhere?"
"He's in a secure hospital."
One more zero.
"600,000," she says.
"You know," Assault says. "When you start all the numbers off of six, it makes it really obvious how arbitrary your pricing is. Makes people sad."
"Could you afford it?" Giselle asks.
"Mm.. it's a little high for a government salary." Assault glances over at Battery. "Suppose it would depend how injured I was."
"Not the healing." Giselle doesn't care about the healing. "The other part."
"If you offered it?" Assault shakes his head. "I'm good."
"What about you?" She looks at Battery.
Battery shakes her head even faster.
"Out of my budget," she says, something slightly uneasy in her eyes.
Why is the world divided into an arbitrary black and white line with Assault on one side and Battery on the other? An utterly invisible binary.
She opens her mouth even though she's not talking to them at all. A poor habit from her childhood.
"Have you ever heard of a ballet called Le Diable Amoureux?" Giselle asks.
Utter bafflement.
"No," Assault says.
"It's adapted from a book of the same name-- The Devil in Love-- where a young man invokes the devil, only for the devil to instantly fall in love with him, gain a female form, and attempt to seduce him," Giselle says. "Trying to get him to lose his virginity before marriage."
Stares.
"The author was later guillotined during the French Revolution."
No familiarity, it seems.
"It's most well known for a single line that was left out of the ballet adaptation, since ballets are pantomime, and thus silent. Che vuoi, the devil asks, directly before permanently transforming."
"I don't know french," Battery says flatly.
"It's Italian. 'Che vuoi?' 'What do you want?'"
Giselle shrugs.
"So I think it's a bit unfair to say that the devil fell in love at all, when it starts with a question like that."
It's really been nagging at her. Even though nothing about her life can be unfair.
Such is the joy of love.
Finding Noelle is much easier the second time around. Most of the people Giselle assumes are Trickster's team are out-- so there's only three people. Health risk: severe drug addiction, powered, Health risk: UNSTABLE/ Heath risk: unstable. Found them.
Actually, there's more than three people. There's some unpowered people a few hundred meters over. How big even is this underground base.
Well, not her problem.
High amount of distance, low amount of information. Trickster is lucky she can do anything at all.
Giselle stares into the reflective surface of a high tech television screen, and her own dark eyes stare back.
Okay. What are the possibilities for Noelle? What could she be?
Monstrous. More monstrous. She could grow more legs, more arms, more teeth. She could grow hungrier. She's got the same brain damage in her that Trickster does, even though she's got more than one brain. The damage has been replicated in each brain, which is fascinating but not fixable.
Possibilities for humanity.
..
She could unweave... Giselle's brow furrows. Noelle can dissolve her own bones. That's a lot of potential to work with. She flexes her hands. Alright. If Noelle can do it, Giselle can do it.
With Nilbog's creatures, it had been 'unweaving', because they were constructs. Stitched together masses of things. In some ways, this is similar. But it's not like Noelle's body is meant to just fall apart.
It's meant to grow. Dissolution is just a way of transforming.
Trickster's directive had been "as humanlike as possible".
HEALTH RISK: UNSTABLE
Dissolve.
She hears the scream carried through the earth. It shakes the fancy laptop shop. James yanks her back out of the way as the screen she'd been staring at cracks and falls forwards.
She'd gone after the secondary heads first, the ones with brain tissue. Hadn't wanted them to suffer. The half-horse, half-dog head collapses into just another tentacle. The almost-human one collapses next. Dissolved into a tentacle. They're the easiest route.
Noelle tries to form more heads, and Giselle clamps down.
No. Heads aren't needed.
UNSTABLE
Hands aren't needed. Dissolve. Transform. Another tentacle. Hooves. Claws. Teeth. Mouths.
Another scream, this one louder.
Giselle vaguely watches James casually steal several laptops from the display while everyone's distracted from the mess. Okay.
"I need to get closer," she says.
James looks at her.
"We could get lunch," he says.
UNSTABLE//////////HEALTH//////RISK//////////
"You take care of it," Giselle says.
Dissolve. She needs to find something stable. Forget a human lower body, she needs to establish a stable framework. She needs to find a likelihood that Noelle will stop changing.
She needs--
Health risk: unstable.
She's doing this all wrong. Prioritizing humanity when what she should be doing is prioritizing weakness.
James takes hold of one of her sleeves, careful to avoid touching his bare hand to hers, and starts tugging her in some direction.
"I'll--" James starts.
"Get back!" Giselle snaps. "The lunch isn't in that direction!"
That's it, that's the key she's been looking for. Noelle's weakness is her stomach, all the limbs are just a distraction.
Giselle dissolves Noelle's stomach, and feels her own head begin to ache.
"Your nose is bleeding," James observes.
There's another health risk: powered (like Battery, why are they all like Battery?) Nearby that wasn't there before. Healthy man in his late thirties. Some old scar tissue.
Once the stomach is dissolved, everything else collapses back into an effort from the body to reconstruct the stomach. The tremors stop, the tentacles disappear.
Giselle speeds up Noelle's digestion to the point where she'll never be able to avoid using all her energy to keep her stomach operational in order to live and decides that counts as stable enough.
Wait, what if she eats enough people to get out of the loop?
..
That would be bad.
But Giselle really can't do anything else from this distance.
"There's the lunch spot," James says. She wonders where he stashed the laptops he stole.
He ordered steak to celebrate that he'd managed to find a non-vegan restaurant, and she has carrot soup.
She's not wearing white today, so it's fine.
The phone rings for five minutes before she picks it up.
"Giselle!" Trickster yells from the other end. She doesn't know his out of costume name.
"Hi," She says. "Rick."
A single blessed moment of silence.
"My name," Trickster says. "Is Francis."
His real name sounds stupid too.
"But that doesn't matter, Giselle! What the fuck was that!"
James has ordered a second steak.
"I did my best," Giselle says. "Why don't you go over and see her."
"I would, but my boss is freaking out right now. Doesn't want his other major asset so close to my girlfriend anymore, does he." There's more than a trace of bitterness in Trickster's voice. "Saying that I'm the one who lied about how stable she was, when he's the one who promised he'd do everything in his power to help her!"
Had he just called her to rant?
"I have done everything possible to achieve without closeness," Giselle says. She considers it more. This has been a lot of dangerous work, but is it actually equivalent to her having asked Trickster to teleport her into Ellisburg? It's hard to say.
"She is always going to be hungry in exchange for less..." What on earth is she going to say about Noelle. "Less weight?"
Now she sounds like one of those shady plastic surgeons some of Heartbreaker's girlfriends went to.
"She uh..." Trickster swallows. "She was already. I mean--"
This conversation is ridiculously hard to make sound normal over a phoneline. But Giselle is eating in a public restaurant, so there's nothing to be done.
"She is no longer thinking with her lower half," Giselle says, which causes James to choke on the other side of the table. "As long as all of her consumption goes into maintaining her current...weight, she'll remain in this current state of affairs. So..."
"Don't let her eat anything spicy," Trickster says.
"It would be bad," Giselle says mildly. "But I have done what you asked."
She doesn't know if anything she's done will make it worse if Noelle goes out of control than it had been before.. Except, well, if Trickster becomes lax, and takes less precautions, then...
Well, this is what it's like to pay people's prices.
"No..." Trickster takes a deep breath, calming down from his rant faster than she'd thought he would. He's a mercurial man, Trickster. Never hanging onto anything for long-- except, it seems, for his remarkably unstable girlfriend. "This is... good. Thank you, Giselle."
It would be fine to hang up on him now.
"Francis," Giselle says.
"What?"
"You don't seem like the kind of guy who would have stayed with a difficult, overweight girl."
Dead silence.
"A lot can change, I guess," Trickster says.
Giselle wonders, for a second, if Noelle has ever thought that Trickster might leave her once she stabilized. Probably not. Most of the women she's known always think the opposite-- that they'll be left behind the minute they fall apart, have a single ugly day, break all their carefully manicured nails scratching and screaming at the walls.
It's true enough for them, since her father doesn't really feel guilt.
But if Noelle ever "recovers" to the point where leaving her would not be disastrous.
Her boyfriend seems quite flaky.
"Is your Earth really such a nice place?" Giselle asks.
"It's gotta be better than here," Trickster says, and hangs up.
James has eaten his third steak by the time they leave the restaurant. Giselle tips their waiter who has long term arthritis in their knees.
Probably because they are a waiter.
The next day at the clinic, a line longer than twenty people are there, including, fascinatingly, people who are openly wearing ABB colors.
"It's only twenty per day," Giselle says dully, but the end of the line doesn't leave.
Chopped off finger. Honestly based on the finger, Giselle would assume cooking accident, instead of gang violence.
"Please," one of them says. "There aren't any open emergency rooms in this part of town anymore!"
"The closest one told us they didn't have any open beds," another man says. He is sweating to the point where Giselle has to realize that her mask might be an actual sickness prevention solution on her part and not just an aesthetic choice.
She exerts a careful effort to stop the contagion from spreading through everyone present.
"Twenty per day," Giselle says. "For diagnosis alone."
Hob steps forward from behind her.
James does, in Giselle's eyes, a reasonable job at coming across as a non threatening guy. It's the combination of slouching, of being middle aged and badling and vacant, of seeming like he doesn't have the energy to really care even if someone spits in his food.
It is all, naturally, a lie.
He lifts a red hand in the air and suddenly every single person in that line is dead quiet. The red mask over the lower half of his mouth has split open so that people can see the teeth of his smile.
"It's easy to diagnose the dead," he says, and giggles, an eerie, hiccuping sort of laugh.
"Twenty people," Giselle repeats one more time, and then goes inside with the first in line.
Sickness, old age, infection.
The pregnant woman is back. She meets Giselle's eyes.
"Can you get rid of it?"
Giselle'd thought she should come up with a price for the second half of her services, but then promptly forgotten about it. In Montreal abortion was covered by provincial healthcare. No idea as to Brockton Bay.
She arbitrarily adds a number on the end.
"600."
The woman pales, but nods. So that's... expensive but not impossible? Giselle considers slashing the price, but doesn't.
"I'll be back tomorrow with that much," the woman says.
The rest of them are simpler.
So now, it's... time to go shopping!
"The bus isn't working today," a worker at the bus stop duly tells Giselle when she and James approach. "If you want to head to the Boardwalk, you'll need to find another way."
It's getting late in the day..
Maybe it will be nice to walk through the evening streets. It hadn't been worth it before, her being a pretty young woman and Brockton Bay being a dangerous town, but James is here now.
"You look like you're limping," Giselle tells the worker, even though he isn't. "Something wrong with your knee?"
