- Location
- Philippines
People really want to see Supermodel Joe in public.
Also free shipping
Brockton's Celestial Forge (Worm/Jumpchain)
- Thread starter LordRoustabout
- Start date
People really want to see Supermodel Joe in public.
Also free shipping
While we're on the topic of supermodel Joe. you know how like Joe is basically a modern day Adonis while not even trying and actually has to use illusions to look even remotely normal. what happens when Joe is trying his best to look good like new costume specifically designed to be beautiful like sing into the unseen runes maybe a bowtie of beauty. What happens then how would the empire merchants the travelers the undersiders the wards the protectorate the prt basically everyone how would they react to Joe being all beautiful and sexy and fancy and stuff
- Location
- Poland
I was rereading the last chapter, as one does, and realized something:
The Matrix is all of the nanites at once
The Matrix is on the Final Frontier
The Key will be returned if lost - or ''lost''
Joe can give a Key to the Matrix
Which means Joe will have physical access to the Passenger space soon.
Well, relatively soon, could be 2 years real time
The Matrix is all of the nanites at once
The Matrix is on the Final Frontier
The Key will be returned if lost - or ''lost''
Joe can give a Key to the Matrix
Which means Joe will have physical access to the Passenger space soon.
Well, relatively soon, could be 2 years real time
This is actually huge. Let's hope our Lord has figured this out too, because there is no reason Joe wouldn't consider this if the story was real.I was rereading the last chapter, as one does, and realized something:
The Matrix is all of the nanites at once
The Matrix is on the Final Frontier
The Key will be returned if lost - or ''lost''
Joe can give a Key to the Matrix
Which means Joe will have physical access to the Passenger space soon.
Well, relatively soon, could be 2 years real time
- Pronouns
- He
None. What's canon is : Joe sit down near Crystal in class without recognizing her. That's it.
It won't stop us from shipping them. Example from the BCF discord :
BarbaCoPut
Voluta indomita
- Location
- Argentina
- Pronouns
- He/His
Standard internet protocols
Ship everyone together with anything we can find including the kitchen sink?
Especially if they are from a different series/universe.
- Location
- Right Where I Am
The important fact to remember about Keys to the Workshop is that the place is the team headquarters for the Celestial Forge and one and only home for the majority of them. Joe giving a Key to anyone else before each member of the team has one would be so out of character for him as to give a reader whiplash.
- Location
- Philippines
Honestly Aisha's likely the first receiver considering literally everyone else lives in the Workshop in the first place.
Edit: Nevermind, it was Garment, though mostly so Garment could go to her studio immediately. Aisha's probably next after.
Last edited:
- Location
- That place where I live?
The hour of our ascension draws nearer, we can but only pray the stars are right, that we might receive our Lord's kindness
- Location
- Right Where I Am
It's not exactly wrong. Tetra arrived as a life fiber equivalent of an infant, and Garment has been right there bonded with Joe and intimately involved in helping raise Tetra into personhood.Also also, I believe that every time Apeiron goes out to battle, Garment is with him all the time! Just look at those immaculate gloves!
►NotALazyHam Replied On Apr 22nd 2011
A comparison to a couple raising an adopted child together isn't that inaccurate.
I think Avid glove is more of an adopted child to them.
- Location
- Philippines
Joe is kind of Suprise Baby Acquisition tag on steroids, except they're both fabric based and the "mother" is a pair of gloves. Tetra takes after her father while Avid is half-horror, half Garment.
83.1 Interlude Alec - Addendum Joe
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
83.1 Interlude Alec - Addendum Joe
Alec took a breath in the comfort of his room. He had taken a lot of breaths in the process of slowly working himself up to be able to make the fucking call. Of all the problems that had come from that mess at the storage yard and healing from Joe, the anxiety over meaningless bullshit was one he hadn't seen coming. It was one thing to be aware of other people in a deeper way and to find yourself with concerning investments and connections that you couldn't just ignore. It was another for millions of scenarios of horrible outcomes to spin off in your mind whenever you tried to do the simplest shit.
Honestly, he didn't want to make this call. He never would have wanted to make a call like this. He resented Lisa for forcing his hand. This was specifically the kind of shit she was supposed to deal with. It was practically her job description as the team smartass.
She hadn't been dealing with it. She couldn't deal with it, couldn't deal with anything right now. It was almost funny, thinking back to how he would have handled the situation, back before everything in his head got turned upside down. The only important things would have been the surface level aspects. The ones he would have had to deal with. Lisa wasn't able to do her job. It was as simple as that. She provided planning and assessments in the field, and both of those had gone to shit.
For the old Alec that would have been the problem. He might have called her out on it, either directly or just made passive aggressive comments at every opportunity until someone else dealt with the problem. Worst case he probably would have pestered Brian to do something. To deal with the problem to get things back to some sense of balance.
Now it wasn't just about him. Oh, he didn't like the way it was affecting him, but that wasn't the end of it like it used to be. Lisa was falling apart. He could see it, now that he was actually looking. It was bringing back memories he'd prefer to keep buried. The mounting tension on women who desperately tried to live up to expectations they couldn't hope to. Tried to manage situations well beyond them, with no hope and no place to turn until they broke, or were broken.
He had learned not to feel for them. Not to feel for anyone in that situation. Close yourself off and never give an inch. Learn where the land mines are and step carefully, but never allow anyone to see weakness or get too close. It was the kind of environment that did things to you. It had to. You needed to change the way you thought, the way you reacted to things if you were going to survive.
Honestly, it was barely even a change. That kind of implied there had been something else. Growing up, it just became normal. You weren't twisted into that shape; you grew into it.
He knew that he didn't work the way other people did. That was fine. He wasn't like other people. Both as a cape and because of his family, that disconnect was always there, but it was something he was used to. It was helpful. Like those glass walls at the zoo. You could see the rest of the world, but not fully interact with it. And that was fine, because there was usually a good reason for those kinds of walls to be put in place.
And now the walls had come down. He wasn't sitting in a comfortable space watching a detached show anymore. He was part of it, and he didn't like what that brought with it.
It wasn't like Joe had turned him into some wonderful person bubbling about the power of friendship and the importance of pulling together to overcome any obstacle. He knew what he was. That hadn't changed. No, the only difference was he could look a little deeper and realize how fucked they really were.
Lisa was lying to herself with the same skill she usually reserved for her enemies. She had barely been holding it together since the storage yard and hadn't been getting better. She had little bursts of improvement, or possibly points where the damage was less obvious, but those were steamrolled the next time something crazy happened.
Which was about every three days, if you went by the memes.
Brian had been as fucked up by his experience with Bakuda as any of them, but had been working to cover it up. He hadn't been run ragged like Lisa, but Alec knew what was going on behind the scenes. Totally committed to a team that probably didn't even work in concept anymore, all for the sake of looking after his sister. Brian didn't have an out to the team the way he, Rachel, and Taylor did. He needed the group to continue as the only way to achieve his goal.
He'd gotten a close look at that side of Brian's life. It wasn't just something his old mindset had held him back from. There was a sense of separation that went beyond that. When they had stumbled into his old friends on Thursday night it was like Brian was being confronted with the ghosts of Christmases past.
Alec knew people tended to divide their lives into pre and post trigger periods, but it was more severe for some people than others. He'd seen it in his own family. Finally triggering himself and being able to stand up to his father's power. Resist the effects of his siblings' abilities. Watched the same things happen to others. Dynamics changing after a trigger. Someone who was pushed too hard suddenly becoming a rock that people moved around rather than part of the shifting mass that tried to adapt to the environment. Pressure shifted, new targets were found, which pushed more people to trigger.
His father knew about it, obviously. Probably encouraged it. Liked the idea of his own army of child soldiers. In reality it didn't really play out like that. At best you had a common cause based on outside threats and interdependency. One that was hard to break free from, as he well knew.
Brian hadn't needed to deal with that kind of mess of shifting dynamics when he triggered. Instead, he just moved on to a new stage of his life, gradually cutting ties with any parts of his past that weren't directly relevant anymore. Until he was reminded that his past wasn't just going to sit quietly in the corner while he pretended it didn't exist.
Okay, it probably didn't help that Brian's old gym had basically become a coordination point for half of the recovery efforts of the Docks. That was a development that seemed to as much as shock to the people involved as it did to Brian. The consensus seemed to be that it was a series of 'lucky' breaks, first a new cape debuting near the place and using it for a media event, then it being a hub for major donations, probably because of the media event, then it somehow managing to organize all the chaos that was being filtered through that place without collapsing under the strain. You know, because it was a boxing gym, not a community center.
He had visited the place himself, and not just as a way to irritate Brian. With the boss throwing a quarter million at the team for their wonderful showing at Somer's Rock, Alec had fifty grand to blow in a city where most of his usual haunts were closed down.
Okay, only ten grand of that was in cash, and the rest in some secret villain savings account, but still, it was nothing to drop a couple hundred on supplies and treats for the hard-working volunteers. It also let him get away with gossiping with the organizers rather than being drafted into manual labor, though that probably didn't help Brian with any rumors that might have been developing.
Between listening to stories about Brian's glory days in the gym and the shame it was that he gave up on the sport and dodging implied questions about how he knew Brian and the nature of their relationship, Alec had been able to pick up the latest news about Brian's sister. Mostly, people talked about her more like a stray cat than a person. Someone who they collectively needed to look out for, but without any real connection. Hints of legal problems were dropped in oblique ways. Not actually doing anything so tasteless as to gossip about her stint in Juvie, but of course they could talk about how hard it was for her father to deal with everything.
Which made the current situation all the more surprising, and something people were happy to discuss openly. Brian's sister, Aisha, had landed an internship or part time job with Garment. The new cape was practically the patron saint of that gym from the way people talked about her. They seemed to see her taking in Aisha as some kind of act of benevolence, evidence of endless patience on Garment's part. There was all kinds of talk about what it could mean and where things would end up.
Alec didn't know about what it meant in general, but he knew it guaranteed extra headaches for Brian. Generally, the leader of a major villain team wouldn't want their sister playing personal assistant to a cape hosting a major get-together of the city's heroes. Though she was hardly the only one. Alec had just narrowly avoided being conscripted into helping out at the event when he'd been cornered by an old Jewish woman who, despite her tiny body, managed to command the presence of a decorated field marshal.
So Brian had walked away from his old life, focusing on the team and the resources he could obtain from the boss, only to find his old life unwilling to wait for him. As entertaining as the entire soap opera situation was, it presented another layer of concerns for Brian that the team did not need right now.
There was the other side of those concerns as well. Alec had already begun to have his doubts about their boss before Somer's Rock. Honestly, he always knew the guy was probably bad news. The type of person who would set up a group like the Undersiders wasn't someone you'd want to cross. Even so, you stay on the right side of guys like that and you're usually fine. Unless they were completely deranged, crime lords typically didn't go after their own employees for no reason.
Though they might throw them away. Looking back at the bank job, it was hard not to think of it like that. The whole thing stunk of some kind of setup. The second they saw all the Wards on site he knew something was wrong. Even Lisa had been taken aback by it.
It didn't escape him that if someone wanted to get rid of a mostly deniable asset, setting them up on a near impossible task and tipping off the heroes was a good way to do it. Then again, he had thrown a lot of money at Joe beforehand, so he probably wasn't planning for them to fail. It stunk of one of those 'wheels within wheels' things that thinkers love so much, where even if everything went to shit they could twirl their mustaches and announce how everything went exactly according to plan.
Now he was picturing Lisa with a villain mustache. It weirdly worked for her. Not the actual mustache, but certainly the feel behind the twirling motion.
Still, what was the situation they were looking at here? Nobody expected them to make it out of the bank, and definitely didn't expect them to hand the Wards their asses in the process. Literally, in Taylor's case. In all likelihood they had been riding a series of fallback or improvised plans thrown together for a situation that wasn't something anybody could have prepared for.