"Huh?" he says to her leaving back.
There is something wrong with his knee.
Such a flaw in the human condition, the hinge at the knee. It's almost like kneeling is something unsuitable and harmful, yet it becomes the easiest way to reach the ground.
As the light continues to drain away, and Brockton Bay's failing street lights sag under the burden of pushing back the night, Giselle detects something more than the homeless and mice and the rats that have been pushed away from the Boardwalk into its neighboring streets.
Dogs.
Not that she needed her supernatural abilities. She can hear them howling.
James licks his lips.
Health risk: powered. Assault style, two of them.
"Another king rules here," James says.
Yes, yes, this is Empire 88 territory.
"Not much of a king," Giselle says.
James is still looking towards the howls.
He looks hungry.
"Steak not enough for you, Coppelius?"
"Will you let me make a little doll?" He asks her. He's gotten brave, being out in the city. Being with her. "Just a little puppy. It will dance and do tricks."
She gets more powerful the longer she's in close proximity to someone, the more she knows about them.
Giselle grabs James's wrist, and her fingernails dig into his sacs where he eats, and she rips them open as if opening suicide scars to let the rid vicious liquid fall uselessly to the ground as he screams.
"You don't get to make more things that can love, Coppelius," she says, voice soft.
He stares at her with wide eyes as she wipes her red hand on her white jeans and leaves a huge stain behind.
The dogs are powered too.
And like the dogs, the capes involved too can be heard long before they are seen.
"I'LL KILL YOU!" Hookwolf bellows, voice harsh and grating, metal on metal. "You'll fucking wish you were dead when I'm through with you, Bitch!!"
The only flesh of him that remains is his eyes. It feels absurd-- surely if he can hear without ears, he can see without eyes?
But perhaps that's not how he sees it.
Giselle smiles a little.
There's a cold snarl from a bloodied girl wearing a thick jacket with a fur collar and a cheap dollar store dog mask that makes Giselle's own surgical one look like she put in effort. On either side of her, dogs the size of motorcycles jump at Hookwolf only to be bashed down by his blades.
Health risk: powered, old scar tissue. Some mental strangeness, but not anything very far from baseline.
"Excuse me," Giselle says politely, stepping forward as James stays close. "I couldn't help but overhear you."
Bitch looks over to her first, nostrils flaring as she sniffs the air and then takes a very large step away from the two of them, eyes wary. What is she--
Ah, she's transforming the dogs.
Giselle can help with that.
"Fuck off!" Hookwolf snarls. "More idiots in my territory? Is this a full on war!"
"Stay out of my business," Bitch snaps at them. "This has nothing to do with strangers!"
It's a lively night.
Giselle looks over at James.
He looks disappointed. And his wrist is still bleeding.
"Hob heard some dogs and wanted to play with them," Giselle says. "It's unfortunate that you two seem so occupied..."
"You're damn right I am," Hookwolf says. He looks at her and licks a metal muzzle with a bladed tongue. "Just wait a second though, missy. I'll show you what a real alpha can do-- oh wait, should I pay? That your uncle or your john?"
"You couldn't afford to pay for a single one of my shoes," Giselle says, not unkindly.
Bitch laughs.
That seems to spur him to action.
The pavement rips beneath him as he launches forwards towards Bitch, apparently having marked her and James off as more annoyance than active threat. An afterthought.
It's not as though turning his back means showing weakness when his back is just more blades and meathooks. And she genuinely can't do much to him at all.
As in, she can't touch him.
The dogs are even easier than Lung. Bitch is already putting her all into having them grow big and strong, but don't they just have so much potential in them? Bitch's power seems a little rough around the edges in its work, but nothing that can't be smoothed out.
Sleek, symmetrical killing machines, better in every way than their opponent.
Bitch's whistle cuts through the air in moments as all three of them jump him, bite through him only for him to reform as completely flesh for a second, eyes white before he shifts back again. He'd had a swastika on one arm and an iron cross on the other. Greasy blonde hair.
"You'll pay for this!" He snarls, but he doesn't stick around.
He'd been a healthy man, too. He must have good healthcare.
James sighs softly.
He hadn't even gotten to touch the man. Well, that's his fault for being so passive. If he's going to play at being a Brute instead of a Master/Tinker...
"Hey, you," Bitch finally says.
Giselle looks in her direction.
"Hello," she says.
"What did you do to my dogs."
She doesn't seem very happy.
"Gave them a good prognosis," Giselle says.
Bitch's nose wrinkles.
"Some shady shit," she says, mood darkening.
The large dogs are now turning towards Giselle, low growls in their oversized throats, a snap to their long, prehensile tails.
Then Bitch pauses and sniffs the air again, lips twisting even further in disgust.
"You.. one of Regent's girlfriends or something?"
Giselle pauses.
"Or something. Why?"
"He's got that same stink to him sometimes," Bitch says.
She doesn't stink.
"I wear perfume."
Bitch looks kind of offended at the concept.
"Keep that away from my dogs too."
It's scent.
"It's weird that Regent would smell like this," Giselle says flatly. "It's a woman's perfume, and it's cheap for him. Less than thirty dollars per ounce."
She can see James mouthing 'per ounce' beside her. He has no idea what actually expensive perfume costs.
Clearly Bitch agrees with her, because she has no reaction to the price.
"But he does. So, what? Trying to get in his good graces through me? Useless. I hate that piece of shit, and he'd be happy if I died. And who are you, anyway."
Apparently Jean-Paul's teammate does not watch the news.
"I'm Prognosis," Giselle says. "This is Hob. We have a clinic in the Docks."
Bitch bares her teeth some more beneath her plastic mask, not even a flicker of recognition in her eyes.
But then.
"So... the dogs. You could heal them."
Giselle looks at her.
"These dogs are perfectly fine."
"Other dogs. You could heal them."
"Not for free."
Bitch stalls out a bit at that, chewing her lip as her eyes narrow.
"How much?"
Is a dog life worth less than a human life?
No, Giselle decides.
"It's 60 for a diagnosis, 600 for healing. Per dog. If you take them to the clinic, instead of an actual practice."
"You think they let me into a real practice?" Bitch, wanted criminal under her legal name, snaps. "Whatever, Regent's or something. We'll see."
Is he going to care if she spills?
"I'm his sister," Giselle clarifies.
Bitch jerks to a halt.
"You're his fucking family."
A very apt description.
"I won't help you track him down," Bitch says, voice dropping even further.
"I have his phone number," Giselle says. "I don't need help finding him, and he doesn't need help finding me. Like I said. Hob just wanted to see the dogs."
Bitch looks over at him.
"He can't touch them."
She's got good instincts. Or simply the right amount of paranoia.
There's a large swastika that's being painted over in front of the hospital closest to the Boardwalk as Giselle finally gets to the shopping district.
Most things are closed, but she can still window shop.
"The wolf will snitch," James says, voice soft. "The clinic might get..."
It's very difficult to find white high end purses that don't look horrifyingly over detailed and ugly. It doesn't seem like this shop is the miraculous exception.
"If I was capable of worrying about consequences to my own health," Giselle says, hand placed on the glass as she stares inside at the brightly lit clothes, "I would have a very different life."
Silence.
Health risk: powered. Walking slowly towards her.
Old damage from drug addiction.
In the reflection of the window, Giselle sees Jean-Paul wave at her, and sighs.
He's the same as always. Black t-shirt, white overshirt, distressed jeans, the same hair, the same eyes.
"Fancy seeing you here," he says, as if he hadn't come down to meet her.
"It's where I always go," Giselle says.
He stares at her, flat black eyes trying to discover everything that could explain her to him. Such evidence does not exist.
"Yeah," he says. His eyes flicker over to James. "This is..."
"Picked him up," Giselle says.
Regent's eyes widen and he takes a firm step further away from the man.
"Why the fuck does he have... does he look like a relative?"
He was going to say "why does he have Heartbreaker's eyes."
She looks over at James.
"I wanted eyes like a ghost," James says.
"Pick someone a little more dead, then! Jesus Christ."
James doesn't respond.
"Did your friend say that I showed up," Giselle says. She thinks she might be supposed to say Rachel, since it's back to civilian names, but it's impossible for her to think of Bitch of having another name.
"No, but I got the idea fine. You really put people off themselves, Giselle. She was giving me the weirdest looks and even hung around until someone else put on the news."
Giselle waits for Jean-Paul to get around to whatever he'd actually come to find her for.
Since he values neither her time nor his own, this takes a while.
"It's weird that you're healing people," he says.
Is this still a tangent?
"It's an expensive service."
"You're in the local news. You should be charging triple. You'd probably be overrun by people from uptown if they weren't so put off by the fact you work in some shady warehouse in the Docks with bloodstains on the walls."
So?
"Why are you even down there? You like places like here. The Boardwalk."
It's true.
"This is E88 territory," Giselle points out.
"Who gives a fuck? You're white enough to be fine. Dye your hair blonde if you're still scared."
Her eyes shift away.
"I was working in one of the emergency clinics when Bakuda went for it," Giselle says, conversational.
Jean-Paul's hand drops back to his side.
"You had a real job. You."
Had he thought she'd keep up sleeping with men for things after she left their father's house? It's just more difficult than he realizes. And more dangerous without her father's distant protection.
She had slept with her supervisor at the clinic, though.
Then he'd died in some gang thing, and she'd kept the job.
"I sent emails," Giselle says gravely.
He still looks disbelieving, probably due to the fact that he's only ever done 'jobs' for their father, and now for whoever his current boss is.
"It's actually very easy," Giselle informs him.
"No, yeah.." Jean-Paul shakes his head. "Then you got hit, huh."
"Lost power and everything."
"Must have been nostalgic," Jean-Paul says distantly. "Dad used to lock you up all the time."
It happens.
"It's your fault for getting set off like that," Giselle says. "Gave him ideas."
Jean-Paul rolls his eyes.
"I don't have any ideas to give," he says. "Besides, if that were it, it would have worked on you years ago. Though, maybe..."
He trails off without finishing the thought. Due to him not having any ideas, no doubt.
"You know that guy I put you in contact with."
"Francis."
"Wow, you got his real name. Did you--"
Did she sleep with him.
Not that it's any of his business.
"I have more expensive things to trade now," Giselle says.
"Yeah," Jean-Paul mutters. "He's shortening your name."
To Prog.
"I assume it's some sort of 'video game' reference," Giselle says.
Jean-Paul starts to laugh.
"You are such a fucking alien," he says. "Whatever, I won't explain it until there's someone who can understand how nerdy he is. Just know it's stupid."
She had already come to that conclusion.
"Your expertise on the matter of stupidity is noted."