That 'something' being Joe, and the 'anybody' was Lisa, their boss, March, the other gangs, the PRT, and probably several global level cape agencies. Hell, they had Dragon on their doorstep and she was basically a footnote in the insanity.
He didn't trust Lisa's ability to manage this. Despite her promises, she'd come out of her last call with Joe with only the vaguest assurances about Joe's team. Confirmation that they didn't know any personal details about them, but no information on who they were or where they'd come from. It wasn't like they were entitled to be informed of any of Joe's plans. If anything, the opposite was true. Still, with everything that had happened, he figured they had a good enough relationship to warrant a heads-up, rather than being completely blindsided.
The whole thing seemed like the product of a set of power plays between Lisa, Joe, and the gangs. Even Brian's insistence that they come off as completely independent and avoid any direct associations with Joe. Well, mission accomplished. Nobody would be thinking of them as Apeiron's team anymore.
From what he could tell Lisa had gotten almost nothing from the call. She was optimistic about it, but was extra deflective about the details to the point where even Brian seemed annoyed. With everything she was dealing with and everything she was trying to keep in the air she probably wasn't the best person to act as their contact with Joe. The problem was that so far she'd been the only one trying.
Obviously, because who else would be willing or able to do it? Well, Brian, but that was out the window. It was clear he was far from an objective party right now, to say nothing of his current family concerns. Rachel was prepared to ride things out, confident that Joe would step in to save their bacon if things got too heavy. And then there was Taylor.
Taylor was hiding something. Lisa obviously knew Taylor was hiding something, but was okay with her on the team. Brian was probably too caught up in his own shit to notice anything, and Rachel definitely didn't care, leaving him the only third party to the situation.
Whatever was being concealed wasn't minor. Taylor wouldn't have been as careful about concealing things if this were just some personal detail or embarrassing secret she wanted to avoid coming to light. Not after she had opened up about her trigger event. Which was another thing provoking more serious reactions than it had before the storage yard. Though after living through that he didn't really want to think about anything locker related if he could possibly help it.
Joe had some connection with Taylor that went beyond the rest of the group. At the very least you could set aside jokes about star-crossed love. No matter what read people thought they could pull from the videos, there was no hint of that kind of thing in person. Not that kind of thing, but something. Regent didn't know what it was, but anyone could tell she was important to Joe.
Which was another thing about this call that was extra awkward. As illogical as it seemed, Regent couldn't shake the feeling that he was calling to tattle on his team. It was childish, and the rules of playground discretion hardly applied to cape life, but that didn't change the impression it left on him.
But someone needed to talk to Joe, someone who wasn't trying to manage him or steer the situation or cover for whatever hidden objective was being kept from the rest of the group.
Fuck, that basically described Brian, Lisa, and Taylor. No wonder they were fucked. More than half the team was drunk on their own bullshit.
He had hemmed and hawed long enough. This wasn't going to get any better by putting it off. With all the shit he'd dealt with in his life he'd be damned if he was going to lose to a phone call.
"Watch." He said. "Video call to Joe."
The band gave a chirp of acknowledgement and the familiar floating screen appeared in front of him. To be perfectly honest, he was half hoping to end up with some kind of call waiting or message service. Any excuse to throw out something about needing to talk, then kicking this down the road, to a point where it would probably be an even bigger issue for both him and the team.
Fortunately, depending on your perspective, the call was answered. The small screen in the corner showed Alec sitting in his admitted pig-sty of a room in the Undersiders' headquarters. The larger screen filled with an image of Apeiron in full costume.
The force of everything that had been on display at Somer's rock filled the image. Joe sat behind an immaculate oak desk in a beautiful office fully kitted out with all of his ridiculously deadly equipment. The jacket was adorned with armored plates glowing with unknown technologies. A white cape was clipped to one shoulder and flowed over his back, though without the subtle billowing effect that had been present at the summit. Once again his face was exposed save for his eyes, hidden behind a high-tech visor.
Seen up close, his facial structure was still recognizable as Joe, but like a version of Joe that had been touched up and refined in order to strike the perfect impression. He had already seen the way Joe's build had shifted, from lanky to bigger than Brian to some ideal midpoint between them, so it wasn't like physical shifts were impossible. Still, things like facial structure or the way his hair had a single glowing red lock standing out took it to another level.
Still, Alec did his best to bury those reactions. "Hey Joe." He said as casually as he could manage. "Did I catch you in the middle of something, or do you just hang out like that?"
Joe smiled, a good sign, and took the visor off of his face. "The end of something, actually. And sometimes I do. Costume is actually crazy comfortable."
He wasn't wrong on that front. Alec was fairly certain Joe had done his best to sandbag when it came to their costumes, except Taylor's, and even then, they were the most comfortable clothes he had ever worn. Part of that was the fit, the way it was perfectly built for his body in a way that bordered on creepy, but there was more than that. Materials, design, style, weight, it was all balanced to perfection, creating a costume that felt more natural than his normal clothes, despite apparently being armored to a ridiculous degree.
"Yeah, I get that." He replied, looking over Joe's appearance again. Even his eyes seemed different, with the pupils giving the impression of gears or spokes.
Somehow, that was what really drove it home. The Undersiders had been through some shit, but so had Joe. The world had seen him blown apart, then pull himself back together to fight on until he was hanging limply off of a rocket pack like meat off a hook. Scooped up by Lethe and whisked away not to be seen publicly until Brian and Lisa dragged him into the mess of Somer's Rock.
He felt like he should say something about it, but nothing came to mind that wasn't shallow or crass. Or worse, something that could be taken as an invitation to bring up his own experience. No, they were guys talking. They would do the appropriate thing and pretend all the horrible stuff that happened wasn't a problem.
Instead, they would talk about everyone else's problems, which totally wasn't some masculine tactic to avoid dealing with your own issues by directing all your energy outward.
"I heard about your call with Lisa." He said. He saw a look of amusement on Joe's face that Lisa definitely didn't share.
"How's she doing?" He asked, sincerely as far as Alec could tell.
"In pretty good spirits, comparatively speaking." He replied. "She's been going pretty hard lately." It felt like a minor betrayal to share even that much. It was something that wouldn't have bothered him before, and only the tip of the iceberg of what he had to cover. "Still, wasn't keen to share details."
"She's getting back to normal then?" Joe joked.
"Ha." Alec shot back. "Yeah, normal for her. Which is fine when we're dealing with normal cape stuff, but this seemed a bit higher priority, so…" He trailed off, not sure how to phrase things.
"So, you decided to call for yourself?" There was no admonishment in his tone. No presumption that Alec had reached beyond his station or was bothering him with petty concerns. If anything, he seemed happy for the opportunity to talk.
"Yeah, if that's okay." He replied with an unfamiliar unsteadiness.
"Alec, I handed out those watches with the intention that they would be used. They're not just for emergencies. The whole point was that communication would probably help avoid problems like what we ran into before." He explained. "And honestly, I get how stressful it would probably be to have Lisa as your main source of information."
"It's usually fine." He said in her defense. "But things haven't exactly been usual lately." He swallowed. "For me or the team."
"How have you been managing?" Joe asked, leaning forward. "I don't have a lot of comparative points for neurological shifts during healing. That was kind of new territory."
Exactly what you wanted to hear from the person who had messed with your brain. Still, Joe had been very clear. No damage, not even a risk of a problem. Just a change. Probably something most people would consider a positive change, but that was assuming they had some baseline to fall back on, rather than the empty air he had found under his feet.
"I'm managing." He said as optimistically as he could. "Adjusting. It's… it's a lot to deal with, especially with everything else that's going on." He swallowed. "The team's not in great shape."
"You mentioned that, back before Somer's Rock." He said.
"And it hasn't gotten better. Don't get me wrong, it was a miracle we made it through that in one piece." Between Joe debuting his team, the appearance of extra groups that nobody knew about, and the Teeth deciding to crash the party, and the Empire needing to buy their way out of a gang war it had turned into a circus. Which was ironic, considering Circus was one of the few villains who had decided to sit the thing out.
Joe nodded. "All in all, it was probably the best we could have hoped for." He said, like he hadn't been the person basically dictating terms for the city.
Because, looking at him, even with the striking superhero costume, the unnatural hair and eyes, the impossible precision and smoothness of his motions, it was surprisingly easy to ignore all of that and just fall into a normal conversation.
It was the kind of thing that probably drove Tattletale nuts. Being able to shift through such drastically different tones with trivial ease, to effectively control the landscape of the conversation, was something she would kill to achieve. But for Joe it didn't come across as a tactical decision. He was never completely open with them, but the friendly personality that joked with them over pizza seemed to be the real deal, or at least something Joe preferred to default to.
You could go six layers deep in terms of strategy and counter strategy, reasons for every motion and twitch, why he presented certain appearances or used specific tones of voice. But that assumed he was actively managing things to that level. More specifically, it assumed he cared enough to try to manage things to that level. There were a million reasons he could have had for answering the phone in his full cape gear, gear more advanced than what had basically fought the entire ABB to a standstill during the Ungodly Hour, but somehow Alec was willing to bet the real reason was exactly what Joe had said. He answered the call in his costume because he'd been in his costume when Alec called.
There was kind of a freeing sensation with accepting that, at this point, Joe didn't need to play those kinds of games. Joe had the ability to be straightforward because any advantage he could gain from petty deception was nothing compared to the advantages he already possessed. The logic probably wasn't perfect, but if you accepted the gap in power it actually made it easier to deal with.
At least for him. For Tattletale and even for Brian he doubted they could be nearly as comfortable with the idea that jockeying for a slight edge in dealing with Joe was effectively meaningless.
Alec let out a sigh. "There were some close calls there. I know the team came out looking like roses, but it hit them hard." He shifted in discomfort. "I don't want to come off like a narc here, but I figured you should probably be filled in on the situation, and in her current state I don't trust Lisa to keep you up to speed."
He could trust her even less in peak form, but phrasing this as a personal concern rather than inherent mistrust would probably be easier for everyone involved.
"I appreciate that." Joe didn't comment further.
This was new ground for Alec. Was this betrayal of friends or interceding for their own good? Once again, he missed the days where he would have just ignored the problem, or gone with whatever seemed most entertaining at the time.
"I'm guessing you picked up on what Lisa was dealing with?" Joe gave a slight nod. He'd need to be blind not to. "It's a lot worse than she lets on. The thing with Bakuda, then her power basically fritzing out." He shook his head. "She's been skimming along, but I know she's come close to crashing a few times. She's used to playing things at a higher level and I know she's trying for something bigger than what we can handle."
He considered elaborating, but decided against it. No way to do so without throwing out unfounded suspicions or coming across as overly concerned and sentimental. Instead, he moved on to Brian.
"Brian's in the same boat. Still recovering back from Bakuda and has been kind of mono-focused on the team." A ghost of a smile crossed Alec's face as he considered Brian's earlier actions with what he knew now. "He was always good at that, keeping the team on track. Better than Lisa for a lot of stuff, but things are different now and he's still trying to power through like nothing's changed."
He considered how much he could share. Family stuff, at least for families that weren't complete dysfunctional nightmares, was a lot more sensitive than just general health concerns. Actually, the dysfunction didn't actually make the topic any less sensitive. If anything, it made it worse.
"He's been working on something for a long time. It's tied into his position on the team, so he's really focused on keeping that together, even with everything that happened." He gave Joe an apologetic look. "I'd go into more detail, but it's kind of personal stuff."
"Don't worry about it." He said and Alec nodded in gratitude as he shifted to the next member of the team.
"Everyone's still pissed at Rachel about attacking that dog fighting ring. Oh, that wasn't something we planned out. Brian probably would have given you a head up if it was." Not that Bitch would have been able to sell the idea. Provoking the Empire for no profit wasn't something that was likely to fly. No wonder she had gone on her own.
"I figured." He said. Alec gave a nod of acknowledgement. Between the watches silencing all discussions and Brian's own impassive appearance with his mask and darkness they came off as a completely united front. Nobody saw the frantic screaming match between Rachel, Lisa and Grue, with him and Taylor as unwelcome additions. Even if Lisa was very clear about Joe not spying on their watches, there were a hundred ways he could have noticed the near meltdown happening at the next table.
"Lisa was happy about the reputation boost from dealing with the Empire, but I know Brian would have rather taken a payout." Alec would have as well, and he didn't have Brian's expenses to worry about. "People are pissed, but she's kind of riding things out, going along with the new plan." He looked up. "Did Lisa tell you about that?"
"New direction. No more heists and support for stabilization efforts during the truce." He replied.
Alec nodded. "That's most of it, but there was an implication. I don't want to put words in her mouth, but it was clear Brian was on board for the idea as well. There's a push for the team to step up. It's probably not just going to be 'stabilization' or whatever during the truce. We're headed for heavier stuff, especially afterwards."
"What is afterwards, exactly?" He asked.
Alec took a breath. "Meeting with the boss, in person. It's coming up, and that's going to be a tipping point." He gave Joe a look of concern. "I get you haven't been doing this that long…" He paused, remembering the shifts in demeanor, the way Joe could act like an old hand at certain skills you didn't see outside of heavy combat experience. Lisa's claims about how long he'd known his team. Suddenly making assumptions about relative experience didn't seem that cut and dry.
Joe picked up on his hesitancy and just waved him off. Alec cleared his throat before continuing. "Right. Thing is, when a guy who's gone to great lengths to keep his identity hidden wants a face-to-face meeting, it's usually pretty serious. The 'no going back' kind of serious. Everyone's rushing forward like they can make the call after they hear his pitch, but those kinds of pitches don't usually have an easy out."
He became aware of the edge of emotion that had started to creep into his words and quickly calmed himself. He looked up, carefully watching Joe's reaction.
Joe sank back into a chair that looked like it belonged at the head of a hundred-foot-long table. As over-designed as the rest of the office, but clearly completely functional. He lifted his head and gave Alec a slight nod.
"Thank you for letting me know. Something like this couldn't have been easy for you." Alec didn't know if that was just reassurance or some product of his thinker power or information resources. "I've had a sense of some of this, but I didn't realize it was this bad."
"I can't imagine Lisa was keen to share that little detail." He paused, then pressed forward. "Do I want to know the line she tried to sell you?"
That got a ghost of a smile out of Joe. "The sale didn't actually go as well as she wanted." He said with a faint grin. "Got her to be at least fifty percent upfront with me."
Alec gave Joe a very skeptical look. "How the hell did that happen?"
"I might have pressed her a bit hard on some of the stuff she was trying to sell." He shook his head, like he hadn't just recounted what must have been a truly terrifying event for Lisa. "I know Lisa's working on something, and she at least thinks she had a good reason for keeping it from everyone."
Alec could connect the dots. "She's still keeping it from you?"
The only way he could see that making sense was if Joe was letting Lisa keep the secret, the same way he did with the watches. Probably the same way he did with everything about everyone. He'd seen what Survey was able to do with her scans. He wasn't the most observant person in the world, but even he could tell that picking a specific gun out of a van from several blocks away was a big fucking deal.
"Like you said, she's not holding up well. She wanted more time to get a handle on things before bringing me on board." He explained.
Alec felt himself tense and shook his head. "She's not going to like that you told me that. If she's got some supersecret plan she's probably trying to set everything perfectly for some masterstroke. Will be afraid that the rest of us even knowing something going on will fuck up everything."
Or she was completely desperate and just trying to get some level of control on a situation that was falling apart. Personally, he preferred the image of Lisa as the implacable mastermind rather than a normal person scrambling in desperate hope of avoiding disaster.
And not just because he was liable to be caught up in that disaster.
"Lisa having something going on isn't exactly the news flash of the century. Having me tangentially involved probably isn't going to shock anyone either." Joe explained. "We're going to be checking in with each other going forward. Making sure things don't get out of hand."
Alec nodded. So, Lisa had a scheme. Lisa always had a scheme. She also had support on her scheme, so that was possibly good. At least it was better than if she was trying to pull some future-of-the-city shit while sleep deprived and close to burnout. If nothing else, Joe would probably make sure she didn't kill herself in the attempt.
"As for the rest of them…" Joe shrugged. "Glad to hear Rachel is managing. I knew there was going to be fallout from that, but I'm not really mourning the loss of those fighting rings."
Dog person. Or animal person. Or just human decency person. Either way, it was lucky for Rachel.
"And Brian?" Alec asked. He paused as he watched Joe's reaction. "You knew something already? What, thinker power? Like with me?"
He remembered Joe's words. In a bad place and trying to get out of it. Worried about 'bad stuff' in his past. Honestly, the vaguely positive words were the biggest endorsement he could imagine with respect to him ditching Heartbreaker and the rest of his family. It was something that felt uplifting and foreboding at the same time. Like Joe was only putting up with him because of his good thinker vibes. Alec had to wonder what would happen to those vibes if the truth about what he'd done back then came to light.
"I do. I know that he's trying to protect someone, that it's a big deal for him. From what you said the Undersiders are probably what's letting him do that." Joe explained, picking apart Brian's entire motivation without unearthing any specific details.
"Yeah." Alec said, and hoped that confirmation didn't count as a betrayal. "I know some of what's happening. Uh, just a heads up, he's probably going to be really resistant to anything that compromises the team, if that's in the cards."
"Thanks." Joe said. "I'll keep that in mind. It's not the kind of thing I'd want to be blindsided by."
Alec blinked. Joe hadn't dismissed his concerns, or offered reassurance. Just thanked him for the heads up. It wasn't an outright confirmation that he was working with Lisa on something that would shatter the team, but Alec could probably be forgiven if his mind immediately jumped to that point.
Alec didn't want to lose the team. Sure, there were conveniences and creature comforts attached to the hideout and cash flow they saw, but at the end of the day he could admit that he actually liked the company of the rest of the team. Or could admit it now. Before it would have been what, he appreciated them? Acknowledged their value, both as capes and entertainment? Held them as a buffer against his family?
As much as he cursed the changes the healing had brought, that was one he didn't particularly mind, at least beyond concerns over what would happen if the team fell apart. If Lisa tried a stupid scheme dreamed up on two hours of sleep, or Brian dragged them into a gang war believing it was the only way to maintain things, or Rachel just up and left, or Taylor did whatever thing she was planning and keeping secret.
He didn't want that to happen, but he didn't know how to stop it from happening, at least beyond putting his cards on the table and hoping Joe was feeling like a generous dealer.
He looked back at Joe and froze. It was that fucking pose. The strategy trance or power meditation or communing with the cosmos or whatever you wanted to fucking call it, and it was happening during their call. And it was big. Alec could see that. Whatever this was, it was a big one, which was about the last thing he wanted to deal with right now.
"Joe?" He called. "Joe!" The impossible tinker blinked and met his eyes again. "Is something wrong?"
"No." Joe said with more levity in his voice than Alec expected. "Definitely not. Just the opposite really."
"What?" Alec asked.
"It's nothing you need to worry about. Well, nothing I need to worry about. Not anymore." Alec gave him a concerned look. Well, there was a reason he had decided to make this call. The assumption that ninety percent of the bullshit they'd dealt with had occurred because everyone was talking past each other. Might as well ask the question everybody on the planet was asking.
"So, what's the deal with those things?" He asked.
Joe gave him a shocked look. "You're just coming right out and asking?" He replied.
Alec shrugged. "I don't think anyone's asked straight before. Not even to get told to back off, so I figured, why not? Worst thing you can do is say you don't want to tell me."
Actually, there were probably a million worse things that Joe could do, and that wasn't even getting into the rest of his team. But the point of all of this was to try to treat Joe like a person, rather than a natural disaster. A person would either share, or they would shut you down. Maybe they'd get snippy for a bit if it was a sensitive subject, but that was it. You didn't need to treat them like they were a live bomb.
Joe smiled. "Well, not giving you the full details, but everyone knows I'm getting stronger?" Alec nodded. It was the last thing anyone would need to confirm about Apeiron. His ridiculous growth curve was practically his defining feature. "That's part of it."
He didn't say any more, and Alec knew not to push, but even that scrap of information filled in so many gaps. They'd seen it happen when Joe was fighting. When he was talking with them, working on his own, even during the summit. Hell, it had happened like five times during that meeting. Did the gathered villains even know they were watching as Apeiron grew further away from them.
"Thanks for filling me in." He said.
Joe shrugged. "I try to keep that stuff close to the vest, but it doesn't really matter anymore. At least not to me."
There was a finality attached to Joe's words that made Alec nervous. It conveyed a complete disregard of personal risk. Joe had been 'nearly' invincible since the fight at the storage yard. How many of those boosts did he need before he closed the gap? Or at least made it so far that it wasn't worth bothering?
Then the last words hit him. Not mattering to him. To Joe. Joe was fine. It was everybody else who he still needed to be concerned about. And first and foremost was probably the girl he had made the golden armor for.
"Joe, about Taylor." Alec considered how to bring this up.
"I'm guessing the reason you left her out earlier wasn't because everything was fine?" He asked, but there was an edge of weariness to his voice. Thinking back on Taylor's escapades, from bringing down Lung on her first night out to slice and dicing Aegis at the bank, and then Bakuda at the storage yard, one of the better moments of the night, he found himself feeling drained as well, and he only needed to work with the girl. For some reason Joe had taken it on himself to keep her safe. The phrase 'thankless task' didn't seem to do the situation justice.
"No." He took a breath. "There's something she's hiding from the group. She covers it up well, but whatever reason she has for seeing this through, she's not being upfront about it." He looked at Joe and saw a complete lack of surprise. "And you already know."
Because of course he knew. Thinker power, Survey's information, robotic spies, or possibly just figuring it out like he did. He was starting to feel foolish about this entire thing. It was easier to believe that everything would be taken care of, that somebody else was going to be responsible for things. But he had seen the complete absence of that in the team. Apparently the Undersiders were reliant on their debt holder to make sure they didn't fuck everything up irrevocably.
"I know Taylor has something she's working on. And she had been for a while." He admitted.
"Do you know what it is?" Alec asked.
"No." There was a note of sharpness in his voice. "Not something I can get a read on. At least not that." He shook his head. "Look, I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve any of this, at least from the context I have. She's working on it alone, but I'm supporting her on this."
Of course he was. "So, with Taylor and Lisa. Seems like a common stance for you." Alec joked. Joe just gave a tired shrug.
"More like a common obligation. Look, I get why you're concerned, and I'll follow up with Taylor some more, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't do anything that would compromise whatever this is."
"Hey, I didn't even want to get this involved. If I can hand this off without worrying about it blowing up in my face, I'm more than happy to do so. But just to let you know, if I was able to piece this together then Lisa definitely knows."
"I figured." Joe said. "But if she's not concerned about it, it's probably a good sign."
Or it was part of some overly complex scheme, step 517 out of 1,237 on the path to world domination or something similarly ridiculous.
"I hope." He said. "Like I said, she's not been in her best form. Was supposed to find out about your team, but just kept assuring us that they didn't know anything about us."
"Wait, she didn't tell you?" Joe asked.
"Tell us about what?" He replied.
"About my team." Joe said. "Lisa was worried about them. I told her they're on the same network as your watches. You can call them yourselves if you have any questions."
"What?" Alec asked. "No, she didn't mention that." She hadn't mentioned that Survey was now in their contact lists. He had to wonder, was that an intentional oversight, or did the news just throw her so badly that she couldn't figure out how to mention it to the group.
"I told you; the communicators are meant to be used. It's not just an emergency thing. In fact, it's probably better to get in touch before things reach that level." Joe explained.
"And we can just call them whenever?" He replied.