"Hey."
Finally, he turns serious.
"My team's being asked to do a big job earlier than I thought we would."
"Too big?"
Jean-Paul gives her a jerky smile.
"Balance of power's swinging hard with Lung being the sole guy in the ABB, and Armsmaster super fucked up," he says. "Think some people on our team are seeing this as the only shot to step up before--"
He gestures at another iron cross present on the Boardwalk.
"Someone else takes the first swing."
Giselle gives him a long look.
"I can't protect you," she says.
"No duh," Jean-Paul says. "You never could."
Giselle waits.
This is still a tangent. He won't have come here to talk about any of that.
"Your power," Jean-Paul says distantly. "It's like mine, isn't it? It's not like his, it's like mine. The more proximity, the more knowledge."
Had he ever explained that part of his power to her before? She doesn't think so.
Jean-Paul starts to laugh harder than she's ever heard him.
"I always knew you liked me best," he says.
"I can't love you best," Giselle says.
"Yeah, so what, I can't love anyone no matter what!"
He still seems happy, though.
"About that favor," he says carelessly. "You're getting actual good fake identification made, right? I want one too. I never bothered."
"What name?"
"Alec Willis."
She'd been going to suggest something like Alvaro for the first name, but somehow it seems inappropriate.
When she goes to the clinic the next day, there's yet more trouble.
Assault and Battery are both smiling brightly and trying to not upset the line of other people in line-- again, more than twenty--
The two protectorate capes are receiving a lot of hostile looks.
"Hi, Prognosis!" Assault says cheerfully. "Long time no see!"
Has it been a long time?
"Hello," Giselle says.
She looks between them and the line.
"You don't mind waiting?"
Battery opens her mouth and Assault steps on her foot.
"Of course not," he says. "Another twenty minutes or so won't hurt."
She doesn't really appreciate being put on a deadline.
Health risk: virus in the lungs, can be escalated to a deadly level.
Giselle has Hob take the money.
"You need to go to a hospital," she informs the man. "Get your lungs looked at."
"It's just a cough," he mutters.
But he moves aside and out of the way, so the line moves quickly enough. The woman is back with 600 dollars, crumpled and smelling like weed.
Giselle puts her gloved hand on the woman's shoulder. Pregnancy ended.
She keeps her hand there for another few minutes since she's being watched.
"All done," she says.
The woman breathes out a huge sigh of relief and practically bolts out of there, leaving only the capes behind.
Assault has been examining the white pointe shoe hanging from the window very closely, so it's Battery who first approaches her.
"You seem much more settled in," Battery starts.
Giselle nods.
"We would have come back sooner, but--"
"Our bosses just take Master/Stranger protocols so seriously," Assault calls, rolling his eyes. "Especially for trumps like you."
Then shouldn't it be Master/Stranger/Trump protocol.
"I understand," Giselle says.
She waits.
"You're absolutely sure you don't want to join up?"
Giselle looks over at Hob. Yeah, she's sure.
Battery follows her gaze.
"Having one piece of muscle is not going to be enough to protect you from a supervillain that doesn't like your attitude," Battery says, genuine concern slipping through. "No offense."
James looks away from Battery and Assault.
"I'll wait outside," he says.
Giselle also looks outside for a second. She can feel a familiar presence once more prowling around the block. Lung doesn't like her visitors.
She looks back at them. It will be polite of her to warn them that they'll need to start running once they leave her clinic.
Depending on how polite she feels when they leave.
"Not very reliable, is he?" Assault says. "I wouldn't leave a client alone with the cops."
Battery elbows him.
"Don't scare her," she says. "Prognosis... your trump and healing abilities have been cleared with PRT security. So if we pay you-- could you boost our capes? Like you did with me?"
Oh.
"It's more limited than that," Giselle says, for once telling the truth. "Some capes, it's hard to tell unless I'm very nearby..."
She has done research, though.
"Aside from you, I could probably do something for... Aegis. Browbeat."
"You're not cleared for minors," Battery says.
"Aegis and... Triumph," Giselle edits. "Not sure about Triumph."
There is not a lot of publicly available information on PRT heroes, and none of it on whether their powers work through biology or through whatever is happening with Assault.
"We are prepared to offer you--"
"60,000 per," Giselle says. "Cash."
She blinks slowly.
"If the PRT is paying."
It's still cheap.
She's charging more than that if a supervillain asks.
"That's the big hangup," Assault says, and snorts.
Battery rubs her forehead.
"We'll see if that's doable," she says. "The other thing... Prognosis. You're not like Panacea."
Yes?
"So does that mean you're alright with treating head injuries?"
Is this a trick question?
"The bombs were in people's heads," Giselle says. "What a useless thing if it couldn't do head injuries."
Battery winces.
"So," she says. "How much would you charge for healing Armsmater?"
Giselle does the math.
600 for a basic healing. 6000 for being a cape. 60,000 for being a rich cape.
"Would I have to go somewhere?"
"He's in a secure hospital."
One more zero.
"600,000," she says.
"You know," Assault says. "When you start all the numbers off of six, it makes it really obvious how arbitrary your pricing is. Makes people sad."
"Could you afford it?" Giselle asks.
"Mm.. it's a little high for a government salary." Assault glances over at Battery. "Suppose it would depend how injured I was."
"Not the healing." Giselle doesn't care about the healing. "The other part."
"If you offered it?" Assault shakes his head. "I'm good."
"What about you?" She looks at Battery.
Battery shakes her head even faster.
"Out of my budget," she says, something slightly uneasy in her eyes.
Why is the world divided into an arbitrary black and white line with Assault on one side and Battery on the other? An utterly invisible binary.
She opens her mouth even though she's not talking to them at all. A poor habit from her childhood.
"Have you ever heard of a ballet called Le Diable Amoureux?" Giselle asks.
Utter bafflement.
"No," Assault says.
"It's adapted from a book of the same name-- The Devil in Love-- where a young man invokes the devil, only for the devil to instantly fall in love with him, gain a female form, and attempt to seduce him," Giselle says. "Trying to get him to lose his virginity before marriage."
Stares.
"The author was later guillotined during the French Revolution."
No familiarity, it seems.
"It's most well known for a single line that was left out of the ballet adaptation, since ballets are pantomime, and thus silent. Che vuoi, the devil asks, directly before permanently transforming."
"I don't know french," Battery says flatly.
"It's Italian. 'Che vuoi?' 'What do you want?'"
Giselle shrugs.
"So I think it's a bit unfair to say that the devil fell in love at all, when it starts with a question like that."
It's really been nagging at her. Even though nothing about her life can be unfair.
Such is the joy of love.
- Pronouns
- He
Thanks for the chapter!
Seeing Giselle and Alec bounce their very particular attitudes off each other was great. For people who seem to have a hard time being understood by others around them, it's nice to see they do understand each other in their own way, no matter how much a fuss Alec might make. That, and him adopting her last name is rather heartwarming.
Glad to see Assault and Battery are back. There's the obvious implications of some canon divergence going on in the background, but I'm more interested in the way Battery sees Giselle. The whole 'arbitrary price' thing might be reminding her a lot of a certain organization who always happens to price their services just out of reach...
Seeing Giselle and Alec bounce their very particular attitudes off each other was great. For people who seem to have a hard time being understood by others around them, it's nice to see they do understand each other in their own way, no matter how much a fuss Alec might make. That, and him adopting her last name is rather heartwarming.
Glad to see Assault and Battery are back. There's the obvious implications of some canon divergence going on in the background, but I'm more interested in the way Battery sees Giselle. The whole 'arbitrary price' thing might be reminding her a lot of a certain organization who always happens to price their services just out of reach...
Francis and Noelle actually got some help which is nice. Giselle is just vibing and doing her own thing. Alec pops by to say hello and be smug that he's the favorite family member by default. Assault is pretty much the main one speaking on a level Giselle is cool with. And Giselle continues to be weirdly cultured in a cool way.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
James asks a question.
Giselle reaches over and slits his wrist as he screams.
Then they go see a pupper.
They're so, so weird.
It's especially funny to remember Giselle has a huge hand-swipe-shaped bloodstain on her outfit, and Hook and Bitch still treat her like an annoying - if hot - bystander.
Giselle reaches over and slits his wrist as he screams.
Then they go see a pupper.
They're so, so weird.
It's especially funny to remember Giselle has a huge hand-swipe-shaped bloodstain on her outfit, and Hook and Bitch still treat her like an annoying - if hot - bystander.
Redcoat_Officer
Long Live the King
Giselle's perspective is a genuine joy to follow, as ever. She has such a unique way of seeing the world, whether it's her idea that "a single ugly day" involves self-harm and screaming at the walls, her complete lack of knowledge on how much anything is supposed to cost, the fact that she's still ninety percent brainwashed or her frankly adorable habit of going on extremely long tangents about ballet to make very minor points.
Giselle's "homeschooled by a cult" education wins again
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That hit hard. Combined with James' eyes resembling her father's and the way James recoiled from being compared to Heartbreaker a few chapters back, it really makes me wonder about Giselle's surface versus true motivations for keeping him around like this. Brainwashing avoidant double-think wins again! Extremely interested in the political and public media events in the background, especially considering how uninterested Giselle is in them. I could read her tangent about ballet all day, the effect it has had on conversations so far is very funny.
Classic little brother behavior. It's very fun to watch their interactions, since Giselle doesn't have any relationships quite like it (and maybe is only now developing this kind of relationship with Alec?). I imagine it was kind of surreal for James to be the bright red fly on the boardwalk for that conversation, among many others.
- Location
- USA
So Giselle is emotional maladjusted, constantly misses social cues, and then randomly starts infodump about her special interest at the slightest opportunity? I can't say I don't relate a little bit.
Her throwaway comments about being unable to love anyone more than Heartbreaker as if it's a normal thing to say continue to be perfectly creepy.
Her throwaway comments about being unable to love anyone more than Heartbreaker as if it's a normal thing to say continue to be perfectly creepy.
- Pronouns
- Ww
I see why I kept seeing this recommended. It is good.
I'm always a fan of this more, detached, narration, that's going on here.
All personalities involved are interesting, and feel unique. Not sure how canon I'd say that Alec is, but that might very well be due to Giselle having such a unique point of view, and him acting differently around her.
The rest is also good.
I'm always a fan of this more, detached, narration, that's going on here.
All personalities involved are interesting, and feel unique. Not sure how canon I'd say that Alec is, but that might very well be due to Giselle having such a unique point of view, and him acting differently around her.
The rest is also good.
bisonlot
Weapons-Grade Buffoon
- Location
- Clowntown, USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him/Dumbass
Image doesn't show on mobile iPhoneGiselle visual reference for Zar. Yay
Works just fine on android so it's probably the iPhone browser.