Joe shrugged. "It's still a call. They might not always want to or be able to take it, but you can leave a message or send a text, whatever you want."
"Right." Alec said, sinking back onto his bed. Hell of a thing to drop. He works himself up to try to open communication and Joe lays out that was the point of the watches the whole time. Obvious, and kind of infuriating.
"Hey, are you doing okay?" Joe asked.
Alec let out a dry laugh. "Well, I'm still dealing with a fucked up, or possibly unfucked up brain, which isn't particularly easy. On top of that I'm trying to figure out if this call counts as betraying my team." He looked up. "If this ends up blowing back on me, I don't suppose you're hiring?"
Joe smiled back. "Main positions are pretty well filled, but we can probably wrangle some kind of internship if you're desperate. Pay will suck, but the benefits are pretty decent."
Joe said it with a joking tone, but Alec couldn't deny some level of appeal there. It wasn't like Joe was hard up for anything these days. He had to wonder, for all the emphasis Brian put towards making sure they were a separate entity from Apeiron, did he really understand what they might have been giving up? Because even owing money to Apeiron got you better gear than any Protectorate team he could name.
"Seriously, thank you for the heads up. I don't think they'll hold any of this against you, and honestly if we had better communication you probably wouldn't have needed to unload everything at once." Joe said.
"I'll keep that in mind." Alec replied. "And about that, those 'stabilization efforts'? Nothing's in the works yet, but it's probably going to be big when it happens."
"As long as they stick to the terms, I'm willing to stay out of things." He could hear the reluctance in Joe's voice. "Lisa was pretty clear about a big conflict being bad for the city right now."
The hairs on the back of Alec's neck rose. He had a feeling Lisa hadn't been just talking about him intervening against the Teeth. Another tidbit, and another clue to the scale of what she was pulling.
"Probably right. But when it happens, we're probably going to be called in. Likely it will be without too much notice." He warned.
"I'll keep an eye on things, but I'd appreciate all the warning you can give me. And I do appreciate you reaching out." He shook his head. "Honestly I probably should have done it, but…"
"Lisa?" Alec ventured.
"Lisa. She likes to run things, doesn't she?" There was more weight to that question than Alec wanted to deal with.
"Always has." He said. "Well, I should probably go fill them in about your new communication policy, since it seemed to have slipped her mind." It was also Alec's way of informing about the call. It was kind of hypocritical to spend an entire conversation ranting about secrets then keep one himself.
"I'd appreciate that." Joe said. "Look after yourself."
"You too." Alec said. "I mean, assuming you need to anymore."
The call ended on a joke, but the look in Joe's eyes, his clearly inhuman eyes, when he talked about that burst of growth stuck with him. Honestly, as if he needed another reason to be concerned about the level of power they were dealing with.
Alec shook his head before making his way out into the crowded common area of the hideout. He could have made the call while everyone else was busy, off with their own lives. Instead, he made sure to do it when the team had been present. When he could own up to what he did, and possibly drop any of the bombshells Lisa had been keeping from them.
"Hey." He called. Brian was watching TV, Lisa had a laptop in her lap, and Rachel was 'reading' a magazine. That meant her watch was doing a text to speech thing that only she could hear as she traced her finger across the page. "Just got off the phone with Joe."
Everyone rounded on him, with Lisa nearly dropping her laptop. "He called you? What about?"
"Nope, I decided to check in, see how things were going." He saw the mix of outrage and panic on Lisa's face.
"You didn't need to do that." She said firmly.
"It was just a call. Worth seeing if you missed anything." He turned to the rest of the group. "Good thing too. Did you know Joe said we can call any member of his team if we want?"
Rachel looked up at him, then tossed down her magazine and marched off to the kitchen. Brian just stared at him. "Seriously?" He asked.
"Yep. Apparently that was his way of dealing with any concerns we might have about who they are or what they know." He looked at Lisa. "He thought you would have told us."
"It didn't come up." She said defensively.
"Fine. That's good to know, but why were you calling Joe anyway?" Brian asked, shifting away from the TV.
"What, do we have some communication blackout with the guy?" He lifted his watch. The timepiece was as immaculate as ever. "Said he gave us these so we could stay in touch, not just for emergencies."
"That's not the point. Joe's dangerous." Brian said.
"No shit? I must have missed that in one of the dozen chasms I have to cross whenever I want to pick up breakfast." Alec shook his head. "The guy's powerful, but treating him like a live bomb isn't going to make things any safer."
"You don't understand." Lisa said. "Things are really sensitive now, with us, with the gangs, with the city. Hell, with groups on a national and international level. There are so many players circling around that the only way we can be sure to not set them off is to take as light a touch with Joe as possible, and with his team. We need to be extremely careful about any interactions we have with the Celestial Forge."
"I've got a date with Fleet." Rachel announced, making her way back from the kitchen.
"What?" Brian asked as she settled back down and picked up her magazine.
"We're going riding tomorrow night." She said as she searched for her previous place.
"Okay, how?" Lisa asked.
"Called him, like Alec said. I said hi, he said hi. Talked about my dogs. He asked where I learned how to ride. Said I taught myself. Asked if I wanted to practice. Had tomorrow night free, so we're going out." She explained.
"So, you're going riding with Fleet?" Alec asked, working to keep his humor contained.
"Yeah." She paused and looked up. "Should I get my hair done or something? I don't like people touching my hair."
"Look, just…" Lisa looked at Rachel, then Alec, then seemed to deflate. "Fine, calls or whatever, just please no more dates without letting me know. I'll deal with this." She gestured towards Rachel who looked to be google searching general date terms on her watch's screen.
"Fine." Alec agreed. Somehow he doubted Survey would be waiting for his call.
Addendum Joe
I closed out the call with Alec, pondering the implications. It was a big deal for him to reach out to me like that, bigger now that I knew his past. Hinting that I was aware of it seemed like a bad idea. That would be tricky to do without getting into Cherish, and into the Nine, and then into Jack's power. Until I dealt with that, either the power or Jack directly, I would be playing things as duplicitously as any of the Undersiders.
I really hadn't expected Alec to be the one to come forward, but it kind of made sense. Between what had happened to him, the changes he was struggling with, and a somewhat unique perspective on the rest of the team it was understandable how things were getting to him.
I wished I could be straight with him, but things were more complicated than that and not just because of the Nine. I knew how different he was and how hard he was working to get away from his past, but at the same time, some of the actions of Hijack were beyond horrific. Sure, that was the standard with Heartbreaker's family, but I couldn't overlook the people who had been caught up in that.
I really hoped I didn't give away any hint of that during the conversation. Honestly, there had been enough other distractions to deal with. I stood up in my new Personal Reality office. Thanks to my duplicates it was decorated in basically the same design scheme as my previous office, but had a handful of minor fiat backed benefits. A PC tied into the Workshop intranet, regenerating office supplies, and a slight boost to concentration.
Really it had nothing on the upgrade that arrived after it. I checked my duplicates' location, then teleported to the storage area, arriving on a lush meadow. Just one spot of the natural terrain that stretched over sixty-four square kilometers, replacing the blank cement that used to serve as the ground. The lawn was only one section of a wide variety of surfaces, but it held a feature tied into a massively significant addition.
The scattered sprinklers were connected to a water system that was basically equivalent to my workshop's electrical grid, complete with over-the-top addition. Instead of a Dyson Sphere I had received an item called Waterworld, because that's what it could create. It was more of a terraforming option than a water system, able to put out five hundred million cubic kilometers of water per day, supplied in any natural form. I could flood the moon in a day and drown reasonable sized planets in short order.
It even came with a targeting computer and a full million hoses each able to put out 29 times the flow of the Amazon River. Unfortunately, I still needed to use my door system for access, so I couldn't just drop a torrent on top of Ash Beast or something.
That was in addition to the basic ability of Pipes Pipes Pipes, which provided complete plumbing hookups for the entire workshop, instead of just the areas that happened to come with them preinstalled or fabricated by my duplicates. And then there was Dynamic Waterworks, which tied in any of my sources of non-water liquid to their own piping system. This ranged from things as direly concerning as the Imulsion Pump to mundane stuff like milkshakes or molten lava. A serious ability but nothing close to Waterworld, which stood as a strong reminder of the scale of the Celestial Forge.
And my latest power was another such reminder of exactly what I was dealing with.
My duplicates waved to me before making their way over. The storage area was ridiculously large and thus perfect as a testing ground, and I could see the results of their tests.
"So, it holds up as well as we thought?" I asked.
"To everything we can throw at it." The first duplicate said. "Including a gadgetized vortex effect." He held up the miniature vortex grenade charge that had been assembled with the advantage of Gadgeteer.
"If it's not total invincibility it's good enough for anything we can throw at it." The second explained. "And everything from the ability suggests it is."
I let out a slow breath as I reviewed my latest power. Armsthrift. The power to stop your weapons from breaking. A mid-sized mote, about on the level of Master Builder, it meant my weapons would never break or fail. Even extremely fragile objects were very durable in my hands, but weapons would NEVER break.
On its own it would have been of minor use. Some reassurance about my equipment and more options for construction materials. But it wasn't on its own. None of my powers were on their own.
The absolute effect of Armsthrift only applied to weapons, but I had my Variable Weapon, a lantern shield, and my Combat Boots. Both were weapons as well as defensive items. And I had Fashion, my first power after receiving the Workshop, which applied the protective properties of my defensive items to my body and clothing. My lantern shield and boots were defensive items. Armsthrift was a protective property. As long as I was wearing either, it was impossible for me to break.
That didn't quite mean impossible to damage. The vortex charge had created some scuffs and scratches on the duplicate it was tested on, but he definitely wasn't broken. It seemed broken was defined as being reduced to a nonfunctional state. While it would have been awesome to weather a barrage of annihilator effects and come out unscathed, somehow it was even more badass to emerge covered in scuffs and surface damage but exactly as ready to kick ass.
"We don't need to worry about the Siberian anymore." My first duplicate said. "That's one of the last possible concerns, gone."
"We don't, but this effect is only for us." The second duplicate paused. "And maybe Garment. We're fine, but we still have to worry about collateral damage."
"Just like always." I said. "But that's not the real problem."
My first duplicate nodded. "The passenger."
I let out a breath. When I had seen March's annihilator effect, I had asked my power about it. Checked the matchups. Nothing was able to match it. No power I could receive would be able to stand against it.
Technically that had been true, but more specifically, there was no one power I could receive that could stand against it. If I had this combination of three abilities when March launched her ambush I would have been able to walk out of that attack and smack her and everyone else down with ease.
That was because my passenger evaluated powers in isolation. They knew about each ability I could get, but not the ways they could work together. There was excitement from my passenger at this discovery and what it could mean, but no foreknowledge of it. Right from the start my passenger had wanted to see the Celestial Forge complete, and it seemed this was the reason. The unique combinations of abilities that rose above what any one should be capable of.
It was the kind of discovery that made it necessary to reevaluate every matchup I had ever considered, at least those that had been based on potential. With the right combination could I counter the 'bad stuff' that came from killing an Endbringer? Could I bring down Sleeper without most of the Forge behind me? And, most of all, could I handle the threat that Taylor was meant to face?
That was still a heavy question, and the best I could get was a feeling of 'maybe'. Whatever that was, it was bigger than anything else I had considered. With my new power I knew I could survive, but I wasn't sure anyone else could. I had a chance to defeat it, but it wasn't a sure thing, at least not before the devastation grew to such levels that the fact that I could endure would hardly matter. Even with my reassessment, the threat hadn't actually gotten any smaller, I had just grown a little closer to it.
"Look, dwelling on that isn't going to do you any good. Not when you need to be recovering spiritual energy." My first duplicate said. "Go, visit the gym. Talk to people who aren't indebted teenage criminals. Help with the preparations. We can handle things here. You go enjoy the city."
"Yeah." My second duplicate said. "After all, at this point, what's there to worry about?"
I smiled and I replied with a voice of dark humor.
"Everyone else."
(Author's note: Points were earned during both the interlude and Joe's section. For those interested, the rolls were Alchemy, Alchemy, Alchemy, Resources and Durability (Armsthrift), and Magitech.)
Jumpchain abilities this chapter:
Armsthrift (Fire Emblem: Awakening) 400:
Your weapons just don't seem to break and you know how to care for them well. Even immensely fragile things are unlikely to break in your care. Guns won't jam and swords never lose their edge.
Alec took a breath in the comfort of his room. He had taken a lot of breaths in the process of slowly working himself up to be able to make the fucking call. Of all the problems that had come from that mess at the storage yard and healing from Joe, the anxiety over meaningless bullshit was one he hadn't seen coming. It was one thing to be aware of other people in a deeper way and to find yourself with concerning investments and connections that you couldn't just ignore. It was another for millions of scenarios of horrible outcomes to spin off in your mind whenever you tried to do the simplest shit.
Honestly, he didn't want to make this call. He never would have wanted to make a call like this. He resented Lisa for forcing his hand. This was specifically the kind of shit she was supposed to deal with. It was practically her job description as the team smartass.
She hadn't been dealing with it. She couldn't deal with it, couldn't deal with anything right now. It was almost funny, thinking back to how he would have handled the situation, back before everything in his head got turned upside down. The only important things would have been the surface level aspects. The ones he would have had to deal with. Lisa wasn't able to do her job. It was as simple as that. She provided planning and assessments in the field, and both of those had gone to shit.
For the old Alec that would have been the problem. He might have called her out on it, either directly or just made passive aggressive comments at every opportunity until someone else dealt with the problem. Worst case he probably would have pestered Brian to do something. To deal with the problem to get things back to some sense of balance.
Now it wasn't just about him. Oh, he didn't like the way it was affecting him, but that wasn't the end of it like it used to be. Lisa was falling apart. He could see it, now that he was actually looking. It was bringing back memories he'd prefer to keep buried. The mounting tension on women who desperately tried to live up to expectations they couldn't hope to. Tried to manage situations well beyond them, with no hope and no place to turn until they broke, or were broken.
He had learned not to feel for them. Not to feel for anyone in that situation. Close yourself off and never give an inch. Learn where the land mines are and step carefully, but never allow anyone to see weakness or get too close. It was the kind of environment that did things to you. It had to. You needed to change the way you thought, the way you reacted to things if you were going to survive.
Honestly, it was barely even a change. That kind of implied there had been something else. Growing up, it just became normal. You weren't twisted into that shape; you grew into it.
He knew that he didn't work the way other people did. That was fine. He wasn't like other people. Both as a cape and because of his family, that disconnect was always there, but it was something he was used to. It was helpful. Like those glass walls at the zoo. You could see the rest of the world, but not fully interact with it. And that was fine, because there was usually a good reason for those kinds of walls to be put in place.
And now the walls had come down. He wasn't sitting in a comfortable space watching a detached show anymore. He was part of it, and he didn't like what that brought with it.
It wasn't like Joe had turned him into some wonderful person bubbling about the power of friendship and the importance of pulling together to overcome any obstacle. He knew what he was. That hadn't changed. No, the only difference was he could look a little deeper and realize how fucked they really were.
Lisa was lying to herself with the same skill she usually reserved for her enemies. She had barely been holding it together since the storage yard and hadn't been getting better. She had little bursts of improvement, or possibly points where the damage was less obvious, but those were steamrolled the next time something crazy happened.
Which was about every three days, if you went by the memes.
Brian had been as fucked up by his experience with Bakuda as any of them, but had been working to cover it up. He hadn't been run ragged like Lisa, but Alec knew what was going on behind the scenes. Totally committed to a team that probably didn't even work in concept anymore, all for the sake of looking after his sister. Brian didn't have an out to the team the way he, Rachel, and Taylor did. He needed the group to continue as the only way to achieve his goal.
He'd gotten a close look at that side of Brian's life. It wasn't just something his old mindset had held him back from. There was a sense of separation that went beyond that. When they had stumbled into his old friends on Thursday night it was like Brian was being confronted with the ghosts of Christmases past.
Alec knew people tended to divide their lives into pre and post trigger periods, but it was more severe for some people than others. He'd seen it in his own family. Finally triggering himself and being able to stand up to his father's power. Resist the effects of his siblings' abilities. Watched the same things happen to others. Dynamics changing after a trigger. Someone who was pushed too hard suddenly becoming a rock that people moved around rather than part of the shifting mass that tried to adapt to the environment. Pressure shifted, new targets were found, which pushed more people to trigger.
His father knew about it, obviously. Probably encouraged it. Liked the idea of his own army of child soldiers. In reality it didn't really play out like that. At best you had a common cause based on outside threats and interdependency. One that was hard to break free from, as he well knew.
Brian hadn't needed to deal with that kind of mess of shifting dynamics when he triggered. Instead, he just moved on to a new stage of his life, gradually cutting ties with any parts of his past that weren't directly relevant anymore. Until he was reminded that his past wasn't just going to sit quietly in the corner while he pretended it didn't exist.
Okay, it probably didn't help that Brian's old gym had basically become a coordination point for half of the recovery efforts of the Docks. That was a development that seemed to as much as shock to the people involved as it did to Brian. The consensus seemed to be that it was a series of 'lucky' breaks, first a new cape debuting near the place and using it for a media event, then it being a hub for major donations, probably because of the media event, then it somehow managing to organize all the chaos that was being filtered through that place without collapsing under the strain. You know, because it was a boxing gym, not a community center.
He had visited the place himself, and not just as a way to irritate Brian. With the boss throwing a quarter million at the team for their wonderful showing at Somer's Rock, Alec had fifty grand to blow in a city where most of his usual haunts were closed down.
Okay, only ten grand of that was in cash, and the rest in some secret villain savings account, but still, it was nothing to drop a couple hundred on supplies and treats for the hard-working volunteers. It also let him get away with gossiping with the organizers rather than being drafted into manual labor, though that probably didn't help Brian with any rumors that might have been developing.
Between listening to stories about Brian's glory days in the gym and the shame it was that he gave up on the sport and dodging implied questions about how he knew Brian and the nature of their relationship, Alec had been able to pick up the latest news about Brian's sister. Mostly, people talked about her more like a stray cat than a person. Someone who they collectively needed to look out for, but without any real connection. Hints of legal problems were dropped in oblique ways. Not actually doing anything so tasteless as to gossip about her stint in Juvie, but of course they could talk about how hard it was for her father to deal with everything.
Which made the current situation all the more surprising, and something people were happy to discuss openly. Brian's sister, Aisha, had landed an internship or part time job with Garment. The new cape was practically the patron saint of that gym from the way people talked about her. They seemed to see her taking in Aisha as some kind of act of benevolence, evidence of endless patience on Garment's part. There was all kinds of talk about what it could mean and where things would end up.
Alec didn't know about what it meant in general, but he knew it guaranteed extra headaches for Brian. Generally, the leader of a major villain team wouldn't want their sister playing personal assistant to a cape hosting a major get-together of the city's heroes. Though she was hardly the only one. Alec had just narrowly avoided being conscripted into helping out at the event when he'd been cornered by an old Jewish woman who, despite her tiny body, managed to command the presence of a decorated field marshal.
So Brian had walked away from his old life, focusing on the team and the resources he could obtain from the boss, only to find his old life unwilling to wait for him. As entertaining as the entire soap opera situation was, it presented another layer of concerns for Brian that the team did not need right now.
There was the other side of those concerns as well. Alec had already begun to have his doubts about their boss before Somer's Rock. Honestly, he always knew the guy was probably bad news. The type of person who would set up a group like the Undersiders wasn't someone you'd want to cross. Even so, you stay on the right side of guys like that and you're usually fine. Unless they were completely deranged, crime lords typically didn't go after their own employees for no reason.
Though they might throw them away. Looking back at the bank job, it was hard not to think of it like that. The whole thing stunk of some kind of setup. The second they saw all the Wards on site he knew something was wrong. Even Lisa had been taken aback by it.
It didn't escape him that if someone wanted to get rid of a mostly deniable asset, setting them up on a near impossible task and tipping off the heroes was a good way to do it. Then again, he had thrown a lot of money at Joe beforehand, so he probably wasn't planning for them to fail. It stunk of one of those 'wheels within wheels' things that thinkers love so much, where even if everything went to shit they could twirl their mustaches and announce how everything went exactly according to plan.
Now he was picturing Lisa with a villain mustache. It weirdly worked for her. Not the actual mustache, but certainly the feel behind the twirling motion.
Still, what was the situation they were looking at here? Nobody expected them to make it out of the bank, and definitely didn't expect them to hand the Wards their asses in the process. Literally, in Taylor's case. In all likelihood they had been riding a series of fallback or improvised plans thrown together for a situation that wasn't something anybody could have prepared for.
That 'something' being Joe, and the 'anybody' was Lisa, their boss, March, the other gangs, the PRT, and probably several global level cape agencies. Hell, they had Dragon on their doorstep and she was basically a footnote in the insanity.
He didn't trust Lisa's ability to manage this. Despite her promises, she'd come out of her last call with Joe with only the vaguest assurances about Joe's team. Confirmation that they didn't know any personal details about them, but no information on who they were or where they'd come from. It wasn't like they were entitled to be informed of any of Joe's plans. If anything, the opposite was true. Still, with everything that had happened, he figured they had a good enough relationship to warrant a heads-up, rather than being completely blindsided.
The whole thing seemed like the product of a set of power plays between Lisa, Joe, and the gangs. Even Brian's insistence that they come off as completely independent and avoid any direct associations with Joe. Well, mission accomplished. Nobody would be thinking of them as Apeiron's team anymore.
From what he could tell Lisa had gotten almost nothing from the call. She was optimistic about it, but was extra deflective about the details to the point where even Brian seemed annoyed. With everything she was dealing with and everything she was trying to keep in the air she probably wasn't the best person to act as their contact with Joe. The problem was that so far she'd been the only one trying.
Obviously, because who else would be willing or able to do it? Well, Brian, but that was out the window. It was clear he was far from an objective party right now, to say nothing of his current family concerns. Rachel was prepared to ride things out, confident that Joe would step in to save their bacon if things got too heavy. And then there was Taylor.
Taylor was hiding something. Lisa obviously knew Taylor was hiding something, but was okay with her on the team. Brian was probably too caught up in his own shit to notice anything, and Rachel definitely didn't care, leaving him the only third party to the situation.
Whatever was being concealed wasn't minor. Taylor wouldn't have been as careful about concealing things if this were just some personal detail or embarrassing secret she wanted to avoid coming to light. Not after she had opened up about her trigger event. Which was another thing provoking more serious reactions than it had before the storage yard. Though after living through that he didn't really want to think about anything locker related if he could possibly help it.
Joe had some connection with Taylor that went beyond the rest of the group. At the very least you could set aside jokes about star-crossed love. No matter what read people thought they could pull from the videos, there was no hint of that kind of thing in person. Not that kind of thing, but something. Regent didn't know what it was, but anyone could tell she was important to Joe.
Which was another thing about this call that was extra awkward. As illogical as it seemed, Regent couldn't shake the feeling that he was calling to tattle on his team. It was childish, and the rules of playground discretion hardly applied to cape life, but that didn't change the impression it left on him.
But someone needed to talk to Joe, someone who wasn't trying to manage him or steer the situation or cover for whatever hidden objective was being kept from the rest of the group.
Fuck, that basically described Brian, Lisa, and Taylor. No wonder they were fucked. More than half the team was drunk on their own bullshit.
He had hemmed and hawed long enough. This wasn't going to get any better by putting it off. With all the shit he'd dealt with in his life he'd be damned if he was going to lose to a phone call.
"Watch." He said. "Video call to Joe."