I can view it on my own iphone so I can't help problem solve this! sorry.
I just binged this fic and saw that the autistic MC went up to Nilbog not to kill him but instead perform a homewrecker move where they seduced him away from being a villainous dictator into their dramatic sidekick with their ballet theatre nerd rizz.
It's great.
It's great.
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6. Swan Lake
She'd had Hob escort Assault and Battery while she walked out to go talk to Lung.
It's just exchanging one calamity for another, though. So she doesn't know why she bothered.
Hob has been pushing, lately. He wants to make things again.
He wants to touch other people.
He wants to make himself a bigger city of his own. Doesn't he? He doesn't do it because he's afraid of her, not because he thinks it's cruel, or wrong.
It's a double reminder. It's good when people are afraid of her. But if the world was as afraid of her as they were of him, nothing good at all could exist.
The more Hob lives with her, the more afraid he is. The more he gets to remember that even the taste of an apple is something that people can lose.
That's right, someone can live for decades devouring nothing but their own illusions, because they can also conjure up the illusion that their stomach is full.
"You really think your two bit muscle is going to be enough to scare anyone serious off of you?" Lung says, voice completely level and human. It seems to actually shock him a little, as if he's so used to a little bit of the draconic growl coming through even when he's not that angry that the fact that nothing at all changes even when he's not trying could be some great change to his way of life.
"I've never thought about it," Giselle says.
Lung snorts in anger, and then again pauses.
Anger without transformation.
"They want you to heal that tin can I ripped open?"
It takes Giselle more than a few moments to piece together who he's referring to.
"Armsmaster? It came up."
"Everyone knows if you want a Brockton Bay hero really out for the count, going for the head is the number one strategy. Since Panacea won't fix it."
It's a flat, off handed explanation.
"That's why Bakuda put them there."
Yes. That's why all the bombs had been in the head. Because of Panacea's restriction.
She doesn't think that the PRT are actually going to let her onto their base. And even if they did... bringing Hob there, would that really work out..
Giselle frowns a bit, disconcerted by the effort to plan ahead something that doesn't really matter at all. Why does she care if things work out or not? If she really cared about something like that, she should have killed Hob back in Ellisburg.
"Should I not heal him?"
She's willing to leave Armsmaster to die if Lung cares enough to pick a fight about it. Only one of these two men is her neighbor.
"Do whatever you want," Lung says coldly. "I can put him back into the ground forever. He just got arrogant because of the poison. Without help, he's nothing."
"You're without help, too," Giselle says.
"Fuck you too, bitch."
He can shout it, but he can't breathe any fire.
"I picked a fight with Hookwolf," Giselle says to him. She'd forgotten until just now. Getting cursed at has reminded her, maybe. "He seemed mad."
"Why'd you do something stupid like that?"
"I must have been angry," Giselle says. "Because Hob wanted a puppy."
Lung makes a noise that Giselle eventually decides is laughter.
"He's got greedy eyes," Lung says. "Even though they look like yours. You don't seem like much of a proper family, though."
That's good. Hob's finished with the two PRT members and is probably back in hearing range.
"The Steadfast Tin Soldier is a Hans Christen Anderson original tale that was adapted into a ballet relatively recently," Giselle says slowly. "It's about a one legged toy soldier that falls in love with a paper doll ballerina."
"What the fuck are you--"
"He's captivated at first sight of her because she is performing an arabesque, so it looks, from his perspective, as if she only has one leg, just like him. But the next moment, he falls into despair. Because that first moment of connection was a momentary illusion, broken the minute she sets her other foot back down."
"I don't care to listen to your bullshit, girl," Lung says. He glances behind her. "You all done making sure your precious white hats made it away from my reach?"
"It seems so," Giselle says. A hint of politeness stirs in her. Since they are neighbors. "Have a nice day, Lung."
He opens his mouth, closes it, and then pivots around and stalks off.
The next few days are rather unremarkable.
Mostly.
It appears that Jean-Paul's team actually had a name. Or maybe they did before, and she'd forgotten it...?
Giselle stares at her computer screen blankly. It feels like she's remembering more pieces of her life recently than she ever has before. It's unnerving, somehow. Things that used to fall through the huge cracks in her mind are now getting stuck there instead, grating up against each other.
Either way, the Undersiders and Empire 88 seem to have gotten into some sort of escalating fight. And then, another mysterious group also targeted the Merchants at the same time...
Brockton Bay is once again in turmoil, but none of it has reached where she lives. Well, unless the Empire 88 decides it also wants to come down here.
Or she goes up to where they live.
She'd never even bothered to get Assault or Battery's phone number, but James did. So he's the one who receives text messages from the PRT, and then shows them to her.
There was an issue where someone had apparently agreed to pay for Armsmaster's healing but then came the secondary issue.
Giselle doesn't have a bank account.
She has to contemplate this one for a while.
Should she call Jean-Paul? But he probably doesn't have one either.
"I can do it," James says. He's been bringing in plants to stick next to the couch where he sleeps. The plants are all sick because he forgets to water them or show them sunlight.
"Do what?"
"Make a bank account. Once you get... a solid name."
He's been more lucid than usual lately, too.
There's a different cape present at the hospital where she's been told to go find Armsmaster at. There are so many sick people in this hospital. It's so loud, like a house of cards that would be easier to destroy than Ellisburg.
She shouldn't stay here for long.
The cape is like Battery.
It's one of the people she'd named. Triumph. A lion's head helmet. A golden theme.
Because he roars. She gets it.
"Hello," Giselle says politely.
Triumph gives her a smile back.
"Hello, Prognosis. I'm here to escort you. I didn't realize that your friend would also come with you?"
Her friend?
Giselle slowly turns back to look at James.
"Do you like hospitals, Hob?"
"No," James says. "I'm hungry."
Giselle nods.
"He'll stay out here until I come back," she says.
Triumph gives an uncomfortable nod.
He still makes small talk when they walk through corridors. He sounds like a television presenter to her. There's a soothing cadence to always talking towards a camera.
"I heard that you brought up my name for potential Trump action," Triumph says quietly. That's not a television presenter's voice.
He is very healthy, aside from his power being sick. He even has.. Giselle blinks slowly. His own healing factor. And he's strong. She'd thought she might be able to do something since his wiki page claimed he 'roared', but it doesn't really...
His sonic abilities don't actually appear to be biologic at all. Even if he acts like they are. So there's nothing for her there.
"Do you want to shake my hand?" Giselle offers.
Strangely, this makes him laugh.
"I can't afford a $60,000 handshake," he says. "Sorry about that. I don't even know how Armsmaster has enough money for what you agreed to do."
He seems like a nice person. She could take a zero back off.
She can tell when they reach Armsmaster's room, of course.
Health risk: ... his entire head.
Had Lung picked him up and slammed his head against a cement block or something? It's incredible that Armsmaster is still alive.
He's been masked ahead of her visit, even though he's in hospital scrubs and not any part of his uniform.
It makes her smile, from one flimsy mask to another.
There are no flowers or well wishes in the room at all. It's completely bare. There's not even a chair pulled up by the bedside.
Triumph takes up a spot by the door while Giselle continues to stare down at Armsmaster.
It would be easier to heal him if she could talk to him, but if he could talk she wouldn't be healing him.
How often her life is formed of these loops.
She reaches forward and clasps his hand.
Health risk: brain bleeding. Concussion. Fractures on the skull.
It's odd, thinking how incredibly fragile this man is. A pure tinker skill that has left him at complete baseline humanity. No healing factor. No strength. No speed.
But he is struggling to live.
His odds are rather bad, but they aren't impossible. Not even close to impossible.
It becomes easier to block out the other patients in the hospital as she focuses in on him. If she can't talk to him directly, she'll have to talk to Triumph.
"What type of person is he?" She says. "Armsmaster."
"Huh?"
"Describe him. What kind of person is he?"
"He's... driven. He wants Brockton Bay to be a safe place."
This isn't helping her at all.
"Why did he fight Lung?"
"To.. defend the citizens of Brockton Bay."
Still not helping her at all.
Maybe asking other people just doesn't work. Or maybe the problem is Triumph.
"Can you call someone who knows him better than you."
A longer pause.
"...Armsmaster doesn't talk much about personal matters with his coworkers," Triumph finally says, voice cautious.
Giselle finally gets her first useful strengthening of the entire conversation.
"Lung said he was arrogant," Giselle says.
"You spoke to Lung?"
"Is he arrogant?"
"He deserves his reputation for competence," Triumph says. "Prognosis, you spoke to Lung?"
This has nothing to do with what Giselle is asking him.
"Lung said he was arrogant because he came to fight alone," Giselle says. "Why didn't you come with him? You are competent enough."
"It's not a good idea to escalate fights against Lung," Triumph says carefully. "But thank you for your support."
Escalation. That's right.
It's something Giselle forgets about. Because it's got nothing to do with her. She could escalate Lung faster than the entire PRT could.
But that would be a bad idea. Like her being in a hospital. And yet she is in a hospital, right? So she has to understand Armsmaster a little bit.
She holds onto his hand tighter.
Hours pass.
"Is he--" Triumph starts.
"Shh," Giselle mumbles.
In many ways this is much harder than dealing with Noelle. There is no supernatural malleability, no inclination to change. Just brain damage.
Likelihood that he will wake up.
Giselle only has two areas of knowledge, and neither of them are medicinal.
Should she talk to him?
"The average price of a couture handbag is between $2,000 and $6,000," Giselle says. "So your treatment is equivalent to a hundred purses. Thank you."
Triumph makes a choking noise behind her.
"That's what you're going to use the money for?"
What else is she going to use the money for? Her father doesn't need money. Her rent is being paid through James's money, so that's not important either.
"And also some new pairs of shoes," Giselle adds.
There's a stir and a flinch under her hands, an instinctive attempt to pull away.
Health risk: stabilized.
"He'll wake up in another day or two," Giselle says. "And I'll have a bank account in a week or so, so everything works out."
She stands up, only to blink as her focus now gives her better feedback on all the presences in the hospital.
There's a lot more capes than there were when she walked in.
Many of them are standing next to Hob.
"Do you have friends around here?" Giselle says slowly.
He gives her a blank look.
"What?"
No?
"Well, that's good." If they're not PRT, it's fine. James can defend himself.
Giselle walks briskly out of the hospital to the point that Triumph is almost running in order to keep up with her.
"No, Prognosis, what--"
It's not familiar to her, the people next to him. Both of them are young, female, completely healthy, powered. One of them has a slightly off kilter effect in her head. Not at all like Trickster, something much milder and less... all consuming.