The band gave a chirp of acknowledgement and the familiar floating screen appeared in front of him. To be perfectly honest, he was half hoping to end up with some kind of call waiting or message service. Any excuse to throw out something about needing to talk, then kicking this down the road, to a point where it would probably be an even bigger issue for both him and the team.
Fortunately, depending on your perspective, the call was answered. The small screen in the corner showed Alec sitting in his admitted pig-sty of a room in the Undersiders' headquarters. The larger screen filled with an image of Apeiron in full costume.
The force of everything that had been on display at Somer's rock filled the image. Joe sat behind an immaculate oak desk in a beautiful office fully kitted out with all of his ridiculously deadly equipment. The jacket was adorned with armored plates glowing with unknown technologies. A white cape was clipped to one shoulder and flowed over his back, though without the subtle billowing effect that had been present at the summit. Once again his face was exposed save for his eyes, hidden behind a high-tech visor.
Seen up close, his facial structure was still recognizable as Joe, but like a version of Joe that had been touched up and refined in order to strike the perfect impression. He had already seen the way Joe's build had shifted, from lanky to bigger than Brian to some ideal midpoint between them, so it wasn't like physical shifts were impossible. Still, things like facial structure or the way his hair had a single glowing red lock standing out took it to another level.
Still, Alec did his best to bury those reactions. "Hey Joe." He said as casually as he could manage. "Did I catch you in the middle of something, or do you just hang out like that?"
Joe smiled, a good sign, and took the visor off of his face. "The end of something, actually. And sometimes I do. Costume is actually crazy comfortable."
He wasn't wrong on that front. Alec was fairly certain Joe had done his best to sandbag when it came to their costumes, except Taylor's, and even then, they were the most comfortable clothes he had ever worn. Part of that was the fit, the way it was perfectly built for his body in a way that bordered on creepy, but there was more than that. Materials, design, style, weight, it was all balanced to perfection, creating a costume that felt more natural than his normal clothes, despite apparently being armored to a ridiculous degree.
"Yeah, I get that." He replied, looking over Joe's appearance again. Even his eyes seemed different, with the pupils giving the impression of gears or spokes.
Somehow, that was what really drove it home. The Undersiders had been through some shit, but so had Joe. The world had seen him blown apart, then pull himself back together to fight on until he was hanging limply off of a rocket pack like meat off a hook. Scooped up by Lethe and whisked away not to be seen publicly until Brian and Lisa dragged him into the mess of Somer's Rock.
He felt like he should say something about it, but nothing came to mind that wasn't shallow or crass. Or worse, something that could be taken as an invitation to bring up his own experience. No, they were guys talking. They would do the appropriate thing and pretend all the horrible stuff that happened wasn't a problem.
Instead, they would talk about everyone else's problems, which totally wasn't some masculine tactic to avoid dealing with your own issues by directing all your energy outward.
"I heard about your call with Lisa." He said. He saw a look of amusement on Joe's face that Lisa definitely didn't share.
"How's she doing?" He asked, sincerely as far as Alec could tell.
"In pretty good spirits, comparatively speaking." He replied. "She's been going pretty hard lately." It felt like a minor betrayal to share even that much. It was something that wouldn't have bothered him before, and only the tip of the iceberg of what he had to cover. "Still, wasn't keen to share details."
"She's getting back to normal then?" Joe joked.
"Ha." Alec shot back. "Yeah, normal for her. Which is fine when we're dealing with normal cape stuff, but this seemed a bit higher priority, so…" He trailed off, not sure how to phrase things.
"So, you decided to call for yourself?" There was no admonishment in his tone. No presumption that Alec had reached beyond his station or was bothering him with petty concerns. If anything, he seemed happy for the opportunity to talk.
"Yeah, if that's okay." He replied with an unfamiliar unsteadiness.
"Alec, I handed out those watches with the intention that they would be used. They're not just for emergencies. The whole point was that communication would probably help avoid problems like what we ran into before." He explained. "And honestly, I get how stressful it would probably be to have Lisa as your main source of information."
"It's usually fine." He said in her defense. "But things haven't exactly been usual lately." He swallowed. "For me or the team."
"How have you been managing?" Joe asked, leaning forward. "I don't have a lot of comparative points for neurological shifts during healing. That was kind of new territory."
Exactly what you wanted to hear from the person who had messed with your brain. Still, Joe had been very clear. No damage, not even a risk of a problem. Just a change. Probably something most people would consider a positive change, but that was assuming they had some baseline to fall back on, rather than the empty air he had found under his feet.
"I'm managing." He said as optimistically as he could. "Adjusting. It's… it's a lot to deal with, especially with everything else that's going on." He swallowed. "The team's not in great shape."
"You mentioned that, back before Somer's Rock." He said.
"And it hasn't gotten better. Don't get me wrong, it was a miracle we made it through that in one piece." Between Joe debuting his team, the appearance of extra groups that nobody knew about, and the Teeth deciding to crash the party, and the Empire needing to buy their way out of a gang war it had turned into a circus. Which was ironic, considering Circus was one of the few villains who had decided to sit the thing out.
Joe nodded. "All in all, it was probably the best we could have hoped for." He said, like he hadn't been the person basically dictating terms for the city.
Because, looking at him, even with the striking superhero costume, the unnatural hair and eyes, the impossible precision and smoothness of his motions, it was surprisingly easy to ignore all of that and just fall into a normal conversation.
It was the kind of thing that probably drove Tattletale nuts. Being able to shift through such drastically different tones with trivial ease, to effectively control the landscape of the conversation, was something she would kill to achieve. But for Joe it didn't come across as a tactical decision. He was never completely open with them, but the friendly personality that joked with them over pizza seemed to be the real deal, or at least something Joe preferred to default to.
You could go six layers deep in terms of strategy and counter strategy, reasons for every motion and twitch, why he presented certain appearances or used specific tones of voice. But that assumed he was actively managing things to that level. More specifically, it assumed he cared enough to try to manage things to that level. There were a million reasons he could have had for answering the phone in his full cape gear, gear more advanced than what had basically fought the entire ABB to a standstill during the Ungodly Hour, but somehow Alec was willing to bet the real reason was exactly what Joe had said. He answered the call in his costume because he'd been in his costume when Alec called.
There was kind of a freeing sensation with accepting that, at this point, Joe didn't need to play those kinds of games. Joe had the ability to be straightforward because any advantage he could gain from petty deception was nothing compared to the advantages he already possessed. The logic probably wasn't perfect, but if you accepted the gap in power it actually made it easier to deal with.
At least for him. For Tattletale and even for Brian he doubted they could be nearly as comfortable with the idea that jockeying for a slight edge in dealing with Joe was effectively meaningless.
Alec let out a sigh. "There were some close calls there. I know the team came out looking like roses, but it hit them hard." He shifted in discomfort. "I don't want to come off like a narc here, but I figured you should probably be filled in on the situation, and in her current state I don't trust Lisa to keep you up to speed."
He could trust her even less in peak form, but phrasing this as a personal concern rather than inherent mistrust would probably be easier for everyone involved.
"I appreciate that." Joe didn't comment further.
This was new ground for Alec. Was this betrayal of friends or interceding for their own good? Once again, he missed the days where he would have just ignored the problem, or gone with whatever seemed most entertaining at the time.
"I'm guessing you picked up on what Lisa was dealing with?" Joe gave a slight nod. He'd need to be blind not to. "It's a lot worse than she lets on. The thing with Bakuda, then her power basically fritzing out." He shook his head. "She's been skimming along, but I know she's come close to crashing a few times. She's used to playing things at a higher level and I know she's trying for something bigger than what we can handle."
He considered elaborating, but decided against it. No way to do so without throwing out unfounded suspicions or coming across as overly concerned and sentimental. Instead, he moved on to Brian.
"Brian's in the same boat. Still recovering back from Bakuda and has been kind of mono-focused on the team." A ghost of a smile crossed Alec's face as he considered Brian's earlier actions with what he knew now. "He was always good at that, keeping the team on track. Better than Lisa for a lot of stuff, but things are different now and he's still trying to power through like nothing's changed."
He considered how much he could share. Family stuff, at least for families that weren't complete dysfunctional nightmares, was a lot more sensitive than just general health concerns. Actually, the dysfunction didn't actually make the topic any less sensitive. If anything, it made it worse.
"He's been working on something for a long time. It's tied into his position on the team, so he's really focused on keeping that together, even with everything that happened." He gave Joe an apologetic look. "I'd go into more detail, but it's kind of personal stuff."
"Don't worry about it." He said and Alec nodded in gratitude as he shifted to the next member of the team.
"Everyone's still pissed at Rachel about attacking that dog fighting ring. Oh, that wasn't something we planned out. Brian probably would have given you a head up if it was." Not that Bitch would have been able to sell the idea. Provoking the Empire for no profit wasn't something that was likely to fly. No wonder she had gone on her own.
"I figured." He said. Alec gave a nod of acknowledgement. Between the watches silencing all discussions and Brian's own impassive appearance with his mask and darkness they came off as a completely united front. Nobody saw the frantic screaming match between Rachel, Lisa and Grue, with him and Taylor as unwelcome additions. Even if Lisa was very clear about Joe not spying on their watches, there were a hundred ways he could have noticed the near meltdown happening at the next table.
"Lisa was happy about the reputation boost from dealing with the Empire, but I know Brian would have rather taken a payout." Alec would have as well, and he didn't have Brian's expenses to worry about. "People are pissed, but she's kind of riding things out, going along with the new plan." He looked up. "Did Lisa tell you about that?"
"New direction. No more heists and support for stabilization efforts during the truce." He replied.
Alec nodded. "That's most of it, but there was an implication. I don't want to put words in her mouth, but it was clear Brian was on board for the idea as well. There's a push for the team to step up. It's probably not just going to be 'stabilization' or whatever during the truce. We're headed for heavier stuff, especially afterwards."
"What is afterwards, exactly?" He asked.
Alec took a breath. "Meeting with the boss, in person. It's coming up, and that's going to be a tipping point." He gave Joe a look of concern. "I get you haven't been doing this that long…" He paused, remembering the shifts in demeanor, the way Joe could act like an old hand at certain skills you didn't see outside of heavy combat experience. Lisa's claims about how long he'd known his team. Suddenly making assumptions about relative experience didn't seem that cut and dry.
Joe picked up on his hesitancy and just waved him off. Alec cleared his throat before continuing. "Right. Thing is, when a guy who's gone to great lengths to keep his identity hidden wants a face-to-face meeting, it's usually pretty serious. The 'no going back' kind of serious. Everyone's rushing forward like they can make the call after they hear his pitch, but those kinds of pitches don't usually have an easy out."
He became aware of the edge of emotion that had started to creep into his words and quickly calmed himself. He looked up, carefully watching Joe's reaction.
Joe sank back into a chair that looked like it belonged at the head of a hundred-foot-long table. As over-designed as the rest of the office, but clearly completely functional. He lifted his head and gave Alec a slight nod.
"Thank you for letting me know. Something like this couldn't have been easy for you." Alec didn't know if that was just reassurance or some product of his thinker power or information resources. "I've had a sense of some of this, but I didn't realize it was this bad."
"I can't imagine Lisa was keen to share that little detail." He paused, then pressed forward. "Do I want to know the line she tried to sell you?"
That got a ghost of a smile out of Joe. "The sale didn't actually go as well as she wanted." He said with a faint grin. "Got her to be at least fifty percent upfront with me."
Alec gave Joe a very skeptical look. "How the hell did that happen?"
"I might have pressed her a bit hard on some of the stuff she was trying to sell." He shook his head, like he hadn't just recounted what must have been a truly terrifying event for Lisa. "I know Lisa's working on something, and she at least thinks she had a good reason for keeping it from everyone."
Alec could connect the dots. "She's still keeping it from you?"
The only way he could see that making sense was if Joe was letting Lisa keep the secret, the same way he did with the watches. Probably the same way he did with everything about everyone. He'd seen what Survey was able to do with her scans. He wasn't the most observant person in the world, but even he could tell that picking a specific gun out of a van from several blocks away was a big fucking deal.
"Like you said, she's not holding up well. She wanted more time to get a handle on things before bringing me on board." He explained.
Alec felt himself tense and shook his head. "She's not going to like that you told me that. If she's got some supersecret plan she's probably trying to set everything perfectly for some masterstroke. Will be afraid that the rest of us even knowing something going on will fuck up everything."
Or she was completely desperate and just trying to get some level of control on a situation that was falling apart. Personally, he preferred the image of Lisa as the implacable mastermind rather than a normal person scrambling in desperate hope of avoiding disaster.
And not just because he was liable to be caught up in that disaster.
"Lisa having something going on isn't exactly the news flash of the century. Having me tangentially involved probably isn't going to shock anyone either." Joe explained. "We're going to be checking in with each other going forward. Making sure things don't get out of hand."
Alec nodded. So, Lisa had a scheme. Lisa always had a scheme. She also had support on her scheme, so that was possibly good. At least it was better than if she was trying to pull some future-of-the-city shit while sleep deprived and close to burnout. If nothing else, Joe would probably make sure she didn't kill herself in the attempt.
"As for the rest of them…" Joe shrugged. "Glad to hear Rachel is managing. I knew there was going to be fallout from that, but I'm not really mourning the loss of those fighting rings."
Dog person. Or animal person. Or just human decency person. Either way, it was lucky for Rachel.
"And Brian?" Alec asked. He paused as he watched Joe's reaction. "You knew something already? What, thinker power? Like with me?"
He remembered Joe's words. In a bad place and trying to get out of it. Worried about 'bad stuff' in his past. Honestly, the vaguely positive words were the biggest endorsement he could imagine with respect to him ditching Heartbreaker and the rest of his family. It was something that felt uplifting and foreboding at the same time. Like Joe was only putting up with him because of his good thinker vibes. Alec had to wonder what would happen to those vibes if the truth about what he'd done back then came to light.
"I do. I know that he's trying to protect someone, that it's a big deal for him. From what you said the Undersiders are probably what's letting him do that." Joe explained, picking apart Brian's entire motivation without unearthing any specific details.
"Yeah." Alec said, and hoped that confirmation didn't count as a betrayal. "I know some of what's happening. Uh, just a heads up, he's probably going to be really resistant to anything that compromises the team, if that's in the cards."
"Thanks." Joe said. "I'll keep that in mind. It's not the kind of thing I'd want to be blindsided by."
Alec blinked. Joe hadn't dismissed his concerns, or offered reassurance. Just thanked him for the heads up. It wasn't an outright confirmation that he was working with Lisa on something that would shatter the team, but Alec could probably be forgiven if his mind immediately jumped to that point.
Alec didn't want to lose the team. Sure, there were conveniences and creature comforts attached to the hideout and cash flow they saw, but at the end of the day he could admit that he actually liked the company of the rest of the team. Or could admit it now. Before it would have been what, he appreciated them? Acknowledged their value, both as capes and entertainment? Held them as a buffer against his family?
As much as he cursed the changes the healing had brought, that was one he didn't particularly mind, at least beyond concerns over what would happen if the team fell apart. If Lisa tried a stupid scheme dreamed up on two hours of sleep, or Brian dragged them into a gang war believing it was the only way to maintain things, or Rachel just up and left, or Taylor did whatever thing she was planning and keeping secret.
He didn't want that to happen, but he didn't know how to stop it from happening, at least beyond putting his cards on the table and hoping Joe was feeling like a generous dealer.
He looked back at Joe and froze. It was that fucking pose. The strategy trance or power meditation or communing with the cosmos or whatever you wanted to fucking call it, and it was happening during their call. And it was big. Alec could see that. Whatever this was, it was a big one, which was about the last thing he wanted to deal with right now.
"Joe?" He called. "Joe!" The impossible tinker blinked and met his eyes again. "Is something wrong?"
"No." Joe said with more levity in his voice than Alec expected. "Definitely not. Just the opposite really."
"What?" Alec asked.
"It's nothing you need to worry about. Well, nothing I need to worry about. Not anymore." Alec gave him a concerned look. Well, there was a reason he had decided to make this call. The assumption that ninety percent of the bullshit they'd dealt with had occurred because everyone was talking past each other. Might as well ask the question everybody on the planet was asking.
"So, what's the deal with those things?" He asked.
Joe gave him a shocked look. "You're just coming right out and asking?" He replied.
Alec shrugged. "I don't think anyone's asked straight before. Not even to get told to back off, so I figured, why not? Worst thing you can do is say you don't want to tell me."
Actually, there were probably a million worse things that Joe could do, and that wasn't even getting into the rest of his team. But the point of all of this was to try to treat Joe like a person, rather than a natural disaster. A person would either share, or they would shut you down. Maybe they'd get snippy for a bit if it was a sensitive subject, but that was it. You didn't need to treat them like they were a live bomb.
Joe smiled. "Well, not giving you the full details, but everyone knows I'm getting stronger?" Alec nodded. It was the last thing anyone would need to confirm about Apeiron. His ridiculous growth curve was practically his defining feature. "That's part of it."
He didn't say any more, and Alec knew not to push, but even that scrap of information filled in so many gaps. They'd seen it happen when Joe was fighting. When he was talking with them, working on his own, even during the summit. Hell, it had happened like five times during that meeting. Did the gathered villains even know they were watching as Apeiron grew further away from them.
"Thanks for filling me in." He said.
Joe shrugged. "I try to keep that stuff close to the vest, but it doesn't really matter anymore. At least not to me."
There was a finality attached to Joe's words that made Alec nervous. It conveyed a complete disregard of personal risk. Joe had been 'nearly' invincible since the fight at the storage yard. How many of those boosts did he need before he closed the gap? Or at least made it so far that it wasn't worth bothering?
Then the last words hit him. Not mattering to him. To Joe. Joe was fine. It was everybody else who he still needed to be concerned about. And first and foremost was probably the girl he had made the golden armor for.
"Joe, about Taylor." Alec considered how to bring this up.
"I'm guessing the reason you left her out earlier wasn't because everything was fine?" He asked, but there was an edge of weariness to his voice. Thinking back on Taylor's escapades, from bringing down Lung on her first night out to slice and dicing Aegis at the bank, and then Bakuda at the storage yard, one of the better moments of the night, he found himself feeling drained as well, and he only needed to work with the girl. For some reason Joe had taken it on himself to keep her safe. The phrase 'thankless task' didn't seem to do the situation justice.
"No." He took a breath. "There's something she's hiding from the group. She covers it up well, but whatever reason she has for seeing this through, she's not being upfront about it." He looked at Joe and saw a complete lack of surprise. "And you already know."
Because of course he knew. Thinker power, Survey's information, robotic spies, or possibly just figuring it out like he did. He was starting to feel foolish about this entire thing. It was easier to believe that everything would be taken care of, that somebody else was going to be responsible for things. But he had seen the complete absence of that in the team. Apparently the Undersiders were reliant on their debt holder to make sure they didn't fuck everything up irrevocably.
"I know Taylor has something she's working on. And she had been for a while." He admitted.
"Do you know what it is?" Alec asked.
"No." There was a note of sharpness in his voice. "Not something I can get a read on. At least not that." He shook his head. "Look, I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve any of this, at least from the context I have. She's working on it alone, but I'm supporting her on this."
Of course he was. "So, with Taylor and Lisa. Seems like a common stance for you." Alec joked. Joe just gave a tired shrug.
"More like a common obligation. Look, I get why you're concerned, and I'll follow up with Taylor some more, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't do anything that would compromise whatever this is."
"Hey, I didn't even want to get this involved. If I can hand this off without worrying about it blowing up in my face, I'm more than happy to do so. But just to let you know, if I was able to piece this together then Lisa definitely knows."
"I figured." Joe said. "But if she's not concerned about it, it's probably a good sign."
Or it was part of some overly complex scheme, step 517 out of 1,237 on the path to world domination or something similarly ridiculous.
"I hope." He said. "Like I said, she's not been in her best form. Was supposed to find out about your team, but just kept assuring us that they didn't know anything about us."
"Wait, she didn't tell you?" Joe asked.
"Tell us about what?" He replied.
"About my team." Joe said. "Lisa was worried about them. I told her they're on the same network as your watches. You can call them yourselves if you have any questions."
"What?" Alec asked. "No, she didn't mention that." She hadn't mentioned that Survey was now in their contact lists. He had to wonder, was that an intentional oversight, or did the news just throw her so badly that she couldn't figure out how to mention it to the group.
"I told you; the communicators are meant to be used. It's not just an emergency thing. In fact, it's probably better to get in touch before things reach that level." Joe explained.
"And we can just call them whenever?" He replied.
Joe shrugged. "It's still a call. They might not always want to or be able to take it, but you can leave a message or send a text, whatever you want."
"Right." Alec said, sinking back onto his bed. Hell of a thing to drop. He works himself up to try to open communication and Joe lays out that was the point of the watches the whole time. Obvious, and kind of infuriating.
"Hey, are you doing okay?" Joe asked.
Alec let out a dry laugh. "Well, I'm still dealing with a fucked up, or possibly unfucked up brain, which isn't particularly easy. On top of that I'm trying to figure out if this call counts as betraying my team." He looked up. "If this ends up blowing back on me, I don't suppose you're hiring?"
Joe smiled back. "Main positions are pretty well filled, but we can probably wrangle some kind of internship if you're desperate. Pay will suck, but the benefits are pretty decent."
Joe said it with a joking tone, but Alec couldn't deny some level of appeal there. It wasn't like Joe was hard up for anything these days. He had to wonder, for all the emphasis Brian put towards making sure they were a separate entity from Apeiron, did he really understand what they might have been giving up? Because even owing money to Apeiron got you better gear than any Protectorate team he could name.
"Seriously, thank you for the heads up. I don't think they'll hold any of this against you, and honestly if we had better communication you probably wouldn't have needed to unload everything at once." Joe said.
"I'll keep that in mind." Alec replied. "And about that, those 'stabilization efforts'? Nothing's in the works yet, but it's probably going to be big when it happens."
"As long as they stick to the terms, I'm willing to stay out of things." He could hear the reluctance in Joe's voice. "Lisa was pretty clear about a big conflict being bad for the city right now."
The hairs on the back of Alec's neck rose. He had a feeling Lisa hadn't been just talking about him intervening against the Teeth. Another tidbit, and another clue to the scale of what she was pulling.
"Probably right. But when it happens, we're probably going to be called in. Likely it will be without too much notice." He warned.
"I'll keep an eye on things, but I'd appreciate all the warning you can give me. And I do appreciate you reaching out." He shook his head. "Honestly I probably should have done it, but…"
"Lisa?" Alec ventured.
"Lisa. She likes to run things, doesn't she?" There was more weight to that question than Alec wanted to deal with.
"Always has." He said. "Well, I should probably go fill them in about your new communication policy, since it seemed to have slipped her mind." It was also Alec's way of informing about the call. It was kind of hypocritical to spend an entire conversation ranting about secrets then keep one himself.
"I'd appreciate that." Joe said. "Look after yourself."
"You too." Alec said. "I mean, assuming you need to anymore."
The call ended on a joke, but the look in Joe's eyes, his clearly inhuman eyes, when he talked about that burst of growth stuck with him. Honestly, as if he needed another reason to be concerned about the level of power they were dealing with.
Alec shook his head before making his way out into the crowded common area of the hideout. He could have made the call while everyone else was busy, off with their own lives. Instead, he made sure to do it when the team had been present. When he could own up to what he did, and possibly drop any of the bombshells Lisa had been keeping from them.