The minute she sees them, she takes it back. She does know them.
Glory Girl and Panacea.
"Hey, old man," Glory Girl says loudly to Hob. "What the hell are you doing, stopping Panacea from going in? It's an honor that she's even here! You're stopping people from being healed!"
"It's not a big deal," Panacea says quietly from behind her. "Really, it's fine."
There are PRT soldiers on either side of the door who are firmly keeping their mouths shut.
"Prognosis doesn't like being around other capes," Hob says. "You can't."
Giselle stops a few feet from the other side of the door, Triumph skidding to a stop behind her.
"Is that... true?" Triumph asks quietly.
She's never thought about it before.
"It's uncomfortable," she says. "Since you're all sick."
"Are you calling me sick!?" Glory Girl demands, hands going on her hips.
"Yes."
Giselle starts walking down the sidewalk outside the hospital.
"Come on, Hob. We're finished."
Hob gives Glory Girl a little wave of his hand before slipping after her.
"I'm sick too," he says.
Giselle looks back at him, and then yanks him out of the way as Glory Girl hurtles down the street after both of them, Panacea and Triumph left behind at the entrance
"Hey, say that again!" She yells. "What the hell! How could you say that! You--"
Hob's hand closes around her arm.
She tries to yank it back, and fails with a loud yelp.
Giselle looks closer, fascinated. Hob has actually failed to make contact with her flesh, instead his hand binding to itself as a strange sort of prison an inch away from her wrist.
It's enough time for Triumph to catch back up.
"I'm so sorry," he says hastily. "Everyone calm down. Let's all cool our heads about this."
He glances at Hob and then at Glory Girl.
"Let go of her, please," he says. "She won't cause more of a fuss, right? You two were just leaving. The PRT will be in touch."
Glory Girl yanks her arms again, super strength and invulnerability not enough to get her arm out of his grip.
"Hob, let her go," Giselle says.
The two instantly separate as Hob steps back to Giselle's side, the red of his gloves perfectly intact.
Triumph gives him a very uneasy look.
"It was a great show of trust leaving your guard outside of the hospital during your visit," he says. "Thank you, Prognosis. I'll convey your hard work to Armsmaster once he wakes up."
"There was no trust," Giselle says. "Goodbye."
Hob waves behind her as they both finally slip away.
When the weekend comes, Trickster swings by with his car. It's not the same one he'd driven back and forth from Ellisburg, since he'd stolen that one.
This one has ugly decals on the back. He keeps revving the engine while she finishes with the daily twenty people.
One of them is a child who's only bruised underneath her clothes.
"Ever been to Boston before?" Trickster asks, motormouth habits immediately resuming after he'd fucked with the rear view mirror enough that he couldn't see James sitting in the back seat with it.
"No," Giselle says.
"No? How did you get all the way to Brockton, then?"
"The train."
She'd bought a ticket in Montreal and simply got off when her brother did. She'd never been on a train before, and she's never gotten on one since. Even though it had been a smooth ride, she'd still felt like it kept rattling her bones, her suitcase, and her skull.
She doesn't plan on ever taking another.
"Haven't taken a train in years," Trickster says.
He can't take his girlfriend on a train.
There's almost a half an hour of blissful silence before Trickster jumps topics again.
"Armsmaster woke up this morning," he says.
That hadn't been on the news channel she listens to.
"Healing him was difficult," Giselle says.
"'Cause it's a head wound, right?"
"No," Giselle says. She doesn't understand Panacea's problem with head wounds. "He didn't have any flowers in his hospital room."
Trickster snorts.
"He's not so unpopular that people wouldn't send any, right? I bet he has a specific will, like, I hate flowers and anything that makes people think I'm normal and have friends. What a weirdo."
If Trickster had been answering her questions about Armsmaster instead of Triumph, she suspects that the healing process would have been much easier.
"I also wouldn't want flowers," Giselle says.
"Huh? But you're, like, girlie. You like purses and flounces and shit. I thought you'd like them."
"Oleander blossoms," James says.
"I can sense them dying when their stems are cut," Giselle says. "Get me flower scented perfume instead."
"I feel like this conversation has jumped from hypothetical to future planning far too fast," Trickster mutters. "You're way too expensive for me, Prog. Just stay out of the hospital."
That had been her first time in a big hospital. Her father only had doctors that did housecalls.
"Swan Lake is technically not a romantic ballet, as it was composed slightly after that era. But its composer was directly inspired by Giselle's use of leitmotifs, and integrated that choice into both Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. However, no matter how hard everyone struggled, Swan Lake didn't become accepted as popular until after most of the people responsible for the original version had already died, and the prima ballerina was swapped out for someone younger."
This stalls out the conversation for the entirety of the ride.
"Now, remember," Trickster mutters, "I already called ahead about this. Accord doesn't even want to meet you in person, we'll be talking to one of his personal assistants. Just... don't make any loud noises, okay? Or sudden movements. Or weird statements."
Giselle hasn't bothered putting her mask on. The point is to get personal identification, so hiding her face seems almost bizarrely pointless.
"The prince in Swan Lake can't tell Odette apart from Odile because he can only see that they are equally beautiful," Giselle informs him. "But the real flaw was that it didn't occur to him that there could be a doppelganger."
"Which one is the black swan?" James asks.
"Odile," Giselle says. "But she's not ever a swan at all. It's a false conception."
"Just...don't talk," Trickster says.
The one remarkable thing about the otherwise unremarkable office building he leads them to is the soundproofing.
It's even hard to hear the echoes of footsteps on the floor. The other thing is that there are no plants anywhere. She can feel guards moving in a synced, almost game like grid from post to post.
None of them are powered. All of them are healthy.
Aside from the room in front of her, the only powered individual is many rooms away, standing completely still.
It's like she's stepping onto the dancer's stage.
Inside the room is a powered, sick, man wearing a tailored black suit and a black and white mask. Aside from being like Battery, he's in the peak of health. She can detect no biological power from him.
"This is Othello," Trickster says. "Othello, these are the two I mentioned. This is Giselle, and this is... James."
Othello nods.
"The IDs are for Giselle Willis, Alec Willis, and James Coppelius," he says. "As agreed upon. The ages..."
"Alec is 17," Giselle says. "I'm 19. James is 44."
James gives her a sharp look from behind.
He didn't think she knew his age? It's Jean-Paul's age she's less sure of. He's definitely not seventeen, though. Fifteen or sixteen is correct.
But getting him a minor's identity is not what Jean-Paul wants. She'll let him be a minor for only a few months before the ID works properly on its own.
"Birthday?"
"28th of June for me," Giselle says. First premiere of Giselle. "1st of January for Alec." First premiere of Giselle in America. "25th of May for James." First premier of Coppelia.
"Decisive," Othello says, and taps an earpiece. "Your dates are acceptable. You two--" he points at Trickster and James-- "Stay here for the next hour while your papers are finalized. You--" he points at her-- "Accord has scheduled an appointment for you. Come with me."
A second Othello shifts into existence for a second and then fades in the next room's doorway as he blinks and then returns.
"Don't be weird," Trickster says behind her, voice close to a prayer.
"This is a good place for ghosts," James says. "A graveyard for flowers."
So he'd also made note of the fact that there isn't any living matter aside from human beings around.
Giselle nods and leaves them both behind.
Accord's office has an art deco flare to it, done in chrome and silver rather than the more standard gold and bronze of the movement.
That flare continues into his own mask, which looks more like a work of art than a disguise. His power is completely healthy. His body is taken care of. He doesn't even have any scars. He's shorter than her, which is great.
His mind...
She doesn't often get close to other Thinkers. Perhaps that addict in Coil's base...
His mind churns more than a little a bit. But she doesn't know if she'd call it disturbed. It's just more malleable than the rest of him.
Giselle gives him a polite nod as Othelo shifts to standing behind her to the left.
"Miss Willis," Accord says. "Or do you prefer Prognosis?"
"Giselle is fine."
Accord gives a disapproving sniff.
"Miss Willis. I don't like other Thinkers, but I've chosen to make an exception and speak to you directly."
Okay?
"I've heard you can enhance abilities."
"I doubt I can do anything for you," Giselle says. "If you want to know for sure, I need skin contact."
Accord sighs.
"The list you gave the PRT implied you prefer working on brute force heroes. I had hoped you were merely lying, but it appears not."
He has a lot of information, doesn't he.
Giselle considers him a little longer. Should she... clarify? What if he thinks she's worth killing on the spot?
But she likes the way he organizes things. It's like watching her recordings.
"You'd make a good ballet director," she says. "You would write beautiful music."
"Indeed," Accord says. "I am a genius who could easily do such things. But it's far too small a scale to bother with."
Rude.
"Since you already work on such a large scale, there's nothing for me to improve," Giselle says, which is more true than not. He's got a shockingly harmonious mind for a cape.
Degrading him, slowing him down, would be so easy that it's actually beginning to distract her.
Accord smirks.
"And what about him?"
"Can I touch him?" Giselle says, taking advantage of the distraction. She shouldn't do anything to Accord just because he's so close and it would be so easy. She doesn't touch sick rats, there's no reason to touch someone so healthy.
"Yes," Accord says.
Giselle reaches out and shakes Othello's hand.
She already knows, though.
"Can't be improved."
"No flattering reason given this time," Accord says.
"Some powers are more mysterious than others," Giselle says blankly. She keeps a hold of Othello's hand. "Do your trick."
Othello waits for Accord's permission before he disappears and then reappears several feet to her right.
In that instant when he'd disappeared, she'd almost detected something.
But, that's far too much of a pain to bother figuring out how to improve it, or even unravel it. She turns back around to face Accord.
"His power's kind of like Tricksters," Giselle says. "Unfortunately, it's not sight based or sensory based so I can't help. As you've no doubt concluded, I'm better with physical things."
"Confirmation is always better than hearsay," Accord says. "Lots of people are very interested in you, Miss Willis. But I've been informed you'd better head back to Brockton Bay as soon as possible."
Giselle tilts her head.
"There's nothing pressing," she says. "I just need a bank account."
"I have already gone ahead and established one for you alongside your new identity," Accord says. "I don't mean meaningless add-ons. I am referring to your part on the stage of Brockton Bay. You must head back there immediately, Miss Willis. The show is going on without you."
If her brother manages to get in horrible trouble the one day she's not in the city.
"Most romantic ballets only have two acts," Giselle says. "As a classical ballet, Swan Lake has four. But despite the fact that it has four acts, it only has three locations, with acts two and four both taking place by the lake formed of tears."
"Who's tears?" Accord asks. He seems genuinely curious.
"When Odette was cursed to become a swan, her mother became so distraught that she wept enough bitter tears to form the lake that Odette then lives in," Giselle says. "Her mother presumably died at some point after that, because she's not present in the ballet."
"If her mother hadn't cried those tears, then Odette would be a swan without a lake," Accord says. "Her contribution seems integral, if personally futile."
"That's a new point of view," Giselle says. "I'll consider it."
"Do so," Accord says, and waves a hand in dismissal.
Giselle calls Assault's number on the way back.
"I have a bank account now," she says. "Armsmaster can send the money."
"That's great!" Assault says brightly. "Quicker than the timeline you gave, as well. I'm actually going to give you his number so you can call him directly."
There's a loud clang from his side of the phone.
"Is there a problem?" Giselle says.
"Oh, just a normal night in the city," Assault says. "Nothing to worry about! I've sent you his number, so I gotta go, bye!"
The phone clicks off.
Trickster's foot on the gas presses down harder.
Giselle dials her brother instead of Armsmaster.
The phone rings for a long time and then tries to go to a voicemail that he hasn't ever set up.
She hangs up and stares at it for a bit.
"The original Swan Lake demands that Odette die in the last act," she says conversationally. "She decides she'd rather die than remain a swan, dies, and then reunites with the lover that betrayed her in heaven."
"Kind of gross," Trickster says.
"In the next variation, her lover throws her freedom away in the form of a crown," Giselle says. "''Willing or unwilling, you will always remain with me!' And then the lake of tears rises up and drowns them both."
"It's difficult to throw crowns away," James says.
"Swan Lake has at least 19 different ending variants," Giselle says. "Many of them revised from a tragedy into a happy ending."
She stares down at her phone again.
"However, even the happy endings, I don't think are happy. Since she always reunites with him. She forgives him, her forgiveness breaks the curse, and all is well."
"What's she forgiving him for?" Trickster asks blankly. "I don't know shit about your shows, Giselle."
Ah.
"She needs him to swear to love only her in order to break the spell," Giselle clarifies. "But he can't tell her apart from someone else, so he swears love to that person instead, and fails her."
"Can't he just take it back?"
"'Only her'," Giselle says dully. "How can you take that back?"
Trickster sighs softly, hands clenching on the steering wheel.
"Girls take promises so seriously," he mutters.
"In most productions, Odette and Odile are played by the same ballerina," Giselle says. "So it's an understandable mistake to make, from an audience perspective."
She taps her finger against the glass of the window.
"But in Tchaikovsky's original, it's thought that two different ballerinas were meant to play Odette and Odile. So, the ballets after his... are just making excuses."
"Sometimes people are reflections of each other even if they don't look identical," James points out.
Giselle looks up and meets her own eyes in his face through the rear view mirror.
"I'd still be disappointed," Giselle says. "If someone couldn't tell me apart. Even if everyone there was exactly identical to me."
"Better hope you don't get turned into a swan, then," Trickster says.
It's too late for that.
Giselle eventually dials her next number.
"This is Armsmaster," a low, tense voice says. "Who are you, and how did you get this number?"
"I'm Prognosis," Giselle says politely. "I'm calling to tell you that I have a bank account now. The agreement with the PRT was for $60,000 but I didn't specify who was paying for that, you privately or the PRT in general. Either way, I don't care. Call me back when you have it sorted out."
"Look, Prognosis, I don't have time for this right now--"
"Is something wrong?" Giselle asks politely.
Next to her, James urgently shoves his own phone in front of her face.
EMPIRE 88 CAPE IDENTITIES LEAKED!? NAZI DOCTORS ON THE LOOSE!
"Are you still in that hospital," Giselle says.
"Yes," Armsmaster says through gritted teeth.
"The debt doesn't end with death," Giselle says, and hangs up.
In the front seat, Trickster's phone begins to ring.
It's just exchanging one calamity for another, though. So she doesn't know why she bothered.
Hob has been pushing, lately. He wants to make things again.
He wants to touch other people.
He wants to make himself a bigger city of his own. Doesn't he? He doesn't do it because he's afraid of her, not because he thinks it's cruel, or wrong.
It's a double reminder. It's good when people are afraid of her. But if the world was as afraid of her as they were of him, nothing good at all could exist.
The more Hob lives with her, the more afraid he is. The more he gets to remember that even the taste of an apple is something that people can lose.
That's right, someone can live for decades devouring nothing but their own illusions, because they can also conjure up the illusion that their stomach is full.
"You really think your two bit muscle is going to be enough to scare anyone serious off of you?" Lung says, voice completely level and human. It seems to actually shock him a little, as if he's so used to a little bit of the draconic growl coming through even when he's not that angry that the fact that nothing at all changes even when he's not trying could be some great change to his way of life.
"I've never thought about it," Giselle says.
Lung snorts in anger, and then again pauses.
Anger without transformation.
"They want you to heal that tin can I ripped open?"
It takes Giselle more than a few moments to piece together who he's referring to.
"Armsmaster? It came up."
"Everyone knows if you want a Brockton Bay hero really out for the count, going for the head is the number one strategy. Since Panacea won't fix it."
It's a flat, off handed explanation.
"That's why Bakuda put them there."
Yes. That's why all the bombs had been in the head. Because of Panacea's restriction.
She doesn't think that the PRT are actually going to let her onto their base. And even if they did... bringing Hob there, would that really work out..
Giselle frowns a bit, disconcerted by the effort to plan ahead something that doesn't really matter at all. Why does she care if things work out or not? If she really cared about something like that, she should have killed Hob back in Ellisburg.
"Should I not heal him?"
She's willing to leave Armsmaster to die if Lung cares enough to pick a fight about it. Only one of these two men is her neighbor.
"Do whatever you want," Lung says coldly. "I can put him back into the ground forever. He just got arrogant because of the poison. Without help, he's nothing."
"You're without help, too," Giselle says.
"Fuck you too, bitch."
He can shout it, but he can't breathe any fire.
"I picked a fight with Hookwolf," Giselle says to him. She'd forgotten until just now. Getting cursed at has reminded her, maybe. "He seemed mad."
"Why'd you do something stupid like that?"
"I must have been angry," Giselle says. "Because Hob wanted a puppy."
Lung makes a noise that Giselle eventually decides is laughter.
"He's got greedy eyes," Lung says. "Even though they look like yours. You don't seem like much of a proper family, though."
That's good. Hob's finished with the two PRT members and is probably back in hearing range.
"The Steadfast Tin Soldier is a Hans Christen Anderson original tale that was adapted into a ballet relatively recently," Giselle says slowly. "It's about a one legged toy soldier that falls in love with a paper doll ballerina."
"What the fuck are you--"
"He's captivated at first sight of her because she is performing an arabesque, so it looks, from his perspective, as if she only has one leg, just like him. But the next moment, he falls into despair. Because that first moment of connection was a momentary illusion, broken the minute she sets her other foot back down."
"I don't care to listen to your bullshit, girl," Lung says. He glances behind her. "You all done making sure your precious white hats made it away from my reach?"
"It seems so," Giselle says. A hint of politeness stirs in her. Since they are neighbors. "Have a nice day, Lung."
He opens his mouth, closes it, and then pivots around and stalks off.
The next few days are rather unremarkable.
Mostly.
It appears that Jean-Paul's team actually had a name. Or maybe they did before, and she'd forgotten it...?
Giselle stares at her computer screen blankly. It feels like she's remembering more pieces of her life recently than she ever has before. It's unnerving, somehow. Things that used to fall through the huge cracks in her mind are now getting stuck there instead, grating up against each other.
Either way, the Undersiders and Empire 88 seem to have gotten into some sort of escalating fight. And then, another mysterious group also targeted the Merchants at the same time...
Brockton Bay is once again in turmoil, but none of it has reached where she lives. Well, unless the Empire 88 decides it also wants to come down here.
Or she goes up to where they live.
She'd never even bothered to get Assault or Battery's phone number, but James did. So he's the one who receives text messages from the PRT, and then shows them to her.
There was an issue where someone had apparently agreed to pay for Armsmaster's healing but then came the secondary issue.
Giselle doesn't have a bank account.
She has to contemplate this one for a while.
Should she call Jean-Paul? But he probably doesn't have one either.
"I can do it," James says. He's been bringing in plants to stick next to the couch where he sleeps. The plants are all sick because he forgets to water them or show them sunlight.
"Do what?"
"Make a bank account. Once you get... a solid name."
He's been more lucid than usual lately, too.
There's a different cape present at the hospital where she's been told to go find Armsmaster at. There are so many sick people in this hospital. It's so loud, like a house of cards that would be easier to destroy than Ellisburg.
She shouldn't stay here for long.
The cape is like Battery.
It's one of the people she'd named. Triumph. A lion's head helmet. A golden theme.
Because he roars. She gets it.
"Hello," Giselle says politely.
Triumph gives her a smile back.
"Hello, Prognosis. I'm here to escort you. I didn't realize that your friend would also come with you?"
Her friend?
Giselle slowly turns back to look at James.
"Do you like hospitals, Hob?"
"No," James says. "I'm hungry."
Giselle nods.
"He'll stay out here until I come back," she says.
Triumph gives an uncomfortable nod.
He still makes small talk when they walk through corridors. He sounds like a television presenter to her. There's a soothing cadence to always talking towards a camera.
"I heard that you brought up my name for potential Trump action," Triumph says quietly. That's not a television presenter's voice.
He is very healthy, aside from his power being sick. He even has.. Giselle blinks slowly. His own healing factor. And he's strong. She'd thought she might be able to do something since his wiki page claimed he 'roared', but it doesn't really...
His sonic abilities don't actually appear to be biologic at all. Even if he acts like they are. So there's nothing for her there.
"Do you want to shake my hand?" Giselle offers.
Strangely, this makes him laugh.
"I can't afford a $60,000 handshake," he says. "Sorry about that. I don't even know how Armsmaster has enough money for what you agreed to do."
He seems like a nice person. She could take a zero back off.
She can tell when they reach Armsmaster's room, of course.
Health risk: ... his entire head.
Had Lung picked him up and slammed his head against a cement block or something? It's incredible that Armsmaster is still alive.
He's been masked ahead of her visit, even though he's in hospital scrubs and not any part of his uniform.
It makes her smile, from one flimsy mask to another.
There are no flowers or well wishes in the room at all. It's completely bare. There's not even a chair pulled up by the bedside.
Triumph takes up a spot by the door while Giselle continues to stare down at Armsmaster.
It would be easier to heal him if she could talk to him, but if he could talk she wouldn't be healing him.
How often her life is formed of these loops.