"Hey." He called. Brian was watching TV, Lisa had a laptop in her lap, and Rachel was 'reading' a magazine. That meant her watch was doing a text to speech thing that only she could hear as she traced her finger across the page. "Just got off the phone with Joe."
Everyone rounded on him, with Lisa nearly dropping her laptop. "He called you? What about?"
"Nope, I decided to check in, see how things were going." He saw the mix of outrage and panic on Lisa's face.
"You didn't need to do that." She said firmly.
"It was just a call. Worth seeing if you missed anything." He turned to the rest of the group. "Good thing too. Did you know Joe said we can call any member of his team if we want?"
Rachel looked up at him, then tossed down her magazine and marched off to the kitchen. Brian just stared at him. "Seriously?" He asked.
"Yep. Apparently that was his way of dealing with any concerns we might have about who they are or what they know." He looked at Lisa. "He thought you would have told us."
"It didn't come up." She said defensively.
"Fine. That's good to know, but why were you calling Joe anyway?" Brian asked, shifting away from the TV.
"What, do we have some communication blackout with the guy?" He lifted his watch. The timepiece was as immaculate as ever. "Said he gave us these so we could stay in touch, not just for emergencies."
"That's not the point. Joe's dangerous." Brian said.
"No shit? I must have missed that in one of the dozen chasms I have to cross whenever I want to pick up breakfast." Alec shook his head. "The guy's powerful, but treating him like a live bomb isn't going to make things any safer."
"You don't understand." Lisa said. "Things are really sensitive now, with us, with the gangs, with the city. Hell, with groups on a national and international level. There are so many players circling around that the only way we can be sure to not set them off is to take as light a touch with Joe as possible, and with his team. We need to be extremely careful about any interactions we have with the Celestial Forge."
"I've got a date with Fleet." Rachel announced, making her way back from the kitchen.
"What?" Brian asked as she settled back down and picked up her magazine.
"We're going riding tomorrow night." She said as she searched for her previous place.
"Okay, how?" Lisa asked.
"Called him, like Alec said. I said hi, he said hi. Talked about my dogs. He asked where I learned how to ride. Said I taught myself. Asked if I wanted to practice. Had tomorrow night free, so we're going out." She explained.
"So, you're going riding with Fleet?" Alec asked, working to keep his humor contained.
"Yeah." She paused and looked up. "Should I get my hair done or something? I don't like people touching my hair."
"Look, just…" Lisa looked at Rachel, then Alec, then seemed to deflate. "Fine, calls or whatever, just please no more dates without letting me know. I'll deal with this." She gestured towards Rachel who looked to be google searching general date terms on her watch's screen.
"Fine." Alec agreed. Somehow he doubted Survey would be waiting for his call.
Addendum Joe
I closed out the call with Alec, pondering the implications. It was a big deal for him to reach out to me like that, bigger now that I knew his past. Hinting that I was aware of it seemed like a bad idea. That would be tricky to do without getting into Cherish, and into the Nine, and then into Jack's power. Until I dealt with that, either the power or Jack directly, I would be playing things as duplicitously as any of the Undersiders.
I really hadn't expected Alec to be the one to come forward, but it kind of made sense. Between what had happened to him, the changes he was struggling with, and a somewhat unique perspective on the rest of the team it was understandable how things were getting to him.
I wished I could be straight with him, but things were more complicated than that and not just because of the Nine. I knew how different he was and how hard he was working to get away from his past, but at the same time, some of the actions of Hijack were beyond horrific. Sure, that was the standard with Heartbreaker's family, but I couldn't overlook the people who had been caught up in that.
I really hoped I didn't give away any hint of that during the conversation. Honestly, there had been enough other distractions to deal with. I stood up in my new Personal Reality office. Thanks to my duplicates it was decorated in basically the same design scheme as my previous office, but had a handful of minor fiat backed benefits. A PC tied into the Workshop intranet, regenerating office supplies, and a slight boost to concentration.
Really it had nothing on the upgrade that arrived after it. I checked my duplicates' location, then teleported to the storage area, arriving on a lush meadow. Just one spot of the natural terrain that stretched over sixty-four square kilometers, replacing the blank cement that used to serve as the ground. The lawn was only one section of a wide variety of surfaces, but it held a feature tied into a massively significant addition.
The scattered sprinklers were connected to a water system that was basically equivalent to my workshop's electrical grid, complete with over-the-top addition. Instead of a Dyson Sphere I had received an item called Waterworld, because that's what it could create. It was more of a terraforming option than a water system, able to put out five hundred million cubic kilometers of water per day, supplied in any natural form. I could flood the moon in a day and drown reasonable sized planets in short order.
It even came with a targeting computer and a full million hoses each able to put out 29 times the flow of the Amazon River. Unfortunately, I still needed to use my door system for access, so I couldn't just drop a torrent on top of Ash Beast or something.
That was in addition to the basic ability of Pipes Pipes Pipes, which provided complete plumbing hookups for the entire workshop, instead of just the areas that happened to come with them preinstalled or fabricated by my duplicates. And then there was Dynamic Waterworks, which tied in any of my sources of non-water liquid to their own piping system. This ranged from things as direly concerning as the Imulsion Pump to mundane stuff like milkshakes or molten lava. A serious ability but nothing close to Waterworld, which stood as a strong reminder of the scale of the Celestial Forge.
And my latest power was another such reminder of exactly what I was dealing with.
My duplicates waved to me before making their way over. The storage area was ridiculously large and thus perfect as a testing ground, and I could see the results of their tests.
"So, it holds up as well as we thought?" I asked.
"To everything we can throw at it." The first duplicate said. "Including a gadgetized vortex effect." He held up the miniature vortex grenade charge that had been assembled with the advantage of Gadgeteer.
"If it's not total invincibility it's good enough for anything we can throw at it." The second explained. "And everything from the ability suggests it is."
I let out a slow breath as I reviewed my latest power. Armsthrift. The power to stop your weapons from breaking. A mid-sized mote, about on the level of Master Builder, it meant my weapons would never break or fail. Even extremely fragile objects were very durable in my hands, but weapons would NEVER break.
On its own it would have been of minor use. Some reassurance about my equipment and more options for construction materials. But it wasn't on its own. None of my powers were on their own.
The absolute effect of Armsthrift only applied to weapons, but I had my Variable Weapon, a lantern shield, and my Combat Boots. Both were weapons as well as defensive items. And I had Fashion, my first power after receiving the Workshop, which applied the protective properties of my defensive items to my body and clothing. My lantern shield and boots were defensive items. Armsthrift was a protective property. As long as I was wearing either, it was impossible for me to break.
That didn't quite mean impossible to damage. The vortex charge had created some scuffs and scratches on the duplicate it was tested on, but he definitely wasn't broken. It seemed broken was defined as being reduced to a nonfunctional state. While it would have been awesome to weather a barrage of annihilator effects and come out unscathed, somehow it was even more badass to emerge covered in scuffs and surface damage but exactly as ready to kick ass.
"We don't need to worry about the Siberian anymore." My first duplicate said. "That's one of the last possible concerns, gone."
"We don't, but this effect is only for us." The second duplicate paused. "And maybe Garment. We're fine, but we still have to worry about collateral damage."
"Just like always." I said. "But that's not the real problem."
My first duplicate nodded. "The passenger."
I let out a breath. When I had seen March's annihilator effect, I had asked my power about it. Checked the matchups. Nothing was able to match it. No power I could receive would be able to stand against it.
Technically that had been true, but more specifically, there was no one power I could receive that could stand against it. If I had this combination of three abilities when March launched her ambush I would have been able to walk out of that attack and smack her and everyone else down with ease.
That was because my passenger evaluated powers in isolation. They knew about each ability I could get, but not the ways they could work together. There was excitement from my passenger at this discovery and what it could mean, but no foreknowledge of it. Right from the start my passenger had wanted to see the Celestial Forge complete, and it seemed this was the reason. The unique combinations of abilities that rose above what any one should be capable of.
It was the kind of discovery that made it necessary to reevaluate every matchup I had ever considered, at least those that had been based on potential. With the right combination could I counter the 'bad stuff' that came from killing an Endbringer? Could I bring down Sleeper without most of the Forge behind me? And, most of all, could I handle the threat that Taylor was meant to face?
That was still a heavy question, and the best I could get was a feeling of 'maybe'. Whatever that was, it was bigger than anything else I had considered. With my new power I knew I could survive, but I wasn't sure anyone else could. I had a chance to defeat it, but it wasn't a sure thing, at least not before the devastation grew to such levels that the fact that I could endure would hardly matter. Even with my reassessment, the threat hadn't actually gotten any smaller, I had just grown a little closer to it.
"Look, dwelling on that isn't going to do you any good. Not when you need to be recovering spiritual energy." My first duplicate said. "Go, visit the gym. Talk to people who aren't indebted teenage criminals. Help with the preparations. We can handle things here. You go enjoy the city."
"Yeah." My second duplicate said. "After all, at this point, what's there to worry about?"
I smiled and I replied with a voice of dark humor.
"Everyone else."
(Author's note: Points were earned during both the interlude and Joe's section. For those interested, the rolls were Alchemy, Alchemy, Alchemy, Resources and Durability (Armsthrift), and Magitech.)
Jumpchain abilities this chapter:
Armsthrift (Fire Emblem: Awakening) 400:
Your weapons just don't seem to break and you know how to care for them well. Even immensely fragile things are unlikely to break in your care. Guns won't jam and swords never lose their edge.
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I'm probably more interested about this development more that anything.
Reminds me of Superman really. Joe is strong and with strength comes a level of freedom beyond any other.
- Location
- Philippines
FINALLY THE ANTI STING
As an explanation of the interaction, for Joe being hit by Sting now, I believe, will leave him scratched and dented, but ultimately unharmed once he digs himself out of the crater he will find himself in. The crater, being the result of the momentum of all that Sting mass immediately coming to a stop upon contact with a truly invulnerable object.
As an explanation of the interaction, for Joe being hit by Sting now, I believe, will leave him scratched and dented, but ultimately unharmed once he digs himself out of the crater he will find himself in. The crater, being the result of the momentum of all that Sting mass immediately coming to a stop upon contact with a truly invulnerable object.
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Rem Freeman
Clouded Personality
- Location
- Ocean Bound
A great new chapter and on my birthday!! Truly a fantastic day, if for no other reason than we got this delightful gem of a conversation:
Just about died laughing at this and I cannot wait to see the interlude that will hopefully spawn off because of this. Still holding out hope that Alec, Rachel, and all her dogs become the newest interns of the Celestial Forge.
Just about died laughing at this and I cannot wait to see the interlude that will hopefully spawn off because of this. Still holding out hope that Alec, Rachel, and all her dogs become the newest interns of the Celestial Forge.
I utterly love how complete and utter invincibility comes not from some fancy shmancy uber-powerful Jump, but from fucking Fire Emblem, a setting where the main characters cap off at city-block level at most.
Whatever happens, I hope both of them have a good time. Also, another addition to the shipping chart.I'm probably more interested about this development more that anything.
@LordRoustabout
I don't know how to do the quote stuff properly so I can't correct any of the spelling mistakes I found, but the "Addendum Joe" part isn't in bold text
I don't know how to do the quote stuff properly so I can't correct any of the spelling mistakes I found, but the "Addendum Joe" part isn't in bold text
- Pronouns
- He, his, him, they
Hold on. If Armsthrift makes it so that defensive items that are still considered weapons can't break, then material durability does not matter anymore. There are tons of materials that have high as fuck stats in other areas but are never considered due to being fragile. This perk bypasses those restrictions.
Further weaponized defense items should just be focused on force dispersal or kinetic redirection since it's not like they'll break anyway.
Further weaponized defense items should just be focused on force dispersal or kinetic redirection since it's not like they'll break anyway.
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To do the quote stuff, all you have to do is highlight whatever you're quoting and something should pop-up that says reply.
Like so.