She reaches forward and clasps his hand.
Health risk: brain bleeding. Concussion. Fractures on the skull.
It's odd, thinking how incredibly fragile this man is. A pure tinker skill that has left him at complete baseline humanity. No healing factor. No strength. No speed.
But he is struggling to live.
His odds are rather bad, but they aren't impossible. Not even close to impossible.
It becomes easier to block out the other patients in the hospital as she focuses in on him. If she can't talk to him directly, she'll have to talk to Triumph.
"What type of person is he?" She says. "Armsmaster."
"Huh?"
"Describe him. What kind of person is he?"
"He's... driven. He wants Brockton Bay to be a safe place."
This isn't helping her at all.
"Why did he fight Lung?"
"To.. defend the citizens of Brockton Bay."
Still not helping her at all.
Maybe asking other people just doesn't work. Or maybe the problem is Triumph.
"Can you call someone who knows him better than you."
A longer pause.
"...Armsmaster doesn't talk much about personal matters with his coworkers," Triumph finally says, voice cautious.
Giselle finally gets her first useful strengthening of the entire conversation.
"Lung said he was arrogant," Giselle says.
"You spoke to Lung?"
"Is he arrogant?"
"He deserves his reputation for competence," Triumph says. "Prognosis, you spoke to Lung?"
This has nothing to do with what Giselle is asking him.
"Lung said he was arrogant because he came to fight alone," Giselle says. "Why didn't you come with him? You are competent enough."
"It's not a good idea to escalate fights against Lung," Triumph says carefully. "But thank you for your support."
Escalation. That's right.
It's something Giselle forgets about. Because it's got nothing to do with her. She could escalate Lung faster than the entire PRT could.
But that would be a bad idea. Like her being in a hospital. And yet she is in a hospital, right? So she has to understand Armsmaster a little bit.
She holds onto his hand tighter.
Hours pass.
"Is he--" Triumph starts.
"Shh," Giselle mumbles.
In many ways this is much harder than dealing with Noelle. There is no supernatural malleability, no inclination to change. Just brain damage.
Likelihood that he will wake up.
Giselle only has two areas of knowledge, and neither of them are medicinal.
Should she talk to him?
"The average price of a couture handbag is between $2,000 and $6,000," Giselle says. "So your treatment is equivalent to a hundred purses. Thank you."
Triumph makes a choking noise behind her.
"That's what you're going to use the money for?"
What else is she going to use the money for? Her father doesn't need money. Her rent is being paid through James's money, so that's not important either.
"And also some new pairs of shoes," Giselle adds.
There's a stir and a flinch under her hands, an instinctive attempt to pull away.
Health risk: stabilized.
"He'll wake up in another day or two," Giselle says. "And I'll have a bank account in a week or so, so everything works out."
She stands up, only to blink as her focus now gives her better feedback on all the presences in the hospital.
There's a lot more capes than there were when she walked in.
Many of them are standing next to Hob.
"Do you have friends around here?" Giselle says slowly.
He gives her a blank look.
"What?"
No?
"Well, that's good." If they're not PRT, it's fine. James can defend himself.
Giselle walks briskly out of the hospital to the point that Triumph is almost running in order to keep up with her.
"No, Prognosis, what--"
It's not familiar to her, the people next to him. Both of them are young, female, completely healthy, powered. One of them has a slightly off kilter effect in her head. Not at all like Trickster, something much milder and less... all consuming.
The minute she sees them, she takes it back. She does know them.
Glory Girl and Panacea.
"Hey, old man," Glory Girl says loudly to Hob. "What the hell are you doing, stopping Panacea from going in? It's an honor that she's even here! You're stopping people from being healed!"
"It's not a big deal," Panacea says quietly from behind her. "Really, it's fine."
There are PRT soldiers on either side of the door who are firmly keeping their mouths shut.
"Prognosis doesn't like being around other capes," Hob says. "You can't."
Giselle stops a few feet from the other side of the door, Triumph skidding to a stop behind her.
"Is that... true?" Triumph asks quietly.
She's never thought about it before.
"It's uncomfortable," she says. "Since you're all sick."
"Are you calling me sick!?" Glory Girl demands, hands going on her hips.
"Yes."
Giselle starts walking down the sidewalk outside the hospital.
"Come on, Hob. We're finished."
Hob gives Glory Girl a little wave of his hand before slipping after her.
"I'm sick too," he says.
Giselle looks back at him, and then yanks him out of the way as Glory Girl hurtles down the street after both of them, Panacea and Triumph left behind at the entrance
"Hey, say that again!" She yells. "What the hell! How could you say that! You--"
Hob's hand closes around her arm.
She tries to yank it back, and fails with a loud yelp.
Giselle looks closer, fascinated. Hob has actually failed to make contact with her flesh, instead his hand binding to itself as a strange sort of prison an inch away from her wrist.
It's enough time for Triumph to catch back up.
"I'm so sorry," he says hastily. "Everyone calm down. Let's all cool our heads about this."
He glances at Hob and then at Glory Girl.
"Let go of her, please," he says. "She won't cause more of a fuss, right? You two were just leaving. The PRT will be in touch."
Glory Girl yanks her arms again, super strength and invulnerability not enough to get her arm out of his grip.
"Hob, let her go," Giselle says.
The two instantly separate as Hob steps back to Giselle's side, the red of his gloves perfectly intact.
Triumph gives him a very uneasy look.
"It was a great show of trust leaving your guard outside of the hospital during your visit," he says. "Thank you, Prognosis. I'll convey your hard work to Armsmaster once he wakes up."
"There was no trust," Giselle says. "Goodbye."
Hob waves behind her as they both finally slip away.
When the weekend comes, Trickster swings by with his car. It's not the same one he'd driven back and forth from Ellisburg, since he'd stolen that one.
This one has ugly decals on the back. He keeps revving the engine while she finishes with the daily twenty people.
One of them is a child who's only bruised underneath her clothes.
"Ever been to Boston before?" Trickster asks, motormouth habits immediately resuming after he'd fucked with the rear view mirror enough that he couldn't see James sitting in the back seat with it.
"No," Giselle says.
"No? How did you get all the way to Brockton, then?"
"The train."
She'd bought a ticket in Montreal and simply got off when her brother did. She'd never been on a train before, and she's never gotten on one since. Even though it had been a smooth ride, she'd still felt like it kept rattling her bones, her suitcase, and her skull.
She doesn't plan on ever taking another.
"Haven't taken a train in years," Trickster says.
He can't take his girlfriend on a train.
There's almost a half an hour of blissful silence before Trickster jumps topics again.
"Armsmaster woke up this morning," he says.
That hadn't been on the news channel she listens to.
"Healing him was difficult," Giselle says.
"'Cause it's a head wound, right?"
"No," Giselle says. She doesn't understand Panacea's problem with head wounds. "He didn't have any flowers in his hospital room."
Trickster snorts.
"He's not so unpopular that people wouldn't send any, right? I bet he has a specific will, like, I hate flowers and anything that makes people think I'm normal and have friends. What a weirdo."
If Trickster had been answering her questions about Armsmaster instead of Triumph, she suspects that the healing process would have been much easier.
"I also wouldn't want flowers," Giselle says.
"Huh? But you're, like, girlie. You like purses and flounces and shit. I thought you'd like them."
"Oleander blossoms," James says.
"I can sense them dying when their stems are cut," Giselle says. "Get me flower scented perfume instead."
"I feel like this conversation has jumped from hypothetical to future planning far too fast," Trickster mutters. "You're way too expensive for me, Prog. Just stay out of the hospital."
That had been her first time in a big hospital. Her father only had doctors that did housecalls.
"Swan Lake is technically not a romantic ballet, as it was composed slightly after that era. But its composer was directly inspired by Giselle's use of leitmotifs, and integrated that choice into both Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. However, no matter how hard everyone struggled, Swan Lake didn't become accepted as popular until after most of the people responsible for the original version had already died, and the prima ballerina was swapped out for someone younger."
This stalls out the conversation for the entirety of the ride.
"Now, remember," Trickster mutters, "I already called ahead about this. Accord doesn't even want to meet you in person, we'll be talking to one of his personal assistants. Just... don't make any loud noises, okay? Or sudden movements. Or weird statements."
Giselle hasn't bothered putting her mask on. The point is to get personal identification, so hiding her face seems almost bizarrely pointless.
"The prince in Swan Lake can't tell Odette apart from Odile because he can only see that they are equally beautiful," Giselle informs him. "But the real flaw was that it didn't occur to him that there could be a doppelganger."
"Which one is the black swan?" James asks.
"Odile," Giselle says. "But she's not ever a swan at all. It's a false conception."
"Just...don't talk," Trickster says.
The one remarkable thing about the otherwise unremarkable office building he leads them to is the soundproofing.
It's even hard to hear the echoes of footsteps on the floor. The other thing is that there are no plants anywhere. She can feel guards moving in a synced, almost game like grid from post to post.
None of them are powered. All of them are healthy.
Aside from the room in front of her, the only powered individual is many rooms away, standing completely still.
It's like she's stepping onto the dancer's stage.
Inside the room is a powered, sick, man wearing a tailored black suit and a black and white mask. Aside from being like Battery, he's in the peak of health. She can detect no biological power from him.
"This is Othello," Trickster says. "Othello, these are the two I mentioned. This is Giselle, and this is... James."
Othello nods.
"The IDs are for Giselle Willis, Alec Willis, and James Coppelius," he says. "As agreed upon. The ages..."
"Alec is 17," Giselle says. "I'm 19. James is 44."
James gives her a sharp look from behind.
He didn't think she knew his age? It's Jean-Paul's age she's less sure of. He's definitely not seventeen, though. Fifteen or sixteen is correct.
But getting him a minor's identity is not what Jean-Paul wants. She'll let him be a minor for only a few months before the ID works properly on its own.
"Birthday?"
"28th of June for me," Giselle says. First premiere of Giselle. "1st of January for Alec." First premiere of Giselle in America. "25th of May for James." First premier of Coppelia.
"Decisive," Othello says, and taps an earpiece. "Your dates are acceptable. You two--" he points at Trickster and James-- "Stay here for the next hour while your papers are finalized. You--" he points at her-- "Accord has scheduled an appointment for you. Come with me."
A second Othello shifts into existence for a second and then fades in the next room's doorway as he blinks and then returns.
"Don't be weird," Trickster says behind her, voice close to a prayer.
"This is a good place for ghosts," James says. "A graveyard for flowers."
So he'd also made note of the fact that there isn't any living matter aside from human beings around.
Giselle nods and leaves them both behind.
Accord's office has an art deco flare to it, done in chrome and silver rather than the more standard gold and bronze of the movement.
That flare continues into his own mask, which looks more like a work of art than a disguise. His power is completely healthy. His body is taken care of. He doesn't even have any scars. He's shorter than her, which is great.
His mind...
She doesn't often get close to other Thinkers. Perhaps that addict in Coil's base...
His mind churns more than a little a bit. But she doesn't know if she'd call it disturbed. It's just more malleable than the rest of him.
Giselle gives him a polite nod as Othelo shifts to standing behind her to the left.
"Miss Willis," Accord says. "Or do you prefer Prognosis?"
"Giselle is fine."
Accord gives a disapproving sniff.
"Miss Willis. I don't like other Thinkers, but I've chosen to make an exception and speak to you directly."
Okay?
"I've heard you can enhance abilities."
"I doubt I can do anything for you," Giselle says. "If you want to know for sure, I need skin contact."
Accord sighs.
"The list you gave the PRT implied you prefer working on brute force heroes. I had hoped you were merely lying, but it appears not."
He has a lot of information, doesn't he.
Giselle considers him a little longer. Should she... clarify? What if he thinks she's worth killing on the spot?
But she likes the way he organizes things. It's like watching her recordings.
"You'd make a good ballet director," she says. "You would write beautiful music."
"Indeed," Accord says. "I am a genius who could easily do such things. But it's far too small a scale to bother with."
Rude.
"Since you already work on such a large scale, there's nothing for me to improve," Giselle says, which is more true than not. He's got a shockingly harmonious mind for a cape.
Degrading him, slowing him down, would be so easy that it's actually beginning to distract her.
Accord smirks.
"And what about him?"
"Can I touch him?" Giselle says, taking advantage of the distraction. She shouldn't do anything to Accord just because he's so close and it would be so easy. She doesn't touch sick rats, there's no reason to touch someone so healthy.
"Yes," Accord says.
Giselle reaches out and shakes Othello's hand.
She already knows, though.
"Can't be improved."
"No flattering reason given this time," Accord says.
"Some powers are more mysterious than others," Giselle says blankly. She keeps a hold of Othello's hand. "Do your trick."
Othello waits for Accord's permission before he disappears and then reappears several feet to her right.
In that instant when he'd disappeared, she'd almost detected something.
But, that's far too much of a pain to bother figuring out how to improve it, or even unravel it. She turns back around to face Accord.
"His power's kind of like Tricksters," Giselle says. "Unfortunately, it's not sight based or sensory based so I can't help. As you've no doubt concluded, I'm better with physical things."
"Confirmation is always better than hearsay," Accord says. "Lots of people are very interested in you, Miss Willis. But I've been informed you'd better head back to Brockton Bay as soon as possible."
Giselle tilts her head.
"There's nothing pressing," she says. "I just need a bank account."
"I have already gone ahead and established one for you alongside your new identity," Accord says. "I don't mean meaningless add-ons. I am referring to your part on the stage of Brockton Bay. You must head back there immediately, Miss Willis. The show is going on without you."
If her brother manages to get in horrible trouble the one day she's not in the city.
"Most romantic ballets only have two acts," Giselle says. "As a classical ballet, Swan Lake has four. But despite the fact that it has four acts, it only has three locations, with acts two and four both taking place by the lake formed of tears."
"Who's tears?" Accord asks. He seems genuinely curious.
"When Odette was cursed to become a swan, her mother became so distraught that she wept enough bitter tears to form the lake that Odette then lives in," Giselle says. "Her mother presumably died at some point after that, because she's not present in the ballet."
"If her mother hadn't cried those tears, then Odette would be a swan without a lake," Accord says. "Her contribution seems integral, if personally futile."
"That's a new point of view," Giselle says. "I'll consider it."
"Do so," Accord says, and waves a hand in dismissal.
Giselle calls Assault's number on the way back.
"I have a bank account now," she says. "Armsmaster can send the money."
"That's great!" Assault says brightly. "Quicker than the timeline you gave, as well. I'm actually going to give you his number so you can call him directly."
There's a loud clang from his side of the phone.
"Is there a problem?" Giselle says.
"Oh, just a normal night in the city," Assault says. "Nothing to worry about! I've sent you his number, so I gotta go, bye!"
The phone clicks off.
Trickster's foot on the gas presses down harder.
Giselle dials her brother instead of Armsmaster.
The phone rings for a long time and then tries to go to a voicemail that he hasn't ever set up.
She hangs up and stares at it for a bit.
"The original Swan Lake demands that Odette die in the last act," she says conversationally. "She decides she'd rather die than remain a swan, dies, and then reunites with the lover that betrayed her in heaven."
"Kind of gross," Trickster says.
"In the next variation, her lover throws her freedom away in the form of a crown," Giselle says. "''Willing or unwilling, you will always remain with me!' And then the lake of tears rises up and drowns them both."
"It's difficult to throw crowns away," James says.
"Swan Lake has at least 19 different ending variants," Giselle says. "Many of them revised from a tragedy into a happy ending."
She stares down at her phone again.
"However, even the happy endings, I don't think are happy. Since she always reunites with him. She forgives him, her forgiveness breaks the curse, and all is well."
"What's she forgiving him for?" Trickster asks blankly. "I don't know shit about your shows, Giselle."
Ah.
"She needs him to swear to love only her in order to break the spell," Giselle clarifies. "But he can't tell her apart from someone else, so he swears love to that person instead, and fails her."
"Can't he just take it back?"
"'Only her'," Giselle says dully. "How can you take that back?"
Trickster sighs softly, hands clenching on the steering wheel.
"Girls take promises so seriously," he mutters.
"In most productions, Odette and Odile are played by the same ballerina," Giselle says. "So it's an understandable mistake to make, from an audience perspective."
She taps her finger against the glass of the window.
"But in Tchaikovsky's original, it's thought that two different ballerinas were meant to play Odette and Odile. So, the ballets after his... are just making excuses."
"Sometimes people are reflections of each other even if they don't look identical," James points out.
Giselle looks up and meets her own eyes in his face through the rear view mirror.
"I'd still be disappointed," Giselle says. "If someone couldn't tell me apart. Even if everyone there was exactly identical to me."
"Better hope you don't get turned into a swan, then," Trickster says.
It's too late for that.
Giselle eventually dials her next number.
"This is Armsmaster," a low, tense voice says. "Who are you, and how did you get this number?"
"I'm Prognosis," Giselle says politely. "I'm calling to tell you that I have a bank account now. The agreement with the PRT was for $60,000 but I didn't specify who was paying for that, you privately or the PRT in general. Either way, I don't care. Call me back when you have it sorted out."
"Look, Prognosis, I don't have time for this right now--"
"Is something wrong?" Giselle asks politely.
Next to her, James urgently shoves his own phone in front of her face.
EMPIRE 88 CAPE IDENTITIES LEAKED!? NAZI DOCTORS ON THE LOOSE!
"Are you still in that hospital," Giselle says.
"Yes," Armsmaster says through gritted teeth.
"The debt doesn't end with death," Giselle says, and hangs up.
In the front seat, Trickster's phone begins to ring.
Redcoat_Officer
Long Live the King
As always your chapters are so full of depth that it's hard to wrap my head around it all once they're over. What I will say at the start, though, is that I have never been more shocked by any Wormfic than when you revealed that James was standing within touching distance of Panacea. No Endbringer arrival or Slaughterhouse Nine attack has managed to make me physically gasp in horror. It's probably close to the feeling a person gets from seeing an unattended toddler run out into the road.
Giselle remains truly one of a kind. Her perspective continues to enthral me, and her conversation with Triumph over the value of the Protectorate's payment in haute couture was a real return to force. She also weathered Lung's visit well, I feel, especially after he rudely interrupted her iconic long-winded ballet metaphor.
On that subject, I found the following exchange simply fascinating, and I cannot wait to see what it leads to.
And yet, without her mother's tears Giselle would not be there.
Giselle remains truly one of a kind. Her perspective continues to enthral me, and her conversation with Triumph over the value of the Protectorate's payment in haute couture was a real return to force. She also weathered Lung's visit well, I feel, especially after he rudely interrupted her iconic long-winded ballet metaphor.
On that subject, I found the following exchange simply fascinating, and I cannot wait to see what it leads to.
It's wonderful that Giselle found a kindred spirit in Accord, and I think it's a brilliant piece of characterisation how he's the only one who's able to turn a long-winded ballet metaphor back onto Giselle herself. As part of the Heartbroken, Giselle's mother has always been less than set-dressing to her life. She's never been mentioned, with all of Giselle's devotion reserved for Heartbreaker, but even Alec and Cherie never mention their mothers in canon.
And yet, without her mother's tears Giselle would not be there.
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Dying flowers really crop up in this chapter, I like it. I'm not smart enough to know what it means, but it ties the vibes together. James being bad at caring for living things is interesting and also makes his interaction with Amy really tense. Every time James does anything he reminds me of existing in the space of a wild animal. Like I flinch every time he moves suddenly in the text. Like he's both the man and the bear in the man or bear thought experiment. Some probably malicious man-bear hybrid that sees the potential of my skeleton.
- Location
- USA
i love these maladjusted little weirdos
- Location
- USA
It's interesting reading everyone else's comments. I had not considered James being near Pancea anymore dangerous than him being within lunging distance of anyone.
Yes objectively taking out the world's best healer/flesh shaper would suck for everyone, but it wouldn't allow Hob to snowball any harder than he allready can, and he'd be doing it within range of someone who can melt his face if she decides it's a good idea.
Anyway loving the character interactions. Thanks for writing.
Yes objectively taking out the world's best healer/flesh shaper would suck for everyone, but it wouldn't allow Hob to snowball any harder than he allready can, and he'd be doing it within range of someone who can melt his face if she decides it's a good idea.
Anyway loving the character interactions. Thanks for writing.
That's actually really insightful and a good lesson to learn.
I think Lung is kinda looking at her like she's a baby monster.
He used to be an accountant or something.
He's been a hero for a long long time and a popular one at that so he gets the sales revenue of his merch.
Giselle is horrendously deadly.
She should likely learn medicine.
Capes are notable to her.
Glory Girl is kinda freaking way to much.
It's the little things that get to you.
Her power lets her know wear and tear.
I like that she choose it based off her passion.
She seems to respect him.
It's what her power is meant for after all.
She's gotten a reputation for herself, both in being able to heal and enhance powers.
He's caught on to how to talk to her really quickly.
Good to know where they are in the timeline.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
Fashion and ballet?zarinthel said:
Casually awful.
Beautiful and poisonous, from root to blossom. Sick burn, King.